343 - Misguided - Matthew Facciani

Summary

Podcast Summary: You Are Not So Smart – Episode 343

Title: Misguided – Matthew Facciani
Host: David McRaney
Guest: Dr. Matthew Facciani
Date: July 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the psychology of misinformation—how it spreads, why people fall for it, and what society can do about it. David McRaney interviews sociologist Dr. Matthew Facciani, author of the new book Misguided and host of the podcast by the same name. The conversation interrogates why misinformation resonates even with highly intelligent people, the role of identities and social dynamics, the amplification of biases in the digital era, and actionable strategies for countering polarization and disinformation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Misinformation, Disinformation, and Propaganda

Timestamps: 01:35 – 10:00

• Misinformation: Broadly refers to false or inaccurate information, whether intentional or not.

• Disinformation: False information deliberately spread to mislead.

• Propaganda: A form of disinformation aimed at changing attitudes by manipulating beliefs.

• Mid-information: Incomplete or uncertain information during evolving situations (e.g., the pre-germ theory understanding of disease).

• Quote:

  “The research is clear... people who fall for fake news, who believe things that seem clearly false, are not stupid... For the most part, they have been misguided.”
  – David McRaney, 02:01

• Historic and current examples demonstrate that misinformation is pervasive and has always exploited human psychology, but the scale has exploded in the digital age.

2. Who Falls For Misinformation and Why?

Timestamps: 17:09 – 24:00

• Facciani's core thesis: Falling for misinformation is not a sign of stupidity but a natural outcome of social belonging and identity maintenance.

• Social motivations override factual accuracy—people hold beliefs that connect them to valued communities.

• Case study: Flat Earth believers derive social support, esteem, and meaning from community participation, making it rational (from a social/psychological perspective) to retain those beliefs.

• Quote:

  “So from that perspective, it’s actually pretty rational to uphold this belief and say, I’m going to continue believing what my friends and close connections believe because I want to maintain that community.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 17:50

• Identity protection vs. factual belief: Identity-driven motivations often make people resistant to facts that threaten their group.

3. Trust, Expertise, and the Sources We Believe

Timestamps: 23:33 – 27:22

• Trust is multi-dimensional: It comes from both perceived competence and, crucially, warmth—whether someone is believed to care about you.

• Influencers or personalities interacting directly with audiences can create strong, trustworthy bonds, sometimes overpowering the authority of faceless scientific institutions.

• Problem: Institutions are slow to adapt to personal, dialogic media, leaving room for misinformation spreaders to fill the social “vacuum.”

• Quote:

  “A huge chunk of trust is warmth, is how do you believe that this person has your best interests in mind?... if you don’t know any scientists personally... it might be easy to believe that they’re not having your best interest in mind and they might be corrupted somehow.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 23:50

4. Identity, Social Media, and the Modern Information Landscape

Timestamps: 27:22 – 34:13

• Throughout history, human biases haven’t changed, but technology allows for faster and broader amplification (“scalability”) of bias and polarization.

• Social media, algorithmic feeds, and personalized content keep users within tight ideological bubbles, increasing us-vs-them dynamics.

• The ease, speed, and self-selection of online communities weaken the moderating effects of in-person relationships.

• Meta-point: Both sides now tend to view “the other” as brainwashed or uniquely misled, when in fact, all humans share similar cognitive vulnerabilities.

• Quote:

  “What is different now is the speed and the scalability of enacting those biases. I mean, social media makes it instant.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 29:17

• Quote:

  “It’s not so much that social media itself is creating polarization, it’s just making these existing social psychological biases much easier to be introduced to us and then amplified and reinforced.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 30:08

5. The Science of Identity: Salience, Prominence, and Overlap

Timestamps: 34:13 – 49:45

• Identity: Defined as a set of meanings associated with roles, groups, traits or characteristics central to the self.

• Salience: How top-of-mind an identity is.

• Prominence: The deep, personal importance of an identity.

• The more salient and prominent an identity, the more behavior and perception are shaped to protect it.

• Social Identity Complexity: When multiple important identities (political, religious, friendship circles, etc.) heavily overlap, new information challenging any facet strikes at the whole system, increasing psychological defensiveness and susceptibility to misinformation.

• Quote:

  “Whenever we have this motivation to protect those identities... sometimes it means rejecting facts and rejecting reality in a way that’s adhering to these falsehoods. Because what matters more is protecting those identities, protecting that source of self esteem...”
  – Matthew Facciani, 36:42

6. Affect Control Theory & Language in Polarization

Timestamps: 42:42 – 49:45

• Affect Control Theory: Individuals rate words and ideas as good/bad, strong/weak, active/passive. When unexpected or culturally incongruent statements are presented, people experience psychological “deflection” and seek to rationalize or reject the incongruity.
• Political identities change the way even simple sentences (“Democrat hurts person”) are perceived; our baseline evaluations shift depending on group membership.
• This shows how deeply cognitive and linguistic frameworks are intertwined with identity.

7. When Political Identity Becomes a "Mega Identity"

Timestamps: 49:45 – 58:53

• The merging of many personal identities into a singular political “superordinate” identity has grown in recent decades, partly fueled by adversarial political discourse, media segmentation, and digital platforms.

• When identities overlap (e.g., your friends, values, religion, and politics all reinforce each other), any challenge to one is a challenge to all—amplifying polarization and defensiveness.

• Social identity complexity: The more non-overlapping, diverse identities a person has, the more resilient they are to information threat and the less likely they are to become entrenched in misinformation.

• Quote:

  “If we have... four really important identities... and all of our friends... our religious and political identity completely overlap... then 100% of how we derive our social self-esteem is based on this very narrow lens... Any information that challenges Those identities challenges 100% of where we derive our self-esteem from.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 54:00

8. What Can We Do? Solutions, Interventions, and Hope

Timestamps: 58:53 – 67:54

• Individual Level:

  • Break out of echo chambers (limit “doomscrolling,” engage in offline activities).
  • Diversify identity: volunteer in new contexts, take up new hobbies, meet people from varied backgrounds.

• Community Level (Meso):

  • Institutions need to actively rebuild trust by engaging with communities in personal, dialogic ways.
  • Emphasis on outreach and visibility of scientists, medical personnel, and credible sources.

