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Tyson Popplestone is a Comedian from Melbourne, Australia. In this podcast he will share thoughts, interviews and rants about lots of different things. Enjoy.
Tyson (00:02.176)
Man, I've been so excited to have the opportunity to sit down with you. You know, I think here in Melbourne, Australia, it's been a really interesting time, especially around the subject of conspiracy theories. A good friend of mine, quite recently, who I consider a really intelligent bloke, he pulled me aside and he goes, have you ever asked your dad if he's a part of the Freemasons group? I said, what's that about? He goes, well, he's quite heavily involved in the media and for a lot of media members, it's a prerequisite.
And I thought, hang on a sec, I've got an interesting conversation and I put an asterisk on that comment, because I've heard you speak in quite some detail about intelligent people making some wild claims. And I know you're no stranger to that kind of speculation, which maybe we could set as a foundation to this conversation. You could give us a little bit of an overview of how you found yourself speaking in depth on this topic.
Dan Ariely (00:55.822)
Yeah, so I'm a social scientist and usually I'm trying to think about how can we use social science for good. And COVID was a fascinating period because of course there was a virus, but there were lots of social science questions. How do we do remote education and how do we do remote work? And should the government pay people unemployment and how should that work?
and what should we do with masks and distancing and how do we get into new habits? Anyway, I was working very hard on all of those topics. And a few months into COVID, I get a note from a woman I once helped. And she says, Dan, what's happened to you? What's wrong with you? I say, what's going on? What's wrong? And she sent me a lot of links.
I'll just describe one of them. And that link kind of started with some truth. It says that when I was a teenager, I got badly burned. That's true, actually, the reason that my, the right side of my face has no hair is that this is all scars. But most of my body's burned, 70 % of my body was burned. Then it says I was in hospital for about three years, also true.
But then it went ahead to say that because of that, I started hating healthy people. Not true. And that I'm doing all that I can to kill as many people as possible with the pandemic and later with the vaccines. And that's why I joined Bill Gates and the Illuminati to try and do that. Anyway, I spent about a month trying to convince those people that I wasn't that person.
This was mid 2020, now we're mid 2024. I had another conversation with somebody yesterday about this and she believes I was the brain behind all of this. I wasn't. Anyway, I spent about a month trying to convince people that it ain't so, very unsuccessfully. And then I gave up on trying to convince them.
Dan Ariely (03:19.918)
And I said, look, I'm a social scientist. Maybe I need to understand this. Because, you know, we all know about people in our circles that five years ago we would have looked, we would have looked at them and say, me and this other person, we're looking at life in the same way. And now we're looking at them and you say, who are they? What's broken in this machinery? And, you know, it's one thing when somebody tells you, you know, your father is
the Freemasons. But when somebody tells you something about you, says, Hey, you know, you were, I saw yesterday you were, you know, doing X, Y, and Z, you plotted to do whatever. And you say, No, I didn't do it. And they say, Yes, yes, you did. There's something very eerie about it. So, so I decided to study this. And I spent about two years in all kinds of dark corners of the internet with lots of misbelievers. And
And what I learned at the end was that it's not us versus them. They are kind, nice, wonderful people. But something happened to them. That thing could have happened to us too, but something happened to them. I call this the funnel of misbelief. There was some stressful events in their life, some unexplained things, and then they went down this path. And this adopt...
The people who are adopting these misbeliefs are adopting it for a reason. And, and, you know, think about the mosquito bite. When you have a mosquito bite, you have a need to itch. It's a real need to itch. Should you itch? No, but you still have the real needs to itch. When people are in a stressed environment, they have a real need for a story that would explain why they're, why they're experiencing what they're experiencing.
And ideally, they want a story with the villain. Is it helpful for them? No. Is it good for them and for society? No. But at the moment, when you're saying to yourself, I don't understand the world. I don't understand what's going on here. You want a story with the villain. So it's a short term satisfaction that ends up being long term very unhelpful, but it is it is a reaction to a real need. So nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I can believe in it.
