- This is an MRI machine,
and that's me going inside to see
what it looks like when my brain hears a lie
and believes it.
I lie and you lie, we all lie.
And more importantly, we all believe lies.
And no matter who you are
or what you believe, that reality is going
to be more important than ever this year.
It turns out that lying is a lot more complicated
than you'd think.
It feels good to say lies sometimes and to hear them.
And I wanna understand why, why do we lie?
Why do we believe lies?
And is there anything we can do about it?
- [Speaker] Why does Joe Biden make so much stuff up?
- I will always tell you the truth.
Four Pinocchios on that one
and there's no evidence to support it.
- It turns out that people are pretty bad in detecting
what is a lie and what is fraud.
- [Speaker] You regret at all, all the lying you've done
to the American people?
- [Trump] All the what?
- [Speaker] All the lying, all the dishonesty.
- [Trump] That who has done?
(soft music)
- I'm on the campus of MIT,
I'm about to go into this building
where they do research on brain and cognitive sciences.
I'm gonna meet with one of the world leading experts
who's gonna talk to me about what happens
when lies enter my brain.
(soft music)
I'm Johnny.
- Hi, Tali. - Hey Tali.
Nice to finally meet you, how are you?
- The primary role of ferrous detectors is
to prevent the catastrophic,
the big things flying into the magnet
because if you walk in
with an oxygen cylinder from about here, it's gone.
And it will annihilate anything in its path.
- [Speaker] God, look at that. - Keys themselves are brass.
- [Speaker] Yeah, oh my. - If I let go, it will fly.
- [Speaker] It would fly in there.
- How do I look?
- [Speaker] Better than ever.
- Hey, I'm gonna just quickly pause the video
to thank today's sponsor.
Sponsors are what allow us to make this journalism.
And I'm really grateful for Trainwell
for supporting this video
and lots of other videos on our channel.
Trainwell used to be called Copilot.
And what it is, is a platform that gets you to exercise
and work out more frequently using good exercise science
and accountability.
So here's how it works, you sign up for Trainwell.
You get paired with a personalized trainer
that you start communicating with.
I did my call with my trainer, Devin,
and told him all about what my goals are.
For me, I'm really into like mobility.
Like I wanna be able to lift my body and do pushups
and like just have like general mobility.
I also had some like back pain that I wanted to work on.
He took all of that information
and designed a totally personalized workout plan for me.
It's all on the app with very clear instructions
that are done through video that just guide you
through your workout so you don't have
to make any decisions.
At the end of your workout, you get to rate it
and give feedback to your trainer on how it went.
You can be like, "Hey, that was too easy"
or "That was too hard," or "I don't like that ab workout.
Can you find another one?"
Or, "I'm not feeling like this is making a difference."
Your trainer then modifies your workout plan
to reflect that feedback and
with time your workout plan becomes really personalized.
I've had moments where I've scrapped my entire workout plan
and started fresh based on new goals that I have
and my trainer is there
with really prompt communication and encouragement.
One of the hardest parts
about consistent exercise is accountability.
Usually no one is holding you accountable
so you end up just not doing it.
What I like about Trainwell is
that you have a real person on the other side
that is asking, how did your workout go?
Who can see when you do your workout.
And that just real world accountability
has made a huge difference for me.
And apparently a lot of other people.
Trainwell found that people are three times more likely
to have a consistent routine.
I work out four times a week and Devin knows about it.
So thank you Trainwell for sponsoring today's video,
so there's a link in my description.
It is go.trainwell.net/JohnnyHarris.
When you click that link, it helps support the channel,
but it also gets you in on 14 days
of free personalized training using this platform.
You can try it out for free
and just see if this is something
that could change your world as it has mine
and go from there.
And just to clarify again, Trainwell used
to be called Copilot.
They're now called Trainwell, thank you Trainwell
for sponsoring today's video, for supporting our journalism.
With that, let's dive back into our brains.
(warm music)
So I'm gonna go in there, they're gonna show me images
of a lot of different things
and we're gonna see how my brain reacts.
We're gonna see what we can learn
about how the brain ingests
and processes information, what it's looking
for, what it cares about.
- [Speaker] How you doing? - [Johnny] Doing great.
- [Speaker] Awesome, so India, or I will talk to you
from the control room.
- [Johnny] Okay.
- [Speaker] So this next scan is
about five and a half minutes.