• Education:

  • Develop and teach media literacy skills, such as “lateral reading” (fact-checking across multiple sources), understanding AI limitations, and navigating online information ecosystems wisely.

• Systemic Level:

  • Push for greater transparency and accountability in social media/data algorithms.
  • Encourage "third spaces"—community venues for diverse interaction.

• Caveats:

  • Education alone is not enough; interventions must target both social/identity awareness AND cognitive literacy.
  • No silver bullet exists—solutions must acknowledge complexity.

• Quote:

  “We need to expand our diversity of identities... I think it’s a really important component to improve our resilience to misinformation. Literally just getting outside social media, outside these screens... and meeting people in the real world.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 60:51

• Quote:

  “You have to have that social understanding as well and that awareness of your own social biases, because that allows you to combine the best of both techniques...”
  – Matthew Facciani, 63:30

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the rationality of false beliefs:

  “It is very rational from a psychological perspective to maintain a variety of beliefs, some of which may be false.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 18:46

• On trust and expertise:

  “If you don’t know any scientists personally, it might be easy to believe that they're not having your best interest in mind and they might be corrupted somehow.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 24:10

• On the new digital landscape:

  “Algorithms amplify that and keep showing you stuff that you like... AI makes that even more personalized. We’re just streamlining these psychological biases to make them more impactful.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 30:30

• On identity overlap:

  “If our religious and political identity completely overlap... any information that challenges those identities challenges 100% of where we derive our self-esteem.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 54:36

• On practical steps to resilience:

  “Diversifying ourselves, diversifying our identities, diversifying our networks... seems so obvious and simple, but there’s so much power in literally joining a local sports league and meeting people from all different backgrounds.”
  – Matthew Facciani, 61:40

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Segment Guide & Timestamps

• 01:35–10:00 — Definitions: misinformation, disinformation, mid-information, misperceptions
• 17:09–24:00 — Who is susceptible to misinformation and why?
• 23:33–27:22 — Trust, warmth, and expertise
• 27:22–34:13 — Social media, group polarization, information bubbles
• 34:13–42:42 — Scientific perspective on identity, salience, and prominence
• 42:42–49:45 — Affect control theory and the language of polarization
• 49:45–58:53 — Political mega-identities, overlap, and social identity complexity
• 58:53–67:54 — Solutions: education, institution outreach, diversifying identity, systemic changes

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Tone & Language

The conversation is warm, approachable, and empathetic—aimed at demystifying complex psychology for listeners and promoting humility about our shared vulnerabilities. Facciani blends research with anecdotes; McRaney is curious and often self-reflexive, prompting the audience to consider their own thinking habits.

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Summary

This episode provides a thorough examination of why people fall for misinformation—highlighting the powerful role of identity, the social (rather than intellectual) drivers of belief, and the vulnerabilities introduced by digital culture. Solutions hinge on reducing the amplification of identity biases, diversifying ourselves and our social circles, improving media literacy, rebuilding trust in institutions, and embracing nuanced, multidimensional interventions. Rather than blame or ridicule, the episode advocates for humility, compassion, and systemic change.

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Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

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[David McRaney]

You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code Smart50Smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the show.

[Matthew Facchiani]

For Happy they went quiet.

[David McRaney]

Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast, episode 343.

[Matthew Facchiani]

The classic example is like someone who is very convinced they are unbiased, but that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. So you're just following this very narrow track in your mind that allows you to believe various falsehoods even though you think you're not.

[David McRaney]

That was the voice of Matthew Facchiani, who is a doctor of sociology, a sociologist, and an interdisciplinary social scientist, which means he researches neuroscience, psychology, and sociology and then mushes them all together to help make sense of the world. His focus these days, his specialty is media literacy, which means he studies misinformation and polarization and how nefarious actors manipulate all of us on purpose to get us to think, feel, and do things they would like us to think, feel and do. He studies all of that and then comes up with ways to better combat all of that and teaches it to people in the form of media literacy. He has a podcast called Misguided, and he just released a new book titled Misguided, which is all about misinformation, where it starts, how it spreads, and what to do about it. And that title is important here, Misguided, because as Facchiani explains, the research is clear, the evidence is overwhelming that people who fall for fake news, people who share misinformation who believe it, people who just believe things that to other people seem clearly false. These people are not stupid, they're not crazy. For the most part, they have been misguided. And as Facchany's research reveals and his book explains, there are a lot of nefarious actors out there, organizations and individuals, political institutions, corporate entities and so on that count. On this, they understand how people actually work and they use that understanding to purposefully generate misinformation. And these nefarious actors, they produce such misinformation a lot. That way you get exposed to it repeatedly, all in an attempt to misguide you toward the assumptions, conclusions, and behaviors they would like you to assume, conclude, and engage in. We will talk about all of that in just a moment. We'll get into things like superordinate identities and affect control theory. What we can do about all of this. Is the train headed for the cliff? Or can we actually create an environment where there's a whole lot less misinformation or just inoculate ourselves against it? All these things are coming up soon. But first, I wanted to take a second to define just what is misinformation, scientifically speaking. According to the American Psychological association, misinformation is quite simply false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead. As Facchiani explains in his book, misguided misinformation includes both intentionally and unintentionally false information. It's put out there on purpose, or

[Interviewer]

it just so happens to be not true.

