October 3, 2024 • 55 mins
Dan Ariely, the renowned behavioral economist, prolific author, frequent TED speaker, and endowed professor at Duke University, has spent decades studying why people behave the way they do. And let’s just say that logic and reasoning do not top the list.
I had the pleasure of seeing Dan speak in person in 2016, and almost a decade later, I was thrilled to host him for this conversation, where we could dive deeper into the drivers of decision making and human behavior. Dan’s latest book, *“Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things,”* served as our catalyst—a topic of historical significance as conspiracy theories seem to be on the rise, in conjunction with declining levels of trust, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that was just the tip of the topics iceberg.
Please join me in welcoming Dan Ariely to *Turn the Lens*.
Why do we do what we do? How does the framing of a question influence our answers? How does stress impact decision-making? How well do we know our own preferences, and do we apply them effectively in our choices? What role does resilience play in avoiding the funnel of misbelief? And how is it that two people can experience the same event and yet perceive ’what happened’ entirely differently?
From B.F. Skinner’s groundbreaking research on reinforcement schedules, principles the gambling industry has leveraged into unprecedented revenue heights, to what organizations are missing in "return to office" efforts, from visual illusions to after-the-fact-stories that ‘explain’ actions, to the power of a terminal illness diagnosis in resetting long-held assumptions and life priorities.
Whether you're intrigued by psychology, decision science, or simply want to understand the nuances of human behavior, I promise this episode will provide thought-provoking perspectives and actionable insights. Join us as we unpack the fascinating complexities of human nature and discover how to navigate life’s choices more effectively with Dan Ariely.
Dan Ariely: Decisions, Behavior, Stress, Resilience | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick, Ep37
#DanAriely #Decisions #Behavior #Stress #Resilience #Bias #Trust #Choices #BehavioralEconomics #Misbelief #HumanBehavior #DecisionMaking #CognitiveBias #ConspiracyTheories #Psychology #BFSkinner #Rationality #Duke #MentalHealth #Economics #ReturnToOffice #BeliefSystems #LifeChoices #Mindset #SocialPerception #Interview #Podcast #TurnTheLens
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
All right,
so I’ll count us down in
three, two, one.
Hey welcomeback everybody.
Jeff Frick here coming to you foranother episode of ‘Turn the Lens.’
And I'm really excitedabout this next episode.
This is a gentlemanI first saw in 2016
that showed some amazing research that really
(00:21):
kind of draws into questionsome really simple, basic things like
do we evenhave free will?
What are the things that go into our decision making?
And we talk a lot about,
kind of evolutionarybehavior
and what's kind of going on behind the scenes
in the way that we thinkand the way we filter information.
And he's got a great perspective.
So joining us all the wayfrom Durham, North Carolina,
(00:42):
he's Dan Ariely,the James B Duke Professor
of Psychology and Behavioral Economics from Duke University.
Dan, great tosee you today.
Lovely to be here.
Thank you.
So I, I did a little,
I was a dual majorecon psychology back in the day.
No PhD, no Masters.
But, you know, I was fascinated
(01:03):
when I walked intothe economics class
and they showedall these beautiful curves.
And everythingis so logical
and mathematical and wonderfulbased on these assumptions.
But then I was also in psychologyand I was like,
that's not how peoplemake decisions.
We're not these like
super rational kind ofcomputer-like decision making machines.
And your, story that I'd love for youto repeat kind of on
(01:26):
on the organ donor,participation rates
really demonstrates that we don't necessarily have as much control
over what we doas we think we do.
Yeah.
So, yes, I think, you know,
economics is aninteresting perspective on life
but it assumesa whole lot.
Some of it isnot correct.
(01:46):
It's a very interesting exercise.
And you can think about underwhat conditions we need apply
but in many conditions it doesn't apply.
And, more often than not,the implications are just wrong.
So, so maybe I'll,I'll start by saying
that my metaphor for the human mind
(02:06):
is that we're walking aroundwith a Swiss Army Knife.
You know what?
What we have in our mindis not a perfect tool for anything.
Like the Swiss Army Knifeis not great for anything.
It's sort of good forlots of things.
That's what ourour mind is designed for.
But our Swiss Army Knife is designed for tasks from a long time ago.
(02:30):
It's not designed for thefor the modern world.
So we’re carrying with usa Swiss Army Knife
with most tools being irrelevant.
So now when we have to deal with
retirement and medical decisions
and AI and misinformationand so on,
that we're not set up,to deal with that.
(02:51):
And because of that,we make mistakes
and we don't make mistakesbecause we're stupid or incapable
or anything like that.
We are making the same mistakes because
we are not designed to this
to be in this modern environment.
When you ask peopleyou know
How many of you
(03:12):
don't sleep as much as you think you should,
everybody raisetheir hand.
How many of us eat more than we think we should?
And you know,the list goes on and on and on.
It's very clear that our
environment is not designed for the kind of tools we have.
And it also meansthat the environment
has a lot to do with thedecisions we end up making.
(03:34):
So I'll give you two examples.
You ask people, do you like apples?
And most peoplesay, yes.
And then you puta bowl of apples.
Almost nobodytakes one.
And you cut the apples into quartersand they disappear.
It turns out that eating a whole appleis just a little bit too much work.
(03:54):
You know, eating a quarteris just the right amount of work.
Or the example that you referred to
is an example from organ donation
that basically looksat different countries in Europe
and showing thatsome countries,
the participation ratein organ donation
is in the 90%, in some it's in the 20%.
And when you say, what's thedifference between these two countries,
(04:17):
the countries in 90% the country and 20%
they educate people differently.
They have different camaraderie.
Do they have different ideologies,different religion, different whatever?
The answer is, they havea different enrollment form.
And countries that have what is called ‘opt in’.
You’re assumed not to be an organ donor
(04:39):
and you have to opt into become an organ donor.
Many peopledon't opt in.
People don'ttake that step.
They say, oh, too complex,too difficult. I'm not sure.
Let me stay out.
And those countries have about a 20% participation.
Countries that have an ‘opt out’.
When you’re assumedto be an organ donor
and you have to signto get out of it,
people say, oh, it's difficult decision complex.
(05:00):
I'm not going to do anything.
Stay with it.
And all of this is suggesting that in many decisions,
we don't know what to do.
And when we don't know what to do,
we do what the interface tells us to do.
And interestingly enough,
as decisions become bigger and more complex
and more meaningful,like organ donation,
it's a tough decision
(05:22):
it involves our death and ourrelatives and mourning and medical
and all kinds ofthings like that.
As decisions get bigger,we don't know what to do even more,
and we just don't do anything.
And when we don't do anything,
we let the person who set up thedecision environment decide for us.
So we call this choice architecture.
(05:43):
It is that the environment
has a lot to do withour final decisions,
but we often don't understand it.
So imagine that
you and I, would stand outside of the Department of Motor Vehicle
where most people get these form.
And imagine we meetone person who gets an opt in form.
And because of that, they didnot sign and not participate.
(06:04):
And one person getsan opt out form
and because of that they didn't sign and participated.
And they come outand we say to this person,
hey, we see you participatedand we see you didn't participate.
Please explain why.
Do you think anybody would say
the form told meto do so.
Right.
Or would anybody say
I didn't know what to do.I did the default,
of course not.
(06:25):
After the fact,people tell stories.
Somebody who didn't sign the form
didn't join the program,would say something like,
I'm really worriedabout medicine these days,
and I'm really worried about
whether physicians will see that I signed this form
and will not treat me as well.
Or will pull the pluga little earlier,
and somebody that did end upparticipating will say,
(06:47):
you know, this is how myparents taught me to be
a caring, wonderful individual.
But those stories will come afterthe decision and not before it.
And we usually think that decisionsare driven by our preferences.
We have preferencesand they drive decisions.
The reality is that we often make decisions because of the environment,
(07:08):
and then we justify them.
Yeah
We justify them so welland we tell the story so well.
That very quickly we convince even ourselves.
And I'll give youone last example.
You look at what's the biggest contributorto 401(k) savings accounts.
It's the default rateat your employer.
But when you ask people,how did you come to decide
(07:29):
that you want to save5%, 10%, 12%, whatever it is,
very few people say,oh, it’s the default rate.
Right, right
Well, I have a story
I thought about itcost and benefits and so on.
So we're very good at telling stories.
And these storiesobfuscate
the real thing that drove the decision, which is often the interface.
It's funny.
(07:50):
Reminds me of always the,
the evening newswhen they talk about
the stock marketperformance that day.
And unlessit's a day
where the fedactually did something
or there was something obvious,
you know, they always havethese explanations
as to why the market was hotor why the market was cool.
And it's like, well, that's easy to do after the fact.
But there's another thing
that I think is really interestingthat's working against us,
(08:10):
and that's this filter between our receptors of information
our eyes, our ears, our nose, our skin,
and what we think happened.
But it's got to go throughthis amazing amount of,
of preconceived biases,our individual experiences.
And you know,what really did happen?
And my favorite examplesis when my wife and I
We've been married over 30 years.
(08:31):
We go to the farmer’s market together
and we buy some fruits and vegetables,
and we come home and we talk about
what happened atthe farmer's market.
We saw completely different things.
We saw completely different people.
You know, I was noticingthis beautiful display of
of fruit that I wanted to take a picture of.
She's over, you know,
engaging, maybe with a friendthat she saw that I didn't see.
(08:53):
But it's really weird.
You come back
and we went to the same place,
we experienced the samegeographic destination.
And yet what we experiencedand the reality that we had
are totally different.
And that's a realmind opener.
And imagine there'sa range of things you can look at
and you can say well, I'm looking at these things
and your wifeis looking at those things.
(09:15):
But sometimes, even if you look at the same thing,
you could interpretthem differently.
And the classic example forthat is sports.
You can have two fansof opposing teams
watching thesame move,
and the referee is calling a call against somebody,
and one person saysthe referee is absolutely correct
and they're willing to betmoney on it.
(09:37):
And the other one is sayingthe referee might,
must be blind, or vicious or being paid and
both of those peoplewould pay money for this bet.
It's not as if they're just saying it.
But yes, we we have this incredible sense
of trust in our senses,
(09:57):
but and we are not reallyexperiencing the outside world.
We're experiencing an inside world
that goes through a very thicklayer of interpretation.
You know, one way we see it, ofcourse, is visual illusions.
Right.
When you see avisual illusion,
you basically say,I can't trust my eyes.
Yes, there's your eyesand there's your brain,
and you are only have accessto the information
(10:19):
after your brainhas been processing it.
You don't have accessto information out there.
Right. And because of that,
because this is what we have to deal with,
it’s the insiderepresentation.
That representation has been worked on
and it has been morphed andchanged in all kinds of
all kinds of ways.
But our sense isthat it's true.
(10:40):
Right.
You're willing to to bet on it.
You're willing topromise it.
Eyewitness testimony, I mean, all kinds of things like that
that are just not as accurateas people think.
Right? Right.
And we'reall experiencing
and then we have an over, simplification I think to
where our expectations iseveryone else is experiencing
the same thingthat we're experiencing,
(11:00):
when in fact,
to me, the wake up call’s
is one day just realizing that
everybody's Facebook feed or LinkedIn feedor social media feed is different.
It's not it's not a feed of
in order
all your friendsof what they posted
it's what Facebook thinks isgoing to keep you on the platform
a little bit longer.
