GA 644 | Defining Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick

And generally, because the brain is optimized for safety and, like I said, stability, the brain is trying to prevent us from risking anything because it just wants to make sure that we don't put ourselves in any form of danger whatsoever. And unfortunately, often that desire actually leads us to putting ourselves into more danger.

Today I am excited to welcome Eoin Fitzpatrick to the show. Now, Eoin, as you'll hear, is the author of a book called Inner Propaganda. And man, I had a lot of fun recording this episode. So I'm almost finished with the book right now. I didn't get it completely finished before I did the interview, but it's a fantastic book. And this is a fantastic interview. I really think you're going to enjoy it. Now, I will say right out of the gate, that's not our typical sort of Lean Six Sigma conversation, but the things that we're talking about are very, very applicable to what we're trying to do within our continuous improvement world. And really, just as human beings, it's very, very applicable. So we get into all different types things like, first of all, like right out of the gate, I sort of ask him like, define propaganda and can propaganda ever be true? And so we sort of define terms out of the gate and then we just get into various aspects of propaganda and even talking about, you know, sort of like how we can be our own worst enemies sometimes, especially within continuous improvement, you know, doubting ourselves or doubting our teams or whatever it might be. And so there's lots of things that are going to, I think, resonate hopefully with all of our listeners. And then towards the end of the interview, we get into this framework that Owen's kind of come up with. And in this framework, it's really about how belief actually changes. And he opines that there's 3 parts to it. Something must feel right, it must fit in, and it must make sense. And so we sort of walk through that and that framework and then tie it all back together with what it has to do with that inner propaganda. So again, really, really fun episode. I really enjoyed this one. Please listen to this one all the way through. It's a little bit longer. Than our normal episode, but it was too good to cut short. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 644. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 644. And also there's going to be lots of goodies that are going to be given away here in the show notes. So be sure to scroll down on whatever you're listening to and check out all the various links that we're going to put in for this episode. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Owen, welcome to the show. How are you?

Very good, thanks, Ron. Really delighted to be here.

Yeah, I'm super excited for this, uh, for this episode. So, um, where are you calling in from, Owen?

Long Island City, New York. So I've been living here for the last 6 years or so, but as you could probably tell from my accent, I'm actually Irish from Dublin in Ireland and, uh, came to the States to live 6 years ago now. So Hopefully my Irish accent's still there, but if you hear a little bit of a New York twang, that explains why.

Okay, I got you, I got you, I got you. No, it sounds great. My wife loves, loves your accent. She loves your country, and we've been there a few times, and yeah, she'll listen to this episode just to hear you speak.

It's always nice, you know. Sometimes maybe I won't say anything worth listening to, but at least the accent will be nice.

It sounds good, right?

Yeah.

Okay, good stuff. All right, well, hey Owen, as you know, We like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

So my favorite quote would be, it's something that I touched on, or at least used at the beginning of, I think, the conclusion of my book. And it's by Rainer Maria Rilke, who's a phenomenal poet. And this is just, it's almost like, because it's in a different language, this is a paraphrased version of it. But it's the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. And when you initially hear that, it doesn't sound that profound or doesn't sound that impactful. But I kind of always interpret that as being when we're defeated by something greater, that presupposes we've already overcome something before that. And so the idea of being defeated by greater and greater things means that you're constantly upgrading yourself, upgrading your success, your engaging in Kanban and you're moving forward to continuous improvement because every single time you overcome and then you're dealing with something greater and then you overcome and you're dealing with something greater as well. And I just love that. I love the compact nature of the way in which he articulated that. And yeah, so that's my favorite quote.

No, that's great, Owen. So, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself. We're obviously going to dive deep into your book here, Inner Propaganda. But what's your background? And then how did you end up in this sort of line of work?