Dan Ariely (05:48.11)
benevolent God, or I can believe that the cabal is trying to inject my kids with the G5 chip. Nobody would believe that, but it's a bad choice to deal with stress, but it's a reaction to stress. And then of course, there are lots of other forces that make it worse. Social media.
Tyson (06:04.896)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Ariely (06:13.774)
identity, our selection of information, there's some personality forces and so on. But the starting condition is stress. And if you look at the people in your life who became misbelievers, you can probably identify the stressful events that got them to start on that path.
Tyson (06:31.04)
I stumbled into it a little bit myself during the COVID pandemic here in Melbourne. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the lockdown restrictions and things that happened. It was quite wild. And I mean, it was interesting to discuss government and all the different elements that came into that period of life. And
Dan Ariely (06:44.366)
You had some serious restrictions.
Tyson (06:57.6)
I remember it was really interesting because like the person who messaged you the link with a couple of truths and the number of falsehoods, I started to hear some things around what was taking place here in Melbourne. And that first, it was the vaccine passport. And I thought, I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're fine. And that came in. And then it was, you know, you can't hear, we had a funny one where you, I mean, it's funny in hindsight only, where you couldn't drive more than five kilometres from your house.
And then I started to hear people say, there was essentially a housing area. If you came back internationally, you had to isolate at a government facility, which was real. And it was there for a little while, but there started to be some talk from some of the same voices who had predicted the COVID vaccine passports, the five K radius restrictions that were saying, if you're unvaccinated, which, which I am, which I was at the time, obviously, where.
they were being developed specifically for unvaccinated. And I started to think, surely not, but I mean, the barrier had been pushed on a couple of things. And this serves as a nice little reminder to me because I often am amazed, as I said at the outset, that a lot of the time, I feel as though the conversations I have with friends who are reasonable and really intelligent people, they always justify their beliefs with what sound like really reasonable.
beliefs and information. And it seems that the bottom of the barrel of information regarding conspiracy does not exist. You can dig and dig and dig. And I mean, if you want to keep digging, if you're going to believe it, you're going to constantly find what it is you need to support what it is to support your conspiracy, if that makes sense.
Dan Ariely (08:42.03)
And you know, for me the term misbelief has two components. The first one is a belief in something that ain't so.
But of course nothing is black and white. It's not as if, you know, every food that we have in the market is healthy and every medication is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Right. Of course the world is much more complex and nuanced and so on. But the second thing is adopting that misbelief as a framework, as a lens from which you view the rest of life. And that's where it becomes dangerous.
So for example, if you say to yourself, you know, the government did this five mile driving distance, seems kind of ridiculous. I don't know what they went in their mind. I don't understand it. But the government does lots of things that are on the steps. This is not the first time. And I don't give them any evil intent. I just think there are people like us, they make mistakes. Sometimes they make strange decisions.
And that's just life. That's one interpretation. The second interpretation, no, no, no, there's an evil intention out there. And if you accept the misbelief framework, then you keep on looking for bad things everywhere, right? It's very, you know, there was like one night where I understood the life of the misbeliever. A misbeliever wakes up in the morning and feels there's a big...
powerful force out there to get them. It's a terrible life to believe that. If you look at everything from the lens of this is intentional, like most people I think, and I for sure, when I see bad things happen, I usually think it's stupidity or lack of attention to details or some bad beliefs. But...
Dan Ariely (10:47.182)
I rarely think that there are things that are truly evil intentions.
Tyson (10:53.536)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (10:54.446)
But if you are starting to believe in conspiracies, then you start believing that there's lots of people, high -ranking people, with tremendous amounts of power, with really bad intentions. And then everything you see, you say, what were they trying to get here? What is it? And that's a very, very difficult point. And of course, if you start looking at it this way, you'll find more things.
