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everything to fix it and we just couldn't.

So I sent it to two different audio engineers

after it was recorded and they did what they could,

but the quality just is not great.

So please forgive that, and I think you you will because it's so interesting that it's worth pushing through.

The guest is Tali Sharett. She is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the Effective Brain Laboratory at the University College in London

and she studies perception and cognition, but she also wrote this book called The Optimism

Bias, which is very popular. She did a great TED talk about it and it's about her research into how we put on rose-colored glasses in a lot of situations that I think you would be surprised to learn. We do. And here she is talking about that book at other topics. So in your book and in your lectures you suggest that our faith in

warning labels is flawed. Why is that?

Hmm. I don't think that our faith in warning labels is flawed. It's simply that we don't believe that those warnings are related to us.

So I think we believe when, you know, we're looking at a cigarette packet and it says that smoking kills. We do believe that smoking

kills, but because of our optimism bias and our superiority illusion, we tend to think that it's

going to kill the other guy and we will be okay.

There's something about us that is special.

We have better genes, you know, we go to the gym and we kind of rationalize these warnings

away.

Right.

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