Sure. So I'm a psychologist. I've been delivering talks or keynotes for the last 25 to 30 years or so all over the world in 33 countries to date. And I've also— I'm a sort of an avid traveler as well. So I've been to more than 100 countries such as North Korea and Afghanistan and Rwanda and Iran. And a lot of the drive for me to really travel and to explore it came from this interest in psychology, which is trying to understand to the best of my ability, why do we believe what we believe? And this started when I was a teenager. I was suicidal. I struggled with my mental health quite a lot, and I did whatever I could to work on my mental health. And the most important, I suppose, I asked myself a question while I was writing a suicide note, of all things. Which changed the trajectory of my life. So I was writing a suicide note to my parents, and then from somewhere I still can't define where, I wrote a question. And the question— so I just said, you know, I love you so, so much. And then the question I wrote was, is this how much you love them? And for whatever reason, that just stopped me in my tracks. And then I went back and forth, and there was like the argument for the, you know, why I should die, why I should live. And that struggle really became something that defined me because from that moment on, I became obsessed with why did my belief change in that moment? Why did all the logic in the world, me trying to talk to myself, thinking positive, why did none of that work? And why did that question work? And so for 25, 30 years, I traveled the world. I taught workshops on beliefs. I worked with clients as a therapist initially, and then I worked with senior executives and CEOs and whatnot with executive coaching. All to try to help them to be able to transform the beliefs that they have so that they can overcome them, so that they can improve their mental health, make better decisions, and become more effective at influence, which is, you know, what belief change is all about. How do you ethically influence and persuade people to be able to get them not just to comply, but to buy in? And that's really been the focus of my career to date. I've again had a lot of amazing experiences, but Really, it all comes down to belief at the end of the day.

Not to pry, and feel free to, if you don't feel comfortable sharing, but how old were you when you wrote that note?

I was 14 years old. So I struggled a lot with being bullied, and I was very isolated, very lonely when I was a teenager, and I felt like I didn't fit in and a whole host of things. But the problem was at that stage, we often talk, Ron, we talk about the inner critic as if the inner critic is like the voice inside our head that criticizes us and then we feel bad. That never really resonated that much with me because when it comes to a critic, you hear a critic and you can choose to listen or not listen. You can argue back. When I experienced it, when I was depressed, it's not that I was thinking negatively, it was I was believing negatively. And so it was a complete reality. And so that's why I label it the inner dictator. And I believe that it is really running a propaganda campaign. And that's what I wrote the book about, Inner Propaganda. It's a propaganda campaign that orients us towards seeing reality in a certain kind of way because our brain is not optimized for our happiness. It's optimized for survival and for stability and for, you know, being as efficient as it can with the energy we consume. So our brains are doing what they can to create the reality that they think will work best for us. And we aren't necessarily always thinking in the healthiest ways. And for me, when I went through that struggle and that very dark time in my, in my past, That became, I suppose, such an important event for me because the event itself helped me to go on this path, this journey where I was like, this is what helped me to change. Now, if only I could unpack and figure out what happened, maybe I could help other people too. And it's not just about mental health. It's also, like I said, about decision-making. It's about high performance as well, because our belief systems, the way in which we think about the world, the things we're certain of, the realities we create are the very things that stop us from being as amazing as we can be. And that's kind of what my life's mission is really all about.

So, okay, I want to get into the book here, but before then, a few years back, I don't know the exact date, you can share the exact date, but there was a YouTube video that you made and went quite viral. I think it was over a million views, 1.4 million views, if I remember right. As of today, at least. And so this video is quite fascinating in that it's all in like rhyming and it's like a big long poem or something of this sort. And you mix it up with music and whatnot. It's brilliant, by the way. Brilliant. But there was a line in there and I've gotten it written down here because I want to ask you because it really struck me. I think it's early in the video, maybe around the 3-minute mark or so. And you say, You see, you convince yourself of what you think is true via this inner battle that happens inside of you. And I thought, oh my gosh, it's like, I mean, that sentence, that one sentence sort of in my mind almost summed up much of what you're trying to talk about, I think is, but correct me if I'm wrong. Like, what are you really saying with that? With that statement?

