 Welcome. So Lord Professor Dan Ariely to the show. I've been a sort of fan of yours for many, many, many years. For those of you who don't know Dan, he's sort of almost one of the Godfathers of behavioral science. He's a professor of behavioral science and psychology at Duke University, and just a generally amazing, super nice, incredible person. Welcome, Dan. Thank you. Lovely to be here. And just before we started this, I was asking where you were. You said you were in LA for a fun thing. Yeah, so I'm here for a premiere of a TV show called The Irrational. And it's a TV show that I helped write and it's loosely based on my life. It's a show on NBC airing tomorrow. Very exciting. And actually, you know, being involved in the writing and seeing something takes place and seeing an actor saying my sentences and actually his office is model after my office at Duke. And it is amazing. And the actor Jesse Martin, he called me so, you know, there was a pilot and so on. So it's been going on for about a year there. And he told me how much he starts thinking like me. So the day before yesterday, he called me to check whether he was really thinking like me or not. But it's a real treat. It's a real treat to see something written in such a different way and how the writers think and how much they respect science. So, you know, when we started, I didn't know, like, if I say, oh, this is not how the experiment works, there's no discounts. You know, it's fiction, it's drama. But when I say something, this is not how an experiment works. So this is not how people think about the research assistants. They take it seriously. And in this show, I have the guy who is playing the professor, his ex-wife, his sister and the two research assistants are the main character. And after a while, I took the two research assistants to dinner. And after about two hours, I realized I'm treating them not like actors, but as my research assistants. We just talked about science and research and how to do things. But yeah, it's really fun. It's amazing. I mean, I imagine your whole research is around sort of, you know, human behavior and emotions. And I mean, those were all great things to work with the storytelling. So is it sort of like a Sherlock Holmes type modern day? Yeah, so every episode there's a psychological force that is the villain. Right. Right. So there's always a crime and there's an attempt to solve it. And it's always about one aspect of the human psyche that is coming to play. Think about revenge or, you know, I don't want to give it away, but that's what's happening. That's amazing. So if anyone's in the U.S. would look for the rational on NBC and Peacock. And we'll hopefully everywhere else in the world will find it in the next few weeks when it becomes a global smash hit. But the reason why we wanted to chat today was because of this amazing... But you got up here. It was absolutely fascinating. It was just got released a couple of days ago called Misbelief. And it's a mind boggling story that I think deals with the subject which has been rising in prominence. Sort of, unfortunately, I think in the last four years or so. A lot of it seems to be about misinformation. And I did a quick Google search on Google Trends. Or you find this very sort of low line up until about March 2020. And then it just spikes and results sort of triple. And it sort of has stayed, unfortunately, very high since. So yeah, what happened? So first of all, let me just say that I don't like the term misinformation. And I don't like the term misinformation because it makes us feel that the solution is simple. There's misinformation, there's real information, we can fix it. I prefer the term corrosive information. Because one of the important thing is to realize that somebody who gets exposed to that is very unlikely to ever go back. But the book and my story is that as COVID started, it was really the highlight of my academic career. I think every government in the world and many businesses realize the importance of social science. We keep on saying, hey, social science is important, important. All of a sudden there's a virus and everybody says social science is important. And there were questions about how to reduce domestic violence, how to do distant education, how to give money to people. Whether we should give fines or rewards. The number of questions, how do we get people to comply with requests? The social science questions were everywhere. I felt I was contributing to the world. I was with two phones and a control center answering questions from different countries, from different places. I felt I was the most useful I could ever be in my life. It was a tremendously, not everything I had an answer, but I did the best I could. And then a few months later, I get an email from somebody I once knew, I once helped. And the email says, Dan, how have you changed? How have you become like this? And I say, how exactly, what exactly do you mean? And I get a long list of links and I'll just describe one of them. That link describes how I was badly burned, which is true, right? Most of my body is 70% of my body was burned. So how because I was burned and I was in hospital for three years, I started hating healthy people. And that's why I joined the Cabal and Bill Gates and the Illuminati to try and kill as many healthy people as possible. And the rest of the videos and links and so on were different