946: Michael McQueen | Mastering the Art of Changing Minds

946: Michael McQueen | Mastering the Art of Changing Minds

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[00:00:12] Michael McQueen: If you're trying to make progress for thing that you would raise would allow the conversation to move forward as opposed to like scoring a point. And I think that's one of the challenges when it comes to trying to change other people's minds is what's your posture going into it? What's your heart, your motivation in this? Because if you're going into win and to trounce the other person, even if they go, "You know what, yeah, you're right. I guess I should change my thinking." I bet they actually haven't.

[00:00:36] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker, Russian spy, astronaut, extreme athlete, or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

[00:01:29] Today's episode is packed with tactical information on persuasion, how to get people to agree with you, comply with you, follow your ideas, et cetera. My guest today, Michael McQueen, he really boils this stuff down to the essence. And after listening, you're going to be able to apply a lot of these ideas right out of the box. We'll discuss how we make decisions, how our brain makes decisions, how our minds make decisions, the processes involved, and how we can leverage our brain's natural conclusion, making routines to persuade others and even to persuade ourselves. Super, super useful. Practical episode today here with Michael McQueen.

[00:02:08] It seemed from the book that — maybe this is just my own observation, are people inherently less rational or less reasonable than previous generations because is it just a media illusion that people are believing really stupid things now compared to before? Or is it just a different flavor and now it's in your face?

[00:02:27] Michael McQueen: I feel like it's both. There's an extent to which there are some people that are so far down the rabbit hole. They've just hook, line and sinker, taken on board all sorts of misinformation, and it's such a part of their identity now that it's hard for them to almost see the world in a different way, which I think is just terribly sad. Have you ever interviewed Sander van der Linden before?

[00:02:49] Jordan Harbinger: I haven't. The name rings a bell though.

[00:02:51] Michael McQueen: He's awesome. So his work looks a lot at what they call prebunking. So how do you get someone essentially prepared so they don't fall prey to misinformation? His prestuff is incredibly good, but he said there are just some people for whom they've gone too far. Their identity is now so enmeshed with misinformation and false belief. A bit like Dan Ariely's chat on I listened. I loved that chat you had with him. Like when people get to the point where they've now got status and a community and their sense of belonging, it is so hard to speak to that because you've got to unpick so many things. Like it's not just a case of getting them to think differently or consider a different opinion. You're actually getting them, in some cases, walk away from their community, from their sense of status. So I feel like we've attached more of our identity to our ideas in this era, maybe in the last 20 or 30 years than we had previously. Unfortunately, that's been a bit of a hallmark of this age.

[00:03:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I got a lot of emails about that. But I definitely agree. Look, if this show was about conspiracy theories or let's say, let's pick one. Let's say if this show is about flat earth or if what a lot of people did during whatever lockdown stuff. They took one conspiracy theory and they ran with it in their show that was getting a hundred downloads a month, now gets a hundred thousand downloads a week. Those people, they're never going to change their minds about 5G causing Covid or whatever hill they died on that then made them a million dollars. There's just no way that they're ever going to change their opinion.

[00:04:18] Pre-show, you were mentioning, I guess I told this anecdote maybe during the Ariely chat, there was a guy who said something online like, "Hey, Joe Biden won't be the president on —" I can't remember what our inauguration day was. "You'll see." And then, inauguration day came and Joe Biden got inaugurated and Donald Trump wasn't magically still the president because of the secrets. I DM'ed the guy and I was like, "Hey, I'm really curious how you're feeling right now. Because I know one of your main things was the storm is coming. And Joe Biden's not going to be the president." And he goes, "Ha! What, am I living rent free in your head?" He just wouldn't address it. And I was like, "Actually, yeah, you really are." Like I'm genuinely very curious what you are thinking and what you're going through right now. And like, "Are the goalposts going to move? Did you come around to the idea that this isn't — and he just blocked me. That was it. No wanting to engage whatsoever because he would've had to think about the fact that he was like just wrong and that reality didn't match what he wanted.