What I'm saying with that statement, as you mentioned, is it's inner propaganda is going on and it's a story work that we have inside our head. And there's a multitude of different voices. And in the speech, I kind of mark it down to like two voices, the good voice and the bad voice, the stereotypical. It's much more nuanced than that, of course, but it really is a conversation we have. And it's almost like when you're in the throes of depression, when you're dealing with anxiety, when you're dealing with stress, when you're dealing with overwhelm, when you're dealing with worry, when someone doesn't text you back, or you're starting to spiral. All of those are a result of that part of you, the inner dictator, is winning in that moment and is able to paint a picture of this whole awful future and how things are not going to work out and how scary everything is. And so this battle that's happening inside of you is a story war, um, because a belief is really a story that we sell to ourselves that become the beliefs that we buy into. And so once you recognize that, you can start to at the very least start to challenge or doubt the limiting beliefs that hold you back or the stories that are trapping you in this mental health struggle or this negative decision or this sometimes from a leadership perspective, the sense of arrogance. Yeah. Or ego that can trap us just as, just as easily as anything else. So for me, that was sort of my attempt to try to articulate what it felt like for me. It's not like, oh, I've got a negative voice and I've got a positive voice. No, it was— it's a war. It's a war. And I have a line later on where I talk about, um, you know, I think it was like at the time it was something like 27 people worldwide by the end of this speech will have already died. That was a 10-minute speech. So in 10 minutes, 27 people took their own life. Yeah, that was also something I wanted to, to highlight to people. It's like, this is happening so much. And the story more is that the ability that the inner dictator has to be able to craft this reality means that a lot of times there's what I call the genocide of the mind, which is, you know, we talk about how awful genocide is, and it's awful, it's so bad. And we aren't paying enough attention to how our brains lead us down that current path. And our brains are amazing, they do amazing things for us. But I think we, we often think in terms of, I feel bad because of what's going on in, in my world at the moment. And it's not that simple. When you feel bad, your world is awful because your brain filters that through the, through the filter of, of emotional reality. It's known as affective realism. You see the world through the filter of your feelings. So it's not just that bad events in the world cause us to feel bad, it's that when we feel bad, we focus more and feel more and experience more of the negative side. And that in turn means it doesn't matter what your life is like. Robin Williams, all of these amazing people who had amazing lives, super rich, successful, people love them, and yet they still ended taking their lives. Why? It's because inside of our head that dominates or dictates the way in which we see the world. And that's kind of what I wanted to highlight with the— that's why I call it mind control. I want to highlight, look, our minds aren't as much in our control as we think. And the answer isn't always just to battle them. The answer isn't to try to just be positive in terms of our thinking. The answer is to learn more about what's going on. We can recognize the propaganda campaign. Just because the inner dictator is speaking doesn't mean we have to listen. We have to them or hear them, but we, we don't have to necessarily always listen. So that's kind of where that came from.

So I, I'm big on definitions and terms, and I don't ever like to just assume anything, but we're going to use the word propaganda a lot today, and I'm wondering if we could just even begin with just a basic definition of like, what is propaganda? And maybe a sub- question. Can there ever be— can it ever be true? Can there be truth in propaganda?

