Todd Rose, co-founder and CEO of Populace and author of books including "Collective Illusions" and "The End of Average," joins the show to discuss the science behind collective illusions and their impact on society.
We explore why so many Americans self-silence, the dangers of conformity, and how one person can spark change.
Todd and I are simpatico on… pretty much everything! So this was a fun one. I hope you it as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Danger of Self-Silencing
“Roughly 2/3 of Americans are self-silencing on things that matter, that really matter to them. They just don't think they can actually express that publicly. That's dangerous […] Research has pretty conclusively shown that consistent self-silencing actually has cardiovascular consequences, elevated cortisol levels, these kind of things […] People that self-silence actually have lower levels of perceived self-worth, have diminished life satisfaction for all the reasons - you're making choices about things that make you miserable. And what I think is even worse is as it ladders up to the interpersonal and then the social, it leads to declining levels of social trust.”
All It Takes is One Person
“All it takes is one other person in the room. One other person. It's when you are isolated that you feel the most pressure. So you can be that person for someone else and you don't have to agree with them. But if all you say is, ‘well, hold on, let's hear him out. I'd love to hear this. It's okay, let them speak.’ ‘I actually don't agree with you, but I want to hear what you have to say.’ You're pretty safe there. You're not getting punished simply for letting other people speak. And so you become that extra sort of confederate, the person that actually allows […] for space for someone to be able to speak up, and you'll start a chain reaction. It's remarkable.”
Social Trust = Shared Values
“The single best predictor of social trust is perceived shared values. Like I knew before you and I got to be friends, I knew we shared some values. So instantly, you know what, until you prove otherwise, I believe you're trustworthy. And what's sad to me is, and I guess it's also hopeful because then we have a way out of this - again, if the country was the same as the people who aren't self-silencing, we would have levels of social trust that we've never had in America before. Like that group has the highest level of social trust ever recorded in America.”
There is Enough
“There is enough. Our brains have been hardwired over a long period of time to assume scarcity. We operate as though the world is zero sum because that is the way the world was for a very long time thanks to people like Adam Smith. That is not true now. It is not true […] We can grow the pie not just economically, which we've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also psychologically […] We can all be happier, healthier and more prosperous together. We really can.”
Reading List
Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
The End of Average; by Todd Rose
The Power of the Powerless (essay); by Václav Havel
Troubled; by Rob Henderson
The Idea Factory; by Jon Gertner
Theory of Moral Sentiments; by Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations; by Adam Smith
White Mirror; by Tinkered Thinking
The Guns of August; by Barbara Tuchman
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been so excited for today's guest. I spent some time with him. He is an absolutely fascinating researcher, co-founder and CEO of Populace, a nonpartisan think tank committed to a positive sum world. Amen to that, Todd. Where everybody can have the opportunity to thrive in society. A professor at Harvard, where he founded the Lab for Science of Individuality. I was introduced to him through his writing, his bestsellers, Collective Illusions, the End of Average. I give you none other than Todd Rose. Todd, welcome.
Todd Rose:
Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you again, buddy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You are such an impressive guy. I mean, my first question is just getting ready for this. I just kind of had to say, okay, Todd, have we been living in a collective illusion à la the Truman Show? Are we all Truman in this scenario?
Todd Rose:
It sure feels like it, doesn't it? It just feels like when we start digging into this topic, you realize that so much of what we think, especially in the social environments, that we think that we all believe, and so we're all doing things that we don't want to do it just turns out to be a lie. And that's a little frightening when you first start to encounter it. But then when you look past it and you start to see the underlying truth, things get kind of exciting and a lot more hopeful.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I came across a quote that I loved from Boris Pasternak while I was preparing and I'm just going to read it to you because it really hit home for me. And the quote goes, "The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health has to be affected if day after day you say the opposite of what you feel. You grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune."
Todd Rose:
Wow. Okay. So first of all, I got to remember this quote. I'm going to borrow that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, please do.
Todd Rose:
There's so much to it. Speaking exactly to the moment we're in as Americans, where at my think tank Populace, we're probably most famous right now for our work in private opinion research which is just no one's telling the truth about what they think. And so we've used methodologies that get around distorting effects of social pressure to reveal what people really think and feel and want and fear. And this is so true. So first of all, what we find right now, roughly 2/3 of Americans are self-silencing on things that matter, that really matter to them. They just don't think they can actually express that publicly. That's dangerous.
Todd Rose:
What's worse is in that need to sort of belong, it can lead you not just to say nothing, but to actually misrepresent your views. As we see in the quote, and we see that no kidding, last year we did the largest sort of truth serum study looking at people's private beliefs and what they say out loud. And we covered 60 some odd of the most controversial issues in the country, 20,000 people plus in the sample. And what we found was every single demographic is outright lying about their views on multiple issues and lying to the point where the consensus in public does not represent their consensus in private. And if you think about something else in that quote right there has to be health consequences. Well, we actually know that's true.
Todd Rose:
Research has pretty conclusively shown that consistent self-silencing actually has cardiovascular consequences, elevated cortisol levels, these kind of things. And the study I'm thinking of actually tracked women in particular, but it showed it actually predicts pretty bad cardiovascular outcomes. Also an interesting thing was that a lot of the gender gap that we see consistently in mental health, other kinds of health issues, when you include self-silencing as a variable, it completely eliminates the gender gap. Women were just self-silencing more and it's costing them.
Todd Rose:
Because you just know, I'm not even telling what I think. People that self-silence actually have lower levels of perceived self-worth, have diminished life satisfaction for all the reasons - you're making choices about things that make you miserable. And what I think is even worse is as it ladders up to the interpersonal and then the social, it leads to declining levels of social trust. In fact, in our research we found that social trust is probably the best predictor of the health of a free society. I mean it's like just your gut feeling whether most people can be trusted, which means I don't need to control you, I can let you make your own choices. Well, we already knew that in the US privately only 38% of people think most people can be trusted. That's dangerously low.
Todd Rose:
But what was fascinating is when you cut that by whether you self-silence or not, the people who are self-silencing, only 30% believe people are trustworthy. That's like third world level of social trust. It's so dangerous. The positive side was for the 1/3 of Americans who don't feel like they have to self-silence, they have 52% level social trust, which is actually really great. The flywheel starts to work in your favor then that's like Scandinavian level social trust. So the last thing I'll say is then you lead to this consequence of what we can talk about around collective illusions where because we're not speaking up, only the vocal fringes are the ones dominating the conversation. So we come to believe that our communities believe things they don't.
Todd Rose:
And that ends up with this false polarization where I'm telling you right now, it feels like we're so divided as a country and in public we are under the hood. Not even close, but it's real in its consequences. Like if we believe we're divided, then we start to act that way. And if I was devising a way to destroy this country, you couldn't think of a more clever and borderline evil way to do it than to convince us that we the people are no longer we the people, that we don't share values, we don't share aspirations. So therefore we're not trustworthy. And you will do great harm to society that way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Could not agree more. And it fascinates me. Like this is nothing new. We both know that.
Todd Rose:
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Like Lenin called all of the Western press and intellectuals useful idiots. They built Potemkin villages which were fake villages that the Western journalists would be driven past. Just false fronts, like a movie studio. And like, it goes back to like our own revolution. The Federalist papers, everybody had their own newspaper and it was basically propaganda. But now I think what's different is, at least from the way I'm seeing this unfold is we now have a global brain. Right?
