In this episode, I sit down with neuroscientist and author Malcolm Gladwell to talk about his new book, "The Theory of Mind: The New Psychology of Persuasion: How Media, Politics, and Conspiracy Theories Control Your Brain."
00:00:00.000So we would also argue that when it comes to crafting culture or changing behavior on a very big meta scale, one of the things you can do that's very meaningful if you are someone in the media or you are a government is like literal.
00:00:13.160It is propaganda, but create more archetypes for pro-social behavior, for types of behaviors that you want to elevate.
00:00:22.680And this is actually something that we saw back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s.
00:00:26.160There were literal propaganda slash instructional videos by organizations like Coronet Films that were distributed throughout high schools and middle schools that showed ideal behavior through these little vignettes.
00:00:36.860You can have a huge volume of media all with the exact same model being shown to people and the exact same types of toxic behavior.
00:00:46.620Yeah, like the trope of the wife or girlfriend who's always like rolling her eyes at and sort of like pulling her husband down a peg like, oh, like my husband.
00:00:55.180There's very few depictions of wives that aren't like secretly smarter than their husbands now.
00:01:00.260Or that are like snide toward them and dismissive.
00:01:04.580Hey, Malcolm, one of the things that I really I love about you and loved about you since the moment I met you was that honestly you more resemble like a superhero or like fictional character, like a caricature of a person than like a real human.
00:01:19.540And I love that that has evolved into something of a more nuanced life philosophy or even like psychological philosophy of yours.
00:01:28.360And I think it'd be really fun to talk about it.
00:01:32.040And I think the the point we're going to get to in this is that I hate to say this.
00:01:37.540I choke on these words, but oh, no, I think representation actually does matter in media and we'll get to why representation matters.
00:01:45.900And it doesn't matter in the way that progressives think it matters and the way they're optimizing our representation is probably not the best way to optimize our representation.
00:01:53.200But the representation actually has a huge effect on our emotional states and the way we construct our self narratives.
00:01:59.660So first, let's talk about how human emotional states work within this theory.
00:02:07.520So a theory of mind, when you use the term theory of mind, what you're talking about is our ability as humans to mentally emulate the mind of somebody else or mentally model the mind of somebody else and predict what they are going to think or do next.
00:02:23.940This is very useful for for all sorts of things like when you are having an argument with someone in your head after you stop talking to them and you are emulating their positions in that argument.
00:02:45.320But it's something that we I mean, with humans is where we do it more often is like fake arguments you're having with someone in your head.
00:02:51.420And then you come up with the right answer a while back and then you think, OK, how are they going to respond to that and everything like that?
00:02:57.560And one of my areas of research when I back to be a neuroscientist was in schizophrenia research, specifically translational neuroscience as it relates to schizophrenia.
00:03:06.000And it's a math from where I studied something, but I always had a weird idea of what was going on in schizophrenia.
00:03:11.600So one of the most common symptoms in schizophrenia across types is auditory hallucinations, right?
00:03:18.060Where you might hear whispers or somebody talking to you.
00:03:20.460What I hypothesize might be going on, and this would actually explain a number of other schizophrenia symptoms, is that they have a hyperactive theory of mind running in the background all the time.
00:03:33.620So using transmagnetic stimulation, you can do something where you hyperactivate a portion of a person's brain so it can become activated with less of a threshold.
00:03:43.880So an example here would be like you hyperactivate the part of their brain that's associated with like the letter A.
00:03:49.420And then you show them the letter A and they'll say A.
00:03:52.400And they won't mean to say A, but they'll just be forced to say it because the neurons around that area were firing.
00:04:20.560It's applying agency, like a theory of mind, to some external force, like a government or something like that.
00:04:27.700Oh, that helicopter, that must mean that this other entity is thinking X or Y, right?
00:04:32.540And just so many weird and seemingly disparate schizophrenia symptoms can be seen from this hyperactive theory of mind.
00:04:39.400So this theory of mind is very important to how all humans work.
00:04:42.540Now, what we hypothesize is that the primary way that we as humans process emotions is through having a theory of mind of ourselves quietly running in the background of our brain and then correlating our environmental circumstances against that theory of mind and determine how emotionally we are supposed to react and then outputting that emotional state.
00:05:10.080This is why, for example, if you're a little mad about something and then a friend comes to you and they're like, you should really be a lot more mad about this than you are.
00:05:17.360Can't you see how bad what they did is?
00:05:19.260And you begin to get really angry about it all of a sudden.
00:05:22.200So if I can recap, basically, most people subconsciously have a model of who I am, like their character sheet of I am this fancy woman or I am this powerful man or I am this creative quirky artist.