And then when youwake up and say,
(11:21):
not only is your Facebook feed different,
but even the feed as you'rewatching that sports game
or the feed as we're at the farmer’s market
is actually different,
even though we're actually looking at
technically, one might argue the same thing.
Yeah.
And you know, the, there'sa really interesting thing about
this thing we call empathy.
So empathy is really an amazing human skill.
(11:44):
It's if you stabbed your toe,
I will be able to empathize to some degree.
If you told me something goodhappened to you
I am able to empathize,something bad will happen.
How do we do that?
How do we have empathy?
Do we really feelthe other person? No.
The reality is that empathy is based on a Mirror Neurons.
(12:04):
These are neuronsbasically activate
what I think you're experiencing in my brain.
So when I am experiencing empathyfor you, for stabbing your toe,
I'm not really experiencingyou stabbing your toe.
My mind activatesstabbing the toe mirror neurons.
And then I am projecting thatthis is how you're feeling.
(12:25):
Now it's an amazing capacity, right?
It's an, it's a thing that makespeople incredible, right?
I can feel your pain.
But of course, I'm notexperiencing your pain.
I'm experiencing my painas I would experience it,
sort of, if I had your experience.
But that meansthat our
(12:46):
empathy is within our minds.
It's not as if we'restepping into your mind
and I'm experiencingwith you.
I'm experiencehow I would experience it.
Maybe.
Maybe it's 50% if Iif I were going to stab my toe.
But I think that that'swhat you're experiencing.
Right, right.
That’s why empathyis not what you're experiencing.
It's what I would experience.
(13:08):
it's a simulation of whatI would experience
if I would go througha sense like you
But because of that also
we have this incredible sense of similarity.
Oh, I just feel your pain. No, I don't feel your pain.
I feel my pain as if I was in your shoes.
But that's, and it's a dramatically important thing.
It's what makes us human.
It's unbelievably important.
(13:29):
But it also gives us the sense
that we're actually experiencing the other person
when we're not really.
So I have pages and pages here of notes.
One of the things that we do as people
is we look for patterns,
I had Evan Benway on from Moodsonicyou know, he's like, even
we look at stars in the heavens and we see patterns.
We see stories, we see shapes,we see people.
At the same timeyou talk about,
(13:51):
we often look for complexity,
in something that we don't understand.
It must be complexif I don't understand.
There must be some complex.
How do those things interact?
You know, this desire to simplify,
because, again,it's this evolutionary biology.
We have to bucket things and free up cycles
for the cheetah that'sgoing to jump out of the bushes.
(14:13):
But then at the same time,when we don't confuse.
We are amazing at coming up with with all kinds of complex and
and, and, rich storiesto explain the unexplainable.
Yeah, So
so I actually I was goingto do a little video on patterns
so I prepared this before.
So this, this is what is called white noise.
(14:36):
White noise is sometimes auditory [static noise]
a wide spectrum, but sometimesit's pictures like this.
And imagine an experiment in whichI show you a picture like this.
And I say, did you see a pattern?
And I show another one.
And each of thoseis randomly generated,
so there shouldn't be a pattern.
And we ask you,‘Do you see a pattern?’
Do you see a pattern?Do you see a pattern?
(14:58):
And the question is
under what conditions would people start seeing more patterns?
And the answer is under conditions of stress.
And I don't mean the stress ofsaying, gee, I have so much email,
I don't know how I’ll finish.
It's the kind of stress that says‘I don't understand the world.’
I don't understand whyI was fired and not them.
(15:18):
I don't understand why I've been healthy
and then I have this disease.
I don't understand what's happening with AI, will I get to keep my job?
I don't understand this thing with this
a virus called COVID 19.
I don't understand why the Houthis are attacking,
shipping around the worldand so on.
When you basically say,I don't understand the world,
our mind goesinto a mode
(15:41):
of trying to see patterns.
Like you gave the analogy of the tiger, like
if I'm an animal in the jungle and I'm stressed,
all my senses now are trying to over interpret things
to see if there's a tiger.
I see a leaf moving and I say, oh, maybe it’s here. Right.
Like I, I basically go intohyper mode of alertness
(16:03):
and try to see try to see patterns.
So that's the, the thing that we see patterns.
But of course we don't stop there,
especially when wetalk about misbelief
about people coming up with alternative theories for the world is
we want a pattern,
we want a villain,
and we want a complex story.
And you would say, you know, okay,I understand pattern.
(16:25):
Why do you want a villain?
And we want a villain because
we want to blame somebody else that is not us.
Right.
That's understandable.
And why complex?
Because we want to feel
that we know more than other people.
We want to feel in control.
So imagine that societyis looking down upon you
(16:45):
you lost your joband something is not going well.
You're not getting your fair
You feel you're not getting your fair share.
You're feeling lowon the totem pole of society.
If now you have a storywith a villain
that is complex and you'rethe only one who understands it
now, you feel more in control.
(17:07):
Right, you feel more in control and better compared to other people.
Yeah.
And actually what what they show in this,
this last bookI wrote called ‘Misbelief’
the point there wasto basically examine
how normal people come to believesome very strange things.
And it turns outthat stress
is the condition that gets people to go down that.
(17:30):
If somebody is completely unstressed,
they are not going to go downthe funnel of misbelief.
They're not going to wake up one day and say,
‘Oh, let me look for an alternative theory’
Right.
If people are comfortablein their lives,
they're not going to lookfor alternative theories.
But when people are stressed,
(17:50):
they're looking for analternative theory with a villain
and ideally complex theorythat could explain to them
why they are where they areand other people are
where they are, but they wouldfeel more, more in control.
So of course there are more elements to this.
There's a big cognitive elementand personality
and socialelement to this.
But this initial element of stress,
(18:12):
one other thing that is very important about this is
the stress we feel
is a combination of the stress that we get
minus the resilience.
So you can think about felt stress
is amount of stressminus resilience.
Right, that's kind of the the equation.
(18:34):
Because if I feel more resilienceI can handle stress.
But if I can't, then the stress gets worse.
And resilience is something thatwe're not doing well on these days.
Right.
Resilience comesfrom having
close personal friendsand in general
people spend much less timewith their friends,
(18:56):
and it comes fromfamily ties
and we spend more timewith our nuclear family.
But less time with our family.
It comes from friends in general,
but you know,we have less friends.
Right, right
Even at work
Even at work, people are notsupposed to talk to their friends
about romantic questionsor illness or politics.
(19:19):
So we have less and less friends,
and we have less and lesstrust in the government
that if something badhappened to us,
the governmentwill be there for us,
or the health care systemor whatever.
And very sadly, it turns out that
as financial inequalityincreases,
people are less likely to ask for help.
(19:40):
Yeah, well I've got the book right here,
so we're going to definitelytalk about the book.
I have to say,it's not
it's not the most uplifting bookI've read in the in the
[Jeff] in the last little while.[Dan] It is not the most
uplifting book. No,
but let's, let's get into a couple a couple of the things
So going back to, to basic psychology, right?
One of my favorite classeswas rat lab.
And you learn really earlyin rat lab
that the way to get the ratto hit the bar the most
(20:03):
is to give them a random return at a random rate.
And that's that's,they'll just keep hitting that bar.
And we see that executed againsthumans in something simple like a
like a one arm bandit,you know,
a slot machine is kind ofthe classic case
where it's a randompayout at random rate.
What's what's really.
Let's, let's,
let's emphasize thatbecause I think it's so important.
(20:24):
So, so what B. F. Skinner showed
is that when you have a rat
and you give the ratthe lever,
and every 200 presses, they get the reward, that's exciting.
But if it's random,it's between 1 and 400.
The same expected value.
The rat will click much faster
and they will continue clickingeven when the reward stops.
(20:46):
And if you think about it,
that's the principle that Las Vegas is based on.
Right
If you knew thatfor every 100 of those you'll get,
you know, $7 back,you will not do it.
But it's the randomnessthat keeps us going
and you can think about our phones.
Is an amazing mechanismfor random reinforcement.
Right, you drive
(21:07):
and there's a little ring on your phoneor a buzz or something like that.
And in that moment you say, ‘Oh, maybe this is an important email’
Right, right
Now, you don't getthat many important emails
you don't get that many important things.
But from time to timeyou do
and you’re not thinkingabout the average
or you don't think about the minimum,
you’re thinking about the possibility that it's
(21:29):
it's going to be rewardingand therefore
people end up being really curious.
Right,
Right, they say ‘Oh, maybe this is the one.’
Maybe thisis the one.
Well, why I wanted to bring it up is
it's one thing if it's Vegasand I walk into a casino
and I kind of know thatthat's the game and I can
I can get on the planeand I can fly home.
[Jeff] What's really scary[Dan] By the way, what do you think.
[Jeff] now, what I was gonna say now it’s[Dan] What do you think
(21:49):
now it’s in your phone, as you said.
And not only is it in your phone,
you're competing against a computer
that's been set up specifically
to optimize and basicallyplay your own biology against you.
And it's in your phone or, excuse me, it's in your pocket 24 x 7.
And they have a level of detailedknowledge about you
(22:12):
that the casino never used to have
back in the day to, to make it even more effective.
I mean, that I think is one of the,the biggest stressors,
whether it's whether it's kind of,
conscious stress or unconscious stress
[Jeff] that, [Dan] Absolutely
So many people are suffering now
without the power to just turn the stupid thing off
(22:33):
because, as you said, the chances of it actually
being that important of a messageare relatively small.
Yeah.
So first of all, before we move to this
just something about Vegas.
What do you think people spend more money on
sports in the USor on gambling?
(22:55):
Gambling.
By sports, I mean goingto sporting events and,
a subscription to TV stations and stuff like that.
Gambling, I don’t even think it’s close.
And now you got.Now you got sports and gambling.
That's a whole nother conversationfor another podcast.
Now that the
the proverbial fox is in the henhouse, I think.
Yeah.
So I, the statistics I
(23:17):
I saw was that people spend on gambling
more than all of entertainment put together,
more than sports
and movies and theater and, and, and, and
gambling is bigger
because it usesthis very basic and
reward mechanism.
Now, the thing about information technology
(23:37):
and phones in particular, as you said,
is really terrible.
And kind of a metaphorfor this is to think about cars.
So think about carsand how do cars get better?
Every year, cars get better.
And they get slightly better engines.
They get slightly better fuel efficiency.
(23:58):
But the real advances in cars
is that they recognizethat we are shitty drivers,
and they're doing some thingsto make us less able to kill ourselves.
Right.
So we have seatbelts and anti-lock brakes
and rearview mirror and side mirrorsand lights on the mirrors.
And we have
my car hasthis sensor
that if I get too close to a car,it applies the brake.
(24:21):
And it has a little thing
that if I go over the line,it makes it harder to to move it.
I mean, justincredible technology.
And every year the engineers are coming with new things
and every yearpeople are proving
that we're even shitty driversthan they thought.
And the cycle continues.
Now think about information technology.
(24:42):
If cars are developing every year
to become more compatible with human nature,
and to assume that we are shittier drivers.
Is information technology every year develops assuming that
we are shittier consumers of information?
Or is it assuming that we are more perfect?
And I think it's the other way around?
(25:02):
I think that every year we diverge
between our humanity, thethe Swiss Army Knife that we carry
and the way that information
what information technology demands from us in terms of ability.
