EP#80: Why Smart Founders Keep Making the Same Bad Call. Owen Fitzpatrick - Inner Propaganda

And I think the beliefs play a large part, obviously for startup founders, play a huge part in determining how successful you are because number one, you have to cultivate belief in yourself. Number two, you have to be resistant to the self-doubt that can very easily creep in as you're trying to build your business. Number three, you have to be able to build belief in your investors. Number four, you have to be able to build, build belief in your team. And number five, you have to be able to build belief in your customers as well. So the importance of understanding belief to me is one of the most critical skills that we need to learn.

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Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh. On today's show, we're looking at the psychology of a founder and all the things that you carry inside of you when you're thinking about decisions that you make and quite often decisions you're making with so much information behind it, you're not even comprehending. And excited today to have Eoghan Fitzpatrick. Eoghan, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much, Andy. Pleasure to be here.

I love, love this topic and we were just chatting before. I've read a whole bunch of books, but today we're here to talk about your book, which is called Inner Propaganda, out on August 4th. It's what, number 4 for you, books?

It's actually number 10.

So number 10, but when we were chatting previously, you were saying for you, this feels like probably the most important piece that you put together.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, for me, what I've always been fascinated with is belief. And why we believe what we do and how beliefs change. And I think the beliefs play a large part, obviously for startup founders, play a huge part in determining how successful you are. Because number one, you have to cultivate belief in yourself. Number two, you have to be resistant to the self-doubt that can very easily creep in as you're trying to build your business. Number three, you have to be able to build belief in your investors. Number four, you have to be able to build, build belief in your team. And number 5, you've to be able to build belief in your customers as well. So the importance of understanding belief to me is one of the most critical skills that we need to learn. And so I became obsessed for the last 30 years or so. And so that's why I feel this particular book is the most important one because it's taken everything I've learned over the past 30 years and sort of breaking it down into this is how beliefs work. This is how they work in the brain. This is how they work from a psychological perspective. And most importantly, this is how we can build belief and how we can change belief.

So fascinating. And you're almost like the yin to my yang. I love storytelling and I love founder storytelling and actually get into the heart of who people are. And I do two exercises, one for a startup, which is auditing the values, mission, all the things about it, and then the competitors, the audience, behavioral traits, et cetera, and putting that on paper. The founder one is slightly different. The part that I love is actually going way back in time. So I do an interview with them on video to look at and explore who they are, the things that inspire them, cuz more often than not, they're carrying influence from things that they've not even acknowledged previously, which is fascinating, which is part of what you are doing, right? Was there a moment in time? Was it a coach of a sporting team, a certain teacher? Mm-hmm. There's various things that start to steer you in certain directions. You studied social psychology, right?

Yeah.

I always love these little moments. Did you think it was just a career that would be interesting? Was there a reason why you chose that originally? I'm fascinated with your original motivation and what sparked that for you.

Sure. So I suppose for me, I struggled with my mental health during the teenage years, and I was suicidal when I was around about 14 years old. And I had an experience there whereby at a certain point I was actually drafting a suicide note. And during the note, I was writing, look, I, you know, I'm so sorry to my parents or whatever. And I was telling them, I love you so, so much. And then from somewhere, a voice came, or my hand at least wrote a sentence which says, is this how much you love them? So it was a question. It wasn't like an argument. It wasn't like, oh, you can do it. It wasn't anything motivational. It was a question. Is this how much you love them? It was kind of like a sarcastic type question, but it stopped me in my tracks at that moment. And then there started to be a sort of a story war between the voice that wanted me to die and the voice that wanted me to live. And this became something that eventually that question was what actually saved me and stopped me from doing that. And instead of allowing that to, I suppose, propel me into a career in clinical psychology or therapy, and I became a therapist for a while, but what was more fascinating to me was why was I able to change my entire way of seeing the world with just one question? And it didn't mean I was happy the next day, but it meant I was alive the next day. But what was it about that that allowed that to change? Because I think so often I'd seen people use lots of logic and evidence And perfectly rational and hugely smart people making really dumb decisions or making huge mistakes. And I always wanted to understand why, and that's why social psychology drew me towards it because I wanted to understand what influences us to believe what we believe. So I went and I started to, to travel around the world. I traveled to more than 100 countries, including North Korea, Iran, Rwanda, Afghanistan, interviewing people there. Learning what I could about how they came to the conclusions they did. I got, was lucky enough to get media coaching from the media coach to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in Washington, DC, learning again, what are some of the kinds of strategies he uses or he shares or he teaches to top political, um, I suppose, representatives. And I looked at how cults work. I looked at how marketing from a purely persuasion perspective works. Obviously sales, and tried to figure out what is it that actually works, not to change behavior just, but to change beliefs. And from all of that work and from studying the neuroscience, and we've been lucky enough in the last 15 years to get a lot more information as to how our brains work, I began to start to see patterns. And I noticed that the patterns I was seeing when I was in North Korea were identical to the experiences I had with my own mental health. And that's what I suppose made me continuously move towards trying to learn everything I could about why we believe what we do and what we can do about it. Because I think in a polarized world as well, that's also something since, you know, the last 10 years or so, the world is becoming increasingly polarized. So understanding why we believe the opposite to someone else and why we dig in the more they challenge us, that once again was something that sparked my interest. And so all of it culminated in this now odyssey towards writing this book and getting the message out there into the world.

