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- [00:04]
A
Hello friends, it's me, Mike Rowe. This is the way I heard it with what I dare say Chuck would be a. Let's call it a very, a very important episode. It is important actually. It brings with it the potential for curing what ails this country. Yeah, man, look, I know that sounds a bit grand, but Chuck is not overstating it. Todd Rose is my guest. We're calling this episode One Good thing. Although we could just as easily call it Be the People, which is an initiative we talk about at length later in the conversation. But I just want to mention it now because I think it's. Well, it's going to be a pretty consequential campaign that is going to attempt to rally the country in a way around. Call it civic minded action, maybe some volunteerism, maybe just something that I think a lot of people feel like we've lost over the years doing something good in your neighborhood. It's a bottom up solution which our friends at Stand Together really appreciate. Yeah. And look, I mean I'm already regretting everything I've said so far because it sounds too earnest, but it's only cause it's important and what Todd does and the reason I want you to listen to this whole episode at normal speed because I don't want you to miss anything. He has an enormous brain. In spite of the fact that he got out of high school with a 0.9 GPA. Wasn't it a 09? No, it was a 0.9.
- [01:32]
B
Oh, okay, 0.9.
- [01:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean he was a disaster academic disaster. A few years later, wound up being a professor at Harvard and then a few years after that set up one of the most important think tanks in the country. It's called Populous. And, and they do a lot of private opinion surveying that has led to an enormous amount of research that among other things is being used to debunk a long list of collective illusions. These are the things that we come to believe with certainty that are not in fact rooted in reality. So the way Todd thinks about the things that are threatening our country at the top of the list is the danger of the manufactured consensus.
- [02:25]
B
Yes.
- [02:25]
A
And we are awash in them. We believe so many things that aren't rooted in reality. We're so sure that we're so completely divided, probably in unprecedented ways and there is just nothing in the research or the science that proves it.
- [02:43]
B
Right.
- [02:43]
A
There's nothing there. And Todd is on a mission to share this research with the world. And he's succeeding to a certain degree, but not to the degree that he must, because it's a giant undertaking with huge consequences. It's a national security issue, which he points out that our adversaries want nothing more than for us to be at each other's throats. Correct. Yeah. There's a clear and present enemy. We'll discuss that enemy in the course of the conversation. And there's a clear and present strategy which involves, unfortunately, the device you're probably listening to this conversation on right now and all the social channels that are attached to it, and the reality of bots that are shaping opinion. And man, he's just so much fun to talk to. It's a little scary. Well, it's a lot scary, but it's also wildly optimistic.
- [03:39]
B
Yes.
- [03:40]
A
And I think that the solution, if you're feeling like things are getting a little wobbly up there, and if you're really worried about the country, I implore you to listen to this, especially through the end. You'll learn some things about Todd that I didn't think we were going to discuss, and you'll learn some things about his research that are truly important. And it all starts with one good thing right after this. Here's a bit of cognitive dissonance I wrestle with every day. I love people, but I hate human resources. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of individuals who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. I even admire some of them. It's just that I don't envy them because hiring people is a drag. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department. For better or worse. It's also why we use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, most passionate and most qualified candidates first. Sounds like a simple thing, but it's a game changer. Saves a ton of time and helps companies find people who can function in a non traditional environment like microworks. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me. They'll probably work for you. Post a job for free@ziprecruiter.com ro watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a human resource that that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. Ziprecruiter.com row that's ziprecruiter.com ro ziprecruiter.com ro, Thank you for making the time, dude.
- [05:39]
B
My pleasure.
- [05:40]
A
This is so long overdue for me. We've talked I don't know how many times, long distance, which, you know, all things considered, lockdowns and so forth. It's a fine substitute. It's better than nothing.
- [05:52]
B
Better than nothing.
- [05:52]
A
But it is a prophylactic, you know?
- [05:55]
B
It's great to be here, man.
- [05:57]
A
Rarely in my experience anyway, have I seen the headlines catch up to a scientist in ways that made their work so incredibly relevant for the time that we're in. Does it feel that way to you?
- [06:13]
B
It does, actually. I'm, like, incredibly grateful to be in this moment and feel like we have a little bit of knowledge about what's actually going on, and more importantly, we know what to do about it. So it's exciting times.
- [06:27]
A
I only want to talk to you about everything. And regular listeners surely will know the end of average and dark horse and collective illusions. Is there a fourth that I'm forgetting?
- [06:38]
B
There was the first one, which I don't like to talk about.
- [06:41]
A
Let's talk about that.
- [06:42]
B
I figured you might like. This one is. It was the first book called Square Peg. This was. Okay, I'm just gonna give you this back. Like, it was fine. But I didn't mean to be an author. Some reporter said, can I interview for my book? And I said, yeah, sure. Of course, I was just a professor. Nobody knew who I was at Harvard at this point.
- [07:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, I was just a professor
- [07:01]
B
at Harvard, but I mean, like, nobody but. And so the president of the publishing house was like, well, why don't we have a book by this guy? And so they're like, well, just write it. And I was like, all right. So I actually just worked with the reporter, right? But it was just like a memoir. But I was like, in my 30s. Like, that's just ridiculous. Yeah.
- [07:18]
A
You know what that is? One of the worst conceits in the literary world is the premature memoir. Right.
- [07:24]
B
I mean, it's like back when I was young.
- [07:26]
A
Yeah. Back in the aughts.
- [07:28]
B
But here's what I learned. This is the problem. It was really fine. But unless you are Stephen King, you have no control over the title of your book or the COVID There we go. So listen, look at it.
- [07:39]
A
We're coming in hot. The one thing you're ashamed of is what we Chuck puts up right out of the gate.
- [07:44]
B
I had to gussy it up by saying I was El Todd Rose. But I was like. They showed me the COVID and I said, what in the Actual hell.
- [07:53]
A
What is happening?
- [07:54]
B
And I said, what is it? It's not me. It's not like. And they said, it's art. I said, that is not an answer. And I said, look, maybe all I did there was capture the pedophile crowd. That was about it. Because I don't understand what this kid with luscious lips and a lollipop stuck to his face has to do with.
- [08:13]
A
Oh, my goodness.
- [08:14]
B
And I wanted to call it troublemaker. And they were like, nobody wants to be a troublemaker.
- [08:17]
A
They want to be a square peg.
- [08:19]
B
Yeah, obviously. Right.
- [08:20]
A
But you open the COVID and of course, the next thing you expect to see is a round hole. And now, like, surely the metaphor. I bet I can guess at what you were. You were probably trying to capture the dichotomy of being a square peg in a world.
- [08:34]
B
Yes.
- [08:35]
A
That is offering up nothing but roundish apertures. And what do we do? Do we make the hole fit us, or do we round off the edges, et cetera, Something like that.
- [08:44]
B
The only thing that. The saving grace of that was that I had a really great experience where I went to Taiwan, and I was invited by the leadership there, and I gave two big talks and to see mothers, and particularly mothers, but mothers, fathers, come from all over the country to line up to me, and they didn't speak English. The translator just telling me, like, you're just like my kid. And there's that moment of like, oh, there's a universal humanity. Right.
- [09:12]
A
Sure.
- [09:12]
B
We have these experiences. We think we're so different, and yet here's a mother worried about her kid who doesn't fit in.
- [09:18]
A
That's obviously been the thread through all your work. Right. I mean, every book, to some extent, sort of dances under that net. The world is not quite what we were told it is. It's not what we think it is. And the more certain we become about what we believe it to be, the more profoundly were ultimately going to be proven to have been mistaken. It's like there is abject humility shot through everything that you do.
- [09:48]
B
Thank you.
- [09:49]
A
And you're welcome. It's not a compliment.
- [09:52]
B
I think I'm the most humble person.
- [09:55]
A
Well, clearly, when it comes to humility, you are the best. No one even comes close. But for the people who aren't totally up to speed with your curriculum. Vite. Yes. You were a professor at Harvard. Today you're running this think tank called Populous, still up there in the. In the Northeast. Once upon a time, you were a high school sort of graduate with a 0.9 0.9 GPA. Right.
- [10:21]
B
But I do have a GED, so that's good.
- [10:24]
A
So those were the circumstances that first attracted me to you. The idea that you could completely reinvent yourself and your relationship to education seemingly single handedly. Although of course nobody ever really does anything single handedly. But now four books in, where are you with the thread that you keep coming back to? Because it now feels like a rope or maybe even a cable or something more substantial.
- [10:52]
B
I really do appreciate that you've seen the sort of underlying things that tie these all together, which for me is, you know, given my life experiences and my scientific work, I feel like there's a basic truth that is we woefully underestimate what people are capable of and we've sort of ultimately put a limit on what we can accomplish individually and as a people.
- [11:19]
A
Why? Why do we underestimate capability?
- [11:22]
B
Well, a lot of it is just coming from the legacy. As I wrote an end of average. Look at this. My publisher would be so proud. The like we had these theories and these ideas. There's always theories. It's always these academics that we think don't matter, but they get all their stupid ideas end up like we live in those shadows. But ultimately I think, you know, we lived in an era of scarcity. We had these ideas about why some people succeeded, some people didn't. We ended up with like pretty profoundly wrong views of like a bell curve of talent. And it's largely innate and like, you know, some people are worth it, some people aren't. But in the end of Average, talk about the standardization problem.
- [12:03]
A
Right. I remember the chapter where the, where the Navy or the Air Force wanted the perfect cockpit that would suit the majority of pilots. And so they, through the lens of average, handled all the dimensionality and came up with a cockpit.
- [12:19]
B
They got it right and it turned out it literally fit nobody. And what a great. That was one of my all time favorite stories to open a book with.
- [12:26]
A
Yeah.
- [12:27]
B
And the poor guy that had to figure this out, guy named Gilbert Daniels. It was so cool because he had gone to Harvard as an undergrad and he got sucked into the military. He was going to, had to do this stuff. But he was a kind of a grunt at first. So he gets tasked with, you know, after they realize something's wrong with these, they just gone from propeller planes to jet powered aviation.
- [12:48]
A
Yeah.
- [12:48]
B
And they're like the promise to Congress was oh, we are going to be sold back. We are going to. These things are going to make us lethal. We're going to be efficient, effective. The exact opposite happens. Like, they couldn't even keep control of the planes. It was like, what is going on? And so they had come up with this idea that the real problem was just that we hadn't updated the average body size for pilots because we'd gotten more nutrition since the last one. So they tasked this poor guy, he was just a kid, to go around to every Air Force base and by himself, measure every pilot. There were over 4,000 pilots on over 100 dimensions of body size, chest circumference, you know, hips, everything.
- [13:30]
A
Everything. Like, wrist size, everything.
