unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

How did we get to the financial crisis of 2008? Where were the signs, and what did we miss? For these questions and more, we turn to the person who wrote a book on the subject. Dr. George Cooper is an author and the chief investment Officer of Equitile investments. He has 27 years of investment experience including with JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and BlueCrest Capital before. His first book, The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy, has an updated version out, and his latest book is called Fixing Economics: The story of how the dismal science was broken - and how it could be rebuilt. George and Greg talk about the limits of neoclassical economics, the importance of systems thinking, and they go into the origins of financial crises. George and Greg talk about the ideas of Keynes, Minsky, Marx, Maxwell,  Kuhn, and Brahmagupta. George introduces his view of dynamic equilibrium and his perspective on Modern Money Theory and other alternative schools of economics.Episode Quotes:Recognizing the role of credit creation system11:18: When you understand the connection between asset inflation, profit formation, and credit creation. When you realize that all three of those are intimately entwined, then you can no longer believe in an equilibrium model anymore because asset inflation leads to credit creation. And interestingly, the creation of credit also leads to a boom in corporate profits.49:21: When we talk about money creation, we need to also think about anti-money creation, which is debt. So debt and money combined are literally created and destroyed.Are we analyzing the wrong side of economic theory? 16:07: We tend to analyze the economy only from the private sector side, but there are no successful economies in the world that are 100 percent private sector. Every successful economy in the world has a public sector that is comparable in size to the private sector.Finding important truths and valid insights in economics25:51: Many social scientists, even today, talk about emotions as if it were one great category, but emotions to their work by virtue of their specificity, that is, by their community entities and action tenses that are also very specific or different from the different emotions. So if you are angry, you want to make the other person suffer. If you hate, then you want other person to disappear from the face of the earth.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hyman MinskyJohn Maynard KeynesParadox of ThriftAustrian SchoolLehman BrothersWilliam HarveyAlfred WegenerCharles DarwinJames MaxwellBrahmaguptaLuca PacioliBenoit MandelbrotThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsunSILOed EP #12 | Understanding Carry Trades feat. Kevin ColdironGuest Profile:Professional on Equitile InvestmentsAuthor’s Profile on  Penguin Random House ProfileSpeaker’s Profile on Specialist SpeakerGeorge Cooper’s WebsiteHis Work:Articles on EvonomicsThe Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market FallacyMoney, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the doctor of King Charles I could turn economics into a scienceFixing Economics: The story of how the dismal science was broken - and how it could be rebuilt  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most history books explain the details of events and provide well-researched context to these events. But history isn’t just about what happened, it’s often about why. The root of any social change is often complex, human emotions.In his new book, France before 1789, Jon Elster explores the circumstances leading up to the French Revolution and the limits of rational choice theory in explaining collective action. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Jon talk about how human emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and hope can motivate entire populations of people to change history.Jon Elster is a professor at Columbia University and the author of a wide range of books exploring Marxism, Social Science, Choice Theory, Constitutions, and Addiction.Episode Quotes:What can we still learn about Aristotle about emotions?35:04: Many social scientists, even today, talk about emotions as if it were one great category, but emotions do their work by virtue of their specificity, that is, by their cognitive antecedents and action tendencies that are also very specific or different from the different emotions. So if you are angry, you want to make the other person suffer. If you hate, then you want other person to disappear from the face of the earth.11:43: Emotions have a short half-life and various other features that don't actually form a formal model but form a complex of features that we can find in many situations where emotions are at work.Self-interest and rationality are not the same thing10:04: Self-interest and rationality are not the same thing, but people act against their rational self-interest under the influence of emotions with respect to vengeance, revenge is often a pointless, sterile act, but it's undertaken under the impulse of very strong emotions.What’s the problem with studying leadership?13:55: The problem about studying leadership is that you can identify good leaders only by their results. There's no way of identifying good leaders ex ante to pick them. That would be good. Of course, if we could, but we can't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Rebellion FrancaiseGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia UniversityHis Work:Jon Elster on Google ScholarAmerica Before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial RegimeFrance before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist RegimeSour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) Reissue EditionSecurities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, ElectionsReason and RationalityUlysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and ConstraintsStrong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Jean Nicod Lectures)Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the EmotionsNuts and Bolts for the Social SciencesExplaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In