What a powerful story. And thank you for being so vulnerable. Anyone on this show who watches, listens, I use the word vulnerable nearly in every episode. Part of my personal purpose or vision is the ability to be able to have open and transparent conversations and trust the person you're sitting beside to do that. So firstly, thank you for sharing that. And it's important, right? We all have these moments in our lives. Some more serious than others. And that intervention moment for you came from something buried inside of you and sparked this red thread that you followed through now to Inner Propaganda, your latest book. And the dedication to it, and I, I love it because I was reading some random stat the other day about Amazon and the volume of fake AI-written books they just have to take down ad nauseam. And to actually have the contrast of life's experience, and we're talking about Johann Hari, who's one of my favorite authors, and And Stolen Focus, his book, he interviews like 150 professors from all over the world to get a breadth of experience. So it wasn't just his own subjective opinion. It was quite well-rounded. And I love that dedication. But you step into countries that most people would cross them off.

Not, ah, it's a nice place. It's a nice place to go on vacation. You know, I was one, one time I was going through American customs and the guy stopped me and opens my passport. This before I was a citizen. Yeah, before I even had the green card and he opens the passport and he goes, Afghanistan. I'm like, yeah. And then he turns and Iran. I'm like, yeah. And he goes, why did you go to Iran and Afghanistan? And I'm like, I made a joke. I said, well, I heard it's really nice when it's really sunny over there, you know? And he just said, come with me. And for 30 minutes, he's like, I don't understand. Like, why did you go to these places? What's it? But for me. I'm, I wanna know, it, it, it's very easy to be sort of stuck in a place where you're surrounded by everyone that thinks like you, and even if they disagree with you politically, they still have the same cultural references. When you go to some of these places, they're radically different. And the way in which they communicate some of the things they believe in, for me at least, my first thought was, that's absolutely insane. But once more, I'm, I'm trying not to get into the whole moral good, you know, is this good or is this bad? Not because I don't have opinions, I have very strong opinions. Opinions morally, whether something is good or bad, but I'm interested in how do you construct that belief? How do you actually get to the point where, for example, in Afghanistan, my guide that I was chatting to, we had a long conversation about stoning as a practice, and he walked me through the rules of stoning and how it works. And I mean, I was like aghast as he started describing the shape of the stones and how you would do it and how you bury them. And like, he described it as if it was like he was telling me how to make ice cream. And as he did that inside, I'm like repulsed, but on the outside, I'm as curious as I can be because once more, I'm not looking at the actual thing itself. That's for, you know, another conversation, another day. What I'm looking at is I want to understand why people believe what they do, because I also believe that when you understand how a person comes to the conclusions they do, you have a chance to influence them more effectively. But as long as you miss that, you're always going to be speaking a totally different language. You're always going to be, you know, obsessed with your own reality. They have their reality and there'll be no overlap.

I've got a very philosophical brain and I, not overanalyze, but I never take things on face value. And I've had some interesting life experiences and something you said there really resonated. And I grew up in Australia, came here in 2012, and then went back to Australia for a few years through the pandemic. And it was really interesting to be away for that long. Go back to the country and I saw the myopic, almost echo chamber type thing. It's almost like watching a social media algorithm in real life with people just affirming incorrect beliefs, things that aren't really based in any fact. There's a lot of fiction that comes through that as well. And just that observation for me and being aware of it from a business sense and how I apply it, we'll go into that a little bit today. I'm fascinated within that local culture versus a global culture. And the nature versus nurture, and we could talk about that for the rest of the episode, but nurture in the sense it grooms you in a certain way to make things normal. And your experience in different countries normalizes things for certain people. They grow up so different. And I read this beautiful, and that wasn't a book, no, it was a podcast actually. This guy Martin Hepple, he's in Australia. His dad was an anthropologist, maybe his mum was too, and they went to Borneo. As kids and why their parents were living with this headhunting tribe. And this is probably 30 years ago. I'm not sure if they still are active or not, but for them, they were living and breathing this life that for us as Westerners just could not feel more worlds apart. And it sat with me in the sense of his observation as a kid growing up in that and his experience and view on the world. And he was Australian by definition, but his values of how he lived his life were so different than what I would say a stereotypical Australian is. Sure.

