210. How Minds Change with David McRaney

Welcome to episode 210 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm so excited to introduce you to David McRaney, author of the new book How Minds Change. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today I am very excited to introduce you to David McRaney. You may have heard of his first book with an amazing title, you Are not so Smart, which is an international bestseller that is now available in 17 languages. He went on to create an awesome podcast of the same name and wrote a second book, you Are Now Less Dumb. I, of course, highly recommend both of those and his podcast. And today we're talking about his new book which just came out this week, titled How Minds Change. As you'll hear us talk about in the interview, this book is a fascinating journey we take along with David as he seeks the answer to the question, how do minds change? This book is filled with interesting stories, lots of science and fun anecdotes. I really enjoyed it and learned so much along the way, some of which you can hear about in today's episode. Within our conversation, we talk about a lot of concepts or past guests which have their own past episodes of the Brainy Business. But no need for you to take notes because I've already done that for you. There are links for you in the show notes which are waiting for you within the app you're listening to or at the BrainyBusiness. That's 21 0. Once there, you'll find links to lots of other great related books, including of course, David's, as well as ways to learn more about David and how to connect with him and more. Again, those are@the brainybusiness.com 210. Now let's jump right in. David McRaney, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you so much. I am very happy to be here with you. I love that I can jump into a couple of different worlds with this crazy thing that I put together and I am very happy to be in your world and talk about the stuff that you do on this show, your books, your world. So thanks for having me.

Of course. So delighted to have you here. And if you can share for anyone who doesn't yet Know who you are and how you found yourself in this space. Can you share a little bit about your background leading up to where we are today?

Sure. I mean, you could go way back. I used to do all sorts of things. I owned several businesses back in the day, including pet stores, which I don't recommend anyone do. I honestly opposed to a lot of the practices of pet stores as a fully adult man these days. But I did do that for a few years. Sold leather coats, worked construction, installed electrical control systems, all sorts of things. And then finally I actually went to college. And there I started out in psychology, but moved into journalism. I really enjoyed writing. I fell in love with literary journalism and worked my way through newspapers and then of all things, local television, where I worked both behind the scenes and their web stuff. When that was when you could be something called a web guru. I was a. I'm a reformed web guru. And then, and then also did some stuff on camera, commercial work, that sort of thing. I, at some point though, started a blog because I was so into the stuff. I had studied in school about psychology. And I called that blog, you are not so Smart. And it just really took off back in the early days, the early days of when blogs were everything, when blogs could be about one very specific thing, like horse racing in the 1800s, you know, they could be blogs about some real thin, narrow slice of the world. And that led to a book deal. And then that book just really took off. It became this bestseller in so many different countries, so many different languages. Even recently, you are not so smart was number one in Vietnam two years ago. For a while it's just been out there and it's all about biases, fallacies, heuristics, critical thinking, self delusion, behavioral economics, that sort of stuff. And then there was a follow up book. And when the follow up came out, I started a podcast. And I was lucky a second time because I started a podcast right when that became a thing. And that has for the last 12 years just been the centerpiece of my world. Like I do all sorts of other stuff, but that's the sun in the solar system of it. The, in the podcast. I just, it started out just being biases and fallacies and heuristics, but at this point I allow myself to get into just about anything and find experts on that and talk about it. So that led to my obsession with trying to understand conspiratorial thinking, why people resist change, misinformation, all before that was a thing. So I guess I've been weirdly I don't know if lucky is the right word, but I got into being interested in something right before that became something we all were really worried about. And this book is coming out, I think at the moment we've reached the nadir of our frustration. So it's called How Minds Change, and that's what it's about. It's about how people do and do not change their minds. The psychology of that, including persuasion and opinion and social change and everything in between.

Right. I want to touch a little bit on from the business side because like you said, everyone in business these days, you know, you have to do the blog. Everybody asks if they should do a podcast. Do I need to, you know, do we need a book? Do we need these things? How do we go about doing the newsletter or whatever, like we were talking about before we started recording. So I think it is fascinating, like you said, that you've always been in that kind of early adopter getting into the thing just before. It's a thing where, of course, you know, too many people then see the wave and think, I should get on that wave. Like me trying to go be a TikTok star. Now I'm too late, right? It's not going to work for me.

I mean, I'm not going to say you're too late, but you have to do something that's never been done on TikTok. If you just play weird instruments or try to dance while you talk about, you know, behavioral economics, probably the bad you're going to be, you're going to look like a bandwagoner. So. But, but I hear you. I hear you. Go ahead.

Yeah.

So.

Other than just being innately curious and following those instincts, I really appreciate that in the book you mentioned this and I know that Near Al is the same in you found something that you were interested in and wanted to find an answer to and started to dig. And so I know Nir has said, you know, he doesn't write books about things he knows. He writes books about things that he doesn't understand. Right. And then you go in and dig in. And I felt a lot of that in how minds change as well. And it was really interesting to follow the journey and we'll. We'll definitely get into that. But how do you have any advice for people of which instincts to jump on and which to kind of let go, especially? I know there are lots of entrepreneurs that listen to the show and we have that squirrel mentality. Right. Shiny object syndrome. And we get really excited about things. Any tips on being discerning as you pick what you're going to jump in.

