all right.

good evening, barnes & noble guess. thank you for joining us today ase welcome dan ariely to celebrate the release of miss belief. what makes rational people believe. irrational things. dan is the bestselling author predictably irrational. the upside irrationality and the honest truth about dishonesty. here's the james b duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at duke university ity and is the foundeof the center f hindsight. his work has been featured in the new york times, the wall street journal, washington post, the boston globe and elsewhere. so without further, please welcome dan dan. thank you very much for being here and. i have made it a habit to get to drop something every every time. and so every time i have a new

book out, i'm at barnes and noble. so wonderful to do this tradition and today. we're here to talk about myths, belief uh, but before start talking about this topic, i want say a few words about facial. uh, so might have noticed that i have a beard and you might have wondered why. and the about this have a beard really has lot to do with behavioral economics. so, uh, the reason that i have, have a beard is that many ars ago, i was burned, so most of my body is covered with scars, including the right side of my face. so i just don't have hair on this side. but of course, i could shave, and if i they would look less non symmetrical. so why don't they shave? well, for many years i shaved and i looked less non non symmetrical. and then few years ago i went on a month long hike and for a month i didn't shave.

and at the end i looked sort of like this slightly less white, but but mostly like this. and i looked at in the mirror with this half beard and i didn't like it i didn't like this. look, it looks strange and odd and i didn't like it, but i thought, you know, i just finished this month long hike. this is souvenir from the hike. and maybe i'll keep it for for a few more. so decide to keep it for a few more weeks. and to my surprise, i started getting notes from people on social media that thanked me for they have a beard now. why would somebody thank me for this a beard. these people who are struggling with their own injuries, these were people that felt that they were trying hide something about own injuries. and they felt that i was doing thisn purpose to say, hey, look how lonesome metrical i am and i don't care, but i didn't corrective it by mistake. but but they got these notes and i thought, you know, if this half beard is is helpful to

other people, i'll keep it. maybe it would be like a public announcement to to say, i don't i don't care. but but the real surprising thing happened about four months down the line where all of a sudden i realized that i cared less about my own injury. i have lots of lots scars, a lot of deformities, lot of things are wrong with me and. and all of a sudden, four months down the line with this happy beard felt that i had i developed a different approach toward my cause. they were less my and they were more like the story of, my life. and they wondered what happened? what was it that that happened in these last four months and here is what i happened, imagine that you are that you have a half your body is half you your face is burned half not you wake up in the morning, one side is smooth, thother side have stubble and then shaving makes

me. it made me every day less not symmetrical. right? i would start with stubble on one side. no stubble here. at the end of shaving, it would be less airy, less, less non symmetrical and and because of that, i think that the process of shaving for somebody like me, it's also a pcess of hiding something it's also a process of starting the day non symmetrical and after shaving becoming slightly less known nancy and i think that's stopping was incredibly helpful for. me now here's the real point i it takes a long time to get there, but here's the real here. i am a social scientist and i had no intuition that having a half a beard would actually be good for me, right. for many years i shaved. i think it was actually right. hiding my lack of symmetry and letting it go was actually good. but there was nothing about set of intuition that says let it go. it will be better for you. in fact, i did something that was for a very long time, and

for me, that's the role of social is to take all kinds of things that we don't have a good intuition about, that we don't understand ourselves. and to say, here's a rule for life. here's something that make us better. you might not see how it would make us better, but eventually it would okay. done with facial hair and let's move to to the question of of belief. so my guess is that all of you have somebody in your circles and maybe a friend close friend less close friend a relative that over the past five yea have changed in some tremendous way and i'm not going to ask you to raise your hand but but i'm guessing that that we each all have those people and i'm not talking about somebody who used to like green and now they like orange. i'm talking about somebody who changed something so fundamental in their set of beliefs that you look at them now and, you say, i don't believe that i ever

thought that you and i were similar, that we showed something, that they look incredibly different right now, much so that we find it very hard stay friends with them or to stay connected to them. how did this process happen? how does it happen that somebody goes onto this journey and changes their beliefs in such such a strongly? this is what this book is about. actually, the book is about three things. the first thing about this journey of how somebody changes their beliefs and all of us can point to other people that are like that. it's also a book about their own beliefs. you know if you if you have the courage question your ow beliefs, you would recognize some of them are not as solid as we as we think they a. and it's also a about trust. why? because as a society, we need to trust each other. we to trust the institution and as people go onto what they call the final of myths, belief and start believing and less