recent decades there has been a major restructuring of the economy from capital-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven fields which increases the demand for high skilled workers. But why is it, that the US is producing a lot more innovation than other parts of the world?Edward W. Conard is an American businessman, author, and scholar. He is a New York Times-bestselling author of The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class and Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong; and a contributor to the book Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality. Conard is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Previously, he was a managing director at Bain Capital, where he worked closely with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.Edward and Greg talk about how information technology led to increased productivity and how the vast majority of the benefits generated by these technological advances go to the consumers and only a tiny fraction is captured by the people that are in the business of producing it. They also discuss why the argument that the middle class is being hollowed out is wrong, and Edward’s strategy for increasing wages for the middle and working classes.Episode Quotes:The constraint to growth in the world04:52: We can't afford to waste our talent because we have a lot less of it. And we have a lot more need from our population in terms of the economic help they need in order to live a happy life and in our economy. Because we have a lot of talent, a lot of it is not properly trained, and ultimately, we have to get the properly trained talent to take risks. (05:20) Because if all we do is our doctor or lawyer, they're not going to increase productivity. They're not going to produce innovation. And so that is the constraint to growth in our economy, it’s probably the constraint to growth in the world.41:41: The lack of talent is a real constraint in trying to get things done. Not only find the ideas but reduce the risk. And so that's a very important piece of it. This whole risk with our savings gives the impression that capital's really cheap.How ideas affect taxes07:22: If you have great ideas, the tax rate is going to matter a lot because you're multiplying by the tax rate. If you don't have good ideas, it doesn't matter if you have zero times in a high or a low tax; then we're still going to be zero.Two effects of properly trained talent 39:41: Properly trained talent has two effects. One is that it goes out and finds the ideas because, without talent, you don't find the ideas. But the second thing it does is reduce the risk of implementing those ideas. So it has this risk-reducing function.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas PikettyEquality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur Okun Guest Profile:Professional at American Enterprise InstituteEdward Conard’s WebsiteEdward Conard on LinkedInEdward Conard on TwitterEdward Conard on YoutubeEdward Conard on FacebookHis Work:Articles in National ReviewThe Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong The Economics of Inequality in High-wage Economies By Edward Conard Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The brain is a curious thing, but how does curiosity happen in it? Where does curiosity begin, and what does that process look like? Curiosity does quite a lot inside the brain, from connecting dots of knowledge to shaping entire architectures of thought and organization. Understanding the underpinnings of this motivating force can allow us to harness its power for our own advancement.Dani Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. They are also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Perry Zurn is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy Department of Philosophy & Religion at American University in Washington D.C. Bassett and Zurn are also twins, and co-authors of the new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, about the nature of curiosity, where it originates from, and how it functions. Dani, Perry, and Greg talk about curiosity as it relates to both Perry’s specialty area of Philosophy and Dani’s specialty area of Neuroscience. They discuss lessons they learned from researching and writing their book and get into some of the discoveries they made inside. They talk about how people can be subdivided into busy bodies, hunters, and dancers and the traits of each. They discuss early school experiences that allowed them to chase and foster the power of curiosity in their own childhoods, and they touch on what a collective curiosity would entail. Episode Quotes:Curiosity is a connective process[Dani Bassett ] 06:39: We argue that it's that connective property of information gathering, information seeking that is what curiosity does. And it provides us with a full, interconnected knowledge base that allows us to reason from our past and make new decisions in the future. It allows us to understand the mental processes of another person, and it also allows us to connect among people themselves.[Perry Zurn] 47:01: Creativity along the way, as fundamental to what it means to be educated, would change the entire structure of education. The practices of attunement[Perry Zurn] 13:04: When we're curious, we direct our observational skills—our capacity to notice or be attuned to certain things or be attuned to particular dynamics, for example. That's something that's at the core of what curiosity does. That's how it does some of its connecting work.The role of a teacher in a child’s curiosity[Dani Bassett ]13:04: Teachers are in this very tricky situation where they have an opportunity to model and to say, "Here, look at how my mind moves." You could try this too. And they also need to be quiet and not forecasting their own curiosity sometimes so that they can notice, hear, support, value, and encourage the kind of curiosity that the child has.Show Links:Recommended Resources:David Lydon-Staley, Ph.D.Center for the EdgeGuest Profile:Dani BassettFaculty Profile at University of PennsylvaniaFaculty Profile at Santa Fe InstituteDani Bassett on LinkedInDani Bassett on TwitterPerry ZurnFaculty Profile at American