On or watch a couple of videos of David Bowie talking about this. Because he's, he's, I agree with him, 1 billion and 3%. And there's a, there's, you know, Gary Vee. I know that, you know, he's, he's a, he says a lot of stuff and so therefore you can kind of cherry pick the parts that turned out to be true. But a lot of his advice is good in just the sense of, yeah, don't, don't jump into anything because you're trying to get rich quick or you're trying to. Like, this is the hot new thing. Like, I, I did a, an article years ago about survivorship bias, and it's, it's on the website. It's, it's one of my longest ones. It's like, it's almost. It's like 12,000 words of research into that. And it's one of those. One of the most telling things about survivorship bias is you. And I'm sure people who listen to your show are familiar with the whole airplane thing and the bullet holes. I wrote that article because I saw that, I'd seen that in a couple of talks and I was like, I don't think that actually happened. And then I went and looked it up and it's like, oh, no, this actually did happen exactly the way they said it did. And I love the restaurant example. Like, if you're in an area where you see that restaurants are making money hand over fist and you think to yourself, oh, this is an example of a business I should get into. Or you see apps. There was a time when it was like, we should make an app, because look at all these apps making all this money. It's usually an indication that's a business you should avoid. Because what it means is if you can make that much money and have that much success, then that's a marketplace in which a lot of people are failing and only a few super successes are making it through. And so all you're seeing are the survivors of a very difficult culling process. And the restaurants that fail just disappear. You just don't see them anymore. And that's what leads to that bias. So the, yeah, don't follow trends. That's for one thing. One thing for sure be a trend. And the way you do that is you adamantly, doggedly pursue that which gives you, that alights an obsession within you, something that, that causes you to have a aching curiosity that Generates an aching curiosity. And then investigate it, explore it. And what you, if you, if you do that, it's going to be the kind of thing that you want to tell everybody about on a, on a car ride, on a road trip. It's gonna be something that you want to tell people at parties. It's going to be something you're going to bother your partner about. Have you heard about this? When you get that feeling like that's what was happening to me with you, with. You are not so smart. Like, I was like, you ever seen this invisible gorilla thing? You ever seen this person swap thing? You ever talk like all these things were driving me, I was like, this. To me, this feels important. This feels like I can't stop looking at it. These. That rabbit hole experience you get, if whatever it is you're talented at, if you're a good writer, if you're good at making videos, if you're good at whatever kind of content that you are, particularly you have some skill at, take that and marry it to the thing you're obsessed with and then plug away at it and give everything away for free forever. You will build an audience, and that's all that really matters. Build the audience and then whatever trend comes through, like when TikTok appears and you happen to be there, then your audience will be like, cool. Now you're making stuff there too. It's so you don't go from that direction. You don't, you don't follow the trend first. You follow the obsession, and then as trends come and go, apply it to the thing you're already making. Because you've created a platform, you've created a. I hate to use the word, you create a brand, right? Really what you've done though, is you've created an audience. And when it comes to publishing, that's what publishers are interested in. They're interested in the fact that you have an audience and they might be interested in the book that you've come out with and they'll help proselytize that to people who may have never seen you before. And once the book phase in the background, you'll still have the thing you're making. You'll still be you. And those people will come over to the other stuff that you're up to. So I don't know if this is coming out as actual advice, but I think that's the only way I would ever be able to. That's the only way I could ever make anything I think is to, like, I did a. Right after I Turned in the manuscript for this. I became crazy fascinated with the, the word genius. And it's a weird way to. It's hard for me to even pitch it to you. Like, I just don't understand what the word means exactly because people were using it all over the place. And then I reached out to a historian who said, oh yeah, the history of the word is is actually one thing and the history of the concept that the word attempts to describe is another thing. They both have two genealogies and that became the coolest thing I'd ever heard for a while. And so I spent six months on the road talking to intelligence experts, people with very high IQs. I went to Mensa headquarters and I made a seven hour documentary about genius and put it out on the side and then went right back to what I was doing here. That'll be the next book after this, probably because it's, it's, it's. I gave myself permission to just say, well, now I'm doing this. And everything you do builds a skill set that you can laterally apply to other stuff later and just jump in there and make stuff, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, yeah. I've given similar advice in the. For the. If you're going to do a podcast or whatever it is, you better love the thing that you're talking about, right. You, you need to want to talk about it and be interested in it because you're going to hopefully be talking about it for a really, really long time. And if you're going to be bored after, you know, six months of it, then, you know, maybe do something else. Work on a different concept.

Yeah. And have you ever listened to a podcast or read a book and you can, you can tell like, audiences are way, are super savvy. Nothing is more important now than, than leading with authenticity. I, I have listened to podcasts before about a topic I'm interested in. I could tell that the people making the podcast were just, just somebody who was following an algorithm. And I can feel that so quickly that I bounce out. Also, I've listened to podcasts about things that I don't care about at all, I thought. But the person was so excited and obsessed with it and knowledgeable about it that they infected me with their enthusiasm. And that's what you, that's what you should be pursuing. And my agent, Erin Malone, she's so fantastic. Every time I've ever pitched any idea to her, she was, she, she listens carefully to see if I almost stumble over myself trying to tell her how great it is if I don't. If I don't do that. She says, no, don't do that. Like. Like, you can't. Don't ever commit to. You know, the book can take three, five, six years. You have to actually really want to jump into it. So I agree that it better. I'm within that category of people who. I love the idea of writing a book. I start out not actually knowing the answers to the questions that we're going to get to. I used to think. I know that. I've had editors who prefer authors who have an authoritative voice. They are a scientist. They are someone who's an expert on the topic. And there's. Yes, there's plenty of books like that, and they're great. But as a journalist, I will create a better book if the authoritative voice emerges and matures about halfway through the project. And then I take you on that journey with me in the book. So that's. That's what I advocate for, is if you're the kind of. If you're like me, who's coming to it with. With curiosity and passion and all these other things, but not expertise.