something very important is happening to society in a very negative way that makes it hard for us to to act together. so so what is the real story? what is this final of myths, belief? and how do people start it's basically has four elements. the first element, what they think of the breeding ground for. this belief is stress. and i mean stress like, oh, how busy i am. i'm not sure if i'll finish my task today. i mean, stress from the sort that says i do not understand the world i don't understand why my share is not as good as i it would be my parents promised me i was special. why? i feel special. did i lose my job and other people? why did i get sick and in other people, not the kind of stress that says i don't understand why my life is not as good as it should have been.

and that kind of stress creates a need come up with the story that explains we're not doing as well as we should have. and that story, of course, is usually not a story about good thing, right? because we have a bad thing happen to us and we end up looking for a story about the villain. why? because who to believe that something bad is happening to us? because it's our fault? not so much. it's much better if. it's other people's fault. so we end up having stress we look for a story. the story is usually a story about, the villain. and that not only story about the villain, the story is complex it's why do we want a complex story? because having a complex story. give us a sense of knowledge, a sense of control and so on. so we have this, which we said is the first element in this in the story, distress caused us to look for story. we find the story usually the

villain, usually complex and. that's the that's the first step the next to pillars of the funnel of belief is the cognitive of pillar and the personality pillar and the cognitive pillar is about how our mind works as we collect and process. and so the first obvious thing is we don't, we never look at all the information available. there's a lot of information there and we make choices we want to look at this tv station or we want to look it at this newspaper and on. but our mind tricks us to a much higher degree than just that our mind is not only letting us select part of information, it also allows us to distort in particular in a particular way. i'll giveou two examples. there's something cald white noise and white. you can think about this either

real noi or you can think of it as an image. so imagine an image made black and white pixels that are just scattered randomly. a white, gray, black, pixels scattered randomly. that's also called white noise. and imagine i show you those images and they you do you see a picture in them do you see an image? most times the answer is is no. but if you look very hard, you might be able to find sometimes pictures. guess whatappens when people are under stress. they find more images. by the way, it's true for all kinds of stress. it's true for stress that we can stress people about their own lives. it's also true when people go parachuting the closer, you get to the moment, jumping from the plane. people seem more and more images. so so we have these cognitive demand to find the story. stress gets us to want to find

that story more. another example of these cognitive process considered the following thing imagine a group of people who say they don't believe that climate change a real thing. okayjust imagine that we have this group of people th says we don't believe that climate change is a real thing and let's t debate that right now. whether it's a real thing or not, just say there's a group of people who say it's not a real thing and now you break them into three groups, subgroups the first one you said is global is climate change. many men made climate change a real thing, and they say no. should we worry about it? they say, you take the second group and you say, this solution to manmade climate change is more regations, more rules, more taxes. this is manmade climate change.

the real thing. and they say, no, not the real thing, and we shouldn't worry about it. the third group you say the solution to nmade climate thing is less government, less rules, free enterprise is manmade climate change a real thing? and what do they say now? it is a real thing and we should worry about it. and and this is called solution aversion. and the idea is that sometimes we don't like a solution to something. and because that we deny the problem, imagine that they came to you and they say, you know what, you have these terrible illness. and because of this illness, you will never be able to eat chocolate for the rest of your life. what would you say. i don't have the problem. you don't like the solution, deny the problem. now if you believe in climate change and you see somebody who esn't. our first tendency is to say, here's another paper, here's

another piece of information. but what we don't take into account. the mind's incredible ability, distort information. if there's something that we really don't to understand, that we don't to be convinced about, we play with the data. we can actually change the way we view things and say, oh, this is not real. we can say all kinds of things. so the cognitive pillar, the cognitive pillar of our story basically says, yes, we can select part of the information, but we also have this amazing ability to distort information. the next part is the personality. and by the way, if we think about stress. we can help alleviate stress if we think about cognitive processes that we don't like, we can think about how to improve them on the news in social media and so on. personality is a little hard to change right, so it's not as if you can take changes. some some of these personality,