So if you look at, uh, and look, there's a million different definitions, and I, I actually— I'm one of these people, I actually agree with most of them because I think that whenever we define different terms, sometimes we're just like, you know, making a big deal about small nuanced differences. And from a practical standpoint or a functional standpoint, it doesn't matter as much for some words than it matters more for others. But propaganda in a nutshell, from the way in which I sort of think about it, it's oftentimes, and it came from the notion of, you know, I think it was a pope in the 17th century or so, described that, you know, the propagation is the term that it came from, is the notion of spreading out information, spreading the message. Out there. And it was only in sort of in the 20th century with, you know, Joseph Goebbels, who during the Second World War, obviously the Ministry of Propaganda and Hitler and all that sort of stuff. And then it took on a specific kind of meaning. But propaganda to me is usually when we think about it in terms of the state, but it's the state manipulating the beliefs and the attitudes of a population. And so if you look at what that effectively means, I always look at it as in three elements of propaganda. There's the state media itself, uh, there's the indoctrination, uh, that the state plays, and then there's truth engineering. So state media is whenever they control the news station. So when I went to North Korea, um, I got to see it firsthand that they control all the news, uh, everything that's there is approved by the government, supports the government, promotes the government, communicates the information the government wants to you, and there's no other information that we can challenge. So that's state media. Then we've got indoctrination, and that's about what does it mean to be part of this society? What does it mean to be, in that case, a member of the, as they call it, the DPRK, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is North Korea? What does it mean to be someone that lives there? What does it mean to revere the Great Leader or Dear Leader? What does it mean to be a good citizen? What does it mean to all that sort of stuff? So that's the indoctrination piece. And then the final piece is truth engineering. The ability to take whatever facts are going on, to, um, identify the facts that they want to focus in on, ignore the ones they don't, and paint the pictures of what they want everyone to believe is as true. And to me, those are the three kind of areas of propaganda. And what I noticed from traveling there and from interviewing people and from my own struggles and my own work was that the outside elements, these 3 outside elements of state media, indoctrination, and truth engineering show up internally as what I call interstate media. And interstate media is when our brains, again, based upon the feelings we feel, dictate and determine how we see the world. So our brains, whenever we're in a particular emotional state, our feelings dictate what we pay attention to, what we remember, right?. So we remember things. If I, if I feel really anxious, I'm much more likely to remember things that made me feel anxious in the past than I am if I feel calm. So whatever— it's state-dependent learning. Whatever emotional state you're in, it tunes your attention to that. And it also makes you think about the future as well in that way. So we've got the interstate media, which dictates it in that way. We've got internal indoctrination, which is how we line up our identity with who we are.. And so we connect to everything. And when you're already in the negative state, you're already paying attention to how you're a terrible person or whatever the case may be. And then as a result of that, you only let in information that supports that hypothesis. So I feel really bad about myself. Therefore, whatever information comes in that, you know, when someone says, you're so much better than you think, Owen, I ignore that and go, they're just saying that to make me feel good. And then someone else says, you know, you look ridiculous. What's wrong with you?. And I go, oh yeah, I totally agree with that. And then finally, truth engineering. That's the ability we have ourselves to be able to craft and construct stories to maintain a conviction about the world. Our brain likes coherence, likes certainty, likes to keep believing the same beliefs we've always had. And so it's great at finding facts and figures and stories and crafting a beautiful narrative that explains why we're right., even if we're wrong.

Well, that sort of sets me up for my next question. So, like, so obviously you've, as you just mentioned, you know, you've looked at a bunch of different, um, countries, you know, North Korea, Rwanda, Afghanistan. I mean, America, you know, for sure not immune. No country is, right? Um, with propaganda. But for, but as you get into the book, really, you sort I don't know, pivoted almost, it seems, from studying this influence of world leaders and world behavior to ourselves. And you've mentioned this already, it's like, what made you sort of turn inward versus towards the outside world?

Well, it was the discovery, I suppose, that as I study the outside world, I noticed the parallels with the inside world. And the more I saw it, the more I couldn't unsee it. And then it was like, well, ultimately, in order for propaganda to work, the question is, why is it that propaganda doesn't work with every single person, right? So you mentioned America there. When I went to North Korea, when I came back, a friend of mine said, you know, oh, it must have been crazy, you know, you over there in North Korea, must have been absolutely insane with all the propaganda. I said, well, the only difference between, let's say, North Korea and America is that in North Korea they only have one point of view, and in America you've got two points of view, right? Now, I was being glib, and obviously, you know, there's more nuance than that, but so often people are just, okay, I'm gonna watch, I'm, I'm gonna watch Fox News, I'm gonna, you know, drink the Kool-Aid here, yeah, or CNN, I'm gonna drink the CNN Kool-Aid, I'm going to be convinced. And so they live in a world where CNN is truth or Fox News is And if that's your reality, then you're effectively not much better off than someone who only gets one point of view. Like, if all you ever do is you— like, if you have a choice between two different news channels and you pick one and you choose to only watch that one, how much better off are you than someone who is only given a choice and only watches one? Like, if you watch one by choice or you're forced on you, like, you know, it's like being in a prison. Really, for to be North Korea, you know, I mean, at least with North Korea, the news is, is much more positive than it is here.

We're great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing to see here, everything's fine, you know. Yeah, but the reality is, is that if it's like I say, if, if you're, if, if you're in prison, like, and forced to be in a cage or forced to be in a cell versus being in a, the same prison but the door is open but you don't walk outside then again, how much better off are you? And I know that people will say, well, you know, I have a much more nuanced view and whatever. But the problem with propaganda is no one ever assumes that they're the ones that are watching it. We all turn around and we go, you know, I'm fine, I'm educated. But Ron, he's a victim of propaganda. And that's what we call naive realism. It's this belief that I've got the ownership over truth. I know what's true. But all of these other people are sheep. They're being influenced, they're being swayed by this news channel or that news channel. And I think that's a big part of the problem because as long as you do that, it means you're disrespecting other people's point of view. And as a leader in today's society, disrespecting others' perspectives is the single greatest thing you can do if you never want anyone to listen to a word that you have to say. And if you want to be absolutely ineffectual in your ability to influence anyone, you know.