- [Johnny] Okay.
- [Speaker] Here we go.
- We can go from the front of the head
to the back of the head.
Oh my God, this is insane.
- Information is processed by the brain,
like primary rewards like food and water and sex,
and also what we call secondary rewards, which is money.
So the same system, reward system in the brain,
that is evolved probably to seek food
so we can survive is actually used by the brain
to seek information.
(upbeat music)
- Okay, so we love information, that I now am convinced of,
but I'm also learning that we like to believe in lies.
But not all lies are the same, they're not all bad.
And we actually have some good examples of this,
starting with the goldmine treasure trove
from 2004 "Mean Girls".
- Oh my God, she's so annoying.
- [Speaker] One time she punched me in the face,
it was awesome.
- So number one, a lot of lies are actually meant
to not hurt other people's feelings.
Like the classic giving someone a compliment
when you really don't mean it.
- Vintage, so adorable.
- Thanks.
- That is the ugliest effing skirt I've ever seen,
- Or lying to avoid telling someone
that you actually don't want to hang out with them.
- I can't go out, (coughs) I'm sick.
- But then there are lies that start
to become a little bit more malicious, more manipulative,
lying to get gain
or advantage over somebody to hurt somebody.
- Is that the summation?
- Yeah, they're the same thing.
- [Speaker] Wrong, he was so wrong.
- I pretended to be bad at math so that you'd help me.
- I mean, this is why corporations lie to us,
telling us that if we drink this brown sugar water,
then we'll suddenly be really beautiful
and have a lot of friends.
(cap popping)
Or that if we drink this other brown sugar water,
we will suddenly be beautiful social justice warriors
who will single-handedly usher in an era of peace
between police and protestors.
Okay, but even these are fairly innocent,
like we know what they're doing.
The scarier lies, the ones
that I'm worried about are the ones that we tell
to protect our tribe or to hurt our enemy
and how easy it is to willfully believe them.
- There is no doubt
that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- These are the dangerous lies,
the ones that are becoming easier and easier
to make believable.
They're the ones that I want to build defenses against,
which is why I'm making this video right now.
But to do that, I'm gonna have to lie to you,
I promise I will tell you after the fact when I lie to you.
So let's start with a little experiment.
(upbeat music)
Okay, let's set the stage.
Imagine your brain looks like this.
(upbeat music)
It's a construction site
that is constantly building a massive tower.
To build this tower, we collect information
from the outside world using our senses.
That information is brought into our brain
and we use it to build our tower, our worldview.
So we're inside my brain right now,
and look, it's 6:30 in the morning.
And because I'm a fan of psychological self-sabotage,
I've decided to start my day by opening my phone
and seeing what the algorithm has to serve me.
Oh and look, here comes all the information I'm taking in
from my social media session.
In my little analogy,
this information is coming into my brain
in the form of bricks.
Bricks that are used to build this tower.
(graphic twinkling)
This tower is my worldview, it is my reality.
The things that I think are true.
We all have one of these,
but whoa, there's way too much information coming
into my brain right now.
I can't process all of this and add all of it to my tower.
So that's where my inspection team comes in.
A bunch of brain regions
and processes dedicated to investigating, processing,
and deciding which of these bricks are most important.
Most bricks don't get much scrutiny
because most of the stuff we take in is familiar
and the brain just assumes it's true.
Like imagine walking down the street
and wondering if that traffic light was actually real
and sitting there and staring at it
or wondering if your friend was lying
when they said they'd meet you at 10:00 AM for coffee.
You wouldn't get anything done.
All of your brain space would be just processing what's
in this room right now.
It would be impossible
to function in this world if you were constantly evaluating
every single thing you saw and felt.
So we let bricks through without a lot of scrutiny.
Oh, but look, I just opened Facebook
and my uncle is posting about COVID vaccines.
Look how this information shows up into my brain.
This is not a boring or familiar or emotionless brick.
It is a big new important brick
(bright music)
and it's a bigger deal for my inspectors
because it contains information that either confirms
or threatens my deep desires, fears, or core identity.
This is the type of information that's more emotional,
that's higher stakes.
We often remember this stuff and it informs our behavior.
And in my analogy, these bricks,
these important bricks are the foundation of our tower,
the foundation of our worldview.
Okay, now that we've laid that foundation,
let's do our experiment where I give you some bricks,
some true, some not,
and you pay attention to what that feels like for you.
