How to Take Smarter Risks in Life & The Lies You Tell Yourself

You’ve probably seen the warning on your passenger-side car mirror: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” Which raises an obvious question: Why put a mirror on your car that deliberately distorts reality? Turns out there is a very good reason—and that distortion may actually help keep you safe. https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/why-objects-in-mirror-closer-than-they-appear.htm We hear all the time that the world has become a riskier place and that the smart thing to do is play it safe. But is that really true? And what do you give up when avoiding risk becomes your default? Economist Allison Schrager explains why younger people appear more risk-averse than previous generations, why safety has a price, and how to tell the difference between a foolish gamble and a risk actually worth taking. Allison is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion. She is author of Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths That Keep Us from Taking the Chances We Need to Take (https://link.amazon/B0cRfL4UU). Right now, there are things you believe about yourself that feel like undeniable facts. Maybe you believe you’re bad at something, that certain people don’t like you, or that you simply aren’t the kind of person who can do certain things. But what if some of those “facts” aren’t facts at all? They may be what social psychologist Owen Fitzpatrick calls inner propaganda—stories your mind has repeated so often that you’ve come to accept them as truth. Owen explains why this inner propaganda can be so convincing and, most importantly, how to recognize it and challenge it. He has studied propaganda around the world, including in North Korea, and his TEDx talk on mind control has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. His latest book is Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times (https://link.amazon/B0aZRzMzg). Cats are missing the ability to taste something humans often find irresistible. Oddly enough, cats can also taste something that we can't. Neither is an accident. The explanation goes back to what cats evolved to eat—and offers a fascinating little glimpse into just how differently your cat experiences its dinner. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-cats-taste-no-sweets/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS MONARCH: Write your own money story with Monarch! Use promo code SYSK at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Monarch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get your 1st year of Monarch Core half off at just $50 AQUATRU: Head to ⁠https:AquaTru.com⁠ and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK, with a 30 day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back! TREES. COM: Right now, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Trees.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% OFF their purchase when using the promo code SYSK at checkout. VINTED: Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing! With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the US on Vinted. WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Find your next Fall favorites at Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts! INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

  I thought I had a pretty good idea of where my money was going. And then I started using Monarch. And it turns out, there's a big difference between thinking, you know, and actually seeing it all laid out in front of you. I've spent some time with Monarch now. I've connected everything and really tested it out. And I like it a lot. Your accounts, investments, savings goals, spending, they're all there in one place. But what really got my attention is Monarch doesn't just show you what's happened. It helps you spot what's happening right now. They have an AI weekly recap, and it can flag a spending spike or a change in your net worth or upcoming expenses,

• 0:44Mike Carruthers?

  things that are surprisingly easy to miss on your own. And I found that once you actually see the numbers, you look at your money differently. If you've ever wondered, where exactly is all my money going? I think you'll find Monarch pretty eye opening. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SYSK at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code SYSK.

• 1:22Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, why are objects in that mirror closer than they appear? What's the point there? Then, we are taking fewer risks than in any time in history.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  It is starting to come at a cost. I've been talking to some neurologists about this, that if you grow up not taking the risks you're supposed to as a kid, a lot of sort of brain development doesn't happen. And that might be why we're seeing more risk aversion amongst young people.

• 1:51Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why your cat can never enjoy dessert like you do. And you understand what propaganda is, but do you know about inner propaganda?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Inner propaganda is really a set of stories that we sell to ourselves that become the beliefs that we buy into. Our brain is optimizing for what it's interested in, which is survival and stability. And the problem is, because it's our brain, therefore, we don't even challenge it.

• 2:17Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:42Mike Carruthers?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 4:11Mike Carruthers?

  I'm sure you've seen that warning on your car's rearview mirrors a million times. It says, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." But have you ever asked yourself, "Why?" Well, that's what we're going to start with today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So why would carmakers deliberately install a mirror that makes you misjudge distance and then put a warning on it that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear? Well, it's because the passenger side mirror is curved outward. And that curvature makes cars behind you look smaller and therefore farther away. But there's an important payoff.

• 4:53Mike Carruthers?

  You can see a much wider area next to and behind your car. A flat mirror would give you a more accurate sense of distance, but a much bigger blind spot. So engineers deliberately trade accurate distance perception for a wider field of vision. So that little warning on the mirror is essentially saying, "We distorted reality a bit because it makes you safer." And that is something you should know.

• 5:23Mike Carruthers?

  Risk is one of those words that sounds like a warning. That sounds risky, usually means maybe you shouldn't do it. But think about almost anything important in life. Changing careers, investing your money, starting a business, falling in love, having a family. There's risk in all of it. And if you spend your life trying to eliminate risk, you may also eliminate a lot of opportunity. So maybe the goal isn't to avoid risk, but to get better at taking the right risks. And that may be especially important now because my guest says, "We've become increasingly risk averse, often without realizing what the caution is costing us."