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And social media, where essentially people can gaslight people all day long and it's propaganda at scale. Right. Like, I know you know about Eddie Bernays, who I call "that guy" because what he did was horrible. He was really good at it though. He was the guy who rebranded propaganda to public relations. Brilliant reframe. But, so as we're looking to disentangle and disambiguate this, people's real beliefs, real opinions versus the stated opinions. What is the methodology that you can get people to, in quotes, say, the unspeakable? What's the single hardest private belief to elicit with current methods that you're using, which I know are very different than traditional polling, and how do you capture that? How do you get that out of the person?
Todd Rose:
That's great. So we get to nerd out here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We have a very nerdy audience, so they'll love it.
Todd Rose:
So all private opinion methodologies have two things in common. They create the perception and reality - but the perception is important - of both anonymity, like you can't know that it's me saying this, and then plausible deniability. And it's really funny that when you look at this, this is true for all polling, not just private opinion research. People are always aware of someone's going to know that I said this. And so it's like, yeah, okay, anonymity. But then they literally imagine if you're taking a survey and you answer a question on a screen that someone might burst in. "Aha. I just saw what you pushed."
Todd Rose:
And this is what you have to do to get to it. And this is why right now we have more private opinion data on the American public than any organization. In part because it's like, you have to really want to do this. You have to know why you need to do it. It's more expensive, more time consuming, and has a level of expertise that's just different than polling. So here's what you do, and I'll tell you in terms of the class of statements that they're really good at getting the truth out of. It's perfectly good when it's stuff you wish you could say but don't believe that you can. And in politics, you remember the shy Trump voter, right? It's like, man, listen, if I could tell you, I would. I'm not ashamed of it. I just don't want to say it.
Todd Rose:
It's a little harder when it's stuff you don't want anyone to know, but these methods do tend to work there. This list experiment method is what the IRS uses to estimate who cheats on their taxes. You know, I don't know anyone who's wanting to tell people that, but luckily we're in this space.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Except maybe Trump himself, right?
Todd Rose:
Yeah. Somehow he's been able to turn this into a virtue. "Only a fool pays taxes. Look at me." So the way this works is for public opinion, straightforward. We will engage in the same polling method. So let me take a statement like, "I support defunding the police," which is one we've actually studied quite a bit. Okay, well, if you're a Democrat, there's definitely a right answer. And if you really thought it through, it's like, really, you just want to get rid of police? So public opinion, we would just survey. We go to like YouGov, get to a panel and say, here's a statement. Do you agree or disagree with this?
Todd Rose:
So that's got all the social pressure. I know what your answer is. Anyone could tell. Okay, to get to private, this is what you have to do. So you're going to embed that controversial statement into a set of non-controversial statements. So first you have to build a control group. And that control group, instead of seeing that sensitive issue of defunding police, they'll get three statements at a time. Like "recessions are a natural part of an economy." People can disagree but no one's like "I can't tell you what I think." And all you ask is how many of these three do you agree with? Okay, easy to do. Now here's the secret with this. They're engineered so that nobody ever agrees with all three and no one agrees with none of them.
Todd Rose:
So it's always going to be like one or two. But what's powerful about that is when you're taking it, you're like, I agree with one of those or two of those. You know for sure that there's no way if I came in and said "aha, Jim, I just caught you saying two" and you're like, "but you don't know which of these two that I was saying." So there's a real confidence there. Okay, that's your control group. Then for the experimental group, you take those same three soft statements, only now they get a fourth, "I support defunding the police." And they're asked how many of these four do you agree with?
Todd Rose:
And then you do some combining that you compare those two groups, there's some math behind it that's a little more sophisticated and you can create an estimate of the aggregate view of this. I will never know what you, Jim, believe on that. Like there's no way to reverse engineer that. So I'm trading precision in terms of individual responses for precision in a private view in the aggregate. And we have the same, there's different ways to measure that confidence interval around the estimate and things like that. But what's really powerful is these kind of methods - you're like, well how would you know that you're right? That's a fair question. We've been at this long enough. When we first started, it's been about eight years where media was like, we don't know what this is.
Todd Rose:
We use this list experiment. The other one's called Conjoint, which measures private trade-offs, which is also really good when that's called for. They're like, how do you know? It's like, I mean look at the history of this. But that wasn't good enough. So we got it going and then pretty soon the stuff we've measured has turned out to prove out. We predicted the collapse of college as the goal of education five years ago. We saw change in private because things always change in private before they change in public. I'm sort of allergic to politics, like the partisan politics, but the thing where you get the most attention now, which is like a blessing and a curse, is last year we did that social pressure index.
Todd Rose:
Using this list experiment. And we included the statement around whether you're going to vote for Trump or Biden, like your willingness to vote for Trump or Biden. Turns out we predicted Trump's final vote percentage within a half a percentage point publicly six months before the election. And it just turned out there were subgroups who specifically felt a lot of pressure not being willing to say whether they'd vote for him. So now that happened. Now everyone's like, okay, what else is going on?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and when we spent the day together, you also gave me a couple other ones. Share some of the more fascinating ones that we talked about. Any new ones that you've learned since we were together? Because you literally blew my mind with some of them.
Todd Rose:
Well, and here's the unfortunate part - there are so many of them that even as we're sitting here talking, I'm like, you'll have to remind me which ones blew your mind because I'll give you a few of my favorites. I want to come back to this "Defund the police." Because this has a - we actually interacted with the Biden administration off of this issue because it was right when the Ukraine crisis was blowing up. There was a state in the address. They reached out, said we'd read the book, we think this might relate to some things. And at the time, like there was 60 some odd percent of Democrats were publicly saying they were in favor of defunding the police. And what we found in private, that it just wasn't true - back then it was 9%.
Todd Rose:
And so really had to show them the methodology, convince them.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right.
Todd Rose:
And they kept saying, "well, but yeah, I mean, maybe in general, but we're hearing from a lot of people." I'm like, who are you hearing from? It's like "we got phone calls" and you're like, yeah, no, right. It's like 17 people in their parents' basements calling you all the time. But it feels like everybody. But we did convince them of that and we got a line in the State of Union address that said it was, "it's not defund the police, it's fund the police." But I use that example because these illusions can have consequences. You think about the cities that went all in on that idea - Seattle, some places in California - it's not my opinion they've reversed course already because of how disastrous it was.
Todd Rose:
And it would be bad enough if that was because that's what people really wanted and it was still foolhardy. But it's pretty tragic when it's based on an illusion that no one really wanted. And so these kind of issues, I think one of the ones that has really been interesting to me and something that's been important is, has to do with Hamas-Israel. Right after October 7th there was a Harvard Harris poll that said like 62% I believe it was in the low 60s of Gen Z believed Hamas was justified. Like not that they care about innocent people, that this terrorist organization was justified in the rape murder of innocent people.
Todd Rose:
Like and as you and I talked about, I went to Israel because they were really worried about that and they thought they had discovered some things about the origin of it. But so we did our private opinion. Not even close. It's not even close. It was single digits of Gen Z. But when you ask them what do you think other of your peers think they thought 87% of Gen Z believed Hamas was justified. And so they want to fit in. They go along with things that they don't really agree with. And pretty soon the media narrative spinning look at all this. And they put those kind of polls out that reinforces the illusion and now people are streaming out in protest of things that they don't even understand and genuinely don't agree with.
Todd Rose:
But here we are. And so you can go after everything from, in most things in politics have these illusions but what's really wild to me is it's one thing for these really contentious political issues to feel that pressure to not say what you think, but we're finding it in some of the most personal spaces of all. Like for example, we did this, what we call a success index around the American dream. What is your view of a good life? A successful life. And we use the conjoint methodology to look at trade-offs because it's time and money. You can't have everything. Right. What do you really prioritize? And you can't game this methodology. It's really powerful. And what we found was just shocking.