[00:05:16] Michael McQueen: So if you'd had that conversation face-to-face, I wonder if he had the same response. The reason being, so you look at someone like that who is their identity is now rooted in a certain worldview — that's their status, their position in the community, they've got probably a lot of people around them who've mocked them, laughed at them. Who've pretended to want to have a conversation, but actually they don't really. They just want to try and catch them out or make a point. So I wonder that even like you actually approach that genuine sense, I'm just curious, I'm actually humbly open like what your perspective is. I wonder, if to him, he's heard that line so much.

[00:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: I think so.

[00:05:49] Michael McQueen: Given to him in a disingenuous way. But like face-to-face, if you would actually get a feel for like you're genuinely interested and curious, I wonder whether it would've simmered down. I think so much of what we see online, it just— we lose perspective because people online behave so differently to how they do face-to-face. And I love that insight, I think it's from one of Adam Grant's articles that he wrote for, I think it was The New Yorker, and he talked about the fact that bigotry never stands the test of intimacy. You know, this idea that like you can have a really fixed idea about someone and what they think and why they think and who they are, but when you meet them and get to know them, it's amazing how they become far more three dimensional. And it softens, I think our view of them, our view of ourself, the way we engage with them. And unfortunately, I mean, and you've probably had this experience like you see someone online and they are just the vitriol, the meanness online and then your like, "They're actually a really nice person." There's almost they've got two personas and the online somehow gives people this sense of license to probably engage in a way that they actually wouldn't normally and they know isn't constructive.

[00:06:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:06:47] Michael McQueen: And doesn't even match their own values.

[00:06:49] Jordan Harbinger: That's really something and completely true. I love the idea that bigotry never can withstand the test of the intimacy or whatever. The challenge of intimacy, whatever it was you said. It reminds me a long time ago, like in the 90s, I worked security at this company in Detroit. I was one of the only white guys and usually the only white guy in the whole company depending on who was staffed. And we had a large contingent of African-American people. Are you familiar with a nation of Islam? Have you ever heard of it?

[00:07:13] Michael McQueen: I've heard the term, but I dont know what that means.

[00:07:15] Jordan Harbinger: They're muslim, but it's not like Arab people from Saudi Arabia. I'm going to be a little off here because I'm going off the cuff, but it's African-Americans who decided, "Oh, our religion is Islam." They converted to Islam and they're pretty strict about a lot of stuff. But one of the sort of unspoken or possibly spoken tenets of it is white people are evil and Jews are really evil. And so, a lot of the stuff they believed was pretty distasteful. And I didn't realize that. I just thought like, "Oh, I work with a couple of black folks and some of 'em are Muslim. Like no big deal."

[00:07:48] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:07:48] Jordan Harbinger: And I'll never forget, I worked with them for so long and the women wouldn't interact with me even though I was their boss at some point. And then I was like, "Whatever, it's a religious thing." And the guys were really standoff-ish. And then over like months and years, they started to warm up a little bit. And then one day we were eating, it was like two o'clock in the morning and they were like talking about the Jews. And I was like, "But I'm Jewish and I don't do any of that stuff." and they were just like, "Oh sh*t. You're Jewish?" And then it was like all over again. But then a couple weeks later, the owner of the company was like, "I know that some of you have a problem with this, but you worked with him for years and you didn't care. And then you found out something about him that doesn't affect you at all. And it's changed the way that you've done." So he basically handed them their ass. And I remember one of the guys was like, "You know what? It doesn't make a lot of sense that we hate people without any reason." It's true. And I'll never forget that because I was so naive that I didn't even understand that. I was just like, "Oh, these guys are just really in a bad mood a lot. We probably worked too much." I never understood that they just really hated white people and they hated Jews.

[00:08:52] Michael McQueen: So they treated you differently once they found that out, is that right?

[00:08:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, but then it was hard for them because force of habit was we get along fine.

[00:09:00] Michael McQueen: Interesting.

[00:09:01] Jordan Harbinger: So like they almost had to remember to be standoff-ish and aggressive. I remember one time, I gave the guy's wife a ride somewhere to another location and she was initially like so standoff-ish and then the next day I saw him, we were like laughing and joking around. And it was like she had forgotten to be a cold hearted, unfriendly, Jew-hating.