• 6:08Mike Carruthers?

  Alison Schreger is an economist who studies risk. She is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, and author of the book Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths That Keep Us From Taking the Chances We Need to Take. Hey, Alison, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Hi, thanks so much for having me.

• 6:28Mike Carruthers?

  So I find it really interesting that you say, "We're taking fewer risks than we used to." How do we know that?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Well, it shows up in a lot of economic indicators. Anyway, we often feel like we're living in these fraught times and we see headlines about everyone getting addicted to sports gambling and all these things. The risks that really matter are actually in decline. We've become less likely to move. We've become less likely to change jobs. We're less likely to start a business. And all of this is showing up. And sort of lower economic growth and actually slower wage growth.

• 7:04Mike Carruthers?

  But it's a generational difference, right? It's not that overall people are taking less risks than they used to. It's just that as younger people mature, they are willing to take less risks as adults. It's a generation thing.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  We say that about every generation. And there's a reason we say that about every generation is because each generation is getting progressively more risk averse. I'm a borderline Gen Xer. And for some reason, Gen Xers have sort of grabbed this mantle that we're this amazing risk takers because we were latchkey children. But really, like, we took less risk than Boomers. And millennials took less risk than us. And Gen Z'ers take less risk. And that's partially just because as we become wealthier, as we have more technology to manage risk, we just start taking less risk. And so we see this sort of increasing risk aversion across generations. And I think it's just getting to the point, some of it's desirable. It's nice not to have a risky life. You know, I think we, in some ways, feel good

• 8:04Speaker 01

  that teenagers aren't going around causing mayhem as much anymore. But it is starting to come at a cost. Particularly, oh, I've been talking to some neurologists about this, that if you grow up not taking the risks you're supposed to as a kid, a lot of sort of brain development doesn't happen. You know, like, all these neural pathways that teach you how to be a smart risk taker as you get older just aren't there. And that might be why, anyway, we're seeing more risk aversion amongst young people. We're also seeing them, when they do take risks, not maybe taking the best ones, like, for instance, sports gambling, rather than investing in an index fund. So I think what we're seeing is this combination of people.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  It's harder to take risks. We've set up a society in a lot of ways where it is more expensive and the downsides feel more precarious. But we're also raising generations to be more risk averse. And then they feel unprepared to take on risk.

• 9:02Mike Carruthers?

  You said a moment ago that if adolescents, young people, don't take the risks they're supposed to, what are the risks they're supposed to take?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't want to endorse any bad behavior, but to some degree, a lot of it is just spending time with friends and doing stupid things. You know, not that they should be drinking and being promiscuous, but they're doing a lot less of that. They're certainly doing a lot less socializing. And it is, a lot of the risk taking does happen in groups. And, you know, this neurologist I spoke to was saying that, she's a professor at Vassar, that she sees these really under-socialized kids showing up. And then they're more likely to do, like, binge drinking because they haven't sort of taken those sort of smaller risks or more controlled risks when they were younger.

• 9:48Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, I have this sense about younger people today and the last couple of generations of younger people that they were brought up in a world where they were told to be careful. The world is a dangerous place. And, you know, when you're, when you hear that message, you are more cautious and take less risks.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, more people survive childhood now. I mean, that's good. But on the other hand, you know, there is a cost to that. There's this sort of central truth to financial markets that granted, people in financial markets like to pretend isn't true either, but we tend to delude ourselves in all areas of life, that you can, that there's no extra reward in finance without taking on more risk. And anyone who tells you differently is defrauding you or charging you a very high fee. And that's just a hard truth no one wants to accept. But it's true in life too. If you shut children out of risk, they're just going to get less out of life. And I think that might be contributing to a lot of this sort of unhappiness. Younger people are taking less risk, but they're also really unhappy.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And particularly, the sort of lack of risks around socialization is very concerning. I spoke to a professor at Tulane who was telling me she took a bunch of the girls in her class out. And they were saying they're afraid to date. And I assumed that was driven by risk aversion, mainly about being hurt or, you know, maybe even, you know, violence or whatever. And she said, "No, they're just afraid to be out on a date and have an awkward conversation with someone they don't know well." I mean, I mean, that is part of dating, unfortunately. But even that scared them.

• 11:25Mike Carruthers?

  That is so strange because you know how you get better at conversation? Having conversation?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:34Mike Carruthers?