Are you ready?
Let's do this.
(upbeat music)
Okay okay, bricks, here's a few, listen to this one.
- Crime is on the rise everywhere
and every place is a possible crime target.
- Okay, now a few more.
- Crime is rising around the country.
- I feel less safe.
Crime is on the rise.
- And crime is on the rise.
- Crime is on the rise.
- Okay, what do you think, do you believe it?
How did you react to this information,
hearing it once and then hearing it again and again?
First, let me just quickly tell you the truth.
Some crime in major cities did rise in 2022,
but has since declined according
to this data from the Major Cities Chief Association.
Here's another good data point.
The police departments from three
of America's biggest cities report
that homicides are trending down.
The big crime report that the FBI puts out says
that 2023 saw a 6% decrease in violent crimes
across the country from the year previous.
And that cities with over a million people saw an 11%
decrease in violent crimes.
So this assertion that crime is on the rise everywhere
in the US is simply not true.
It is not factually accurate.
Okay, but my point here has nothing to do with crime rates.
What I'm trying to show you is the Illusory Truth Effect.
- So the Illusory Truth Effect is the tendency
to believe something that you heard more than once.
- Okay, let's go back to our construction site for a sec.
The Illusory Truth Effect is when you hear something once,
like that first clip I showed you,
"Crime is on the rise everywhere,"
and maybe you're skeptical at first,
so your inspectors like reject it.
It doesn't make it into your tower,
but wait, there's like a ghost coming out of the brick
that slips through these inspectors
and settles onto the tower?
Wait, what?
Okay, but watch what happens next.
I then played more clips with that same assertion,
and even as my inspectors kept rejecting it, the ghost
of the brick kept getting through,
smoother and easier every time.
And look, the brick is getting stronger until it kind
of looks like the rest of the bricks.
Okay, so you hear something a bunch of times
and it starts to code as true.
And then, and I hate this part,
even after that information is debunked,
like I looked up all the stats, I read all the FBI reports,
and I know that that is not a true assertion,
even then the ghost of the brick still stays around.
(graphic twinkling)
It's still there, and it quietly influences my behavior.
Like I know this claim is false,
but the idea of crime is now more pronounced in my mind
and I'm living with increased stress
and anxiety about it,
even though I'm at a lower risk than I was five years ago.
- And it's such a strong effect.
You do an experiment and you always get it.
Yeah, you show subjects a bunch of sentences
and some of them you only show once
and some of them you show twice.
And then you ask them, oh, is this true, is this not true?
They're more likely to believe things are true
if they've seen them more than once.
And the reason is that when you hear a sentence
for the first time, your brain does a lot
of work to process it.
So imagine I tell you, a shrimp's gut is in its head, right?
So you're processing this information,
maybe you're imagining the gut in the head.
Maybe you're thinking
about the last time that you ate the shrimp.
Now the second time I tell you,
a shrimp's gut is in its head.
You don't need to do as much processing, right?
You've heard it before, so there's less processing.
And the way that our brain works is
that when there's less processing, there's less surprise.
We just immediately, unconsciously,
automatically assume things are true.
- [Johnny] So is a shrimp's gut in its head?
- It is. - [Johnny] It is.
You can see this in the brain scans.
I mean, look at this, even after being debunked,
the misleading information stays in the brain
and competes with the good information for your attention.
They're both there wanting to be remembered
when you think about crime.
The ghost is still in your brain.
So yeah, this unfortunate quirk
of the brain is called the Illusory Truth Effect.
The more you hear something, the more you think it's true,
and it kind of sticks around even
after it's been debunked or corrected.
And because of that, people who want us
to believe them take advantage of it, repeating lies over
and over and over until they start
to kind of feel like truth.
Like that time when Trump insisted
that he had like a massive turnout for his inauguration.
- We had the biggest audience in the history
of inaugural speeches.
I looked out, the field was,
it looked like a million, million and a half people.
- This was the largest audience ever witness an inauguration
period, both in person and around the globe.
- Sean Spicer, our Press Secretary,
gave alternative facts to that, alternative facts to that.
- And he just sort of said it over and over and over,
even though there was like such clear evidence
that no, this was not the largest turnout of all time,
but when Trump and his people just say it over and over,
people start to believe it.
And yeah, I just wielded the Illusory Truth Effect
against you in the name of teaching you how this works.