- [13:32]
B
It was comical. Lucky for me, his work got declassified before the book came out. And he's writing this technical manual going, yeah, I'm the one doing all the measurements, and something's not right here. So he starts to think that the problem might be the idea of average. So he goes to the generals. He's like, I think you're wrong. And he said, can I have another idea? And they said, okay, you can play around all you want on your own time. So he decides. He asks a very simple question, like, how many of these 4,000 pilots who were picked because they actually do fit in a cockpit, right? Like, if you're super tall or overweight, you're not getting it anyway, right? How many of these pilots were average on any of these dimensions, right? Like, and the idea was like, well, most of them, obviously. So he just picks, like, the top 10 dimensions of size, and he finds out, like, nobody. Zero. No pilots. None of them. None of these. They were all white male pilots who were picked because they. They seemingly fit, right? It didn't fit any of them. What he discovers is. Is what I call the end of average, the jaggedness principle, which is when we think about being a human being, like, almost everything that matters is not just one dimension. So size isn't. Height is one dimension, but size is made up of a bunch of things, right? And when you take all those dimensions, it turns out they don't correlate anywhere near that we, like, we think they do. And if you think about this, the tallest person, you know, is probably not the heaviest person, you know, right? So we think in our mind, there's like. Like clothing size. Like, there's a small, a medium, a large, an extra, and it's just a bigger, bigger version scaled. It's just not how it works. Every single human being ever studied in physical size is on the upper end of some dimension, on the lower end of others, and in the middle, on other. It's everybody Everybody. And so Gilbert Daniels figures this out and he's like, oh, right. He, to his everlasting credit, convinces the generals to ban the use of averages in design, that this was the problem. And they introduce literally adjustable seats in cockpits, things that just weren't there. They invented the whole field of human factors and ergonomics as a result of that work. So instead of trying to cut down the pilots to fit your stupid average thing that you made up, how about you start making the environment fit the pilot? And the result was incredible. Not only incredible performance success, but one of the unintended consequences. And I write about one of my favorite pilots at the end of the book, which I won't tell you about. So you have to, you guys, I know you've read about the other, memorize. Everybody else has to go, you know, you know, killer chick was the pilot. But the unintended consequence was it actually opened opportunity for women. Because we were just like, well, tough luck, we had to average it. You tend to be smaller. So turns out women are actually physiologically better suited to be fighter pilots. They handle G force better, their bodies do. Turns out now out of our top pilots, a majority of them are women.
- [16:41]
A
You know, we've noticed something. I don't know if it's corollary or not, but it rhymes a bit with the welding world right now. Women seem to have a facility for that particular trade. Inherently masculine, historically testosterone driven. And yet in our little foundation time and time again, we find these jagged little pills, these women who have it. I think Gladwell called it a disagreeable quality. And I wonder if, was it Gilbert? So was it the work that he did that actually led to the breakthrough? Or was it his disagreeable quality or the whatever it was in him that gave him the self possession to go to a general and say, hey, you just might have your head up your ass.
- [17:33]
B
It's a great question because like I got to know him, he passed away shortly after, but I got to meet him and talk to him and interview him for the book. And he just said there was just something inside. He was, he said he was raised to have a healthy respect and healthy disrespect for received wisdom and authority. And so it was like good for you that you could look at something that we just thought was God's truth forever. I mean, and he's born into it and say, I don't think this is right. And instead of just complain, you did something about it.
- [18:08]
A
Dumb. One of the reasons I subscribe to Good Ranchers has to do with my personal belief that most Americans have no idea where their food actually comes from. We're disconnected by and large, not just from the food that we eat, but from the people who actually provide it. Well, Good Ranchers is committed to delivering only 100% American meat from local farms and local ranches straight to their customers. I'm talking about pasture raised meat with zero antibiotics, zero hormones and none of the other nonsense you'll find in imported meat, which I'm sorry to tell you is still everywhere and still being deceptively labeled. Of course, the other reason I subscribe to Good Ranchers is because the steaks are delicious. They got seafood as well. Everything's locally sourced and lots to choose from@goodranchers.com, but personally, I'm in it for the meat. And this July, if you drop my name at checkout, you'll save $50 off anything on their site. That's code MIKE for $50 off and free meat with every order. If you decide to start a plan today, and I hope you will, there's always a free gift with Good Ranchers. Angus ground beef, extra thick applewood smoked bacon, delicious. Gluten free seed oil free, high quality whole muscle chicken nuggets also delicious. You choose@goodranchers.com Code Mike American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get Good Ranchers. Now that's a quality I don't. Do you think that's a choice? Is that a muscle that you can choose to exercise? Because it seems like it really doesn't form a lot of your work. Like, who in the mob is the one who goes, hey, you know something? I didn't sign on for this and drops the pitchfork and walks off.
- [20:06]
B
What we found is there is a bit of dispositional stuff, right? Like, so some people seem to be born with a little more being. Okay, I don't need to quite be aligned with the crowd entirely all the time. It makes sense that there's a distribution of how sensitive people are because in fact, when you run the models, if everybody is a, is a maverick, society doesn't work. If everybody's a conformist, society doesn't work. You need that little bit of the 10% that are just constantly like, but is this right? Is this better? Now what we've seen is people can move themselves a little bit, but where the real win comes is when you start to promote norms in society that say, what does it mean to be part of this Group. So my need to belong, which would normally lead me not to question is actually you speak up, you respectfully speak your truth. Right. Like when you do that, then the very people who would normally be like, I'm not rocking the boat. What it means to not rock the boat is to be honest about your views.
- [21:04]
A
It's so fungible though. Yeah, I mean, it's like the minute you have a consensus, then you have a thing that you can conform to. But the moment that confirmation. I guess that's where we had a confirmation bias. Right. We get used to a thing and that's when you find the people who go, oh, wait a minute, you know what? It's, it's more cool to not be a part of the thing that I used to equate coolness with. And it's, that's what interests me the most, the fact that you might be able to choose. I mean, Chuck and I, we were kids. What, what is more uncool than being 12 years, 15 years old and being in the Boy Scouts and singing in a barbershop quartet?
- [21:46]
B
Probably nothing.
- [21:47]
A
Nothing.
- [21:48]
B
No, I'm just kidding. Well, I didn't sing in a barbershop, but I was in the Boy Scouts, so that's good.
- [21:51]
A
Well, I want to get to that too, because this whole notion of these, these groups in our society that appear to be frayed and disappearing strikes me as really bad.
- [22:02]
B
Really bad. But by the way, can I say one thing just to close the loop on what you put your finger on? So for me, all of my life's work, the thing I'm the most interested in is, okay, if we've underestimated what people are capable of and we want people to be able to live more self determined lives, make better contributions to society, then I'm interested in every internal and external barrier that keeps people from that. And so whether that's our belief in an average and that's leading us to standardize things that ignore people's individuality or the more recent stuff, because we're social creatures and we care about being with our groups, how that can be manipulated into getting us to live less authentic
- [22:43]
A
lives, and how quickly it all is in flux. Like one minute. I don't know why this popped to mind, but black lives matter. Terribly important movement, Absolutely essential. You'd have to be out of your mind to oppose it in any way, shape or form. Stay tuned. Ideas change. Yeah, I've just never seen them change so fast.
- [23:06]
B
So fast. This is the problem, right? Which is the mechanisms by which we generate consensus and even to new ideas or old ones, our brains are not meant for social media. And so. And right now, the chaos is largely our biology slamming up against these new technologies. And AI is going to make that even, like, worse. So what's interesting is, before these new ideas could form, and they were emerging organically based on some consensus, even of a smaller group that then starts to persuade and people start to join. Now, with our technologies, it's so easy to manipulate that process that you can artificially boost a fringe idea, give it the veneer of consensus, and get people to go along with stuff they just don't want.
- [23:58]
A
And you know what you just described. I don't know if you've riffed on this as a metaphor before, but this is fashion.
- [24:05]
B
Yes.
- [24:05]
A
You're talking about fashion, right? And when I look at what is fashionable historically, anyway, I was always sort of amused by how quickly it could change. Like, you look at some cat wearing bell bottoms now, and you're like, dude, you did not get the memo. Unless he's responding to another memo that actually, Mike, you dummy, didn't you get that memo? It's back in style.
- [24:29]
B
What's so great about that? It's such a perfect metaphor. Because, you know, modern fashion as we know it really emerges hundreds and hundreds of years ago in Venice, when they tried to create laws about what you could wear and how affluent you could look like, you know, what, your buckle on your shoe. We're getting out of control. People are too fancy. It has to be this size, this. And so there's always that. There's always that 10% that are like, whatever people are doing, I want to do something else. Right? And so they would find all these ways, these small ways to just push the envelope a little bit, just so you weren't conforming to what that these officials wanted you to do.
- [25:06]
A
How awesome would it be just as some sort of exercise, like the ultimate punk, let's say you're 21 years old, you've dyed your hair purple, you've put rings in orifices that have never been violated before. You've got a tattoo. You got. You are. So you're out there, and the next morning, everybody looks just like you. Now what do you do? Yeah, it's this constant, like, so that's the fashion world, and I've always kind of understood it, but I feel like what social media has done has forced that dynamic into our ideas and our thoughts and our actual identity. And to throw one more metaphorical thing into it, back to the end of Average what is a fit model? A fit model is the very definition of. Of average in fashion. A perfect 42, a perfect size 6. I dated a fit model briefly. Right. She was not average in any way, except that way.
- [26:13]
B
Right.
- [26:14]
A
And so, wow, maybe fashion, maybe we can learn something from fashion. We can.
- [26:18]
B
And what's funny is you could take it a little step further, which is as our industrial technologies enabled fast fashion, the cycles of fashion have accelerated. Right. And you take it into the space of ideas, what used to take quite a while to form, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, that consensus would form over time. And it had some durability because it actually did recruit people to it. People did start believing it and they'd stick around a little longer. And now we have these almost ephemeral sort of like, well, this seems like a good idea, I guess, is what we do. And then it's just gone and we're on to the next thing. And it's always a telltale sign when you see these ideas emerge out of nowhere and then just collapse, that it was always rooted in a collective illusion. Because I can easily manipulate group consensus now with an army of bots, it's drop dead easy. Can I sustain it? No, I need to do a bunch of stuff to keep it around long enough for people to internalize it. I'll give you a good example of when we just participate in, remember, the defund the police movement.
- [27:21]
A
Sure, vividly.
- [27:22]
B
I mean, listen, I'm all for ensuring police don't violate our rights, but I don't know a single person, besides like a really crazy fringe, who thought it was a good idea to replace cops with social workers. Okay? So, man, they got a lot of.
- [27:37]
A
Man, they got a lot of attention.
- [27:38]
B
It did. And I'll tell you, it was kind of funny. So I'm a registered independent. I don't like politics at all. It's a nasty thing that has to happen. I want as small footprint in my life as possible. But we got called to meet with Biden and his team when he was president. They had read Collective Illusions and said, listen, we want to talk. It was really funny. My media advisor, who's my media advisor, who's a dyed in the wool liberal, love her deeply. She goes, yeah, Todd, no offense, if they're calling you, we're truly, we're in trouble. I was like, what? Okay, well, thank you very much. So they're like, okay, well what. What should we be considering? I said, well, look, we have the data. I'll give you one. It's this Defund the police movement because publicly you had 55% of registered Democrats saying they supported was 9%.
- [28:29]
A
Okay, wait a minute. Wait. Just so people are trying. You're minding your business, you're living your life, you're running your little think tank. You get a call from the Biden administration, and they want to understand how real the enthusiasm is for this.
- [28:44]
B
Well, first of all, what they want to do is like, hey, listen, is there something we can learn from this? That was the general thing, Right. And so we were taking them through all the data, what stuff might matter. It was coming up on the State of the Union address when the Ukraine crisis blew up, which was kind of like two State of the Unions. We had literally got the question asked of me if you were writing the State of the Union address. I don't know what this is. I don't know what's going on here, but. And so we honed in. I said, look, here's one example, right? Talk me through the neurological mechanisms, how this happens, why you can't trust your brain anymore. Loudest voices repeated. The most your brain reads is the majority, as we talked about last time.