And, and I mean, I think your culture very much shapes you because the cultures that you experience are the stories that you've heard all your, your life. The stories about the way the world works, the stories about who you are, not just individually, but collectively. And some cultures are more collectivist than individualistic. Therefore, some of the stories will actually bond you to others more. There's a concept in psychology called identity fusion, which is oftentimes we can get immersed so closely within a group that we become a big part of identity is attached to that group. And therefore that group holds a strong power over us. And whenever you look at beliefs and why people don't change the beliefs they do, a lot of the times it's because the beliefs are so entrenched and locked into this particular identity. And as a result of this, anything that you do that moves away from that risks your, you know, you being thrown out of the group. Now, for some people that would be okay, but if you've got strong fusion with the group, then that's a problem. So culturally, as he grew up in Borneo, you see so much of a completely different world. And then when you try to make sense of it, you're gonna have a different pers— perspective over something that the rest of us take granted because, you know, we are already programmed in with certain associations with this is how you live, this is what you're supposed to do. For him, he's looking at it from a radically different perspective, but that also gives him more flexibility in his thinking. And that's what I was trying to do through travel. Obviously I'll never have the, you know, experience that he's had. But the more I traveled and the more, most importantly, I shut myself up from dismissing things just because it's not what I'm used to, the more it opened my mind up to how different people think and believe. And it doesn't mean that I, I'm now completely obsessed or brainwashed by a different group, but it just means now I've got a perspective. Like I study history in university as well. I have a degree in history and When I went to North Korea, they told me about the real history of the Korean War, when the South, you know, with the, they called it the American imperialist bastards. That's how they termed the Americans and the puppet government of the South when they invaded. Now, in my history, my degree in history, we learned how the North invaded the South. If you ask me which one I believe, probably still believe that the North invaded the South. However, If I don't understand how they're thinking about it, there's no shot of me to ever have a productive conversation with anyone. So I think it's important for us to, you know, when you're listening to your friend that grew up in Borneo, to try to learn and be curious as you do to try to understand their point of view and perspective without jumping to the judgment. We can judge them, but if you judge them, do it way after you've understood them. 'Cause I think in this world, we love soundbites and we love, you know what I mean? Are they an us or them? Oh, they're an us. Okay, great.

Or are they a them?

Okay, great. We love to get clarity and certainty really quickly. And there's a concept in psychology called the need for cognitive control, or need for, the need for cognitive control, which is that we want to be able to control a particular closure, sorry, which is that we want to get closure over a particular idea. And we want to be able to You know, now I understand this, even though there's nuance, there's complexity, there's all these different things. And again, bridging it back to being, you know, being a founder or being in business, so much information hurtling towards us. There's so many things we gotta make sense of. And so when you are in that situation of uncertainty, the temptation is let me just get a perspective. I need any perspective because the idea of not having this closure, this cognitive closure, not having the answer. Can become really stressful for us. And so as a result, a lot of times we'll make mistakes because we'll jump to a conclusion that is erroneous because it feels good to think we're right, even if we're not.

I'm obsessed with Ted Lasso. I've watched it so many times and he, there's an episode where he is playing a darts game and he talks about a quote from Walt Whitman, which is, be curious, not judgmental. Paraphrasing, I'm not sure of the exact quote, but For me, there's something about curiosity which allows you to have a connection like nothing else, right? Because immediately you're parking anything that you've learned and you're asking for someone else's point of view. But to have the maturity to be able to sit and listen and be more curious and get to a point where you fully understand their point of view, it's only then can you truly understand that. But whether that person believes that or not, whether they've been groomed or just adopted as part of a social tribe, which you're talking about as well, is fascinating too. So I assume it starts from a very young age.

I mean, it can do. A lot of times when we're very young, we're obviously crafting what the world is like. We're, we're building our associations. We're figuring out, okay, this is what I like to eat. This is what I don't like to eat. I like to eat ice cream. I don't like to eat vegetables, right? You, you have all of these experiences as you're growing up. And then culturally from the media nowadays, from social media, from your friends, from your parents, from your teachers. There's all of these messages that you're getting. And once again, it's not so much about logically, this is the correct or the right message. It's also about you are surrounded by other people that all will form into having certain beliefs. And a large part of it is I want to be friends with them. I want to be in that group. So a lot more of our beliefs are based on whether or not they allow us to be part of a social group than are logically formed from us evaluate, like even Even when people talk about voting, right? I have to say for the most people, including myself, the idea that you sit down with all of the different policies and you investigate each politician that is up for election and you evaluate their policies and you start to move through and you make a reasonable logical analysis to figure out, out of all of these politicians, who is it that I'm going to vote for? Irregardless of what party they're, you know, a part of, irregardless, you know, or, or of their past or of anything or their personality. You just do it purely based on logic. I certainly don't do that. And I don't think 99% of voters do it. People will say, oh yeah, I've done my research. Okay, bro, sit down, show me, you know what I mean? Show me what you've actually done because I really don't believe it. I've talked to so many different people and whenever it comes to talking about it, they usually just are able to tell me the, the, the soundbite. There's a concept, another concept in psychology called the illusion of explanatory depth. And this is based on a study a few years ago where they said to people, they said, look, do you know how a toilet works? Do you know how, how a safety pin works? Do you know how this? And they gave them lots of questions about everyday objects. And most people said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And gave themselves a good sense. And then they said, cool, talk me through it. And then the people were like, and couldn't explain most of these everyday objects how they actually worked. And so we tend to have this confidence that we understand something. We tend to have a confidence we understand the policies of that particular politician, but when we're actually asked about it, you know, we're just gonna waffle. We don't always have the right answers. And I think so often we vote because of who that person represents themselves to be, what side they're on, and who we want to be in connection. I'm the kind of person that votes for that person because they symbolize what's important to me.

