Surviving Lies, Rumors, and Digital Hate: Dan Ariely’s Guide to Thriving Online

Well, I am so excited about the show today, and I'm sure you're gonna have an amazing time listening, but I have a favor to ask. See, I'm in a mission to help millions leap their careers, elevate their careers, land their dream rules, fast-track to leadership, jump to a demurorship, create portfolio careers, and this podcast is about giving you the map of how some of the biggest leaders of our time reach success.
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So let's dive in. The recipe for a good life has to involve lots of progress, and lots of progress means lots of scars.
Don Ariely, he's one of the most well-known behavioral economists of our time. He's also a professor in psychology and behavioral economics at Duke and author of many books, including bestsellers like The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.
And we're also going to talk about your new book, Misbelief, which actually give me chills. Many years ago, I was burned in a bad accident.
70% of my body was burned. I was in hospital for about three years.
I get a simple email from somebody and she sent me a list of links. I'll just describe to you one video.
It says I was burned. 70% of my body, all of this correct.
And then the video goes on to say that this is why I started hating healthy people. And that's why I joined Bill Gates, the cabal, the Illuminati, to try and kill as many healthy people as possible.

I started getting death threats.

It became very tough.

I feel hate in the digital world became really, really easy.

Why do people become villains?

What happened is that people start with... Dan Ariely, he's one of the most well-known behavioral economists of our time, but I saw Dan on stage about a decade ago, and I was mesmerized by his wisdom and how we make decisions.
He's also a professor in psychology and behavior economics at Duke and author of many books, including bestsellers like The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. And we're also going to talk about your new book, Misbelief, which actually give me chills.
But Dan, especially for those who are watching us on video, but also for those on a podcast, you have to start with a little bit, why half a beard? Half a beard is a good way to think about my life, my history, and also on behavioral economics. So here's the story.
I have half a beard. If you're on audio, believe me, half a beard.
My right cheek doesn't have hair. My left cheek does.
and there's also some white there. And this half a beard has a few reasons.
The first one is that I was badly burned. Many years ago, I was burned in a bad accident.
70% of my body was burned. I was in hospital for about three years.
Terrible tragedy, very difficult, got me to think about lots of things in life. But as a consequence, I don't have hair on the right side of my face.
It's all scar tissue, so hair doesn't grow on this side. But of course, I could shave.
And if I shaved, I would have no hair on both sides. And for many years, indeed, I shaved.
And a few years ago, I went on a month-long hike. And at the end of this month-long hike, I came out with half a beard.
And it was the first time I looked at myself in the mirror. And I didn't like how I looked.
It's a very strange look. It's strange to look at.
It's strange for me to look at. And I thought to myself that I'll certainly shave this half a beard, but I'll keep it for a few more weeks just as a memory of the hike.
So I kept it for a few weeks, and then I posted a few comments on social networks and so on.

And to my surprise, a few people reached out to me,

thanking me for the half a beard.

Now, why were they thanking me for the half a beard?

These were people who were struggling with their own injuries.

They were feeling that they were hiding their own injuries,

and that now that might give them some energy to try something different.

So, for example, there was a woman in her 50s,

Thank you. hiding their own injuries, and that now that might give them some energy to try something different.

So for example, there was a woman in her 50s who told me that when she was 17, she had

a car accident, her leg was injured, and she never wore a dress or a skirt since, and she's

going to try.

So that gave me power to say, okay, I'll continue with this half a beard.

