Welcome to the show everybody. I hope you enjoy this episode. I was lucky enough to get the authors of my favorite book that I read in 2020 really meaningful stuff and understanding yourself and understanding what you know why you know it what you think you know that sort of thing if you if you get frustrated with the human condition sometimes this is also a really good book and understanding.

Some of the reasons why people seemingly behave in irrational ways are act like they know more than they do and that sort of thing.

So a bunch of stuff that we all do and see easier to to notice in others and I've found it to be not just incredibly informative and help me become a better thinker but also understanding others a little bit more.

And you might be saying but Shane you don't show a ton of understanding for human nature all of the time you seem just as frustrated as anybody else regarding humanity if not more so and you're right but imagine where I'd be if I wasn't working on it if I wasn't trying to learn more and educate myself.

Who wouldn't want to be that guy so check out the book the knowledge illusion it's really great if you want to support this show go to patreon.com slash Shane Moss I did my first plug for patreon in a while last week and I should remind people more often I'm glad that you guys listen to my circumstances and what my plans are for kind of setting things up for the future.

In talking about future touring plans and where I'm at with now with things and I've got I already received some support from you guys and so if more of you could be inspired to support this show it mean a lot less stress in my life I'm not talking about I'm not going to go out buy in the Lamborghini's already think with my patreon support but it would be nice to not be on a night.

On a nice edge all of the time with paying for the costs of my podcasts and etc so that helps quite a bit and the more the more resources we have for the show the more I can put into it as well so it also helps you plus you'll get a warm and fuzzy feeling by helping out and supporting show that you hopefully gain a lot from gain a lot of insights and and knowledge and.

New ways of thinking about things I hope that's the case and other than that if you are if you're strapped your on that nice edge to you know don't don't you do you first of course but there are freeways of supporting the show you can always go to the iTunes page of this show and write a nice review you can comment on you tube and.

You can help kind of engage others in the conversation there and help give a little algorithm boost tricky thing navigating this new the the the world of of podcasting and now trying to do video casting so I'd appreciate that support and otherwise just make sure and check out the book the knowledge illusion I hope you enjoy this interview it's really fun.

Are we yes where are we here why are we here not entirely clear we are misfits gross into existence by random chance with no hands at all as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all it's immensely bizarre here we are.

Hello everybody and welcome to the here we are podcast of a fantastic episode today as you know since COVID I've been doing all of these remotely I used to do them in person and my tour I look up a university I find guests that way and what's been really cool about about doing things remotely is that I can kind of get the guests that I want when things pop into my head.

I read this book the knowledge illusion I actually had Phil Fernbach on the show is it back or back from back from back on the show a few years ago when the book was had come out I read a couple chapters skimmed the rest and then about a year ago I read the entire book and it's been on my mind it just keeps on popping up into my head.

I've referenced it on other podcasts and so just a couple days or a week or so ago I decided to reach out and get the authors of the book for a conversation all about it and it's tons of stuff that you in the listeners regular listeners of the show this is way in our real house you're going to love this conversation so please welcome to the show Steve Solomon and Philip Fernbach everybody.

The knowledge illusion why we never think alone so as we start out first off let me I'll just have each of you kind of introduce yourselves in your backgrounds independently Steve do you want to go first sure my name Steve Sloeman and I have been a cognitive scientist at Brown University since 1892 or it feels that way actually since 1992.

I study all things having to do with high level cognition from categorization and reasoning to decision making and most recently collective cognition how we think with other people.

Fantastic Phil my name is Phil Fernbach I actually studied with Steve at Brown University many years ago and I also have a background in cognitive science.

But I now work in the business school at the University of Colorado and study all kinds of different stuff around consumer decision making political decision making and a lot of work on financial decision making as well.

Fantastic so why don't you why don't you guys introduce a little bit about what is the knowledge illusion what is this book about well the book has two themes one has to do with human ignorance the fact that we know relatively little more importantly we know less than we think we do.

And the second theme has to do with why it is that we manage as human beings to accomplish so much despite the fact that we're relatively ignorant and the claim is we accomplish so much because we work together with other people so even though individually we're relatively ignorant as a collective we are pretty smart.

Yeah so so the we're specialists and and then work collectively together this is one of the things I don't know if I'm jumping into the right part of this book but one of the things that I've shared so many times recently was the and I'm probably butchering my recall every time I do it.

But it was the idea of the study that you referenced about they made up a said that scientists had discovered a new mineral or something like that and could you talk about about that because I think it leads in really well to so much of this stuff.

Yeah it's actually my study so Phil is being generous enough to let me describe it so what I did with my colleague netrab is tell people that scientists had discovered this new thing we we actually had various things but one of them was a glowing rock we said so they've discovered this glowing rock and one group we said and they fully understand how it works.

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