And it's kind of amazingto look at cars and say,
look how much regulationthere are in cars.
(25:26):
You know, things about bumpers and, you know,
cars are unbelievably regulated
because it's so clearhow bad drivers we are.
Yeah.
Information technology, Facebook, Twitter and so on.
It just assumesthat we’re perfect
[Jeff] Yeah[Dan] that’s
there's no reason to regulate anything because
yeah, we couldmake perfect decisions, but
(25:49):
I don't see any evidencethat says that we are
better informationconsumers than we are drivers.
I think that the immediateconsequences are different.
Like in one case,we kill ourselves,
we kill other people.The evidence is there.
In the other case,we degrade our social capital.
We get depressed, we get envious.
(26:09):
We get down the funnel of misbelief. All kinds
Not as easy to quantify,
but I don't thinkwe're better at it.
Right.
I think we're actually, terribleconsumers of information.
And I think we're terrible in
in actually lots of these technologies that are developing
are developing further and further from our human nature.
(26:29):
Yeah.
There’s so
I hope you have like six hours
there are so many places we can you go.
But the one I wantto point out, there
is really this kind of lawof unintended consequences
when you've got this misalignedincentive structure.
So, you know, from the
from the Facebook,we'll just pick on Facebook
just becauseit's easy,
you know, from their perspective,they want you to stay on,
(26:50):
on the site.
But it turns out that the,
the stuff that gets you to stay the longest
is the stuff that's the most extreme.
So you got this kind of law of unattended consequences,
which maybe Facebook wasn't specifically
trying to push people to the extremes,
but it's the extreme stuff
that gets people to click,which is what their objective is.
And then you get this otherreally horrible effect,
(27:11):
which is we so quickly normalize things,
so that we can move on and,and bucket them.
And so the only way to keepthe clicks going
is to make this stuff more and more and more extreme.
So in this pursuit of clicksto sell a few more ads,
this law of unintended consequencesis in fact pushed division.
And the other kind of slice on it,to get your take,
(27:35):
especially in the context of friends and friendships and keeping those strong
is just kind ofthis micro segmentation
as we all now go with an AI driven, specific little feed
just thatthat's targeted to us.
So, you know, we spend more of our time in this little micro hole
versus a more general and
and you know, you talk about trustin the news will get the trust
(27:57):
where when there was only one source
and it was just Walter Cronkite,
he had to kind of cross all the bounds
because there was only one source.
So I wonder if you can talk about this
I think it's really scary.
And the final pieceto throw out is, you know,
there's kind of biology speed,which is pretty damn slow.
You know, there’s kind of people as a civilization speed,
which has been a little bit faster.
(28:18):
But it wasn't that long agothat your father
and your grandfatherand his grandfather
all probably did the same thing.
And you could probably expectyour kids to do the same.
And now we've got thisexponential curves
in the technology side,
which we're just not very well equipped.
And I think the ChatGPT
explosion on the scenewas just kind of a
(28:39):
exponential curves in your face, like
all of a sudden, oh my God,
I can talk to a supercomputerand it'll talk back to me.
Yeah.
So, so lotsof things.
Lots of thingsin there.
So, so to start with,I think that we can
even go a step more backward
and say people don't like to payfor services with money.
(29:02):
So we pay with time,
like, you can imagine a universe.
And we would say, you know what?
Facebook isso wonderful.
I'll pay $10 a month for this,
you know, but by the amount of timepeople spend on Facebook,
it should be easy to justify, youknow, three cups of coffee.
Right.
Or if you're in San Francisco, one.
But you know, it's.
(29:23):
But we are reluctant.
We're happy topay for coffee.
We're not that happyto pay for services.
So all of these
a lot of these technologies were left, like,
how do we provide this technologywhere people on one hand are saying
they want to spend a lot of time
with another hand, I’m not willing to pay.
So the advertising model came
that's kind of the beginning ofthe unintended consequences, right?
(29:45):
The world would have beena very different world
if we paid for it.
And then of course, what happened is that once
you pay with your time,they're incentivized.
You know, there was a,
like, you can imagine a world in which we
which we paid for Facebook,
they would not be incentivized.
(30:05):
They would be incentivizedto keep us for longer
months, years,but not per day, right.
They would say that'snot in their best interest, but
but in this case,it's in their best interest
to get us to be there for longer.
And what are the thingsthat get to
to bethere longer?
It's the thingsthat are provocative
and the thingsthat are less likely to be true,
(30:27):
that are more puzzling,more sensationalist, and so on.
And not only that,
they're not just producing information,
they're allowing peopleto produce information.
So now there'sa competition,
there's a market for people to produce this thing,
and now everybody is competing
in this poolof lots of people
who are trying to create a signal.
And now, you know, whoever is the noisiest,
(30:49):
can create one.
And then the other thing that you mentioned,
which is very important,
is that there is this
focusing onan audience,
you know, think about it.
When I was a kid and there was network
and national television, right.
Network television,whoever was there
(31:11):
had to talk to everybody.
Now, pick your network.
It's like people withthe same ideas of talking
to people with basically the same ideas.
It's happening on, you know, on social media.
But it happens everywhere.
And that, by the way,is very bad for democracy.
You know, the idea for representative democracy,
(31:33):
it’s kind of interesting.
But the moment you have representative democracy
and people can only talk to their base,
now we get a very different
approach because people say
can say all kinds of ridiculousthing to their base,
not as truth, but as basically camaraderie, right.
Look at these idiotson the other side.
You couldnever say it,
(31:54):
if you said it on to everybody.
But if you just
if you say it mostly to your base,
that's a very different story.
So, and we and we created this
competition between information producers
who are trying to become moreand more extreme.
You know, sometimes I feel,very kind of
(32:16):
sympathetic toward journalists.
Imagine you're a journalist
and you're fighting with people that have a blog
or write on TikTok or whatever,
you know, and you have journalistic standards
and they don't,
you know, howhow easy is it to keep
to keep journalistic standards,
(32:37):
Right. Well and this
this blurring between information and entertainment
[Jeff] and [Dan] Yep
which if the lines are clear, great.
You know, if I'm watching Saturday Night Live
or I'm at a theater and, you know
it's satire or stand up comedian stuff where it's clear,
but when it's perceivedto be information,
(32:57):
you know, that's not necessarily good
when it, isn't even really intended
to be informationin the first place.
Which, which takes me to another big word.
Let me say one other things I,
I was at some reception for,
really a wonderfula professor at Harvard and
somebody introduced him and she read from,
(33:23):
the story about himin ‘The New Yorker’
from many years ago.
That was kind of,
you know, glorifying all the wonderful things that he has done
and all the thingshe should be glorified for.
But she also saidthat these days
nobody would ever writesuch a glowing story anymore.
(33:45):
You know, if youthink about it
and you look at all the,
the profiles inanywhere,
just, there are no good people
and it's not that there are not good people anymore.
It's that bad news sells.
Right.
And positive newsis just not as exciting.
(34:06):
You know, the headline,
a guy, you know, did something good
is not as exciting asa guy as, you know.
Right.
has said something nasty to somebody else.
So we have this
competition, like you said,
that the laws of unintended consequences.
(34:28):
I think that
that the world offree information,
together with this very fierce competition
is changing,not just social media.
It's changing journalism.
And I think information in generaland everybody,
there's kind of arace to the bottom.
Right, right.
Everybody's doing thingsthat are more superficial
(34:51):
and can be caught in, you know, 17 characters
and three seconds and,
and it's very tough.
And sometimes now you see exceptions
and sometimes those exceptions work.
But mostly it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where
editors are saying we need
(35:12):
if it bleeds, it leads.
And, you know, what do you puton the top and so on.
And then people get used to that.
And that creates a very,
a very vicious cyclethat is very much against us.
Yeah.
You know there was thisthere was a claim
that after Brexit, after Brexit,
there were lots of Google searches
from England aboutwhat Brexit means.
(35:34):
You know, that people didn't know really what it meant.
Right.
You know, they probably got lotsof all kinds of other propaganda,
but now all of a sudden said,
‘Oh my goodness, let's check what this really means’
Yeah.
Because, you know, there's
because I think, you know,if it bleeds, it leads.
It's always been the editorial point of view
and it's always been, you know,what's on top of the fold.
(35:54):
I think what's different is thatwas your once a daily newspaper.
And it wasn't coming at youat machine speed,
in your phone 24 x 7.
And if you didn't happen tobite on that, picture
of a burning car onthe front of the paper,
we'll send you a different one.
Maybe you'll bite on this of oneor different one.
So I think it's really scarywhen these principles are applied,
(36:16):
with literally machine speed and AI
to try to trigger your emotional response, when
I always think of like, spam, like, we don't even know
how much spam Google's gettingbefore it even gets to our mailbox.
But you know, you try to manageyour spam and manage your inbox.
You're fighting against machines
that are operating at a differentscale and a different speed,
(36:37):
and they're just playinga different game
than you are asas a person.
And so the
the likelihood of, you know,
[Jeff] clicking on spam and this and that is horrible[Dan] And it’s very taxing
Yeah.
And you know, it'sit's very taxing.
Like, you know, I
even reading through
because, you know, my life is kind of
interesting and complex.
I get emails from lotsof places and lots of people
(37:00):
and it's hard to know.
Right.
And, you know, this,
this additional level of,
okay, this person wrote methere’s an attachment.
Is it a real person?Is it not?
What do I do?Google didn't block it.
Yeah,
It's a very taxing activity, it’s taxing
taxing on our societyto a great
To a great degree.
(37:21):
Yeah.
Let's talk about trust.
Yeah, yeah.
As a topic.And
and I want to lean into it.
You know, Edelman puts outa trust index every year.
They put putting it outfor quite a while.
And they distinguish betweenkind of institutions and leaders.
And you brought up the car earlierin self-driving car.
And I think what’s really interestingto pick on Tesla for a minute,
(37:42):
is people now are so comfortable with technology
that they just assumetechnology works.
They don't read the instruction manuals,
they don't run itthrough a burn in period.
So you've got literally people
sitting in the backseats of their Tesla car,
which is not a full self-driving level five car.
It's a super,cruise control.
And yet, how is the trustpotentially with the technology, the car
(38:06):
compare with the trust of the organization,
how are they keeping my information,are they keeping it private
are they taking care of it?
And then you've got
kind of the trustof the leadership,
and then you've got trustof institutions.
And all of that really seems to bein a little bit of a crisis,
because trust is, you know,one of these things that we decide,
as a group to share
(38:27):
in that trust and not necessarily question everything
because we don't just
we don't have the mental bandwidthand we need some foundation to live on.
So have you seen kindof the evolution of trust
or the dissolution of trustor the shifting of trust
change bothwithin misbelieving
and kind of the conspiracy stuff,but also this
just increasingly complex world?
The other piece is to throw outthat you see this a little bit is,
(38:50):
you know, ‘right to fix’,
you know, I want to fix my carI used to fix my car.
There’s a big story about John Deere tractor guys
that can't fix their tractors anymore.
At the same time,the level of complexity
in the machines that we engage withis so much higher.
The percentage of softwarein any product versus
something I can fix with a wrench and ruler
and tools is different.
(39:11):
So this, this, complexity kind of running away,
and really making itmore of a challenge to figure out
what's to trustand what's not to trust.