00:05:36.100And then when life circumstances happen, when you are about to react, there's this internal question of, well, how would the quirky artist react?
00:05:59.000We're not that stable as sort of internal characters.
00:06:02.180But this is meaningful and why this theory of Malcolm's is really meaningful and why I love it a lot is that if this is true and based on like our anecdotal experience, we have, we find it to be compelling.
00:06:14.360It means that if you change the way that you view yourself, if you recontextualize yourself, if you change that character sheet, you can also change the way you react to things.
00:06:24.800So, for example, if you view yourself as a delicate person with severe trauma in their past and high anxiety issues and all this other baggage, obviously, when bad things happen to you, you're going to react in a way of, well, I can't get out of bed today.
00:06:39.500Great. Like now everything's ruined. If you see yourself as a spoonie, well, my pain is too great. That's, that's it.
00:06:45.000I only have three spoons today and I just spent them getting out of breakfast and, or sorry, getting out of bed and eating breakfast.
00:06:50.660So this means that if you rewrite that character sheet, I'm a resilient person.
00:06:54.600I react to things very optimistically. Whenever a problem comes up, I'm smart and resourceful and I look on the bright side and I solve it.
00:07:01.580But we actually believe that you can react much more favorably and optimally to situations, be they positive or negative.
00:07:10.840But it's very hard to rewrite this internal character sheet. You can really only do it during what we call quote unquote, flex, flex periods.
00:07:17.860So these are periods in an individual's life where like they're moving or they're about to start college or they're about to start a new job and moving.
00:07:24.240And we're a lot of your environment is changing. A lot of your friend group is changing. Just a lot is changing in your life.
00:07:29.440And during these moments, people can genuinely reinvent themselves.
00:07:33.040And, and keep in mind, what I'm saying here is it's not exactly like you have an internal character sheet.
00:07:36.840It's like you have a model of a person running off of an internal character sheet that you've created.
00:07:41.300Now what's important here, and this is where representation comes into all of this, is these character sheets are not fully flexible.
00:07:49.660It's very hard to say, I want to be this type of person or this type of person or this type of person, like to fully build out the character sheet.
00:07:55.820What we really often do is stitch together a few stereotypes or things that we have seen portrayed in media or within our socially evoked set within our environment.
00:08:08.420And then stitch those things together into a character and utilize that character.
00:08:14.780If you do not have many things in media that are healthy, that you can use, or many things in media that, that are, that are like, you feel you can identify with.
00:08:26.400So some people, they can identify with an individual in media, regardless of that individual's ethnicity.
00:08:31.020Other people, where their ethnicity is much more important to whoever they happen to be at the moment, they will have a genuinely hard time identifying with different ethnic, different ethnicities when they see it in media.
00:08:45.780And what's important to note here is character archetypes are often associated with a few ethnic groups.
00:08:52.940And this is true, even in progressive media, they will, they will maybe color up the media.
00:08:57.420They'll add more black and brown people, but they will still give those people often black and brown approved personalities because if they give them an overly quote unquote white-ish personality that they would be seen as, I don't know, not culturally authentic or something like that.
00:09:13.620And you even see this for other groups.
00:09:15.320So if you're like Irish and you really identify with Irish, there are like four ways of being Irish portrayed in media.
00:09:23.460If you're a Romani or a gypsy, if you're using the more offensive term, but the term that most people know, there are not that many Romani stereotypes presented in media.
00:09:34.080And if that's an important part of the way you see yourself, you're going to really struggle.
00:09:39.160So let's like, first, I want to jump back to the concept of flux periods.
00:09:42.860We're not just pulling this out of our asses.
00:09:44.780This is also something that shows up in other areas.
00:09:47.560Like when it comes to behavioral changes that even governments try to enact.
00:09:52.580For example, the UK had this one sort of department for enacting behavioral changes that they called the Nudge Unit informally.
00:10:00.080They did a lot of research on when they were able to successfully change behavior to intervene and help people change their behavior for the better in a way that improved health outcomes or spending or whatever it might be.
00:10:09.680And they found that very similarly, they didn't call them these, but periods of flux were the key times when they were able to do this.
00:10:17.140For example, one really common period like this is when someone becomes a first-time parent.
00:10:24.100So this Nudge Unit, for example, found that when it came to enacting interventions around parenting, helping people do better things for their children, really only first-time parents changed their behavior.
00:10:35.980And once people had gone past that, they just already firmed up their identity as a parent.
00:10:40.420So it became really hard to change it.