types of accusations, different types of starting points and so on, but all of the same type. And in my initial instinct was to just correct those people that they were wrong. And I do have to say that before I tried to correct them, I called some friends to ask them for advice and everybody said don't. But I went ahead anyway. I felt so strongly. This is to tell you that social science, even knowing something about social science is no protection from not doing mistakes. But my instinct was so much that these people are just wrong. And if I only told them, they would get convinced. And I spent the next month trying to convince them. I talked to people. I invited some people to my house. I joined some online discussion groups. I joined things on telegram, lots of things. I think I only did damage. I convinced one person during that month and I probably got thousands to hate me even more. And then at the end of the month, I realized that's not going to work. I'm a slow learner. And I decided to try to understand the problem. It was just incredible feeling of being villainized on wrong things and unable to talk to people. Unable to give them data, information, anything. And I decided to understand this. And I basically sat back. And for the next two years, I just tried to understand things. I found about 20 very, very serious misbelievers who I would talk to regularly to try to understand the world. I stopped trying to convince them. I gave up on them. I said, I just want to understand your worldview. I joined some of the discussion groups, watched a tremendous number of videos, did my own research. And it was very tough to use. It's very tough to use. And at some point, I thought I'll write this book because I realized that the problem is bigger than I thought, more complex than I thought and more important than I thought. If 10 years ago I asked you, what are the big challenges facing humanity? Corrosive information or misbelief would not be there. Correct. Now it is. Now you're saying, you know, every big problem that we want to save to improve together, whatever it is, misbelief is an enemy of... It's undermining a lot of our ability to work together and improve things. Love in your book as well as you go through so many different stories. So obviously you do share your own story, which carry on going into it. But the other way you've got stories about sort of dogs, JFK, COVID, payday loans, everything. It's written in such a beautiful way. Again, you're a masterful storyteller. So everything is just, you know, everything is framed really beastly. So if someone is a little bit scared of this topic and might think it's over complicated, please don't be worried. The way that Dan's put it down there, it's super easy to understand. But yeah, I mean, it must make you feel pretty ghastly, I'd imagine. Yeah, you know, the book is really, you can look at it as almost like an introductory textbook to psychology. Because in the same way that, you know, the cookie is designed to attack human nature with the right combination of salt, sugar and fat. Misbelief is designed to attack every aspect of our psychology, right? And I described this funnel of misbelief that starts with emotion, stress, cognitive personality and social. It's kind of, you know, it's not all of psychology, but it's a lot of psychology that is attacking us in different phases of this funnel of misbelief. And causing people to act in very strange ways. And since I started talking about this more generally, I usually ask people, you know, do you have somebody in your circle, family, friend, close, not so close, that has changed in some deep and fundamental ways over the last few years? And the answer from everybody is yes, there is somebody that I once thought was just like me. And they have changed in such a way that I am not sure, like, who are they anymore? But the book is not just about them, it's also about us, right? Because it's very easy to say, oh, it's these other people. But the reality is that all of us are susceptible to misbeliefs. And also, when you start exploring the nature of our beliefs, and you take these tasks seriously, you start realizing that some of our closely held beliefs might not be as solid as we think they are. And it's a very healthy process to go through. What I thought was interesting, one of the themes in the book is this sort of at the start. It seems like a lot of this is driven by people in bad situations. And it can be something very small and benign. There was a story I think you share about a lady whose kid was chastised for losing their mask. And then it goes, you know, that angers the parent who then goes online and, you know, why are we having to wear a mask anyway? Which then escalates into this sort of, you know, right full-blown on thing. It's frightening to see how easy it can start. What such a small thing can lead to such a big thing. And there are two elements there. The first one is that, yes, it can happen to all of us. And the breeding ground for misbelief is really stress. That's important to realize. Because when you say to yourself, why these other person are not me? What separates us? Maybe I'm just smarter or no, no, no. We shouldn't discount the people who go down this path. And we shouldn't discount misbeliefs. We need to understand that they grow as a response to stress. So first of all, with the right level of stress or the wrong level