Todd Rose:
The first time we did it, we used, I think it was 72 different attributes that could go into a successful life. Everything from being the richest person to having a family, having good character, everything in between. So we always have them do the instrument for themselves. And then immediately after each question it's like, what do you think most people would say to this? So you're building your perception of the majority and your own personal view. Well, people believe that the number one trade-off priority for a successful life for other people is to be famous. Like that's it. In private, it was dead last. And the in-private view of a good life is pretty remarkable. What we have in common as a people, there's no kidding.
Todd Rose:
In private, the number one trade-off priority is that I want to do work that has a positive impact on other people. That's pretty great. If you realized that most of your fellow Americans see that as success, that kind of warms my heart.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Me too.
Todd Rose:
What I thought was wild as well, in the most recent one we did. Beyond wanting to contribute, the idea of being involved in your community was a top 10 priority for every single demographic in the country. Now of course they don't believe anyone thinks that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right.
Todd Rose:
So here we have a bunch of people who define success in terms of contribution, community, relationships, family. Like, yeah, they want to achieve, but they don't see it as a zero-sum game. They don't want to chase the trappings of fame and wealth for their own sake. But we think everybody does. And what's funny about the community one which just blew my mind - we also measure the perception of how are we doing on these things? How are you doing? So if you say I want to be a good person, do you think you're a good person? So we can measure achievement on all these attributes. Being involved in your community was the lowest achieved attribute in the top 10 of any attribute for people. And there's no kidding.
Todd Rose:
More people reported being debt-free than involved in their community at the level they want to be. So it's just wild and we can talk about this. But a couple things I think are worth sharing real quick. Because we'll talk about this idea of a collective illusion. It's probably worth defining it. I'd love to share a little bit about how we got to these things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Absolutely.
Todd Rose:
And then we could talk a little about, if you don't mind, like, what do we do about it? Because this is pretty scary. But just to put a definition to it, when we say collective illusion, it's really just group think. But you're wrong about the group if you can sink in. Like, group think's bad enough as it is, you're just going along with the crowd. But what if you were wrong about the crowd to begin with? So you're conforming to something that really no one wants. And that's what it is. They're these social phenomena where most people in a group go along with something they don't privately agree with because they incorrectly think most people in their group agree with it.
Todd Rose:
And so as a result, entire groups end up doing things that almost no one actually wanted to do. Now, what's wild is you think, how could that happen? Like, how could we be systematically wrong? Because it's one thing, you hear this, like, "oh, Republicans are wrong about Democrats." Yeah, okay, that's all good stuff. I'm talking about you're wrong about your own tribe, right? The group that actually matters to you - you're wrong about. So here's what's kind of cool, because we'll talk a little about the way that bad actors have figured this out and are manipulating us. And I do think it's the new form of propaganda manipulation, not disinformation. But without that, it's pretty simple for how we arrive here. And you just have to know two things about your brain.
Todd Rose:
First is we all have what I might call conformity bias, right? And that just means not like blind conformity. It's just that all else equal, we're hardwired to prefer to be with our groups, not against our groups. Makes tons of sense. Good for survival. Since we have a little bit time, I'm going to give you - I got to share. When I say conformity bias, I gotta tell - I gotta share this one. The best study ever to show this. Because a lot of conformity studies use these sort of like arbitrary artificially contrived situations. So colleague of mine in the Netherlands decides he's like, "yeah, but really, how hardwired is this? How far does this go?" He did the best study ever.
Todd Rose:
I cannot believe he got money to do this because he's like, what could be the most personal thing I could think of? So he arrives at, like, who you think is good looking, like, attractiveness. It's eye of the beholder, right? So he gets money to create a scientific version of essentially hot or not. He puts people in a scanner and he shows them a couple hundred pictures of faces, and all you got to do is rate with each face, hot or not, on a scale. Five being like super hot, one being no, thank you. Never in a million years. And I think it's funny because it's like, if I did that on the street, I'm a creep.
Todd Rose:
If I do it in an MRI scanner, I'm a scientist, so it's great. So super clever. You're taking, you're in there right now and you're taking this study. So you just rate a face, say, a three. Immediately after you respond, there's a little line on the screen. It shows you what the average of everyone who's taken that has done the study before you. What is that response? So it represents a group. What's cool about that is it's a group of people you've never met and frankly don't care about. So it shouldn't have that much pressure. And yet. So it was actually rigged so that those numbers were made up. There was no other group. But on a subset of the time, it would ensure that it looks like you and the group are exactly the same.
Todd Rose:
You're with your group and on about a quarter of the time, it would make it extremely different. So if you said five, it says one. Okay. So you're doing that and then meanwhile, they're recording your brain activity. What's super interesting is what happens when you're told that group agrees with your opinion on who's good looking, it triggers a dopamine reward response. Remarkable. Same reward response that hard drugs activate.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep.
Todd Rose:
Now, when it looks like you are way opposed to your group on the subjective idea of who's hot, it triggers this cascading error signal which disrupts memory and attention. It's evolutionarily meant to say, stop whatever you're doing something's wrong. You could be in danger. Figure it out. Okay, now here's the clever part. They get done with that wave of the study and then they literally tell the people over the intercom, "oh, shoot, sorry. For whatever reason, your responses didn't register. If we give you a little more money, would you mind just quickly going through the task again? We won't show you what anybody else thinks. We just need your responses."
Todd Rose:
And lo and behold, the vast majority of people move their subjective perception to align with the group. And by the way, then you interview them after they're like, "oh no, definitely I didn't." They really don't think they did.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, yeah.
Todd Rose:
Okay, so when I say that first step, we have a conformity bias. That's what I mean. Okay, it is hardwired. But for conformity to work, you have to know what your group actually thinks. Otherwise what are you conforming to? And this is the funniest thing. The way that your brain estimates group consensus, this is no kidding. It assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority. Now it must have worked back in the day when we had smaller groups. In real life you kind of knew people. But when you put that mechanism into a social media environment, this is where the problem starts. If you look at just what is X now, but was Twitter before. The research there shows that roughly 80% of all content on that platform is generated by 10% of the users. That's it.
Todd Rose:
And it's probably even lower than that now. It's crazy, right? And Pew Research has studied those people and it turns out they're crazy. That's not what - that wasn't Pew. That was my interpretation. Let's just be clear. They are socially extreme right on almost every issue. But you could see the problem, right? Without any interference here. If only 10% of Americans believe some idea, but you think it's 80% and you disagree. Unless you're willing to go against your group to trigger that error signal, then you'll self-silence. If you can just keep your head down, don't say anything. Or if there's incentive, you'll just outright lie. You'll actually say what you know you need to say to be close to your group. And that - now we're back to what we just talked about.
Todd Rose:
Two-thirds of Americans right now, self-silencing every demographic outright lying about multiple issues. We are in that environment and that's just without any bad actors. What we've seen in our work now is that there are state-sponsored efforts by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea to build bot armies that do this across every platform. Now it turns out on social media if only 5% of your interactions are with bots, but those bots are well designed, they can guarantee what consensus emerges. It's unbelievable. The downside here, the bad news here is that conservatively 18% of all your interactions on social media are with bots and that's super conservative.
Todd Rose:
So there's an older book called the Guns of August, which is a really incredible book by Barbara Tuchman, a historian that talked about World War I and why it was so awful in terms of the loss of human life. And her thesis was that it was uniquely awful because the technology for war had changed exponentially, but the mindset about war had not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep.