Tyson (11:24.16)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (11:24.462)
So in my case, you know, people can take one thing I said here and one thing I said here. And if you look in a suspicious mindset, you say, I connected the dots. I now found this evil person who's trying to destroy the world.
Tyson (11:44.896)
I had this conversation with my wife today actually, because we recently came home from Sydney and we came home to a find that I had where I'd been picked up head down moment using my phone as I was driving by a camera at a traffic light. And I thought, isn't it interesting? Because there's one side of me that goes, okay, I understand how that's beneficial. You're not allowed to, like it's for the safety of everyone that you're not on your phone. And if a police officer pulled me over, I'd go, okay, you know what? You're right. I knew the rules.
I disobeyed the rules. Where's my fine? There's my demerit points. I'm sorry. But then the flip side of that is, okay, now we have a camera set up and there's something that feels a little bit 1984. It starts to creep in. You can see in my mind, I go, okay, I don't know how much I like the idea of a camera doing the same job. And as you say, I find that interesting because the situation hasn't changed. I mean, the outcome's exactly the same. I'm still fine. I still lose the demerit point, but it's a person giving me the fine over a machine.
And I find that conversation one, which has been coming up recently, a lot of people like to point to China and the social credit score and say about how we're starting to move towards a lifestyle or a society like that, which for me sounds really unappealing.
Dan Ariely (12:41.102)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (12:48.59)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (12:52.59)
Yeah, so let me let me say let, yeah, let me say a couple of words about this. So so the funnel of misbelief, the way described in the book has four components. The first one is stress, emotion, the second one is cognitive, what information we choose to look and how we interpret it. The third one is personality and the last one is social. But at the end of the day, kind of there's all kinds of things we can do. There are things we can support each other, support ourselves and so on.
but we also need to build systems that are compatible with our humanity. So let's take a little step back. My metaphor for the human mind is a Swiss army knife. You know, if you needed to do a job, any job, you would not pick a Swiss army knife. It's not ideal in anything, but it has lots of things that you can do in a relative compact way. And our mind is kind of like that. It's not ideal for anything.
but it's quite good in lots of different things. But our Swiss Army knife is not designed for the modern task of today. It's designed for many thousands of years ago. So it's a Swiss Army knife, but the tools are from an old time ago. We don't have the right tools for now. But that's what we have. And just because...
Tyson (13:54.944)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (14:18.414)
We have a cryptocurrency and we have anonymous internet and social network and so on. It doesn't mean that the tools have changed. So let's take one example. We are designed to trust. We're designed to trust. Now, why are we designed to trust? Think about the community of, let's say, 200 people. In a community of 200 people, a lot of trust can be created.
And what is the mechanism that keeps trust up? Gossip. Because if you and I were part of the same 200 people and you did something bad to me, I would tell everybody. And then nobody would deal with you again. And you know that. You know the gossip. Gossip is like the solution for a society that doesn't have police and doesn't have a justice system. There's no court system. It's gossip.
Right, you basically know that if you do something bad to me and I would find out, I would tell everybody and then you get punished by the community because everybody would think you're unfair. We have a few mechanisms like that. So evolutionary speaking, trusting was a good way to go because in most, most, most cases you could trust people. But then we moved to big cities and then we became anonymous and then we got...
the internet and we're extra anonymous. And now we have what we call cheap talk. You know, we can do, we can cheat, we can lie. There's no consequences for the things we're doing in an anonymous internet way. So we still have these two of saying in general, I trust the people, but now it's not a relevant tool. So you can say to yourself, you know, let's just teach all kids not to trust.
It's not going to be easy because it's against our human nature. Now, I love the fact that we're trusting, but I'm saying what we need to do is we need to build systems that's basically our worthy of our trust. So, you know, we have this human mind and the systems that we build for information need to be human -mind compatible. Think about cars. Every year we discover more ways in which we could...