But then the other thing that happened was about four months down the line, I felt more comfortable with my scars. Now, I got injured when I was about 18.
It was many years ago. And all of a sudden now, four months into this half a beard, I feel better about my scars.
I don't feel that they are me and my injury. I feel that I'm together.
It's part of the story of my life. And I think to myself, what's happening? Why now? And here is what happened.
Imagine somebody like me wakes up. When I wake up, my right cheek is smooth, no hair.
The left cheek has stubble, little black dots. And the act of shaving is also an act act of hiding exactly the thing that people told me that they wanted to stop doing I I start the day more non-symmetrical and after shaving it's less apparent now here's the thing about this I'm a social scientist I should know those things but of course I didn't in fact for many years I did the thing that wasn't good for me.
I shaved. And letting go of that was an incredible act of self-acceptance.
And I think that what happened there was that I basically stopped hiding, started accepting myself to a higher degree, and it had lots of implications in all kinds of ways. And if I think about what it means in social science terms, where are our half beards? And if you asked me, you know, a few years ago, how would life look like with half a beard? I would be very able to tell you how day one would look like.
People would ask questions, kids would laugh, people would point. But if you ask me how would that lead to self-acceptance or to anything down the road, I would not be good at it.
And it's true for lots of things and some of the things we'll talk about today with our intuitions are about short-term activities and our long-term intuitions about processes are not that good. So somebody thinks about switching jobs, we might have good intuitions about day one, we might not have intuition about month four and so on.
So anyway, that's my half a beard and my introduction. That's an incredible story.
I knew it, but I love hearing it again and again. So tell me, Dan, I do want to go back in time though, because you suffered for three years an incredible injury.
You talk about it with some details, and I'm sure it's not a fraction of what you went through. But that somehow built you.
That injury actually became your gift. Can you talk a little bit about that? There's an expression in the pain research when they call people pain people.
And the idea that at a certain level of pain, the pain becomes so much that there's really nothing beyond the pain. And in the initial period of the injury, there's really wasn't more.
I can't take credit for anything. I wasn't planning.
I wasn't thinking. I was just focusing on a daily pain, trying to get over it.
I think managing quite well with the daily pain, trying to come up with my own strategies to dealing with pain and so on. But the beginning was just pain.
And in some strange way, maybe year two, when I was trying to be a bit better, was psychologically more difficult.

This is when I all of a sudden had time.

And I asked myself questions like, where would I find my place in society?

Where will I find my place professionally?

Will society accept me?

Will I have a romantic life with all of these cars? When will the pain go away? And then there was another interesting period, interesting in a difficult sense. Burns are really interesting because all of us had burns and mostly they go away.
But if you look at my hand, for example, these are burns that don't go away. This is all transplanted skin.
The fingers are deformed. The joints were burned.
This doesn't go away. And I had lots of questions about where will this leave me and how will I manage my life? What do you do with that? And in the beginning was not easy.
I remember actually the people in the hospital brought somebody to talk to me that had a bad injury and then became a car mechanic. So even though his fingers were not so good, he actually managed to be a car mechanic.
And I think it was a tremendous feat for him to be a car mechanic. But I looked at it and said, that's what they expect me to be.
What will happen to me? What skills will I have and not have and so on?

So there was a lot of wondering about what would life be with somebody with very substantial injuries.

And you're about 19, 20 at this time when you're having all these debates, right?

I mean, you're young.

Yeah.

The whole future is in front of you.

The whole future is ahead of me. And I'm also mostly in bed.
So I'm thinking about those things, but I'm mostly in bed. And I actually don't feel very much part of human society.
I don't know if you know this, but I helped write a TV show loosely based on my life. The TV show is called The Irrational.
And we're filming now the second season. In the writer's room, they asked me, what have I learned? Injuries are terrible, but they also asked me, what did I gain from this experience? And one of the very dual elements that is both good and bad is that I didn't feel human.
My friends were doing regular human things, and I was not doing any of those. I wasn't dating, and I wasn't going to the movies, and I wasn't doing anything.
Even in the beginning, I wasn't eating. I was fed by a tube for a very long time.
But I think this distance also was really helpful for me as a social scientist. I think that now I'm a little bit more objective.
I might not feel as connected in some ways to the human experience, but I feel a bit more observant. And I think some of it has been very good for me in terms of my ability to sit back and try and observe our behaviors.
So this is where you started just observing, understanding, but then you made this your life mission, I guess, to understand and take it to a whole different level. How did that become your profession? The first thing that started was that I really hated the bandage removal process.
So imagine that you are mostly burned. It means that the flesh is exposed.
There's no skin. Bandages have to come on because you have to prevent infections.
And once a day, they have to come off. The skin has to be scrubbed and new bandages have to come again.
Very, very painful process. Morphine was helpful, but certainly not eliminating all the pain.
Excruciating. And especially when the flesh is bleeding, bandages adhere.
Anyway, I was very much occupied with how do we make this process not as bad? And it has to be done.

It's not an avoidable process,

but can it be done in a better way?

That was the thing that troubled me.

These kind of questions have led the rest of my career.

I'm a social scientist,

but really I'm concerned with problems

that I think social science can help improve.

