Thought Leaders

It's another summer select episode of Ed's favorites! This week, hear from some of the podcasting industry's top minds. Folks like Scott Galloway, Kara Swisher, Jad Abumrad, Adam Grant, Kelly Corrigan, and more. Witness how their brains analyze and envision important cultural events, past and future, in ways both awe-inspiring and hilarious. Tune in for our montage episode of SNAFU's Best "Thought Leaders". See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:23Speaker 04

  Hello, Snafu listeners. I've been pondering the world's deepest questions. Why are we here? Who will win the World Cup later this week? What is the meaning of life? Are La Boo Boo's always going to be popular, or is it just like a 2025 thing? And if so, what's the new La Boo Boo of 2026? Is there a chance I could make an Ed Boo Boo? You know what? No. Anywho, the people who do the real cognitive acrobatics, the real critical ponderers, those are the folks that get me really thinking the most. People like Adam Grant, Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway, Kelly Corrigan, or one of my oldest buddies, Jadabumrat. The best part

• 2:06Speaker 04

  is, all of those folks appeared on Snafu this season, and they Blew me away with their adept insights and quick witticisms. The way these folks interpret and evaluate snafus, it's really cool. It's eye opening and incredibly insightful and also at times extremely funny. So this week, I'm really excited to share a few of my favorite moments with our favorite thought leaders. Enjoy.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Kelly Gorogin Wonders is a phenomenal podcast, which I highly recommend. You're five years in, over 700 episodes. The format of the show, it's basically a masterclass in human curiosity. In like exploring what makes us tick, what we fear and love and how we cope. And I'm just curious, after all of that deep listening, do you feel any closer to the the secret of living a good life? Or, or is there anything like some crazy counterintuitive revelation about the human condition that you've landed on?

• 3:15Speaker 05

  More that sometimes when you're listening to someone, a guest on the show, they synthesize things in such a memorable way that it's almost like I've sort of known this, I've sort of intuited this my whole life, but now you just put the words on it. So two that come to mind are this, we had this neuroscientist on named Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's some top 1% scientist cited worldwide. So in any discipline, so she's really respected. And she has a great book called How Emotions Are Made, and that's what we were talking about. And the line she said was, "The best thing for a human central nervous system is another human central nervous system.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  And the worst thing for a human central nervous system is another human central nervous system."

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Damn it.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  So pick your human central nervous systems wisely.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  And that's the feeling that you get. I mean, that's what happened when we first met, really, is my central nervous system and your central nervous system kind of rubbed up against each other and it was like, oh, this is a good.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that's a lot of pressure when you're like on the life partner choices. That's like, oh, geez, I better get this right.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, this other guest said that we're an average of the five people we spend the most time with.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  And so that's sort of a related thought. And then this other guest said that listening is so close to love that most people can't tell the difference.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  And so if you kind of glue those all together, you get some clarity about like who you're looking for out there. And you're looking for people who can be still, who can listen, who can take it in.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  And that's the central nervous system that's going to work for you. And that's the central nervous system that's going to make you better.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  I love that because I've always felt that profound insights are things that we hear that were like these aha moments. They feel like aha moments, right? They feel like things that like, oh, my God, what a revelation. I now understand that better. But you're really just, it's already, it's actually just affirming something that you already felt. The only reason it's an aha moment is because you know that it's true the second you hear it, because it resonates with something already in you. And to, and I just, I love that because it speaks to this like, kind of like grand human intuition that we all share and that we all could be, we all understand these fundamental truths.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  Yes. And that intuition is being developed and honed by knowledge. You know what you feel from podcasting that you're just full of so much more information to draw from? Like, I feel like my inputs in the last five years have gone through the roof.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  I love that podcasting has emerged as such a vital medium in our culture now because it feels like an antidote to, to social media. It feels like an antidote to all of the, the just like crazy, flashy, quick, disposable stuff. Yes, to your point, it has provided a great scaffolding for my curiosity and connection with so many cool people like yourself. I see this as basically the collision of two very primal emotions. It's rage versus fear. You have the workers raging about inequality and then, of course, elites are afraid of losing their status and their fancy things. Is this dynamic just baked into capitalism? Or is there a better way?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Is socialism kind of trying to have both sides?