of stress, we could all start adopting misbeliefs. That's important to understand. And the second is that misbeliefs are a response to a real need, right? It's not that people just say, oh, let me wake up and let me start believing in whatever. No, there's a real need that those beliefs are a response to. It's not healthy. It's like an autoimmune problem, but it's a response. So imagine that somebody is stressed and they are not stressed of the type of being busy at work. They're stressed of the type of being hard done by, feeling that life is not fair to them, that they have lost their job when other people haven't, that their kids don't like them when they like the other spouse, where financial health, anything, and stress accumulates. And there's also this beautiful research showing that countries that have more violence have more conspiracy theories, right? Stress accumulates across domains. It's not as if, oh, my stress comes from health or my stress comes from my kids. It accumulates. And now we feel stress. And that's a very unhealthy state of emotional state. And we want to relieve that stress. So what do we want? We want the story. We want the story to explain why this is happening. And we also want the villain. Why do we want the villain? Because we want somebody else to blame, right? Imagine that the story said, oh, I'm just not the talent there though. I'm not a nice person or whatever. That's not a good answer. So we want the story. We want the villain. And also we want the complex story. And why do we want the complex story? Because it gives us a sense of control. It gives us a sense that we know something that other people don't. Oh, you think that, no, no, no, here's a much, much more. All of a sudden from being an underdog, I feel I'm on top because of that. So then we gravitate over the stories. The internet is full of them. We find one. The moment we listen to it or hear it and so on, there's a short-term improvement in well-being. Oh, it's not my fault. It's this other person. It's the immigrants. It's Bill Gates. It's whatever. But that's the improvement is short-lived. A little bit like a mosquito bite. It's short-lived because it's good for now. But long-term, you get to wake up the next day and say, oh, my goodness, the world is a bad place. There's all these evil forces. So it's a short-term improvement, long-term deterioration. And then you say, oh, what did I do last time when I felt bad? Oh, I watched this villain thing. Short-term improvement, long-term deterioration. And that's the starting point. And then, of course, there's lots of other elements that build on top of that. I guess two things I thought about when you were talking there was one was you mentioned other countries. When you read up on a lot of this, a lot of the stuff that you do read up on ends up being USA-related stuff. Is it more of a problem, do you think, in the States? Or is that just because a lot of mainstream media, I guess, of your English speaking comes from the States? I don't think it's just US. I don't think it's just US. And, you know, US is getting better at that and so on. But it's not just US. You know, let's not talk about the UK, but, you know, Brazil. It's not just the US. It's in more and more places. And look, COVID was an extraordinary time because of the amount of stress and because people were home. And there were some other things that pushed it forward, but it's very hard to turn the clock back on that. So, you know, as we said, you know, there's stress, cognitive personality and social. Think a little bit about the social part. So in the social part, like, you know, if we said that stress is the building block, social is what seals the deal. Once people get to the social element, it's very hard to turn back. It's the same as community. But different. It's part of that. But community is broader than that. So, for example, community contributes to reduction of stress. So if you ask, where do we get resilience from? From the fact that people around us would help us if we need their help. As community becomes more free, stress becomes higher. So community is not exactly as socially placed in multiple places. But in the social part, there's a couple of things. The first thing is ostracism. And the story of ostracism is actually a beautiful story. So this guy that started the research on this described how he walks in the park with his dog, walks and walks and walks, and he sees two people playing frisbee. They play frisbee and somehow the frisbee falls next to his feet. He picks it up, he throws it to one of them, and to his surprise, the guy throws the frisbee back. And the three of them play for a few minutes, and then they stop throwing it to him. And he just stands there, and they stop throwing it to him, and he feels rejected. Now, he didn't come to play with them, they don't know him, he's not their friend, but he felt rejected. And he went ahead and he started doing research on this. So he invited, he basically replicated this, he invited people to come to an experiment. But he said, please wait here for ten minutes outside, I'll call you when the experiment is ready. And there was a participant, but there were two other people that worked for him, for the researcher. And he asked them to start throwing a ball between the three of them. And for half the participant, they played the three of them for ten minutes. For the other