  And so if you avoid it, you'll never get better at it. So how does that help?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  But also, yeah, I mean, a lot of the evidence for getting to be a better risk taker is, you know, it's important to take risks and have them not go well and realize, you know, it wasn't the worst thing. And then you feel better about taking risks again. So yeah, you go and you have a bad date and you realize the world doesn't end. Or you realize, okay, this is how I can save this date and keep it going by being more practiced at conversation. But they're just not getting these experiences.

• 12:02Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that is, I think what you just said is so important about risk taking that often doesn't come up in the conversation. And that is by taking risks and failing, you realize it's not so bad much of the time. I mean, some risks have huge consequences, but most everyday kind of risks, it's just not the horror you think it's going to be.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  No, but we've set up this idea. I mean, we certainly see this with especially a lot of young people, especially I live in New York and a lot of the kids in school feels so, and it might be just a social media thing, they feel like they're being watched and monitored and they feel like if they have a setback, if they make a mistake, it's going to be there forever and haunt them for the rest of their lives, rather than just adolescence is a time where you should be doing stupid things and making mistakes, saying stupid things, you know, it's part of your developmental process. But they feel so inhibited for a lot of reasons that they can't afford to do that.

• 13:02Mike Carruthers?

  I want to understand, and you're the perfect person to ask this, this idea of risks in financial markets, because my understanding, and I've read a bit about this, that it isn't as risky as people think in the long term, that yeah, things go up and down. But if you invested money in almost anything 40 years ago and diversified it, you'd be doing pretty well.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Most of the time, yes, it's certainly not a guarantee. I mean, that wouldn't be true if you invested in Japan. But often, yes, because really when you invest in the US stock market, you're investing in the US economy. So if you own almost all the stocks, you own the US economy. And if you believe the US economy is going to grow, then your stock portfolio will also grow with it. If we have a period of just economic calamity, maybe not. It's certainly not a guarantee that more time makes it safer. But especially if you diversify, again, like one of my points here is that it's not just go out and take any risk. There's a skill to risk taking.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And you know, what financial markets does and the financial field does is try to get your arms around how to get the most out of your risks or how to get the biggest bang for your risk buck. And what you pay for risk is you risk loss. So how to design a good financial portfolio is how to get as much return while minimizing downside risk as much as possible. And it turns out, it's really actually quite easy. You don't have to pay anyone to do it. You just have to own as many stocks as possible. That more or less works. And then, you know, as you get closer to retirement, you want to think about managing the risk that the whole stock market could collapse like right before you retire. So you want to think about that.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  But it really, diversification is probably the only, what we call free lunch in finance in that you really isn't that hard and odds are you'll do well. The last 40 years were just extraordinary, though. I'm not sure that will ever happen again. I was just writing a column and because I was talking to my brother and I was talking about Nantucket, you know, one of the most, you know, this little island off Massachusetts full of very rich people. And I spent summers there as a teenager and I was like, you know, it's crazy. You know, a house there in the 90s was $500,000. And now like the average house is more than 4 million. And my brother pointed out to me that actually isn't that crazy, considering the stock market went up even more. And I'm like, that's not true.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And then I looked and if you invested $500,000 in 1995 in the S and P 500, you'd have eight and a half million now. And that's if you don't reinvest the dividends. With the dividends, you'd have 12 million. I mean, that's, if you look at stock growth going back to the 20s, that is insane. That is like not normal. It could be our new normal. I don't know. But it has been a really remarkable run for stocks.

• 16:07Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but it's been going on since for 100 years. I mean, to say it's not normal, something that lasts 100 years seems pretty normal to me.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's been going up for 100 years. I mean, there's been, you know, obviously there was the Great Depression and there was the global financial crisis, but it's been up exponential in the last 40 years. And that could just be, you know, to some degree, as I said, stocks going up reflect growth in the economy. And you could argue that with technology now is just on an exponential curve and technology makes us more productive. So the stock market goes up with our productivity. Does that make sense?

• 16:44Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it could be that this exponential growth is our new normal because we've reached a point where technology is improving at an exponential rate. So it could be that or could just be a fluke. We don't, that's the whole point of risk. You never know. If you're investing in the stock market, odds are it's the best way to get rich. It's the most reasonable way to get rich, better than becoming a tightrope walker celebrity. But, you know, it's still never really a guarantee.

• 17:12Mike Carruthers?

  I want to talk about some of the myths about risk that you write about, that a lot of people buy into and the consequences of doing that. And we'll do that when we come back. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted.

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• 18:40Speaker 04

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• 19:10Mike Carruthers?