• 6:47Speaker 06

  Oh, I think, I mean, Scott, well, Scott can talk more about this because he talks about sort of the rage. But one of the things, I just interviewed Bernie Sanders. He was very, he was very good. He was very mad about the oligarchs. He has a book called Fighting Oligarchy. So I think this isn't a new thing. But one of the things that's important to keep in mind is that it's usually preceded by an area where lots of people get really rich, like really, really rich. And we're in that. And many years ago, when this income inequality started to really, and then the tech people are the new winners, essentially, the tech moguls, when they started to get ahead, I went to one of them and I said, "We have a real problem with income inequality." You could see the numbers, the minimum wage hadn't been, hadn't been rising.

• 7:30Speaker 06

  And I said, "You're either going to have to deal with the inequality and give people a better wage, like solve it, or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla." And I looked at him and I realized he wanted to armor plate his Tesla. That was okay. Like, they, they thought that they had gotten all their money by their own doing and not by, helped by the government, et cetera. And they didn't care about people and you could see that.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, if I were to try and think of one piece of data that explains the epicenter of many of our problems, it would be the following. For the first time in our 275-year history, a 30-year-old American isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. And that not only keeps, creates rage and shame among a young group of people who are more likely to pick up guns, specifically young men, it creates rage and shame across the household. The algorithm or the pattern you're referring to plays out over and over in a capitalist society and it's the following. A group of very talented, very hardworking, and very lucky people gather a disproportionate amount of assets. And then we talk ourselves into believing that it is patriotic and not a bad thing

• 8:37Speaker 04

  to create tax policy, legislative policy, and regulatory capture such that corporations can have their lowest taxes since 1939 now, such that the 26 wealthiest families in America pay an average tax rate of 6%. That is now. Bad news about income inequality is it always happens. The good news is it's always self-correcting. And more bad news, though, is that the means of correction are usually war, famine, or revolution. And I would argue that as revolutions take on new complexion, we're in the midst of a series of small revolutions. Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement were both righteous movements that had real justifiable components, but they weren't going after the sexual harasser owner of a taco truck. They weren't going after someone who was racist in a small company.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  They were going after rich people. And at some point, when the bottom 52% of America have the same amount of wealth as Elon Musk, they figure out that the fastest way to double their wealth is to go after that person. And that's where we are. We are having a series of small revolutions to try and correct income inequality. Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  Heavy.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  That's a good break.

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Heavy.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  That's heavy. It's a good breakdown.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  And people are getting it. I'm sort of shocked we haven't had much more of a revolution or anger over money.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  The crazy thing is that back in 1919, these workers were in like really horrendous conditions and still trying to make it work. But it's sort of, it's all relative, right? It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what, like what the actual conditions might be. It's the disparity itself that is so, that just feels so off. Well, that's a, that's a great, that's a great point. Just to interrupt you because if you, there's something to the notion, and this is true, this is a true statement. A middle-class person right now is living better than the richest person on the planet 100 years ago.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  And middle-class, Mississippi is our poorest state. It has a higher household income than the UK or Germany or France. So America is actually, you could correctly say a middle-class person in the US is thriving and doing really well. But that's not how the human brain works. The human brain sees 210 times a day that if they're not on a Gulfstream or don't have a boyfriend with ripped abs, that they're failing. And also, they're living with roommates because they, the price of a home went from $290 to $420,000 during COVID because we flushed the market with so much stimulus because me or you or Kara getting less wealthy would be a crime, greater than a million people dying.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  And the natural cycle of redistributing income and destroying capital during crises that cedes economic advantage back from the capital owners to labor, we didn't allow happen. And what was most criminal about it was we used their credit card to pay for our incumbency. So these people, you know, you can understand, people say, young people are entitled. No, they're not. They're entitled to be enraged. And you have just this incredible shifting of economic prosperity and they're reminded several hundred times a day on their phones that they're failing. So try to tell, it's like the mistake Democrats made trying to tell people inflation's not that bad. Well, okay, it feels that bad to me. And I also want to be clear, this is a bipartisan issue.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  What Trump has effectively done really well is like, okay, Republicans and Republican donors, I'm going to divide up TikTok, I'm going to give you AI legislation that makes you richer. And Democrats who are really rich and hold the power, there's a really uncomfortable silence, a conspiracy that says, don't get too angry because you're going to make bank if you're a rich Democrat. And one of the most disappointing things about this is good Democrats who are in positions of powers have been fucking silent on all of this. Why? Because stop, stop, it hurts so good. My taxes are going down.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  I would agree. Yeah, absolutely. Brutal. And also, you know, it's often at the expense of the young toward the old. And, you know, you see it in Congress where they're, you know, antiquated and they're making rules that benefit the top groups.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  That story has all the things, Ed.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  That is something. I liked how you kind of, right at the Connecticut moment, you spun it into a sort of clue knives out whodunit kind of situation. They lived large back then, you know? They explored large, they poisoned large, they beefed pretty large. It's a, I feel like our lives are soft and small by comparison, although maybe we're better for it, you know? That's quite a tale.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  What I love about this story and what I loved about it for you in particular was how science is part of the murder mystery.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  And I always loved how Radiolab episodes would unpack a narrative, whether it was a mystery, whether it was even a science-based narrative. Very often, science was part of the, if not the, sort of mechanism of discovery in Radiolab episodes.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  It speaks to the power of science, both from just a research standpoint. I mean, here's a guy at Dartmouth, this Loomis professor, he's just writing a biography. And it turns out, oh, I've got reason to suspect he was murdered. We're going to go dig him up and run these tests on him. And lo and behold, all this new evidence emerges. And there's just no end to what we can learn when science is applied in the right ways and with creativity.