Dan Ariely (16:45.55)
make the cars better given our limitations. We have rear view mirrors. In the beginning we didn't have seat belts. Discovered that we have accidents. There was an economist that his solution for accidents was to put in the middle of the steering wheel to put the sword. That if you had an accident, it would just kill you.
You know, it's a funny, it's a funny idea. I don't, I don't, I think, you know, too. He said, people would be so afraid of it that everybody would derive safely. I don't think so. I think people would, would too many people would get killed. You know, our human nature is not to pay attention and to take chances. And, we need rear view mirrors and we need seat belts and we need anti -lock brakes and we need things that remind us about distance.
to cars and all kinds of things like that. The same thing is true about other systems as well. We need things that help us trust or not trust, that change the level of attention we put to things. So I think those systems need to be more compatible with our humanity.
Tyson (18:05.792)
Yeah, we're really at a crossroads, especially in contrast to how long it's taken to develop that Swiss army knife of a brain. Especially one thing which constantly comes up and seems to be at the center of this conversation, regardless of which angle you take it from is that around social media. And I mean, the echo chambers and the stresses and the emotions and just the gossip factor that you've already touched on. I mean, they're all ticked when you log on to Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or
wherever you get your poison. And it seems as though when you tune into any of the people in tech, this is one problem that people are constantly trying to navigate their way through it. It is a truth that when I log on, there's a certain amount of information, which pretty much just agrees with everything I already believe. And I'll constantly show my wife and I point it out to her and I go, hey, look how right we are. And it's not until I sit down in a situation like this and actually reflect on what I'm doing that I can...
so clearly see that I'm also a part of the Echo box, which I keep everyone else being in, but I'm not sure if you've looked too far into that. It's a really interesting conversation to have where it's a very, a really challenging field to be a part of.
Dan Ariely (19:18.35)
Yeah, so you know, the echo box in many ways very understandable. How many of us want to wake up every day and be confronted with some of our deeply held beliefs? And, you know, there's all kinds of podcasts that bring very different perspective. I woke up very early today at 5am and I listened to one of them. It's very unpleasant. It's very unpleasant. I
I push myself to keep on doing it. It's so much fun to be exposed to what we believe already. It fits with our cognitive structure. It's lazy. We feel more justified and so on. So, you know, the human desire for doing it is very understandable. But when we choose a TV station, we at least know what we're choosing. When we log into one of those social media,
There's an algorithm. And like, if you choose to watch Fox News, you at least know you chose Fox News. If you open TikTok, you don't necessarily know that TikTok has chosen for you the equivalent of Fox News. So it's a very serious issue, but it gets worse. Because when we think about the echo chamber,
It's just about what do we choose or what's being chosen for us. But there's another phenomenon now, which is that almost everything is connected to identity.
And, you know, people tell you whatever they tell you, it's about identity. So, you know, people tell you if they're vegans or not, and if they are pro -life or pro -choice, and where do they stand on the Israel Hamas war or vaccines or anything like that. All of it is identity. And there's a story from the Bible that there were two tribes.
Dan Ariely (21:29.614)
that had a difficult war between them. And at the end of the war, they settled on two sides of the river. And then they walked around and they wanted to know if the people that they meet are from their tribe or from the other tribe. And it just so happened that these two tribes pronounced the name of the plant, shibolet. Shibolet is like a type of wheat. But they pronounced the name of that plant slightly differently. One of them said, shibolet.
And one of them said, see bullet. So imagine I meet you and I show you the plant and I say, Hey, how do you call this? And if you call it the way I do, that's great. We're friends, we're brothers, we're from the same tribe. And if you call it in the other name from the other tribe, now I chase you away. Now, if you think about this, when I show you the plant and I say, what's the name of this plant? Do I care about the name of the plant? No.
Tyson (22:10.176)
Thank you.
Dan Ariely (22:27.726)
What do I care about? Your identity. So we now use the term shibbolit for a conversation that seems to be about the right thing, but it's actually about identity. Now think about this as a lens. Think about politicians. How much of the statements that people are making are statements about the real thing?