- [29:24]
A
Sure. What? 10% of the people on Twitter are creating 80% of the content.
- [29:30]
B
And I'm showing them the data, and they're like, listen, we agree with. We think your methods are sound. We agree with, in general, we think you're wrong on this one. I said, why? Oh, we get. We get a lot of calls. I'm like, could we see the call logs? It's like 15 people calling a lot and yelling at you. And it's just your brain is just. It still feels like it's everybody. So, okay, so we got one line. I will say we influenced one line in the State of Union address, which was where you said, it's not defund the police, it's fund the police.
- [30:03]
A
And, well, there's a distinction.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah. And I got a nice little note from them. Might have been from the auto pen, I'm not sure. But, like, that said, thanks for showing us the emperor has no clothes. Right. Wow. And so I was quite proud of that one. But I use that because, like, all of a sudden, you've got a fringe who has an agenda. They will shame you. Course you into. If you're not, you know, you're not supporting this. Are you racist? Are you? Like, we can't have a conversation about how we solve like you and I talked about last time. It's like, we usually agree on most outcomes. We just usually disagree on process. Sure. And, and then you, you see, well, look, you know, other politicians in places like Seattle, San Francisco, they fell for the illusion and they implemented policies that were disastrous. And you don't take my word for it, those same politicians have reversed course.
- [30:51]
A
Not, not to put too fine a point on it, I just want to be crystal clear. The consensus among the administration was that 55% of Democrats supported a movement to defund the police.
- [31:07]
B
That was a. In public opinion. That's what it showed every time, including ours. And the science, the private opinion research.
- [31:13]
A
Yeah.
- [31:14]
B
Said it was 9%. So. But when you ask them, my God, what do you think other Democrats believe? They thought, overwhelmingly, we believe in this. And now because of tribal sort of identity politics, it's like, well, if I'm a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm not those guys. So what does it mean to be a Democrat? And this is where it gets very, very sticky and why we feel so polarized now is I can move in your little group. I can take a fringe idea, I can use bots and things to give the impression that this is consensus. And now you're like, but I'm not that other side. So I guess I got to move a little. I'd rather. You know what, I don't really want to defund the police, but I also don't want to get kicked out of this group because I'm certainly not Republican.
- [31:57]
A
Right.
- [31:57]
B
So I'll just inch over here, I'll say what you want me to say. I don't really believe it and I'm going to be mad when you implement the policy, but you're part of the mob and this is just happening. I mean, we've documented this same phenomenon in over 100 issues in the country.
- [32:17]
A
Sometimes too often, in fact, things have to get worse before they get better. And honestly, I'm afraid that's the case with public education today. I hate to say that because I come from a family of teachers and my own public education has served me pretty well. But the system we have right now, it's broken. And if you have a child in that system, it's cold comfort to hear that things are only going to improve after they get even worse. So don't wait. Check out K12's career and college prep program today. This is tuition free online public education that gives students a head start in super practical careers like healthcare and cybersecurity and lots of other fields that are expanding every day. Every year, K12's career in college prep helps thousands of Students get the industry certifications they need to hit the ground running when they graduate. Whether they want to head to a university or jump straight into a high demand trade. K12's career in college prep lets them earn college credits along the way and offers something a diploma can no longer guarantee, a head start. It's practical, it's smart, it works. Give your student the opportunity to explore the right fit for them. Right now with K12's career and college prep, go to K12 to learn more. That's the letter K, the number 12.com roe the letter K the number 12.com row. What other ones are keeping you up?
- [33:58]
B
You know, it's funny. Our latest round of data that will come out next week, one of the things I thought was super interesting is while our elections certainly have problems, and I don't doubt that there's shenanigans here and there, the idea of like widespread, like manipulation, Republicans publicly, a majority will say, oh no, this upcoming election will not be free and fair. In private, the majority actually thinks it will be.
- [34:27]
A
Huh.
- [34:28]
B
Now that's dangerous, right? Because if you just only look at public opinion, you get the sense that a majority thinks that there's something fundamentally wrong here.
- [34:40]
A
Because when it comes to policy, what's the difference between perception and reality?
- [34:44]
B
Nothing.
- [34:45]
A
Correct. Nothing.
- [34:46]
B
In fact, I would argue it's how most of the world just works. It's really less about the truth. It's what you believe to be true that ends up. I mean, it's called, literally there's a sociological term called the Thomas Theorem. It is like, look, if enough people believe something to be true, it is true in its consequences.
- [35:02]
A
And who the hell is Thomas?
- [35:03]
B
You know, it's really funny. Some guy, some sociologist, it turned out his wife came up with the idea, so he didn't get credit for it. I wonder if Thomas's wife's theorem, maybe
- [35:12]
A
it was his last name.
- [35:13]
B
Probably.
- [35:15]
A
What a crazy thing to have a theorem named after like the Mike theory, the Todd theory. Anyway, wow, it's just mind boggling to think how easy then it is. So, all right, give me some other examples of big consequential collective illusions that are currently current.
- [35:36]
B
So overwhelming majority of Americans across all demographics care deeply about diversity, care about immigration, and also think you should just secure the border. But they don't want to shut things down. But publicly on the right was like, oh yeah, we just shut the border down. Like, you don't believe this, you don't believe this, you don't. And the other one, which is you've already seen collapse. When we started this work with private opinion research, right, to get around social pressure, it was hard to show people like, this is true because how do you know, right? How do you know that we have truth and the public opinion polls are wrong? There's only so many ways that you can prove that. So we've predicted a bunch of trends, we've talked about last time, education shift that's happened. We were five years ahead on that. Even though I don't like politics, voting is always a good one. Right. We ended up predicting Trump's final vote percentage in the last election within a half a percentage point, six months in advance because it turned out Gen Z was lying about their willingness to vote for him.
- [36:39]
A
Why? I missed your victory lap on that.
- [36:41]
B
I didn't want that. Victory lap, meaning I don't want. It's like, I don't want to do horse race polling. It's just we were like, you know what, there's only so many ways you can be like, look, we were right and publish it publicly. Right? And just be like, hey, this is what private opinion says. Didn't think it would be that accurate. It was the most accurate prediction. So now everybody thinks we know more than we do. It went from how do you know? To what else is true.
- [37:02]
A
Well, what's wrong fundamentally with polling mechanisms?
- [37:07]
B
So it's not. This is what's really important. Some of my best friends are pollsters, but it's a. It's actually, they do a really good job. It's really hard. But all opinion polling assumes you're at least trying to tell the truth. There's no amount of math or sampling methods that will get around you lying to a pollster.
- [37:30]
A
I've got a book for you.
- [37:32]
B
Is it called Collective Illusions?
- [37:34]
A
Would you autograph it for me? No, it's called Everybody Lies. Would you mind Googling this, Chuck? And the author's last name is a hyphenate. This book, Todd. He wound up getting permission from Google to dive deep into search histories. Now anonymous people, right? But the point, and I won't belabor it, but everybody lies about everything to a pollster. Pollster's job is to ask better questions, to unmask the prevarication. That's it. Everybody likes big data, new data. What the Internet Can Tell Us about who We Really Are by Seth Stevens. Dividends.
- [38:19]
B
That's worse than El Todd Rose.
- [38:21]
A
Point being, man, you can't lie in your searches.
- [38:26]
B
No.
- [38:27]
A
Because if you do, you won't find yourself.
- [38:28]
B
You don't get what you're looking for. That's right.
- [38:30]
A
So what can we learn from people at any moment in time based on their search histories? If you have millions of data points to cull and the answers are mind boggling.
- [38:43]
B
And that is such a great thing. I mean, this is such a good example of another mechanism at getting at private truth. Right. And it's so funny. We've recently been doing a lot of work with the creatives, like musicians, showrunners, who are like, well, wait, could we use private opinion to like, tell better stories that people? And a former executive at Netflix told me, she said, oh, no, no, we already believe your theory because we were trying to do this kind of cool little crossover with Facebook where we thought, you know, it'd be good to start pulling more people in, is have people post to their friends what it is they're watching, you know, and she's like, but they sort of forgot that we know what they're watching.
- [39:27]
A
Right.
- [39:27]
B
And so she said it was only accurate about 30% of the time. So you would sit there and tell all your friends, oh, I just saw the best documentary. I just like, shut up. You're watching Real Housewives and you know it. Like, just like, are you kidding me? Like, right? It's just. And so they're like, yeah, we thought, well, this will be great. It's like, no, all we got were lies. And then the problem was is that, like, your friend group usually likes what you like too. They certainly didn't like those documentaries. So that it didn't actually work. Right. People like, I don't want to watch that.
- [39:57]
A
Like, isn't that something like, I think they call it the warm market. So the power of a friend recommending a thing is exponentially.
- [40:07]
B
Exponential.
- [40:08]
A
Huge compared to a critic.
- [40:11]
B
Yep.
- [40:12]
A
Or an ad, which is probably lower on the, on the poll than it's ever been before. But wouldn't a social media essentially enable a warm market interaction? It should, it should. But that's where the bots can come in and completely hijack.
- [40:30]
B
It's exactly the authenticity, because we look for the. It's in the work we do. Especially under collective illusions, when you want to do something about it, you have to deploy a strategy called social proof, not persuasion. Right. And that comes in just three flavors. It's cultural artifacts. So if I watch a movie and it's talking a certain way, I'm like, oh, that might be what we believe. It's people I admire. Right. So you say something, I might be like, okay, hold on. But the most powerful one is people like me. Right. I don't care what a Silicon Valley billionaire thinks about education. If I'm a middle class person with a lot of constraints, I'm like, good for you. Right. If I had a billion dollars, I, I probably wouldn't worry either.
- [41:09]
A
Right.
- [41:10]
B
But when my next door neighbor starts to talk to me about it, I'm like, well, you, you kind of live in the same constraints I live in. We, you know, we go to the same church, we go to same, you know. Yeah. So those become by far the most powerful signals of things. And so that, that sort of warm market is one of those things. We just trust that signal a lot more. And then what you realize is, okay, well we could actually weaponize that.
- [41:31]
A
Right.
- [41:32]
B
And this is what's going on. You know, one of the things that we've been a part of since we last spoke is as people started recognizing that collective illusions not only were a thing and they were doing real damage. What started to be unearthed and we've started to become a part of this, these coalitions is we realized that foreign adversaries recognized the value of this idea and intentionally weaponized it with bots. And the level of this foreign malign influence on our people is like shocking. I mean, I'm deep into it and
- [42:06]
A
I'm talking about China.
- [42:08]
B
China, China is the biggest player. Russia, Iran, Venezuela was weirdly, their bots went silent. Yeah, I don't know what happened. Yeah, it was. But it's funny, I had written a little bit about the Venezuela one in collective illusions. And then just what's been going on in the world stage, it just came out. And then I've been going all around the world doing things that's kind of cool. I didn't. I mean, it's good for me, bad for society, but there are trade offs. Right.
- [42:39]
A
But you do get around. I mean, you mentioned that Taiwan trip and I did want to gloss over that. I know you were over in Israel right after October 7th.