My motivation is to say, let's analyze things that I think people are not doing so well right now. And let's think if we can do them better.
Let's study them, understand them, and see if we can improve how things are done. So it started with this experience with bandages, where I started just arguing with the nurses and doctors.
And later on, I did some experiments. I found out that they were indeed wrong.
I started a campaign to change how things were done in hospital, had some success, and then went from there to continue with this path. First of all, it makes sense because the level of questions dictate the level of problems and focus and wisdom that you're going to start gaining.
Yeah. By the way, I think that personal passion for me is crucial.
So a few years ago, I hired a guy in my research lab to work on health-related problems. And he came first day in the lab, and we talk about what he's going to do and the project and so on and then I ask him about him his life his childhood his hobbies where he is and it turns out that his parents had to declare bankruptcy when he was in high school and his whole growing up experience came from a family that was doing well so a family in bankruptcy to try and fight with all the bureaucracy and the complexity that comes with it.
And we talked a lot about this. And when we finished, I said to him, this looks like you're really passionate about understanding what's happening during bankruptcy, how you can prevent it, how you can help people deal better with it.
He said, yes. And I said, so why did you want to study healthcare? He said, this is what you offered.
I said, okay, I don't think you should study healthcare. I think you should study these kind of problems because if that's what motivates you, that's what you should be doing.
So we switched him. We found a new job for him.
We started a new project. But I think at the end, every project we do is going to take longer, going to be more complex, going to have ups and downs, plus downs.
And to sustain the motivation, we need something that we're interested in, in general, that we're truly excited about. And I think we need to spend time figuring those things out and finding those projects.

And I think that somehow, and we'll talk about it, is because you're able from really hard moments to actually find your passion and swerve it towards analyzing and actually understanding. So to me, that is your zone of genius.
I think it was really interesting for the listeners to understand sometimes from your hardest moments will actually come the biggest breakthroughs.

I think of hardest moment as a magnifying glass or as a telescope or something that allows you to understand more of the nuances.

I'll give an example.

Because of my injury and because I write so much about this, I get lots of people with injuries writing me. And there was this one kid who wrote me, also got very badly burned.
So this is many years after I got out of hospital. I visit him in hospital and the nurse comes in and she said, today we're going to have a new treatment.
And she says the name of the treatment. And I remembered what it was and it didn't bring up good memories.
And the kid says, can we do it tomorrow? And the nurse says, no. And the kid said, can we do it only on my legs and not on my upper body? The nurse said, no.
And she said, it could win in a few hours hours and not now. And she says no.
And as this negotiation happens, I remember all my negotiations. And I remember the feeling of helplessness.
One of the things that happened in hospital, of course, is pain. But another thing is helplessness.
And I remember all the helplessness and I just couldn't stand. I was

standing next to him in bed. The nurse was standing on the bottom of his bed and talking to him.

And I couldn't stand up. I just had to sit and put my head between my knees and kind of just

breathe a little bit. And only then I realized the role of helplessness.
Up to that point,

I thought a lot about pain. I didn't think about helplessness.
From that point on, I realized the role of helplessness. Up to that point, I thought a lot about pain.

I didn't think about helplessness.

From that point on, I realized the role of helplessness and how tough it was.

So I think the moment we get into a phenomenon and we get dive deeper and deeper into it,

we learn more and more about it.

You've been author of many books, top keynotes. You've been on Google Talks and Brazilian podcasts, right? But at some point during COVID, something flipped and you started going into some very weird things.
Can you share a little bit? When I read this, I have to say in your book, Misbelief, it's heart-wrenching. I literally had tears in my eyes.
Can you share a little bit what happened? That was a very, very, very tough, very tough period. So here I was in COVID.
I'm feeling at the best period of my life. Why? Because there's this crazy thing going on in the world.
And all of a sudden, people ask for social science. So I do all kinds of things.
People ask about remote work and people ask about remote studying and what do you do with domestic violence and how do you get people to wear a mask and lots and lots of things. And I am feeling this unbelievable height of my career.
And all of this is wonderful. And all of a sudden, about four months into it, I get a simple email from somebody.
And somebody says, Dan, what happened to you? What's wrong with you? How did you become that person? And I answer very quickly, what kind of person? This was a person I helped at some point. I volunteered time to help her.
I thought this was a good thing. And she sent me a list of links.
And this list of links, it's like opening a curtain and realizing that the world has a very, very different idea about me. something that I had no idea, not understanding.
And I'll just describe to you one video. One video shows me in hospital, burns.
They got some pictures. It says I was burned early, 70% of my body, almost three years, all of this correct.
And then the video goes on to say that this is why I started hating healthy people. And that's why I joined Bill Gates, the cabal, the Illuminati to try and kill as many healthy people as possible.
First with the pandemic and then with the vaccine when there would be one. And there were many links like that.
There was one video of two women sitting like in a living room setting, complaining about me, discussing my downsides. I started getting death threats.
It became very tough. The last death threat came just a few months ago.
So it was first two years, it maybe was once a day. Now it's slowed down, but still.
And my first reaction was to talk to those people. And I said, if they only knew, if they only knew that I wake up in the morning and all I try is to help.
That's the only thing that drives me is try to help as many people as possible. I might make some mistakes from time to time, but my only motivation is to help.
But talking to those people only got things worse. It was a very tough month.