I gave you a fake fact, something that isn't true,
and that fact is maybe still there floating around
as a ghost in your brain.
But let me just repeat once and for all that this fact
that I told you was a lie, it is not true.
The crime rate in the United States
is not rising everywhere.
Do you understand?
Sorry.
It's just that one of the studies I read
said that if I make it emotionally intense,
then you'll remember better.
(upbeat music)
Okay, back to the construction site.
I want to try to get a few more bricks into your brain.
And this next one is the one we have
to be probably most vigilant about.
It's the hardest one to arm yourself against.
Oh look, what a surprise.
I'm on my phone again
and this time I'm watching a political video
on the internet.
I deeply agree with this video.
And look at these bricks coming in.
They're just breezing past my inspectors.
They're getting loaded up right onto my tower.
But wait a minute, hold on.
These are high stakes bricks,
like the important emotional information,
shouldn't they get careful inspection?
Wait, what's going on?
Why are these bricks getting in with just a free pass?
Why is no one looking at these?
Yeah, I'm looking at you.
(creatures snoring)
Hold on and who's that?
Okay, there's a lot going on here.
Let me explain.
These bricks, we'll call these bricks preferred information.
They're kinda like the fancy people at the airport
who have platinum status and who breeze through security
and get priority boarding,
but in this case, priority boarding into your brain.
These bricks are bits of information that line up
with your preexisting beliefs.
They fit really nicely into your worldview tower.
I mean, look at how nicely these are fitting
into my worldview, I love this.
(upbeat music)
So the inspectors see these bricks arrive
and they compare it to the rest of the tower.
And if it looks kind of like the bricks
that are already there, they assume that it's good to go.
No need to waste time thoroughly inspecting these bricks.
Wait, what the, who is this?
Who let you in here, who are you?
- I'm Dorothy. - [Johnny] Ah, yes, Dorothy,
AKA, the dopamine fairy
who we've decided to call Dorothy
because we make videos on the internet
and kind of do whatever we want.
Honestly, Dorothy's great.
She shows up and makes us feel happy
whenever we do something good for ourselves
or the survival of our species.
So whenever these high stakes emotional bricks just slide
through inspection quickly
and fortify our already existing tower, she rewards us
for fortifying our worldview,
for making us feel safe in our beliefs, all without having
to use the valuable, limited mental resources of the brain.
You're making everyone's job easier.
So give everyone a bonus, let's do more of this, please.
The result is a good feeling, the thing we all want.
Okay, but let's go into the real world really quick
and see what this looks like.
I'm gonna do that thing again where I show you information,
I put bricks into your brain.
These ones are gonna be a little spicier than the last bit.
And like on the real internet, some of these will be false
or misleading while others will be factually accurate.
I'll disclose all of that after the experiment, I promise.
What I want you to do here
as I throw these bricks into your world, is pay attention
to how they feel.
Do you agree with them?
Do you want to agree with them?
Does it feel good to agree with them
or does it feel good to reject them?
Does it make you feel angry?
Does it make you feel excited?
Did you just learn something that you can't wait
to tell your uncle at the next Thanksgiving so
that you can once and for all prove
that you are right and he is wrong.
- Here I am, woo. - That's it.
Janksgiving is on.
- It's an amazing feeling.
Is Dorothy present for you?
Pay attention, here they come.
(upbeat music)
All right, first one, immigration.
Look at this tweet, under the Biden administration,
illegal border crossings are way up from the Trump years,
reaching an all time high.
Okay, all time high, illegal border crossings.
How did that hit for you?
Watch it again if you need to.
Next this Instagram post, it says
that Biden has been providing US taxpayer dollars
to fund both the Israeli army and Hamas' military wing.
This post gives specific details as solid proof
that Biden is quote, funding every angle of this conflict.
Okay, remember, I'm gonna tell you which one
of these are true and if it's factually accurate
and all of that at the end.
Let's keep going, next, abortion.
Here's a tweet that I saw with a video clip
that apparently shows Trump saying
that he thinks he personally should be allowed
to throw doctors who perform abortions in jail
and that people should retweet so that everyone knows
how dangerous Trump's authoritarianism is.
That same clip with a similar caption was posted
by the Governor of California.
Okay, I didn't watch the clip, I just read that tweet.
Pay attention to how you're feeling about it.
Last one, President Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine,
recently bought two luxury yachts worth $75 million,
quote, amidst heavy reliance on Western aid
like using money from the West.
