In this lessons episode, explore how hidden motives shape behavior more than most realize.

Discover why subconscious biases block accurate self-assessment,

understand how patterns in laughter, conversation, and politics reveal deeper truths,

and uncover how exposing these forces challenges assumptions and reshap views on human motives.

So, motives. So understanding that, understanding that we are wrong a lot in the actions that we take or the presumptions that we internalize, how is it even possible to model,

model different outputs or different ideas if the test group is flawed?

How do we ever predict anything?

How do we ever improve anything? How do we ever improve anything?

Well, so you're designed not to see your real motives.

You're designed to see the motives you want to say.

So if you just try to look at yourself and try to see your real motives,

that's not going to go very well.

Your subconscious is ready to divert you from that.

What you'll have more successful doing is looking at just humans in general,

looking at their average behavior, and trying to come up with average typical motives to explain average typical behavior. Your subconscious mind is not very well set to defend against that.

It doesn't care so much against that as long as it's not directed at you.

So what we do in our book is to go through 10 different areas of life, and in each area, we say,

what's the usual stated motive?

And then what are a bunch of things that don't make sense that don't fit very well with that story and then offer an alternative

motive that fits better with a bunch of the puzzles that we describe. And that's our method of analysis

to say, here's a motive that makes more sense of these various puzzles. And most of these puzzles

might not even be things you have noticed or if you noticed thought were very interesting or

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