[David McRaney]

So if you have a belief based on such inaccurate information, that would be considered a misperception. And as he puts it, if someone were to, say, believe that walking backward cures the common cold, that would be a misperception. That's a belief that is not supported by the evidence. That's someone who for some reason is misinformed, which is not the same as being uninformed. An uninformed person wouldn't have any beliefs about how to cure the common cold at all. They're just absent of beliefs in this regard. In this framework, misinformation is therefore a big umbrella term under which there are many kinds of misinformation. So, for instance, disinformation in this framework would be intentionally false or misleading information. That means the person or people who spread disinformation want the people who are exposed to the misinformation they spread to believe it. And they want them to believe it because they have some goal in mind toward which the belief in things the spreaders know are false serves some purpose. Propaganda in this framework is a form of disinformation. Usually propaganda is used to change attitudes via changing beliefs via misinformation. So if you want to shift public opinion from negative to positive or positive to negative, you can do so by identifying an area in which people may be uninformed, then you can misinform them, and then once they are misinformed they will on their own generate positive or negative emotional reactions to the issue for which their false beliefs now provide them with an inaccurate model about some concept or event or institution or person or political party or so on. For instance, someone who does not live in a major metropolitan area, who has never visited one. They might be uninformed about the rate of crime in major cities. The truth might be that crime rates have been going down for a long time and are currently at a 50 year low. But they don't know that. So a nefarious actor might spread disinformation about high crime rates in major cities for the sake of misinforming the uninformed. And now the misinformed will generate negative attitudes about the safety and overall civic health of cities they've never visited in person. You can then manipulate people's deeper beliefs, attitudes and behaviors by suggesting actions, laws and blame that those attitudes will now support. And that's not just some hypothetical. This is how it would work if people. No, this has been done a lot. There is a long history of propaganda throughout all of civilization, especially during sort of the radio into television era, where it became much easier to spread that sort of thing and get a lot more bang for your buck. Propaganda, it's a thing that happens, still happens right now. It's happening today. It's happening wherever there is a device where you can look at things that tell you how things might be working around you. It's a real thing. And there's a wide array of this sort of stuff. There's another kind of misinformation that's rarely mentioned in the literature. They call it mid information, and that's when no one really knows exactly what the truth is yet, either concerning a science fact or historical incident or some sort of evolving situation. As Faciani points out, this was the case during the Middle Ages, before the development of germ theory. Back then, most medical experts believed miasma, or bad air, was the true cause of the bubonic plague. What they didn't know was that it was actually being spread through direct contact with individuals. So in this case, it wasn't what they didn't know that got them in trouble so much as what they thought they knew for sure, because they took actions to avoid bad air all the time, but they did not take measures to avoid direct contact. So this has been with us forever. Misinformation in some form or another is part of the human experience. It's been part of our information exchange for a long, long time. It's just now the information economy is much more complex and misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and so on, it's much easier to spread and share at scale. And if that bothers you, you are not alone. A recent Pew Research center poll found that 70% of people polled across 19 countries said the spread of false information online is a major threat. When polling people just inside the United States, 84% of people said they believed misinformation was a, quote, very big problem today. But here's the thing. The fallout and impact of misinformation, it's not inevitable. We actually understand scientifically how all of this works and we understand it quite well. We have been researching this for a long while and we know how to fight against it. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. That is what we're going to discuss with sociologist Matthew Facchiani right after this. Commercial break.

[Interviewer]

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[David McRaney]

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[Interviewer]

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[David McRaney]

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[Interviewer]

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[David McRaney]

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[Matthew Facchiani]

I am a social scientist who studies why people believe the things that they do. I've been working at the University of Notre Dame for the last few years in their computer science department, where we've been studying how to teach media and digital literacy in a way that's scalable and engaging.

[Interviewer]

You wrote a book about all of this, and I think the title is important. Misguided is a good term that I will use, and I will cite you when I use it, because what I often see in discourse about all this is to assume that people who are behaving in ways that you disagree with or they believe things you disagree with, that they're stupid or that they are rubes or that they have been tricked because. Because they're stupid and root. And the framing of they've been misguided is a different frame when you get down into the scalpel version of this. So let me ask that as a question. Are people who fall for misinformation? Matt, the expert on this topic, are people who fall for misinformation stupid?

[David McRaney]

No.

[Matthew Facchiani]

To give a yes, no answer, I would say no, because there's so many intelligent people that fall for misinformation. It kind of goes against that idea. And my whole point is that we're all vulnerable to this process because we're social creatures. We're motivated by these social motivations to belong in our groups and to have community. And I start out the book and often use this example outside my book, but the idea of flat Earthers and how there was this really great documentary behind the Curve that came out a few years ago that really dives into this very beautifully. They talk about the community and the social aspects of people who believe the earth is flat and how they use conferences and friendships that develop and this community around that. And I think that's so critical to understand the community component because it provides us with so much self esteem and makes us feel supported within ourselves. So I think when we think about like why someone might believe something false, even something as extreme as the earth being flat, that belief by itself may not have a big impact or any impact on their day to day life. So whether the earth is hexagon or square or spherical, it's really not changing their day to day life. But what definitely impacts their day to day life is if they lose all their friends and people they care about in their community. So from that perspective, it's actually pretty rational to uphold this belief and say, I'm going to continue believing what my friends and close connections believe because I want to maintain that community and these people care about me, I care about them. And this belief is part of a larger set of beliefs that kind of holds us together and we can connect with each other. So it, to me, it is very rational from a psychological perspective to maintain a variety of beliefs, some of which may be false. And that speaks to my larger point about the book. Misguided. Misguided is something that happens to all of us. It's a process of being guided by social forces that provide us with self esteem and meaning and reductions of uncertainty. So we have this strong motivation to protect our identities and our groups that provide us with this meaning and self esteem. So a lot of times it can be very positive. We're guided towards being a good parent because we care about our children. Like that's an identity process. Or we want to do well on our sports team because we care about the sports team that we belong to. But when we belong to a political team, for example, sometimes that support of that political identity and that support of the political team might mean rejecting certain facts that make the political team look bad. And that's where we run into these issues with people having this motivation to protect that identity so strongly that they will reject information and believe falsehoods sometimes. So that's kind of like the larger issue of identities. And then it gets more complicated as you dive into like the context to which these identity forces are most impactful.

[Interviewer]

And we'll get into that in a second. But I, I just, I love how surprising this can seem to the uninitiated because you're doing it all day, every day. And we've been doing it all day, every day for the entirety of human civilization, right?