00:10:42.260So other examples of flux periods, because I think it's important to know like when you're even going to have the capacity to make changes like this, is graduating from college, graduating from high school, getting a new job, moving to a new state, getting married, the death of a very close loved one.
00:10:56.680Like these very fundamental life changes where either the stage dressing or the stage or the characters in your drama of life are changing.
00:11:06.700And so that's something that's really important.
00:11:08.880And it's not just like character archetypes that really help in helping you establish a new character.
00:11:14.360Because again, we're just not really creative.
00:11:15.560Like we need to see almost like training data, like AI.
00:11:18.720Like we need training data to understand what the common responses are of a certain archetype.
00:11:26.740And it also is why what you expose yourself to in media and also what the broader media landscape exposes people to is going to shape culture and society.
00:11:36.640So we would argue that one thing that could really help, for example, with pronatalism, a cause that really matters to us, is more media that shows what it's like to be a functional, happy family, to be a parent that isn't miserable or stressed out.
00:11:50.100It was a reasonable number of kids, like five kids, not like two kids.
00:11:54.160You don't keep a population stable if every woman expects you kids.
00:11:58.040Because I mean, what does the media show now?
00:12:21.080It's like a chaotic house full of feral children who are very passionate and colorful, which is great.
00:12:28.240But like also doesn't look very appealing to many people who want to have a non-stressful life.
00:12:33.420So we would also argue that when it comes to crafting culture or changing behavior on a very big meta scale, one of the things you can do that's very meaningful if you are someone in the media or you are a government is like literal.
00:12:49.600But create more archetypes for pro-social behavior, for types of behaviors that you want to elevate.
00:12:55.960And this is actually something that we saw back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s.
00:13:00.080There were literal propaganda slash instructional videos by organizations like Coronet Films that were distributed throughout high schools and middle schools that showed ideal behavior through these little vignettes.
00:13:11.280And yeah, I mean, it's just something that's incredibly helpful and incredibly underrated.
00:13:16.880I'd say another area where this becomes really damaging for people is when, and this happens in media and all societies, they associate certain character archetypes with attractiveness in either males or females.
00:13:31.180And so when a woman wants to see herself as attractive, she will begin to adopt these character archetypes, which can often be very intrinsically toxic.
00:13:40.040A great example of this that has really gotten popular recently is the crazy young girl.
00:13:45.260So we see this in Harley Quinn, we see this in Jinx, we see this to be like, if you are an attractive woman in modern media, there are just not that many character archetypes.
00:13:57.660And that's a big one in terms of the social landscape right now, right?
00:14:02.100And that is really toxic when we are elevating the status of mental instability and associating it with being hot.
00:14:15.260Um, or, or, or being a desirable female.
00:14:21.840What are some other ones that you've seen in media where you're like, wow, this is a really toxic character that people are having modeled for them.
00:14:27.880Oh, well, I mean, pretty much every depiction of relationships is, is pretty toxic.
00:14:33.280I remember when House of Cards first came out, like the first few episodes and we're like, oh my gosh, is this finally like a dynamic couple that like broadly works together on things and coordinates and is aligned in their goals.
00:14:44.520And then it just like completely goes off the rails, gets toxic, it's semi-abusive, like it's just horrible.
00:14:51.480And there are so many other shows that, that supposedly depict power couples.
00:14:56.680And people have told us like, oh yeah, I love this power couple on this show.
00:14:59.860And like genuinely their behavior is toxic.
00:15:14.800Like where, where are the functional relationships online?
00:15:18.700So it's also no surprise to me that people don't have good relationships because no one is modeling them at all.
00:15:24.800This is a great point where I think many people can be like, no, there's lots of stereotypes of what it's like to be a family when I look at TV and then it's okay.
00:15:44.480The, the rare show, but the point that we're making is because there's a lot of media out there, there could be a feeling that there are a lot of ways of structuring yourself and ways of structuring an identity or a relationship being modeled, but that's not necessarily the case.
00:16:00.120You can have a huge volume of media, all with the exact same model being shown to people and the exact same types of toxic behavior.
00:16:09.820Like the trope of the wife or girlfriend, who's always like rolling her eyes at and sort of like pulling her husband down a peg, like, Oh, like my husband.
00:16:18.880And like very few depictions of wives that aren't like secretly smarter than their husbands now.
00:16:23.280Or just that are like snide toward them and dismissive.
00:16:25.740Like, I mean, we've had, I've personally had problems where like in public, I start acting like that merely because one, like I'm, I'm way too autistic to know how to actually act in public.
00:16:36.540So of course I'm just taking my training data and acting how I understand wives to act in public.