• 14:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. What I was thinking about as you were talking was the way science has changed over the years, right? There was a period in the 19th century, really in the precise moment that this story is unfolding, where what it meant to be a scientist, it was this kind of...

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Kind of like the era of the gentleman scientist where they would get on a boat and sail to a new land and they would collect species. And then they would create these cabinets of curiosities of butterflies and birds and, you know, all kinds of marsupials. And, and there's something sort of imperial about it.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  There's such an abundance and they're grabbing from the land and, and really collecting and trying to outdo each other. But on the other hand, there is just this kind of wonderful sense of openness and discovery of like, the world is full of things that might seem magical, but we, through inquiry and a method, will, will demystify them. And we can, there's a sense of like a naive sense that we can know everything.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And it's interesting to juxtapose that in a split screen in your mind to where we are now, where there's, science has never been more robust and there's so much. I mean, my mother, just as a personal example, has been studying one protein for 40 something years at this point.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  In what capacity as a?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  As a biologist.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  She discovered, or not discovered, I mean, it was there, but she kind of came to know this protein, brought it to the world's attention, and has been studying it every day for 40 years. And like, that's what science is now. It's just like unbelievable rigor and dedication and discipline. And yet you're in this like Maha moment.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Science's kind of hold on the truth has been a bit marginalized. But, you know, I say to myself, I know I'm spinning myself into a cul-de-sac here. I say to myself, you know, science was always one way of knowing the world and it's not the only way. And now all the different ways have to compete. And maybe that's, maybe that's where we are.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Very well said. I, I think, yeah, that the, the sort of magic of, of science is getting confused with the.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  The magic of wellness stories that make you feel good. Wellness narratives that grossly oversimplify and just kind of give us that endorphin rush. But good science, hard science, disciplined science also provides that. It's just a lot harder and it's a lot harder to consume. In 1907, Ponzi landed in Montreal and scored a job as an assistant teller at a small bank serving Italian immigrants. And it was there that he witnessed the original model of the scam he would later perfect. His boss, Luigi Zorosi, lured depositors with absurdly generous interest rates and amazingly,