but there are people who are more susceptible to belief. some people who are more sueptible to adopt this alternative worldview. who are they? who are those, by the way? just be clear. it's not as if the personality by itself is sufficient to either get people to be believers or it's just one element too, for it makes it even more likely that people, you know, slightly more likely that people would down the path. but if you don't have this personality trait, not going to mean that you will never be a miss believers. and you have it doesn't mean you would. so this does a couple of interesting personality traits. e of them is this the sense in which we trust our intuitions. so this is a standard that people ask. it's called the bat and the ball. so wait, are you ready? small math problem. okay, a baseball bat in the baseball ball cost to gather a dollar ten baseball bat in a

baseball ball close together a dollar ten. some. you know this question and the bat cost a dollar more than the ball. how much does the ball costow, most people the answ of $0.10, jumping to their minds. and some pple shouted and say $0.10. and some people wait. and they said, well, if the bat cost a dollar than theall and the ball is $0.10, the bat will be a dollar ten together they'll be a dollar 20. no, no, no. you said together they're a dollar ten. so it has to be $0.10 less. each of them has to be five sense less. so it's $0.05 in the dollar five. now, this is not tou. this is not something you say, oh, my goodness, i had no idea how to do this math. but there are some people who just follow their gut intuition. i think it's $0.10. i'll say it's in the world also tweeted or, you know, exit or whatever it is. but some people just their intuition to a very large degree

and some people basically say let me myself let me just make sure that this correct and the people who question themselves and come up with a very different answer. and if you think about the funnel of misspelling if the people that are more likely to to go the funnel are people who trust their intuitions less. and by the way, trusting your intuition is not always a bad thing, right? sometimes it's wonderful. another interesting trait is it's people who find connections, things right. and you know, the the thing that got me down this on this research path, um, was actually a very strange day. there was a day in early and is covid was just starting the first few months of covid and. when somebody sends an email and say, then how have you changed? and i say, how have i changed?

and she sent me a long of links as evidence. what they've changed and i clicked all of. bui'll just describe to you one of them, one of them describes how because of my injury and it shows pictures of me in hospital, i hating healthy people and because of that joined bill gates and the illuminati in order to try and kill as many people as possible with covid and the vaccine and so on. and like a lot of me believe, there are some elements that true. i did get injured, but everything else, of course, is not is not true. anyway, there were lots of other links i can tell you later about some of the the the funny things people say, but, but if you, if you think about this the story, by the way, it's a really good story, right? if you like literature and nothing compares with the 92nd video of the creation of villain. right. you can't tell a good true story

that is so short and so so appealing. but the moment you go into bad things and so on. it's very easy. so who are people that that see that and say yes, that has to be the case right. so it's people who trust their intuition. it's people who see multiple dots and connect them. um, in all, in all kinds of ways. and then there's a couple other, other kind of a few other personality traits. so we said we have stress, cognition, personal. and then the last component is the social component and the social component don't mean just social media. now when, when we abt the social component, the fst thing i think that is good to do is to realize the role that we each had in chasing people

away. so consider the following story and, uh, one of the research who started the research on ostracism describes the following story. you describeow he walks in with his dog one day in the park and he sees two people throwing the frisbee. you throw a frisbee back and rth back forth, and all of a sudden the frisbee next to his legs, he picks it up and he throws it to one of the and they throw back to him and for a few minutes the three of them play and after a few minutes they stop throwing it to him and they just play themselves. he felt so offended now he didn't to the park to play with them. he friends with them. he had to go with his dog at some point, but he felt. so he decided to create an experiment like that. he created an experiment in

which he got two people who worked for him and one participant. they know that the other people worked for him and he said, please wait here until start the experiment. and in the meanwhile, the two ople who worked for him there was a soccer ball and they started playing between them and half the participants they played all three of them, and for the other half they played all three of them for a little bit, and then they stopped throwing to the participants in question. how does it feel? turns out it feels terrible. it decreases quality of life dramatically and almost. they measured it also decreases people's it decreases people's curiosity it decrease of course it's a real bummer. you know, it's very hard experiment on yourself. right. because how do you get but you do it at some point and your friends see what the impact impact it has now think about

what lots of people did ding covid. a lot of things that people do during covid was to ostracize people who are not so sure covid is real or not. there was this tremendous sense of ostracism right? if you think about what macro said that, you know, you're not french, if you're not getting vaccinated, but people have said very, very extreme things. and by the way, again, not going to ask you to raise your hand, but, you know, when you were in a dinner party and somebody is expressing than normative opinions about something that they're starting to think about and you make fun of them, you think it's is level fun, but they are perceiving it as level of of abuse. so the first part of of this social journey is, a journey in which society basically expels people, ostracized them. now, what are people to do when

this happens? they nd to find a group of social supports, right? they are losing their own support and they need to find another support. and i can you i spend when i was initially attacked with all these theories what i was i was doing and my first my first instinct was to defend myself. let's go and teach what's really going on. and so i called people. i joined telegram groups, i joined some discussion groups. i did all kinds of things. how much impact do you think i had very close to zero. um, there was also actually one woman i managed to change and this was a woman i talked to one one day, late at night. and she she asked me whether i really believed that there was excess because of covid. again, early days.