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And yet this can still seem quite surprising.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, I've. I felt, I felt similarly. I mean, you know, I study this stuff every day, so like, I know other people who don't maybe don't think about it as much, and it could be a lot more novel, but I think it's even broader and deeper than that because whenever you're learning about these social biases that, okay, we have this motivation to protect important identities and we have this motivation to protect identities and meanings that bond us with our communities. What the broader message is that we're actually motivated by these forces that we're not always aware of or thinking about. And human beings like to believe that we're very rational and logical and we're making decisions completely by logic and reason, and we're just in control, driving how we believe things and how we come to different conclusions. But the reality is much more complex and that we have a lot less control than we might think and we might be very biased by our environments and the social and psychological forces behind that. So I think some of that requires awareness and this broader intellectual humility that yes, we can be biased, and yes, there are forces that we might not even know about, and appreciating that makes us less biased. So it's kind of, it's kind of interesting whenever someone is trying to say, like, no, you know, I know the classic example is like, someone who is very convinced they are unbiased, but that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. So you're just following this very narrow track in your mind that allows you to believe various falsehoods even though you think you're not.

[Interviewer]

What comes up a lot in these discussions, I find, is the information deficit model is what comes up. Because it just seems like if you just saw the things I saw, if you just been exposed, especially in academia, if you just exposed the information that I've been exposed to and just acknowledge that I am an expert on this topic, and so therefore take a look at this information that I have provided for you, then you'll look at that and go, oh, okay, I was wrong about that. And it seems to me there's an element of this group is trusting one source of information. This group is trusting a different source of information. As a question, what would you suppose is the difference between a person who believes the earth is round, a person who believes there's this flat when it comes to who they're trusting? What's altering that? Different trust bases.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Trust is such a critical component, and it's also another very social component, another social type of thing here, because it's comprised of how you feel about the person and how competent you are you think they are. So, you know, you know, it's interesting to think about trust in the, the form of experts because so much of how we determine if someone's trustworthy or not is not just like a very technical aspect of how competent they are at like, certain problem solving. It's not like we're just like viewing all their test scores or something and saying, okay, this person's competition, it or not. A huge chunk of trust is warmth, is how do you believe that this person has your best interests in mind? And that component is a huge predictor of whether or not we trust someone. So if you don't know any scientists personally or any physicians personally, then you might have less interactions with them and it might be more easy to believe that they're not having your best interest in mind and they might be corrupted somehow. So as far as the flat earth thing, it's like, okay, imagine you have this contrarian, free thinker influencer that you like to follow who is always in your phone, in your hand every day, talking to you directly, sometimes responding to your comments, and you have this like, connection with them. It might be a parasocial connection, but it's still a social connection with this person. And you believe that they have your best interests in mind. They're constantly affirming identities and questions that you have. So you trust them and they might think that the earth is flat, or they're presenting that view to you and maybe they're showing some of their work in a technical looking way and you trust that because of the social connection you have with them. And you can compare that to this faceless abstract scientific institution that releases a statement on their website and says, you know, the earth is round. Well, like from a psychological perspective, which one of those pieces of information are you more likely to trust? The person that you have this ongoing social contract with or this faceless abstract non human entity of just this like big science group that you know, you're supposed to distrust. And I think that really speaks to how we form trust and then what that looks like in practice and how a lot of these institutions have been super slow to adapt to the current media landscape and have been so cautious to have dialogue with people that now we're seeing the negative effects of that. Where we need people like going on podcasts and having dialogue with people on social media from these institutions, whether it's academic institutions or medical institutions, science institutions, because people want to see that level of sociality that, that, that social relationship. And if you don't have that, then you're already being reduced so much in the components that determine if you're trustworthy. And it creates a vacuum for someone else to come in and be like, hey, that person's not even talking to you. Or when they do talk to you, it's a very patronizing, like top down type of process. So instead, trust me and I will talk to you and I'll give you access and answer all your questions directly. So you were seeing that asymmetry between these institutions that didn't value science outreach enough and all of these influencers who were all about outreach and connecting with their communities, how that Asymmetry and trust can form from that perspective.

[David McRaney]

You talk about this in the book

[Interviewer]

like there's a question of how much of this has always been the case and how much of this is new, especially when it comes to the polarization. And you have, you know, you go from there's a maniac in the street yelling crazy things in your small village and you know that person and everybody knows who that is. And then you switches to every maniac that has access to the Internet now yelling and. And it alters like the signal to noise ratio and what goes the top. And then you've got newspapers, then radio, then television, then Internet. Every single one of those changes the information economy and the attention economy and the. And then what gets incentivized and what everybody's consciously or unconsciously ab testing all of that and going with what works, especially if you make a living off of it. Cable news started having, you know, punditry that was just angry is the like in my. From my perspective, it's like accuracy was never what was connecting you to the person. It was the. They were angry at the same things you were angry about.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

And that's the issue that's at stake. That's what's actually the motivation. Even when you're arguing with your family member like you're.

[David McRaney]

What you want them to do is

[Interviewer]

come over to your side so it's no longer an us versus them situation. And the actual topic is almost irrelevant that you just. I just want you on my side.

[Commercial Narrator]

Right.

[Interviewer]

So that you're motivated by the same things I'm motivated by and you're angry at the same things I'm angry about and then the landscape just adapted to it. So that's what you do up front is portray your anger and portray your us versus dimness and everything sorts that seems newer or at least how quickly the economy can adapt to that is faster now. I think I'm on the right track there, right?

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, absolutely. I think the psychological biases that we've been talking about have been around since humans have been around. But what is different now is the speed and the scalability of enacting those biases. I mean social media makes it instant. Whereas before you'd have to have like a group of people actually meet them in person and have conversations and then it gets really messy. And I think that's kind of another interesting distinction of before whenever you would try to bring up politics or something like you might if you were embedded within your local community and you were like going to community events and interacting with lots of different people. There was. You knew you had to have future encounters with these people, so you had to treat them with respect and, you know, mutual respect and understand that they're full humans with their complex ideas, just like you. But with the age of the Internet and social media, you can self select people who think almost exactly like you and affirm your identities and your ideologies and make the world much cleaner. And like, these are all the good guys on my side who agree with me 100% and everyone else who's disagreeing with me is on the bad side. And it just makes it so simple and so quick. And algorithms amplify that and keep showing you stuff that you like and you interact with. And AI makes that even more personalized. We're just streamlining these psychological biases to make them more impactful. So it's not so much that social media itself is creating polarization, it's just making these existing social psychological biases much easier to be introduced to us and then amplified and reinforced as we interact with them.