This was reported in an article that was tweeted
by a Republican lawmaker, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
saying that American taxpayers
are funding deep corruption in Ukraine.
(soft upbeat music)
Okay, so illegal border crossings,
are they at an all time high?
So full disclosure, if you look at my tower,
you're gonna see a lot of like pro-immigration bricks.
I think it should be a lot easier for people
to come to this country.
I think we need to fix that.
That is like a deeply held belief of mine,
given my life experience and what I've seen.
And I'm also aware that people use illegal border crossings
as a way to sort of rile up the conversation,
to politicize it, to create fear of outsiders.
So I'm pretty skeptical when I see a stat like this
that claims an all time high border crossing,
and Biden is way worse than Trump on this.
So my natural inclination was to not believe this,
to reject it outright and say like,
no, this is probably misleading.
It turns out I am totally wrong.
This data is absolutely solid reported
from the border patrol via the Washington Post.
This is an accurate graph.
Whether I like it or not,
I should let this brick into my tower.
It's not gonna change a ton
about how I think about immigration
and what I hope policymakers do, but it's true it's factual.
- It's the truth, it's actual.
- I need to let it in and so do you, this is a fact.
If you're someone who is very critical
of the Biden administration
and how they've handled immigration,
you may have let this in without even thinking twice
because it was preferred information,
it confirmed your worldview and it probably slipped in.
Next up, Biden funding every angle of the war in Gaza.
(upbeat music)
Okay, when I read this, I saw the stats on the right
and I sort of was like, yeah, this is maybe true.
I've been quite critical of how the US war machine tends
to give money and weapons to all sides of conflicts.
They've done that many times.
It wouldn't be surprising to me if this was the case here.
So I kind of let it slip in without a ton of scrutiny,
another brick to confirm my worldview
that we have a overly militarized foreign policy.
But no, once again, I'm wrong.
There's some facts in here.
But overall, this post is misleading.
Yes, the US does give aid to Palestinians,
but it's humanitarian aid, comes in the form
of emergency shelter, food, relief items, healthcare,
mental health, psychological support.
And it does not go to Hamas' military wing
like the visual in this post asserts.
One thing that is true is that the US does give a lot
of money in weapons to Israel for their military,
which they're now using in their war in Gaza.
But again, this post is misleading, it is misinformation.
It is not giving me a factual picture
of what is going on here, but I kinda let it slip in again.
Okay, that's two in a row where my confirmation bias just
sort of let a couple bricks in,
see if we can do better here.
Okay, let's get to the last two here.
Did Trump say that he personally should be able
to throw doctors in jail if they perform an abortion,
proof of his authoritarianism?
I mean, this would not be surprising at all to me.
Trump has all kinds of authoritarian impulses
and says crazy stuff all the time.
So if he said that he personally should be able
to throw a doctor in jail,
I would be like, yeah, he probably said that.
Okay, but watch what happens
when you actually watch the clip.
- Questions about abortion.
But do you think a doctor should be punished
who will perform abortions?
- I'll let that be to the states.
Everything we're doing now is states and states' rights.
And what we wanted to do is get it back to the states
because for 53 years it's been a fight
and now the states are handling it
and some have handled it very well,
and the others will end up handling it very well.
And those are the things that states are going
to make a determination about.
(reporter chattering) (cymbal swelling)
So, he didn't say that.
He did not say the thing that that tweet said.
What he said is still problematic to me
and deserves scrutiny.
But now it's all muddled
because there's misinformation involved.
Someone has totally mischaracterized this in a way
that draws the attention into information wars as opposed
to actually being able to scrutinize
how Trump thinks about abortion and states' rights.
That's what's so toxic about misinformation.
When I see it on things that like I in spirit would agree
with, I feel so disappointed that the person sharing
that information didn't stick to the facts,
which would've been so much more powerful.
(host yelling)
So once again, I fell prey to some confirmation bias.
Boy, oh boy, it's a hard world out there.
Last one, did President Zelenskyy use US taxpayer money
to buy two yachts worth $75 million as reported
by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican lawmaker?
Like no, like I immediately rejected this.
I was like, you do not speak truth, you're not trustworthy.
This feels outlandish.
I tagged it as false right away and I was right.
This is totally 100% made up.
In fact, even on the tweet, if you zoom down, you'll see
that the link she posted comes from what is widely known
as a Russian propaganda website.