Yeah, I do. I really loved learning with you in the book. Right. So that. Yeah.

Best feedback ever.

Oh, good. Funny enough, I end every episode of the show. I say, thanks for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Is like how we close every episode.

I wish I had a sparkler delight right now. That's good.

Thank you. It's my. You know, that's the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. Right.

Come on, don't bring up cookies. I used to do a cookie segment. That's a good example of something I did. Like, be careful. Obviously, when people give you advice, they don't tell you about the things that didn't work out. I had this crazy idea that I wanted to have a cookie segment at the end of my podcast. It was. I did a hundred of them and. And then I retired it. But I would. We'd make cookies and then I would eat them. I'd have somebody. It was a way to build a rapport with the audience, but it's also a way to. I was trying to promote the fact that I had to come out with a. With a second book, and I. The idea was, if you send me a cookie recipe and I eat it on the air, I'll send you a signed copy of the book. So as a way to say, hey, by the way, I have a book. But also you get some new content out of it. And then it seemed like it wasn't just so weird as just saying, like, by the way, buy a book. And if my audience was exactly split down the middle, I would get emails that were like, that is my favorite part of the show. Because I would go on for five minutes trying to just extemporaneously say weird stuff about that cookie. Like I would say like, this feels like I fell over in the forest and face first and my mouth is full of delicious gravel. That kind of stuff. And the. But one half of my audience was like, this is my favorite part of the show. And the other half was like, you are ruining this show for me. And I fought for it forever, but after about 100 episodes it's like, okay, it's fine, I can retire that.

So, so super. As our kindred spirits continue to to intertwine here. So my pricing model is called it's not about the Cookie for one. So the truth about pricing is not about the cookie. And my framework for applying behavioral economics in business is called behavioral baking. And I actually did a couple where I was starting to put into email. I did an episode on behavioral baking and was talking about, hey, like I, I do enjoy baking, so do you. Would it be interesting if I was to share a recipe or something, a show like what I'm baking up as. I'm like baking ideas and I just didn't have the time to do anything with it yet. And I wanted wanted to make sure I was going to really like do it right if I was going to get into the baking thing. But I had actually started something with that process for the baking as. And I use that talk about baking all the time for making.

I love it. Why are we insane this way? I still have it up there. And you know what's weird is I have some people who've been fans for a long time and here recently with the launch of this new book, I've been getting these messages all over the place from people who are like, I hope this leads to an endless supply of delicious cookies. Like all these little inside. Hey, by the way, I remember back in the day when you did the cookie thing. So it still brings me joy.

I love it. Yeah. And cookies versus anything else. Just because you feel confident in baking cookies or you like cookies more than other sweet treats or just kind of.

Well, it came out because there was a study I loved about where you would if you primed people with all these cues about fastidiousness and you had. Or you. There's another one where you would you put us the smell of cleaning supplies in the room and you give people a cookie that's real crumbly that it affects their behavior deeply. How they were primed beforehand. So again. And so I just thought then it. And then there are. There are other cookie. There are other. They're like a lot of cookie experiments. There's the. There's the. The one about ego depletion, which, you know, has gone through a lot of weirdness with replication. But it was all about like cookie smells, cookie baking. I just thought it was weird that psychology loved to do cookies that I thought it would go. There was a way to put that the show.

Nice. Yeah. Well, actually, so I have talked about in the episode on the sense of smell. We talked about the cleaning up after yourself with the lemon scent in the air after the crumbly cookies. So I'll link to that one in the show. Notes. Also in research on partitioning, talking about having a. The, like a white stopper, like the little piece of paper between the cookies versus colored sheets, whether that impacts whether people stop eating cookies in the sleeve or not. So I'll link to that one too. Another.

Tell me, what is. What is it? How does it impact it? I don't think I've ever heard of that one.

So it's because, you know, we get used to the little white card in there. And so it's now kind of gotten to a point that it doesn't have that same partitioning effect, but when you have the dramatic contrast of like a bright color or something, it can trigger that stopping point where you may be less likely to keep eating the cookies when it draws your attention to it.

Interesting, because I remember Instagram tried this for a minute where they. They must have been a B testing it because I remember I would get. I would be scroll, scroll, scroll, and go, hey, you've. You're all caught up. You've seen a bunch of stuff on Instagram. Maybe you don't want to look at any of this anymore. And I was like, yeah, you're probably right. And then I don't get that message anymore. So maybe they were like, they must have tried the partitioning thing and decided not to go with it and said.

Why are we kicking people out of our app? That seems like, I'm sure we can find something else they want to watch.

Yeah, sure. Ironically. Not ironically. That disappeared around the time TikTok appeared.

So they were like, oh, yikes, we got to amp it up. Yeah. More and more stuff in there for sure. One Quick thing that I would love if you can provide some tips for, because I know people that listen to the show, myself included. I don't. I listen because I have to for editing, but you know what I mean.