00:16:41.740And so we've had, especially earlier in our relationship, like I'm literally just like using training data to behave a certain way.
00:16:48.400And I was like, Simone, why do you keep throwing me under the bus?
00:16:57.040And I'm like, well, not my wife, but I, but it's also important that like we challenged that and we were able to work on that.
00:17:02.540And I'm able to, to point that out because it is, it is really important.
00:17:08.440If you're in a relationship with someone and you see them modeling these sorts of bad behavior patterns to immediately call them out and, and not like psychologist nonsense, right?
00:17:18.680People are like, oh, I need to go to relationship counseling or go to a psychologist and that's who I changed myself.
00:17:25.220If you're doing something and it's not aligned with who you want to be, because these models we build of ourselves, they're not who we want to be.
00:17:36.380If it's not aligned with who you want to be or which you want to be like as a relationship, nip it in the bud as quickly as possible, because the more one of these behavior patterns replicates over time, the harder and harder it's going to be to change without changing your environment.
00:17:50.480But I would say, so another thing that this, this model of behavior, I think dovetails really well with is our general principle that when it comes to encouraging behavior in our kids, it's really like show, don't tell.
00:18:03.900Like the best way to encourage certain behavior is by modeling it, not by telling you to do it.
00:18:09.300And again, like kids, just like humans use training data to determine how to behave.
00:18:14.180So if you provide examples, you're more likely to see those examples be followed.
00:18:18.820I also feel like that's one reason why parents can feel like really self-conscious around their kids in public, because they feel like your kids in public are like your drunk self, like what you look like behind the scenes and like without inhibitions.
00:18:33.400So people get really, really embarrassed because their kids start saying stuff that like they would say behind.
00:18:38.420And I actually think actually a really important thing about kids and drinking and stuff like that is I think that to a level, we all have like underlying pre-programmed behavior patterns.
00:18:48.180And it's one of the reasons I like drinking with people is because I think you can begin to see those come out.
00:18:52.800And this is separate from these narrative building things.
00:18:54.800So, I mean, alcohol lowers inhibition and through that, I think that speaking of alcohol personality types, you see like one of four predominant personality types and individual motivators when somebody gets drunk.
00:19:08.580Because you are dripping away the inhibition that they are using to suppress the way they actually just like biologically interact with the world.
00:19:17.400And you see this with kids as well, right?
00:19:19.520Like some people, when they get drunk, they just get really happy all the time.
00:19:50.920And it's sweet because you wouldn't be productive.
00:19:53.160We wouldn't be able to move towards our actual objectives if you acted like that all the time.
00:19:57.460But it's sweet to know what's under the hood.
00:20:00.340And it's definitely something I see in our kids, which one of our sons, Torsten, he'll just do this thing where he'll start getting really good.
00:22:27.960It was very sweet that she wanted me to get married in, in her cultural way and her culture or the culture that she had adapted was a very Wiccan pagan culture, which is very different from my cultural value set.
00:22:39.220And I would have gone along with it had she told me going into it anyway.
00:22:42.880It's, it's, you gotta keep family happy, right?
00:22:47.180But it is that that was the one time you saw me get really drunk.
00:23:03.840Well, so what, what would your advice be for someone who's like, all right, I don't like the way that I react to things.
00:23:10.560I react to angrily to things, or I, I don't like the anxiety that I have, or I just feel like I could respond in a more opportunistic and, and optimal way when life throws me curve balls.
00:23:22.440What would your advice be to them on one, creating a flux period, like manufacturing one, because you can't necessarily make someone in your life die or leave your job and move to a new place easily.
00:23:34.520That's not something you can do all the time.
00:23:36.380So what advice would you give on that front?
00:23:38.040What advice would you give on designing a more optimal person?
00:23:41.080First, look for an upcoming flux period.
00:23:44.540If you're going to go to college in a year, like best just to use that one for you.
00:23:48.240But also if you're broadly not satisfied with who you are in your life, it may be worth creating a flux period through leaving your job, where you live, starting something new.
00:23:56.840This is only something you do if you feel like you have like real major self work to do.
00:24:01.680But then in addition to that, how do you create it?
00:24:04.400I think the most important saying is getting excited about who you're going to become and beginning to build a picture of that.
00:24:10.880And this is something that I think most people can model or remember having done when they were going to start high school or college or their first job.
00:24:17.660We all have some period in our life where everything was going to change and you began to think about, oh, I could be a different person.
00:24:37.760It makes it a lot easier to slip into that role.
00:24:40.920If you don't have good social archetypes or what that character looks like, right, which can be really hard for people, then especially people who don't have a lot of experience with the sort of like creativity or whatever, right?