I learned a lot, right? We said you dive into something, you learned a lot. So for example, in psychology, there's a notion of scarcity mindset.
And scarcity mindset is usually thought of for people who are very low income. And the idea is that if you're concerned with, Will I have money for dinner?

Will I have money to pay bills?

Some of your IQ is dedicated to those tasks and your active IQ dedicated to other things goes down. So people perform worse on IQ tests.
It's not as if they have worse IQ, it's just that some of their mind is occupied. For me, part of it was, what are they talking about me now? When's the next death threat? And so on.
I felt I had less IQ. It was just incredible.
I had a very, very tough month trying to argue. I joined discussions group and Zooms and Telegram and WhatsApp and all kinds of crazy sites.
And at the end of the month, I decided to give up. I said, I'm not going to convince anybody that I'm not evil.
I tried for a month. I failed.
I'm a slow learner. But I learned.
And I decided to turn it into a learning process. And I said, OK, I am very close to this phenomenon.
Very few people in the world have been attacked this brutally. And very few people are social scientists who have been attacked brutally.
I'm a unique position to both care a lot and try and understand this. And then I spend two very, very complex, difficult years.
For example, there was one guy, these people thought that there will be Nirenberg 2.0 trials in which the people who committed crimes against humanity like me will be sentenced for their trial. And there was one guy who said he wanted to be my executionary.
And I talked to him. I said, okay, I'm going to forget the executionary for now.
Help me understand. So I tried to understand them.
By the way, I gave ChatGPT my book. and I said, please summarize it in one word.
And the word was empathy.

And I kind of like that. At the end of the day, it's a very sad story about our time.
But I think I ended up having a lot of empathy for my attackers. And I can't still understand that, I have to say, even though I read the book.

And I think one of the things that you explained so well there is how this can happen almost to everybody, how they can move from something nudged them a little bit to the wrong way.

And suddenly you're going off to the dark holes of the internet and beyond.

We're seeing a lot of people losing their job. They can barely pay the bill.
They run into endless rejections. We can see how it's taking them to really dark places.
What do you feel they should do? What helped you wake up in the morning and say, I didn't sleep well at night, but I'm going to try again? So first of all, I think your conclusion that we're all susceptible is very important. Because it's very easy to say, oh, it's them versus us.
We don't need to worry because we're good people. And it's those people and they need to worry.
But of course, it's not them versus us. It's humanity.
And we have a machine that is creating stress and information and so on, and it's leading us down a path toward misbelief. And the first thing that I learned was causing people to question the current narrative and to go for an alternative one is stress.
And I don't mean the stress of saying, gee, I have too much email. I don't know how I'll finish.
I mean the stress saying, I don't understand the world. Why am I sick? Why did I lose my job? My parents told me I'll do better than they do.
Why is my town losing? I mean, just think about it. What are the Houthis doing attacking American merchant ships around the world? What is Iran exactly doing? And my students, right? They say things like, tell me that whatever profession I'm learning now will still be around in three years.
So I'm not so sure. So we're dealing with a period of very high stress and very low resilience.
We don't have the same number of good friends. We don't spend enough time with extended family.
At work, we don't have friends anymore. We have work friends.
Economic inequality is decreasing resilience. So we're dealing in a very tough period.
And look, the stress in the world is the stress in the world. The hutis are the hutis until we get rid of that problem.

It's not something. But the thing that we need to deal with is resilience.
I have to say that part of my attempt to try and understand this problem is my attempt to control it.