- [42:50]
B
Yeah.
- [42:51]
A
That must have been a hell of a trip.
- [42:53]
B
That was, it was one of those profoundly life altering experiences because.
- [42:58]
A
Who invited you? What can you tell me about that?
- [43:01]
B
So I can tell you that a little bit. So I had a Jewish American friend who also. And another Israeli friend and they had. After the attacks on October 7, one of the biggest things that emerged in the US that really frightened a lot of people was that Harvard Harris pollution that said that 60% of Gen Z believed Hamas was justified in the rape and murder of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians. Not. We are worried about Innocent lives. And we should be careful, which anybody that isn't, I would think is a monster, but that they were justified. And if that it was true, if that tapped real sentiment, then I think Israelis were in big trouble, right? Because they were like, we're at risk.
- [43:47]
A
We were in big trouble.
- [43:48]
B
We would be. I mean, there'd be. A country's a rot at the core, you know, a worm at the core of the apple, if you will. So we did. They said, well, we need to show you something. We think it has to do with your work. And I'm like, cool, well, show me. And they're like, well, you have to come. Wait, this is like six and a half weeks after the attacks. So they're at war.
- [44:09]
A
Good grief. So it's like Thanksgiving.
- [44:12]
B
I. I literally was on vacation for Thanksgiving in the Bahamas, and I get this call. I still remember.
- [44:18]
A
I'm.
- [44:18]
B
I'm on a golf cart, going to dinner, pull over. And I'm like, okay, okay, I guess I gotta go, right?
- [44:25]
A
Who call? I mean, is it the Mossad? Like, who. Who in the administration? Just trying to imagine, like, get.
- [44:32]
B
Get.
- [44:32]
A
El Todd Rose.
- [44:33]
B
El Todd Rose. No, the. And so the only way you could get there was on El Al. They weren't letting anyone fly in. I learned that El Al has missile defense technologies on their planes, which made
- [44:44]
A
me feel good on the commercial flights.
- [44:46]
B
So it was great. And what was really wonderful is both. It turned out it was true. We deployed our private opinion methods on that same statement and found that it was not 60%, it was only 7% of Gen Z actually believed that. But when you asked him, what do you think your peers believe? They thought 85% of their peers thought Hamas was justified. Which, by the way, if I think that, and I just want to belong. One of the most powerful motivations that we have as humans is to be part of something. And if I think my group believes this, and here's the thing, most of these young people couldn't have pointed out. God's on a map, have no understanding of it. So that's the best way you can manipulate, right? You have no real understanding.
- [45:34]
A
So wait, wait, wait. Just so I understand, from the river to the sea. I've seen the protests. I saw the Ivy League people are camping out. I saw that Disastrous testimony from McGill and gay and shameful. Right. So we're not imagining that this is happening, but what you're saying is the number of people who were participating who actually had conviction, truly believed it tiny.
- [46:03]
B
And in fact, that number has collapsed over Time. Um, it is now in our latest research on this amongst Gen Z it is now in private down to 2% and here's the thing. So what they had found was that. So, so wait, wait, so why is this happening? Right? How does that happen? And it turns out that it wasn't organic. So there are people who believe it. Right? This is how it always works there, there are always fringes that you can get a small percentage of people to believe any dumb thing. Right. What they did was, what they discovered was that China was manipulating the algorithm of TikTok to drive that anti Semitic sentiment amongst Gen Z specifically. Now it wasn't because China is particularly hates Jews or something. I don't think they care less. And if you Google this now you'll see a lot of it's become public so I can talk about that. They saw TikTok as a weapon, a psychological weapon and it is, it's, it's so clever if you think about it like Facebook was at least your friends X is you fault you choose to follow. TikTok was the first algorithmically driven it's virality. It's pushed to you and now everybody else has followed suit because it turns out to be. You're super addictive. Right. What a clever mechanism to be able to manipulate. So if all I'm seeing on my feed over and over again is certain things liked and reposted and stuff like that, it's very hard for your brain not to be like I think this is what we believe.
- [47:30]
A
Yeah.
- [47:30]
B
And then you get them out in the streets protesting. I still remember one.
- [47:34]
A
And you assume that everybody else is seeing the same thing.
- [47:36]
B
Correct. Even though they're not. That's the beauty of it is it's so customized, it's unbelievable. And so you know, the, the documents that were stolen and made public was like it wasn't about Israel, it was about Taiwan. So the ability, it's refining that weapon so that when they want to take Taiwan, they activate it. And our young people are out in the streets saying hands off, hands off China. You know, like they did with Hands off Iran. What are you talking about?
- [48:02]
A
Like hands up, don't shoot.
- [48:03]
B
Yeah. So it's just. And so you know, it was, you know, thank goodness there was a forced sell, you know, and it's funny when Congress tried to get that, you know, bytedance to sell and they were like we will not. And we're like yeah, China will not let you. The algorithm was a state secret. And what's funny is only a few years earlier under the same national security laws we had forced the sell of. Was it Grindr? The seriously, like. Yeah, for national security reasons. And they were like, okay, fine. So like, oh, interesting. But not here. And so it was.
- [48:37]
A
Grindr was deemed an overt threat to national security.
- [48:41]
B
Yeah. So for the same mechanism, if you control the means. So what's funny is that one was taken off the table. Okay. But what's important is the mechanism by which I can manipulate consensus and these foreign adversaries can do it. Doesn't depend on you controlling the algorithm. You just need your bot armies. And it is. If you just Google it. And look at this. The China stuff that's come out that we've been going after, and I can say a little bit about it, is called the Cognitive Domain. Operations Cognitive Warfare. Yep. CDO is much better. Right? Cdo, where they literally lay out. I was half proud that it's just my work.
- [49:24]
A
Right.
- [49:24]
B
And half mortified because it's so funny. Someone wrote a summary of this and it's like, Todd Rose explores this for more of a defensive. Like, how do we save civilization? They weaponized it. But it's like verbatim, right? It's like, oh, we don't need to spread disinformation. That doesn't work anyway. It just doesn't. I'm going to manufacture a false consensus and get your conformity to do the rest.
- [49:48]
A
So that's the game.
- [49:49]
B
That's the whole game.
- [49:50]
A
Manufacture a false consensus.
- [49:53]
B
This is what I would say is. As you know, I'm a reformed academic, so I always have to have one thing.
- [49:58]
A
0.9 GPA, folks. Just always remember that.
- [50:01]
B
Super smart and humble. There's a book called Guns of August by Taubman. Yes. Yeah.
- [50:07]
A
Early days, World War I.
- [50:09]
B
Exactly. Right. So you're a nerd. You know it and it is. And her thesis, right, Was that. Why was this so awful? Was that in part, the technology for war had changed exponentially.
- [50:19]
A
Tactics versus tech.
- [50:21]
B
But we. Our strategy and tactics had not caught up. So we were still digging trenches and fighting over small amounts of land with Maxim guns. Yeah, we have machine guns, chemical weapons.
- [50:32]
A
But Todd, we made that mistake. That's. I mean, history. What is it? History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.
- [50:39]
B
So I believe we are in a Guns of August moment right now. When it comes to propaganda and manipulation. The technologies have enabled a new form of propaganda in the form of manufacturing collective illusions.
- [50:52]
A
Sorry, I just want people to understand what you're saying. You're talking about like the sum you're talking about Eat, pray. Yeah, one and two. You're talking about mustard gas.
- [51:00]
B
Correct.
- [51:01]
A
And Maxim guns and people marching into battle as though it was still the Napoleonic army.
- [51:08]
B
As if someone's got a rifle and they can shoot one of you. You know what I mean?
- [51:11]
A
It's like what happened in Shiloh. They found those guys.
- [51:14]
B
Exactly right.
- [51:15]
A
Six dead. Killed by the same. By the same round out of a sharp rifle. Because suddenly that thing's got a three mile range.
- [51:22]
B
And so imagine so at the US the level of our government, and I unfortunately know this now because our work to have to fight this is we are completely caught off guard. Our entire effort to protect our digital borders, if you will, from manipulation was entirely oriented around disinformation. Nobody's really trying that. It doesn't really work. So meanwhile they've got these bots that just swarm in and it's shockingly sophisticated. It just blows my mind. Like basically online, if you have 5% of your interactions are with bots, those bots can almost always determine what consensus is. And second, the reality is right now, today, conservatively, the typical person In America, about 20 to 25% of their interactions online are with bots. And they don't know it.
- [52:17]
A
They have no idea.
- [52:18]
B
They have no idea. And they're so sophisticated. Now the AI AI enabled bots, we just saw some security levels that was just blew my mind because most of the bots are just dumb. Like they don't even bother to put like a picture on the account. Right. They're just like frontline infantry. Just put them in. The AI ones are shocking. So there's these sleeper bots. So you'll go on a Reddit forum on cooking and you've been on that forum for two years, you think you know everybody. Here's some guy, Steve, that's only ever talked about cooking. It's just an AI bot. You don't know it. It's learning the language of that micro group. And then when you want to activate them, they start ratcheting up, start quoting fringe views, start to amplify, start to. And then they'll bring in secondary bots. So let's say you fall for it and you say, oh yeah, Steve, that's a. Okay, I guess, yeah, yeah, I guess I agree with you. Then other bots come in and approve of what you said.
- [53:12]
A
But what's the goal in a cooking forum? Is it to get you to buy hexclad? Is it to get you.
- [53:17]
B
It turns out it's the best place to. To radicalize not cooking per se.
- [53:23]
A
Just one order.
- [53:24]
B
Betty Crocker.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah, that's the last thing we need. And I never trusted that hag.
- [53:27]
B
But it's. No, it's the place you would least expect it that it's most effective.
- [53:33]
A
Can't believe you just besmirched Betty Crocker.
- [53:36]
B
She's a saint.
- [53:38]
A
She's the best.
- [53:39]
B
The best. So basically, if you were in a political forum, you'd sort of be exclusive.
- [53:43]
A
It's obvious.
- [53:43]
B
Yeah, but if I'm, I'm a big New England Patriots fan, if I'm on some forum, we're talking football and then someone starts to ratch up other conversation, I'm like, wait, what? You know, yeah, yeah. It's just very clever that way because I start to think of those as my peers and my friends.
- [53:57]
A
The neighbor you just referred to earlier, who has a bigger. Who has more credibility in the warm group. So the bot in the cooking forum earns your trust over time with a consistent series of predictable posts that reinforce the same. The sameness.
- [54:13]
B
They're literally mirroring you.
- [54:14]
A
The warmth.
- [54:15]
B
They're mirroring you.
- [54:16]
A
It was clever.
- [54:17]
B
It's. It's so. It's so good. And if you think about this, so in the leaked documents from China, they laid out the argument for this essentially cognitive warfare is like, you really can't beat the United States militarily right now, probably can't beat us economically. What do you do?
- [54:34]
A
You turn us against us.
- [54:35]
B
You weaponize culture with these technologies and it's pretty cheap. It's shocking. You think about like, what we spend on our, you know, an interceptor to deal with missiles. You can have. For one interceptor, I could have an entire couple million bots in my army,
- [54:50]
A
dude, I'm telling you. I mean, can you overstate the ramifications of false manufactured consensus writ large?