There's something fascinating in that pack mentality of following what's around you, but then you need to look also what are the other inputs that come into the mix, right? And if you look at advertising, politics, the trust levels of each of these people is getting less and less. So as consumers, we know that people will feel comfortable just saying whatever they want almost to a certain degree, and they're not held to the same account or whether they just lack integrity. And they're prepared to do that. So being able to filter that is an active skill, cuz as the media, you assume you can trust what they're saying. So that one sentence that you're talking about, if people latch onto it and they go, oh, that's my belief now, cuz this one person said it once and they carry that forward.

Yeah.

It's either self-validating something they already believe or have heard, or they don't know enough about it and they want to be seen to know in the room and they just lean on that in repetition.

And that's the problem. The problem is that if you're believing so many of these things, then every single time anything happens, you're filtering it through these beliefs. So if you, for example, believe that, you know, from a political standpoint, all people on this side are like this, then whatever comes out of the mouth of anybody that represents that political side, you instantly dismiss it. That's, that's the beauty of the word or the terror of the word fake news. As soon as you use the word fake news, it Ultimately, it just means you're lying. That's, that's all it means. But saying fake news is this blanket statement that you can say that instantly is, is designed to destroy trust in anything that comes out of a particular person's mouth. And so we, we fall into again, this simplified way of thinking where we go, let's say if Andy Walsh is speaking to me, then either everything he says is true or everything he says is false. Either everything he says he knows is true, or everything he says he knows is false. There, there's no middle ground. And the reality is for all of us, we say certain things that are true. We say other things that aren't true. Now, we might think that they're true, but that doesn't mean that they are. And it, it's the same is true of if you look at very successful business people, like you take Elon Musk, for example, he's done amazing with a lot of things.. But if you turn around and therefore you believe everything that Elon Musk says about every topic, that's insanity, right? And I'm not saying it's insanity because it's just Elon Musk. I'm saying it's insanity because he's not an expert in everything. He's an expert in his own space. It's like psychologists like me. If you ask me about my political beliefs, well, they're my political beliefs. That doesn't mean I'm an expert in politics. I'm an expert in psychology. So I think that there's this mistake we make as well where we go, Okay, either everything is like this or everything is like this, a nice little black and white thinking. And that same thing is responsible for a lot of the self-doubt we feel. We think, oh my goodness, I'm no good at this. I am good at that. We very simplified way and the truth is much more nuanced and it's only when we recognize that, that we can actually do something about it.

A lot of things at play in that, and I wanted to shift it into understanding it as a human being yourself. I look at someone through a trust factor, right? If trust has been taken away from all of these media channels ultimately, and I include social media in there, the human part of that is this person that I know either directly or I've read about has a certain hierarchy of pedigree or respect. So say it was LeBron James talking about basketball, but then he started talking about something he knows nothing about. He has a halo effect, right?

Yeah.

Of people going, well, it's LeBron James. He's great at basketball. I believe what he says. And they take what he says verbatim. And that applies in like large scale like him or in micro scale with just day to day when you're hanging out with a group of people.

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The challenge is, is that let's say you have somebody who's very, very successful and you study what they're doing to become successful. What they're doing now to become successful is not necessarily gonna work for you because they're in a position based upon their status, based upon the amount of money they have, based upon the, you know, the context they have to be able to be successful now with that. You're, you might not be in that position. Similarly to how they became successful was how they became successfully successful in the 1990s or in the 1980s or in the 2000s. That isn't necessarily gonna work today. So I think once again, if you take LeBron James, he's an expert, let's say at like basketball, you would definitely listen to him and listen to his point of view. But the more nuance you go, the more you realize just because they're an expert in this space doesn't mean they're an expert in all spaces. And the mistake is just because you see someone being successful, like a lot of people try to explain, this is the, these are the secrets to greatness. Like if LeBron James tells you the secrets to greatness, you can take from that, that this worked for him and some no doubt will be helpful, right? His mindset and all that. But a lot of it might be helpful to help you to become great at basketball. Some of it might help you in general to have a good attitude, to be resilient or whatnot, but it doesn't mean he's got all the answers to become great because once again, it depends on your circumstance. It depends what you're doing. And not everything works. That there's a book that we, me and you were chatting about beforehand called Range by David Epstein. One of the things he talked about was some people like Tiger Woods are successful by focusing and locking into obsessions with golf. Like all he does is play golf from a very early age, whereas Roger Federer tried a lot of different sports and then made it. And so the notion is that this false assumption we have is that some people are just like, they're born as a golfer and then they become it. The real trick to it, and any great startup founder knows this, is that you have to be able to learn on the job. You have to be able to iterate. You have to be able to take feedback. You have to be able to figure out what's working. You have to almost smell the market and those instincts. And that intuition is what will get you, you know, through the challenges that you face. I think there's a myth or a fairy tale we tell ourselves where it's like, well, I'm just naturally this and naturally that. Well, that natural quality, the nurture or the nature has certainly been influenced by the nurture. And the question is, how much are you nurturing yourself? How much are you actually putting yourself out there to actually embrace the lessons and learning so you can become more effective?