Tyson (22:30.24)
Mm.
Dan Ariely (22:55.726)
and how many of statements are saying, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat. You know, in the US, the reaction to COVID was very much along party lines. How could it be that the decision to wear a mask or not work a mask, get vaccinated or not, is a political decision? But it did become political. And it's now very strong, you know, when people are saying,
I'm pro -life or pro -choice. It's an identity. Or when people say, you know, gender identity or anything like that, it all becomes about identity. It's not about the topic. It's not about the topic. It really is an identity statement. And of course, those identity statements are polarizing us.
Tyson (23:28.84)
Hmm.
Tyson (23:51.008)
I had this conversation.
Dan Ariely (23:51.886)
polarizing in a way that is very hard. I don't know what it is in Australia, but in the US there was a survey recently. I mean they do it every few years. They ask people how much they would be in favor or object to their kids getting married to people from the other side of the political aisle.
And if I remember correctly, it's close to 50 % of the people who said they don't want their kids to get married to somebody from the other political line. It's kind of amazing. And these numbers have grown from single digits to almost 50. But you know, we're so polarized and everything is looked from this lens of, you know, the moment you tell me that you are different pro, I'm pro X, you pro Y, I already think you're a terrible human being.
I already think something is inherently wrong with you that you're broken in some way. When I started this research, I was very curious about it. But now I think it's one of the biggest challenges we have. And the reason is if we think about any of our big challenges, think about the war with Russia and Ukraine, the ability of Europe to...
Tyson (24:40.288)
We'll see you next time.
Dan Ariely (25:10.862)
stay Europe with the with the elections, the questions about global warming, the next pandemic, whatever it is, we need to be to act together. And if we're basically, we'll take the American case, half Republicans have Democrat and we can't agree on anything. And always 50 % of foreign 50 % are against this, there's no way to act.
Tyson (25:40.832)
Hmm.
Dan Ariely (25:41.166)
There's no way to act. So I think we have to solve this problem and solving the media is part of that, but not all of it. Some of it is not about the media.
Tyson (25:50.4)
Sure. Yeah, I had this conversation with a friend on a run yesterday. We were laughing because we were saying, how is it that based on the color of your hair, we can have a fairly safe degree of certainty about whether you're pro -life or something else or based on the color of your hat, you're wearing a MAGA hat. The same is true. It is wild that, you know, you can know so much or at least you can assume. And I feel a lot of cases,
fairly accurately based on just a couple of things like that. It does seem that, you know, was it sheer bite? I can't remember the name of the plant that year.
Dan Ariely (26:28.206)
She ball it. She ball it. Yeah.
Tyson (26:29.568)
She ball it she ball it. Yeah, it's amazing that all of a sudden the issue is not the issue It's just a little bit of a badge. That's the coincide
Dan Ariely (26:37.038)
Yeah, and you know, when we think about those issues, we tend to think that we have thought these things thoroughly.
But the reality is that most people have the same opinions as their parents. You know, the same way that TikTok directs you, your parents do, right? You got to be born to your parents and they directed your exposure to ideas from age zero. And most of us, you know, we have the sense that we have thought very carefully about our opinions. But the reality is that...
If most of us thought very carefully about these topics, we wouldn't all end up, we wouldn't most of us end up believing the same things our parents did. It tells you that it comes from a different direction. Or think about global warming.
Tyson (27:25.568)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (27:32.142)
I asked lots of people I say, how sure are you in your opinion? And people say very. And then I say, how much have you read? And most people say, truthfully, not that much. Some people say, I have not read any original papers, I wrote things I read things about them. But I so and it's an example, because you know, it's a recent issue, clearly very big.
very contentious, but, but clearly most of our opinions, like, you know, we didn't say, okay, let me now take three months and read through the papers on both sides of the discussion and try to, to make sense of it. We went to sources we trust. We started with some beliefs already. And it's true, it's true for us and it's true for the people who believe the other side as well.