Yeah.
So first of all, trust isunbelievably important.
And, you know, there's this saying that
fish don't know that they're in water because they're surrounded by it.
(39:32):
And to some degree,we are surrounded by trust.
And we trust that the vegetables we buy in the store,
are without pesticides.
And we, we trust that
somebody washed the lettucewhen they serve the salad.
And we trust that somebody inspected the elevator.
(39:54):
And that the cars in our
the brakes in our car will work.
And we trust and we trustand we trust.
It's kind of amazingthe kind of things that we trust.
And we start losing trust.
Bad things happen.
By the way, I don't know if you've seen, but
but since COVID, there are more people
who are not giving their kidsstandard immunizations.
(40:17):
Right.
People have lost trustin the health care system.
I recently talked to a womanwho's a cancer patient
and she's refusingto take chemotherapy.
She doesn't trust pharmaand after COVID,
she and she's not willingto take chemotherapy.
She's willing to have surgery but not
(40:39):
not chemotherapy.
So you know,we lose a lot of trust.
Now when we think about how we update
our beliefsabout trust,
there are things that we experience
and there are things we don't experience.
So think about the cycleof learning from experience.
You say to yourself,I think that the probability
(41:01):
of texting and driving and something bad happening is 2%
just making it up.It's probably not 2%.
And one day you text and drive
and nothing bad happened.
It's only 2% probability.
But at the end of this experienceyou say, oh, maybe it's not one
well maybe it’s not 2%, maybe it's 1.9%.
So you do it more and moreand more and more, so
(41:22):
when we deal withlow probability events,
every time we try them,our experience
teaches us the wrong thing
until it's too late, and then we,we crash into something.
So when you think about something like driving,
in a car like the Tesla,
(41:43):
if people kind of letgo of their hands
and nothingbad happened,
they say, oh my goodness,it might be safer than I thought.
And then they, they do moreand more and more and more.
Of course,
you know, the probabilitythat something bad will happen
could be very small.It could be incredibly devastating.
It could happenat some point.
Right.
But it's a very bad feedback loop.
(42:05):
But there are thingsthat we need trust.
Like trust in the health care system
that we don't get to experience in the same way.
So when we talk about trust,I think the question is,
do we talk about trust in thingsthat we can learn from experience,
or we talking about trust fromthings we can't learn about?
They’re only from description.
(42:26):
And things that we can learn from experience,
can be, we can learn the wrong lesson from experience
because we update too much
and things that arejust get from description.
You know, those things are rather
would be rather stable. So,
(42:46):
but in general, I think trust
is like a public goodin society.
And when people stop trusting things, we lose a lot.
And you know what?
Think about it like
where do you get to experience
the most trustin society?
I think it's with money.
(43:07):
You know, you pay with your credit card, you do this
and you basically check youryour bank once in a while
and it feels likeit's all okay.
And it's kind of magical.
You go to different places,
use your card onlineand so on, and,
and things kind of accumulateand they seem to be okay.
And you have a listof what's going on.
It's a great exercise in trust.
(43:29):
And this is one of the reasons why I don't like cryptocurrency,
because I want peopleto experience trust.
Now I understand the cryptocurrency people
are sayingI don't trust people.
And I understand.
But for me, the answer would be
If you don't trust people. Great. Let's build trust.
Let's work on institutionsthat will get more trust, so
(43:51):
For them to say, no, no,
I just want a payment mechanismthat don't rely on trust,
I think of it as very sadbecause I say
payment is the place where people could learn the most
that you can trust.You can trust people.
So I want you to use, to use that trust.
And I want you to prove to yourself five times a day
(44:11):
that you can trust the institutionand trust the bank
and trust the regulators,and you can even trust that
if somebody stole your credit card,they will get it back to you.
I want those experiences.
And if you don't, you don't trust it.
Let's work on the trust.
Let's fix the trust.
Let's not try to to bypass it.
So I think we needto work on trust.
(44:31):
Yeah
I think we need to work on trust.
We are at a trust crisis.
And if you ask mewho should make the first move,
I think it should bethe government.
I think it should be the governmentto make the first move
to show trust in us, the citizens, rather than,
to do something,
something theother way.
And, you know, when I,
(44:52):
when I look at organizations,
one of thebiggest de-motivator
for people inorganization
is bureaucracy.
And why is that?
It's bureaucracy tells peopleI don't trust you.
I don't value your time.
And I don't want totry and improve anything.
Just follow the rules
(45:12):
Right
And do whatever your told.
But to not trusting anybody is a very
It's a very,
the opposite from empowering.
Right, right.
To weakening positionthat has lots of consequences.
Well
I think we need to figure out
trust building mechanismsin companies in society.
(45:33):
Yeah, well, unfortunately what right now.
And we haven'tgot to the workplace,
which is one of our many topics.
You know, thesereturn to office mandates
as well as this increasedkind of surveillance society
in which we're getting everythingfrom cameras everywhere
to keystroke monitoring to everything else.
I mean, nothing says ‘I don't trust you’more than that.
(45:55):
Where at the same time,
[Dan] Terrible, terrible[Jeff] the same managers are going,
well, how do I know if you're working,
if you're not moving your mouse,and it’s like
well because you're a bad manager.
You don't know what I'm supposed to be working on?
You're not checking inon my progress against my task.
You're not.
You know, we're not workingtowards a common goal.
It's just like this lazy.
It's just like this lazy substitutefor actually managing people
we’ll just monitor your your keystroke activity.
(46:18):
Yeah, it's it's not just lazy.
I think it's, So, so look
So much to say about this, but,
But think about what's called work life balance,
which is a termthat I don't like.
So, at my university.
The rule is that if somebodyis going to a doctor's visit,
(46:40):
they should mark thatthey're taking two hours
to a doctor's visitbecause
for some reason, this is not part of work.
This is life.
Right?
And I'm trying very hard to fight this
for all the people who are working with me.
And, you know, I saya whole person is coming to work.
(47:01):
And if they are not healthy,
it's bad for for the whole person.
It's not just bad for the homeperson and it's good for the
And if that person decidesin the middle of the day
to go for a run, it's good for the whole person.
And if that person decide to
and, like think about books,
there are books that are maybe work books and
(47:23):
books that are life books, but
but there are many booksthat are the same.
But they arecould be both.
And I think of it as like a line that says
there are awful thingsto do at home, dishes.
Awful things to do at work,bureaucracy,
and there's lots of things in middle that are good for both.
And I think that
I want people to do what's in the middle.
(47:45):
I want peopleto go to see a doctor,
and I want them to exercise,and I want them to sleep well,
like,
you know, it'skind of an amazing thing
that you say,sleep on your own time.
And no, you know,you hire the whole person
with their whole complexityand the whole talent and,
you want them to flourish.
And this,this micromanaging approach
(48:06):
is just completely undermining the idea that
the person is coming, coming to work
is a whole person with all of their skills and so on, and
anyway, so I really,
I really dislike it.
But the moment you start talking about
work life balance
and you saytake two hours
(48:28):
to go to a doctor,it's on your time.
People say, okay,so I'm finishing at 5?
You know, the whole equationchanges because once you
once you start creating these norms that
this is work and this is life and there is separation,
people say ‘Oh, there’s separation?’
Let me, take advantage of it.
Can I tell you one other metaphor?
(48:49):
[Jeff] Of course[Dan] You talked about
coming backto work.
So, as you know, I was badly injured.
I was in hospitalfor a very long time.
And for the first almostfour months, I was fed by tube.
So I had the tube andthey would feed me
30 eggs a day and 7,000 calories a day
to try and help the body
[Dan] rebuild.[Jeff] Wow
(49:12):
I lost weight on that diet.
And anyway they come,
they come to me almostat the end of these four months,
and they say the day after tomorrow
we'll take the tube out
and you'll start eating on your own.
And what do you thinkwas my reaction?
I said, ‘Please, don’tplease keep the tube in.’
I said, ‘I have discovered the future.’
(49:33):
I say in the future nobodywould want to waste time eating.
I mean, why would you?
I say, look, I don't think
in the future people will go with tubes
They will take little pillsand everything will be solved.
It will be efficient.
Like why would you want to chew
and spend so much timeon this and so on.
Anyway, of course I was the patient they were the doctor.
So they took the tube outand I started eating
(49:54):
and what happened?
So I remember that food tastes really good.
Right, right.
It turns outthat four months
were enough to forgetwhat food tastes like.
I remembered that food had a taste,
but wasn't as
I didn't remember the full range of enjoyment.
Now, the reason I'm telling you this story
(50:15):
is that the question is,
What does it meanto get back at work?
And some people thinkthat getting back at work is just
you’re at work.
But first of all, I think that after two years of COVID
people forgot what it isto be at work.
But I also think thatwhen people got back to work,
they were not really at work,
(50:35):
at work means
that you have really close friends at work,
you have people that you care about
that youjoke with,
that you have a common sense of humor,
that you can complete their sentences
and they can complete yours,
that you want them to do well,
that you're happy toto help them.
Your happy to make your day longerbecause you want their benefits.
And you know somethingabout the kids and their spouses,
(50:58):
and you’re happy with themand sad with them and so on.
And when you come back to work
you're not really back at workat the same level
that you truly havethis full potential.
So we had a very social life at work
Then we took a break from it.
And then when we come backphysically to work,
we're not really fully at work.
(51:19):
Yeah.
And I've seen most placesare not really working on
how to get peopleto reintegrate at work.
And until we do that,
until people have some of their more meaningful relationships
back at the workplace,
we're not going to beback at work.
We're going to, you know,
be in the same building.
(51:39):
Yeah, yeah.
But notnot fully back at work.
OK, so Dan we're,
we're coming to the end of our time, and I
and I still have pagesand pages of notes,
so maybe we'll have to havechapter two.
But, you know, kind of as a
as a parting thought as you think aboutthe complexity of people
versus kind of the, thisthis desire to be so rational.
What advice do you give peopleto better cope
(52:03):
in this kind of messy, sloppy, people populated world.
Okay, so there's lots of things, but
I would say number one is
figure out where your resilience is coming from
Both where you aregetting it from other people
and where youcan give it
(52:25):
and work on it.
You know, we’re we are here for a
a tough ride I think for the next decade.
Life is complex.
Things in the worldare not going to settle soon,
and we need to investin resilience.
Spend time with friends, family, loved ones.
(52:45):
Don't bicker
you know things, things like that.
And then the second thing is,I think that,
there's a lot to gainby asking yourself
what from our workingassumption is not correct.
We, grow up
and we have some assumptions,and then we go on,
and we don't examinethose assumptions very often.
(53:08):
Midlife crisis is a good opportunity
to examine some of those assumptions.
Sometimes when people get the diagnosis of terminal illness,
they do that.
But I think we need to do it moreoften than just midlife crisis.
And when we get a terminal illness diagnosis.
So I think it's very goodto kind of sit and ask ourself
what are our basic assumptions about life
(53:33):
and which assumptions are wesure about and which assumptions ...
maybe not so sure.
Yeah.
About
You know, if I have nowa project, when I talk to people
who are on, either very sickor lost somebody close and,
and it is amazingunder those conditions, what,
what people are able to
(53:55):
what kind of this
life changes they're able to make.