Yeah. Um, I was trying to think. Um, yeah, well, yeah, Pontius Pilate maybe answered, uh, said it best when he asked, what is truth? You know.

Yeah, yeah. And, and, and it's still happening, right? Everyone argues. You know, I, I talk about in the book, I talk about 5 types of truth, Ron. And as soon as I do this, it's kind of a little controversial because people go, no, there's only one type of truth. And I don't mean that there is 5 literal types of truth, as in, you know, this truth is totally 100% subjective. Objective truth is one of those 5, and objective truth is it's true because we can verify it and we've seen it and we've actually done it, but we know it. And that's the kind of truth that scientists and engineers use, right? We're able to make predictions.

Cause and effect.

Yeah, exactly. Cause and effect. Because when we do A, B occurs, and that means that we can build buildings, we can build planes, we can do skyscrapers, we can do the most amazing things. That's one type. We also have past truth, which is, it's true because I remember that it happened that way. So we believe our memories. And the problem is, our memories, by research, are notoriously unreliable. So we make a lot of mistakes with our memories. We don't really remember, actually. We don't, like, reaccess it. The research shows that we reconstruct our memories. And it's not like we— it's not like it's a safe and we take out the memory. The memories change every time we reconstruct them. So we're slowly changing them more and more. And yet we assume that that's the truth of what happened. We have emotional truth where it's true because I feel that it's true, right? My gut says it's true, therefore it's just— I just know it's true. Then we've got desired truth. It's true because I want it to be true. And this is both a good and bad thing. A lot of times people can waste their lives. Business leaders can waste their lives because they want something to be true, or you want the figures to be good. Therefore, you ignore the bad figures, and that can be catastrophic. At the same time, some of the most successful founders of all time had desired truth before they had objective truth. So Dyson had like more than 5,000 prototypes of, you know, of the famous vacuum cleaner. And in order for him to be able to do that, he had to believe that this was going to work. He had not much objective evidence, but he created all those prototypes from desired belief. So again, desired truth. Is another form of truth. And then finally, the shared truth, which is if me and Ron agree on it, then it's true. If there's a bunch of us that all agree, then it's true. Now, the reason I bring this up and the reason I say it is because when we talk about these things, when we talk about whatever is true for us, we will never say, this is my desired truth, this is my emotional truth, this is my shared truth. But if we can do that, we'll be a lot more accurate in our language. If I can say the reason I believe this is because me and Ron both believe it, and I think, like, if we're more definite with the way in which we describe what kind of truth is it, we're going to be much more accurate in our language and a lot less frustrated because the challenge is if I believe in my desired truth and you believe in your shared truth, we're not even talking about the same thing. We're having different conversations. And this is all you got to do is have a look at both the different news networks we talked about. If you watch both of them back to back, and I've done this on many occasions, it's like they're talking about two different nations, two different countries, right? I'm like, well, I haven't heard anything about this on this channel. I haven't heard anything about that on this channel, you know, because they're creating whatever they want everyone to believe is true, and they're controlling our desired truth.

And you know which one I watch? Neither. We don't even turn the TV on for real in my house. We really literally don't turn the TV on except for Saturday mornings. We let the kids watch their little shows a little bit. I mean, I will pop on and just like on my phone, I'll go, okay, I really do. I go to Fox News, I scan, see, make sure it's nothing for my business and whatnot. I make sure that the world's not falling apart. And then I literally do go to CNN.com and I just scan there just to see what's going on. And then I'm done. Like, 'cause it's scary though, honestly.