and what i told is i'm not sure about excess mortality, but i said, i'm not just thinking about the people die. i also think about the people are on the ventilator every day. there were lots of pple infected lectures and she why why do you care about those? and i actually went ahead and describe to her what it feels like to be on a ventilator. so i so these were days was brutally attacked. plaza was there remembering being in the hospital and ventilator and so on and i just started crying i just crying and i cried so badly that she that was not pure evil at that moment. but it's really a lot of work to convince to convince one one person. but they spent about a month trng to to convince and really just failed just failed it aside from this this one person and then i went back and i said, i'm just going to try to understand what's going on. so i spent the last the next two

years kind of at the some of the darkest of the internet, looking and trying to understand what is what is really going on. and the result, of course, is this book. and my understanding and i also talked to about 20 and very serious believers on an almost basis to kind of they were my guiding light for this for this journey what was happening on their on side. but as we as we go back to this discussion of the social element and there was there was one post that described of my crimes against humanity. and in post the guy predicted that there's going to be nierenberg trials 2.0 for against the people who have committed crimes against humanity. and i would be, of course, on the agenda of nuremberg trials 2.0 and after a very, very very

long post, he raised the question of i should get for my life in prison or public hanging. and of course that was a topic of discussion. what's what's appropriate and there were about a thousand people who commented on this and now if you just read the comments you would say these are some of the loveliest people ever they congratulated him they told him how insightful there is. there was lot of little hearts and, all kinds of things like that. you you just read the comments. you would say these people have gathered here to to eradicate poverty. what do you know to do to do something wonderful? but and and, you know, every day in those dozens of misinformation, there be a comment about sobody deserves the nobel peace prize. now, if you go an academic board, nobody ever believes that anybody else deserves any prize. but here they thought people deserve prizes left and right.

why do you think why do you think those people so congratulatory? why do you think they were so long and supporting? it's because they needed that they really needed it. you know, when they started this journey, understand this belief, their beliefs were very strange to me. why they need that. but at the end, what i came to understand is that they are not random. the answer a real need. they are not a healthy response, but a response to a real need. and and here's my metaphor for this. so think about somebody who is just stressed about something maybe not so comfortable about how i look. and i'm not so sure about going out and. i'm stressed about it and. so maybe i figure out the strategy and i wash my hands. i wash my hands. i have some control, done something, and then i get some energy feeling of control and i

go out next time i want to go out. i said to myself, did i do last time? oh, i wash my hands, let me do it again. and eventually i can develop obsessive compulsive disorder when i when i wash hands is a mechanism to cope with my insecurity about about how i look. and this is, in some sense, a good a also bad metaphor for a missed belief. i feel stressed. i'm not so sure about myself. i'm not sure why things are not going well for me and so on. i'm looking for a villain. what do i do, i go online, i search for a video, i find it's bill gates. with the vaccine in the library. you know, i, i find some about about why this is wrong. and now i slight improvement right? it's not my fault. it's somebody else. and here is this and here's the evidence that and then i go on

my day and. then the next day i also don't feel good what do i do? i ask myself all day yesterday. oh, i went and i watched that video. let me do it again and again. and and again and so on. nothis is where this metaphor breaks down. why? because we wash our hands. it's the same thing every day and it's finite. it's not as if you will watch. you will wash your hands for minutes when you watch videos, it's like one video leads to the next to the next to the next. but also when we watch the video, the next day, we don't necessarily watch the same. we watch similar videos. they expand and expand and expand our understanding. and what happened is that people feel bad. and the videos that show them a villain and it's not their fault and somebody else is doing it give them a small increase in well-being followed by a reduction in well-being. why? because if you start believing