- [54:59]
B
No. And I'll tell you what some of the consequences right now are. We already talked last time I was here. Like right now, 80 something percent of Americans think we're extremely divided as a people. It turns out this is not even remotely true. We have more private opinion data on the American public than any organization. It's just not true. We are have a shocking amount in common. But more importantly, as I start to think that the people around me not only don't share my values, they share the antithesis of that. Up is down, left is right. Good is evil. Evil's good. I'm like, what is going on? Right. First of all, we retreat into smaller groups. This experiment of ours as Americans, this imagined Community.
- [55:45]
A
This melting pot.
- [55:46]
B
Yes. Becomes a threat and we retreat to our tribes and we really hunker down there. What also you'll see the effects of their efforts to do this to us is have you seen the data. And we have this data as well, on the percentage of Americans who believe that other Americans are the greatest threat to their way of life. It is A majority of Americans believe that.
- [56:12]
A
Is white supremacy the greatest threat to America?
- [56:14]
B
It's 85% of progressives think that other Americans are the greatest threat to them. What happens when you see your fellow citizens who you may disagree with on the margins as not just different, but bad, like morally wrong. It's amazing the kind of evil you will allow when you think you're right and good.
- [56:41]
A
Oh, my God, of course.
- [56:42]
B
And so that's where the curse of virtue. Yeah. And that's where we are. So this is the thing is. And we're seeing the secondary effects of exactly what China had hoped would happen. Right. We are at each other's throats. We can't get anything done because we don't trust each other anymore.
- [56:56]
A
We.
- [56:57]
B
Social trust, which is probably the best predictor of the health of a culture, is at the lowest levels ever recorded in America right now. We don't trust the other anymore. And our levels of resentment in America are higher than they were during the Great Depression. So that's the bad news. This is all that's the bad news. There is some good news we can talk about. I actually.
- [57:17]
A
Now, let's stick with the bad.
- [57:19]
B
Let's just keep digging.
- [57:20]
A
How do you measure resentment?
- [57:22]
B
What's great is you can do a couple of things. One, you got to do it privately because people. It was really funny the first time we measured fairness and resentment in private when Trump was present. The first time Republicans, they were like. All we asked was, is society even mostly fair? Do we live in a mostly fair society? And they're like, yes, like, like 70%, something like that. Like, yes, publicly, in private, they were the most resentful of any demographic group, really.
- [57:52]
A
Republicans.
- [57:52]
B
Yeah, it was crazy. But of course, you can't say that. Right?
- [57:55]
A
Right.
- [57:56]
B
Well, then he didn't make America. If this isn't fair. So we have a number of different ways, but it's. That resentment data is probably the most frightening data we have.
- [58:04]
A
That's why I'm asking about it.
- [58:06]
B
Because that festers. Yes, it does. Because there's a couple of things about it. One, we're hardwired to cooperate as humans. Like, it's actually our superpower we can always do more together than we can do by ourselves. But cooperation makes you vulnerable. And if other people aren't cooperating, then you get taken advantage of. So we actually have, like, built in mechanisms neurologically to be exquisitely sensitive to violations of fairness. Because it's a good sign you should stop cooperating and start competing. Right. When you start to feel resentful, you become very zero sum in your thinking. So, okay, someone's gotta lose. And you get to that sort of burn it down mentality. The behavioral economic studies on this are fascinating. If you and I are playing a fairness game and you agreed we're gonna, hey, we'll split the pot. But the game's structured so that we could take advantage of each other anytime. You take advantage of me once and we keep playing, I will zero you out. Even if I get nothing.
- [59:07]
A
Right.
- [59:07]
B
It's like I will literally cut my face off despite my nose, just so you can't win justice for all. And by the way, doesn't that sound a lot like our politics right now?
- [59:16]
A
I was just about to say, since you said burn it down, and since we're sitting here in Santa Monica, and since Spencer Pratt has completely upset the apple cart with regard to political messaging and, you know, I have nothing but anecdotal evidence, but the conversations. There's something simmering right now. People are beginning to get, I think, to a point where you would have to get if you're confronted day after day after day after day with examples of no consequences and the perception or maybe the reality. But again, what's the difference? The feeling that everyone is getting away with murder or maybe in this case, arson.
- [59:59]
B
Yeah.
- [59:59]
A
Or just mass fibbing. I can't imagine the species has an infinite capacity to live or function with that feeling.
- [60:11]
B
Correct. And the thing is, is that's why it's these sort of collective illusions, Right. Where I'm going along with it, because I think this is not right. But I'm pretty sure everyone else seems to be okay with it, and so I'll go along with it for a little while. But they're so fragile because they're lies that it doesn't take much to actually tip this right? If you do it right.
- [60:31]
A
Do you know who Doug Allen is?
- [60:33]
B
The name sounds familiar.
- [60:34]
A
Tell me. Yeah, he wrote and directed and produced Entourage.
- [60:39]
B
Oh, my goodness. Okay, that's my way. Entourage is one of my guilty pleasures.
- [60:43]
A
Well, I mean, how do you not love it? I mean, especially in this town, in this industry. Well, he's all over the socials today. His house was robbed.
- [60:53]
B
I saw it.
- [60:54]
A
Two masked, right? Two guys come in. He's got 15 cameras set up. All his neighbors have the same. He is sounding to me very now. He left a center guy, didn't vote for Trump, wants to be clear about all that. But he lives in a fairly isolated enclave and he is among the chosen in this town. And he's had it, and he's had it, and his neighbors have had it. And he's making these videos and he is out of the closet and he's pissed and he's like. He's. It's his version of the emperor has no clothes. Somebody has to do something because there's no justice. And this is insane. And we can't. He literally called the people who burgled his home animals and then quickly explained that he's not gonna apologize. Cause they had masks on and he doesn't know what color they are. He doesn't know if they're Jewish. He didn't care. They're animals and they should be in jail for 20 years, damn it. Because they invaded my home. But they're not. They're not even being chased or investigated. And you can see this guy exploding with the frustration of a world without
- [62:02]
B
consequence and from a shattering an illusion and driving the change you want. That's the spark, right? That's the people. I admire the people. Oh, wait, the guy that did entourage, you know, hold on. Okay, yes, hold on, I'll listen. I'll listen to him, you know, rant, wave. You know, it's really funny. I had a. I always try to tell people, okay, under collective illusions, it's a problem, because they will destroy civilization. They really will. But they're also fragile because they're lies. And so if you understand the right strategy, you can actually shatter them and unlock change at a speed and a scale that would be unimaginable otherwise. But you gotta get the right strategy. And I'll give you the example of the strategy is about social proof, not persuasion. You try. If I try to. So imagine you believe that nobody cares about free speech anymore, which is one of the illusions on the left. The left believes the left doesn't care about free speech. It's just not true in private. So I'm like, okay, this is a problem. We gotta believe in free speech. And so I start telling everyone, listen, free speech is under attack. It's really important. We gotta preserve it. If I'm under an illusion, that reinforces the illusion.
- [63:08]
A
Sure.
- [63:09]
B
So the best example, by the way. So you never try to persuade when it's an illusion. If you know that's the problem, because it will make it worse. Best example of that. And then I'll tell you what the right way to do it is, is. Remember the stando drugs campaign?
- [63:22]
A
Oh, yeah. Okay, Nancy. Yeah.
- [63:24]
B
That came about because the government noticed a very slight uptick in first time marijuana use amongst teens. In response, they spent a billion dollars, got the best ad agencies in the country to come up with incredibly clever or whatever, you know, and they ran it for years and years. And from an advertising standpoint, it was unbelievably successful. The typical American teens saw three ads a day for six years.
- [63:51]
A
Like that was also part of. This is your brain.
- [63:53]
B
This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? How's it like an egg? Okay, but I had lots of questions. But here was the problem. The government assumed the reason kids were trying drugs is they were curious about drugs. But private opinion data existed at the time that they ignored or didn't know about that completely refuted that kids were skeptical. What they wanted is what every kid wants is to fit in. And they were under what I think is kind of a funny collective illusion. Most American teens back then thought most teens did drugs. So into that illusion, you blitz them with a billion dollars of ads, trying to scare them straight. What they took from the ads was, this must be what we're doing. Why would the adults try to get us to stop? So as a result, scholars have pretty conclusively proven that that campaign directly caused an increase in drug use. Okay, so we don't do that. You do not persuade.
- [64:53]
A
Is it possible that that same dynamic was at work with Black Lives Matter with regard to the immediate reaction by lots of people who said, wait, all lives matter? And then all of a sudden those people were deemed racist because they didn't understand. So what was the underlying collective illusion there? Was it the fact that there's a real belief that cops are fundamentally corrupt and they in giant numbers unfairly target like what?
- [65:22]
B
No, they did a really good job. So my interpretation of it is that. So first of all, it tapped something that I think is right. Like any decent person should be against racism.
- [65:32]
A
Of course.
- [65:32]
B
Right. Discrimination of any kind should be unacceptable. In a pluralistic, free society. There is racism and the folks on our side of things, we weren't really doing anything about. Not really. You know what I mean? And so into an event that had racial issues at play, there's no other alternative. So I see something that seems profoundly wrong that wasn't right. What happened this Side is very clever, and I don't mean this as derogatory as it can sound, but these are Marxists. The people that founded Black Lives Matter are avowed Marxists. Of course. It's just not my particular ideology. I think it's a fairly evil ideology. I don't think they're evil. I think the idea is fairly evil. Fairly evil.
- [66:14]
A
Fairly evil.
- [66:15]
B
Anything that has consistently led to the mass murder and starvation of tens of millions of people, probably. So I disagree with their starting assumptions of how the world should work. But all of a sudden you flood in with this thing. That sounds right. Yeah, of course. Black Lives Matter.
- [66:35]
A
Right.
- [66:36]
B
And then you get it. Like, if I want to control that narrative, then I can't let it become about everybody. Right. Because then that's not. I can't. We have a whole agenda. So. So the defund the police that came from them, that wasn't new. They had proposed that years before and got no traction.
- [66:51]
A
Right.
- [66:52]
B
So into something where you tap a real feeling like, this isn't right, something should be done and there's no other solution on offer. Like you could have done something that could have been the moment where we questioned qualified immunity. It's funny that our surgeons don't get qualified immunity. They have to pay for malpractice insurance.
- [67:10]
A
Right.
- [67:11]
B
You could have solved that problem by saying, we will go ahead and increase the salaries for cops to cover malpractice insurance, but we're removing qualified immunity. And if you consistently violate people's rights, just like a surgeon that keeps messing up, you will not be able to practice.
- [67:26]
A
I want people to really understand that. So say it again.
- [67:29]
B
Just this.
- [67:29]
A
There was a little slower and with the assumption that my audience's IQ is that. I'm listening. That Chuck's here.
- [67:36]
B
Okay, so Chuck's here. I'll explain to Chuck. So there was a very straightforward solution. Chuck.
- [67:42]
A
Thank you.
- [67:44]
B
That if you want to solve this problem, I mean, look, in any profession, there are bad apples. How do you make sure they can't do a lot of harm? There was a very straightforward proposal. The underlying problem was qualified immunity. And for people that don't know it, it's officers. It's anybody administering the law. This is why politicians didn't want it because they are covered under qualified immunity, too. If you are doing something in the service of your job as officer of the state, you have some qualified immunity from prosecution.