If you're a victim, which I was for the first month, I was just a victim. I was just accused,

accused, accused, accused. And by starting to study it, I had some of my own autonomy, some agency.
I said, okay, now I'm studying you. You're the one who's been attacking me.
You want to be my executioner. Fine.
Help me understand how you got to these beliefs. So taking control back to you.
Yeah. I needed to understand what was going on.
In some sense, what you're asking, and it's very true, in some sense, I was doing what they were doing. So the misbelievers, as I call them, were living in a very, very stressful time, and they were looking for an explanation.
And they found Bill Gates and the cabal were doing kind of things. Me, I was also in a very stressful period.
I was also looking for an explanation, but the explanation I was looking for is explanation about the interaction of human nature and technology. I think it's a healthier journey.
And I looked at it more as a scientist, but I think, yes, the part of getting control, explaining the story, understanding what is going on, these were very important parts of the story. First of all, it's really great to be boxed together with Bill Gates in the same way.
To me, that's a huge compliment. But I hear you.
It is tough. There's a good chance that some of them are still after me.
There's a good chance that even this podcast, some people would write some really terrible things. Well, we'll bash them back because I'm a big fan and I think that's all BS.
And I know how you've been for decades trying to just help explain humanity, help people date better, help people make more money. You've been trying to help humanity for decades.
How can they even take you there? Thank you so much for saying this. I will say that the videos that people send me burning my books, so death threats are very tough.
Death threats are tougher than I would have imagined. When people write a death threat, it feels worse than I would have imagined.
But also burning books is very tough as well, right? It hurts. And it also means that these are people that know something about me because they read my book.
So it's extra tough. It's not a stranger just writer.
This is people who read the book and burning it. It's very tough.
Hey, I'm pausing here for a second. I hope you're enjoying this amazing conversation.
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Now back to the show. I feel hate in the digital world became really, really easy.
I personally got rape threats to myself and my daughter. By the way, the minute they involved my daughter, I went berserk.
You want to threat me? I'm okay. I can take it.
You're involving my daughter in any way. I went through the roof, Dan.
I could not sleep at night. I was going nuts.
I feel it became too easy to just be an anonymous or not even anonymous and just throw things. How do you explain it? Why do people become villains? One of the things we need to understand is that we always tell ourselves, oh, this is online behavior.
It just stays online. No, the emotions that people have of real hate are real.
Yes, it's harder to execute in real world than to execute threats. But, you know, I had people shouting at me at the street as well.
But what happened is that people start hating, and then they go into what is called moral outrage. And what they try to do is they try to feel that it's not just that they dislike you, it's that your existence in the world offends them.
And now you've transitioned to a very different way. If you look at, for example, how many people are adding pedophilia to the accusations of the Illuminati and so on.
Why is that? It's because they're trying to add a crime that we would never forgive people for. So if they say, oh, these people are terrible, they wanted to make too much money, they changed something, you could forgive people for that.
But what they're trying to do is they're trying to paint people in a way that they will be unforgivable. And once people say it a few times, and once it's become a currency, it just continues from there.
And you know, I look a little strange with my half a beard and so on. But there was a long period where I felt that I was a social currency, that somebody wanted to elevate their position within the community of misbeliever.
And they would make something new about me with a picture. And there's lots in the internet to choose from.
And they would get lots of social credit for it. But of course, once they say something, people start believing it.
I gave a talk, by the way, somewhere a few weeks ago, and there were flyers around that place with a barcode that you could scan to take to all kinds of terrible information about me. It's a cycle.
So you ask, what happens? What happens is that people start with a rumor. It becomes stronger and stronger.
It becomes a currency. They develop emotions.
It becomes an identity issue. And then they continue.
And let me say one thing about identity.

There's a term called Shibboleth.

And Shibboleth came from a war between two tribes in Israel many years ago.

And at the end of the war, they settled on two sides of the river.

And when they walked around, they wanted to know whether 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 plan, Shibboleth,

Thank you. And when they walked around, they wanted to know whether 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, Shibboleth, slightly differently. One of them said Shibboleth, and one of them said Seibboleth.
So imagine we walk, I see you, I show you the plant, I say, hey you, how do you call this? If you say it the way I say it, we're brothers, we're from the same tribe. If you say it the way the other people are saying it, I try to chase you away.

And we now use this term shibbolet as a discussion that is not about the facts, but it's about identity.

Now, take that lens and say a discussion is not about the facts, but it's about identity.