[David McRaney]

I think this is one of the

[Interviewer]

things that is most difficult for like a, especially in a United States culture, but just Western culture in general. You want to think that people are being misled and they're being tricked and the battle is like to fight the agents who are brainwashing people. And there's a less emphasis on a person is actively choosing to engage or disengage with certain sources and information. The idea there would be any responsibility involved is a prickly thing to introduce to the conversation for a lot of people. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting. Yeah, I think both, this is something that like both sides of the political spectrum will say. It's like the other side is just brainwashed. They're NPCs or whatever. And I think that's, that's an interesting idea of itself because, like, what does that say about how you view other people? Like, you do view other people as just these easy to lead and mislead people. But like you're not part of that. So it's like you're like very much othering this group of people that it's like you're assuming they have completely different psychological processes than you do. And that's just not true. Like we're all human beings, we all have these social psychological biases. Again, that's like my main point is like we all have these and we're all vulnerable to it. And it's important to understand what contexts and what situations make these biases more impactful. So yeah, I think it's an easy way to just ascribe a simple explanation to something, especially if we don't like the outcome. It kind of goes into like, you know, just world hypothesis stuff and thinking about like neat simple solutions of well, you know, my dad, I want to believe my dad is good and what he's believing is something I consider not good. So there must be this external thing that's driving that. And instead of like under diving into the complex interplay of environment and social influence and how we all have these

[Interviewer]

biases, I'm just reiterating things in a way but I find that to be

[David McRaney]

one of the things I most knee

[Interviewer]

jerk response to is this othering that you're describing because there's just so much research into. Well, people will actively avoid certain types of information. You do that enough and that. But it was just newspapers or books. There's, that's one. There's some sort of impact there. But when it's as you're describing it, constant from the almost if you, especially if you wake up and you begin doom scrolling within, you know, 30 seconds of entering conscious reality again, like, like yeah, you're doing a lot of work to stay inside your bubble, right? A lot of people are helping you do that more and more and almost making it as easy as ordering room service. But it's, you know, it's a. The effort you have to put into doing the thing that you're going to do. They're making it so easy to get from here to there. Okay, I could talk about that forever and I'll burn a lot of time talking about that because I find that particularly fascinating right now.

[David McRaney]

Identity, that that's a word that we. That is in the common parlance.

[Interviewer]

But an actual social scientist, a cognitive researcher, has a much more robust understanding of the term identity. So let's just start there. What from the site, from a scientific perspective, what do we talk about when we talk about identity?

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, great question. So from a social science perspective, how I we can go. Other people have different identity or different definitions of identity. So that's a whole other conversation of like the nuance there. But broadly speaking, from a social psychological perspective, an identity is defined as a set of meanings that allow us to identify with a role or a social group or a unique characteristic that defines us as a unique person. So the set of meanings is really how we're thinking about it. So what does that mean and how do we define those meanings? And how do we measure them? We can ask people, we can try to track how they interact with different things. But really thinking about identities as meanings and values that we want to adhere to, why that matters is because once we know that there's these important identities and then associated with these important values and meanings, we then know that people have this motivation to protect those identities by acting in ways that are consistent with those meanings and values. And when people act in ways that are consistent with these meanings and values, it provides them a source of self esteem. So there's this constant motivation to maintain consistencies between the behaviors that we do, the information that we process, and the meanings and the values associated with those important identities because they provide us with this feedback loop of self esteem. So, for example, let's say you're a student and you care about being a good student. That's an important identity for you. There's roles associated with that identity, such as studying and going to class, and whenever you're studying and going to class and then you're getting good grades, that provides you a self esteem boost because you care about that. And it allows you to verify that identity in your mind in a way that keeps giving you this positive feedback loop. So you want to keep studying, getting good grades, being a good student, and so on and so forth. That's the positive aspects of identities. Not only do we have this feedback loop with self esteem, identities also allow us to connect with other people who share characteristics with us, so we can form bonds and provide all this social support and communities. So there's all these positives that go along with identities like this. Constant verification of the meanings and the values of these identities make us feel good. So we're constantly motivated to do that. But as we've been describing, whenever we have this motivation to protect those identities and act in ways that are consistent with those meanings, sometimes it means rejecting facts and rejecting reality in a way that's adhering to these falsehoods. Because what matters more is protecting those identities, protecting that source of self esteem, and protecting the communities associated with those identities we belong to. And that's where we see issues of vulnerability to misinformation.

[Interviewer]

We like to think of our identity as something that just is, this is who I. I either was born with this identity or I chose it from the panoply of options. The fact that I was influenced to consider this identity important to me is something we would get prickly about because it feels like I have no agency involved.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Agency is a key word there. And I think that's one of the challenges with having these types of conversations is we have to acknowledge that we have less agency than we might think. And that's an uncomfortable truth to try to present with people. You talk about like a meta discussion of identity.

[David McRaney]

Yeah, because identity is.

[Interviewer]

It feels like it's synonymous with agency, but it's not, Right?

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, it's a psychological process. Like we're measuring psychological bias in the form of social influence. Influence through identities. And when we have these identities, they do happen sometimes randomly, you know, like, like college is a good example because, like, you're meeting lots of different people and like you're kind of growing up and becoming who you are. And that could. Your identities could be formed by just who you interact with, who you have class with. Like, if you're just walking through campus and this kid comes up to you and he's like, hey, you want to join my club? And let's say it's a religious club and he seems really nice. And then you become religious ultimately because of that interaction. Or maybe you become non religious if it's like an atheist club. So it's like you might not even think that that was the thing that pushed you. But what do you think of like the preponderance of your social interactions? We're motivated again to be these social creatures and have social support from people we care about. And that can be due to who we connect with. And that can be a very random process that, you know, we don't always like to think about,

[David McRaney]

which is in

[Interviewer]

itself we may have.

[David McRaney]

We could have been born into a

[Interviewer]

culture that was more okay with that. Yeah, it gets better so quickly. Yeah. Which is my favorite thing. And we can have many, many identities. As you talk about in the book, the. You can be a parent and a teacher and a musician and ex military and American and from Iowa and a fan of this. And you like this. And I go to this conference and this convention and I like this TV show. All of these things are multiple aspects. Identities that can become, depending on the context and depending on the other people that share it will have more impact on your cognition and behavior because it sort of rises in the importance of that context. That identity is front and center.