You know, but our beliefs too, many of them are like if you ask people about how sure you are in your beliefs, they would say very, and then you say, how much have you actually read? They say very little. And you say, so how come you're so sure? And people don't know how to explain their certainty. They say, well, I trust the media. I trust this. I trust that people. But and the reality is that our beliefs are all quite
Tyson (28:30.528)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (28:59.438)
on shaky grounds. And, you know, even even in COVID, I because I was so involved in it, I read lots of papers about it. But but very few people read lots of papers. And most people got their impression from a media source that they trusted. But but this is why the betrayal of trust is so tough. You know, one of the
Tyson (29:01.024)
Mm.
Dan Ariely (29:28.974)
One of the misbelievers I talked to is a really amazing guy. I think in a different universe, he would have been an unbelievable contributor to humanity. He just went down that path. He said that he thinks that the misbelievers would end up winning. And he said that he made the parallel between losing trust in government,
to losing trust in a significant other that had an affair.
And he said that when a significant other has an affair, you lose trust in them forever. Right? It's one action. And he said, when people lose trust in the government, they lose their trust forever. And he says, because the way the government acts, all of us would be betrayed at some point. All of us would feel that there's something not right was done to us. And...
Tyson (30:25.024)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Ariely (30:33.934)
Of course, what you need for that is the intention was negative. But because of that, he believes that eventually everybody will experience some level of betrayal and start looking at the government as evil. And then once you start looking at the government as evil, you'll find more and more things of society, the cabal, the central banks, and so on.
But you know, it's very non -symmetrical. It's very hard to create trust, very easy to break it. And if one breaking it is getting people to start their journey down the funnel of misbelief, that's a very sad thing for humanity. You know, at the end of the day though, we do need to work on trust. Trust is kind of at an all -time low in all kinds of things.
Tyson (31:07.808)
Hmm.
Tyson (31:23.104)
Yeah.
Tyson (31:29.312)
Yeah, I even have conversations with my wife who is a person I trust more than anyone on the planet. Like where we've both got the same goal to have a good marriage, to have a good friendship, to look after our kids. We're on the same page. I know her. I know she's got a good heart and still, and still if I'm tired or hungry, my trust weens, my faith weens, my appreciation. So if...
I mean, to give credit or at least maybe step back and be a little more neutral towards the government. I mean, you get a hundred people that you don't know in a room trying to make any decision that impacts not only their life, but yours. Like it really is impossible to come anywhere near pleasing the majority of people because there's so much speculation. As I said, I experienced it in my own health.
Dan Ariely (32:14.702)
So much speculation and in COVID there was a ton of speculation. We knew so little. One of the problems is that we knew so little but we didn't communicate how little we knew. And it is confusing, right? So to basically say surfaces are dangerous, surfaces are not dangerous. Yes masks, no masks. Science is difficult.
Population science is extra difficult. Like, you know, if we could do a randomized control trial, we would have learned things much faster. But people do random things and it's hard to measure. And we're trying to guess what they're doing. It's a very, very hard exercise to do in real time. But when people communicated all these findings, they did not communicate them with the correct level of humility. So they say, this is the fact. And what we should have done is to convey things with the right level of
of humility. And by the way, humility is important on the side of communicating, but also on the sides of perceiving. There's a personality trait called intellectual humility. It's kind of a funny name because it's such an arrogant name. I'm an intellectual. But intellectual humility is really about the ability to hold multiple hypothesis in mind at the same time and not be 100 % sure in our opinion.
Tyson (33:28.672)
Hahaha!