  My guest is Allison Schrager. She is author of the book Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths That Keep Us From Taking The Chances We Need to Take. And so let's talk about some of the seven myths about risk and you pick one to start and jump in.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Well, the first one is that you know what safe is. I mean, we, I was, been thinking a lot about safety, you know, because there have been two big bad risk events, say in the last 20 years, the financial crisis and then the pandemic. And in both of them, you noticed how people spoke about safety a lot, you know, with the financial crisis, it's like, oh, we thought we had a safe asset, you know, when no asset is really truly safe. Or with the pandemic, it was we can go back to normal when it's safe, as if it's ever been safe. And it struck me as just really extraordinary that we've all sort of imposed this idea of safety on everyone. Because in financial markets, I don't think a lot of people realize this because, you

• 20:12Speaker 01

  know, whatever derivative or stock market gets all the attention. But the most important asset in finance is the safe asset. Now, you could quibble about what is a safe asset, if anything's really safe. But it's super important because my mentor is Robert Merton, you know, he's a finance professor at MIT. And he sort of really created with a couple of other people, the field of modern finance. And he always told me, there's no uniform definition of risk. The only, because you know, if you look it up, it's like some people say it's upside. Some people say it's a risk. It means it's a bad thing is going to happen. So the only real definition we have of risk is it is what safe isn't. So safety is what defines risk because risk is its complement.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  So when we keep specifying what we mean by safe or pushing safe on people, when it's not safe to them, we've sort of forced them to misspecify risk in their own life. And that is a big reason why people don't feel comfortable taking risks is to take, feel good about taking risks. You one, not only have to manage it, but you have to be really clear in what the risk is, what you're risking for. And as long as we sort of have this idea that the safety is this pervasive thing that is obtainable and that it's the same thing for everyone, people will never feel really comfortable taking risk.

• 21:33Mike Carruthers?

  But the goal isn't to find safety. The goal is to play the game.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  It is. Well, the goal is to reach your potential and live your best life and get what you want out of life. And that's just not going to happen unless you take risk.

• 21:48Mike Carruthers?

  Well, another myth that you talk about, well, you say it's a myth, but I think a lot of people believe it to be true, is that we live in very precarious, risky times.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is kind of ridiculous if you really think about it. Now, obviously, it's safer than it was in the Middle Ages, or even, you know, the turn of the last century, you know, when, you know, people would die young before we had good sanitation, when, you know, the odds of getting cholera were high. But even compared to, say, 20, generally compared to 50 years ago, it's even less risky around then. I think we tend to idealize the 1960s as this time when we had all the security, when, you know, you could just go to high school, get a union job, have a guaranteed job for life, have a gold-plated pension, and face no risk at all. But really, it's much safer today in a number of ways. First of all, I mean, the people who had those sorts of jobs actually weren't that

• 22:44Speaker 01

  many people, particularly, it was mostly white men. You know, if you really look at risk for most people in the economy, it wasn't such a golden era. And right now, the economy serves way more people, way more diversity of kinds of people, and they're a lot safer for it. Even, you know, when I was pitching this book, I was talking to an editor, and he said to me, he's like, "I read that you think that things have never been safer." And I just thought, you know, that's absolutely ridiculous. I was on my bike the other day, and I was thinking, if I fell and broke my back, I'd, you know, have to spend a fortune on medical care, and this could bankrupt me. And I was like, "Well, first of all, more people than ever have health insurance," which is a great win.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Second, you know, if you fell and broke your bike, even, and broke your back on your bike, you know, even 30 years ago, medical care was not nearly what it is now. Now you could actually be cured. Before, you would be an invalid, you know, potentially disabled from ever working again. So that would have been even worse. I don't think we appreciate the low-risk society that we've actually created for ourselves. And in some ways, in some aspects of it, it's not good because it's holding us back from getting what we really want out of life. But really, severe downside risk has been largely sort of reduced in a level I don't think people really appreciate, and I think that makes them more scared.

• 24:04Mike Carruthers?

  Well, think about when people say, "Well, you know, that's very risky." That's never said in a way where the point is, "And you should do it." It's always, "Well, that's very risky," meaning you probably shouldn't. The word "risky" doesn't mean "go for it," it means "don't go for it."

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we see this change in language over time. I mean, granted, originally, risky did always did mean that. But around the time of exploration, it started to have a more positive connotation around it. But what we see in the 19th century, which in some ways is a golden era of us being great risk-takers, in my opinion, is you see sort of more positive connotations around risk. But we see, starting in like the 60s, the 70s, that started to sort of flip back, and we started to really sort of associate risk as being negative, something to be managed, something to be eliminated in our lives. And so that negative connotation has largely come back. And as I said, safety now is sort of something is, was what we should be aiming for.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And we see that, as I, I didn't say where that data comes from, it's Google Ngrams, which looks at newspapers and books, just how we're using these words.