Todd Rose:
So you're digging trenches, you're fighting over small amounts of land, but now you have machine guns and chemical weapons and things like that. And I think we're living in a similar Guns of August moment right now, which is when it comes to propaganda manipulation, the narrative is that it's about disinformation and look that exists, but it's not that effective. The real name of the game now is the ability to manufacture a false consensus. The ability for China to use TikTok, which it does - and I mean that's a matter of fact - to generate anti-Semitic sentiment amongst Gen Z. I can literally get young people in this country to endorse things they don't agree with that are anti-Western, anti-US, anti-free society and get them to behave in ways that they wouldn't behave otherwise.
Todd Rose:
And it's funny, if it weren't so evil, it's quite clever. My friend Mike Milken always tells me, like, they - because we asked like, why would they do this? And he's like, well look, if you're China and you can't beat the US militarily or economically, the clever thing you do is you destroy the human capital, you destroy the social trust. You create the perception of division and you get us seeing each other as enemies. It's very clever. And so my dear friend Michael Davis made a term that I use all the time, which is "we're losing a war we didn't know we were fighting." I mean, that's the thing.
Todd Rose:
And I really genuinely believe that collective illusions represent the greatest invisible threat to free society that's ever existed.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Amen. And I agree, as you know, entirely with your thesis. And yet, like going into the experiment with the MRI, we are battling biology here, right? We are battling our hardwiring. And it's not just us, right? If you look at ants, at bees, at termites, guess what? Same percentages, 5% of the bees are the explorer bees, 95% are drones.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it is in every aspect of the evolutionary chain. And Tuchman's book, I love that book, by the way, because it really clearly shows the example of where we are now. Our technology has grown so rapidly that culturally we're not able to catch up.
Todd Rose:
That's right. And I mean, you're at the forefront of what's next, right? The work you're doing. And I was fortunate enough to see under the hood a bit, just unbelievable in the space of AI, which is going to make the consequences of social media seem like child's play. I mean, absolute child's play. So it does bring us to this place of like, I see AI as this fork in the road moment where it really could become the greatest engine of prosperity and self-determination ever created, or it could completely destroy us. And I don't see it as a technological issue so much as a human issue. And in this case it's like, what do you do? And we can talk about some of the stuff we do.
Todd Rose:
There are ways to deal with illusions and they're very different. But I'll jump to the end and say what's really funny is, to your point of we're battling biology. Well, part of the answer is what classical liberalism figured out a long time ago, which is, well, wait a minute, what would really matter then is that the norms of things like tolerance and free expression and individual rights and equal treatment and these things that are the bedrock principles of human progress and free societies, they're there for a reason. Because if the norms of what it means to be an American is, "You know what? I might not like what you're saying, but I am going to defend your right to say it."
Todd Rose:
Well now, the illusions have no room to hide because to silence someone is unacceptable. So you got to get that need to belong to work in favor of free expression and pluralism and things like that. That was probably one of the greatest wins of the liberal tradition throughout history. And even the concept of tolerance came out of the religious wars where it was like, we're fighting over literally existential ideas that if you believe them, why would you broker any compromise? But it was like we keep killing each other all the time and no one - "hey, how about we just stop?" So it worries me when this very same mechanisms start to go after the norms themselves. And that's happening.
Todd Rose:
So for example, under free speech we see this where actually in private, every demographic is solidly in favor of that. But the left, for example, does not believe that the left is in favor of it anymore. They are. And that's really dangerous. So the long game is it sounds simple, but we shouldn't overlook it. We will win when we find the moral courage to be honest with each other and the civic courage to make it safe for other people to do the same. But in the meantime, we've got a fight on our hands. And I'll say when it comes to collective illusions, the bad news is they're self-fulfilling. So we can look at it go, well, no one believes in defund the police, well, they think they do.
Todd Rose:
And then policies get implemented. The good news is they're fragile because they're lies. And if you shatter them, history shows that you can unlock a level of social change, a level and pace that's just unimaginable otherwise. But, and this is really important, the strategy is completely different than if it's privately held beliefs. If it's private, you got to persuade people. Turns out under illusions, if you try to persuade, you actually entrench the illusion. And I'll give you what I think is my favorite example of what not to do. You remember the "say no to drugs" campaign?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We joked about that when we were together.
Todd Rose:
So for the viewers and listeners, we all remember it, right. That campaign was born out of a small uptick in first time marijuana use amongst teenagers in the U.S. The government in response brings together the best ad agencies in the country and spends over a billion dollars to create this campaign. From an advertising standpoint, it was actually remarkably successful. I believe the typical American teen saw, I think it was three ads a day for six years. Which is kind of amazing. If you're an ad company, you're like, "guess what? We literally got our audience - we interacted three times a day for six years with them on this idea." Amazing.
Todd Rose:
Problem was the assumption the government had in terms of why kids were trying drugs is that they just assumed that they were doing it because they were curious about drugs. But back then private opinion data existed that said that wasn't true, that they were skeptical about drugs, but what they cared about was fitting in. Back then, American teens were under the collective illusion that most teenagers did drugs, which is kind of amazing. Like you think you're just like one out of two. Every other person you run into at least is high.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But well, if you're in New York, that might hold.
Todd Rose:
That's right, that's right. So into this illusion you blitz them with a billion dollars of ads, trying to scare them straight. And what they took from the ads was "this must be what we're doing because why would adults try so hard to get us to stop?" And the result of the campaign, no kidding, was that campaign directly caused an increase in drug use for adolescents. So we're not doing that right with collective illusions. It's so much more about social proof. It's about revealing shared beliefs, not persuading. And so it's people you admire, it's people who are like you, like neighborhood people. So this is the danger when we're self-silencing, we're not hearing from people like us. It's really dangerous. And then it's passive content, entertainment.
Todd Rose:
So we have some pretty cool projects and you and I, we're going to figure out something to do together on this too. The ability to embed private opinion in the TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, the things like that has such an asymmetric effect in terms of its ability to shatter illusions and reveal shared values. And we've got some work we're doing in Hollywood on that because just saying - you're not manipulating anyone, you are creating, you're telling stories that resonate with people's private values and in doing so you're creating transparency in our culture. That's the game, that's it. But so we've got to deal with the social proof mechanisms now. Play a little whack-a-mole with some of these illusions that are the most pressing.
Todd Rose:
But ultimately, because illusions are generated by the people themselves, only we the people can actually deal with this. And so we get back to that idea of these tried and true principles of a free society matter more now and will matter even more as AI comes to be a fundamental part of all of our lives.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And.
Todd Rose:
And we cannot give up on those. We have to reaffirm our commitment to them.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, again, you had me at hello on that one. Like, literally the entire organization of O'Shaughnessy Ventures is dedicated to that very thing. That's why we have a book publisher. That's why we have the Infinite Media. That's why we have Infinite Films. Because I have six grandchildren, I do not want them to live in a world where the panopticon of the ability to control that stuff at scale - that's where AI comes in and, hey, I am incredibly pro AI for the right use and the way it can help us retain and return to all of that sort of stuff. But it did not take a genius to see. Like, I think we talked about the movie Rudy.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
For people who hadn't seen Rudy, it's about this underachiever kid. One of the lines of the movie is, a guy looks at him and he goes, "you know, you're five foot nothing, you weigh a buck nothing, and you want to start for Notre Dame. You're crazy, kid." And it's this incredibly inspiring movie because he doesn't become a football star. He gets to dress and they put him on the field.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it was just through his sheer determination. But it's a great movie that encourages kids to try those kinds of things. And if that changed just a couple of minds, right, that was for the good. And I just noticed they weren't making any of those movies anymore. TV shows, same thing.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Just gloom, doom, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Todd Rose:
And what's funny about that is, when we've met with studio executives and creators, their view is, "listen, we're just giving people what they want."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And they themselves are victims of the same collective illusion.