But the problem is as well, we live in a world now where The headlines are designed to get our attention. So therefore you could just be scanning the news and again, you could even be looking for business stuff, but out of the blue, it's like, you know, soon as they mention, you know, even soon as they mention politics of any nature, it's very easy to get hooked in because everything's hyperbolized and everything's exaggerated and they make everything such a big drama because that's the goal. Because what their goal is, they want when Ron is scanning, They want to— they want to stop Ron in his tracks, and that's their goal. So they're very good and very sophisticated at it. Once again, going back to what we talked about, like, that's one of the main reasons why I was also attracted to looking what's going on inside of us, because I can't control what these new news networks do. I can't control what businesses do. I can't control what social media algorithms do. Yeah, I can control what I'm doing in my own head. I can't control where my attention goes. I can't control I can control what questions I ask myself and what information I take in. And that's what I want to help others to do as well. We have a phenomenal ability to control so much of what's going on. We just need to build the right kinds of processes inside our head to be able to do that. And that's what drove me to write the book in the first place.

So Owen, let's say someone's listening right now, they're running a factory or they run a marketing team or they're just leading people or leading their family, whatever, doesn't really matter. And for whatever reason, they are struggling with their own sort of like inner propaganda. It might even be just sort of sabotaging their beliefs and maybe making them doubt themselves or whatever it might be. Like, what do you want to say to that person? Like, what do we do when our inner propaganda is sabotaging ourselves?

The first thing of all is to notice that it is inner propaganda. Like, the, the, the, the interesting thing is the big switch, or the big mindset shift, or the big idea in this whole thing is as soon as you recognize that whatever thoughts you're thinking at that moment in time is propaganda, automatically your brain shifts the way in which you think about it because The problem is we believe everything that our brain tells us. Our brain tells us this is the way the world is, right? And as soon as you recognize it's propaganda, your brain now will go, hold on a second. It's a little bit like if you were about to hear news, like, let's imagine you were being introduced. A friend of yours was introducing you to a friend of theirs. And let's imagine before you met this new person, your friend whispered in your ear saying, by the way, don't believe anything Owen says. He exaggerates everything, he lies about everything, you know, especially about himself. And let's imagine I came up and I was like just telling you my background. Yeah, I've traveled to this countries, I've done this, this. Your brain is now automatically hearing that radically different than you would do if you just met me in a different context. Yeah, right. Or if someone else turned to you beforehand and said, you know, listen to our great guy, amazing, like he's You know, he's very, one of the most honest people I've ever met. And then you meet me and then I say the exact same thing, but you've a totally different conversation going on inside your head. And so that's what happens with inner propaganda is that as soon as we realize, hang on, this is inner propaganda going on, this is my inner dictator that's telling me that I'm not enough, that I'm telling him I'm not this and telling him I'm not that. And there's great tools out there, like from the area of cognitive behavioral therapy or neuro-linguistic programming of questions that we can ask ask, you know, Socratic-type questions where we say, how do you know that's true? Or what do you mean by that exactly? Or please, you know, define that. When you say you're not good enough, what does good enough even mean in this context? How do you know you're not good enough? Have you always never been good enough? Is there ever a time where you were good? Like, these are all great questions, but I go one before that and I go, what is the brain trying to do by convincing you that you're not good enough? And generally, because the brain is optimized for safety and, like I said, stability, The brain is trying to prevent us from risking anything because it just wants to make sure that we don't put ourselves in any form of danger whatsoever. And unfortunately, often that desire actually leads us to putting ourselves into more danger because we make poor decisions. And at a very extreme level, that's what leads to suicide. So when you recognize that your brain is feeding you propaganda and you understand, and the way I like to call it, the inner dictator or dick, When I think about it like this, this voice that says these things, automatically now I'm listening in a different way. The same way that when your friend tells you, you know, this person's usually full of it. The same way I'm listening to my head. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is, what is it that my brain is trying to do? Like, what am I trying to get from these negative thoughts, from believing that I'm not enough? What positive benefit might that have for me, or what is it trying to do? And then once I start to unpack, then I go, is it working? In other words, is me believing that I'm not good enough, how's that working for me? So I don't even go to challenging the evidence, like, how do you know you're not good enough? That's later on, that's down the line. For me, I start with, what do you believe, right? I believe I'm not good enough. And then you go, so what's that, how's that working out for you? You believing that, what's that actually trying to do? And is it getting the result? And in that moment, you're having a different conversation because now you're going, how useful is it as opposed to how true is it? Because your brain can make anything true. We can believe anything. Look, there's people out there that believe in the flat Earth. They believe in all sorts of different conspiracies. And sometimes they believe in conspiracies that turn out to be true. But people can believe in anything. And the smarter you are, the more capable you are to believe in anything. That's why the smartest people can actually be the very people that have terrible takes on something but can convince a lot of folks because they're great at argumentation and they're great at being able to put together an airtight argument that convinces people. But we convince ourselves of that as well. And so what's really critical is that instead of arguing about the truth, is this true or not, we go, is this useful or not? And the more we do that, the more we then have the opportunity to be able to go, okay, this isn't very useful. I'm saying this to try to protect me, but all it's doing is sabotaging my success and making it so that I'm not a very good leader. And therefore, you know, maybe there's another choice.