Sure.

Care about that idea of pitching people. And I find it fascinating all the people you've gotten access to in interviews and things for the book, which I know comes from your background in journalism. Do you have tips for someone who does want to do interviews, that wants to get access to someone interesting if they are curious? I know it. It can feel really bad. Vanessa Bonds, when she was on the show, was talking about how. And I forget whose book it was where you talk about that. Asking for things is the worst. Right. So that point of saying, hi, can I talk to you? Feels just kind of excruciating to us. So how do you have tips for overcoming that? Do you have some kind of set ways to get people to talk to you?

I teach a journalism class off and on at my alma mater and I teach two things when I. When they invite me over, I teach interviewing technique. And then I also. And I also talk about, you know, just the method of. Of proper research methods and all that. But often what I'll say in any class is I'll talk about this very thing you ask, which is because people, I guess you're in it for so long, you forget that it's so scary and so hard to get guests or to get people in here. But like, when you're. When I was a print journalist, we had to do a story a day and we had to have a feature on the weekends. So there was no. We didn't have the option of like worrying and then procrastinating. We had to ask, we had to get our. Our sources and we had sort of a minimum requirement. You had to have at least three sources per story. So that's a lot of people. And you have to juggle a lot of that. You have to. Some people went so far as having spreadsheets and things to keep up with all the people I've asked and who said. Who said yes and who said no. And I've played with that over the years. I've used all sorts of different apps like Airtable. And I forget there's been like a thousand like that where you can sort of plug in who you've asked, who's coming up, who's been on the show, that sort of thing. I'm still at this point, just kind of just keeping up with it. Loosey goosey. But when it Comes to asking. I tell students all the time, you can email anyone and they will at least tell you no. And I have a pretty good success rate. Even before I had these platforms that had any sort of awareness to them, about 75% of the time, people say yes. I've only had two people, and I'm not going to say them. I used to say their names all the time. I only have two people who continuously say no to me, and it upsets me. But they. But that's. That's fine. I have asked just about. You can ask just about anyone. You can email just anyone. You can email anyone. And then they will at least email back, sorry, I can't do it. And then you can move on from that. The ask I usually make is related to what we were talking about earlier. I explain I am. I want to do a show about this, or I'm writing an article about this, and I read this thing you did or I saw this thing you did, and it made me feel like you're the. You're someone who should be in this thing. And I'm very excited by it. And I actually don't know enough about this that I need your expertise. So you're just really making it. You really explain that. I'm reaching out to you because I need you. I'm reaching out to you because I think it would be better if you were part of it. So you're giving. You're putting. You're giving them a total opportunity to say no, not to the ask, but to the reason you're asking. And oftentimes, if they do decline, they'll say, I would love to be part of this. I'm just very busy. I'm not saying no because I don't want to do it. I'm saying no because I can't. But here's somebody who I think you could probably talk to. And some of the best guests I've gotten on the show came from something like that, Whereas it turns out I wasn't even asking the person that I ought to be asking, but they knew who to ask. And that email has established some sort of connection with this person. And they go in the file of people I might reach out to in the future for things. And sometimes people I've asked to come on the show who didn't come on the show or past guests, I'll email and just ask one question and say, hey, I'm doing this new thing and I'm wondering about this. Do you know who I should talk to about this? Or I don't understand this particular term, or I think I do. And here's what I've said. Am I wrong? And they'll send back a real quick email reply. But no, it's a little bit more like this. Or. You got that right. Or here's somebody you should go to. Or here's a book about this. So that the ask process should be looked at, as far as I'm concerned, more of a. That is part of the making the thing process. Less of a plugging in something into a calendar process. It is part of the creation. It is a tool to get more into the topic and expand your understanding of it and build out your network for the purpose of making a good thing in the end, if that's any way of making sense of it.

Yeah, well. And I think it definitely builds on, like you were talking about earlier, about just being genuinely curious and really caring about the topic. And you're reaching out to someone who also genuinely cares about this topic and in many ways has dedicated their life to what you're asking them about. Right. And so when they can tell that you genuinely care and are interested, I'm guessing it also makes it so people are more likely to say yes versus the pitches. I'm sure that you get plenty of that. Say, hey, I would love to take advantage of your platform to talk about me.

And you go, yeah, I get a lot of those. And most of them, they go into a file, and I look. I look at that file every once in a while. But honestly, I mean, I say yes to some of them, but I'm so in the middle of working on six or seven ideas that it's. I'm usually. It's usually me doing the asking, or I'm sort of the active element in that. But, like, one of the biggest parts of how minds change is the. Is the exploration of the dress and the neuroscience behind it.

