I recorded some of my audio in this episode from my hotel room in Amsterdam, where I am

currently on a book tour for how mine's changed, not currently on a book tour in the hotel and

going places across the Netherlands and in the UK. I just did a lecture last night in

Nyman and the night before in Utrecht and the night before that at the school of life here in

Amsterdam. And tomorrow night I'll be the opening act for the night of philosophy in Rotterdam.

If you follow me on social media, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, that sort of thing,

I'll be posting updates from all of these things, including some clips and some other fun stuff,

links to things. Just watch out for all of that. Okay, let's start the show.

Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast episode 256.

If we don't reclaim the idea of persuasion, if we don't ditch this kind of pessimistic pose

that people can never change, we'll never change. We're consigning this country to a future of

of tyranny and hatred and mass delusion. And that's a future I don't accept.

That is the voice of a non-geardardist, the author of the persuaders. And this is the third

episode in a three-part series about how to have difficult conversations with people who see the

world differently, how to have better debates about contentious issues and how to ethically and

scientifically persuade one another about the things that matter. In short, this is a three-part

series about how minds change, which just happens to be the title of my new book, which is also about

all those topics. While promoting how minds change, which came out a few months ago, a lot of people

reached out to me to let me know that several other books had come out around the same time as

bind with similar questions, similar themes, similar concerns. And so it seemed to me there was

a movement of foot, a new wave of nonfiction about how to have better conversations and reduce

all this argumentative madness and epistemic chaos. So instead of framing all these authors and

...