It's a totally made up story,
but this factless brick slipped into the minds
of a bunch of Republican lawmakers, who by the way,
by design were thinking about Ukraine and whether
or not we should give more money to them.
And in the back room deliberations,
while they were talking about it, one reporter notes
that they said, "They are corrupt
and they're maybe gonna buy yachts with this money."
It worked, the brick got in,
and the funding was delayed, not just because of this,
but stuff like this misinformation contributed
to that discussion.
Now the funding did eventually get passed
as we're recording this, like just got passed.
So anyway, the point is this misinformation can make it
into the brains of people who are making our laws
and by the Russian government, no less.
(bright music)
So that my friends is confirmation bias.
It is the lovely feeling you get when you're met
with information that confirms your worldview,
whether it's true or not.
If it confirms your worldview, makes you feel safe in your
and your group's identity, you're gonna be way more likely
to accept it without giving it any scrutiny.
- We're also more likely to go out
and seek information, opinions,
and data that confirms what we already believe.
And on the other hand, we're less likely
to believe information that goes against
what we already believe and less likely
to go and seek it out.
- That's what we gotta be careful about.
That's the dangerous stuff.
- [Narrator] More doctors smoke Camels
than any other cigarette.
- Let's just switch gears for one second
and ask a very important question, which is why?
Why does our brain have these faulty habits
that makes us so susceptible to lies?
And the answer is that for a lot of years,
that's what kept us safe.
(soft music)
Believing in myths
and stories was actually very beneficial to humans
for most of our history.
It allowed us to organize
around leaders who we thought had special powers
or to believe that there was a man in the sky
who would reward us with good weather,
which meant healthy crops,
which was literally our food source,
all if we obeyed the same rules.
Anything that conflicted with these beliefs, these myths,
these stories was a threat
to what kept our group cooperating in large numbers,
which for a long time was our survival.
- What is true is not always the thing
that will get us a reward and help us avoid harm, sometimes,
but not always.
So we have beliefs that can actually lead
to positive outcomes despite the fact
that these beliefs are untrue.
So for example, believing in God.
So in some locations, geographical locations,
believing in God can actually make you more likely
to get a job perhaps in some states
or some countries, right?
In many situations,
believing in God will get you social support, right?
So it doesn't, regardless of
whether it's an accurate or inaccurate belief, right?
Believing in God can actually get you reward
and help you avoid harm and
therefore in increase your survival.
- [Johnny] So our brains adapted to seek information
that promotes safety within our group.
Social cooperation, not empirical truth told
to us in statistics and nuanced data sets,
but eventually we learned how to measure the world
and produce shared facts.
That allowed us to thrive in new ways.
But our brains unfortunately didn't suddenly upgrade
to crave facts and truth.
We still have the old hardware, we still want
to feel safe in our group like the old days.
We want visits from the dopamine fairy,
whether that comes from truth or lies.
And as you all know, that feeling
is exactly what we all have now.
(eerie music)
A few years ago we invented a new information delivery
system that custom delivers this feeling of safety for us,
only the preferred bricks, the ones that slip right
through, the ones that earn us a visit
from our favorite fairy.
It's incredible technology,
from the comfort of our own home,
I can connect with people
who have the same preferred bricks as me.
We can build our towers
and build bridges between them
so we can share our preferred bricks with each other,
giving each other bricks that fortify our worldview,
confirm our safety.
And God, it feels good, it's what every human brain wants.
You are safe here.
And whenever someone else with a different kind
of tower shows up to the neighborhood
and tells you in 280 characters that all of these bricks
that make up the foundation of your tower are wrong
and that you're an idiot for building your tower
that way, you and everyone in your tower neighborhood get
to fire arrows at them from afar.
Oh look, and here comes the ferry again to reward you
for dunking on this enemy, this threat, allowing you
to further bond with your group who helped you.
- If you think about how we evolved,
it was mostly experiences, first experiences,
or hearing the experience of or watching people
that are close to us, right?
Now of course we can go online
and we can get this information,
epistemic knowledge in the forms of like text.
And of course the difference now is that it's also infinite
and we can also search
for specific things according to what we want.
So now we are directing what information we're consuming.
What do I Google, who do I follow?
- None of us are immune from this, I do this too.
It is incredibly human.
We crave that feeling that our group is right,
our tower is firm, we are safe.