I love that. And one of the things that I use, and I adopted it from somebody else, and I'm not gonna claim it as my own, but it's, and I wish I could remember the source, but I could find it, I'm sure, which is strong opinions, weakly held.

Yeah.

And I use it as a little catchphrase when I'm working with any of my portfolio companies and founders. It's having the conviction to feel confident that I've got a well-rounded point of view. I've looked at different information. I'm going to come up with a hypothesis. I'm going to test it. I'm going to learn. It's going to work or it's not going to work. From that, I then move forward again. And from there, you're actively evolving the way that you think. So having a strong opinion means being rigorous to a point within time capacity, financial capacity. By being prepared to be proved wrong, having the maturity to be able to do that because it's a thinking process, but it's also a process of actually having projects within your company. In that, is there anything that's flawed? I'm happy to be proven wrong here in the sense of having a point of view and how you actually get to the heart of what's informed that point of view because self-awareness is obviously key to be able to do what you're talking about. And I assume most of us are pretty bad. Unpacking who we are and finding our own bias or shortcuts we've taken that aren't the full picture.

I would agree with that. I like to think of it as the conviction paradox. And this is the notion that if you want to be a successful leader, you need to be able to demonstrate conviction and certainty in the strategy or the initiative moving forward. But at the same time, to your point, you also need to be able to rigorously red team it and challenge it and be able to take it apart and, you know, use discernment. To be able to figure out what's not working. And I think to me, the most important kind of skill that is part of self-awareness is the ability to update your beliefs. Like, there's a concept in math actually called Bayesian reasoning, right? And this is to do with probability and whatnot. And it comes from a guy called Thomas Bayes. And the notion is that instead of you going and going, okay, this is the answer, you go in, this is what they call my prior. And so the prior is the current belief., but based on the evidence that you get, it will update the prior. And this is the notion of iteration. This is what's fueling a lot of like scientific discoveries, AI, whatnot. It's the sort of Bayesian approach, which looks at how can I update the current belief that I have. And when you start to look in the way to go, what new, what new evidence can help me update my current prior or my current belief? When you start thinking like that, it means now you become very evidence-focused, as opposed to what a lot of times we do is we only look, we fall into confirmation bias where we look for evidence to prove we're right and we dismiss evidence that contradicts us. And I think that's what we need to get better at is discerning whatever information is coming in and looking to see how it might change and what, what is necessary in order to change your beliefs about this. And when we start thinking like that, we're gonna be a lot more smart or a lot more intelligent in our ability or capacity to be able to make better decisions.

I equate it to emotions and I know more about it and I, I did exercise science at university and did a minor in biomedical science and explored it a little bit and it just seeded this idea with me to be curious, to read more, et cetera. And one of the ones was around emotions, which is basically a pre-programmed response. So if there's something that we find funny, our body has this and there's all the chemicals that go with it. Same for crying. These things, it's a shortcut that our brain has learned along the way. And that feels fairly hardwired. From a beliefs perspective, like what is that process and not deeply physiological, but what's happening there? And you can obviously challenge yourself, but how do you start to ingrain something where the shortcut that you're taking is the latest operating system? Let's talk product talk, is that you're refreshing your brain every year with new information to be contemporary, but also to be respectful because it impacts relationships significantly. Mentally too. 100%.