Oh, good stuff. So maybe to wrap things up, I want to— I had a million other questions I wanted to ask you, but maybe we'll have to do a part 2. But I want to talk a little bit about your framework that you sort of lay out in the book. And from what I understand, so there's really 3 parts: feels right, fits in, makes sense. And well, just start there, like maybe walk us through like those 3 and then we can get into the how do we mess it up?

Sure. Sure. So, well, actually, if it's okay, I'll start by what we do wrong because I think that's a good route into how to do it right. So, the way we mess up is what most leaders do, what most people do in general, but most leaders, it has higher stakes when they do it. Is that we assume that the way in which we change minds, the way in which we change beliefs, is down to logic. So what I'll do is I'll come to the table with an airtight, brilliant steel man argument, and I'll communicate it to Ron. And once Ron realizes how right I am and how wrong he is, he'll change his mind. It doesn't work like that, right? Being right is not enough, right? Having the facts, having the data, having the information, table stakes, you need to have that. Of course you do. But it's not enough to be persuasive. If you want to actually change minds, being able to put forward the greatest argument in the history of the world is not going to work. And when it does work, it's because the first two, what I call the first two conditions of belief change, are already met. And so there's three conditions I'm talking about. The first, as you mentioned, is feels right. As soon as you hear someone make a point, give you a message, communicate an idea, the first thing you do is immediately notice how your body or how your brain feels about that message. Does it feel right or does it not? Now, feeling right doesn't mean does it feel like it's definitely true. It could also mean does it feel like something I want to believe, right? So we tend to reject things that we don't want to believe. We— because we feel bad about them, we have a desire not to believe in them. This is known as motivated reasoning. We look to, uh, reason in a way that ensures we believe what serves us. And the techniques of impacted reasoning are things like confirmation bias or my side bias, those kind of things. So we have the, and that element of believing what we want to believe, but also our gut as well. Our feelings also dictate what happens. There's a part of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is oftentimes, and I'm simplifying it now, it's a lot more obviously complicated when it comes to neuroscience, but it's something that lights up whenever we feel something is right, whenever we feel something is true or something is correct. That kind of part of the brain responds. And the interesting piece is, is that you can again believe all sorts of crazy things. Like Isaac Newton, one of the smartest human beings that was ever, you know, that was ever on this planet, he made a huge mistake and lost £20,000 in in what was known as the South Sea Bubble. Now, this is one of the smartest minds of all time, and yet he got caught up in the hype and made the terrible business decision. And that was the equivalent, like I said, of millions, millions of dollars today. And so the smartest people can make the dumbest choices because, again, feelings dictate it. It's what we feel is true and what we want to feel is true. And also we'll get caught up in the hype and that will affect us. The second piece that is fits in. So it also must fit in, fit in with who we are as a person, fit in with the groups, the social groups we're part of. Often when we join a group, the membership fee that we pay to join that group is believing whatever it is that they believe. We don't just join groups that believe what we also believe. When we join the groups, we start to believe what it is that they— so it's a different— what we think is cause and effect is actually flipped.. And so often we are very much influenced by the people that surround us, and we're very much influenced by the social groups we find ourselves in, as well as our culture, which has a huge impact upon what we believe, and also the sense of meaning we give to our lives. Meaning is really the story we tell ourselves or sell to ourselves about what life is for, what we're for, what our future is all about, what are the impact that we make, why we do the things that we do.. And so those stories influence and dictate whether or not we receive information in. So if you communicate a message to me, there's a concept called identity protective cognition, which means that my brain is more likely to reject whatever might challenge my identity. So at a very simple level, if you're a leader and you're trying to put across a message and you put that across the message in a way that makes the other person feel bad about themselves, or feel like a dummy, then it's not going to work. And that person will find every single skill that they possibly have to reject your message and your idea to the best of their ability. And that's why it's so difficult. You're right, it's so frustrating because you know you're right, but you can't get the message across. It's because it doesn't feel right and it doesn't fit in. And then the final piece is making sense. This is, like I said, the table stakes. This is the way in which you're able to construct a story You're able to frame the information, and it's also where we use logical reasoning. Logic comes last and takes most of the credit for the fact that you change your mind. No one ever turns around and said, I changed my mind because everyone around me, uh, believed differently, or I changed my mind because my feelings changed. It's always, I changed my mind because I looked at the evidence and I did my re— I did my own research. No, no, no, no, no, no. The research comes at the end. The research is a way to justify why the belief changed itself, and that's a really difficult thing, to get our heads around. Um, but also it's important to realize most of the time we're more open. When you feel open and your, your identity is more open, like you're willing to change your mind about things, then making sense does change minds because you're open to it at that standpoint. What I'm talking about is every time we try to use logic and it doesn't work, that's when it needs to— we need to change the way people feel and we need lock it in or connect it into their identity. And that's, again, through the book, I try to give as many examples as possible to go, this is what's going on, this is why it's going on. And most importantly, this is what we can do about it. Because when you learn to craft your messages to make people feel, make the idea feel right, make it fit in with who they are, and then also make it make sense, that's when you're cooking with gas. That's when people are going to start to believe differently. And that's what I believe in the concept of belief leadership, that we can cultivate belief in the folks that we lead. And compliance is not the same as buy-in. As I mentioned earlier, our goal is to get buy-in. Our goal is to get commitment. Our goal is to make everyone believe in an idea. And a belief is an idea we feel certain about. So, by making it feel right, fit in with who they are, and then make sense, that's how we change minds.