University Perry Zurn’s WebsitePerry Zurn on LinkedInPerry Zurn on TwitterPerry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett on Talks at GoogleTheir/His Work:Dani Bassett on Google ScholarPerry Zurn on Google ScholarComplex Systems LabCurious Minds: The Power of ConnectionCuriosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Growth is good but creates losers as well as winners. The Economics profession has far too often failed to provide insight into how to design policies that protect those negatively impacted by forces such as technological change and globalization. There’s a lot riding with how we address the economic ‘losers’, and it matters because the two main ways to engage with this problem have dramatically different consequences.Glenn Hubbard is an author, economist, and also Professor of Economics as well as Dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business until his retirement in 2019. Glenn was also the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Glenn’s latest book is The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption’s Wake, and he tackles the two main ways to assist the ‘losers’ in life. Governments and establishments try to wall off the affected areas and protect them from further harm, but at great cost to and minimal benefit for those people affected. Glenn promotes the second strategy of building bridges out from the areas of loss in different directions as lifelines, serving to assist in whatever transition needs to be made to reach a working position.Glenn and Greg talk about the two approaches to disruption, walls, which seek to keep change at bay, and bridges, which make change easier to accept. They discuss how Lincoln and Roosevelt built bridges through Land Grant Colleges and the GI Bill and how current policymakers could build new bridges to opportunity. . Glenn explains the role of community colleges and labor mobility and local development initiatives in places like Pittsburgh, PA, and Youngstown, OH.Episode Quotes:Why business leaders should step outside their comfort zone41:18: Many business people think that there's enormous and widespread support for business in the system. And so we can just tinker around the edges and ignore the social support. (41:48) I do think business leaders have to step outside their comfort zone a little. I don't think social support is given, and I do think they have to think of themselves as somewhere, not anywhere.On being optimistic about the future of economic growth49:07: Markets and the market for ideas have a great capacity to solve our problems. Where we trip over ourselves is when we don't notice the consequences of things, but a perfectly alert group of economists, businesspeople, public policymakers, and citizens—real people as well as economists—can make this work.Growth and economic development03:16: Imagine in my hand, I had a coin, and the head side of that coin is called growth. Now, who wouldn't be for that? Here's the problem: There's no modern theory of economic growth that doesn't entail a tail side of the coin, which is disruption. Every modern theory of growth has it. There's no such thing as growing a little bit each year smoothly, and everybody's incrementally better off. That's not how economic growth happens.Why isn't the congress the political realm where deals take place?26:56: Elites, whether they sat in boardrooms, congressional halls, or, dare I say, the economics profession, weren't noticing that we were speaking more to people who won. And not enough the people who lost and the anxiety that creates for individuals and communities. So I think noticing is a big element of it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robert D. PutnamAdam SmithThe Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our TimeKaldor-hicks efficiencyMancur OlsonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchProfessional Profile on Committee on Economic DevelopmentGlenn Hubbard’s WebsiteGlenn Hubbard on LinkedInHis Work:The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption's WakeBalance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern AmericaThe Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare HEALTHY, WEALTHY, AND WISE: Five Steps to a Better Healthcare System (second edition)Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American ProsperityThe Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the last 30 years, there has been an explosion in the diversity of cuisine. But while there are more diverse and healthier food choices available than ever before, and people are becoming more aware of what they are actually eating, the science of taste is still underdeveloped compared to our other senses.John McQuaid, is a journalist and author, most recently of the book "Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat," which explores the biology and history of flavor from the origin of life to the modern food system. While working for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he was the lead reporter on a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series about market-driven fisheries collapses around the world and co-writer of a series that anticipated the city’s near-demise by Hurricane Katrina. He has also written for other publications including Smithsonian magazine, The Washington Post, and Scientific American.John and Greg talk about the interplay of the natural, genetic and neurological aspects of taste and how this sense has evolved in our culture in the last decades. They also discuss the limitations of industrial manufacturing and artificial flavors and the obstacles to using machine intelligence to come up with new recipes.Episode Quotes:Food is a product of a particular time and place28:36: Food is very much a product of particular time and place. And to experiment radically with it is both exciting, somewhat dangerous; if you do it right, can be a real revolution. And so that's a lot of what's going on now. In flavor, they're starting to manipulate these processes, which have cultural roots, but nobody really understands how it works in terms of the flavors it produces because flavors are so complicated. Just the biochemical makeup of them, in