that the world is really an evil place with people plotting, all kinds of terrible things, that's terrible background, thought. so we have small increase, decrease, small increase. other video decrease, small increase and so on. and this just continues, continues and continues and so so we said in that, in the in the social in social element, we have this initial part where we my guess is that i'm including in that without thinking too deeply i did push some some people away i did make fun of a few people with some alternative beliefs and it's not just about not just about covid, all kinds, all kinds of things. and the next the next component, it is a component of becoming more and a term called chez

bullet. now, the story about shibboleth comes from the bible, and the story is that there were two tribes fighting each other. they had a very bloody war. and then they after the war, one tribe was one side of the river the other tribe was in another side of the river. but they would sometimes meet people that they didn't know. and the question is, are these people our tribe? are they from thopposite tribe and those two tribes pronounce, the word shibboleth in slightl different way. one tribe pronounced it sheep it and one tribe pronounce it symbolic. so now we meet somebody and say, hey, how do you pronounce this thing? and if you said it the right way, the way i do, everything would be fine. you pronounce the wrong way. we tried to kill you so now if you think about it, that discussion was not about the item in question, it was about showing identities and social have started using this idea of

saying sometimes we speak, we talk about the fact, but sometimes when we speak not about the fact, it's about signaling something else, something completely different, like, am i a member of the tribe now? just thi for a moment about the regular discourse. for example, the way politicians speak, how many times are they saying the truth with the intention of telling the truth? and how many times are they saying something as a sign of identity? now we by mistake, think they are trying to convey the truth, but they are in fact not conveying the truth. they just saying, look how strong we are on tribe one looks at how strong we are on tribe to now. if you belong a tribe, whatever tribe it is, it could be vegans, it could be democrats whatever tribe it is. if you say like run of the mill, you're not really showing

loyalty to show loyalty, you have to say something extreme. so in the world of showing identity, people not just show, say standard. they say something extreme that belong to a category. and that's what we see lot happening in social media. people got to a group and all of a sudden they need to show leadership, they need to show extremity. and of course, once people starting extreme, at some point that becomes the new norm. and then things continue and continue and continue. by the way, at some i became kind of the the social currency. people would start start saying terrible things about me to elevate those social the social status. and then there's the last social part we said that is the the, the initial part that people need. so they get ostracized. they need supposed the second part, people become more and more extreme.

and the third part is something we all know cognitive dissonance. i'm sure you know, cognitive dissonance is, but just to remind ourselves, when first thing started on social and cognitive dissonance, the story was that there was this woman who said that some point the earth be destroyed and some aliens would come and they will save only the people who are following her. and first thing i said, you know, there are two types. let's say there are two types of followers, like the hard followers, the people who sold their homes and say gobye to their families, so on. and the wk followers. people said, you know, we're not taking any chances. maybe she right, but but we're not committing. we're not selling our homes. we're not saying goodbye to our friends and family. and he said he is quite sure that the earth would not end, that the aliens would not come. and he said, how will those people the next day now you could say, oh, the people who would like who would be more upset with her, the diehard followers or the weak followers

like you could say, the diehard followers that we really disappointed and would leave immediately. they would be so heartbroken they would leave immediately. and the week for that guy, we never thought it would really happen. thought maybe we were here. she's a fine woman. let's stay with her. but but he predict that that the die hard followers because they committed so much to the cause could not just admit we were wrong and that act would actually strengthen their beliefs. and that's actually what he saw. he saw that the die hard followers actually went with extra energy. they said, she's the one who saved us. and they tried toecruit people. and the people who are gng to follow the fce said, okay, didn't work out, we're going home now. imagine will happen to people who've adopted a certain worldview on something and they went into groups and discussions

and changed their jobs and they changed your friends and then it turns out that they were wrong. could they go back you know cognitive dissonance. yes, they can't. they have to find a new cause. they have to find something. and indeed, that's what see, right now we see lots of people who are all kinds of other agendas just because the way back is very, very complex complex is is a final point. and i want to say something about what the bigger picture in this so so in this book i try to characterize this machinery this machinery that takes people and changes them. and you n think about this as a machinery is a little bit like a cookie. you know a cookie attacks nature in the worst possible ways for us, it's the worst combination of salt. sugar and fat that gets us to,