Fantastic. Oh my gosh, good stuff. All right. Innerpropaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times, Owen It's Patrick. So we're going to link to the book in the show notes. I want everybody out and go out and buy it because it's fantastic. So I was lucky enough to get an advanced reader copy, it says here. So thank you for that. But I really have enjoyed it though. It's just been fantastic. I'm fascinated with the brain, just with the way that we think and behave as human beings and as continuous improvement practitioners, which is primarily our audience. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to invoke change, good positive change, you know, to make the world a better place, make our businesses better. And last time I checked, at least right now, the robots haven't completely taken over and we humans are still involved.

And that's the thing. That's the thing, Ron. I think oftentimes when we talk about, you know, AI coming in and whatnot, the one thing that AI can't do is AI can't believe in you, right? Only human beings can believe in you. They can be sycophantic. They can tell you what you want to hear. But they can't actually believe in you. And there's something magical from that that comes from believing in somebody because they can feel it and it impacts them as well. So, you know, I'm hoping that this isn't like— to me, it's not just about the book. It's a sort of a movement. Yeah. To try to get more people to lock in. And also, I wanted to say for any of the listeners that are interested, if they go to innerpropaganda.com, and I know you're going to have that in the show notes, they could also get a masterclass that I've done for 90 minutes as well as a workbook as well, just to add them completely free, just included when they get the book through there. And that will help. And if they've bought it on Amazon, they can use the receipt in there as well. But it just means it's a way of training them up on some of the skills as well. I think I might have to do it. There you go. Please do. Please do. You're very welcome.

Good stuff. All right. Owen, if people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

Uh, innerpropaganda.com is the best way to get the book, and owenfitzpatrick.com as well. I'm also on all the social media platforms, on Instagram, I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, I've got a newsletter called Inner Propaganda as well that you can find at owenfitzpatrick.com. So I'm pretty much wherever you see social media, I'm there. Um, and please feel free, reach out, connect, let me, you know, let let me know that you heard the episode and stuff. And please, anything I could do, be delighted to.

Fantastic. All right. Well, thanks again, man. This has been a lot of fun.

Thank you very much, Ron. My pleasure.

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