This is Trend Following Radio, where great thinking comes alive.

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

I am your host, Michael Covel.

Not filtered, raw, honest.

That's my passion.

Let me tell you how this podcast works.

There's no great staff that picks the latest and greatest

whoever to come on this show. I pick people that I like. I pick people that have something

interesting to say that resonates with me, someone who has deep dived over the course of their life into a topic.

And when I hear their insights, I just go, damn, that's cool. That's awesome.

Those are the kinds of people that I want. And often the way that I find them entirely random.

My guest today is Timur Karan.

He's a professor of economics and political science at Duke University.

What caught my eye about his work?

A little piece of jargon that he pulled together called preference falsification.

Outlined in his book, Private Truths, Public Lies.

Essentially, we just don't tell the truth.

We tell people one thing when we really believe something else.

There's a lot of reasons for this.

If there's too much preference falsification, it can dampen a community, a population's

capacity to want change because it brings about this intellectual narrowness. People essentially

forget. They become stupid. They spent so much time not saying what they really believe that eventually they come

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