participant, they played between them for five minutes and then they stopped throwing it to the real participant. And then he checked what is the effect of, you know, meeting two people, playing for five minutes, and then feeling rejected for five minutes. And it turns out the effect are very substantial. They change optimism and well-being. They change desire to help other people. They change altruism. And in fMRI studies, they get people to feel like they're in pain when this is happening in terms of the brain mechanism. Now, I don't know about you, but I feel that sometimes when people kind of start going down the path of misbelief and have some strange ideas, I have not shown them enough empathy. That I wouldn't say I ridiculed them. I'm kind of a gentle person, but I make a little bit fun of them. I have. I stopped. And, you know, if I make a little fun of somebody, they probably perceive it as big offense, right? There's an asymmetry there. And I think that's the first thing we do, where we see people with very different opinions and we basically reject them. And we reject them in a very, in a way that is probably more intense than we intend, and it has a bigger effect on them. And what happens now? They need to seek a different community, right? And where can they find it? Online. And if you go and look at these online communities, they're incredibly loving. There was one guy who had a post about Nirenberg Trials 2.0 for people who made crimes against humanity during COVID. And very long post, description of my crimes and sins against humanity. And at the end, he basically asked the question of whether I should get life in prison or public hanging. And people discussed that. Now, if you just look at the comments and though about a thousand of them, they sounded very lovely. Oh, you're so smart. Love is so insightful. Like, you know, the amount of support was amazing. You would think that these people are there to solve, you know, poverty or something. But it's not for nothing that they give each other too much support. Again, the psychological perspective is not to look at something and saying it's a mistake, but to say, what need is it fulfilling? Those people were getting ostracized. Like, if you think about Macron, Macron said that they're not French, right? They were basically very strong offenses against them. Very counterproductive. Very counterproductive. Anyway, so the social has a few other elements. There's one other thing I wanted to, that is important to mention, which is a very worrisome trend. And this is a trend called shibolit. And the story is as follows. There's a story in the Bible about two tribes that went to war. Very, very bloody war. And at the end of this war, one is on one side of the river, the other one is on the other side of the river. And when they meet somebody, they want to know if that person is from their side or from the other side. And shibolit is the name of a plant. But the two tribes pronounced it differently. Once a shibolit, once a cibolit. So now I meet you and I say, how do you call this plant? If you say it the right way, I let you live. You say it the wrong way, I try to kill you. Now, when you think about what it means is when I show you the plant and I say, how do you say this word? I don't really care about the plants and I don't care about the words. What I care about is a signal of your identity. Are you among us? What do you belong to the other group? And we start using the term shibolit in this sense. Who do you belong to? And if you look at it from this perspective at, for example, a lot of political discourse, you would say that sometimes people are saying things that you don't think they believe. But they're saying it as loyalty. And of course, if I just say something run of the mill, I don't show my true loyalty. I have to say something really extreme to show my loyalty to the cause. So when you and I listen to a discussion, we might say, oh, this is discussion about the truth. No, no, no. It's not a discussion about facts. It's discussion that somebody is trying to signal their loyalty to the group. And I'm not following very closely British politics, but we see it a lot in other countries. And you can tell me if you think that you see signs of that also in British politics and not just the politicians, but in discussions where people are really saying things they don't necessarily believe, but are showing their identity. And of course, once they say it over time, they might forget that they started with it as a shibolet, and now it's kind of accepted truth. It's a fascinating one. I was reading an article from Professor Galloway from Neil. He was saying that he wrote an article the other day about how he was worried about the sort of breakdown in religion and how that has broken down communities. And he was looking at research on when people used to be more religious. It's sort of people who are members of religious organizations tend to live longer, be more juror about things. I was thinking in the old school as well, it says it's sort of researching. I think it's down to 20%. And I wonder whether it's those kind of things leave a void for these kind of, you know, when a pandemic does come, like, in most places in the West, we don't, you know, our parents aren't necessarily even close by to us. We're living alone in the city, isolated. No wonder these kind of things tend to happen a little