• 25:19Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, that's the thing. Safety is the goal now, it seems, in a lot of ways, in finance, in personal behavior, like, safety is the gold standard. If you can be safe, then that's better than not.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I've just really been struck by this in the last decades, about how we're hearing this more and more, is the goal is safety, rather than, you know, feeling like you've lived a full life, a satisfying life, like you've achieved what you want. And, you know, if the goal is safety, then you're never going to get what you want. Again, it's that sort of belief that people keep falling for in finance, that you can get more and not risk loss. It just doesn't work that way.

• 26:03Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah. Well, and part of it, too, is, you know, you can, like your editor, you can, you can take any situation and make it sound horrible. "Well, what if I fell off my bike and broke my back?" Well, okay, that would be horrible. But you can do that with anything. You can find a very particular story, weave it together, and say, "See, risk is bad because this could happen." Well, yeah, it could not happen either.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, something bad is going to happen to you and everyone you love at some point in your life. It is sadly inevitable. But, you know, that can't, but bad things could also happen to you anywhere. I mean, you could, you know, go to a party and get into a car accident, but you could also get hit by a meteor or have a pipe explode while you're home. I mean, it's just, there's no way you can just completely achieve safety anyway. But if you chase it, the only thing you're going to sort of ensure isn't safety, but that you'll never get what you want.

• 27:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you know, risk is one of those topics I think people think they understand, but there's so much more to it, and I appreciate you explaining all this. I've been talking with Allison Schrager. She is an economist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at Bloomberg, and author of the book, "Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths That Keep Us From Taking the Chances We Need to Take." There's a link to her book in the show notes, and Alison, thank you.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike. This has been wonderful.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials?

• 27:37Speaker 04

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• 27:58Speaker 05

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• 28:32Mike Carruthers?

  When you hear the word "propaganda," you probably think of governments and politicians trying to influence what you believe. But there's another kind of propaganda that may be even harder to recognize. It's the propaganda you tell yourself. Right now, your brain is selling you a story about who you are, what's true, and what you're capable of. And you may be buying into that story, even if it's wrong or holding you back. So where does this inner propaganda come from? How do you recognize it? And how do you stop believing it? Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist who has studied propaganda firsthand in places

• 29:15Mike Carruthers?

  like North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. His TEDx talk on mind control has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. And his latest book is "Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times." Hey, Owen, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Mike. Pleasure to be here.

• 29:37Mike Carruthers?

  So I imagine everyone knows what propaganda is, but the term "inner propaganda" is not one I don't think I've heard before, your book. So explain inner propaganda.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Inner propaganda is really a set of stories that we sell to ourselves that become the beliefs that we buy into. We think that we logically arrive at conclusions by taking the information that comes into us from the world, and then from that, painting a picture for ourselves about exactly what's going on. But really, our brain is selling us a story, optimizing for what it's interested in, which is survival and stability. And so in order to ensure survival and stability, it constructs the reality it wants us to perceive. And the problem is, because it's our brain, it sounds like us, therefore, we don't even challenge it. And so many of the erroneous or limiting beliefs that we find ourselves having happen as a result of this exact phenomenon.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Sometimes we talk about inner speech, but for me, it's always been much stronger than that. Whenever I feel, for example, whenever I struggle with depression or anxiety, whenever I feel myself in a negative mood, it doesn't just affect me in terms of how I feel, it affects how I perceive the world and what I believe about the world. And so the more I put that together, the more I traveled to various different countries like North Korea, Rwanda, Iran, and Afghanistan, the more I began to start to put the pieces together, and I realized our brain is the ultimate propaganda machine. And the more we know about it, the more we can do something about it.

• 31:08Mike Carruthers?

  So give me just a real common, everyday example of what you just described, of your thoughts and beliefs clouding your vision of the world.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  So let's imagine you're scrolling through your phone and you see a friend of yours is on vacation in a beautiful island in Greece and they're swimming and they're having the best time. Now, a part of you is happy for them, of course, but another part of you might be struggling because you're working so hard, you're stressed out, and you look and you see how good they have it. That immediately makes you feel a little bad. But that bad feeling that you feel doesn't just stop there. When you feel that feeling, it will also dictate and determine how you perceive what's going on around you. So let's imagine you send an email and you don't get a response back. Or you text a friend and you don't get a response back the way you would expect it to. When you're in the wrong kind of emotional state, you're more likely to perceive that as something dangerous. So your brain will start to manufacture the reality that you think is going on.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  So before you know it, you've spiraled into a sense of believing, well, maybe my friend actually doesn't want to get in touch. Maybe they're ignoring my text messages. And before you know it, you've built an entire reality that is inside your mind, but nonetheless, it feels real to you in that moment. This is an example of the propaganda that we find ourselves falling for because it doesn't arrive as a negative thought or as something that we're worried about. It arrives as the truth. And the most important thing is for us to recognize when we're experiencing this truth and understanding that it's not nearly as real as we might think it might be.