[David McRaney]

Tell me a little bit and tell

[Interviewer]

everybody in the world a little bit about the difference between identity salience and identity prominence.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah. So identity prominence is referring to how personally important the identity is to you. And identity salience is more about if it's top of mind or not. So if something is salient, you're thinking about it. If something is prominent, it's more of a deeper personal association with that identity. And both of those influence our behavior because if we're reminded about an identity we have, so it's more salient. We're also more likely to want to support that identity and act in ways consistent with that identity. But if it's an important identity, a prominent identity, we're also motivated to support it. And these are constantly changing. What's top of mind for us is a constant process of if you remind someone about their identity, then they may be more likely to think about it and then have a motivation to protect it. So one of the studies that I mentioned that kind of dives into this is this political identity study where if you have people write about their political identities, they become more biased, and that's because they're thinking about it more and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm a conservative or I'm a liberal, and now that I'm thinking about this, I'm going to respond to even having stronger political attitudes than the group of people in the study that you don't ask to think about your political identity. So it's becoming more salient in their mind. It's more top of mind. And it was already important to them for many of that. So both of those concepts explain how motivated we are to protect these identities when we're consciously thinking about them or unconsciously thinking about them. If it's a deeper, broader personal importance, like with prominence.

[Interviewer]

You did research into this ethic control thing. People heard a story. Share a little bit, if you could, about the research you did into the affect control theory.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah. So affect control theory talks more about how we feel towards cultural ideas and how we think about different components of language. So you mentioned language. So you might find this interesting because what we're actually doing is evaluating each word on three dimensions of meaning, like evaluation, potency, and activity. Evaluation good, bad, potency strong, weak, and activity really active or more passive and slow. There's been a lot of research on showing that these three dimensions of meaning really break down a lot of concepts just with those three factors. Yeah. So this is like part of my dissertation work. So it's been a few years since I really dove into this, but I remember it being such a cool way to try to quantify how we navigate our social and cultural worlds. Because whenever we experience the world in a way that contrasts from what we expect, it creates this, like, sense of unreality and this kind of like, oh, response. And we're motivated to try to fix that in some way. So, for example, I think this is example I provide in my book. One way to study this is through really short statements. One statement is, I think mother hurts child. You break down each of those components. Even more specifically, mother, we think more positively. For as a culture, this word and this concept, we think, okay, mother, good. Hurt is a bad thing, a bad action, a strong action. And then child, we think good. So it creates this cultural inconsistency and this psychological inconsistency for us to read that sentence of, like, mother hurts child. We think, oh, like something. We then are, like, motivated to reframe one part of that sentence. So maybe the mother we think is a bad person, we say like, oh, this is actually more of a monster, not a mother. Or hurt. Maybe we're saying, oh, maybe hurt is just they're disciplining them. They're not actually hurting them. So, like, we're trying to reframe this constantly in our mind to try to make sense of. Of the world. And I think that's an interesting way to think about how we, like, process identities and biases on a very granular, detailed level. It's like, even at the level of each word, we're trying to make sense of it. And we are rejecting these inconsistencies whenever we see them, even at a very lower level. So to connect it to politics, which is like, the easy political identity to fit in here, if we're a Republican or a Democrat and we read a story about, like, democrat hurts person. If we're a Democrat, we read that we're like, oh, well, we're less likely to think that's true. But if we're a Republican or read that same sentence, we're more likely to think that's true because the Republicans are evaluating the word Democrat very differently than Democrats are. So you can really, like, quantify at a very simple mathematical level how. How much conflict people are going to perceive these statements based on their own identities. And that's what I was trying to study in my dissertation, is really breaking down these political attitudes at this, like, synaptical level of, okay, Democrats and Republicans are going to evaluate each other differently. And that also means that they're going to evaluate the likelihood of events differently based on how they are evaluating different words. So, like Democrats and Republicans. I think in my dissertation, I did use the example Democrat hurts person, Republican hurts person. So Democrats and Republicans evaluated the words hurt and person pretty similarly, but they evaluated Democrat and Republican very differently. And you can do this mathematical equation of Seeing how much conflict there is between the words in that particular sequence. So a Democrat reading the sentence Democrat hurts person creates a lot of conflict, or what's called in the literature deflection, because you're saying good word is doing bad thing, and that's this big conflict in your mind. Whereas Republicans, it creates a lot less deflection and less conflict in their mind because that is more similar to their expectations based on their identities. And so we can kind of like mathematically operationalize how much psychological conflict are people experiencing when they read these short sentences. And then you can expand that to like, a broader way of how they view their worlds where. All right, so right from the beginning, we're seeing that this person is going to consider this social situation much more or less likely, depending on the identities that they have. And that likelihood is really what I'm driving at is like, how likely do you think this event is? And that likelihood is dependent on how you evaluate each component of the social situation. So again, if you're viewing the actor in this situation, good or bad, you're going to view the subsequent behaviors of that actor differently. So it's kind of speaking to this broader identity bias, but it's really diving into the details of like, okay, here are the nuts and bolts of where it starts. And you can see these, like, building blocks of identity bias based on how people just evaluate certain words and certain actors they experience, you know, in their environments.

[Interviewer]

Something you brought up. I think it was Mason who had brought this up. I've noticed this, and it's a strange thing. And I'm wondering if you have any insights into this or just any curiosity about. Seems to be in my lifetime, and I could be wrong about this, and maybe this has happened all throughout history. I just happen to be in a pocket of it where it's happening now. Being in American culture, being a Democrat or being a Republican has become this superordinate identity. And you can say left versus right, but it seems like this, this idea, if this becomes salient, this becomes the thing and the. This mega identity. As she was describing it,

[David McRaney]

this feels,

[Interviewer]

at least in my lifetime, it feels stronger than ever. And I'm wondering if you have any insights as to how did that come about? How did. Why is that now our superordinate identity across all sorts of contexts?