• 17:29Speaker 04

  he would pay them, of course, by funneling new deposits straight to the earlier investors. It was a beautifully unsustainable system. So when the bank inevitably crashed and Zorosi bolted for Mexico to avoid accountability, Ponzi was left behind unemployed, but newly educated in the fine art of financial tomfoolery. Now, most of us would look at this whole mess and think, okay, well, that backfired. Maybe crime doesn't pay. What can you tell us about the psychology of someone who definitely does not learn that lesson? In fact, sort of learns the opposite lesson of like, here's more opportunity.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  I mean, is, do you see like sociopathy at play? Or is it just sort of that healthy or maybe unhealthy ego with a kind of rules don't apply swagger? I mean, how dark is that? So there are three traits that would normally predict being attracted to that kind of, that kind of scheme. And psychologists call them the dark triad. And you hit on one of them pretty closely, anyway. There being a narcissist, being Machiavellian and being a psychopath. Hmm. And I think we're probably talking about Machiavellianism here more than we are being a narcissist or a psychopath or sociopath.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Because what this kind of scheme is really about is it's about manipulating other people and using them for personal gain. And you don't have to have a giant inflated ego to want to do that. You don't have to feel no empathy for other people. You just have to be a little bit callous around feeling like, you know what? I can, I can use other people a little bit. And in fact, I think part of the appeal of a Ponzi scheme is you look at that and you say, well, you know, if I can keep it going, actually, I'm going to profit and no one else is going to get hurt because each, like each, each former investor is going to get their money back because of a new one. And so all I have to do is perpetuate it. And, you know, I'm just, I'm exploiting a loophole in the system. I'm not exploiting people so much.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  And I think if you tell yourself that story, you probably sleep at night and it doesn't, it doesn't require much more than a little bit of Machiavellianism. The scale of his operation, that's what's so mind blowing is that like the buy-in from so many different people, like the eagerness to want, like the desire for this to be true is, and for this all to be like a functioning, healthy way to make money.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  It's like the things we can force ourselves to believe, like he's the perpetrator, Ponzi or Bernie Madoff, like they're the perpetrators. They're either deluding themselves or they're just like criminals or whatever they're, whatever's going on with them. I mean, there's the investors who are just pure victims, but then there are people who are in the organization, right? They're in the running of these things and they have to have a sense of like, this is, this doesn't add up. Or it's just like, I'm going to keep my head in the sand. I'm not going to, like this spreadsheet looks weird to me, but I'm just not going to ask because boy, it feels good to trust this like nice old man Bernie, who's just

• 20:49Speaker 04

  seems to know, who's been venerated by the great financial institutions for decades. There are terms that have been coined to describe what happens to a lot of people in the orbit of a Ponzi or a Madoff. Bandura called it moral disengagement. Ten Bronzel and Messick have called it ethical fading, where you just, you stop.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  Applying a principled lens to the situation you're in because other people are accepting it and you assume, well, you know, surely these are not bad people. I see them, you know, they're decent parents and partners and caring bosses and, you know, they couldn't be doing anything bad. And you lose sight of the lines that are being crossed. I think that that could be part of what's happening in their orbit. And maybe the other piece of this is, I was thinking about Maria Konikova, a psychologist turned poker champ, who wrote a book called The Confidence Game. And there's a quote in that book that shook me. Maria wrote, "The true con artist doesn't force us to do anything. He makes us complicit

• 21:55Speaker 05

  in our own undoing."

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Adam, what are you and I complicit in right now that we have no idea is part of our undoing?

• 22:03Speaker 05

  I really hope nothing, but, you know, just thinking about what happens to the early employees and the early clients. They start to recruit other people into the scheme.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  You try to get your friends hired at this great company. You try to get your, you know, your family to invest in this, you know, this fund with incredible returns. And pretty soon, you have a strong incentive to see no evil.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  I want to bring this into the present moment a little bit. I love digging into this story because of how hyper relevant it feels today in the age of internet scammers and just this sort of like new generation of con artists that have emerged. I mean, it's funny to think of Charles Ponzi as perhaps now him being like an Instagram influencer, you know, who's just like taking people in. But here's just a few stats. The FBI reported that Americans lost $16.6 billion to online scams, which is a 33% increase from 2023. Do you think that there is also a way that sort of the online distance from a con artist?

• 23:15Speaker 04

  And like us, when we're in our own bubble and we don't have other people to sort of cross-reference with or bounce an idea off of, does that, does the solitary nature of internet interaction make us additionally more vulnerable or less vulnerable? Or, I mean, it does seem like the internet is just a cesspool of scam. Yeah, I would love to see some data on this. I have not seen a good analysis. I think, I have a similar hunch to yours, which is the isolation can make it really easy to fall for a scam. I think the other piece of it is, you're missing some of the cutes that would normally,