- [68:16]
A
Yeah, I'm a diplomat. I don't have to pay the car ticket.
- [68:18]
B
Yeah. And it turns out politicians take advantage of that quite A bit. And the last thing they want to do is be held accountable for their behavior. And, um. And so you could have easily if you said, okay, this was unacceptable. Let's understand what happened. Let's reform this. We should remove qualified immunity from officers, and again, not. Not to put them at risk, because most. Most police officers are fantastic and they're important, and we can replace that with malpractice insurance the way we do with surgeons. Right. It's kind of sad that someone goes to medical school and all the residency stuff and training, and she's a surgeon, and for whatever reason ends up making a bunch of mistakes, she will not be able to practice.
- [68:56]
A
Right.
- [68:57]
B
And we think that's okay. Right. That's a consequence. Called a consequence.
- [68:59]
A
Yes.
- [69:00]
B
So if we want to make sure there are personal consequences for bad behavior, you remove qualified immunity. And you. And I say, like there were even proposals to say, look, we will pay for the malpractice insurance. This is not an attack on cops. We just want to hold individuals responsible for violating the rights of other people. That wasn't the agenda on the Marxist side. Right. And so the last thing in the world you want to do is. Is expand the aperture on what this is.
- [69:28]
A
You don't want individual responsibility.
- [69:29]
B
No, no. And so you already have the defund the police movement that had gotten no traction and all these other things that were just, like, antithetical to our fundamental values as Americans, but as the only game in town addressing a very real thing. Again, racism's real. It's wrong, and we should all care about that.
- [69:50]
A
Are we a racist country?
- [69:51]
B
You know what? I think that it's always a work in progress, and I think that it's never finished. And I think that our brains are very, very tribal and prejudice of any kind. You know, our brains use stereotypes all the time to navigate the world. It doesn't mean they're right. In fact, they're not right. So we have to work hard to overcome that prejudgment and those things. And there are certainly a lot of racist people or some racist people. Do I think the country's racist? I do not. I think that fear makes us behave in ways that are probably.
- [70:25]
A
What's the science say?
- [70:26]
B
Well, look, I can tell you from our private opinion data, it's just every way we've pushed the stuff around to try to understand it, it's like, pretty shocking how eager we are to. To not judge people by the color of their skin or their gender. This. And really get what Dr. King wanted. Right. Content of Your character, that's still what people want in private. Now what's interesting is when we ask people in private whether they think we are systemically racist, are we this? No. Right. When we ask them, what do you think most Americans would say? Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [71:01]
A
And what about the line between how you might actually feel and what you actually do as a result of the feelings? For instance, there's a chapter in that book, Everybody Lies where the author's trying to answer the same question. And I don't know what he ultimately concluded, but he said, you know what, let's search these billions of Google searches the day after Barack Obama is elected president and let's see what we find. And, well, as it turns out, there were a fair amount of requests for racist jokes. Now where'd they come from? What part of the country? What demographic? They got all the info. Like they're not identifying me, but they're saying, okay, well there was a 62 year old white user who searched for racist jokes within 24 hours of Barack Obama's election and he lived in Baltimore. So what can we learn about this? Well, I don't know, but it is interesting to see where those searches took because again, to our earlier point, that's not a pollster asking a question. Correct. That's somebody all alone with their little keyboard going, I wonder, yeah, why? And what, if anything, do we glean from it?
- [72:29]
B
Yeah. What's interesting is most of our, again, our private views usually lead to our behavior. There are distorting things. Right. So like in that case, because what's weird is for whatever you think no one knows, like everybody knows what you're searching, Google knows everything. But there's this perception of anonymity, especially when you go on like safari, you're like, I'll go incognito. Yeah. Like, I don't think you know what that means. Like, people actually think incognito means nobody
- [72:58]
A
knows, no one knows.
- [72:59]
B
And we're like, no, it means they won't store the cash. Yeah, they know exactly what you're searching for.
- [73:03]
A
I know, I know.
- [73:05]
B
In fact, it's one of the easiest ways I can get you to like, this is like just what are you searching on incognito? When people hit incognito, it's one of the best predictors of what they really care about and think because they just think no one knows.
- [73:15]
A
You want to hear something really troubling? There's another chapter in this book, Everybody lies. And the author says the most reliable source of truly unfiltered real belief is on pornhub, because A, it's vast. It's vast. And B, if you're on pornhub and you're searching for something specific, it says a great deal about a great deal.
- [73:42]
B
I know you share all that with me all the time. I really appreciate those. Yeah. It's really. I really open my eyes to.
- [73:48]
A
I'm an open book. So, like, what do you do with this? So the author's like, okay, are we a depraved people? Are we like, sexually? Like, what are we really into? What are we really. So he goes, got all this data from pornhub. You know what the most searched thing on pornhub is?
- [74:08]
B
If you say dirty job, so help me.
- [74:11]
A
It's. I want to see activity between a mother and a son. Hello, Freud.
- [74:20]
B
Yeah.
- [74:21]
A
Hello, Oedipus. That's a like the most searched thing
- [74:26]
B
now, technically, isn't it? Stepson.
- [74:29]
A
Yeah.
- [74:30]
B
That makes it so much.
- [74:31]
A
That's okay.
- [74:32]
B
Okay.
- [74:32]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [74:34]
B
Chuck, you're fine.
- [74:36]
A
Yeah, you're good. But I mean, look, I think that's such a good example of a poll that could never hope to be accurately conduct.
- [74:44]
B
Yeah.
- [74:44]
A
You're never going to get the truth of this.
- [74:46]
B
I'll tell you something we've been developing. It's some of our preliminary data. We haven't made it public, but because
- [74:52]
A
we do, you're about to.
- [74:53]
B
Well, here's. Here's what's funny. Yeah. My poor co founders. Like, what are you doing?
- [74:57]
A
People do.
- [74:58]
B
Listen, we make this joke. Yeah, we. We always make this joke because the areas where people are going to lie the most are in some of these things that have to do with very private things like, like sex and stuff like that. Right. And so it's like we've always wanted to do a full suite of things. We're like, are we like a kink tank? Is that where you are now? Like, what is this? Right.
- [75:16]
A
Yeah.
- [75:17]
B
Populace after dark. But. But is young men and young women from watching so much porn who think everybody. That women like to be choked.
- [75:29]
A
Yeah.
- [75:29]
B
And it is definitely not true.
- [75:31]
A
Yeah.
- [75:31]
B
But they think that men want it. Young men think that women expect it, when in fact it's unbelievably dangerous.
- [75:38]
A
Yeah.
- [75:39]
B
This is the kind of stuff where you're like, wow, we're all being shaped by what we think everybody believes.
- [75:45]
A
Have you read the studies on auto asphyxiation? Death by misadventure?
- [75:52]
B
So bad. It's so bad. How sad is that? That. Because I do think, like, the porn industry has Gone so violent and crazy and. But then these young kids that, that's where they're learning about what it means to engage like that. Like, it's, it's quite bad. But the. On a happier note, if you see this, like, basically what I would say to anyone listening or watching is like, number one, you cannot trust your brain to tell you what your group thinks anymore. You can't. Those days are over. We're never going back. It's just digitally in an online environment. They're funhouse and mirrors. That's the bad news. Right. Good news is we're living under most of the problems we face as a people are actually problems of collective illusions. They are not, right now, not representative of ground truth. Right. If you just go on our website and download any of our private opinion research, you'll be shocked. Like, if I removed Democrat, Republican from the labels, you would not be able to tell me. Like, it is really ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And we're not looking for good news. Like, I don't. We just want the truth, right? Like, yes, like, like, like, look, if we have a problem over here, let's just see it accurately so we can try to solve it. That's just not what's going on. And I'll tell you the data that is both the most interesting to me that we have and the most useful for the moment we're in. We did the largest study ever on private opinion, on what people mean by a good life, what do they mean by success, what kind of life they want to live.
- [77:32]
A
Yeah.
- [77:33]
B
Over 65 attributes that you could choose from. Its trade offs. We talked about this last episode so people can go back and watch that one. If you want to know about the methodology that was in the previous episode and it had everything from being the richest person you know, to having a family, everything in between. Like anything that could index a successful life. Every time we do those, we always have you answer in private for yourself and then we always follow up with what do you think most other people would say on this? Our perception of what other people view as a successful life is entirely about status. Entirely. It is shocking. We think everybody, in fact, we've done this study a couple of times now. In one of them. The number one thing we think everybody else wants in life is to be famous in private. It was dead last.
- [78:28]
A
No kidding.
- [78:28]
B
Dead last. What's interesting, and this was fun in that same study, kind of circling back to stuff we've talked about before. For the first time ever, getting a certificate in a skilled trade ranked Significantly higher in people's view of a successful life than a four year diploma, an advanced degree, or a degree from elite institution.
- [78:50]
A
Sidebar before we sat down to start talking, I showed Todd a clip that I had seen on south park and sidebar to the sidebar. Parker and Stone, I reckon, will be looked back on as maybe the greatest satirists of our age. And so much of what south park does in an unapologetically puerile adolescent way is let the air out of the tire you talked about and tackle. I mean, if you really. You ought to do a deep dive on the collective illusions that south park has either debunked or dealt with, can
- [79:28]
B
I say this is. I, first of all, love south park because first of all, they're equal opportunity, like, and there's always a little kernel underneath where it's not just. You're not just being mean. Right, Right. You know, Book of Mormon, such a good example. Oh, I mean, mercilessly, like. And yet at the end, you're kind of endearing a little bit. Right. There's still.
- [79:52]
A
And Mormons love it.
- [79:53]
B
And the Mormons, by the way, the Mormons, the greatest response I've ever seen to somebody like that. Instead of, instead of throwing a fit, they took out that full page ad in the playbill.
- [80:01]
A
Yep.
- [80:02]
B
Said if you like this, you'll love the real thing.
- [80:04]
A
Yep.
- [80:04]
B
It's such a good. Can we just.
- [80:06]
A
It's called. It's called being in on the joke.
- [80:08]
B
Yes. It's like, come on. Like, you can either look like you can't handle a joke or you can lean into it. I bet you they got so many people going. You know what? It's pretty great. So what I love about them is that I had this asked to me before. It's like, when would you know that you've succeeded? And I said when south park explicitly does something on collective illusions, like, they've tackled them, but name it. If that ever happens, then I know we. Because everything's downstream from culture. And south park has been probably the most interesting, important driver of shattering some of these. Whether they realize that's what they're doing or not, they're so good at it.
- [80:46]
A
Yeah. That's a great point too. You know, back to your guy. What was his name with the airplane seat?
- [80:53]
B
Gilbert Daniels.
- [80:54]
A
Gilbert. Yeah. The work versus the personality trait that allowed the work to resonate.
- [81:02]
B
Yeah.
- [81:02]
A
That almost rhymes. But you know, I think Trey and Matt are mostly trying to amuse themselves. Right. And I think they're so good at it and they've got such a history of doing it that the people in the audience who are able to go along for that ride, they bought their ticket. You must be this tall to get on.
- [81:22]
B
That's right.
- [81:23]
A
And we go. I watch them, not religiously, but I. And obviously I doubt we see eye to eye on a bunch of stuff, but when they put Trump in bed with Satan, that is. That's what the court Jester is supposed to do.