Todd Rose:
Illusions. And so if you think of it like, "hey, I'm just trying to sell a movie," and I'm like, "well, wait a minute if I need to show someone as really successful. Well, I kind of think I know what people think of success, and I don't think it's Rudy, do you know what I mean? I don't think it's about character and trying and effort and camaraderie - no, I think that's naive. I think it's going to be fame and wealth and status." And so you'll inadvertently propagate these illusions. And coming back to some of the ones when you asked about some of these bigger illusions that I find remarkable.
Todd Rose:
Last year in this massive one we did, social pressure index, one of the things that was crazy to me is Americans, across every single demographic, reject almost everything about DEI, like, wholesale. Like, college admissions - there wasn't a single demographic that privately is in favor of affirmative action. Even 2/3 of African Americans are against it because, listen, they want a fair shot, as they deserve. But it was true in how we hire, how we promote, how we treat marginalized groups. In private, overwhelming consensus. In public, not so much. What I think is really important is where I think private opinion gives a nuance that I think is really valuable. You can't understand that data without understanding that Americans still hold an incredible commitment to diversity, they still deeply believe.
Todd Rose:
In fact, one of the statements we tested back then was the idea that more diversity would be good for America. So not even that they're okay with how much we have now. An overwhelming super majority of Americans privately agree with that statement. So there are the fringes on both sides who have a vested interest in bundling this stuff into a binary. "You're either with us or you're against us." And it's like, no, Americans are actually more nuanced than that. They deeply believe in diversity. They deeply believe in a fair shot and an opportunity to earn your own success. And the assumptions behind how that was being done in the name of DEI are antithetical to American values. Like, those are all true statements.
Todd Rose:
So I say that because it's a cautionary tale of, like, you saw the collapse of DEI really quick, which was easy to see coming. But if we go too far the other way and act as though we don't care, that we don't recognize that some people may not have a fair shot and that there has been discrimination and things, and we just pretend like none of that matters, we're gonna be back in the same place. What Americans care about - again, diversity, a fair shot, but there is a principled way to do that. And so let's get on with that. Similarly, in the case of immigration, a majority of Americans privately think immigrants are really great for the country.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep.
Todd Rose:
They want more of them. They believe they add more than they take. And at the same time, they believe if you came here illegally, you should leave. Those are not mutually exclusive. But again, both sides have vested interest in bundling that, like, "if you're not okay with open borders, you must hate immigrants," or vice versa. So it's like, no, Americans are actually pretty sophisticated on this. And if we can get out of their way and listen to them and get to the place where we understand what they really believe, it's quite instructive and again, quite hopeful. Like, we weren't looking for good news, we just wanted the truth. It just so happens that private opinion is more good news than it is bad.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and that was the thing that always fascinated me was this idea that your average American - even though we both agreed that average is over - but go anywhere in, pick a state. Ohio or my home state of Minnesota. If your car is broken down on the side of the road, chances are that within five or ten minutes somebody's going to pull over and offer to help you.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I've witnessed that. I've seen it. It's the way Americans do things. And yet if you are blinded by these collective illusions, you would be living in terror. Oh my God. And especially the villainization of the police. If a police car pulls over behind you, you're terrified.
Todd Rose:
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that's just not right.
Todd Rose:
That's right. And that's why these become self-fulfilling. It's so sad because the single best predictor of social trust is perceived shared values. Like I knew before you and I got to be friends, I knew we shared some values. So instantly, you know what, until you prove otherwise, I believe you're trustworthy. And what's sad to me is, and I guess it's also hopeful because then we have a way out of this - again, if the country was the same as the people who aren't self-silencing, we would have levels of social trust that we've never had in America before. Like that group has the highest level of social trust ever recorded in America.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah.
Todd Rose:
Right now. And that's still, by the way, that one-third is still bigger than most Scandinavian countries. So this is a big group. And when we start to feel like we live in a society where we can't be honest about our views with each other, and then therefore I start to perceive my neighbors as holding different values, then why would I trust them? Why would I even reach out? It just starts to spiral and that's the bad news. But again, the good news is this can end today. Like every one of us has far more power than we realize to play a productive role in this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And that's what I am interested in. What actions can people take? Like right now, people listening to us or watching this and they're furiously nodding their heads.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
They're like, yeah. They both have experienced silencing themselves. And then they're here, wait a minute, I'm wrong about the group that I am pledging allegiance to here. What can the people listening to us right now, what can they do as individuals?
Todd Rose:
So there's kind of three things. In long run, one is going to sound unbelievably self-serving. So I'm going to start with that one. If even appreciating the concept of collective illusions. Having a name for this thing because absent being aware of the phenomenon, why in the world would you think you can't trust your brain to tell you what your group believes anymore? And so people have to intellectually get there because it feels real. And so the more that we introduce this concept to people and again we have a shared vocabulary for it, we now can call it when we see it and we can show that it's really quite important. And again, self-serving as the person that wrote the book on it.
Todd Rose:
But it's just if everybody knew then we could have that conversation. And the number of times I get people saying, "I almost self-silenced and I thought wait, is this a collective illusion?" And in the book I lay out ways that you can actually detect whether what you're seeing is really the group's view or not. So you can make a decision for yourself. If you want to conform, by all means conform. There are reasons to do that sometimes for social learning and things like that. You want to go against the group. The only truly bad decision is when you conform to something your group didn't even want because you're miserable and you're destroying the very group that you're being miserable to be a part of. So being aware of that's important.
Todd Rose:
I'm going to come back to this idea again. It seems so simple. When I say have the moral courage to be honest, that's easier said than done. I think a fair response is, "well, yeah, like, if it was that easy, I wouldn't have lied." So in that space, listen, I would say once you realize, if you just look at all the data we have and it's all public, it's like a 50-50 coin toss whether on any important issue, whether you're right about your group or not. So even just appreciating that while right now I'm feeling like I should go along, what if I'm wrong? What if I'm wrong about the group?
Todd Rose:
And so engaging in some of these things like in the book talked about the power of why - it's amazing if people, if you're in this, you're like, "oh, sorry, like we all know this is it." "Oh, really? Why?" And someone that is also just propagating illusion that's going along doesn't have answer for that. They'll literally be like, "well, because we, obviously it's right. What do you mean? Why?" They'll call you names or they cannot give you answer. And at least you now know that this thing you're feeling is not based on private views of the group. And so you should feel free. Because when it's an illusion, all you have to do is say, "I don't agree." But if you don't want to risk that, just inject uncertainty. It's unbelievable.
Todd Rose:
So if someone's like, "oh, who are you going to vote for? This is obviously the best candidate." If all you say is - and you disagree but you don't want to challenge it - "I haven't made up my mind yet." It's kind of remarkable. Groups never punish you for not having made up your mind yet. That's a phenomenon in social psychology. They might punish you when they really disagree with you. And they do, but they'll actively try to convince you. So if you're just like, "you know what, I'm not sure yet," and then ask the questions of the people. And when people say, or you say, "I haven't made up my mind yet, on the one hand this, on the other hand that." And what's really remarkable is you will start to hear other people imitate that so quickly.