I recently talkedto somebody who,
very sick, very short time to live,
did some dramatic changes in their life.
And he's having an amazing last chapter
be about two years,
(54:15):
but an amazing chapter now.
Now, what can we do without that,
bad news in terms of examining our, basic assumption,
I think many people
had kind of this examination in early COVID,
but
very few people followed up on it.
I think it's a good
(54:35):
it's a good time to to ask yourself, what is
What are our assumptions?
What do we fully trust?
What do weneed to change?
Yeah.
All right, Dan, well we're going to have to leave it there
until we pick it up next time.
Maybe, before the holidaysto help people deal with,
how to manage family at Thanksgiving
and talk about more than just the weather.
[Dan] Absolutely important. [Jeff] So I really appreciate the time today.
(54:57):
Big fan of your work.
And, look forward to the next time we talk.
Really appreciate it. And thanks again.
Thank you.Take Care. Bye
He's Dan, I'm Jeff
you're watching ‘Turn the Lens’ with Jeff Frick.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
We'll catch you next time.Take care.
Thank you Dan
Any anytime.
Love it.
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
All right,
so I’ll count us down in
three, two, one.
Hey welcomeback everybody.
Jeff Frick here coming to you foranother episode of ‘Turn the Lens.’
And I'm really excitedabout this next episode.
This is a gentlemanI first saw in 2016
that showed some amazing research that really
(00:21):
kind of draws into questionsome really simple, basic things like
do we evenhave free will?
What are the things that go into our decision making?
And we talk a lot about,
kind of evolutionarybehavior
and what's kind of going on behind the scenes
in the way that we thinkand the way we filter information.
And he's got a great perspective.
So joining us all the wayfrom Durham, North Carolina,
(00:42):
he's Dan Ariely,the James B Duke Professor
of Psychology and Behavioral Economics from Duke University.
Dan, great tosee you today.
Lovely to be here.
Thank you.
So I, I did a little,
I was a dual majorecon psychology back in the day.
No PhD, no Masters.
But, you know, I was fascinated
(01:03):
when I walked intothe economics class
and they showedall these beautiful curves.
And everythingis so logical
and mathematical and wonderfulbased on these assumptions.
But then I was also in psychologyand I was like,
that's not how peoplemake decisions.
We're not these like
super rational kind ofcomputer-like decision making machines.
And your, story that I'd love for youto repeat kind of on
(01:26):
on the organ donor,participation rates
really demonstrates that we don't necessarily have as much control
over what we doas we think we do.
Yeah.
So, yes, I think, you know,
economics is aninteresting perspective on life
but it assumesa whole lot.
Some of it isnot correct.
(01:46):
It's a very interesting exercise.
And you can think about underwhat conditions we need apply
but in many conditions it doesn't apply.
And, more often than not,the implications are just wrong.
So, so maybe I'll,I'll start by saying
that my metaphor for the human mind
(02:06):
is that we're walking aroundwith a Swiss Army Knife.
You know what?
What we have in our mindis not a perfect tool for anything.
Like the Swiss Army Knifeis not great for anything.
It's sort of good forlots of things.
That's what ourour mind is designed for.
But our Swiss Army Knife is designed for tasks from a long time ago.
(02:30):
It's not designed for thefor the modern world.
So we’re carrying with usa Swiss Army Knife
with most tools being irrelevant.
So now when we have to deal with
retirement and medical decisions
and AI and misinformationand so on,
that we're not set up,to deal with that.
(02:51):
And because of that,we make mistakes
and we don't make mistakesbecause we're stupid or incapable
or anything like that.
We are making the same mistakes because
we are not designed to this
to be in this modern environment.
When you ask peopleyou know
How many of you
(03:12):
don't sleep as much as you think you should,
everybody raisetheir hand.
How many of us eat more than we think we should?
And you know,the list goes on and on and on.
It's very clear that our
environment is not designed for the kind of tools we have.
And it also meansthat the environment
has a lot to do with thedecisions we end up making.
(03:34):
So I'll give you two examples.
You ask people, do you like apples?
And most peoplesay, yes.
And then you puta bowl of apples.
Almost nobodytakes one.
And you cut the apples into quartersand they disappear.
It turns out that eating a whole appleis just a little bit too much work.
(03:54):
You know, eating a quarteris just the right amount of work.
Or the example that you referred to
is an example from organ donation
that basically looksat different countries in Europe
and showing thatsome countries,
the participation ratein organ donation
is in the 90%, in some it's in the 20%.
And when you say, what's thedifference between these two countries,
(04:17):
the countries in 90% the country and 20%
they educate people differently.
They have different camaraderie.
Do they have different ideologies,different religion, different whatever?
The answer is, they havea different enrollment form.
And countries that have what is called ‘opt in’.
You’re assumed not to be an organ donor
(04:39):
and you have to opt into become an organ donor.
Many peopledon't opt in.
People don'ttake that step.
They say, oh, too complex,too difficult. I'm not sure.
Let me stay out.
And those countries have about a 20% participation.
Countries that have an ‘opt out’.
When you’re assumedto be an organ donor
and you have to signto get out of it,
people say, oh, it's difficult decision complex.
(05:00):
I'm not going to do anything.
Stay with it.
And all of this is suggesting that in many decisions,
we don't know what to do.
And when we don't know what to do,
we do what the interface tells us to do.
And interestingly enough,
as decisions become bigger and more complex
and more meaningful,like organ donation,
it's a tough decision
(05:22):
it involves our death and ourrelatives and mourning and medical
and all kinds ofthings like that.
As decisions get bigger,we don't know what to do even more,
and we just don't do anything.
And when we don't do anything,
we let the person who set up thedecision environment decide for us.
So we call this choice architecture.
(05:43):
It is that the environment
has a lot to do withour final decisions,
but we often don't understand it.
So imagine that
you and I, would stand outside of the Department of Motor Vehicle
where most people get these form.
And imagine we meetone person who gets an opt in form.
And because of that, they didnot sign and not participate.
(06:04):
And one person getsan opt out form
and because of that they didn't sign and participated.
And they come outand we say to this person,
hey, we see you participatedand we see you didn't participate.
Please explain why.
Do you think anybody would say
the form told meto do so.
Right.
Or would anybody say
I didn't know what to do.I did the default,
of course not.
(06:25):
After the fact,people tell stories.
Somebody who didn't sign the form
didn't join the program,would say something like,
I'm really worriedabout medicine these days,
and I'm really worried about
whether physicians will see that I signed this form
and will not treat me as well.
Or will pull the pluga little earlier,
and somebody that did end upparticipating will say,
(06:47):
you know, this is how myparents taught me to be
a caring, wonderful individual.
But those stories will come afterthe decision and not before it.
And we usually think that decisionsare driven by our preferences.
We have preferencesand they drive decisions.
The reality is that we often make decisions because of the environment,
(07:08):
and then we justify them.
Yeah
We justify them so welland we tell the story so well.
That very quickly we convince even ourselves.
And I'll give youone last example.
You look at what's the biggest contributorto 401(k) savings accounts.
It's the default rateat your employer.
But when you ask people,how did you come to decide
(07:29):
that you want to save5%, 10%, 12%, whatever it is,
very few people say,oh, it’s the default rate.
Right, right
Well, I have a story
I thought about itcost and benefits and so on.
So we're very good at telling stories.
And these storiesobfuscate
the real thing that drove the decision, which is often the interface.
It's funny.
(07:50):
Reminds me of always the,
the evening newswhen they talk about
the stock marketperformance that day.
And unlessit's a day
where the fedactually did something
or there was something obvious,
you know, they always havethese explanations
as to why the market was hotor why the market was cool.
And it's like, well, that's easy to do after the fact.
But there's another thing
that I think is really interestingthat's working against us,
(08:10):
and that's this filter between our receptors of information
our eyes, our ears, our nose, our skin,
and what we think happened.
But it's got to go throughthis amazing amount of,
of preconceived biases,our individual experiences.
And you know,what really did happen?
And my favorite examplesis when my wife and I
We've been married over 30 years.
(08:31):
We go to the farmer’s market together
and we buy some fruits and vegetables,
and we come home and we talk about
what happened atthe farmer's market.
We saw completely different things.
We saw completely different people.
You know, I was noticingthis beautiful display of
of fruit that I wanted to take a picture of.
She's over, you know,
engaging, maybe with a friendthat she saw that I didn't see.
(08:53):
But it's really weird.
You come back
and we went to the same place,
we experienced the samegeographic destination.
And yet what we experiencedand the reality that we had
are totally different.
And that's a realmind opener.
And imagine there'sa range of things you can look at
and you can say well, I'm looking at these things
and your wifeis looking at those things.
(09:15):
But sometimes, even if you look at the same thing,
you could interpretthem differently.
And the classic example forthat is sports.
You can have two fansof opposing teams
watching thesame move,
and the referee is calling a call against somebody,
and one person saysthe referee is absolutely correct
and they're willing to betmoney on it.
(09:37):
And the other one is sayingthe referee might,
must be blind, or vicious or being paid and
both of those peoplewould pay money for this bet.
It's not as if they're just saying it.
But yes, we we have this incredible sense
of trust in our senses,
(09:57):
but and we are not reallyexperiencing the outside world.
We're experiencing an inside world
that goes through a very thicklayer of interpretation.
You know, one way we see it, ofcourse, is visual illusions.
Right.
When you see avisual illusion,
you basically say,I can't trust my eyes.
Yes, there's your eyesand there's your brain,
and you are only have accessto the information
(10:19):
after your brainhas been processing it.
You don't have accessto information out there.
Right. And because of that,
because this is what we have to deal with,
it’s the insiderepresentation.
That representation has been worked on
and it has been morphed andchanged in all kinds of
all kinds of ways.
But our sense isthat it's true.
(10:40):
Right.
You're willing to to bet on it.
You're willing topromise it.
Eyewitness testimony, I mean, all kinds of things like that
that are just not as accurateas people think.
Right? Right.
And we'reall experiencing
and then we have an over, simplification I think to
where our expectations iseveryone else is experiencing
the same thingthat we're experiencing,
(11:00):
when in fact,
to me, the wake up call’s
is one day just realizing that
everybody's Facebook feed or LinkedIn feedor social media feed is different.
It's not it's not a feed of
in order
all your friendsof what they posted
it's what Facebook thinks isgoing to keep you on the platform
a little bit longer.
And then when youwake up and say,
(11:21):
not only is your Facebook feed different,
but even the feed as you'rewatching that sports game
or the feed as we're at the farmer’s market
is actually different,
even though we're actually looking at
technically, one might argue the same thing.
Yeah.
And you know, the, there'sa really interesting thing about
this thing we call empathy.
So empathy is really an amazing human skill.
(11:44):
It's if you stabbed your toe,
I will be able to empathize to some degree.
If you told me something goodhappened to you
I am able to empathize,something bad will happen.
How do we do that?
How do we have empathy?
Do we really feelthe other person? No.
The reality is that empathy is based on a Mirror Neurons.
(12:04):
These are neuronsbasically activate
what I think you're experiencing in my brain.
So when I am experiencing empathyfor you, for stabbing your toe,
I'm not really experiencingyou stabbing your toe.
My mind activatesstabbing the toe mirror neurons.
And then I am projecting thatthis is how you're feeling.
(12:25):
Now it's an amazing capacity, right?