- [81:40]
B
But it's exactly right. We don't have the Jester. Right. Who can actually make fun of the king without undermining his authority. Right, right. That was the Jester's job.
- [81:49]
A
Yes.
- [81:50]
B
And right now we've literally, in the name of whatever ideology we're after, have neutered art and neutered this thing. And it's. But it is coming back. It is. And by the way, the fact that these guys are filthy rich, Salzburg, it's not just going, it keeps just growing. And the amount. It tells you a lot.
- [82:10]
A
Yeah, right.
- [82:10]
B
Because nobody has to watch it.
- [82:12]
A
Right, right.
- [82:13]
B
But it's what we choose to watch. And what's so interesting though, let me come back to this six. I think, I think it's really important when we looked at the private truth about the lives that Americans want to live, because nothing's more important. Like we can talk about democracy. That's great. It's important we can talk about all this collective stuff. There is no better indicator of a thriving society than. Than when most people believe they have a shot at living the life they want to live. Call it the American dream, call it whatever you want. Like, like pursuit. If I believe I have a chance at that, a lot of other stuff gets easier in society. Right. When I feel like I have no chance at the life I want to live, why would I defend this thing? So, you know, when I think about how we actually revive it and ensure this American experiment continues, we've got to get back to what kind of life do people really want to live and how do we make that possible? Right. The pursuit of it. Not the guarantee of it, but the pursuit. So we were really interested what kind of life do you want to live? Look, in private. It's remarkable, honestly, and it's worth reading. Not just because we did the research, but it's across all demographics, every single one. The top trade off priority for their view of success is that they want to do work that has a positive impact on other people. They want to contribute. That is their number one private trade off priority for a good life. Also in the top 10 for every demographic, including Gen Z. They want to be actively engaged in their community. That one I was like that. I just, I think that can't be like. I was just a good place to
- [83:54]
A
circle back to the Boy Scouts. When I grew up, it wasn't just the Boy Scouts. It was Future Farmers of America. It was Skills USA. It was the 4H Club for Kids.
- [84:04]
B
Yeah.
- [84:04]
A
But then for adults, you had the Rotarians, you had the jcs, you had the Lions Club. Right. You had the Elks Lodge. Like there was so much grout between the tile and.
- [84:15]
B
And this is if you go all the way back to Tocqueville and democracy in America where people always forget he was a French aristocrat. He wasn't in love with democracy. He was like, what's going on?
- [84:25]
A
Yeah.
- [84:25]
B
You know? Yeah. And it was like his first real insight was this is a nation of joiners. They don't ask for permission. Like they don't even care who's president. Like it was like the mayor was way more important than the president.
- [84:39]
A
Sure.
- [84:39]
B
Politics and I love you say.
- [84:41]
A
Yeah.
- [84:42]
B
The thing I didn't really like is everybody thinks they're your equal. They all think they are entitled to their opinion. It just was so weird to him. Right. He also. A little known thing that people don't talk about is in his treaty on that he talked about how weirdly in a society that prized the freedom and equality, we were way more herd mentality. The social influence was really powerful. But we were a nation of joiners. And this is important because when you gut that layer, that middle layer of society, what's left is the individual and the government. And now if we want to get anything done either do it myself. But there's a lot of stuff that is not something you can just do by yourself.
- [85:27]
A
Yeah.
- [85:27]
B
So now I have to go to the government and everything becomes political. That layer was decimated. You know, Bob Putnam wrote Bowling Alone that really documented that decline.
- [85:38]
A
But wow, what a great title that was.
- [85:40]
B
Yeah. So good.
- [85:41]
A
I mean, right up there with square peg.
- [85:42]
B
Is that right?
- [85:43]
A
Yeah.
- [85:43]
B
It wasn't as good a cover as mine, but it was licking a bowling can all. We can't all have luscious lips and. And lollipops. But. Yeah, I know, right? But it's art.
- [85:53]
A
Yeah.
- [85:54]
B
You just don't get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [85:55]
A
I'm sorry, but licking a bowling ball. I mean, is there a dirtier hole on the planet than a hole in a bowling ball?
- [86:01]
B
I'm just gonna leave that. I'll let Chuck make you forcing me to think of a lot of dirty holes. I don't need that.
- [86:07]
A
God.
- [86:08]
B
So, but let me, let me just close up on this because. Okay, let me go back. So on these priorities that people have for the life they want to live.
- [86:14]
A
Yeah.
- [86:15]
B
We also measure achievement on them. What do you care about and how you doing? Being involved in your community is the lowest level of achievement of any top priority. In fact, there's no kidding. More people in our research reported being debt free that engaged in their community at the level they want to be. And I was like, wait, wait a
- [86:37]
A
minute, like where,
- [86:40]
B
where do those two
- [86:41]
A
things live in the rank?
- [86:42]
B
People would like to have financial security. They don't need to be rich. They definitely don't want to be drowning in debt. Right, right. So we say, oh, that's a top 10 priority. Just having financial security, not being rich. How are you doing? Oh, no, not so good, right? Or okay, a higher percentage of people reported, oh, I'm debt free, then I am engaged in my community at the level I want to be.
- [87:05]
A
But were they sad? Oh, they're saying, I'm dissatisfied with my level of engagement.
- [87:10]
B
It's a top 10 priority for how I deem is my life going well. And so we were like, well, hold on, this is weird because it's like all these things that are in the, that people care about, it's like, but you could just go do it, right? Like, so we, we did a lot of follow up stuff on digging into with people in focus groups. And so I was, okay, well, so what's stopping you? Two things.
- [87:34]
A
Oh God.
- [87:35]
B
One, the collective illusion.
- [87:36]
A
Huh?
- [87:37]
B
I'm all alone. If I want to go out and do something, I want to clean up the park, I want to do whatever, you know, I don't think anyone else cares. Some people still might go do it, but a lot of people don't want to be out of step with it and think it's okay. No one else is going to do it, so why am I wasting my time? Second thing is back to this gutting of the civic layer. Even the people said, well, I would, I don't know how. And it's really funny, I will say, like, I experienced this. You know, I grew up in Utah and it was a culture of charity, a culture of giving. It's, you know, it was so easy to plug in and do stuff like that to be engaged in your community. When I moved to Massachusetts, I realized without even thinking about it, I hadn't done anything for quite a while. And I realized oh, it requires me to go figure out.
- [88:25]
A
Right. It's not coming to you?
- [88:26]
B
No. Literally, like thank goodness the gym that I go to, the people that own it were like we're going to start doing Thanksgiving stuff and Christmas and it gave. Made it easy for me to actually contribute in my community. So this is the thing that worries me the most. We're under this massive illusion that nobody cares about contribution, nobody cares about community. We think everybody sees success as zero sum, sees it as status oriented. We don't want that. But we think our neighbors care about it. So we feel alienated, isolated. We feel like we don't share values anymore. So we don't trust people. This is why I think probably the most important thing I've ever been a part of and I'm so excited about this. Is everyone listening or watching one ask. There is a new initiative that is going to come online. Sorry. Doing the stuff in stealth that I don't think I've ever been prouder to be a part of something in my life. It's called Be the people.
- [89:31]
A
Love it.
- [89:32]
B
If you go to Instagram, which is at bethepeople Be the people. Org. This is a 10 year effort to completely recapture the American spirit rooted in the data we just talked about. The things I love about it. Politicians are banned. I don't care how nice you are, you might be good. There's a few good politics. Sorry, can't be a part of it. Because the thing that's terrifying to me is not just that we now see as a result of thinking we have no shared values anymore. We see each other as the enemy. And the other data that kept us up at night is for the first time a majority of Americans no longer believe we can solve our own problems. That is frightening because when you get to that place of impotence, the sort of strong man becomes tempting. So this is. I don't want to spoil this. All I want is go follow this because you're going to be shy. I don't want to spoil all the cool stuff that's coming. But we are talking about hundreds of companies and civic organizations and this is not it. This is not me doing it. I'm on the leadership council. I'm so excited about this because like this is. I get chills thinking about this. This is an attempt to bottom up, shatter the most important collective illusion we face as Americans. What do we believe in? What kind of lives do we want to live and get that identity back to the can do problem solving. We just see a problem. You Solve it. Get in there, right? Do something. Stop complaining. Do something. This is replacing that layer right now. It's standing it up. It's going to give people so many ways to just get involved. Not going to tell you what you have to do. And you're going to see, like, sports leagues. So all kinds of people get involved because people are desperate for something that isn't political, that gets back to who we are. And like, if you feel like something is wrong in the country right now and you, you still give a damn, you can't wallow in that.
- [91:42]
A
Get involved, brother. Look, I. It's not as on the nose as this, but, you know, dirty jobs and somebody's got to do it and returning the favor. And people you should know, and every kind of TV thing I've ever worked on really was an attempt to check that box in some way. And I didn't really know it when I, when I started, but the big lesson for me that began to emerge had to do with dignified work. And, you know, for a long time, that expression gets thrown around a lot. I don't think everybody think it means the same thing, right? And I think, you know, a lot of my progressive friends have asked me about, you know, well, what makes a job dignified. And they're coming from the place of the circumstances of the job, right? And it's like, okay, well, that, you know what? Picking up roadkill is not dignified. I mean, God, you're covered in guts and da, da, da, and those poor people and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, man, I experienced a very different social, anthropological awakening on dirty jobs. And for me, the big moment was, oh, shit, you know what, man? Dignified work is work that blesses someone else. It's not you.
- [93:04]
B
That's right. It's not about the.
- [93:06]
A
It's not you. And then conversely, if you start to look, I mean, sadly, there is a lot of undignified work in this country, and a lot of it exists in academia, a lot of it exists in consultancies, a lot of it exists in nonprofits.
- [93:20]
B
What do you do here?
- [93:22]
A
Activism. Right.
- [93:23]
B
The NGOs that are right now, I'm
- [93:25]
A
not saying those people are bad, but I'm saying if you're really going to put work into two different categories, the line maybe ought to be. But between that labor which benefits you, period, hard stop. And that which benefits somebody else. And that's the meaning, I think your research.
- [93:46]
B
So this is it. If I could sum up how the vast majority of Americans view a successful life is that they find meaning in their life by contributing to the lives of other people. Yes, that's it.
- [93:57]
A
The needle moves.
- [93:58]
B
Yes. And so, and I love that idea. It's like there's dignity in the work because it benefits somebody else. Right. It's not all about you. Right.
- [94:07]
A
And is collecting garbage dignified? Well, the answer to that question is brought to you by Jimmy Stewart and It's a Wonderful Life. And let's just imagine a world where it's not gathered. Yeah, that's the answer.
- [94:23]
B
That's right. And so it's fascinating because this is such an important issue, weirdly, because with, with the coming AI and it becoming the new operating system for society, I actually think we are not thinking about the right unintended consequence of that. Because right now the conversation is it's going to destroy humanity. Right. The bots, the robots will take over, maybe. I think usually that stuff's pretty overblown. I mean, I think we got to be careful on some things. But I like. But what's funny is the only thing that we seem to be able to muster on the positive side is, well, but you might not have to work.
- [94:59]
A
Right.
- [94:59]
B
Universe based income isn't that great. I'm like, no, no. Because guess what? Viktor Frankl was exactly right. We don't have a will to power, we have a will to meaning.
- [95:08]
A
Right.