[00:09:21] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:09:21] Jordan Harbinger: You know, it's hardcore. Yeah. She just forgot because it was bullsh*t and I think she knew that.

[00:09:29] Michael McQueen: And I think that's the thing is, once you actually get to know the person behind like the brand or the tribe or the persona, all that stuff starts to fall apart. All those really simplistic explanations for the way things are and who people are and why they do what they do. Like those simplistic things, they're very dogmatic ways we box people like they do fall apart pretty fast if you are willing to actually engage, honestly. The problem is people do such amazing intellectual back flips and trapeze acts, trying to figure out how can I still hold that belief but then update it with this experience. So for instance, they might've said, "Okay, well we don't like people like Jordan, but Jordan's different."

[00:10:04] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:10:05] Michael McQueen: "He's okay, but we still don't like." So it is amazing just the brain's capacity. And this is what I found fascinating in writing this book, and there's so much great work done on the nature of delusion and how we dilute ourselves. We negotiate with reality so quickly. And I love this great thing I came across. So Daniel Gilbert, who's a psychologist at Harvard, he had this piece, I think it was in the New York Times, and he was talking about this notion of delusion and he said, "You think about the way we approach our bathroom scales at home. So if you jump on the bathroom scales and it gives you the number you want to see, you jump straight off. Like straight off into the shower, get on with the day. It's a good day. But if that number isn't the number you want to see, what do you do? You get back off."

[00:10:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I weigh myself again.

[00:10:46] Michael McQueen: You weigh yourself again.

[00:10:47] Jordan Harbinger: I'm like, "No no no."

[00:10:48] Michael McQueen: Maybe I was putting too much weight on one foot or the other or —

[00:10:50] Jordan Harbinger: A hundred percent.

[00:10:50] Michael McQueen: Maybe the scales weren't sitting flat on the floor, or they need to be recalibrated. Like we start to bargain with reality. It's almost like we'd like to think that seeing is believing, but it's just not. It's humans, we tend to see what we want to see and believe what we've already decided is true. And so, just all those dynamics mean that It's so tricky to try and engage people around issues because you've got to take all of that into account. There's all these other things that are — I mean, we're not just approaching it like a computer would approach, you know, solving a mathematical problem. And then deep down, I think we have this baked in idea that humans are essentially reasonable. And if you just give them enough evidence, enough logic, enough good reasons, eventually they'll see the light and change their mind. And that's just not how the way it rolls.

[00:11:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, it's not how it rolls. I'll never forget, there was a event we were at that we were securing and one of the Nation of Islam guys was letting people in for money without checking them, which is extremely dangerous because we're frisking for weapons and he is letting people get in who don't want to get frisked for weapons. Why do you think they don't want to get frisked for weapons? Sure, maybe they wanted to skip the line, but probably they were wanted to bring in their weapons. And I confronted him about this and he went off on this weird tangent about how George Bush fed crack to the black community, 9/11 was an inside job, therefore he needs to make money. And I was like, "What are you even talking about right now?" And I thought, "Oh, he's mentally unstable. This is just nonsense rambling. Surely no one else here will agree with that because you can't really follow that. There's no logic." So I brought it to other people and I was like, "Can you keep an eye on him? He just said this and this." And then he's like, "Oh, well, they're right about that." And I was just like, "Oh, so they've been fed that story from somewhere else and they used it to rationalize." That was just like a thing they probably met about at one of their meetings or something. So then they all used that to rationalize theft and doing dangerous things or putting the whole team in a dangerous situation. And they ended up all getting fired because, of course, I told the head of the company that we're letting in weapons so this guy can make an extra $20 an hour or whatever. And he was like, "Okay, well that's not going to work." it's just so weird. The rationalization is wild. It's like we can really do anything. Look, I'm as guilty as anyone else. I move the scale, I try to pee a little bit more, make sure I'm not wearing anything. You know, maybe like do some sort of weird ritual and step back on the scale hoping for a different number. And it's never happened, but I still do it every single time anyway.