It's an, it's a thing that makespeople incredible, right?
I can feel your pain.
But of course, I'm notexperiencing your pain.
I'm experiencing my painas I would experience it,
sort of, if I had your experience.
But that meansthat our
(12:46):
empathy is within our minds.
It's not as if we'restepping into your mind
and I'm experiencingwith you.
I'm experiencehow I would experience it.
Maybe.
Maybe it's 50% if Iif I were going to stab my toe.
But I think that that'swhat you're experiencing.
Right, right.
That’s why empathyis not what you're experiencing.
It's what I would experience.
(13:08):
it's a simulation of whatI would experience
if I would go througha sense like you
But because of that also
we have this incredible sense of similarity.
Oh, I just feel your pain. No, I don't feel your pain.
I feel my pain as if I was in your shoes.
But that's, and it's a dramatically important thing.
It's what makes us human.
It's unbelievably important.
(13:29):
But it also gives us the sense
that we're actually experiencing the other person
when we're not really.
So I have pages and pages here of notes.
One of the things that we do as people
is we look for patterns,
I had Evan Benway on from Moodsonicyou know, he's like, even
we look at stars in the heavens and we see patterns.
We see stories, we see shapes,we see people.
At the same timeyou talk about,
(13:51):
we often look for complexity,
in something that we don't understand.
It must be complexif I don't understand.
There must be some complex.
How do those things interact?
You know, this desire to simplify,
because, again,it's this evolutionary biology.
We have to bucket things and free up cycles
for the cheetah that'sgoing to jump out of the bushes.
(14:13):
But then at the same time,when we don't confuse.
We are amazing at coming up with with all kinds of complex and
and, and, rich storiesto explain the unexplainable.
Yeah, So
so I actually I was goingto do a little video on patterns
so I prepared this before.
So this, this is what is called white noise.
(14:36):
White noise is sometimes auditory [static noise]
a wide spectrum, but sometimesit's pictures like this.
And imagine an experiment in whichI show you a picture like this.
And I say, did you see a pattern?
And I show another one.
And each of thoseis randomly generated,
so there shouldn't be a pattern.
And we ask you,‘Do you see a pattern?’
Do you see a pattern?Do you see a pattern?
(14:58):
And the question is
under what conditions would people start seeing more patterns?
And the answer is under conditions of stress.
And I don't mean the stress ofsaying, gee, I have so much email,
I don't know how I’ll finish.
It's the kind of stress that says‘I don't understand the world.’
I don't understand whyI was fired and not them.
(15:18):
I don't understand why I've been healthy
and then I have this disease.
I don't understand what's happening with AI, will I get to keep my job?
I don't understand this thing with this
a virus called COVID 19.
I don't understand why the Houthis are attacking,
shipping around the worldand so on.
When you basically say,I don't understand the world,
our mind goesinto a mode
(15:41):
of trying to see patterns.
Like you gave the analogy of the tiger, like
if I'm an animal in the jungle and I'm stressed,
all my senses now are trying to over interpret things
to see if there's a tiger.
I see a leaf moving and I say, oh, maybe it’s here. Right.
Like I, I basically go intohyper mode of alertness
(16:03):
and try to see try to see patterns.
So that's the, the thing that we see patterns.
But of course we don't stop there,
especially when wetalk about misbelief
about people coming up with alternative theories for the world is
we want a pattern,
we want a villain,
and we want a complex story.
And you would say, you know, okay,I understand pattern.
(16:25):
Why do you want a villain?
And we want a villain because
we want to blame somebody else that is not us.
Right.
That's understandable.
And why complex?
Because we want to feel
that we know more than other people.
We want to feel in control.
So imagine that societyis looking down upon you
(16:45):
you lost your joband something is not going well.
You're not getting your fair
You feel you're not getting your fair share.
You're feeling lowon the totem pole of society.
If now you have a storywith a villain
that is complex and you'rethe only one who understands it
now, you feel more in control.
(17:07):
Right, you feel more in control and better compared to other people.
Yeah.
And actually what what they show in this,
this last bookI wrote called ‘Misbelief’
the point there wasto basically examine
how normal people come to believesome very strange things.
And it turns outthat stress
is the condition that gets people to go down that.
(17:30):
If somebody is completely unstressed,
they are not going to go downthe funnel of misbelief.
They're not going to wake up one day and say,
‘Oh, let me look for an alternative theory’
Right.
If people are comfortablein their lives,
they're not going to lookfor alternative theories.
But when people are stressed,
(17:50):
they're looking for analternative theory with a villain
and ideally complex theorythat could explain to them
why they are where they areand other people are
where they are, but they wouldfeel more, more in control.
So of course there are more elements to this.
There's a big cognitive elementand personality
and socialelement to this.
But this initial element of stress,
(18:12):
one other thing that is very important about this is
the stress we feel
is a combination of the stress that we get
minus the resilience.
So you can think about felt stress
is amount of stressminus resilience.
Right, that's kind of the the equation.
(18:34):
Because if I feel more resilienceI can handle stress.
But if I can't, then the stress gets worse.
And resilience is something thatwe're not doing well on these days.
Right.
Resilience comesfrom having
close personal friendsand in general
people spend much less timewith their friends,
(18:56):
and it comes fromfamily ties
and we spend more timewith our nuclear family.
But less time with our family.
It comes from friends in general,
but you know,we have less friends.
Right, right
Even at work
Even at work, people are notsupposed to talk to their friends
about romantic questionsor illness or politics.
(19:19):
So we have less and less friends,
and we have less and lesstrust in the government
that if something badhappened to us,
the governmentwill be there for us,
or the health care systemor whatever.
And very sadly, it turns out that
as financial inequalityincreases,
people are less likely to ask for help.
(19:40):
Yeah, well I've got the book right here,
so we're going to definitelytalk about the book.
I have to say,it's not
it's not the most uplifting bookI've read in the in the
[Jeff] in the last little while.[Dan] It is not the most
uplifting book. No,
but let's, let's get into a couple a couple of the things
So going back to, to basic psychology, right?
One of my favorite classeswas rat lab.
And you learn really earlyin rat lab
that the way to get the ratto hit the bar the most
(20:03):
is to give them a random return at a random rate.
And that's that's,they'll just keep hitting that bar.
And we see that executed againsthumans in something simple like a
like a one arm bandit,you know,
a slot machine is kind ofthe classic case
where it's a randompayout at random rate.
What's what's really.
Let's, let's,
let's emphasize thatbecause I think it's so important.
(20:24):
So, so what B. F. Skinner showed
is that when you have a rat
and you give the ratthe lever,
and every 200 presses, they get the reward, that's exciting.
But if it's random,it's between 1 and 400.
The same expected value.
The rat will click much faster
and they will continue clickingeven when the reward stops.
(20:46):
And if you think about it,
that's the principle that Las Vegas is based on.
Right
If you knew thatfor every 100 of those you'll get,
you know, $7 back,you will not do it.
But it's the randomnessthat keeps us going
and you can think about our phones.
Is an amazing mechanismfor random reinforcement.
Right, you drive
(21:07):
and there's a little ring on your phoneor a buzz or something like that.
And in that moment you say, ‘Oh, maybe this is an important email’
Right, right
Now, you don't getthat many important emails
you don't get that many important things.
But from time to timeyou do
and you’re not thinkingabout the average
or you don't think about the minimum,
you’re thinking about the possibility that it's
(21:29):
it's going to be rewardingand therefore
people end up being really curious.
Right,
Right, they say ‘Oh, maybe this is the one.’
Maybe thisis the one.
Well, why I wanted to bring it up is
it's one thing if it's Vegasand I walk into a casino
and I kind of know thatthat's the game and I can
I can get on the planeand I can fly home.
[Jeff] What's really scary[Dan] By the way, what do you think.
[Jeff] now, what I was gonna say now it’s[Dan] What do you think
(21:49):
now it’s in your phone, as you said.
And not only is it in your phone,
you're competing against a computer
that's been set up specifically
to optimize and basicallyplay your own biology against you.
And it's in your phone or, excuse me, it's in your pocket 24 x 7.
And they have a level of detailedknowledge about you
(22:12):
that the casino never used to have
back in the day to, to make it even more effective.
I mean, that I think is one of the,the biggest stressors,
whether it's whether it's kind of,
conscious stress or unconscious stress
[Jeff] that, [Dan] Absolutely
So many people are suffering now
without the power to just turn the stupid thing off
(22:33):
because, as you said, the chances of it actually
being that important of a messageare relatively small.
Yeah.
So first of all, before we move to this
just something about Vegas.
What do you think people spend more money on
sports in the USor on gambling?
(22:55):
Gambling.
By sports, I mean goingto sporting events and,
a subscription to TV stations and stuff like that.
Gambling, I don’t even think it’s close.
And now you got.Now you got sports and gambling.
That's a whole nother conversationfor another podcast.
Now that the
the proverbial fox is in the henhouse, I think.
Yeah.
So I, the statistics I
(23:17):
I saw was that people spend on gambling
more than all of entertainment put together,
more than sports
and movies and theater and, and, and, and
gambling is bigger
because it usesthis very basic and
reward mechanism.
Now, the thing about information technology
(23:37):
and phones in particular, as you said,
is really terrible.
And kind of a metaphorfor this is to think about cars.
So think about carsand how do cars get better?
Every year, cars get better.
And they get slightly better engines.
They get slightly better fuel efficiency.
(23:58):
But the real advances in cars
is that they recognizethat we are shitty drivers,
and they're doing some thingsto make us less able to kill ourselves.
Right.
So we have seatbelts and anti-lock brakes
and rearview mirror and side mirrorsand lights on the mirrors.
And we have
my car hasthis sensor
that if I get too close to a car,it applies the brake.
(24:21):
And it has a little thing
that if I go over the line,it makes it harder to to move it.
I mean, justincredible technology.
And every year the engineers are coming with new things
and every yearpeople are proving
that we're even shitty driversthan they thought.
And the cycle continues.
Now think about information technology.
(24:42):
If cars are developing every year
to become more compatible with human nature,
and to assume that we are shittier drivers.
Is information technology every year develops assuming that
we are shittier consumers of information?
Or is it assuming that we are more perfect?
And I think it's the other way around?
(25:02):
I think that every year we diverge
between our humanity, thethe Swiss Army Knife that we carry
and the way that information
what information technology demands from us in terms of ability.
And it's kind of amazingto look at cars and say,
look how much regulationthere are in cars.
(25:26):
You know, things about bumpers and, you know,
cars are unbelievably regulated
because it's so clearhow bad drivers we are.
Yeah.
Information technology, Facebook, Twitter and so on.
It just assumesthat we’re perfect
[Jeff] Yeah[Dan] that’s
there's no reason to regulate anything because
yeah, we couldmake perfect decisions, but
(25:49):
I don't see any evidencethat says that we are
better informationconsumers than we are drivers.
I think that the immediateconsequences are different.
Like in one case,we kill ourselves,
we kill other people.The evidence is there.
In the other case,we degrade our social capital.
We get depressed, we get envious.
(26:09):
We get down the funnel of misbelief. All kinds
Not as easy to quantify,
but I don't thinkwe're better at it.
Right.
I think we're actually, terribleconsumers of information.
And I think we're terrible in
in actually lots of these technologies that are developing
are developing further and further from our human nature.
