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