Todd Rose:
"Yeah, I haven't made up my mind either. You know, that's true." It's like they're dying for the escape hatch. So there's a lot of lower risk ways that you can help to shatter those illusions. But then I'll come back to that third point, which is by far the most powerful is in all the conformity studies throughout history, all the way back to Solomon Asch and these things, which are some of the most famous ones.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah.
Todd Rose:
All it takes is one other person in the room. One other person. It's when you are isolated that you feel the most pressure. So you can be that person for someone else and you don't have to agree with them. But if all you say is, "well, hold on, let's hear him out. I'd love to hear this. It's okay, let them speak." "I actually don't agree with you, but I want to hear what you have to say." You're pretty safe there. You're not getting punished simply for letting other people speak. And so you become that extra sort of confederate, the person that actually allows. So Jim says, "Todd, I don't really agree with you, but man, you should be able to speak. Tell me more."
Todd Rose:
I'm going to tell you my honest views now because I know it's safe because I know the person who even disagrees with me wants me to be able to speak up. So I promise you, the studies are crystal clear on this. You play that role, that civic courage to say, and not just the people that you agree with. That's always like the free speech thing, right? It's not free speech defender when it's like, "I agree with you, so speak up." We've always known this. It just matters even more under collective illusions. So again, everybody buy the book or at least hear the concept. It's okay if you don't buy the book, just be aware of the concept and make sure if we all have that shared language, that goes a long ways.
Todd Rose:
If we find those ways to have the moral courage, if we don't dare to confront, at least do these things like injecting uncertainty, that kind of thing. But then back to that civic courage where we're like, be that person. Be the confederate that actually allows for space for someone to be able to speak up, and you'll start a chain reaction. It's remarkable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I do something that is, at least thus far, I found it to be incredibly successful at getting a third party who I don't know to hear what they really think. And the easiest way to describe it is you and I are in an Uber together. And instead of asking the driver a question, I turn to you and I say, "hey, Todd, did you read that satisfaction survey? It blew my mind, man. It said Uber drivers were the most satisfied with their jobs." And then you're like, "no, you're kidding me." I can guarantee you, Todd, he's going to turn around and say, "that is bullshit." And then - "Really? You mean the survey?" Boom. They just go and they list all of their grievances or whatever. And it works both ways. You can say.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You can alternatively go to the other extreme and say, "hey, Todd, man, I just read this survey that, like, Uber drivers are the most angry and they hate their company," and the same guy who would list all of the grievances will turn around with the need to correct. "You know, that's mostly right. But I got to tell you, here's what I really like about being an Uber driver," and it's like magical, and it actually works. I try it all the time.
Todd Rose:
I'm in an Uber and I'm trying that. This is great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it goes along with your idea of that being the third or being the one person who is like, "no, it's safe to express yourself here." And when you do it in that way, too, you're not even asking. You're not saying, "hey, you tell me what you believe."
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You're just saying it. I'm saying it to my friend Todd in the back seat. And that engages them instantly.
Todd Rose:
That's so great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I like your idea, too, of having the language to describe it. Like, my friend Rob Henderson wrote a book about his upbringing in foster care.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Too long, didn't read: Ouch. It's rough. But he went to the Air Force, got a scholarship to Yale, got a scholarship to Cambridge and got a PhD in psychology there. But what he's best known for is he invented the term "luxury beliefs."
Todd Rose:
Right? Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it just took off like wildfire. And I cannot tell you the number of people who I now am talking with who don't know that I know Rob. They'll say, "well, yeah, no, that's just a luxury belief." And the point is it gives them a linguistic framework to go there, so to speak.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I agree with you entirely that you gotta do it, especially for things you do disagree with. You gotta say, "you know what? I really don't agree with that. But hey, tell me more. Go ahead, explain."
Todd Rose:
Yeah, and what's really cool about that too is the remarkable thing about engagement. So we often think that everybody just wants everyone to agree with them. Now, of course we don't. We like it when people agree with us. That's totally true. But actually, what's under the hood there is the need to be understood. And it turns out that the same psychological benefits, interpersonal benefits, trust, friendship come from - "you know what? You and I talk and we don't see eye to eye, but I walk away feeling like, but you did listen, you really did. You do understand where I'm coming from." Like, that's what people actually crave more than anything. And so the ability to say, "listen, I don't know, I don't agree with you at all. How did you arrive at those beliefs? Where'd that come from?" It's so humanizing.
Todd Rose:
Because what I have found, I started doing that mainly as a way to actually try to do what we've been talking about. One of the surprise effects for me is how often what I think I'm certain about - I've actually created space to have my mind changed in big and even small ways. Like, at a bare minimum, by hearing the person's why, I'm like, "you know, I still don't agree with where you arrived, but I totally see how had I had those experiences, I would probably be right where you're at." And that empathy that's created does wonders. And once again, sometimes I'm just wrong. I don't ever think that, but it turns out it is true.
Todd Rose:
And it's just like, so that willingness to see another person's dignity and just be like, "yeah, I don't agree with you. But whether it's because what's worse than us disagreeing is this society we've created of these illusions and the self-silence that's so much worse, or actually, I just want to know you better. I want to understand where you're coming from." It's incredible. The studies on asking like understanding people's why is an instant boost of trust. It is unbelievable. It works particularly well across perceived demographic psychographic differences. Groups that are supposed to be at odds. Out groups. You can melt that so fast just by being serious and being curious that way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I think it also is - you got to lead by example in those things. Like, I'll talk to anybody. Because I find people interesting and I like, why are certain people the way they are? And I had this experience when we were down in Miami. I think I may have even shared it with you when we were together, where we're walking around Miami and I see this guy, basically the door bouncer at a club. And he looks like he just came off of the Hell's Angels reunion. He's got the leather vest, he's got the chain, he's all tatted up and everything like that, but he's vaping. This is many years ago. And we're walking along and I gotta go ask that guy why he's vaping. And my wife is talking, "Jim, don't do that."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I end up having a conversation with this guy. And he was the most delightful person. We talked for like half an hour. He looked like this rough "don't go there" guy. And the first thing I'm like, "so why are you vaping as opposed to cigarettes?" And he goes, "because I love my old lady, man." And I went, "well, me too." And then we just got into this really fascinating discussion and it turned out that we come from very different places in the world, and yet we agreed on a ton of stuff. And if you're just willing to take that first kind of step. And I love your way of making space.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And another thing that I do that I've gotten into the habit of with AI is I long ago realized that I'm probably wrong, probably more than I'm right. Because I did a thought experiment and was like, if I went back 500 years in time and I found the smartest people, like the documented smartest people of that time, they're probably wrong about everything. Like they're Ptolemy. They're not Copernicus even. And so the more you start doing that, the more you're like, well, why am I suddenly the only exception here?
Todd Rose:
Yeah, no, I'm prob-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Wrong, too. So one thing that I do with AI is when I see something that I really disagree with, I go to the AI and have it steel man that argument for me.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And when you do that, you realize, you know, they actually do have some points.
Todd Rose:
You know, one of my absolute favorite philosophers was Karl Popper. It changed how I thought about being a scientist.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Me too.
Todd Rose:
What it meant, just amazing. But his approach when he would write was he would take the argument he was about to dismantle and he would write the steel man version of that argument, and you'll see it in his books. And he would send copies of that to people who believed in it. "Does this represent your views?" To the point where the positivists, the people that he was taking down at the time, literally wanted to publish the thing. "Oh, this is - yeah, you're one of us." He's like, "no, I just want to make sure. Am I getting it right?" And then systematically go after it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah.