• 32:41Mike Carruthers?

  Can you ever trust what you believe? Can you ever have a situation where you're just right on, you're dead center, perfect? Yeah, this is really, really true? Or is it always going to be tainted by other factors that you may not even be aware of?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be tainted to some degree, but I think that we have a very binary way of thinking about the truth. We think it's either true or it's false. And I think really what we need to do is be a lot more nuanced in the world today. The big problem is we see things as this is either a fact or it's a fiction. It's either true or it's false. And the problem that that gets us into is it's very difficult once we've accepted some things, in inverted commas, fact. It's very difficult for us to turn around and say, well, actually, it's not a fact. Actually, it's made up. Actually, it's not true. Because we lose socially as a result of that. So I think it's much more useful to be able to see it more on a sort of a scale of how certain we feel about something.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  And so you could be thinking about something and feeling a sense of certainty. For example, do you love your children? Do you love your partner? And the answer, I'm sure, for most people will be yes. And they would have a feeling of certainty that would be nearing 100%. Great, that feels right. But there's lots of other situations, lots of other concepts, lots of other ideas that we might feel a sense of certainty about, but then something happens and it completely changes our entire worldview. And so what I invite people to do is to recognize when you have your sense of certainty on a scale, it means that you go in with a form of what we call Bayesian reasoning. So this came from a guy a few hundred years ago called Thomas Bayes. And the idea is that you go into any situation with a prior.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  That means a current belief. The way I think about it right now is this. And then you look for evidence to see what the evidence does. And the evidence might actually increase your certainty or decrease your certainty. It might give you a little bit more nuance or it might make you feel a little bit more certain about whatever it is that you were talking about. The more we think in this way, the more we get away from this notion of is it true, is it false? Because there's different types of truth, really. There's the objective truth, as we mentioned, which is something you verify, which you study scientifically. But then there's believing what you want to believe, a desired truth, or believing what you feel is true, an emotional truth. Not everything is objective truth, even when we describe it that way.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  And I think the more we see it on a continuum, the easier it is for us to be able to make smarter, better decisions.

• 35:15Mike Carruthers?

  You said at the beginning that the reason that this all happens is all about your brain trying to keep you alive, survival. But how does it help you survive if, say, you lose your job and you start believing, I'll never get another job, I'm gonna lose my house, everything's over? How is that helping you survive?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  So when we need to survive, there's a few different elements of our psychology that allows us to be able to make better decisions or at least evolve to allow us to make better decisions. One of them is known as the negativity bias. And this means that our brains are more likely to pay attention to what's negative because in order for us to survive in the hunter-gatherer world, we needed to pay attention to the snakes and the lions and the tigers. We didn't necessarily need to pay attention to the rabbits. Our brain got used to focusing on what's negative because by focusing on what's negative, it means we're watching our surroundings and we're vigilant about what may in fact put us in danger. But there's another aspect to keeping us safe, and that is agreeing with our tribe. In many ways, believing what the tribe believes in is the membership fee we pay

• 36:20Speaker 02

  in order to be part of that tribe. So when you agree with everyone and believe what everyone else believes, that may well be the very thing that limits you. However, your brain is optimized to believe it because it keeps you part of that particular group. So when we do have that experience you mentioned, when we think to ourselves, I'll never get another job, this will all be doomed, everything is going wrong, it's our brains, not very useful, but our brains' desire to be able to keep us protected that it focuses our attention on this. So it tunes us up and gets, we need to pay attention to this notion. And sometimes it might have the hidden desire of, if I believe like this, then I'll be a victim. And if I'm a victim, maybe I'll get help from someone else in the tribe. But more often than not,

• 37:03Speaker 02

  it's a simple case of our brain paying attention to all the problems in our life because that's what has allowed it to survive. The problem is, just believing that, as we know, just allows us to buy into a story where we constantly find ourselves struggling because now we build a narrative as a victim of our world. When I was a therapist, I worked with many people and usually they would come in with either a victim narrative or a villain narrative. They would either say the reason for my problems is because of the world, because of my partner, because of my kids, because of my parents. Or they would come in and say the reason for my problems is because of me. I'm not good enough, I'm useless, I sabotage my life. And my job in both cases was to help them to become more agents, more of a hero in their life. And that means giving them a sense that they could make better choices

• 37:48Speaker 02

  and they could focus on what they could control in that moment. So when someone believes that everything's hopeless, I'll never get another job, the goal isn't to say you definitely will get another job. The goal is to be able to get them to believe that if they are able to take control of their situation, then they have a better chance to get a better job and better chance to build their life back up than if they don't.

• 38:09Mike Carruthers?