[00:13:04] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:13:05] Jordan Harbinger: But you're right. We like to imagine that making decisions or being convinced of something is like this logical linear process. But essentially, we just make a decision based on what our intuition or our gut or whatever we want, the desired outcome. I think you wrote it in the book, something like, "They play the role of attorney. They've rationalize whatever conclusion we've already jumped to in the first place."

[00:13:29] Michael McQueen: Yeah. I think what I wanted to look at in the book too is this notion of what are the two different parts of our brain that it's almost like two operating systems that we work with in any given day, in any given moment. And the reality is, we do have that part of our brain that is logical and rational and reasonable. And so, I refer to it as our inquiry mind. It lives at the front of our brains, that frontal lobe, the most recent part of our brains to develop from an evolutionary standpoint, gets really good at nuance and complexity and being reasonable. The problem is, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of self-discipline to use, and so we just don't use it. Anywhere near as much as we'd like to think we do. Zoe Chance, who's a researcher at Yale, so she'd suggest that part of our brain, that inquiry mind part, we only use for five to 10 percent of our decision making and our perception formation. So where's the rest of our thinking happen? It's in a part of our brain I refer to as our instinctive mind. So the instinctive mind isn't that, if you want to look at the geography, like where does it live, it's in that sort of the limbic system part of the brain. So near the top of the brain stem, it's where we process emotion. It's where our tribal instincts live. It's where our fight and flight impulses tend to reside. And the problem with our instinctive mind is that it's super fast, it's very efficient, but it's prone to jumping to conclusions. And therefore, it comes with so many of those, you know, and the classical term is heuristics or shortcuts that we use as humans. But it also doesn't just rely on what's coming, you know, as a brain impulse, it actually is incredibly sensitive to things like our gut. The brain gut connection thing is fascinating.

[00:14:54] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. Yeah, do you know much about that?

[00:14:56] Michael McQueen: The little bit that I looked at in the book, I'm like, "This is a whole other thing." So I'll probably come back to that in the next book, I think. Because it's still really new as well. Like we're still discovering it exactly how the gut works. Like how some of those vagal nerves, those parts of our gut that do the thinking, how they interact with our brain. Also, it feeds into bigger and almost metaphysical questions like, where does the soul live? Where is consciousness? That idea of we're not just brains roaming around in a body. There's something about when you walk into a room or a conversation, you're like, "I've got a gut feel for this." There's an intuitive sense that I sort of know what's going on because somehow I've picked up on stuff that I can't logically make sense of, but it's data I need to pay attention to. And so I think our instinctive mind, we'd be silly to dismiss it and go like, "It's unreliable, it's impulsive, it's prejudice, and all the rest of it." Because it can be those things. But actually, often it's taking a very wide frame of view in terms of what's happening around us. And so, typically we make the decision with our instinctive mind and then we look to our inquiry mind to back it up. That's when logic and evidence does play a role, but it's only to reinforce what our instinctive mind has already decided to be true. And so that's a tricky thing, if you're want to change someone's mind, the question is, which mind are you trying to change?

[00:16:02] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:16:03] Michael McQueen: Because in most cases, stubbornness resides in instinctive mind. And you look at most government campaigns, most health campaigns, most of our conversations when you're trying to influence someone, you're using the tools that speak to the inquiry mind. You're using data and evidence and pie charts and rational reasons, but that's not mine you need to change. And so it's like, how do you speak to that instinctive mind? That's the challenge.

[00:16:23] Jordan Harbinger: I also noticed that a lot of the most effective fake news is the stuff that is highly emotional and that you can use as a cudgel against somebody else. Like you might see an ad — here's an online conversation and I'm making these numbers up, right? "73 percent of Republicans believe that you shouldn't have a choice to have a child." And then, the reply to that is, "Oh yeah? Well, the Democrats sacrifice babies." And it's like both of those things are probably BS, but one of those things is making the other side look horrible and is enraging zealots and things like that. And the other one is just like a number, even if it is a number again, that I made up and is phrased as a certain way. It's hard to get around that. So people write in all the time and they're like, "How do I convince my uncle that baby trafficking for organs is not a problem you have to worry about in Ohio?" And I'm like, "You probably can't."