Dan Ariely (33:43.47)
And that's actually incredibly important. So you believe in diet A or diet B or pro -life or pro -choice and you say that. In general, I believe this, but I'm not 100 % sure. I'm only 98 % sure. Like even that small difference is very important because it means that you're open for other alternatives. And if I could add something to schools, I would could probably add.
intellectual humility. And I think the highest order of intellectual humility is the level that we actually enjoy not knowing. Right? When you basically saying, you know, we're not sure. And it's going to be a great journey to find out if we can learn a bit more about that. So I think that not being 100 % sure in anything is, first of all, it's correct, right? There's very, very few
Tyson (34:26.976)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (34:40.846)
things that we should be 100 % sure about. So I think for most things we should.
keep keep intellectual humility and then to the extent that we can enjoy it. That's a huge improvement.
Tyson (34:55.744)
Hmm. For sure. I think it's freeing as well. That idea of, like a lot of the time I'll start my day with an intention or a list of things that I've got to get done because I know where it is I'm trying to get to, or I've got some picture in my mind about what that ideal future looks like and how I've got to pave the way there. And sometimes, you know, I can, I can move through the day and I know this isn't.
isolated to me, it's a very common human thing, but, I can move through the day as though I'm simply ticking off a bunch of chores and not really enjoying any of it. And so for me, if I take that attitude that you just mentioned, I mean, the process actually becomes a little bit enjoyable. I think it was, Macklemore, the, the U S rapper, he sings in one of his songs. He, he mentions, just do the work. Don't worry about the praise. And I thought, that's a, that's a great attitude in the same vein of what I'm speaking about. Cause.
If you can separate the work from the praise or the work from the result, then you can actually enjoy the work without stressing about whether or not you're close to the result or not.
Dan Ariely (35:54.446)
Yeah, you know, in social science, we think of it as process versus outcome. And the idea is that it's much more important to think about process than the outcome. And I'll give you an example. Imagine you have two kids. One of your kids is studying really hard for the exam, and they covered 90 % of the material. But the exam had a lot of the 10 % they didn't cover and they got a mediocre grade. The second kid,
didn't study much, they studied 10 % of the material. But most of what they studied was covered in the was the exam and they got a good grade. Which kid should you say great continue doing what you're doing? The first kid, right? Because in the long term, doing the right thing pays off in the long term, but in the short term, it's not guaranteed. And there are many things in life in which our actions and the outcome.
are statistically connected, but it's not deterministic. It's not as if every time you do the right thing, you'll get the right reward. By the way, also, also true on the negative side, it's not true that every time you text and drive you, you kill yourself or somebody else. It happens very infrequently, right? But you want to be rewarded and punished based on what you do, not based on the outcome. And it's true more and more.
when there's a randomness between the behavior and the outcome. It's true for medication adherence, it's true for weight, it's true for work, it's true for lots of things. But the outcome is much easier to measure. So we often measure the outcome as a substitute, but it actually can kill motivation. And when in fact, it's much better to do the hard work of understanding what are people doing and should be rewarded and, and, and, and
Tyson (37:35.264)
Mm.
Dan Ariely (37:50.446)
punished based on what people do, not based on what would happen.
Tyson (37:55.36)
for sure. Yeah, CS Lewis has a cool quote in one of his books where he talks about that exact thing. He talks about the process of learning maths can be a long and tedious process at the start where you're trying to navigate your way through the actual work. But over time, if you be consistent, you start to understand it can become quite enjoyable, as opposed to the student who has to cram the night before the test, doesn't understand the concepts, just gets it there. They forget as quick as they remembered. One's left with a whole heap of skills, the other's left with...
just a little bit of stress in their fingers crossed that they are the grades that they can actually work out well.
Dan Ariely (38:26.99)
Yeah. Yeah. And this, this insight is actually something that we're not trying to study. So, so think about some of the things we're supposed to do. We're supposed to eat well, we're supposed to exercise, we're supposed to go to bed on time, all kinds of things. And the things that we hear from society is mostly these things are going to be painful and difficult and not pleasurable, but you have to do it always for the rest of your life. That's not a good recipe.
