Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And today we're going to dive once again into the waters of psychology. Our guest is Olga

Hazan, who's written a new book called Weird, the Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

In other words, we're talking about what it means to be weird. And we're not defining the

word weird, to mean some weird thing. What we really mean in everyday life when we just say

someone is weird. That person's normal. This one over here is a little bit weird.

So what do we mean by that? What are the conditions under which we would classify someone

is weird? Why do we do that? There's a sociology problem, not a psychology question here.

Why do societies choose to label certain people as weird and other people to be normal?

The word normal reflects on the fact that we're obeying norms. Every society comes up with,

it invents rules that you're supposed to follow. And if you don't follow those rules,

or not just rules, but expectations, then you are labeled weird. Now there's questions for

the person who is being weird also, right? Like there are different ways to be weird. Sometimes

it has nothing to do with things you can control like your a foreigner in a strange country.

Sometimes it might be your personality or your choice of hobbies or work or whatever.

There's very clear ways backed up by psychological studies that show you how society kind of

punishes you for being weird. How it ostracizes you tries to slow you down,

but as Olga argues, there's also benefits to being weird. There's a certain kind of creativity,

a kind of new perspective on the world that you can get from standing a little bit outside the norms.

So this is a very fun and insightful conversation that probably everyone can relate to because

it's not that people are weird. It's the different parts of every individual person

may have some weirdness attached to them. Remember, we have a Patreon that you can support

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