Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 236

This is the first episode of The You Are Not So Smart Podcast to come out

after my new book How Minds Change is out there.

It has been released. It is a real book. It is as surreal as you might think it would

be after all this time working on it. You can hold it in your hands. It's printed

on paper with ink and it's available wherever you get your books and I really appreciate

everyone who has reached out and said very nice things about it. But this is also the

first episode of this podcast to come out after the US Supreme Court ruling that struck

down Roe vs. Wade making abortion illegal in many states. So that makes the book more

timely than I expected it to be given that so much of it deals with the political landscape

and the state of epistemic crisis and information chaos we all continue with every day. And it

focuses deeply on how to change minds on issues like this. Originally I planned for this

episode to just be an interview with Chris Clearfield as the interviewer asking me about

the book. And that's still in here. It's at the end of the episode. But after that ruling

I thought I'd add a reading of an excerpt that's relevant to this moment, extremely relevant

to this moment. To set this up this is from chapter 2 of How Minds Change where I tell

you all about my time at the Leadership Lab in Los Angeles, the political action wing

of the Los Angeles LGBT Center who spent years recording their conversations at people's

front doors discussing difficult, contentious wedge issues, recording more than 15,000 of

them on video. And they used those videos to a B test their approach, keeping what worked

throwing away what didn't until they zeroed in on a persuasion technique that's so new

...