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, I think there's a variety of reasons for this. One thing has just been how you can talk of the macro level of how political discussion from political leaders has changed, has become much more adversarial in just the past few decades. So you can see this top down effect of people becoming much more aggressive towards their opponents, considering their opponents as the enemy more versus just someone they disagree with. And we saw that, you know, in the 90s with like Newt Gingrich and stuff like that, where the language used was just very different. And so that's like at the macro level, but then there's also the personal level. And the environment we are in now is very different than it used to be. So we talked about social media. Social media is just amplifying this existing process. So you already have these social biases, these social identities and these networks that amplify these identities. But now you can find your own cable channel that supports your political identity. Whereas before there wasn't like a personal cable channel, that it was more of a broad channel that applies to everyone. So now it can be personalized with one identity or the other, but not just cable identities like it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Now we're seeing social media. You can have your very personalized social media information that will support your identity and tell you the other identity is bad. So it's this amplification process. And that's really the major vulnerability that I see with these identity processes. It's not so much that we have these identities that bias us. Like, yes, we should be mindful of these identity biases. Where it really becomes a problem is the spaces where it's reinforced to be the superordinate identity like you speak of, or this mega identity and what contexts and situations allow for that to happen. So any sort of amplification process is going to make us more vulnerable to these identity processes. And that could be surrounding ourselves with people who think just like us and are constantly reinforcing our identities and our beliefs and our meanings associated with those identities. So that again, that could be like a cable news show. You watch it and it's constantly affirming that. But then it's not just cable news, it's your social networks, it's your social media. And it's constantly amplifying these existing forces to create such a strong polarization that connects other identities together. And that can be because when we are navigating our world, we want to associate with people who are like us and share characteristics. And when politics is such a driving force of who we are, we want to be around people who think similarly to us. But this can be an issue when we are so motivated to be around people that we share characteristics with that we stop associating with people who think differently than us or have different backgrounds. And this relates to this idea of, in this research topic that I talk in a book of this psychological concept of social identity complexity. That's a really interesting way to think about identities. It's not just that we have this identities that exist in vacuums, but our identities operate in a context of intersecting with other identities. How does that influence us? So if we have, let's say our political and religious identity, how much overlap do those two identities have? If they have complete overlap? This is an extreme example. Let's say we have like four really important identities in our, in our lives, which is, you know, just an extreme example. Let's say our political identity, our religious identity, our volunteer identity and our friend identity. So this is who we are. So let's pretend that our religious and political identity completely overlap. All the meanings are 100% agreement. And we volunteer at our place of worship. So we are there, we care about volume a volunteer. It's also connected to this. And all of our friends are also at this place of worship and also share our political beliefs. Then in this example, 100% of how we derive our social self esteem is based on this very narrow lens of meanings that are all within this four identities that completely overlap and completely amplify and increase the prominence of these identities. So it's not just that these are personally important to us, but they share meanings with other personally important identities that then enhances the overall importance of those meanings. So 100% of how we view ourselves is through these few meanings associated with these identities. So any information that challenges Those identities challenges 100% of where we derive our self esteem from. So it's a super strong personal attack that makes us motivated to reject it because it feels very, very uncomfortable, Very, very negative. You could think of the converse of that where we have a much broader set of identities that do not overlap very much. So we can still have a political and religious identity. Let's say they're not over connected all that much. Our church doesn't even really talk about politics all that much. And let's say we volunteer, but we volunteer at like a pet shelter, something completely outside our church. And we have friends that maybe a few go to our church, but we have a lot of friends who don't go to our church. So our friend identity is much broader. Now our meanings associated with our identities are spread across a wide range of social support systems. So whenever we encounter information that challenges our political identity, it's only a small subset of where we're deriving self esteem from. And we're much better able to absorb it and process it more objectively because it's not completely attacking our entire sense of self, but only a small component of it. And that's how we're more resilient towards misinformation. If we're experiencing information that is false that challenges these identities.

[Interviewer]

Oh, that's awesome. I'm going to, I'm going to make a new slide for my next thing. I'm going to present to talk about this. It would take a long time to get here on your own, but once you see it, it's like.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, you kind of have to build it up. Yeah, it's. But like, once you get it, then you can just see it. Like, I now like, I literally try to see like what I'm. I visualize this. You can write it down on like a map. And some people have talked about like, how that could help reduce polarization by actually like visualizing your identities on a piece of paper. But like, you can see how this all connects because we have our identities and our identity maps and how much overlap they have spatially. And then you can see the network effects of all those identities amplifying them. And then if you really get really crazy and granular, you can think about that affect control theory and how we view social situations based on our evaluations of specific words and actions and how that is all interacting with each other and potentially amplifying our susceptibility to misinformation and bias. So it's like, it gets really complicated, but that in that complexity you can really start to understand the broad effect of how we're vulnerable to these social biases and what we can do about it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And I'm imagining all throughout our history different types of ways of being civilized. You know, villages, communities, empires. How that alters the way your identities get a chance to be overlapped just because of the practicality of the situation and the geographical limitations. And you don't have a, a media source. You don't even have literacy yet because like, it's a. My politics and my religion and my

[David McRaney]

friends and my volunteers.

[Interviewer]

It's, it's, it's all smushed up. And it makes sense that when you meet, you suddenly, when this group suddenly meets the Romans, you know, like, oh, wow, there's not a whole lot of overlap here.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Exactly. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's wild to think about how much we can like visualize these processes happening and, and it makes a lot of sense of how strong and quickly that othering can be when it's not just, okay, it's one identity. It's this confluence of all these identities that amplify each other. And that's really where that polarization stems from.

[Interviewer]

This is good stuff. Okay. But I do want to get one last thing in which is. And this is a question that would take two hours for you to answer. So I understand that. But in these discussions, no matter who you're talking to, if you're talking to somebody who seems like an expert, the question is, okay, well, what do we do about this? Because it seems like we're like the train's headed for the cliff. What options are available? According to the research we've done, that seems actually has a. Can have some positive impact on all of this. Is this just an inevitable outcome of what happens when societies get complex, or do we have options here? And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.