Oh, I love that part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's my favorite chapter. That happened because the neuroscientists Pascal Wallace and Michael Karlovich, that is an example of Pascal. I went to nyu. I wanted to do a live show about the concept of post truth in New York City. So I asked people at nyu, so I wouldn't have to fly anybody out, they could just Uber right over to the venue. I asked, I looked through the list of people who studied things that seemed to be in that domain. And I got color experts. And no, no, I'm jumping ahead. I found. I found J. Van Babel, who studies this exact thing, and he's Been incredible. He's now, he's, he's now like a really good friend. Like, like, at this point, I, like, I've, you know, know him well enough that we can like, text message and stuff. And, and, and like, we've been to, I've been to his apartment, all that cool stuff. Right? But he, he was like, you know, the, there's somebody here who's researching something that you might find could be cool for the show. And this is Pascal and his team. They're studying the dress, which is kind of neat when you think about it, because that's kind of a post truth thing. I was like, that is kind of a thing. So I asked him if he'd like to come on stage. He did. He totally made me look like a fool on stage because I didn't understand. He was asking me all these rhetorical questions that I didn't know the answers to. And the crowd was. It really loved watching me getting grilled on stage. But it looked like a professor, like, now tell me, David, what happens when you look at this? And I'm like, I, I, I, I don't know. And he's like, I thought I was talking to someone who was worth talking to, that kind of thing. And, but the, the outcome of that was he was, I was like, this dress thing is fascinating. And I was like, I'd like to do a show about this. And, and he started sending me the, the research as it was coming out by email. And so I went to NYU just to talk to him about that. That became a really incredible moment where I was like, this is actually because I was also working on the book at the same time. And I was thinking this actually tells something to the reader that I was worried I would have to just start out by going, okay, now, time for science. And instead I had this beautiful thing that was a way to get into the science that we could all connect to. So that was from following up, reaching out to Jeff led to Pascal. Pascal led to the research on the dress. Then a little bit after that, Pascal, one of his students, had produced a paper on narcissism that led to one of my very favorite episodes of the show, which explored, what is narcissism? What do we know about it in the latest research? Then Jay's partner Tessa came out with a book about jerks at work, which, if you haven't had her on the show, I highly recommend Tessa West's book, Jerks on Work. Jerks at Work. And so this one, this one thing led to a dozen Other things and will lead to a dozen more. Some of them went in the book, some went into the podcast. So go into. Some will go into future projects. These are all people that I now know personally and keep up with their research. And it all came from this thing you learn as a. As a beat print journalist in a small town hoping to have a story every day. I remember Nancy Kaffer was the seasoned journalist that sat next to me, and she told me, every time you go out to get a story, come back with three. She's like, never go out and get the information and come back with it. Go out, talk to people, get an idea what's going on, ask them what they're working on, what problems they're facing, and try to come back with ideas for more stories going forward. That way you're never sitting there any morning at your desk going home, my God, what am I going to write about? And that's been something I've continued to do to this day in what I'm doing now.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Just as a quick note, so Jay co authored the Power of Us with Dominic Packer. Dominic was on the show talking about the Power of Us. So we'll link to that in the show notes. Haven't talked to Tessa yet. Great note there. Love that. We transitioned into some of the stuff about how minds change and the book.

I'm supposed to be promoting a book. That's fine. I'm enjoying myself. That's good.

That's good to. In this same curious questioning. I love coming into episodes and whatever I. When we're talking, you say something that makes me want to ask a question. I assume the audience wants to ask the same thing. And so, you know, we have a good conversation and we still talk about the book, but can you talk about. Because you said the dress. But for anyone who doesn't remember the dress and you the. The insanity that became the Internet when the dress came out. Can you share a little bit about that? And then we'll talk about more into how minds change.

Yeah, man, I love the dress. Okay, so the dress, the dress. If you haven't heard of this, it blows my mind you haven't heard of this. Most people remember it. It is one of those monocultural touchstone things that was pre whatever is happening to us now, but also presaged a lot of the things that are happening now. And the reaction to it seems quaint because the Washington Post wrote this was the argument that broke the Internet. But this was before all the weird stuff with politics and Covid and civil unrest and everything else we faced that truly has broke the Internet, which is why I wanted to put it the book, because it's a great. It helps you understand all the things that I cover later on. The dress is what it is is not really a dress. What it is is a image, which is important when you think about it psychologically and neurologically. It's an image that appeared on the Internet of a dress. It was a photograph taken by a mother getting ready for a wedding. And it was on a dreary day in London in a store, taken with a crappy phone. And it ended up being a overexposed image of a dress. She took it and shared it with her family and said, do you think this would be a good dress for me to wear? And some people were responding with, I don't think so. It's white and gold. And some people were responding with, yes, you know, black and blue is pretty good. And she was like, what? What? And then the family started. She was sharing it with each, everybody sharing each other. Like, what color do you see? And just within this one family, people could not agree on what color the dress was. And so they would do this. Then they would go be in person and they just look at it on their phones and go, it's white and gold. And then somebody else would look at it on that exact same phone in the room and say, it's black and blue. What is going on? And then there's a real freak out that takes place in a moment like that. It wasn't like any optical illusion you had ever seen before. You really, truly saw it as one color or another, and you couldn't see it any other way. And it made people who saw it differently than you seem absolutely bonkers. Or maybe you're bonkers and it freaks you out. Well, the musician at the wedding had heard about all this. This person shared it to their social circles online. And then that got it onto the Internet. And then all of a sudden it's on buzzfeed. And then after that, it went everywhere. It was being shared so much on Twitter that Twitter stopped working on phones for a while because it couldn't load all the tweets that were coming out about this thing. The hashtags were just burning servers. One of the most read things ever on Wired magazine's website was just their breakdown. Have you seen this thing? I was seeing it on local news shows. Like, at the end of the day, they would do the thing where, like, I don't care where you're at like you're in the smallest small town in America. Their local news would end with, so now let's talk about this thing that's going around, the dress. And then I've watched so many of them on YouTube. They're great. It'll be somebody in a small town in the middle of the United States, and the hosts of the show, the anchors will start arguing right there. And it was a great moment. And it talked about like it was guaranteed traffic if you put it on your website for a while and celebrities were chiming in on it like you had everybody from Kanye to Taylor Swift talking about it. So that in and of itself is a fascinating thing. And you could stop right there and use it as an example of what happens when we disagree online. Thankfully, though, Pascal and his team, they really wanted to understand what was going on with it. They were color researchers, vision researchers, back in the day. This did not make sense to them. This was not something they had seen in that domain before. And so they did this enormous study of 13,000 participants. They put every imaginable check and measure to make sure this was a really, really well performed study. And what they. The short. The short version of what they discovered was if you had spent more time. Well, I guess to set this up, I have to explain what goes on the brain when we see something that's overexposed. We without our. Without. We have no choice in this. The brain does it on our behalf. It will lower the overexposure a bit to try to help us see what the image actually is. This is happening at all times. It's happening right now as we look at our screens. If you look in a dark closet, it'll do the opposite. It'll turn up the exposure a little bit. You just get the outcome of all that. It's the end of the processing chain.