  Help me understand, because you tie in the idea of propaganda with this and you talk about North Korea when you visited there. It doesn't sound like propaganda as much as it sounds like a personal belief system. So explain the propaganda part to me.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  When I experienced depression, I was a teenager when I first experienced depression and anxiety and I struggled with my mental health quite vividly. And whenever I would talk to people or whenever psychologists, you would read a psychology book, for example, it would talk about your negative voice or the negative inner critic. And it never felt strong enough for me because when I was in one of those zones, I didn't feel like I was having a bad day. I didn't feel like I was thinking negatively. I felt like the world was wrong. I was completely and totally brainwashed into seeing the world in this dark way where I saw everything as hopeless. I saw myself as helpless and worthless. So there was no question about it. And when I visited North Korea, I found myself experiencing a very similar example of brainwashing in the people that I had conversations with.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  They were convinced that this is the way it was. They were telling me stories about the Korean War, which were very different to what I'd learned when I'd studied history in university. And so for me, the more I spent time listening to them, the more it started to remind me of what was going inside my head. There's three things happening. The first is, in propaganda regimes, they have the state media where they control what you see, they control what they report in the news. So you only get information that they decide to get, for you to get. Inside your head, when you're in the wrong kind of mode, when you're in the wrong mood, your brain will only give you, this is known as mood congruent cognition. It will only give you information that lines up with the mood that you're in. I call this the interstate media. The second piece is, in propaganda cultures, they normally have what we call indoctrination,

• 39:57Speaker 02

  where they get everyone in the nation to all ascribe to a certain identity, which is the nation's identity, kind of like being part of a cult. But we also have that in our own mind. Our brain tends to try to align us with whatever identity it believes we have. So in the example you gave earlier, when someone is struggling with their mental health, saying, I'm useless, I'm never gonna get a new job, it may well be that the identity they have for themselves as a victim, as someone who's not very good, as someone who, let's say, artificial intelligence is gonna take over from, as a result of that particular belief about who they are, no amount of reasoning with them is gonna work. No matter what you say to them, they're going to ignore you if it conflicts with this identity of them being a victim or indeed of them being skilled in any way because they don't believe that's true about themselves.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  So we have an internal form of indoctrination. And the third element is truth engineering. So in a propaganda regime, we experience the truth as they use logical reasoning and they use their own evidence or facts to be able to prove this is the way the world is. And similarly too, our brain will rationalize and find ways to be able to prove why this person hates us, why we'll never get a new job. So we don't just feel it. Our brain then uses logic, almost coming in at the end, to prove why what we believe is true, which goes really counter to the way in which we think. We think to ourselves, well, you know, I know what the truth is, but my key's experiencing propaganda. But the reality is, I'm experiencing in that moment the form of what we call naive realism,

• 41:27Speaker 02

  where I think that I'm the only one who knows what's real and everyone else is a victim of propaganda. Once we realize that we're the ones who are actually propagandizing ourselves, it gives us the chance to be able to do exactly what we need to do to resist the propaganda on the outside. We can start to recognize that whatever we feel is true in that moment may not be. And it doesn't mean it's not true. It just means we need to start questioning it because by doing so, we give ourselves the freedom to really inspect it and investigate it and see whether or not it's not necessarily true, but whether or not it's useful for us to believe.

• 42:03Mike Carruthers?

  So before we get into what people can do to counter their own inner propaganda, I'm curious, since you were in North Korea, and I find that whole thing fascinating. Do the people, when you talk to them in North Korea... They believe things are the way they are. And are they okay with it? Or do they believe it really sucks?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Well, it depends who you talk to, right? The guides that I spoke to, you were, when you're there, you're very much managed and you're very much shown what they want you to see. But I've done a lot of research in terms of North Korea itself and what it's like behind the scenes. And when I was there, one of the guides, for example, was very prim and proper and very sort of sharp in the way in which she would describe things and very polite and very surface level and very much a big fan. The other guide was much realer and had a sense of humor. She actually was sarcastic, which I didn't expect at all in Pyongyang. But we had long conversations. We went for a few drinks and we shared different things. And for her, what was interesting was it wasn't that she was unhappy.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  She had almost accepted the way it was. But the struggles that she was dealing with weren't that different to the struggles of the folks that I work with in terms of banks in London or in terms of big corporations in America. She was struggling with some of the same concerns, the same worries, maybe higher stakes, but she was still worried about her relationships with certain people, worried about gossip, worried about different things that were stressing her out. And initially, she didn't even know what a psychologist did. So I had to explain that, which is something I've never had to explain to anyone. Everyone just knows what a psychologist is. But over there, I had to explain what it was. And it turned out that the more she learned about it, the more interested she got. And then we started to talk about her struggles

• 43:53Speaker 02

  and then I gave her some thoughts and she had a, well, at least she described her having a positive experience as a result of that. But she was very much under the impression or under the influence of what the general messaging of the DPOK or Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North Korea communicated to her. But she also had a mind of her own. She was super smart. She spoke multiple languages. And it was something that really stopped me in my tracks. Because when I arrived in North Korea, I was expecting everyone to be totally brainwashed. And the more I saw it, the more I realized it doesn't matter where you were in the world. When I went back to America, when I went to Ireland, it's always the same. People have their beliefs and are convinced of them.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  And I think we need to recognize that a lot of times, the more convinced we are, oftentimes, the less we've actually spent time thinking through our reasoning and thinking through whether or not we're absolutely correct.