[Matthew Facchiani]

Yeah, so it is a big question. And yeah, it will take several hours to really dive into it. But to try to summarize it, what I've been referring to is like, the particular vulnerability of our susceptibility to misinformation. So when are we most susceptible to misinformation from a social science perspective? Perspective. My point is that happens under context where our identity biases are amplified and reinforced. So in order to reduce that vulnerability, we need to reduce that reinforcement and amplification process. And that's kind of like a good starting point of like, okay, well, now we actually are defining stuff. So it's like, okay, so where do these vulnerabilities take place? One is social media is an easy one because you can kind of visualize it. And I think we have an idea of what that looks like Whenever we're in these hyper echo chambers on social media. It provides a way to amplify and reinforce these identities. So trying to break out of that would be one way. Like trying to not doom scroll and constantly obsess over whatever your particular place political ideology is trying to break out of that. And, you know, I think people are aware of this. Like, the whole idea of like, touch grass, like, that's a common thing. Like, people know, like, yes, sometimes it's good to log off and meet people in the real world. And it sounds so simple and obvious, but it's true. Like, literally just getting outside social media, outside whatever these, these, you know, these screens or however you're receiving these, these, this online information, it's important to take a break and not allow yourself to become radicalized through this reinforcement process that will take advantage and exploit these identity processes that we've been describing. Actually meeting lots of different people, again, it seems so obvious and simple, but I think it's a really important component to improve our resilience to misinformation. We need to expand our diversity of identities. And what that could look like is simply volunteering at different places, you know, getting a new hobby, meeting different people, joining a sports league. So again, it's like, it seems silly, but there's so much power. And literally, like joining a local sports league and meeting people from all different backgrounds. So that's why I really enjoy sports, because one is like, good physical exercise and good for your mental health, but also it's good for, like, your social health. Like, just meeting lots of different people and. And being active and thinking about how, you know, there's a variety of people out here from different perspectives that you might otherwise not have a chance to meet. So personally, we can, on an individual level, we can try to expand our identity maps and do different things, meet different people, and not have our identities so wrapped up in a narrow set of meetings. So we can. Individually, we can do that. Now the issue is, like, what does that look like on a societal level? And we don't always have opportunities to do that. So in the United States, we don't have a lot of what's called third spaces where, you know, we have our home, we have our work, but it's not really a lot of good community spaces where we can meet lots of different people. So that's kind of the tricky part is like, how do we, like, find fund initiatives for more people to do this? You know, that requires like, a whole structural kind of bigger picture thing. But there are opportunities still for people to join sports leagues or volunteer with different things, you know, meet people at their local libraries and stuff. So, like, there are, like, publicly available things like that. So that's one part I think is like, diversifying ourselves, diversifying our identities, diversifying our networks. And then there's the education component, which is what I've been working on the last few years. It's like, not only do we have to be aware of our social biases and work on that, but that should be merged with this idea of becoming as media literate as we can. Like, how do we learn how to navigate our media and information landscape as best we can? And that speaks to some of the work that I've been doing at Notre Dame, developing these short media literacy games. That teaches people different aspects of verifying the credibility of sources. For example, what's called lateral reading. Often where instead of looking within an article and trying to fact check it within the confines of that article, you're going laterally and opening new tabs and seeing who the author is, what their biases might be, what outlet are they writing for, and what journalistic practices does that particular media outlet have. So, like, learning those skills is also really important. And in the age of AI, I think that connects to digital literacy, learning the limitations of artificial intelligence, and these large language models, these chatbots. So, like, there's that whole education component too. But the education component, I would argue, can only go so far. You have to have that social understanding as well and that awareness of your own social biases, because that allows you to combine the best of both of those techniques where it's like, okay, now I know how to fact check and I'm aware of my social biases. So I'm not just fact checking stuff that's inconvenient or convenient for me. So that's on the individual level is like trying to understand how we can learn about our biases, learn how to fact check better, and how to navigate the Internet. So that's individually. But then I can also go into like the meso and macro as well, because I think that's also important. So I dive into this, into my, in my book about the meso level of basically communities and what that looks like. So we've talked about trust and how trust is a social process of how we trust someone when they think they're competent and we think they have our best interests in mind. So that might require forming relationships with someone. So what I would like to see happen is more of these scientific and medical institutions that have lost some trust actually go out in their communities and form relationships again with their local communities or on social media, like actually invest in this and have people speaking about what is the importance of a university, what are they actually doing, what research are they doing that makes a difference, difference in your life? And that reduces the psychological distance between people who are not familiar with universities and the universities themselves. So, you know, I often think, like, I'm, I'm within academia, I know a lot of scientists and physicians. So for me, it's a lot easier for me to trust them because I know them personally. But if you don't personally know these people, then that creates a barrier and it creates an opportunity for someone else to be like, hey, don't trust those people. You don't even know them. Trust me. Instead, and I think if more opportunities existed for partnerships between local community leaders and their hospitals and universities and really invest in those partnerships at a local level and then city scale that throughout the United States, like, that's like my big picture. If I could wave a magic wand, I would have these hospitals and universities have resources to invest in those community outreach programs. And then of course, there's like, big, big picture of like thinking about social media and what they can do a better job on. And that gets really tricky because it requires regulation. But I mean, some simple things are just like having these companies share their data more and have more transparency. And that's something, unfortunately, that we've kind of drifted away from because ideally we'd have independent researchers studying these platforms and having access to their data so we can actually, really know what these algorithms are doing and how they're affecting us. So that's, that's a big component of it as well.

[Interviewer]

It should be complicated. If you had a, if you had a simple answer, I'd be like me,

[Matthew Facchiani]

yeah, that is as simple as I can try to be.

[Commercial Narrator]

That is it.

[David McRaney]

For this episode of the you are not so smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. In those show notes, you can find my book how minds change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details [e-mail] and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well right there in your podcast player. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or you are not. Sosmart.com you can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and bluesky and everything else that's like that@ David McCraney symbol David McCraney. Follow the ShowtSmartBlog. We're also on Facebook.

[Interviewer]

You are not so smart.

[David McRaney]

And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me, go to patreon.com you are not so smart pitching in it. Any amount gets you the show ad free. But the higher amounts, that'll get you posters and T shirts and sign books and other stuff. The opening music, that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support this show, the best way to do that, just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it on all these platforms or just tell somebody directly. Hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something, that really connected with you. And check back in in about two weeks for a fresh new episode.

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