• 24:00Speaker 04

  you know, sort of, you know, even if you didn't recognize them consciously, you know, you interact with a con artist face to face and you start to get a gut feeling sometimes, like, I don't quite trust this person, I don't know why, but, you know, maybe, maybe I should verify, or maybe I should, you know, wait a little bit. And you're just deprived of a lot of those cues over the internet. Sometimes you don't even know if it's a human or a bot that's, you know, that's pitching you. And so I think that, that probably makes it harder for people to use whatever intuition they have around judging people's trustworthiness. What's the, what's the New Yorker cartoon on the internet? No one knows you're a dog? Yeah, of course.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Well, that's more of a catfish joke, no? But I guess it's, I guess it works here just as well. This app was building a surprisingly detailed dossier on you, your psychology, and that of your entire digital entourage. Question, do you think that the average American at that time had any sense of how this kind of personal information that everyone was sharing just exhaustively could be turned against them? Or were we just high on digital narcissism? No, I mean, an American, Americans are very interesting in that they will-

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Say that privacy is very important to them, but they will give up their privacy for almost anything. Right? It's like they will tell you, you know, that they they don't want to, you know, put the name of their children online. But if it got them 10% off at Ross Dress for Less, they will absolutely give you all that and more. So companies are always sort of doing this weird dance where they're trying to get you to reveal as much as they possibly can without it accidentally blowing up in their face. Well, and this was also an era that was called sort of the Open Graph era of Facebook. Basically, they were trying to turn Facebook from an app where you would go and, you know, stalk your crushes from college or whatever

• 26:03Speaker 04

  to a platform where other apps could build things. There were apps like Farmville that you could play inside Facebook. You could use Facebook to log into Spotify or any other number of services. And that was part of this quiz push was like you could build things on top of Facebook. And then Facebook would actually send some of that data to the developers of the quizzes. This was the same protocol, the same process that they use to connect people with Farmville Games and Spotify. The best case use of that data would just be for that app to reach more users?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Or at this point, what's their reason for being just so give and take with this data? So Facebook used to have this very permissive, what they call an API, an application programming interface. It's essentially just a piece of software that lets other pieces of software talk to each other. And there was a time when Facebook invested really heavily in that because they wanted essentially every other software to connect whatever they were building to Facebook. Facebook thought this is the way that We are going to grow and take over the world is essentially everything runs through this. And the way that Facebook was able to attract so many of those people to its platforms was by saying, we will give you data that you can't get anywhere else, right?

• 27:30Speaker 04

  There aren't a lot of other places where you can go if you're a legitimate researcher, a shady researcher, somebody who's making a mobile game and immediately get not just my name and my email address and my phone number, but also at the time, the names of all of my friends and their phone numbers and their email addresses. So for people like the ones who wound up building the app that led to Cambridge Analytica, this was a goldmine. It was an absolute bonanza and it really benefited Facebook until it didn't. And do you think we've gotten, just back to that initial question about how, you know, we share information online, have we gotten any better at this? Or, I mean, Casey, I love your analogy, like if we get a discount on something, we're just like, yeah, take whatever you, whatever you want.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Here's, here's my mother's maiden name, but are we just that lazy? Like we're just, our brains are just wired for heuristics, like we just want the shortcuts everywhere? I think there have been some major changes and you can see it when you log on to social media, right? You used to log on to Facebook and Instagram and you see your friends and family. Now you see a clip from a podcast you've never heard of, right? And that's, you know, has several causes behind it, but one of the big ones is that Americans are sharing less. The whole bargain that they struck with Facebook of, hey, I'll give you all my information in exchange for you keeping up on the divorces of my high school classmates. That bargain doesn't feel like that's as good anymore. And so all the real sharing is happening in these private group chats and all the public stuff is kind of more,

• 28:58Speaker 04

  you know, creator content and, you know, celebrities and all of that. So in that respect, I really do think things have changed. Now, at the same time, can I get you to give up? If I give you something of relatively low value, yes, I think that is still broadly the case across, you know, many different dimensions.

• 29:16Speaker 06

  Well, and I also think like AI has become the sort of next frontier of this because people are sharing all kinds of stuff with chatbots. People are having therapy sessions. They're confessing their crimes. They're like, people are doing, people are having these conversations that are very intimate in some cases. And I don't think they know or particularly care what's happening to that data on the other end.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Wow. Yeah, we, I don't, I don't know. I just, I've gotten much more anxious about this over the last few years.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  What kinds of crimes are you doing, Ed?

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Well, I mean, the stuff I've already told to ChatGPT, it's all, that's all just in the murder category.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special

• 30:45Speaker 04

  thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

• 31:18Speaker 01

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.