I think, first of all, the way in which we look at neuroscience, the way in which we look at emotions from a neuroscience perspective and what a lot of the latest research suggests is that emotions aren't necessarily reactions. They're more constructions. So there's great work done by a neuroscientist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. And what she talks about is how we construct emotions in the moment based upon what our brain thinks we need. So our brains are prediction machines trying to figure out what is it that I need in this context? Back in the hunter-gatherer days, you see a lion, your brain immediately notices what's going on on the outside. The lion's running towards me. What's going on on the inside? Currently I'm at rest. What's my memory or association of the concept called lion? Oh, they eat people. Straight away then our brain regulates what she calls the body budget and says, okay, you need adrenaline right now. You need epinephrine right now, noradrenaline, nor epinephrine to get out of here, to run, hide, or fight. And so we construct the emotions that we need at that moment. Now, why that matters is that when we find ourselves in a situation that we're trying to make smart decisions or we're trying to think or we're trying to do anything, our emotions actually determine and dictate the way we perceive the world. So there's a concept called affective realism, which means that our affect, which is our feelings, dictate the way in which we perceive things. So if you're in a really shitty mood, you're more likely to pay attention to all the negative things that are going on in that moment. And so just to give you a sense as to how it works in the brain, I like to use the metaphor of it's like a newsroom. The brain is like a newsroom. So if you go to CNN or Fox News, depending on where you go, there's billions of different news stories that they could focus on on any one day. But Fox News will pick, let's say, 10 news stories. So let's say CNN picks 10 news stories. Much of the time, the two news stories will be very different to each other, right? For obvious reasons. Once they've picked the news stories, then they will have the angle of those news stories. In other words, they will tell the narrative or the story of those news stories, and they will construct that in that way. Now, from a brain's perspective, our brain, depending on the state we're in, depending on how we feel, will dictate where we place our attention. So just like they select the stories, our brain selects the stories. So if you feel miserable, then your brain will start to see everything, every reason why you should feel miserable. If you're anxious or worried as a startup founder, you're not sure this is gonna work, your brain will point your focus towards every possible way this could get screwed up. And the more you see that, the more it will then craft stories once again aligned with how you feel at this moment in time. So your brain operates very like this newsroom and it has like edit, an editorial team, which is fueled by the emotion dictating what the researchers go ahead and find and what the journalists then go ahead and write. And that can then form into the kind of beliefs that we hold at that moment in time. And there's different networks that are in the brain. There's the salience network, which is like kind of like the research part of the brain where we're looking out to try to find information about what's going on. There's the default mode network, which is the network that happens whenever we're not focusing on a task. Our brain is telling stories about who we are and how we represent ourselves to the world and our identity. And then you've also the executive network, which is what we do whenever we logically reason or rationalize through things. But the default mode network, the stories we tell and the feelings that we feel are the editorial team dictating what's going on in the rest of the world. And when we understand that, the beauty is it allows us to go, hang on a second, when I'm in this state, we're able to check ourselves and go, okay, how am I feeling right now? And how is this distorting the way in which I'm interpreting things? So if you're a startup founder and you're starting to doubt yourself, or you're starting to panic, or you're starting to feel anxious, just labeling those has been shown to decrease the activity in the amygdala, right? So the more specific you get in describing exactly how you're feeling, the less likely that is to negatively impact you. So you're actually reducing how bad it feels the more specifically you label it. And that's a simple technique. It's called emotional granularity. The more granular or specific you make it, but it also allows us to separate ourselves from it so we can go, okay, I need to make a better decision. And I need to think through this differently than just allowing myself to get caught up with the emotions or feelings.

So fascinating. I know from meditation practice is when you come up with something in your mind is to refocus on your breath, but then there's a structure you can use. It's thinking or feeling and then naming what it is. And in that process, combining with the breathing allows you to get back to regulated breathing and forget it and let that pass in a way that is constructive. You still acknowledge that it's there, but don't let it overwhelm you because if that's stimulated, then you have an emotional response, which then stimulates it even further again. And I openly talked about this earlier in the year. I had a really tough few months and I, I saw that negativity decline where everything, even small things impacted me that it was, became overwhelming because everything felt like it was catastrophic. I'd rather be able to step outside of it, take it on face value for what it is, acknowledge it. Deal with it and then move on.

And the most important thing I think of all of that, Andy Walsh, is, and this is what really helps me, 'cause I'll struggle with my mental health every now and then. What really helps me to make it so I don't like find myself in a funk for a long amount of time is again, going back to the concept of inner propaganda. The way I think about it is that it's not that I have an inner critic that's negative, that I have negative thought and I have positive thought, is that whenever I think a negative thought, it feels like it's true. Feels like this is a fact. And the more that we recognize we've got more like an inner dictator, right? The more we realize this inner dictator is spitting inner propaganda, the more you just know that, the less it's going to impact you, the less you're going to find yourself getting caught up in it, and the more you're going to be in control. And I think that's a really critical piece to the puzzle is that we need to make it so that we don't fall into this trap. We're able to hold ourselves back and go, hang on a second. No matter how true it feels, what I'm going through right now, it's a liar, right? And the more you're able to distance yourself and your, what the technique you shared does that, the more it gives you the chance to go, okay, I know I can't trust myself right now. Therefore, let's just take whatever action I know I need to take. And then when this cloud passes, then maybe I'll be able to see through it.

Love that. And another podcast that I was listening to, and they were talking about gratitude and the essence of the whole thing was that by writing down positive things in your life, and it can be the most smallest things, but doing that for as little as 2 weeks up to 4 weeks can rewire the brain so you're more glass half full rather than glass half empty. Is that connected to what you're talking about there?