first of all, eat one and then not stop the funnel of miss belief is attacking all our psychology. it's not just one thing, it's attacks. it's attack, stress, cognitive personality, social. it attacks all of us. and it's very easy to go down that funnel and all of us think, oh, it would never happen to me. no, it can happen to all of us. we really need to understand how works and how how it can affect all of us. but but the bigger picture, of course, is, is the story of trust and society. what happens when people losing trust and when people start losing trust, they get a perspective of suspicion to everything. right. imagine you you you're losing trust. uh, where would it end? would you trust your docr? would you trust your. would you trust the government

with the trust the people who are certifying elevator's like where, does it end? the reality is the trust is kind of the the lubricant of society. if you stop for a minute and you think about how much trust have we have tremendous amount of trust. and once people believing once people stop trust, it has tremendous implication. we' just entering the beginning of a new election season. uh, is the role of trust. trust in the government, trust the election? what happened when the trust is low, where will they take us? i we've had some, uh very frightening observations about where lack of trust could, could take us. and because of that, we need to understand not just at the individual level, but we needed to think about it. the societal level, about where this is, where this is going. okay. so that's it for me. happy to take questions,

comments, concern concern. yeah. i'm just going to come around with the mic. we have time for some questions about time. here you go. i just real, real quic when you that cognitive dissonance that there was a person that were believing in that person that was wrong and they were still unwilling to surrender wa'their pride that does that so so first all this one experiment can never eminate all the other accounts so a g literature on cognitive dissonance but the end the sry is that effortleads to preferences so usually we think that we have preferences i like and i like x and therefore i act toward x what cognitive dissonance shows in very interesting way is that actions lead to preferences.

so if you can get pele to something. yeah, their preferences change accordingly. and that's, by the way, one theory of people have about y expensive are so good. why did i spend so much. i must really love that person kind of kind of logic. but but the idea is that preferences go both ways. preferences lead to actions, but alsoctions are very visible in. our mind when you ask yourself who my preferences are, bit more fluffy, you're not really sure when you see what done, you say, oh, i'm the person that does that. let me continue doing that. so actions actually define us in a bigger way than we. then we think. this pson here and oh, oh,

well, first of all, thank you. very enlightening. i'm curious if your research for any of this book did you find anything that might leado let's say, policy recommendationsn, terms of like promoting truthful content and not things that lead you down the ph of disbelief. yeah. so there's a lot and what so first of all, on the on the sad note, when they started this book, um, and matt is here and he will testify because he saw my book proposal there, a chapter that said solutions. i never got to the chapter and, and i never got to the chapter because at the end of dai didn't feel that we have enough solutions and i have lots of little called hopefully helpful. so to to have the neededodesty about about solution but it's a much more hairy problem, much more complex and the taxesany more places than we than we think so so there's not one i

wish there was one solution that i said this would be this would be enough. so so can we do first of all, u know, gave you two clues. one of them is often, let's just stop. no one. one of the if we take seriously the question of stress is, is the breeding ground for for mis belief, how we each reduce stress and of course let's stop ostracizing people. that would be one one good thing but but the second thing is about resilience and specifically about secure attachment. so imagine this is a timeline when somebody has something bad happen, quality of life goes down. we think of resilience as their ability to bounce back or even bounce to better situation. secure attachment is usually the period before something bad happens.

so imagine a parent. you have a kid who is four years old and you take them to the playground. you say kids go to the swing and the kid goes to the swing and come back. half an hour later. if you've done that, you have a kid with a secure attachment. on the other hand, if you say to the kids, go to the swing, they go. but every 90 seconds they look behind your shoulder to if you're still there, you haven't been too successful. and you think about secure attachment. this way. it's really about an insurance policy. everything in life, you walk around life, you say, i know that if something bad will happen, somebody will catch me. it could be my friend. it could family. i don't have to wait for something bad to happen. i walk around life and think about how it feels to walk around life this way. it's amazing, right? it's amazing. now, as a society, i think we don't do enough of that. and again, this is the individual. that's not the government. this is this is us.