And think about the political discourse in the world or in the U. US.
How much of our political discourse is not really about the facts? It's about shibbolit. It's about this idea of, you might think that I'm saying this, but I'm actually thinking I'm saying something about identity to other people.
If we think about, example, Fox News. So in the last election, presidential election, Fox News said that Trump won the election and they stole the election from him.
And they lost almost a billion dollars for the statement. But I think what they meant to say is, look what strong Trumpists we are.
Now, because we know from their communication, they didn't believe that Trump won the election. But what they wanted to say is they want to say, look, only people who are really strong believers of Trump will say something this extreme.
Now, I'm not justifying what they said, but I'm saying if you look at it through that lens, it's much more understandable. Now, it had some all kinds of downside effects because people thought they meant it literally, but they actually meant it to say, look what Trump supporters we

are. And these discussions on shibboleth are very confusing because if you take it at face value,

you're very confused. And if you repeat something, it might start with shibboleth,

but then become something that people accept as truth and then go down the line as well.

Is it because we're impatient and we jump to conclusions too fast? So we want a simple version of the world. This goes back to the stress.
There's this test that I love. You show people a piece of paper with black and white dots organized in a random way.
You say, do you see a figure? Yes or no? There's another one. Do you see a figure? And I show you 50 of those.
And people see a few figures, not that many. What happens when stress goes up? As stress goes up, people see more figures.
Now, why is that? Imagine you're an animal, like many years in the past or evolutionary past, you're an animal in the savannah, and you think there's a tiger. Now, every movement of a leaf, you want to interpret it as if it's a tiger.
When we are stressed, our system goes into hyperdrive to interpret everything as if it's a pattern. In regular life, you say, oh, there's all kinds of random things.
But when you're stressed, you try very hard to see patterns. So we are very stressed.

We are very stressed. We're concerned.
We're not sure. And we are looking for patterns.

We don't have the comfort to basically say, you know what? Let me hold judgment. I'm not yet sure

what is really going on. We really want answers.
And by the way, a lot of these misbeliefs come because they give quick answers that calm people down. They also tell them it's not their fault, it's the villain's fault.
And it makes them feel superior. So all of those things are very, very helpful.
It's always easier to look at somebody else's fault. I mean, that's for sure.
But one of the things that I hear for a lot of people are listening to this podcast, one of the things that will scare them a little bit is they're going to say, well, if I build my brand or if I go to these executive level roles, I'm more susceptible to be in the forefront, to suddenly find myself in these

situations and I need to create thick skin or I need to learn how to be more resilient because and between us, Dan, I get hurt by these things. I can't even imagine what you went through.
I take it personally. So how do you build either a thicker skin or motivate yourself to still be on a mission, get back up, continue going? This is a scary thing.
Very scary. And you're very right.
So let's take a slightly different example. Think about the first time that somebody in the business world

betrayed your trust.

What did you want to do?

You said, from now on,

ironclad documents.

I don't care.

No handshakes anymore.

From now on,

everything goes through legal.

Nobody would ever screw me over like this.

And then you stop

and you think to yourself

and you say, my goodness,

I benefit a lot from trust. It's true.
From time to time, I'm going to lose. And the thing about it is that the screwed over is going to be very salient.
And the gains I'm getting from trust are not as salient. If you ask me whether it's better in this world to be a trusting person or not trusting person, I would say that the trusting person would have much more improvement, but they would feel more the pain of mistrust.
The non-trusting person will not make much gains in the world, but they will not experience the betrayals. So that was a betrayal.
If you think about the question of cancel culture, society, negative feedback, and so on,

I think it's the same thing. Lots of people are basically saying, you know what, I'm out of the game.
I'm not interested. I'm not participating.
I'm not playing. And I can see why in the short term it's tempting.
But I don't think it's the recipe for a good life. I think at the end of the day, the recipe for a good life has to involve lots of progress and lots of progress means lots of scars, metaphorically.
You're right. I think about this adventure with the misbelievers.
I think of it as like climbing Mount Everest, intellectual, not the real thing. I can't climb the real thing.
But when people climb Mount Everest, they get injured. Nobody gets out of there without frostbite.
Some people lose their lives. I mean, it's a very, very tough thing to do.
And I think a lot of the things we do that are worthwhile are kind of like that. We need to figure out if that's our life strategy.
And I think that more of us would be better off by taking more of these challenges.

One of my favorite stories from economics is a story from Paul Samuelson, the famous economist at MIT.

And Samuelson goes to a friend of his in the department and he says, look, I'm going to

offer you a bet and I'm going to give you slightly different numbers.

I'll toss a coin.