Todd Rose:
And there's a discipline to that. It's not easy. It's so much easier to straw man things and go after it. But especially - and again, I'm talking to one of the experts here - in a world of AI, my goodness, if you start to see it as the Oracle or look to it to simply be an echo chamber of your priors, well, it's going to feel good for a minute, and we're going to be in really big trouble. And so one of the things I learned from you and I tell anyone who will listen is especially with AI, there are choices being made. AI is just technology. It's not like it's - so what is it going to be for? And what do we value? And then that literally is encoded in the technology itself. And so does AI, is it built to promote Socratic dialogue? Is it meant to help you think for yourself? Or is it meant to pretend it's the Oracle and that it knows all the answers? And if we go that way, oh, my goodness, talk about manipulation at a scale, and it'll be so undetectable because you'll actually think it's just personalized and you'll probably think it's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It is, it is literally weapons grade persuasion and it is Promethean fire.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Fire is both incredibly useful. It created our prefrontal cortex when we started cooking our food and it's incredibly dangerous too. So that's why we, after inventing how to control fire, we had to invent fire departments, fire alarms, fire exits. That's right. It is a dual use technology and you can use it to create a panopticon that sees everything, that makes you think you are the best thing since sliced bread and it absolutely controls you. Or it can be used as intelligence amplification, the ability like idea amplification, imagination amplification, all of those things. Same technology.
Todd Rose:
That's right, same technology.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And we tend to anthropomorphize tech to a point where people will have conversations with an AI that they never have with another human being. One of the reasons why a therapeutic use case, done properly, let's underline that done properly, AI could be enormously helpful to human beings. But it can also be the opposite.
Todd Rose:
And you just gotta understand it's exactly right. And I think that's why I'm so excited about what you're doing because there's only a small number of people that I know that truly are betting on human beings and self-determination and that sort of bottom-up empowerment view of the technology. And I think it's that age-old fight between self-determination and paternalism. And the reality is I believe you're taking the most - I think you're going to make the most money in the long run. But the short game is to protect the incumbent kind of paternalistic "the algorithms know everything" - there's a short brass ring that you could grab onto and you just see a lot of people doing that and there's an incentive to be able to position it that way. The longer game is I'm betting on humanity and I'm betting on individuals and their potential and this technology to amplify and augment in ways that actually allow us all to live a version of the American dream that our ancestors would think is science fiction.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. And that is the truth - you gotta take the longer view. But literally that is the truth in almost anything. We are hyperbolic discounters by our nature too. And the bird in the hand, worth two, worth a dozen in the bush. And so you get this short-termism and that is the way for those kind of quick dopamine hits. But you're gonna lose the war. You might win a battle or two. But again, I'll confess, I spent most of my life as a quant asset manager and I've always kind of looked at AI and thought there's a lot of alpha to capture because you can systematically, for example, imagine the alpha you capture from using the methodology that you learn people's private opinions by, and then front-running it, so to speak.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Like, "oh, look, the vast majority" - and I don't feel like we'll do that as part of our books, as part of our movies. Because if 80% of people believe that we should do things this way and there's like zero books or movies or podcasts about that, that's a classic misfit.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Huge arbitrage opportunity.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that's why I find this so fascinating because all of these things exist. You have proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now you have something to work with. Now you're like, "wow, 80% of people in this country or even worldwide share this belief and yet there's nobody writing about it. There's no books that celebrate it. There's none of that." Like, hello.
Todd Rose:
And what's so cool about this moment is, essentially from a - if I were just thinking about the social effects, that social proof mechanism of artifacts is so important. Like we tend to believe artifacts tell us what we believe. And anthropologists and other people can reverse engineer what societies believed that are long gone by the artifacts they created. We do the same thing with our own societies. And so when there are no more Rudies being told, then I'm like, "yeah, I don't think we care about that." Like it doesn't matter what you say. I'm looking around and I know what we believe. And so what's so funny about that is the distorting artifacts.
Todd Rose:
One of my colleagues was part of creating a lot of the Marvel movies and he actually left and started a new studio because he said, "I thought I was doing good. But think about what Marvel stories tell us. We are impotent. It requires these supernatural people to save us. We can't do it." And it kept taking this darker and darker turn. And he's like, "I don't think these are the stories people want to hear." And he was right. You bet on telling better stories. But it's funny when you think about the media landscape and entertainment landscape, when you just look at private opinion, I'm like, it's like this donut. You're telling all these fringe stories and people will watch some of them because they want to be entertained. There's this massive middle of.
Todd Rose:
Just empty space of like, wait, this is just like bad free market. There is a need that's not being met for which you would be compensated as you should. And you're not doing it because you don't think it's true. This is crazy. And so I love that because it's one of those moments where if I just wanted folks like you to do the right thing as I understand it for collective illusions, I would say tell those stories. But if I just said, "you know what? I want to advise you on how to make the most money." Tell those stories. The sort of quote unquote, right thing to do and the profitable thing to do right now have converged. And that's great news.
Todd Rose:
And the cool thing is again, in this sort of, how do we get out of this mess? The books that you're producing, the movies, the content like this stuff that are aligned to our shared values, will do more than just about anything to convince us that we believe things that we really believe. It's remarkable. The funniest thing about why that works is if you take your favorite TV shows or books, things like that, your brain treats characters in those things as part of your in-group, even though you know they're fiction. And so the things that are said even in the background of these things are read by your brain as, "oh, that's what we believe." It's amazing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It is crazy. And when I was in college, I wrote a term paper on TV. And one of the points that I still remember to this day is that there was a popular TV show that was a spin-off of Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda. And Rhoda moved to New York and got married and all these things. But something happened that her fictional character was having a birthday and thousands of gifts arrived at the network that produced the show. People took the time - this is just underlying your point - thousands of gifts that people took their time, treasure and everything else to go and do that and send a gift to somebody that you would think they knew was a fictional character. Our brains don't distinguish.
Todd Rose:
No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that's why fiction is so important.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We have coming out soon a book called White Mirror. Because Black Mirror is what everybody is being inundated with. And if you read the older science fiction stories, they were very positive, they were very forward looking. They were like, "we can do this." And we're doing a documentary on Bell Labs, the Idea Factory. And we're working with the author of the Idea Factory to make the script for that movie because people are starved for seeing that.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I talk to people and they say, "what are you making about?" And I tell them and I would say, "and did you know that they did that?" And they're like, "that is so cool." And you can literally watch them get excited because it's going to those private beliefs that we know are there and nobody is making anything for them to enjoy or watch.
Todd Rose:
That's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And we're going to do it.
Todd Rose:
To your point, I love this. The science fiction done right - the sort of White Mirror variety of it has historically related and then broadened our horizons of what's possible. And it's pretty shocking historically how much science fiction front-runs the technologies that eventually get created in our society. It's pretty remarkable. And so those things actually end up being pretty reliable narrators of our future in ways that once you realize that it really matters, the stories we tell.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It really does to a point where I always believe that. But now after doing all of the research and looking at things like all of your work, I now understand that it matters more than what laws we're passing.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Like, literally, if you want to destroy a society, destroy their stories, destroy their trust in each other, have them just wallow in fear, uncertainty and doubt and there you go.
Todd Rose:
It's exactly right. Because everything is downstream from culture. Everything.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yes.
Todd Rose:
Institutions are, policies are, politics are. And we've inverted that. Now everything is political and we believe every solution has to have some federal - and it's just not true. And when we lose the shared values, the shared aspirations, the shared beliefs - those shared things like culture is what we believe. And what we believe creates the norms about the way we interact with one another and it creates the expectations for our institutions. That's how it's supposed to flow. That was one of the geniuses of how we've structured our system in America.