And now that message is confirmed to you day
and night with bright buttons and flashing lights.
It's social, it's new media, it's free speech,
but really, it's a feeling of safety and comfort
and we've mastered it, good for us.
(soft music)
Okay, but it's not all doom and gloom.
I know that we hear this all of the time
and it feels like our brains are broken
and social media has hijacked us
and there's nothing we can do about it.
But I actually believe in human brains.
I mean, look what we've done,
if there's anything humans can do,
it is transcend our natural impulses
to find more enlightened ways to work together
and to create real safety
and real connection, not the cheap and easy stuff.
So I think we can do this.
We're just at a moment in time
where it's gonna take some work.
So as we all go back into the trenches of the internet
that is now laced with misinformation
and lies, let me give you a tips that I have started using
to navigate this world.
(upbeat music)
Number one, pay attention to your bricks.
Just pay attention like we've done today in the video,
how that information hits your brain,
how you want to reject it
or accept it without scrutinizing it and why,
what that feels like.
I think that's step one for all of us.
I know I am sharpening my sense as I've reported the story
and thought about this more.
I'm gonna walk away from this with a much keener sense
and desire to put some friction in that
often frictionless experience of letting bricks in
that confirm my previously held worldviews.
So pay attention, number two, remember
how we actually change someone's mind.
Most of us every day see some article or tweet
or post that we deeply disagree with
and that we think is based off of lies
or misleading information.
I will tell you, and there's now decent science on this,
That one way to not change that person's mind is
to yell at them and tell them that they're wrong.
In fact, new studies are suggesting that trying
to prove somebody wrong, especially in an internet setting,
actually has the opposite effect,
forcing us to refortify our towers.
The more we yell at each other, the more we polarize,
and the less we talk to each other,
the less people's minds change.
(whistles blowing) (crowd yelling)
So if you're someone who has those types of arguments
or leaves those types of comments on the internet, just know
that the only person you're serving is you.
You're not serving anyone else.
You are serving that feeling that you get when you leave
that comment that confirms your identity.
You do you, but you're not changing anyone's mind.
Number three, and my last one here is the power
of I don't know, which,
this is kind of a big one, tall order these days.
The more I think about it, the more I realize
that it's quite silly that we have this expectation that all
of us are going to have these refined,
well-argued opinions
about every hot button issue of the day.
No one has that, but we all kind of pretend we do
because we're afraid to say, "I don't know,"
or "I don't understand."
And yet some of the smartest people I know are the ones
who say, "I don't understand," who speak less,
who listen more, and who are curious.
Arriving curious is an instantly disarming energy
and it opens you up to understanding and learning
And ironically, helps the person you're arguing
with understand you better.
This doesn't mean agreeing with everyone you talk to
or being so open-minded, that you just let everything in.
You should have your morals, you should have your red lines.
But try to arrive curious.
Try to empathize with the people who read that information
that you disagree with and believe it
and why they might do that.
You might not get the short term buzz
that you get when you argue and you yell,
but I promise that arriving curious with I don't know,
actually fosters long-term security.
So that's it, that's the video.
- [Crowd] USA, USA.
(audience clamors)
As we head into this election,
we're gonna hear a lot of lies.
People are going to want us
to believe things that are not true.
I hope we can pay attention
and see this information for what it is.
(soft upbeat music)
And I hope through curiosity
and understanding, we can get back to a world
where our bricks start to look the same.
We can agree on some version of fact and reality.
I don't know if that's like two years from now
or 20 years from now, or 100,
but I believe that we humans are capable of doing it.
Even if the incentives of media
and social media algorithms don't want us to,
I think we can, but it's gonna take more vigilance
of what goes into our own minds than ever before.
- And so this is especially a problem when people have
like outrageous lies,
if you think about like the big fraudsters, right?
- Yeah, - Why do people fall
for these big fraudsters, like Elizabeth Holmes for example?
Because probably the person who is on the other side,
they could not imagine doing something
to such a large extent,
so it's difficult for them
to figure out that this is a lie.
Well, for the kind of smaller lies,
like upping your height on like a dating app
or something, people can be more suspicious
because they're more likely to do that themselves.
- I see.
- Thank you Trainwell for sponsoring today's video
for supporting our journalism.
And just to clarify again, Trainwell used
to be called Copilot.
They're now called Trainwell.
(soft upbeat music)