Yeah, because what you're doing is you're training yourself to be focusing that, like Brené Brown talks about this. She talks about how we, you know, she quoted someone where she talked about how the first thing you think of in the morning is You know, I didn't get enough sleep. And the last thing you think of at night is I didn't get enough done. And so there's a very sort of strong sense of scarcity that we have in our life where we're trained or our brains are oriented towards all the things we don't have. So even if you're doomscrolling, looking at your friend in, you know, in the Hamptons enjoying themselves, then you think to yourself, I wish I was there. So instead of going, great, they're enjoying it, you go, oh, well, I'm not there. I miss it. Oh, why do I have to work? And you find yourself in there. When you start to, let's say, have a habit or build a habit where you're focusing on what do I have to feel grateful for? And the key is specificity. So you don't go, what do I have to feel grateful for? And say, I have to feel grateful for my family because it means nothing unless you go in and you go, I feel grateful for my parents. I feel grateful for my partner. And not just that, I feel grateful for the way in which my partner greets me when I go home, or I feel grateful for the way in which my mother makes me this whenever I visit, or I feel grateful for the way my father gives me advice, like something specific that we find. You train yourself to start to pay more attention to that. So you're actually getting your brain to start to input more of the kind of information that you need. So it's a little bit like eating healthy. Whatever you, if you eat healthy foods, then your body's gonna be more likely to be healthy. If you eat junk food, your body's more likely to be, you know, not healthy. And so the same is true of our mind. And so what are we taking in? And when you're doomscrolling Facebook or Instagram or any of these social media platforms, they're not going, how can we make Andy's life happier? How can we make Andy happier and more satisfied with life? No, of course not. That's not going to produce more business. If you're happy and satisfied with life, well, you're less likely to doomscroll, right? We do that for the dopamine fix. And so what they're optimizing for is attention and they get your attention by grabbing it with things like surprise, but often with anger, with fury, with fear. All of those are things that provoke us to want to be able to consume because we wanna know what's happening next. Uh, desire as well, of course. But once more, the goal is addiction, cuz when you're using it all the time, your attention's there and that's able to be monetized. And again, we could argue about that and say that's wrong and say it's unfair. What are we going to do? Right? Maybe we'll be able to make a difference or influence, but I prefer taking control over what I can do.

Yeah.

And that means understanding how I'm being influenced in the first place.

There's a guy, his name is Ben Crow. He was a personal coach working with professional athletes, did a lot in tennis. And he has a lot of really beautiful ways of separating people from their careers and a little saying, human being versus human doing. And having strength of character, who you are, the purpose that you have, what people know you for outside of the sport that you play. For me, attached to what you're talking about and identity and finding those things in who you are, because mental health for founders is really tough. I would love to look at tools, things that we can do from a proactive standpoint. Some of those negative thoughts can come from everywhere, but if you're making quick decisions and you're thinking about, okay, I've got the fire hose in my mouth, there's all these things that are stressing me out. And you've got to make quick decisions. So the intervention part of how do you actually just take a minute rather than feel like you have to be instantaneous with a decision? What are the things you can do to slow yourself down and build out some sort of framework to make decisions, to make sure you're being as objective as possible?