bit more. Perhaps they would. Religion has its own issues, I'm sure. But yes, that's the change happening. So I agree with you in two ways. First of all, in terms of resilience, right? So religion is usually not just the belief in God or some entity. It's also community around that. And having that community is important. The second thing is that when you have a physical community, some people are going to have different opinions. And you'll have to basically realize that some people have a different opinion. Online you could choose something that have just your opinion. But the other thing that, and this was a, you know, it's an obvious statement, but it struck me one night. I talked to one misbeliever in Germany and all of a sudden I realized how difficult life is for the misbelievers. Now, and this is a very big difference from believing in God. If you believe in God, you believe that the world is governed by some good force. God is generally good. Yes, you know, sometimes there's a devil and sometimes the devil wins. But mostly it's God and mostly you feel that there's a good force guiding you. So forget the social element. That's a separate issue. But the belief is inherently about goodness. If you are a misbeliever and you believe that it's not just that Pfizer is coming up with the vaccine and they want to make money, but that the plot is much larger and there's a cabal that smuggles kids that, you know, and you wake up in a terrible state. You wake up feeling that there's forces that are bigger than you, that are conniving, that are trying to do harm to you and your kids. And that's just a terrible way to live. So I think that as religion goes down, we lose community, we lose resilience, but we also have a chance to adopt notions about evil controlling the world. And for me, the term is belief. It's not just the belief about something that is not so. It's also about the perspective of the person. It's that the person is looking at life from not a skeptical perspective. Or, you know, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, but from a perspective of evil forces out to get me. And everything that I see is evidence of it. Like I was on some radio show a couple of days ago and somebody wrote me about some manila poisoning that happened in the US. You know, happens, not for this person. For this person, this was part of a plot to get people to be unhealthy. So the moment you become a misbeliever and truly adopt a tenant like this. And it's not just something that you don't care about. It becomes something central in your personality. And that's the perspective in which you look at the rest of life. That's incredibly damaging. I guess then how can we try and protect ourselves against these things so that we don't fall into these traps? Is it an environmental thing or are there just some steps that we can do or a bit of both? Yeah, so there's a lot of little things that we can do. I call these sections hopefully helpful. And then there are big things we need to take as a society. But let's talk about the things we can do individually. So first of all, we talked about resilience. How do we give, like when we see people starting adopting these misbeliefs, our role is to support them. It's very tough because they start having strange opinions and we feel the needs to tell them that they're wrong. But we need to create resilience. We also need to create resilience for ourselves. Each of us can think about how much are we investing in friendship, support network, deep supportive romantic love. It's kind of a bank of resilience that we need to invest for ourselves and for others. So that's one component. We certainly need to stop ostracizing people. That's just very, very unhelpful and counterproductive. There's a couple of things that we can do on the cognitive side as well. I'll just give you one example, but there's something called the illusion of explanatory depth. And I demonstrated this once, there's lots of demonstration, but one of mine were with a flush toilet. So I came to people, I said, hey, do you understand how a flush toilet works? So they asked, of course. I said, okay, here are all the pieces, can you assemble one? Nobody managed to assemble it. And then I said, and how much do you think now that you understand the flush toilet? People change their beliefs in their knowledge. And this has been demonstrated for lots of things. You understand how a zipper works and how a locks works and how a virus works, how a vaccine works, how a plane works, everything, helicopter. And it turns out that in these places where knowledge is low but our confidence is high, these are very dangerous places. Where we could adopt very strongly a misbelief. And the nice thing about this perspective is that there's a way to help. So I can say, you know, Chris, you seems to be saying that the elections were stolen. Help me understand exactly how could they be stolen? Like where exactly would it work? Is it happening when somebody marks something, somebody changes it? It's in this and talk about the exact mechanism where this is happening. And mostly we find that when we do this with people, they say, well, you know, I'm not so sure. Now, you don't attack somebody because when you attack somebody, they don't listen to you. They can't argue. You basically say, I'm with you. Let's just help me understand this. And there's even a nicer result showing that