• 44:49Mike Carruthers?

  So I want to talk about what do you do when this happens to you? When you find yourself in one of those slumps where you believe this to be true when it's not? And I would imagine that a big part of it is being able to recognize what you're in when you're in it. Because if you really believe it's the truth, it's not a problem. It's the truth, so there's nothing to fix.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  That's the most important piece, Mike. The most important piece is to recognize right now, this feels true. Right now, I'm experiencing inner propaganda. And that's why the notion or the concept itself of inner propaganda is the most important piece. Because once you sort of know that this is inner propaganda going on now, then that allows you to be able to go, okay, so let me check off what is it that I can verify as a fact? What is conjecture? What is an opinion? And you can start to look into the thoughts that you're thinking. One of the exercises I like to give people is start to write out your internal dialogue. So whatever it is that you're saying to yourself in that moment, start to write it out. And then, once you've written it out, then start to go through it and go, okay, is this something that I could fact check?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Is this something that I know is true? And the more you do this, the more you recognize so much of what we think as true. Well, we haven't done any form of evidence control. There's no scientific basis of this. It's like, sometimes I see people will put on comments or texts on a particular post on YouTube or Instagram or whatnot. And they'll say, they'll make up a particular statement and then they'll say after it, "fact." But saying "fact" after something doesn't make it a fact, right? What makes something a fact is observation, is evidence, right? Is being able to test it scientifically. If we are building a skyscraper, we cannot have a guess at things. We need to make predictions in order to ensure that this works,

• 46:44Speaker 02

  in order to make sure that we're able to build it. Same with building a plane. You have to be able to make predictions. And therefore, science and engineering often require you to have facts. But most of the rest of society doesn't really require that you always have facts. And so often, you'll hear politicians or you'll hear influencers or whatnot. They'll say things as if they're true and they're just an opinion or a thought or a perspective. So I think the first step is to go, right now, I'm experiencing inner propaganda and it feels true. And that's the most important piece is to recognize this feels like it is actually reality. And the more we do this, the more it gives us a sort of an extra bone to be able to go, given that I know that this is going to happen and I know that I'm, let's say, under the influence,

• 47:28Speaker 02

  what do I need to do about this? Because we all know what it's like to be, let's say, for example, hangry. This means angry when you're hungry. And therefore, you're agitated. But once you recognize you're agitated because you're hungry, you're less likely to go, oh, this person agitated me. You're more likely to think, well, you know what? I haven't eaten and that's why I'm snappy. And the more we can recognize what's actually going on, which is we are under the influence of this inner propaganda, the less likely we are to start to think in terms of this is definitely true. There's a big difference between being absolutely certain about something and something being absolutely true. And just noticing and recognizing those two differences can give us the freedom, to some degree, stop trusting ourselves

• 48:13Speaker 02

  so that we can ultimately start trusting ourselves.

• 48:17Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I've always thought of propaganda as something other people use to try to convince us of the truth. But this is a new way of looking at it, that propaganda can come from within as well as from other people. I've been speaking with Owen Fitzpatrick. He is a social psychologist who has studied propaganda all over the world. And he's author of a book called "Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times." There's a link to that book in the show notes. Owen, I appreciate your time and thank you for sharing this.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike. Real pleasure. Love the show.

• 48:56Mike Carruthers?

  You know, your cat could lick a bowl of sugar and never experience sweetness the way you do. Cats essentially cannot taste sweet things. Scientists discovered that all cats, from your house cat to lions and tigers, are missing part of a gene needed to make a functioning sweet taste receptor. Apparently, once cats evolved into dedicated meat eaters, detecting sugar wasn't particularly useful. What's even stranger is that cats can taste some things we cannot, including a compound called ATP. It's found in living cells and may help signal the presence of meat. So if your cat seems interested in your ice cream,

• 49:41Mike Carruthers?

  it probably isn't the sugar that's attracting him. It could be the fat or something else entirely. But for a cat, dessert basically doesn't exist. And that is something you should know. This podcast is produced by Jeffrey Havison, Jennifer Brennan, and the executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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