So I think first of all, there's a great example from the Cold War in 1980, I think it was 1983, Stanislav Petrov. Was this Russian engineer that was working in a sort of a Soviet base and his job was to be able to inform the chain of command to, you know, if there was ever an attack from the Americans to be able to tell them so that they could retaliate. And so there was 5 nuclear missiles that all of a sudden the alarms went off. There was 5 nuclear missiles that they noticed above and everyone looked to Petrov cuz he was in charge. He was supposed to, you know, signaling, but instead of doing that, he paused and he didn't make the call and he waited. And then eventually it turned out that these were like, I think there were some sort of shadows or there was some sort of, it was something to do with light hitting off them and it caused this hallucination of these 5 things. But we could have been in World War III if he didn't pause. So the question is, why did he pause and why would most people not? And the main thing was he was trained as an engineer. And when you're trained as an engineer, you learn to discern, you learn to challenge assumptions, you learn to challenge your thinking. And so to go back to the technique, one of the most important things we can do is to ask ourselves questions like, how could this potentially be wrong? Or does this make sense? Does this logically make sense? And if, if so, what would I need to know in order for me to increase my certainty? How sure am I from 0 to 100? 100 being I would give my life for it, 0 being I haven't got a clue. How sure are we and what are we prepared? What level of certainty are we prepared to make a decision on? And when you start to think it like that, like I love Annie Duke in a great book called Thinking in Bets. She's a former poker professional and psychology professor. One of the things she says is, let's say for example, you say, I believe in something. If I say, how much would you bet that's true? Now, if you have to put a number to whether or not you believe in something, you're a lot more careful in what you say you believe in, right? So if I say, you know, you say to me, this, this is the most, this is the best team in the world, right? And I go to you, okay, so how sure are you of that? How much money would you put on this team winning the World Cup? Now, all of a sudden, you're not as sure as you might have been beforehand. And so the same is true of this evaluation from a 0 to 100. What is your level of certainty in it? And so what Petrov did in that moment is he looked at the situation and what was going on, and he said, does this make sense? And he asked himself the question, does this make sense? And he thought, if the Americans were actually bombing us, they wouldn't send 5 missiles. That's, it's insane. They would send all of the missiles to destroy us. They wouldn't send 5. 5 is not enough. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't res— it doesn't resonate. And so he asked questions like that because he was looking for why it might not be true as opposed to looking for why it's probably true. And I think that's the most important skill is to go, okay, how much do I believe that in this at the moment from a 0 to 100 and what would need to happen for it to go higher? And then at what point will I actually make the decision? And so that's one. And then the second one would be in terms of our beliefs. If you write out the assumptions you have, you can do what I call a belief audit. And just a very simple version of belief audit is a lot of people go with the belief audit and they go, okay, what's your belief? And then you go, where, where's your evidence for the belief? But that's the wrong question. 'Cause you can always find evidence to back up your belief. We are remarkably good bullshitters. So instead what you do is you go, what's my belief? How is, how useful is that? In other words, what am I trying to achieve by believing this? And is it actually allowing me to achieve what I want? So is this belief actually serving me? And then if it's not, what belief is better? So what belief might help me to make a smarter, better, more rational decision in this context? And those are just a couple of examples of exercises, but they're quite easy to do because it just, you know, it's simple thought experiments. But by doing so, it allows us to move away from this notion where we're so caught up in the content. And so caught up in the stories that we're selling to ourselves, 'cause really, you know, our identity is just a story. Just to give you one more extra sort of bonus technique, there's a concept that I use called the antifragile identity. And this is based on a concept by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called antifragile, things that gain from adversity or disorder. So whenever you throw a glass at a wall, it's fragile. The opposite to that, uh, sorry, whenever you throw a glass at the wall and it's fragile, it breaks. Yeah. The opposite of that is you throw a glass at the wall and somehow it becomes stronger. So some things get stronger whenever they're, you know, exposed to adversity. So the antifragile identity is the way I see as sort of an overlap between who you are and who you want to be. It's that you see yourself as the kind of person that no matter what happens, it helps you to get better. So whatever you go through, whatever mistakes you make, that serves to help you to get better. And there's a beauty in this because it means that you are pretty much impossible to defeat because you're constantly learning, you're constantly growing, you're constantly developing, and nothing is going to get you because you don't see yourself as the finished product. A lot of times people go, I'm not sure if I'm good enough. Well, what does good enough mean? It's a redundant question. It may— it's nonsense. Because if you say, am I good enough? All you're doing is creating some sort of arbitrary comparison to figure out whether or not you are this or that. And that's just the story that you're telling yourself. And instead, when you start to see yourself as the kind of person who can improve, who can get better, and no matter what happens, all of it serves to make you better, then you can't be defeated.

Love it. There's a phrase I use called thinking like a scientist, which encapsulates what you're saying, which is that an outcome that's negative or outside the level of significance is still progress because you're getting closer to the one that is, right? Process of elimination, a reframe in doing it. Quick little synopsis on the book. Well, we've covered, I assume, what is a lot of content in there. Can you talk us through what people expect and what they would walk away with after finishing the book?

So the book is called Inner Propaganda, and it's pretty much an exploration of everything from my own experience. You know, I start off with my own mental health experience that changed everything for me. I tell a lot of stories to do with a lot of business stories, some startup stories, stories from World War II, a brilliant story about this guy who's a true story about this spy during World War II that won the Iron Cross from Germany and got a knighthood from the British Empire at the same time. It's one of the most interesting things, and he actually shows up right the way through the book. Some, you know, stories from Irish history. But all of it comes down to blending it with science to be able to figure out fundamentally why do we believe what we believe and how do they change. And it comes through 3 main elements of the framework, which is in order for belief to change, number 1, it must feel right. Number 2, it must fit in with who we are, our identity. And only then does it move to the third gate, which is to make sense. And make it sense is unfortunately where we all go. We all go, I'm gonna convince Andy of this by giving him all of this logic and reasoning., but it just doesn't work that way. If I want to change anyone's mind, I need to make sure that my idea feels right, fits in with who you are, and only then will it make sense for you. And so that's really the concept. It's available in bookstores across the United States. It's for more information on it, innerpropaganda.com is the website to go to. And I'm at owenfitzbattery.com. I'm also on LinkedIn as as well if anyone's interested in following along. I have a newsletter and a podcast also called Inner Propaganda. So that's pretty much the bones of it.

Oh, and Fitzpatrick, this has been such a treat for me. I love this topic and nowhere near as immersed as you are, but 30 years wrapped up in one book sounds appealing. So look forward to getting a copy myself.

Thank you so much, Andy. Appreciate it. And hopefully all the listeners found it useful.

Absolutely. Thanks for listening to Startups Decoded. If today's conversation helped you think differently, share it with a founder in your network. And don't forget to subscribe for real-world startup insights every week. We really value your support. If you're interested in partnering with us, email hello@startupsdecoded.com. I'm Andy Walsh. I'll see you next week.