If it comes on head, I'll give you $120. If it comes on tail, you'll give me $100.
I'll give you $120, you'll give me $100. Do you want to play? And his friend said, no, I don't want to play.
And he said, I understand that the expected value is positive, that on average it's a good deal. But if I'll win $120, I'll be slightly happy.

If I lose $100, I'll be very miserable.

So winning $120 is a little happiness.

Losing $100 is a lot of misery.

Not worth it.

And then Samuelson says, and what if we play this a thousand times?

Of course I'll play.

And then Samuelson says, look what you're telling me.

You're telling me that if I came to you every day and said you want to play this,

every day you would say no.

Thank you. of course I'll play.
And then Samuelson says, look what you're telling me. You're telling me that if I came to you every day and said, do you want to play this? Every day you would say no.
And three years later, a thousand days later, I would ask you, how were your decisions up to now? And you would say, my goodness, why did I play this way? And I think that when we look at life, one decision at a time, we tend to be too timid. We tend to think about the losses and the gains, and the losses are more painful than the gains are happy.
And because of that, we don't take enough risk. But I think we need like a portfolio approach.
When we look at our life, we say, that's not the life I want to live. I don't want to live a timid life.
So I think we need to figure out, it is painful. It's terrible.
I'm not recommending it to anybody.

But on the other hand... I don't want to live a timid life.
So I think we need to figure out, it is painful, it's terrible.

I'm not recommending it to anybody.

But on the other hand,

living a timid life is no way to live either.

We have to try and we have to learn to accept it.

And then there are things we can do to prepare.

So you said thick skin.

I think the thick skin is really resilience.

I think the thick skin is really developing

a good group of friends

Thank you. you said thick skin, I think the thick skin is really resilience.
I think the thick skin is really developing a good group of friends that trust us and support us in those moments. I don't think anybody could look at hateful comments about themselves and not care.
I think it's about having those people around us who reflect to us who we really are. And again, you need people that will not drain you and take you down with this, right?

Because that's also easy.

People will be so timid for you that they will start taking you down.

Well, so don't try so much, right? And there's the Richard Branson quote, the brave don't live forever, but cowards don't

live at all, which is kind of what we're saying.

And I love that example that you just gave.

I think it's so beautiful.

So, let's go. quote, the brave don't live forever, but cowards don't live at all, which is kind of what we're saying.
And I love that example that you just gave. I think it's so beautiful.
There's another great saying, you're going to always overestimate what you can do in a year, but we always going to underestimate what we can do in a decade. So we never really get started, which I think is sort of what you're saying.
Let me ask you one of the questions that I think our listeners, if that's okay, will really care about. You talk a little bit about mental health, I think now for CEOs and entrepreneurs and employees.
And I think this is something that is right now very much on a topic that I would love to talk a little bit about that, if that's okay, Dan. We're certainly not doing well.
We have record number of people who are on all kinds of SSRIs,

and we have lots of people who are not doing so well. I think part of it is the attention economy.

Part of it is the fragmented day. Part of it is the fact that we're not feeling in control.

Part of it is the fact that we feel helplessly and hopelessly behind. And my field, behavioral economics, basically believe that it's very hard to change people and much easier to change the environment.
We also believe that the decisions people end up making are a function of the people, but mostly the function of the environment. And we have designed an environment that is just not good for us.
And I'll give you a metaphor for this. Every year, cars get better.
How do cars get better? Yeah, they get a little bit more efficient and so on. Mostly they get better by assuming correctly what shitty drivers we are.
You know, we used to think that if we had anti-lock brakes, it will help. Then we had a seatbelt and a rear view mirror, then side mirrors, then we have little lights, then we have all kinds of things.
Every year, the main advances is to realize the extent to which we're shitty drivers and to make it a little more difficult for us to kill ourselves. So if you think about the development, the development is accepting human nature and building around it.
Nobody in the car industry says, oh, let's send people to a workshop on how to be a better driver. No, no, no.
It's hopeless. People are shitty drivers.
Let's make cars. It will get people to have more difficult time to kill themselves and other people.
In the world of information technology is the opposite. Every year, information technology is becoming less compatible with human nature, less comfortable, less conforming to our limitation, more demanding and so on.
It's kind of a shame, right? You could say, okay, what would IT, what would information, what would the calendar look like if it understood we can't just focus eight hours straight? what would the calendar look like if it understood we can't just focus eight hours straight?