Oh, I love the example that just as a really easy visual for people where you talk about a picture of strawberries and you say that like you see these as red. There's no actual red in the photo at all. And it's because it's overexposed with blue, I think.

Yeah, yeah. There's a QR code in the book, so you can see all these things. And I have examples over at my website whenever you land on it. But you can also just Google it right now. The strawberries illusion is a beautiful Japanese researcher. I don't know if the researcher is beautiful, but the work of this researcher is beautiful. The. The. The strawberry illusion. It's a black and white image that has been overexposed in a bluish sort of teal tint. And you will naturally try to reduce the overexposure of the blue. But when you do that, there's a second thing that brains do. So when you subtract the luminant, that's going to possibly corrupt the true color of the image. So we tend to the brain on your behalf, will then punch up some of the colors and it'll punch up the colors based off your past experiences. In neuroscience, this is called color constancy. And there's a lot of. We don't actually know exactly why this evolved within us, but the assumption right now, the leading assumption is like, if you're in a dark environment, you need to be able to see the color of blood. Or you might need to be able to. It may be in some environments with different exposures, you want to see the ripeness of something. We don't know for sure, that's all speculation. But this is what happens. And in that image, your prior experiences with strawberries, you turn up the red and you see red strawberries, but there are no red pixels in the image whatsoever. So that's only happening in your brain. Which could seem weird except for the fact that everything you experience is only happening in your brain. So every color you see is an illusion. There is no actual color out there in the world. Colors are things that brains make. So when it comes to the dress, whatever color you're seeing is just whatever your brain's creating for you based off of your previous experiences and the under overexposure of the image. And you just get the result of all that. If you have never been been, if you're not aware of this, if you're. This is your first time to learn about these things, it is bizarre to realize, oh, wait, I don't see the world as it is, but as my brain creates it. It's a thing, right?

Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, I can't interpret things in 3D. That's not real. For. For myself, like talking about this is definitely. And you made a reference at some point to the Matrix in the book at least once. Right. And so it is very much like when you're reading, you're like, I'm. Wait, what? Like that's not real. That's not there. I don't see that. I love the examples you give. They are very colorful, to use our term here. Right. Like, but in a way that makes it really interesting. And they're not. While there are concepts we've heard many Times at least I have. Right. They're not using the same example that you see over and over again.