addition to how we experience them, is very poorly understood.12:02: Over time, we learned to integrate and create more complicated experiences around food that could turn bitterness into something that was a plus rather than a minus.Can we use machine intelligence to come up with new recipes?44:15: To create new cuisine, you need to build on existing traditions and experiment, and it's a constant, never-ending process that's underway. And it's a live process. It requires human beings trying different things and tasting different things. And they might get some clues from looking at how computers would suggest putting certain flavors together. But until you actually do that in a kitchen, you're not really going to know what works and what doesn't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat” Book by John McQuaidGuest Profile:Professional Profile at the Wilson CenterJohn McQuaid’s WebsiteJohn McQuaid on LinkedInJohn McQuaid on TwitterHis Work:Articles on Scientific AmericanArticles on ForbesTasty: The Art and Science of What We EatPath of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When is clean too clean? And what science connects how we treat our skin with common skin conditions? While the virtues of cleanliness may seem to flow from modern scientific findings about germs, there are deep cultural and economic factors that have shaped the evolution of hygiene.James Hamblin is a physician who specializes in public health and preventative medicine. He is also a journalist, author, and lecturer at Yale University. His latest book is titled Clean: The New Science of Skin, which was named an editor’s choice by The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair named it among the best books of 2020. James and Greg discuss James’s book and the counterintuitive way we sometimes think of clean and healthy skin. They touch on the history of marketing by the soap and beauty industry and the relationship between status and cleanliness. James discusses new insights into the skin biome, how doctors blur the lines between the medical and the cosmetic, and unlocks some of the mysteries around various small body parts.Episode Quotes:How marketing manipulated us to things we don't really need11:26: You have to create a need in someone. You have to make them believe that they are lacking something, that they previously were fine. The term "body odor" didn't exist before people trying to sell deodorant. People didn't worry about fine lines before certain beauty soaps started saying they could prevent them—a soap for preventing wrinkles. They just were using every possible marketing strategy, and that's what’s really unfortunate about it. It didn’t have to go that way.On the concept of cleanliness03:54: The concept of cleanliness goes back far, far beyond germ theory, and it's always been a stand-in for purity, whether it's religious purity, ethnic purity, or sexual purity, and these are arbitrary concepts, but it's been used as this sort of idea of what is right and wrong, essentially.The information constraints faced by doctors26:56: All kinds of different psychological stressors require constant work, help, and support. It's not that doctors don't know. It's just that we don't have a healthcare system that makes those things part of the toolkit.Show Links:Recommended Resources:James’s Newsletter: The BodySocial Distance PodcastGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Yale UniversityJames Hamblin on LinkedInJames Hamblin’s WebsiteJames Hamblin on TwitterJames Hamblin on InstagramJames Hamblin on TEDxYaleHis Work:Stories on the AtlanticClean: The New Science of Skin If Our Bodies Could Talk  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fear is a common and important human emotion that we’ve all experienced at some time. But have you ever paid attention to how you react to fear in others? Your response may say a lot about your moral compass. Neuroscientist Abigail Marsh studied two groups of people, psychopaths and altruists, and how they interpret fear and other emotions in others. The psychopaths have trouble identifying fear in others, while the altruists respond immediately with empathy. The result of Marsh’s research is her book The Fear Factor: How one emotion connects altruists, psychopaths & everyone in between. On this episode of unSILOed, Abigail and Greg talk about her research and how these findings apply to all of our lives and interactions with people. Abigail Marsh is a professor of psychology at Georgetown University. She runs the Laboratory on Social & Affective Neuroscience which conducts research on human behavior and interaction. Episode Quotes:Fearlessness is a core part of a psychopathic personality39:07: People with psychopathy are really bad at recognizing when other people are afraid. And the reason we think that is because they don't feel fear strongly themselves. Fearlessness is a core part of the psychopathic personality. And so the idea is if you don't really know what fear feels like, and some people with psychopathy report not ever feeling fear, you don't have the empathic reaction to it in the brain that, I think, is what allows you to then identify the emotion that you're witnessing in somebody else.30:59: Being good at fear and recognizing when other people are afraid is a really strong individual difference predictor of altruism. The violence inhibition mechanism45:47: The idea is that, in typical people, the amygdala is a key part of the brain that, during development, is sort of neurobiologically prepared to respond to other people's distress and to learn from other people's distress, such that when you learn that a particular behavior results in another person looking highly distressed, for example, afraid, you very quickly learn not to do that thing again. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel WegnerThe Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic PersonalityMilgram studyDaniel BatsonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgetown UniversityContributor’s Profile on Psychology TodayAbigail Marsh WebsiteAbigail Marsh on LinkedInAbigail Marsh on TwitterAbigail Marsh on TEDTalkHer Work:Abigail Marsh on Google ScholarThe Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between (US)Good for Nothing (UK) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whether we are talking about food, clothing, or financial products, the supply chains which convert the raw materials to finished goods are getting more and more complex, giving rise to a wide range of intermediaries, ranging from the Walmarts and Amazons of the world to the Etsys and the Kickstarters. Increasing complexity often means increasing opacity. Regardless of the industry, understanding where our stuff comes from requires an understanding of intermediation design. Kathryn Judge, a Columbia law professor who researches financial markets, explores the complexities of our modern economy and supply chain systems in her new book Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source. She joins Greg on this episode of unSILOed to talk about consumer habits in our modern economy, how convenience changed the world, and the sociological impacts of this convenience. Kathryn Judge is the Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Her academic work focuses on financial institutions, innovation, and banking. Episode Quotes:Defining the middleman economy03:31: When I talk about the middleman economy, it's really two phenomena that build off each other. One, are they increasing the scale of intermediaries? Whether it's large banks, Walmart, or Amazon. And then how the scale of those largest intermediaries justifies changes in the process of production quite often where it becomes more disaggregated so you get the longer and the complex supply chains, and then how these two patterns feed off of each other.38:09: Even though we're seeing a shift in consumer and investor demands, conscious consumerism is not going to solve the structural challenges we're facing right now. There is always somebody on the other side of your transaction.28:34: There are people and places behind all of the goods that we're bringing into our lives. And once you start to reawaken that awareness, that becomes a mechanism for also helping to build a political will to think about, "Well, what do we want those structures to look like?" And what are the tradeoffs we're willing to make, and what are the tradeoffs we don't want to make?Using technology to enable disruption to intermediation schemes21:58: We are seeing technology being used in different ways. On the one hand, you do have these large intermediaries, like Amazon and Walmart, that we think about that are doing an incredible amount with data in ways that are helping to strengthen their position. At the same time, we are seeing technology come in and enable a disruption to some of the largest and most entrenched intermediation schemes and enable a different type of exchange.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Law SchoolKathryn Judge’s WebsiteKathryn Judge on LinkedInKathryn Judge on TwitterHer Work:Kathryn Judge on Google ScholarArticle on Time MagazineArticle on GreenBizDirect: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when two sides are in disagreement and both think they are right? How do you change a mind? Some tactics can be persuasive, but others can backfire and result in no movement or even extra resistance. There are things that can be learned from these disagreements, and tools that can be used to resolve them.David McRaney is a journalist, podcaster and author. His latest book is How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion where David explores different methodologies for changing both one’s own mind and the minds of others, exploring what works, what does not, and what was surprising along the way. He is also the author of the books You Are Now Less Dumb, and You Are Not So Smart, which shares that title with his podcast.David and Greg talk about David’s experiences researching his books and what he found out about changing minds as he was studying how minds change. They talk about experiments with coin flips and card colors where seemingly arbitrary decisions are motivated by unconscious thought processes. They also discuss the social phenomenon of ‘The Dress’ and what science could tell us about people on either side of the color line. Episode Quotes:Why do we tend to make decisions that are easier to justify?22:52: If you deny people the information that they will use to justify their decision, they won't make the decision because they can't. We do not make decisions unless we’re allowed the opportunity to justify them. And the other side of that spectrum is unfortunately, that means we'll also tend to only make the decisions that are easiest to justify, not the ones that are "best" or have the most factual evidence underpinning them.19:10: When it comes to arguing about facts, figures, politics, hypotheticals, and abstractions, the facts often remain inert. They stay the same, and the reasons don’t change. Your motivation to search for reasons changes.An important part of how we flow from acting to thinking21:42: You have people and put them in situations where they have to rationalize and justify their decisions. They will always choose the option that is easiest to justify, and if you deny them the opportunity to justify their decisions, they just stop. They just don't make anything. It's such an important part of how we flow from thinking to acting.Defining an epiphany47:58: An epiphany is the moment you realize you have changed your mind. It's not the moment you change your mind. It's the moment you realize you have already changed your mind. And it's a shocking, thrilling, visceral experience. And it needs to be. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Marshall McLuhanThe Enigma of ReasonThe Bruner Postman ExperimentDisagreeing about Crocs and socks: Creating profoundly ambiguous color displaysThe DressGuest Profile:Speaker’s Profile at the Harry Walker AgencyDavid McRaney’s WebsiteDavid McRaney on LinkedInDavid McRaney on TwitterHis Work:You Are Not So Smart PodcastHow Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and PersuasionYou Can Beat Your Brain: How to Turn Your Enemies Into Friends, How to Make Better Decisions, and Other Ways to Be Less DumbYou Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.