(26:29):
Yeah.
There’s so
I hope you have like six hours
there are so many places we can you go.
But the one I wantto point out, there
is really this kind of lawof unintended consequences
when you've got this misalignedincentive structure.
So, you know, from the
from the Facebook,we'll just pick on Facebook
just becauseit's easy,
you know, from their perspective,they want you to stay on,
(26:50):
on the site.
But it turns out that the,
the stuff that gets you to stay the longest
is the stuff that's the most extreme.
So you got this kind of law of unattended consequences,
which maybe Facebook wasn't specifically
trying to push people to the extremes,
but it's the extreme stuff
that gets people to click,which is what their objective is.
And then you get this otherreally horrible effect,
(27:11):
which is we so quickly normalize things,
so that we can move on and,and bucket them.
And so the only way to keepthe clicks going
is to make this stuff more and more and more extreme.
So in this pursuit of clicksto sell a few more ads,
this law of unintended consequencesis in fact pushed division.
And the other kind of slice on it,to get your take,
(27:35):
especially in the context of friends and friendships and keeping those strong
is just kind ofthis micro segmentation
as we all now go with an AI driven, specific little feed
just thatthat's targeted to us.
So, you know, we spend more of our time in this little micro hole
versus a more general and
and you know, you talk about trustin the news will get the trust
(27:57):
where when there was only one source
and it was just Walter Cronkite,
he had to kind of cross all the bounds
because there was only one source.
So I wonder if you can talk about this
I think it's really scary.
And the final pieceto throw out is, you know,
there's kind of biology speed,which is pretty damn slow.
You know, there’s kind of people as a civilization speed,
which has been a little bit faster.
(28:18):
But it wasn't that long agothat your father
and your grandfatherand his grandfather
all probably did the same thing.
And you could probably expectyour kids to do the same.
And now we've got thisexponential curves
in the technology side,
which we're just not very well equipped.
And I think the ChatGPT
explosion on the scenewas just kind of a
(28:39):
exponential curves in your face, like
all of a sudden, oh my God,
I can talk to a supercomputerand it'll talk back to me.
Yeah.
So, so lotsof things.
Lots of thingsin there.
So, so to start with,I think that we can
even go a step more backward
and say people don't like to payfor services with money.
(29:02):
So we pay with time,
like, you can imagine a universe.
And we would say, you know what?
Facebook isso wonderful.
I'll pay $10 a month for this,
you know, but by the amount of timepeople spend on Facebook,
it should be easy to justify, youknow, three cups of coffee.
Right.
Or if you're in San Francisco, one.
But you know, it's.
(29:23):
But we are reluctant.
We're happy topay for coffee.
We're not that happyto pay for services.
So all of these
a lot of these technologies were left, like,
how do we provide this technologywhere people on one hand are saying
they want to spend a lot of time
with another hand, I’m not willing to pay.
So the advertising model came
that's kind of the beginning ofthe unintended consequences, right?
(29:45):
The world would have beena very different world
if we paid for it.
And then of course, what happened is that once
you pay with your time,they're incentivized.
You know, there was a,
like, you can imagine a world in which we
which we paid for Facebook,
they would not be incentivized.
(30:05):
They would be incentivizedto keep us for longer
months, years,but not per day, right.
They would say that'snot in their best interest, but
but in this case,it's in their best interest
to get us to be there for longer.
And what are the thingsthat get to
to bethere longer?
It's the thingsthat are provocative
and the thingsthat are less likely to be true,
(30:27):
that are more puzzling,more sensationalist, and so on.
And not only that,
they're not just producing information,
they're allowing peopleto produce information.
So now there'sa competition,
there's a market for people to produce this thing,
and now everybody is competing
in this poolof lots of people
who are trying to create a signal.
And now, you know, whoever is the noisiest,
(30:49):
can create one.
And then the other thing that you mentioned,
which is very important,
is that there is this
focusing onan audience,
you know, think about it.
When I was a kid and there was network
and national television, right.
Network television,whoever was there
(31:11):
had to talk to everybody.
Now, pick your network.
It's like people withthe same ideas of talking
to people with basically the same ideas.
It's happening on, you know, on social media.
But it happens everywhere.
And that, by the way,is very bad for democracy.
You know, the idea for representative democracy,
(31:33):
it’s kind of interesting.
But the moment you have representative democracy
and people can only talk to their base,
now we get a very different
approach because people say
can say all kinds of ridiculousthing to their base,
not as truth, but as basically camaraderie, right.
Look at these idiotson the other side.
You couldnever say it,
(31:54):
if you said it on to everybody.
But if you just
if you say it mostly to your base,
that's a very different story.
So, and we and we created this
competition between information producers
who are trying to become moreand more extreme.
You know, sometimes I feel,very kind of
(32:16):
sympathetic toward journalists.
Imagine you're a journalist
and you're fighting with people that have a blog
or write on TikTok or whatever,
you know, and you have journalistic standards
and they don't,
you know, howhow easy is it to keep
to keep journalistic standards,
(32:37):
Right. Well and this
this blurring between information and entertainment
[Jeff] and [Dan] Yep
which if the lines are clear, great.
You know, if I'm watching Saturday Night Live
or I'm at a theater and, you know
it's satire or stand up comedian stuff where it's clear,
but when it's perceivedto be information,
(32:57):
you know, that's not necessarily good
when it, isn't even really intended
to be informationin the first place.
Which, which takes me to another big word.
Let me say one other things I,
I was at some reception for,
really a wonderfula professor at Harvard and
somebody introduced him and she read from,
(33:23):
the story about himin ‘The New Yorker’
from many years ago.
That was kind of,
you know, glorifying all the wonderful things that he has done
and all the thingshe should be glorified for.
But she also saidthat these days
nobody would ever writesuch a glowing story anymore.
(33:45):
You know, if youthink about it
and you look at all the,
the profiles inanywhere,
just, there are no good people
and it's not that there are not good people anymore.
It's that bad news sells.
Right.
And positive newsis just not as exciting.
(34:06):
You know, the headline,
a guy, you know, did something good
is not as exciting asa guy as, you know.
Right.
has said something nasty to somebody else.
So we have this
competition, like you said,
that the laws of unintended consequences.
(34:28):
I think that
that the world offree information,
together with this very fierce competition
is changing,not just social media.
It's changing journalism.
And I think information in generaland everybody,
there's kind of arace to the bottom.
Right, right.
Everybody's doing thingsthat are more superficial
(34:51):
and can be caught in, you know, 17 characters
and three seconds and,
and it's very tough.
And sometimes now you see exceptions
and sometimes those exceptions work.
But mostly it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where
editors are saying we need
(35:12):
if it bleeds, it leads.
And, you know, what do you puton the top and so on.
And then people get used to that.
And that creates a very,
a very vicious cyclethat is very much against us.
Yeah.
You know there was thisthere was a claim
that after Brexit, after Brexit,
there were lots of Google searches
from England aboutwhat Brexit means.
(35:34):
You know, that people didn't know really what it meant.
Right.
You know, they probably got lotsof all kinds of other propaganda,
but now all of a sudden said,
‘Oh my goodness, let's check what this really means’
Yeah.
Because, you know, there's
because I think, you know,if it bleeds, it leads.
It's always been the editorial point of view
and it's always been, you know,what's on top of the fold.
(35:54):
I think what's different is thatwas your once a daily newspaper.
And it wasn't coming at youat machine speed,
in your phone 24 x 7.
And if you didn't happen tobite on that, picture
of a burning car onthe front of the paper,
we'll send you a different one.
Maybe you'll bite on this of oneor different one.
So I think it's really scarywhen these principles are applied,
(36:16):
with literally machine speed and AI
to try to trigger your emotional response, when
I always think of like, spam, like, we don't even know
how much spam Google's gettingbefore it even gets to our mailbox.
But you know, you try to manageyour spam and manage your inbox.
You're fighting against machines
that are operating at a differentscale and a different speed,
(36:37):
and they're just playinga different game
than you are asas a person.
And so the
the likelihood of, you know,
[Jeff] clicking on spam and this and that is horrible[Dan] And it’s very taxing
Yeah.
And you know, it'sit's very taxing.
Like, you know, I
even reading through
because, you know, my life is kind of
interesting and complex.
I get emails from lotsof places and lots of people
(37:00):
and it's hard to know.
Right.
And, you know, this,
this additional level of,
okay, this person wrote methere’s an attachment.
Is it a real person?Is it not?
What do I do?Google didn't block it.
Yeah,
It's a very taxing activity, it’s taxing
taxing on our societyto a great
To a great degree.
(37:21):
Yeah.
Let's talk about trust.
Yeah, yeah.
As a topic.And
and I want to lean into it.
You know, Edelman puts outa trust index every year.
They put putting it outfor quite a while.
And they distinguish betweenkind of institutions and leaders.
And you brought up the car earlierin self-driving car.
And I think what’s really interestingto pick on Tesla for a minute,
(37:42):
is people now are so comfortable with technology
that they just assumetechnology works.
They don't read the instruction manuals,
they don't run itthrough a burn in period.
So you've got literally people
sitting in the backseats of their Tesla car,
which is not a full self-driving level five car.
It's a super,cruise control.
And yet, how is the trustpotentially with the technology, the car
(38:06):
compare with the trust of the organization,
how are they keeping my information,are they keeping it private
are they taking care of it?
And then you've got
kind of the trustof the leadership,
and then you've got trustof institutions.
And all of that really seems to bein a little bit of a crisis,
because trust is, you know,one of these things that we decide,
as a group to share
(38:27):
in that trust and not necessarily question everything
because we don't just
we don't have the mental bandwidthand we need some foundation to live on.
So have you seen kindof the evolution of trust
or the dissolution of trustor the shifting of trust
change bothwithin misbelieving
and kind of the conspiracy stuff,but also this
just increasingly complex world?
The other piece is to throw outthat you see this a little bit is,
(38:50):
you know, ‘right to fix’,
you know, I want to fix my carI used to fix my car.
There’s a big story about John Deere tractor guys
that can't fix their tractors anymore.
At the same time,the level of complexity
in the machines that we engage withis so much higher.
The percentage of softwarein any product versus
something I can fix with a wrench and ruler
and tools is different.
(39:11):
So this, this, complexity kind of running away,
and really making itmore of a challenge to figure out
what's to trustand what's not to trust.
Yeah.
So first of all, trust isunbelievably important.
And, you know, there's this saying that
fish don't know that they're in water because they're surrounded by it.
(39:32):
And to some degree,we are surrounded by trust.
And we trust that the vegetables we buy in the store,
are without pesticides.
And we, we trust that
somebody washed the lettucewhen they serve the salad.
And we trust that somebody inspected the elevator.
(39:54):
And that the cars in our
the brakes in our car will work.
And we trust and we trustand we trust.
It's kind of amazingthe kind of things that we trust.
And we start losing trust.
Bad things happen.
By the way, I don't know if you've seen, but
but since COVID, there are more people
who are not giving their kidsstandard immunizations.
(40:17):
Right.
People have lost trustin the health care system.
I recently talked to a womanwho's a cancer patient
and she's refusingto take chemotherapy.
She doesn't trust pharmaand after COVID,
she and she's not willingto take chemotherapy.
She's willing to have surgery but not
(40:39):
not chemotherapy.
So you know,we lose a lot of trust.