00:24:54.880This is where things like role-playing games and stuff like that can have active utility in your life is that you can learn how to act like and pick up and think like another character and test different archetypes that you can then build into yourself during your next flex period.
00:25:12.400Because who we are, like people are like, no, I am who I really am.
00:25:40.860I mean, would you have any additional advice?
00:25:43.060Yeah, I think I'd add that also to our earlier points, the media that you choose to consume really does matter and that you will probably start to passively model behaviors that you see.
00:25:54.320So if you're watching or consuming a lot of media, and this isn't just like TV shows and movies, it's also music that just models bad behavior that isn't going to help you if you're depressed and you're listening to a bunch of sad songs and watching shows that are really depressing with people who are dysfunctional and mentally.
00:26:12.400Okay, that's gonna that's gonna prime you to do all that bad stuff.
00:26:16.360I know the research on priming is now going through replication crisis, but it's going to give you bad training data.
00:26:21.980I would also say that and this is, I think, a lot harder to deal with the people that you surround yourself with may need to change, because they very much reinforce who you are.
00:26:33.040And many of them will not want you to change and I've changed myself pretty significantly since I've met you, Malcolm, and a lot of that.
00:26:40.960It was notable to see how some people were very openly against the new me and they did all sorts of things to both shame me for changing and try to change me back.
00:26:56.600So you may have to break up with friends and family or move away from them or stop spending time with them or just set really clear boundaries like this is the new me.
00:27:04.200I mean, of course, they built a relationship with the previous person that was valuable to them when you become somebody new is somebody more aligned with your actual value system, you become less useful to them at the friend you're no longer who their friend was like why wouldn't they?
00:27:20.300Yeah, but I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge that this stuff is really hard.
00:27:25.880And I think it's one of those things where unfortunately, the vast majority of people are going to hear this and they're going to say, well, nope, like I've had people, people be like, oh, you've had three kids, like, how are you so thin?
00:27:57.000I mean, I'm probably walking two miles an hour, four hours a day.
00:28:01.480Okay, four to five hours a day. She's exercising every.
00:28:04.800That's not walking two miles an hour is not exercising. It's like slowly moving while typing.
00:28:10.400But my point is like most people like.
00:28:13.000But a exercise desk and elliptical, you are hugely underselling how much you exercise.
00:28:18.600Yeah, because I'm autistic and that's my stimming.
00:28:20.580But that's also, I think, really important.
00:28:22.680We sometimes talk about the sinfulness of exercising for vanity.
00:28:26.300And what we're talking about with this type of exercise is exercise that's not useful for health reasons and that distracts you.
00:28:32.460So you can't work. Right. You can't do other productive things.
00:28:35.840The type of exercise you're doing is totally efficacious because it is in no way interfering with your ability to get productive work done.
00:28:44.200So you're just doing two hard things at the same time.
00:28:47.060And I deeply admire that you're somebody who works to combine those things.
00:28:50.740Well, it's not it's not admirable because I can't focus while sitting.
00:28:53.760I hate sitting like I can barely cope with sitting down for these.
00:29:43.720And two, you also like, there's some people who just are psychologically not structured for action.
00:29:53.060And there's some people that are psychologically structured for action.
00:29:56.860And both of us come from environments that sorted for people psychologically structured for action intergenerationally.
00:30:04.040But what I mean is like you're in, you grew up in the San Francisco area, right?
00:30:07.480Like family moving to the San Francisco area are people who at least immigrated twice, likely three times in their history.
00:30:15.820So you've already selected for people willing to immigrate, right?
00:30:19.240And to a high risk, high reward environment, either the Gold Rush or Silicon Valley or any of the other various things that was going on in San Francisco.
00:30:26.520My family's from Dallas, Texas, right?
00:30:28.880Again, almost everyone who's living there immigrated at least twice in their family history and likely three times.
00:30:35.400And they were immigrating because they just didn't want to be wherever things had become too civilized.
00:30:42.740So they just kept moving to the edge of civilization, to the edge of civilization.
00:30:45.820And I think that that's really apparent in my personality and worldviews that I am to an extent shaped by that.
00:30:52.080Well, and so for that reason, for us to be like, no, all you have to do is this is like, it's not perfect.
00:30:57.880And no, not everyone's going to be able to do it.
00:31:00.300But still, I mean, at least we anecdotally have found that this model is really effective.
00:31:03.940And we think it's worth considering if right now you don't react to life in a way that makes you happy.
00:31:10.500If you're not happy with your outcome when you respond to various developments.