Todd Rose:
And so getting back to that - and it seems like such a big lift, but I'm like, listen, at the end of the day, because so much of our problem sits under these collective illusions and because they're lies and they're fragile and because the profit incentive and the moral incentive are aligned in the ways that entertainment works, I think we're in good shape. I really do. And I actually think that it feels like the bottom's falling out. And I just, I don't think this is true. I actually think we're going to look back - "yeah, it was an interesting transition, had some bumps," but I think we have the chance to enter an era of unprecedented prosperity. And I don't just mean materially, but I do mean materially. But what was the point of material abundance than flourishing, than living a good life?
Todd Rose:
And that I think is the frontier. When you and I talk about our shared belief in positive sum societies, we mean that both materially and psychologically. The ability for your success to not just benefit me materially or whatever, but actually to add some value to my life as I understand it, is so powerful. I mean, that's what's on offer. That's what AI enables done right. But we've got to address the challenges in front of us right now. And from my standpoint, the self-silencing, the preference falsification and the collective illusions that have formed as a result are the biggest things standing in our way between here and a future that we all really want.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Could not, I mean, absolutely simpatico on that. And all of these other ideas and the other message that you give that I really want to underline and amplify is you, our listener, our viewer, everyone can make a difference. You are not powerless. You have much more power than you know you have. And if it only means taking your advice and saying, "you know, I'm not sure about that, I really probably disagree. But tell me why," that ability for a person who feels like boxed in by what they believe other people believe, and then just one human being saying to them, "you know what, I don't agree, but tell me more."
Todd Rose:
Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
They're like, "oh my God."
Todd Rose:
And here's the thing. So 100% - we have so much more power than we realize. And it is not something that requires some collective action.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Nope.
Todd Rose:
It is not ever going to change that way. It is one person at a time. And if all you said was "I could talk to my neighbor, I could talk to one of my neighbors, I could have that one conversation." If we do that, it will change. And it's remarkable how easy this goes. We've just lost the muscle right now. And the dirty secret of all collective illusions is they don't hold up when we have authentic conversations. They don't.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. I mean, there's even the children's story about the Naked Emperor. That's right, the minute - and I always found it interesting that he made it a child who called out the emperor like, "excuse me, adults. He's naked."
Todd Rose:
Because what I loved about it is, and you read the backstory on that parable - that the child had no status. Everybody around the emperor had something to gain for maintaining the illusion.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, exactly.
Todd Rose:
No offense to my politician friends. Politicians often have a reason to maintain the illusion. Of course, the division serves some of them quite well. You don't, your neighbor doesn't. And here's the thing, all the bad actors, like the state-sponsored efforts to destroy us from the inside out, they don't want you to have the conversation. That's the last thing they want. To me, that act of defiance is to just have the conversation.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And the thing that I like to stress and that you do such a great job of convincing people of - it's not this huge heroic effort.
Todd Rose:
It's not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It's literally just have the conversation.
Todd Rose:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It doesn't matter what happens. Just have it. Because as you say, these are very brittle things, these collective illusions. And they snap right the minute anyone just is like, "I smell something here."
Todd Rose:
That's right. And I mean, history is littered with this. Of the incredible societal transformations that happen from the bottom up, one person at a time. When you recognize and diagnose the problem as a collective illusion and you pursue the right strategy. And that's true from things in the US like marriage equality movement, which harnessed this like no one's business, all the way to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, where the only time that an authoritarian communist regime was overthrown without anybody losing their life.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep.
Todd Rose:
At the same time, Hungary and other places had bloody suppression of this. And if you want to read what I think is one of the most remarkable little pamphlets on something, go read Václav Havel, who was the originator of that Velvet Revolution. No military background, wasn't a politician. He was a poet and a playwright.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right.
Todd Rose:
But he wrote a manifesto called the Power of the Powerless. It's free online.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Brilliant, brilliant. I've read it. It's amazing.
Todd Rose:
And you'll see where he describes how he detects the illusion at the heart of Communism. And he realizes if that's the problem, if the problem isn't that people believe, but they believe that they believe, then the answer isn't military. He called it authenticity and personal responsibility.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep.
Todd Rose:
And they set up an entire effort all over the country at these small works that were just meant to get people more comfortable living in truth in small ways, because they were so used to living in a lie. And they made fun of him. They literally said, "you're going to overthrow communism? They have all the guns. You're going to do that with authenticity?" And it was funny. Even Havel - nobody saw the Velvet Revolution coming. Nobody. The KGB missed it. Even Havel. A few months before the student protest that kicked off this thing that ended with him - he's interviewed in an international magazine, and he's trying to rally the troops and he said, "look, I am committed to this through the rest of my life, but it's going to take a while. And let's be clear, I probably won't be alive to see the end." Three months later, he was the first democratically elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. Like I always think, look, if a poet can overthrow communism because of collective illusions, I think we'll be okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, wow. My producers are now buzzing me because we've gotten to our 90 minutes.
Todd Rose:
This is part one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yes, this is definitely part one, because I haven't gotten to, like, half of the other cool stuff that your research and your team have uncovered. Todd. This has been even more enjoyable than I thought it would be, and I had very high expectations.
Todd Rose:
Me, too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
As you might know, our final question, since you're going to come on again for part two, you're going to get four bytes of the apple. All right, instead of just two. But we make you the emperor of the world. You cannot do anything like collective illusions so that everyone leaves you as the emperor of the world. You only get to position for one day. You can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it. And what will happen is you will incept the entire population of planet Earth whenever their morning happens to be.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
They're going to wake up the next morning and say, "you know, I've just had two of the best ideas and unlike all the other times, I'm going to act on both of these starting today and to continue," what are you going to incept into the world's population?
Todd Rose:
The first is - did I get two? Is that we said two, two ideas. Yeah, the first and we touched on this a little bit, but it's the trust. Yes, there are bad people in the world and those small number of people who will take advantage of that are not sufficient to warrant the lack of trust we have in each other as a people. We are a good people. I think human beings want to be good out of fear. We often operate otherwise. But a world that is awash in trust is a world that is capable of achieving. The second thing that I would say which is there is enough. There is enough. Our brains have been hardwired over a long period of time to assume scarcity.
Todd Rose:
We operate as though the world is zero sum because that is the way the world was for a very long time thanks to people like Adam Smith. That is not true now. It is not true. And so our ability to operate with an abundance mindset that there is enough and that we can grow the pie not just economically, which we've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also psychologically that we can all be happier, healthier and more prosperous together. We really can. And those two things I think go hand in hand.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I could not agree with you more. And that's another one of my little soapboxes. You take any ideology, take any religion, take any political belief and compare it with free markets. And free markets delivered in 300 odd years much more than all the promises that they were making. Promised land and the land of milk and honey. And guess what got us there? Free markets and people trusting each other and working together.
Todd Rose:
Isn't that great? And you go back and read Adam Smith, not just Wealth of Nations, read his Theory of Moral Sentiment - he was a moral philosopher who cared a lot about everyday people and how to lift all boats and free markets were his answer to that. And we have to overcome that bias to see the world as zero sum. And if we can get those two things. I was gonna say, I just felt a little less substantive. If we could all be New England Patriots fans, this would be so much better. If you could all just join in. It might be the world's best religion. I'm just saying.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
All right, even though I live in New England, I'm going to disagree with you.
Todd Rose:
Hey, you know what, Jim? I want to make the space for you to be able to disagree with me. Tell me why you have such bad taste in football.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, touché. I love it. All right, well, Todd, until part two, wonderful conversation and can't wait to talk again.
Todd Rose:
It was great to see you, man.
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