Tyson (38:53.312)
You
Dan Ariely (38:57.326)
It's not a good recipe for behavior. And I think what we need to do and what we're trying to do now is to try and figure out if we can find the sources of joy in those activities. So I started talking to concert pianists and actors, and I started talking to runners, long distance runners, trying to understand what is it that keeps them motivated? Where do they find their...
their joy. And what I learned is really the kind of two types of joy. There's the joy of getting better at something, right, the improvement, and you get feedback and you get you get better. And, and, you know, I used to play squash, so I can't hold the tennis racket because my hand is not not good enough, but I can hold a squash racket and
It's not about winning points against the other person. It's about knowing what I want to do and seeing what actually happens and seeing the gap and trying to reduce that gap. It's a feedback mechanism that I enjoy getting better. And then when people get really good, they start playing with their expertise. So for example, one actor told me that he plays the same play day after day, but he said it's not the same play. He said he's actually playing it on two levels.
He has the level in which he's playing during the acting. And he has another level in which he's trying to figure out small differences in how he's acting today compared to the other days. And he's trying to look at the audience reaction to that. So he has the acting level and he has another level in which he's saying, let me increase the pause here for a fraction of a second. Or let me say this a little louder and see, is it better? Is it worse?
and kind of finding the points. And one of the runners told me the same thing. He said, you know, he's trying to notice the relationship between how his feet hits the ground and his breathing and trying to figure out the synchronicity between between those things. So, you know, I think that we need to find these sources of joy and think about how to enter them into our daily life.
Dan Ariely (41:19.758)
How do we make those things? What would be expertise in eating better? I went for a run the day before yesterday. I'm not a runner and I don't run much. I have no idea what my body is doing. I know I'm moving, I know there's some breathing happening, there's some sweat, but you know I...
Tyson (41:19.936)
Yeah.
Dan Ariely (41:45.038)
There's a lot of room to get into this part where there could be joy in understanding my body and how it synchronizes and so on. But I'm a long way from that.
Tyson (41:55.968)
For sure, that's a really interesting point. Dan, before I let you go, you said something earlier that I was just keen to pick up on, pick your brains about just quickly. I think you said that you listened to a podcast this morning in a field that you completely disagree with just to challenge yourself to live outside the box a little bit. That's something that I've flirted with the idea of doing, but I've currently got two kids and my spare time is limited. And so my time that I have dedicated to podcasts has been my echo chamber, I would say.
Is that something you're doing deliberately or regularly? Obviously, I mean, you can see based on what you've said, the benefits of that is world gets a lot broader.
Dan Ariely (42:31.629)
Yeah, so usually I do a little bit of this, but in election years I do much more. So, you know, this year about 40 % of humanity is going to vote. It's an incredibly important election year for many countries. So, yes, this year I'm looking more at news that I disagree with and I listen more carefully to people I deeply...
disagree with. It's, it's an interesting exercise. And you know, like, I think there's a way to listen. And there's a way to pretend that we listen. And usually, we're in discussion with somebody, we pretend we listen, but we counter argue. And somebody comes with a different opinion, we pretend we're listening, but in our mind, we're building an argument for how to argue with them back. So I worked very hard on not to do that.
Tyson (43:14.624)
Hmm.
Dan Ariely (43:31.15)
I work very hard on listening to arguments from the other side and in my mind, fully go with them, not go against them. So, and that's actually when it becomes much more difficult, but very important to do.
Tyson (43:47.54)
It sounds difficult. Hey, I've got my eye on the clock. I know you're off to another meeting, but man, it's amazing what you can get through in 45 minutes. I really appreciate you making the time to come on. Thanks so much for making it.
Dan Ariely (43:59.534)
My pleasure, lovely to talk to you and anytime I'm happy to do it again.
Tyson (44:01.792)
He too.
Awesome, well, let's look at a time to do around two. Thanks, Dan I'll cut that off there man. Don't feel like you got to hang around. I really appreciate it. I know you got a
Dan Ariely (44:07.79)
Thank you, bye.
Dan Ariely (44:12.814)
No, but stop the recording. Let's just.