this is cross-domains. So, you know, maybe you believe the elections were stolen. And I don't want to attack you to talk to you about that just yet. I can start with the zipper because when people understand that it's not as effective, but it's also a little bit effective when we say, you know, maybe I should be less confident. And then of course, you know, there's lots of things we need to do as society. We need to treat the media differently. We need to think about what we do with social media. We need to think about what we do against polarization. So there's other, it's not as if, you know, just resilience and just the illusion of explanatory depth and just stopping at ostracizing is there will fix everything. It's where we as individuals can start. But we also need to recognize the importance of the problem and do something more, more generally. So we met someone who, I was being an epilope in that earth theory. Do you, I guess it's, do you need to convince them that that's wrong in the first place? Or do you just sort of have to make a judgment call as like, well, you know, they're happy that they're happy with their beliefs and move on. Yeah. So, so one of the problems with, with misbelief, as we said, is that it's a, it's a perspective from which to view the rest of the world. And it's the bigger issue on hand is trust. And this is why when people start misbelieving, they start misbelieving other things. It doesn't end with, with one thing. Like if you think about, let's say COVID is basically over. Let's, let's, let's say all the people who dedicated three years of their lives to this are not going to close shop. Remember, they've left their friends and family. They found a new, a new group. They view everything from this perspective. Now they, they go against the UN, they're going against the World Health Organization. You know, it's not. So, so when you see somebody, okay, imagine you dated somebody who believed in flat earth. Right. You know, you could take them home to meet your parents. Like it would be a little bit embarrassing, but you could. If you met somebody who was a COVID denier, that would be tougher because it would feel that they are hurting the common good. Somebody who believes in flat earth doesn't change the shape of the earth. Somebody who believes that there's no COVID can change the actual risk of COVID. But so you could say, Oh, I don't care. If you, if you believe in something that is not, but if it becomes a central tenant in their life and their personality and so on, then, then they're likely to start believing other things as well. Right. So, so I would say that the real issue here is not a specific belief. It's this perspective, this suspicious negative perspective on, on everything. Okay. So sort of, yeah, deal with it at your own peril than it was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's easy to kind of kick down the road and say, Oh, it's just the beginning. I really don't want to deal with it, but it will only get worse. Yeah. It is interesting what you say. And it makes sense. You see that in other areas as well. Yeah. Again, these things often seem to be a slippery slope. It's sort of start to a smart start small and go deeper. I'd imagine, you know, social media and probably AI present don't help these things a huge amount, either. And how do you particularly probably with kids who, you know, haven't, you know, they've only grown up with that. And that's probably where they get their main source of news from as well. So, I mean, what, how do you, is that sort of something that maybe the social media companies themselves need to deal with more or government needs to deal with more? Is that just something that we as parents or as individuals need to be more aware of? Well, I guess is there again, like anything, any questions you can ask yourself to stop yourself down that wrong rabbit hole. So, so I think that all of the above are correct. I think social media platforms need to deal with it. I think we as parents need to deal with it and so on. And, and I'm trying to talk with as many social media companies that I that I can and, you know, sometimes they say, oh, let's just censor things. Censoring is not the right approach. First of all, it's very tough to do efficiently. But if I think about my daughter who's 17 and I think about her feet, I don't want her feet to be fully clean of conspiracy theories. I don't want her to have zero exposure to those things. I think she needs to start seeing those things, dealing with them, developing critical thinking. You know, the solution is not to say, oh, let's just protect you against against that. That's that's not a good recipe for life. So, you know, I hope that social media will start thinking about information diet per person, rather than about videos as a unit of analysis. But, but personally, what what I think we can do is it's our responsibility to do this for our kids until the social media platform. Wake up or forced to wake up or something where you actually want to expose your kids to alternative views. You want to expose your kids to, you know, corrosive information, but you want to do it in a way that helps them develop a critical thinking and stopping and also help them figure out that they might not want to share it. You know, one of the one of the challenges in social media is what is the share button really about. So imagine that you see