Yeah, yeah. It was very important to me to do that. And luckily I've made like 230 episodes of a show and in a couple like I'm pretty aware of the well trodden territory. I wanted to do new things and the dress is a great way to do that because the true the story. Here's why you see it differently. If you have spent more time around sunlight, you're a morning person, you work in a place with windows, something of that effect, and we're talking over your lifetime. Then all you see at first is this is an overexposed image. What is the nature of the light that is overexposing it? I've spent most of my time around overexposed things that are overexposed in sunlight. Therefore sunlight's probably the overexposure. Reduce sunlight, get true image. Sunlight is, has more light in the bluish spectrum, you know, blue skies. On the other hand, you may have spent more time as a night person working indoors, away from windows, something that effect you will see the overexposure and. Or just all the things you've ever seen overexposed in your life tended to be overexposed. And incandescent light, for some reason, maybe you're a photographer or something like that. So incandescent light is mostly in the yellow side of the spectrum. You take out the yellow. If you take out the yellow, you get a black and blue dress. If you take out the blue, you get a yellow and gold dress. And that's what you get. And what you have are two humongous populations of human beings that have had different life experiences. And because of those different life experiences, they disambiguate an ambiguous image with a different kind of disambiguation than the other side. And the different disambiguations lead to different conclusions. And that is what Pascal calls the surf pad model of disagreement. And I love it so much. Surf pad stands for if I can remember. In moments of substantial uncertainty, in the presence of ramified or forked prior assumptions, you will arrive at incredible disagreement. So there's a line of all, like all your nature and nurture, all your experiences leading up to it, all your priors leads to the way that you will disambiguate the ambiguous or arrive at certainty in a moment of uncertainty. And then over that line is the conclusion. But when we interact with other human beings and we discover that we disagree on our interpretations, we disagree on what we consider to be true or not true. When our attitudes differ, or in this case, the truth of what we see with our eyeballs differ, that's at the level of conclusions. And if you were to argue with somebody in that space, you're not going to get anywhere. Which becomes this huge theme in the book. Because you could imagine, if I was to try to. If you saw the dress one way, I saw it the other. And we got into an argument where I'm trying to prove that the way I see it is the way to see it and the way you see it is wrong. And you're doing the same thing. We're both trying to be right and convince the other person they're wrong. We miss out on getting at the deeper truth of the matter, which is, why do you think we see it differently? That's stuff that's on the other side of the line. And that conversation could take place, we could go into that frame and that might lead you into the whole neuroscience of vision that opened up new spaces for us to understand ourselves. But you deny yourself that kind of conversation by getting into a debate over who's right and who's wrong. And that is applicable to just about anything that we disagree upon today. And that becomes a big point of the investigation going forward. From the dress, by the way, they replicated the dress. That was my favorite part of the book is they were. The title of that chapter is Socks and Crocs. Because they. Pascal is a neuroscientist who has decided he wants to play around in psychology space. And his big problem with psychology is it isn't. It doesn't have rigorous standards to his. This is his. Is him speaking. He doesn't like this. He wants the standards of psychology be as tight as in physics. And so he wants to design experiments like that. And he thought the dress would be a great way to do it. And so they recreated it by taking crocs. The reason they use crocs is he said we needed an object that has no. No actual, specific default color. And it's a great thought experiment. You can try it yourself. Close your eyes and imagine a croc. What color is it? If you ask a bunch of people that, you get about 100 different answers, and they took that. So you take a crock and you expose it to a light that it doesn't reflect, and you'll end up with. It'll appear gray. So if you expose a pink croc to only green light, you end up with a gray croc is what it Looks like. But if you pair it with something that reflects the light, then now you're given another cue which goes through the whole color constancy and overexposure thing. So crocs are great because a lot of people like to wear socks and crocs. So you put white socks on somebody, you put pink crocs over the socks, and then you overexpose the whole thing in green light. And when you show that to people, they did this beautiful experiment where some people will see green socks and gray crocs because the socks are reflecting all the green light and the crocs aren't reflecting any of it. But some people will see that in. And in there the brain will go, those socks should be white. So they reduce the color, the green from the image without their knowledge that this is happening. And that leads them to do sort of the strawberry thing where they go, well, in instances like that where I've taken green out, what usually happens is I don't get to see the reddish tones of the thing. So they. They enhance the reddish tones. And so you end up with our two groups of people. Some people see gray crocs, green socks, some people see pink crocs, white socks. And the one correlating factor is it seems to be older people are the ones who tend to see the white sock version, because the speculation is they've had more experience in their lives with socks that weren't colored, and they recreated it in the lab. It's one of the most bizarre experiments ever, but it demonstrates very well the whole surf pad concept.

Yeah, I love that one too. And for everyone, just for that. And obviously, you know, talked through it here, but it's so fascinating to read. And there's the story with the. How they came about making this choice where the researcher was saying he was in a space that had the green light in a greenhouse or something. And then he thought there was a.

Grow house, for, quote, unquote. Plants.

Yes, plants in the house. Right? Yeah, we're growing them with lights. But they were. And he thought the crocs were gray, like, no big deal. But then they got outside and he saw they were pink. And then when they were back inside, he could only see them as pink and he couldn't see them as gray anymore, which is just bizarre. Just even again, to think of our.

Because he was a grad student in color, color visual perception. And he was like, that's impossible. Like, they are not pink. There is no pink light in this room. And he was like, this is. He remembered that when it came to the dress, and he was like, I have an insight here. It's an incredible story. Right?

All right, so really quick, before we have to go, what's the, you know, overarching of how minds change? I think we talked about so much fascinating stuff. I'm sure everyone is so excited to go get this book, as they should be. And if you give the elevator speech of what the book is about and the journey you went through, what would that be? What are people gonna get from the book?