What would the calendar look like if it understood that we need to pee between meetings? You don't have to go far. But it's not just a calendar.
It's email and it's every different platform like this. So I think that our digital world eventually is very, very badly designed for our health and our mental health.
We'll see its effect on health in 30 years from now, but we see the mental health effect very much now. And people have to take control.
And I think people who are high up in organization need to do it for themselves and they need to do it for the people who work with them. We need to control the flow of email and we need to control what we do on social media and we need to figure out how we go to sleep without screens and all of those things.
There's this term called structured procrastination. I love that.
Structured procrastination is the idea that we do things that make us feel like we're making progress, but without actually making progress. Like getting to inbox zero or making a to-do list and then checking things off.
It's not really making progress, but there are a lot of things in the digital world that gives us a sense that we're making progress and we gravitate to them and we do less. So here is one simple advice.
I'll tell you what I do. I go to the office every morning.
I think about what is the task that I most want to have make progress by the end of the day. What is the thing that is actually the most important to me that I want to make progress on today.
I think of it while I make my espresso. Then I sit back and I work on that task for at least 45 minutes.
And you know, you might say, oh, you know, it's only 45 minutes. It's a big deal.
B.F. Skinner, the famous psychologist, used to come to the office and not do anything else until he wrote 700 and a few words.

I forgot the exact number.

Let's say 738. And you can say, only 738? Really easy.
Well, a book has 70,000 words. If you wrote 700 words a day, in a year you'll have three books.
It's kind of an amazing, unheard of. The reality is that the issue with productivity is to carve the time and not wait for the moment of inspiration.
But most of us don't do it. Most of us come to the office, turn on email.
And once we turn on email, we are preoccupied with what this, we feel we're late. And then if we turn email end.
So I would say, look, we need to recognize how these systems are bad for us. And we need to figure out where do we take control.
And the ideal thing to do is to create a ritual, a daily ritual that is working for us. So this is one that works for me.
I love that. And we say that to our clients too, do the most important thing first.
Otherwise you just continue to push it. And I think there's another element of self-ownership of if you are pushing it, why? Because I push it sometimes because we all do, but then we need to reflect back and say, why am I actually pushing it? It's because I'm scared or I don't know what, and I don't want to, and I don't feel like it.
Like there's something holding me back. And if we can actually move this away, we can actually move forward, right? So I absolutely love that, Dan.
We always end with an advice to your younger self. And you had multiple younger selves along the journey.
What would you say to yourself looking back? You know, I told you that the people from the TV show asked me, what have I gained with all of this thing? And I wrote them a list of things that I think I gained. And one of the things that I gained, and I now tell people with injuries, but I think it's correct for everybody.
I say,

your life will never be the same. You were not injured.
You're injured now. Don't mourn the past.
It's over. And there'll be things that you can never go back to.
There'll be things you can't do. That's done.
And I say, the question to figure out is where are your skills, where you can make a unique contribution that fits to you

and to try and not feel accountable for other people's rules and standards. And I think that's really hard.
I'm an academic. Academics have a very specific life.
That life doesn't work for me. I can't use my hands.
there's lots of things that I can't do. And at the end of the day, my disability allowed me to not feel beholden to these standards.
I just can't do them. So it was very good for me to say, you know, I can do what I can do.
You can do what you can do. But I think in general, there's lots of rules from society,

a lot of standards from society about how we behave.

And I think an injury can be very liberating

in terms of not looking at this too seriously.

But I think it's also true for people without an injury

to basically look at where are our skills,

what do we really want to do,

and where are the rules of society not really playing for our strength? Is it the way we manage people? Is it the way we think about innovation? Is it the way we spend our time? Is it in the way that we are parents or significant others? Or it's in the variety of things that we do. At the end of the day, we really need to figure out our strength.
It's so tempting to go into role-playing for different things in society, but we each have unique strength. We need to figure those out and worry less about societal roles.
And I think not worrying so much about what will people say and what does it look like and what should I take to make my parents proud, but more of where do you actually want to be? And I think that makes all the difference. Then I could probably talk to you for like 12 more hours.
Seriously, just such a big fan. I hope all the BS is going away very fast because it doesn't make any sense.
And I think maybe you had to go through it to create something so powerful like misbelief and to start understanding what happens in our society with all the stress and the mental health. And maybe that's why they unleashed it on you because they knew that you're the genius that can figure this out.
So thank you for being on the show, Dan. Lovely to be here and happy to continue at some other point.
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