what kind of secure attachment are we giving each other? yeah. what kind of feeling? of secure attachment do we feel? do our spouses, our friends or family like if we if we start at the level stress and we say let's first of all, not ostracize people, but let's also give people, you know, more more secure attachment. think we could do we could do a lot. so that's that's one level. and then there's lots other lots of other and approaches that we need to attack all of them, including, of course, we have to do some reawith social media and there's no there's no question now it's not easy, but the's lot there's a lot to do. by the way, i had an interest in discussion with one of the big platforms and they asked me if i think that they should eliminate altogether misinformation and and my recommendation was to think about maybe not eliminate altogether, but to think about

the mix of of information, not information. i said, let's about my daughter, who's 17, i want her to be unaware that about misinfortion. on the other hand, i really don't want it to go do the path of my beliefs. so i want her to get to 100% misinformation a not even the majority, but under the right conditions. i want them to understand there are people with very different opinions. i want you to understand that not all information is accurate. i think we we think about pieces of information. is this right? is this wrong but i think the real issue and that's going to be much tougher is to think about what is the information diet that we want to give people. right? do we do we how much do we want to give people something some people think x, we don't think it's true. but just so you know, just so you're aware of those of issues anyway, very tough question. but yes, every one of those

elements of the funnel of disbelief needs to be attacked and many of those things need to be attacked in multiple ways. yes. how thank you. and when? first, thank you for everything, when when you are creating cultures in startups, you need to go very quick. how to create culture where people can trust other but also where can create those conversations in an open way where they can say, i don't trust what you are saying. we can discuss this. yeah. how how do you think so? so the question is, how do create a culture of trust and what's for all of us is to say, hey, why don't you trust me? why don't you make the first move? that's obviously not to work out right? if we want to create a culture of trust, we need to take the

first step. now, what is trust? trust is about saying i'm giving an edge and you and we have a long aligned interest, right? so we all know at some level, right. if you are on a social meeting with somebody, you want them to trust you, what would you do you all know the answer. you'll them a secret and the difficult and complex and you mediating the secret is the more you create trust. you say, i'm giving you the doomsday weapon. if you decide to to blow it will destroy my reputation. right? that's that's an amazing side trust. so i'm not saying go with a doomsday weapon, but but yes, i think trust. needs two things. you need to basically to people we trustou. first, you have the upper hand. i'm giving you strength. and the other thing is to emphasize long term aligned interests, right? we're here together for a long

time. so culture that says we're going to be here for a long time. and we're doing the first step to. trust you. that's the that's the the first do secret. just in the back. first off. thank you. that was super super interesting. i'm curious, by the way, when people give compliments people like them more initially so that's always gooeven ithey think the compliments are insincere saying i'm not saying yours is but'm just saying it's a good u're going to say that it goes down after a while so yeah okay so misinformation i think you often hear it tked about in terms of social polarization and political porization and an absence of social trust. i'm curious wt came up in your research or what you think about the financial component? can we like what hope do you actually see there as bei restoring the sort of trust that needed to combat

misinformation? and this and then an economy that is and more unequal. yeah so so thanks for the clarification. the's lots of places in which finance and mis belief go meet each oth. it has to do the incentives of people and incentive of media and the incentive of foreign countries and so on. but but your question was really about inequality, and that's a very, very important point because one of the tngs that inequality is to make resources lower. think about even a neighborhood and ask yourself. what are the odds that you will to one of your neighbors and ask for help? it turns out that is inequality increases the likelihood to go and ask for goes down. so when we think about society,

we say we're getting less and less social, we're getting less and less resilience inequality is one of those one of those drivers, by the way, very hard to change. very hard to change. but i think it's important to understand that the real thing we want to drive toward resilience. we're losing on the inequality. is there another way to to compensate for that? what are the ways we need to compensate? so and, you know, i don't think there are easy solutions for inequality, but i think there are some to try and improve on socialist and a lower resilience resilience. okay. let me just say this as. it is an end. you knowi talked about the the believers and said, you know, the mis believers were stressed. they didn't know what to do and they were looking for a villain. they went online, they found a villain, somebody blame in the story.

and so on. and that made them feel better in some way. also my story here, i was attacked. i felt stressed and i went to look for a story. you know, this is this is my this is my story, ght? in some sense, i went to look for a villain. i went to look for what? explain the bad things that were happening to me. and eventually my story of villain was human nature. right? human nature is it interacts with other people as it interacts with technology. but this book is kind of money and coping right here. i was. what do i do with that? i can't convince anybody. i need to explain it. i spent two years and trying to explain it to myself and and to others. and hopefully you'll it useful as well. thank you very

it's great to bwith you, too. here to talk about your new book. hi, jeremy. i'm very excited. thanks for inviting me. yeah, i , it's. it's my pleasure to talk with you.