The thing that started the investigation was I had done a lot of work in the domain of conspiratorial thinking, and I would often be asked questions. Years ago, people would have a family member who thought, like, the president was a reptile, something like that, the earth is flat, something. And they'd ask me, like, I can never reach. I cannot seem to get to this person. Like. Like they get angry with me. And then. Or it might be a political issue or something. And I. I would give this terrible advice years ago. I'd say, yeah, you can't reach people like that. Don't worry. Then I would talk. I would just talk about motivated reasoning, because I spend so much time talking about motivated reasoning. And I never liked that advice. Just. It felt gross to say that to people. And I was over. I would. Every once in a while, something would come along that would challenge that. And then while this was happening, everyone in the United States changed their mind, or the majority of the United States changed their mind about same sex marriage. The. The prevailing attitudes and norms related to LGBTQ issues and same sex marriage completely flipped. And I remember I was researching something else and saw the. The. The polling. And the polling showed that just 10 years previous, the majority of people in the United States said they were opposed to making same sex marriage legal. And Then around about 2012, 2013, the majority of the United States said that they were in favor of it. So you had millions of people who felt one way 10 years ago, and millions of who, if you were to put them in a time machine and they went back in time 10 years, they would disagree with themselves. And to me, what I didn't understand was, well, then what happened in their brain? Like, when a person looks back on a previous thing, they used to think, feel, or believe, and they disagree with it. What happened in between those two points? And I had no answer for it, and I just wanted to go research it. Plus, it also challenged my assumption that people can't change their mind. A lot of people had to change their minds. For that to be something that changed. And then there's the other thing, which is a lot of us who, anyone who is in the majority who did change their mind, there's a thing called belief change blindness that indicates they. And the consistency bias like that, where you probably don't even remember changing your mind. You feel like this is how you've always felt about it and it seems so obviously true that it's weird that you would ever have seen it any other way. And that all made me curious about what is the nature of epiphanies. And then the biggest extension of all that is, can you influence this? Is there a way to actually get a person to change their mind faster than would take place through sort of just natural experiences and inputs and social costs and rewards and everything. So that set me off on what I wanted to do. So in the end, in the beginning, I don't have these answers. And I start out by going to spend time with people who left conspiratorial communities trying to understand what got them to leave. I spend time with activists like deep canvassers and street epistemologists who go door to door and walk up to people and just straight up change their minds about things using persuasion techniques. I go all over the place with it. And in the end it's one of those things where the book didn't have a thesis till it was over, until it was done. And so now I can give you an elevator pitch which is an exploration of why people do, how people do and do not change their minds. What's the nature of the resistance? And if you wanted to overcome that resistance, what would you have to do? And why is it that I was didn't have those answers going in, despite the fact that I had done so much work in this field going up and leading up to it, and you learn that it's about listening people. You can't brute force, dump a bunch of facts on people and expect something to happen because you're trying to get a person to interpret things through your lens. And what you have to do is move the conversation into a non judgmental compassionate listening framework where you listen your way into changing someone's mind. And there's a whole lot of science that explains it. But then in the end there are some very simple techniques that you can employ. And I offer those. But. And I did not want to write a book that was going to be how to Win Friends and influence people. I did not want anything in that domain. But by the end I felt like I did Owe the reader some, you know, bullet points and they're in there. So that's the strange elevator pitch of what this book is all about.

It's perfect. And as we've already said, I love going on the journey with you. It's so much into your thought process is really well preserved in the book. It's a very interesting read. I highly recommend it for everyone. And for everyone who does want to go get that and learn more from you and follow all your amazing journeys, what's their best way to contact you and get the book and learn more, Obviously.

Right now I want everybody to get this book. The book is How Minds Change. You can find it by just googling that anywhere. It's everywhere they sell books. I encourage you to support your local independent bookstores, but of course, any of the big places have it as well. If you want to learn more about it. I have videos, resources, all sorts of extra material you can find at my personal website, davidmcraney.com if you are interested in you are not so smart and my podcast and all the stuff that comes out of that you are not so smart.com or just look for you are not so smart on your podcast stuff.

Perfect. And Twitter.

Yeah, I'm just David McCraney over there. Easy to find me.

Perfect. Always like to encourage listeners to give a nice tweet shout out to say, oh, this was amazing. You talked about, you know, give a little. Give a little tweet love.

Yeah, yeah. And Twitter is crazy because right before we got on here, I learned that How Minds Changes was just named on Amazon. It's on three different best of 2022 list, which is bonkers. So I just tweeted that out right before we got on here. I don't know what's going to happen. It feels like this is going to be a book that really that a lot of people connect to and coming from a lot of different starting points and I feel really good about that.

Well, congratulations. Well deserved. I am looking forward to watching all the amazing things that you and the book have on the horizon. And to the next one about genius or wherever else we end up. Just thanks so much for coming and sharing about it today. It's been a lot of fun to learn with you.

Hey, this has been one of the best interviews. I really appreciate it. I love what you're up to. I love your show and just consider me on call for whatever you get into going forward. I really appreciate your time and this has been fantastic.

Oh, thank you. That's very kind of you. And you may regret saying it because I bet I'll be calling thank you again to David McRaney for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? I mean, what besides everything got your brain buzzing today? This was such a fun interview and I really appreciate David being willing to go on a journey with me. Throughout our conversation, he gave you tips about how to be more successful in your business so you don't waste time chasing trends and amazing insights for how to pitch people and increase the likelihood that they're going to interact with you. And as you'll see when you read your copy of How Minds Change, David has gotten access to some fascinating people in places that are traditionally pretty closed off to outsiders. I truly believe that David is one of the best representations of the value of being a curious questioner. When people can tell that you're asking questions because you're deeply interested in their perspective and what they have to say, it can lead to fascinating conversations and revelations. One of my favorite things that David said in our conversation was that you need to listen your way into changing somebody's mind. It isn't about force or proving someone that they're wrong. There's so much interesting work showcased in the book about how people can actually change their own minds when they're asked the right thoughtful questions and someone takes the time to listen. I've linked to some other Great Questioners episodes in the show notes including Nira Al and J. Van Bavel's co author Dominic Packer, who were mentioned by name in the episode, as well as Warren Berger, another journalist who wrote my favorite book, A More Beautiful Question and was my guest on episode 200 of the Brainy Business. As a reminder, those notes are waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 210. In them you will find, of course, a link to those episodes and others, all three of David's books, including of course, How Minds Change, Ways to Connect With David, and so much more. Be sure to give us a shout out on Twitter where you can find him as at David McRaney and I'm at the Brainy Biz B I Z. We would love to hear what resonated with you most in the episode. Again, that's all waiting all those links and everything waiting for you@the brainybusiness.com 210Thank you again to David McRaney for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next week for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and you thank Learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

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