something absolutely ridiculous that you completely don't believe in versus you see something amazing that you really believe in. Sharing is the same in both in both cases. How is the person that you share this information with is going to react? And are they going to understand your intention? They're not. You know, we have this kind of very simplistic way. We don't separate claims about facts from opinions from entertainment. We don't separate what the thumbs up or liking is from. Do I do I find it funny? Do I find it ridiculous and interesting? Do I find it? So so the language is very ambiguous in this in this regard and and especially with sharing. I think people need to understand that whatever they think they're doing, they're endorsing. I loved what you say in the book about ambiguity and, you know, it's in is another skill that we need to learn is how to get very comfortable with ambiguity. Yeah, I guess we're always trying to search for meaning and and look for an answer. And then sometimes you I think you share an example of what comes race or is it the often it is just totally random. And the question about how do we interpret things is very important. And that's why I think skepticism is very healthy. And skepticism is the same. I don't know if it's A or B, but I'm not going to decide yet. But by the way, very hard to do in a world in which you're stressed. When you're stressed, very hard to say, oh, let me hold this multiple hypothesis in mind. But but learning to enjoy the ambiguity and saying, I really don't know. Let me let me hold judgment and come back to this and and so on is is incredibly important. And, you know, that that was one of the things with COVID is yes airborne, no airborne, yes surfaces, no surfaces, yes masks, no mask. It was it was so hard to keep what was really going on because very hard to do science in kind of out there in the world. So so so so the ambiguity was inherent to the situation. By the way, lots of important questions. There's so much ambiguity. You know, think about think about Brexit, think about immigration, think about European Union, very hard like this. These are very, very tough question. The answer is not is not very clear for for any of those. And and we don't want to jump to conclusions. It is complex. Well, you talk in the book again about just the complexity of human nature. It is is a thing. I think it was a lovely experiment. She had the talks about an experiment done with someone asking a research has some random questions on the suspension bridge versus in a normal area. They sort of confuse confuse their fear and with with love, I think of the the researcher or something. That's right. That's it with attraction. We don't know where our emotions come from and we don't know what to hang them and it can come on the on the wrong the wrong reason. So so you know, the book, the book just came out a few days ago and I have given more more talks about it. I had a funny realization and I didn't I didn't think about it as I was writing the book. I just had it afterward. But you know, we talked about the fact that the misbelievers are experiencing stress and they try to come up with a story and the story has a villain and the story is complex and so on. And what I realized is I did the same thing exactly. So so here's my life death threats attacks and so on stress. I very hard, very hard, you know, death threat sounds like it was very, very, very, very tough. And I also needed a story and I didn't explanation. And I think this book is this story. And and at the end, you know, my villain is is is human nature and and the technology we've built, we've built around it. But but I think that much like the misbelievers, I went on a journey to to explain what was going on. Now, I didn't do it very quickly. It took me a long time and I I I try to understand to do this. But I think it's similar that my coping mechanism for all these misery and stress and so on was to find a story and explain it. And this is eventually the book and it and what an amazing book it is. And I know we it's a running out of time. So I mean, I think the things I took from here are we need to work on our empathy for others. And I love what you say about trust. I'm happy to be one of those people who overly trusts in everyone. And I think I believe it serves me better in the long run than they're not being trusted. I think it's the same with humanity. I think you mentioned in the book that you sort of tend to have the same approach. And then I also love what you talked about the sort of curiosity and critical thinking and sort of working on that. And I guess trying to look for areas where if we are perhaps a bit stressed, you know, are there are there less hectic communities that we can maybe join? Maybe just some gardening or something or something. Yeah, it's more a civil good. But yeah, look, I wish you the very best for this book. It's marvellous. Yeah, please do listening to podcast or gas and buy this available with all good book shops and all bad book shops, too. It's sort of lovely stories and just lots of incredible paper biases. So, yeah, Dan, you've done an incredible job again. Smashed it out the park. It's been such an honor chatting with you. And I really appreciate the time you've taken to speak with us today. My pleasure. And looking forward to meeting face to face next time I'm in the UK. Very much. Thank you. Thanks.