- [95:08]
B
And I think one of the unintended consequences of AI succeeding is that we will generate enough abundance where work becomes optional at some level for a critical mass of people. And I think work, even when you didn't like it, was a forcing function for meaning because it made you have to give a shit about other people. Yeah, you contributed to their lives. And so I believe that the, the thing we have to get right as a people is we have to understand what it means to be able to engineer our own meaning now and not just relying that. And so this is why, like I think, you know, we've seen over and over again under collective illusions, if you pursue the right strategy, they shatter and things change super fast, super fast in ways that you just can't believe. The other thing that's really important about that and relevant to this meaning and the lives we want to live and be the people, is that the secret is everyday people have all the power because they're the ones holding up the illusion. Right. There's nobody that can save you when the problem is an illusion. Only we can do that. So let's take this idea as like, what matters most to us is we want meaning in our Life by contributing the lives of other people. And we want to do that in real life, not online, in our own communities. Okay? And we're not getting that right now. Imagine this 10 year effort, there's an air coming, it's going to be amazing. So you just got to sign up for it. So you can see it's shocking what's coming. But it's not about celebrities and politicians, obviously. It's about reigniting the everyday people to realize you have so much more power than you think. Not to destroy, but to build. And when we give you the opportunities to contribute in ways that matter to you and matter for other people, and then we show you that you weren't alone in that desire, that it's not just what you believe, it's what we believe. It's what it means to be an American. Like, watch what happens to this country. Like, I don't say this lightly. I think that this is going to be the kind of effort that's written about in history. You know, there's always these times in history, civil rights movement, other things like that, where your kids and your grandkids are like, where were you? What did you do?
- [97:29]
A
This is your answer.
- [97:30]
B
This is it. And it doesn't require. It's us. So just all I ask, like, follow it, sign up just so you can stay in touch and do one thing, one good thing.
- [97:42]
A
Be the people. Instagram anywhere, just Google it.
- [97:45]
B
And you are the social proof to everybody else that this is what it means to be American.
- [97:51]
A
Are you spearheading this?
- [97:53]
B
Are you? I'm not that smart. I'm. I'm on the National Leadership Council. Our research and stuff informed the opportunity. But this has gotten so big and there's so many amazing people I wouldn't be smart enough to do.
- [98:07]
A
Did it come out of Stand Together?
- [98:08]
B
They were part of it. But it's like literally what as you could imagine, it's bottom up. So it's like what I love about that is people who really believe in other people don't need to control. So you're going to create the conditions for everyday people to take a hold of this and make it their own and start living the lives they want to live and reveal for each other that this is who we are and we'll actually solve some problems along the way.
- [98:32]
A
So do you believe this initiative really is sort of the pointy part of the spear that can pierce the bubble where the, the illusions.
- [98:42]
B
I honestly believe it's the only way because, number one, all these other illusions we've talked About. They affect your life in some ways. Right? But like, you know, okay, this is about. I get one life. This is the life I want to live. This is what I want for my kids. Nothing matters more than the thing that is most personal. And the thing that's most personal is always the most universal. And when we start to realize that this was all bullshit, we were manipulated into seeing each other as the enemy. You can't say that to people. I can't teach. I can't just talk to you and convince you that I need to see that the people around me care about what I care about and they're willing to do something. And here's the trick. If you get that right, the illusions have nowhere to hide. Like, you know what China doesn't want? They don't want you to sign up. They don't want you to have a conversation with your neighbor. They don't want you to go out and contribute. Because the second you do, the government can't. Yeah, they can't. The second that we start seeing that, and I'm in, you know, just outside of Boston, and I'm like, wow, who knew in Burlington we did this. Look at the thing we did. And I'm like, oh, cool. So Burlington. And then I'm like, wait, I just saw on TV that this was going on in Los Angeles, too, and in Wichita. And as I was. Hold on. Wait, is this just us?
- [100:07]
A
Yeah.
- [100:08]
B
And guess what? The single best predictor of social trust is perceived shared values. When you shatter that illusion and reveal our shared values, we start to trust each other more. And when we start to trust each other more, we can actually tackle the hard problems where we do disagree with
- [100:25]
A
regard to that kind of universality. And since you used the word personal, can I ask you a personal question?
- [100:31]
B
Absolutely. We talked about animas last time, so it's fine.
- [100:35]
A
Not that personal. Okay, but look, I'm really struck. You're a scientist and the nature of your work can be. Well, it's illuminating, it's eye opening, it can be upsetting, but it can also be really, really optimistic. In a way, you're kind of in the contentment business. Like the search for truth ought to lead to some kind of insight that will hopefully lead to some version of happiness. You lost your wife a few years ago. Your dad is struggling in a huge way.
- [101:09]
B
Glioblastoma.
- [101:11]
A
Yeah. That's the most serious kind of brain cancer that I know of. So grief is both personal and universal. And I guarantee you people are watching this right now who are in your shoes, and they feel lost and they don't know how to process that level of pain. And maybe they feel like they're alone and of course they're not.
- [101:41]
B
Yeah.
- [101:42]
A
As a scientist, is there anything you can say to them in that whole glass half full kind of thing you've been vibing on?
- [101:51]
B
Probably not as a scientist, but as a human being, I'll settle for that.
- [101:55]
A
Some of our audience are as well,
- [101:58]
B
you know, as you from the previous story. Like, I mean, I got married when I was 19. It's funny, you don't realize you build a life and an identity together. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's gone. And it just. It only happened a month after the last time I was here. It's awful. It feels. I don't think I've ever felt more alone. But that's the weird part, because if you're in a relationship, either you go first or they go first. It might be the most. The thing we all have in common. But I'm going to tell you a piece of advice I got from a dear friend that was so profound and I think it's. It's worth sharing because you don't have to lose a spouse for this to also be true. Grief, like, collapses in on itself. Best I can describe is it's dark and it just keeps getting smaller and smaller. My dear friend Derek Johnson, who I think you know too, called me and he said, look right in the thick of it. He said, can I give you some advice? He said, I need you over the next week or so, in the funeral and stuff. He said, I need you to pay attention to all the ways that people around you show you they love you in the small ways. And not just the people who should have, but the people who come out of the woodwork and do stuff that you might just not even pay because you're going to be like, lost in your own grief. And then he said something, which was really the hard part, but was the magic. He said, and then I need you to feel the gratitude. What he didn't know, because he's not a scientist, is that grief and those kind of negative emotions don't coexist with gratitude at the same time. Gratitude is expansive, it's warm, it's encompassing. It was unbelievable to see people I barely knew, people I didn't even think liked me, just rallying because they cared. And I think that, like I said, it doesn't have to be that deep, but we all feel that grief, the loss, the things. And as you Feel it sort of caving in on itself. I would recommend the same thing. It is unbelievable. It is also extremely hard to force yourself to feel the gratitude, you know, because you just want to be angry. You want someone to blame. You want something. But it was a saving idea. It might be one of the most important things that anyone's ever taught me.
- [104:46]
A
We're in such violent agreement on so many things, Todd. It's just. I mean, over your shoulder, there is the sweat pledge. Everybody who applies for a scholarship from my foundation has to sign it. There are 12 tenets. The first one says, I believe I've hit the greatest lottery of all time. I'm alive. I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all, I'm grateful. Very hard to feel sorry for yourself. It's very hard to be angry at anybody. It's very hard to, as you say, really collapse into the grief. If that other G word is your North Star.
- [105:21]
B
Yeah. And guess what? It also doesn't just counteract grief. It counteracts resentment. It counteracts all these negative emotions. In fact, you know what's really funny? And this will tie back to this bigger initiative that I want everyone to be a part of. It's. It's so important to me. The single best predictor of feeling gratitude is acts of service. It is losing yourself in the service of another human being, even for a moment. Isn't that funny?
- [105:50]
A
Dignified work.
- [105:51]
B
Yes. By contributing without expecting some return. Right? Contributing. I feel gratitude seems like, a little bit, like, counterintuitive, but it's true. So think about if you're listening to this right now or watching it, and, you know, you don't have to have, like, sorry. I get that you're sad, angry, frustrated. You care about this country. You thought we were making progress, and the wheels seem to fall off. This little blip of the American experiment is a blip in human history. Human history is dark and mean. It's Leviathan, right? It's brutal. We built this. Our ancestors built this. And every generation has been asked in some form to either renew it or let it go. Here we are. You think, what would it matter that I sign up, that I go do one thing, it will heal you. It's what? If you're listening, it's going, wow, that is kind of how I think about the life I want to live. And if you're honest with yourself, are you really getting it? One good thing, you do it for yourself. But more importantly, do it for us. Shadow the illusion. Reveal our shared values. Renew the American Spirit. And the next 250 years will be better than the first 250.
- [107:21]
A
What better way to celebrate our semi quincentennial. Is that what it is?
- [107:26]
B
Yep.
- [107:27]
A
Semiquincentennial. Yeah. Maybe you're not. Maybe things feel a little wobbly up there. Maybe coming off the rails a tad. You go to be the people. You sniff around. Maybe you find a civic organization, maybe a volunteer. You know, I read David Sedaris living over in France, just started picking up the trash. Every day he goes on walks and he just started picking up the trash. Now they got his picture on the side of garbage trucks. They honor him.
- [107:56]
B
Isn't it amazing?
- [107:57]
A
You do one thing so true. Jordan Peterson talks about it. Make your bed.
- [108:01]
B
Just start one good thing. We are a nation of problem solvers, not complainers. We build. We don't destroy. We've lost that. Not because we don't believe it anymore, because we believe. We don't believe it. This is our effort. We will shatter this illusion. We'll reveal our American spirit. This is what makes me so optimistic. And I know everyone that's involved. It is unbelievable what's about to happen.
- [108:28]
A
You've been among my favorite scientists for as long as I've known you. Now you're among my favorite humans. I appreciate you sharing that. And I know it makes a difference in people's life. I think you're a real patriot and a pretty great guy. L. What's the L stand for?
- [108:44]
B
Well, listen, I used to be upset about that. It was Larry Todd Rose. My dad's name's Larry. They never meant to call me Larry. Now every government document says Larry Todd. Now with my dad, this. I'm leaning more into that. I'm still calling myself L. Todd Rose. It just seemed.
- [109:00]
A
It seems.
- [109:01]
B
Seemed fancy.
- [109:02]
A
You'll always be El Todrose to me. Be the people, folks. Remember that. Go there. Be restored. I can't seem to end this episode but you said it earlier. Sorry, Chuck. I know this makes you crazy.
- [109:16]
B
Let's just get some of that bourbon. We keep going.
- [109:18]
A
God. There's a song called Alone in the Crowd. It's an old song. All the old landmarks are gone from the town where I was born there's an atmosphere that wasn't there before and the friends who love me true they're up and wealthy do they don't recognize me anymore I'm so alone in the crowd don't feel at home in the crowd Old friends seem to be total strangers to me For I'm so alone in the crowd Maybe you really are. Maybe it's an illusion. Feels pretty crappy either way. Maybe not. Be so alone.
- [109:54]
B
Isn't it worth finding out whether it's an illusion or not? One Good thing.
- [110:00]
A
There's the title. I know I'd get it if we went long enough. One Good Thing with Todd Rose. Thanks, brother.
- [110:05]
B
Thank you.
- [110:06]
A
If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go. Before you go, Could you please subscribe?