Now when we think about how we update
our beliefsabout trust,
there are things that we experience
and there are things we don't experience.
So think about the cycleof learning from experience.
You say to yourself,I think that the probability
(41:01):
of texting and driving and something bad happening is 2%
just making it up.It's probably not 2%.
And one day you text and drive
and nothing bad happened.
It's only 2% probability.
But at the end of this experienceyou say, oh, maybe it's not one
well maybe it’s not 2%, maybe it's 1.9%.
So you do it more and moreand more and more, so
(41:22):
when we deal withlow probability events,
every time we try them,our experience
teaches us the wrong thing
until it's too late, and then we,we crash into something.
So when you think about something like driving,
in a car like the Tesla,
(41:43):
if people kind of letgo of their hands
and nothingbad happened,
they say, oh my goodness,it might be safer than I thought.
And then they, they do moreand more and more and more.
Of course,
you know, the probabilitythat something bad will happen
could be very small.It could be incredibly devastating.
It could happenat some point.
Right.
But it's a very bad feedback loop.
(42:05):
But there are thingsthat we need trust.
Like trust in the health care system
that we don't get to experience in the same way.
So when we talk about trust,I think the question is,
do we talk about trust in thingsthat we can learn from experience,
or we talking about trust fromthings we can't learn about?
They’re only from description.
(42:26):
And things that we can learn from experience,
can be, we can learn the wrong lesson from experience
because we update too much
and things that arejust get from description.
You know, those things are rather
would be rather stable. So,
(42:46):
but in general, I think trust
is like a public goodin society.
And when people stop trusting things, we lose a lot.
And you know what?
Think about it like
where do you get to experience
the most trustin society?
I think it's with money.
(43:07):
You know, you pay with your credit card, you do this
and you basically check youryour bank once in a while
and it feels likeit's all okay.
And it's kind of magical.
You go to different places,
use your card onlineand so on, and,
and things kind of accumulateand they seem to be okay.
And you have a listof what's going on.
It's a great exercise in trust.
(43:29):
And this is one of the reasons why I don't like cryptocurrency,
because I want peopleto experience trust.
Now I understand the cryptocurrency people
are sayingI don't trust people.
And I understand.
But for me, the answer would be
If you don't trust people. Great. Let's build trust.
Let's work on institutionsthat will get more trust, so
(43:51):
For them to say, no, no,
I just want a payment mechanismthat don't rely on trust,
I think of it as very sadbecause I say
payment is the place where people could learn the most
that you can trust.You can trust people.
So I want you to use, to use that trust.
And I want you to prove to yourself five times a day
(44:11):
that you can trust the institutionand trust the bank
and trust the regulators,and you can even trust that
if somebody stole your credit card,they will get it back to you.
I want those experiences.
And if you don't, you don't trust it.
Let's work on the trust.
Let's fix the trust.
Let's not try to to bypass it.
So I think we needto work on trust.
(44:31):
Yeah
I think we need to work on trust.
We are at a trust crisis.
And if you ask mewho should make the first move,
I think it should bethe government.
I think it should be the governmentto make the first move
to show trust in us, the citizens, rather than,
to do something,
something theother way.
And, you know, when I,
(44:52):
when I look at organizations,
one of thebiggest de-motivator
for people inorganization
is bureaucracy.
And why is that?
It's bureaucracy tells peopleI don't trust you.
I don't value your time.
And I don't want totry and improve anything.
Just follow the rules
(45:12):
Right
And do whatever your told.
But to not trusting anybody is a very
It's a very,
the opposite from empowering.
Right, right.
To weakening positionthat has lots of consequences.
Well
I think we need to figure out
trust building mechanismsin companies in society.
(45:33):
Yeah, well, unfortunately what right now.
And we haven'tgot to the workplace,
which is one of our many topics.
You know, thesereturn to office mandates
as well as this increasedkind of surveillance society
in which we're getting everythingfrom cameras everywhere
to keystroke monitoring to everything else.
I mean, nothing says ‘I don't trust you’more than that.
(45:55):
Where at the same time,
[Dan] Terrible, terrible[Jeff] the same managers are going,
well, how do I know if you're working,
if you're not moving your mouse,and it’s like
well because you're a bad manager.
You don't know what I'm supposed to be working on?
You're not checking inon my progress against my task.
You're not.
You know, we're not workingtowards a common goal.
It's just like this lazy.
It's just like this lazy substitutefor actually managing people
we’ll just monitor your your keystroke activity.
(46:18):
Yeah, it's it's not just lazy.
I think it's, So, so look
So much to say about this, but,
But think about what's called work life balance,
which is a termthat I don't like.
So, at my university.
The rule is that if somebodyis going to a doctor's visit,
(46:40):
they should mark thatthey're taking two hours
to a doctor's visitbecause
for some reason, this is not part of work.
This is life.
Right?
And I'm trying very hard to fight this
for all the people who are working with me.
And, you know, I saya whole person is coming to work.
(47:01):
And if they are not healthy,
it's bad for for the whole person.
It's not just bad for the homeperson and it's good for the
And if that person decidesin the middle of the day
to go for a run, it's good for the whole person.
And if that person decide to
and, like think about books,
there are books that are maybe work books and
(47:23):
books that are life books, but
but there are many booksthat are the same.
But they arecould be both.
And I think of it as like a line that says
there are awful thingsto do at home, dishes.
Awful things to do at work,bureaucracy,
and there's lots of things in middle that are good for both.
And I think that
I want people to do what's in the middle.
(47:45):
I want peopleto go to see a doctor,
and I want them to exercise,and I want them to sleep well,
like,
you know, it'skind of an amazing thing
that you say,sleep on your own time.
And no, you know,you hire the whole person
with their whole complexityand the whole talent and,
you want them to flourish.
And this,this micromanaging approach
(48:06):
is just completely undermining the idea that
the person is coming, coming to work
is a whole person with all of their skills and so on, and
anyway, so I really,
I really dislike it.
But the moment you start talking about
work life balance
and you saytake two hours
(48:28):
to go to a doctor,it's on your time.
People say, okay,so I'm finishing at 5?
You know, the whole equationchanges because once you
once you start creating these norms that
this is work and this is life and there is separation,
people say ‘Oh, there’s separation?’
Let me, take advantage of it.
Can I tell you one other metaphor?
(48:49):
[Jeff] Of course[Dan] You talked about
coming backto work.
So, as you know, I was badly injured.
I was in hospitalfor a very long time.
And for the first almostfour months, I was fed by tube.
So I had the tube andthey would feed me
30 eggs a day and 7,000 calories a day
to try and help the body
[Dan] rebuild.[Jeff] Wow
(49:12):
I lost weight on that diet.
And anyway they come,
they come to me almostat the end of these four months,
and they say the day after tomorrow
we'll take the tube out
and you'll start eating on your own.
And what do you thinkwas my reaction?
I said, ‘Please, don’tplease keep the tube in.’
I said, ‘I have discovered the future.’
(49:33):
I say in the future nobodywould want to waste time eating.
I mean, why would you?
I say, look, I don't think
in the future people will go with tubes
They will take little pillsand everything will be solved.
It will be efficient.
Like why would you want to chew
and spend so much timeon this and so on.
Anyway, of course I was the patient they were the doctor.
So they took the tube outand I started eating
(49:54):
and what happened?
So I remember that food tastes really good.
Right, right.
It turns outthat four months
were enough to forgetwhat food tastes like.
I remembered that food had a taste,
but wasn't as
I didn't remember the full range of enjoyment.
Now, the reason I'm telling you this story
(50:15):
is that the question is,
What does it meanto get back at work?
And some people thinkthat getting back at work is just
you’re at work.
But first of all, I think that after two years of COVID
people forgot what it isto be at work.
But I also think thatwhen people got back to work,
they were not really at work,
(50:35):
at work means
that you have really close friends at work,
you have people that you care about
that youjoke with,
that you have a common sense of humor,
that you can complete their sentences
and they can complete yours,
that you want them to do well,
that you're happy toto help them.
Your happy to make your day longerbecause you want their benefits.
And you know somethingabout the kids and their spouses,
(50:58):
and you’re happy with themand sad with them and so on.
And when you come back to work
you're not really back at workat the same level
that you truly havethis full potential.
So we had a very social life at work
Then we took a break from it.
And then when we come backphysically to work,
we're not really fully at work.
(51:19):
Yeah.
And I've seen most placesare not really working on
how to get peopleto reintegrate at work.
And until we do that,
until people have some of their more meaningful relationships
back at the workplace,
we're not going to beback at work.
We're going to, you know,
be in the same building.
(51:39):
Yeah, yeah.
But notnot fully back at work.
OK, so Dan we're,
we're coming to the end of our time, and I
and I still have pagesand pages of notes,
so maybe we'll have to havechapter two.
But, you know, kind of as a
as a parting thought as you think aboutthe complexity of people
versus kind of the, thisthis desire to be so rational.
What advice do you give peopleto better cope
(52:03):
in this kind of messy, sloppy, people populated world.
Okay, so there's lots of things, but
I would say number one is
figure out where your resilience is coming from
Both where you aregetting it from other people
and where youcan give it
(52:25):
and work on it.
You know, we’re we are here for a
a tough ride I think for the next decade.
Life is complex.
Things in the worldare not going to settle soon,
and we need to investin resilience.
Spend time with friends, family, loved ones.
(52:45):
Don't bicker
you know things, things like that.
And then the second thing is,I think that,
there's a lot to gainby asking yourself
what from our workingassumption is not correct.
We, grow up
and we have some assumptions,and then we go on,
and we don't examinethose assumptions very often.
(53:08):
Midlife crisis is a good opportunity
to examine some of those assumptions.
Sometimes when people get the diagnosis of terminal illness,
they do that.
But I think we need to do it moreoften than just midlife crisis.
And when we get a terminal illness diagnosis.
So I think it's very goodto kind of sit and ask ourself
what are our basic assumptions about life
(53:33):
and which assumptions are wesure about and which assumptions ...
maybe not so sure.
Yeah.
About
You know, if I have nowa project, when I talk to people
who are on, either very sickor lost somebody close and,
and it is amazingunder those conditions, what,
what people are able to
(53:55):
what kind of this
life changes they're able to make.
I recently talkedto somebody who,
very sick, very short time to live,
did some dramatic changes in their life.
And he's having an amazing last chapter
be about two years,
(54:15):
but an amazing chapter now.
Now, what can we do without that,
bad news in terms of examining our, basic assumption,
I think many people
had kind of this examination in early COVID,
but
very few people followed up on it.
I think it's a good
(54:35):
it's a good time to to ask yourself, what is
What are our assumptions?
What do we fully trust?
What do weneed to change?
Yeah.
All right, Dan, well we're going to have to leave it there
until we pick it up next time.
Maybe, before the holidaysto help people deal with,
how to manage family at Thanksgiving
and talk about more than just the weather.
[Dan] Absolutely important. [Jeff] So I really appreciate the time today.
(54:57):
Big fan of your work.
And, look forward to the next time we talk.
Really appreciate it. And thanks again.
Thank you.Take Care. Bye
He's Dan, I'm Jeff
you're watching ‘Turn the Lens’ with Jeff Frick.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
We'll catch you next time.Take care.
Thank you Dan
Any anytime.
Love it.
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
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