Hello, welcome to Sir Clancho on the Box Media Podcast Network.

Today is the day. It is the not that long awaited, ask me anything episode. You You guys send in great questions, hundreds of questions,

which I'm grateful for, and I'm going to try my best to answer them. But to keep me honest,

as always, I've asked somebody to join me here. And in this case, it is the man, the myth,

the legend, my mysterious producer and engineer, Jeffrey Gelt. How's it going? Good man. How are you?

I'm well. How are things?

Yeah, you know. Ask me in an hour and a half. Yeah, fair enough. We're going to get some hard-hitting questions here. Keep you honest. What's up first? So, Prateek wants to know. And I'm not sure I

totally agree with the premise of this question and that you are here to

convince people of anything. But he asks, if you believe that changing someone's mind about a topic,

any topic is difficult, how do you function as a journalist where your ultimate goal,

he presumes, is to show your readers the reality and try to sway their mindset towards

the, quote, right one.

If you add to that the polarization and our intertwined identities, it seems even more challenging to

convince someone of an idea. So it's true. My book has a lot on this. And the way I put it is,

I don't think it is impossible to change people's minds in normal circumstances. If you, if like we're

deciding where to go for dinner and I say, I like, I like this pizza place. And you say, yeah,

but you know, I've been to this other one and it has better reviews on Yelp, you can change

my mind about where to go for dinner or even possibly who has better pizza pretty easily.

The place where it gets really hard is, and I have a chapter on the

book that's one of the things that kind of most informed my thinking ever, or changed my thinking

ever, about an idea called identity protective cognition. And so the idea is that once your

identity is implicated in a view, the community you are part of is holding you in part to that view,

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