[00:17:17] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:17:18] Jordan Harbinger: Because a lot of what appears to be stubbornness or arrogance, it boils down to us just not knowing how decisions are made and how people are convinced. But also, if somebody's just bought in whole hog on something like that — What's that phrase? Like you can't logic your way out of something that you've emotioned yourself into or it's if you convinced yourself emotionally of something, you can't reason your way out of it. It only works in one direction.

[00:17:39] Michael McQueen: That's exactly it. Like you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't arrive at by reason, like they got there in a really different way. That example is interesting. I think this is where, sadly, the levers that get pulled in fake news, but also just mainstream media. On both sides or any part of the continuum ideologically, typically we play to the things that the instinctive mind say junk food for an instinctive mind. What is instinctive mind, love? Tribalism. Me versus you. Simplistic binary narratives. It loves outrage. It loves fear because fear triggers that we've got to do something quickly, we've got to react. And so nuanced discussions, complexity doesn't really speak to the instinctive mind necessarily. Well, it can be a good primer for reflection, and we'll probably get to that at some point. Interestingly, in fact, one of the problems we see with the climate change, I heard this put recently, the problem with climate change isn't that it's happening too fast, it's that it's happening too slowly. Because the problem is, our instinctive minds are only wired to react to concrete, tangible, immediate threats.

[00:18:39] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:40] Michael McQueen: So if something is vague and nuanced and slow and hard to pin down, our instinctive minds basically don't pay any attention to it. So you tend to see, like those sorts of messages appeal to those instinctive mind — fear, outrage we've got to defend ourselves and fight against. And in many cases, the enemy doesn't even exist.

[00:18:56] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:56] Michael McQueen: It's a figment of our imagination. I think starting with imaginations a useful one. So, if you look at an issue like abortion, depending on where you are on the spectrum, like what do you imagine the opposing side to be like? And typically, they're really silly imagined things.

[00:19:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they are.

[00:19:12] Michael McQueen: One side imagining you've got all these uncaring white politicians who have no sense of what it's like to be a parent in need, has no compassion. I'm like, "There might be some who are like that, but I bet there's a lot who aren't." And a lot of those who are really committed to not allowing abortions easily, they give to charities, they care like they're actually not evil people. But by the end of the same token, you see people on that side of the equation who've got imaginations of the sort of people who fight for abortion rights, sort of way off reality.

[00:19:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:19:39] Michael McQueen: Like they're actually just not like that. And so, this is where I think coming together and hopefully meeting each other in the middle, getting a sense that like the 2D trap, that idea of demonizing or deifying, like you are awesome and perfect and flawless, or you are enemy and the scum and a band of deplorables. When we label those things, it feeds into those binary narratives. It's not a reflection of reality, and it means we don't think well. And yet, again, mainstream media can play to that really well. And over time, it does so much damage to society because it speaks to all of our worst impulses as humans.

[00:20:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I've had these types of conversations where I'm like, "Tell me which group has the most abortions."

[00:20:15] Michael McQueen: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:16] Jordan Harbinger: And you get various answers. But usually, it boils down to — I'm not going to try and sugarcoat this, like brown lesbians who get pregnant every week just so they can go get their weekly abortion, basically. It's just not —

[00:20:28] Michael McQueen: Wow. Yeah.

[00:20:28] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not really.

[00:20:30] Michael McQueen: Yep.

[00:20:30] Jordan Harbinger: The person who needs an abortion is not like a blue hair, 35-year-old woman who just loves going to get abortions. It's like a 15-year-old girl whose life is about to be pretty much ruined because she didn't know how sex worked or got assaulted by somebody.

[00:20:47] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:20:47] Jordan Harbinger: You got to have to steelman the case study here. And if you don't, if you stereotype that it's just, "Oh, it's a bunch of poor people that live in cities who have no morals.", then of course you're going to vote against something that they do that you don't like. Of course you're going to do that.

[00:21:00] Michael McQueen: Yeah. I think the tricky thing, and I've tried to really focus that from a research perspective, is that there are two areas of focus, like how do you persuade other people, but also how do you try and guard against yourself being stubborn.

[00:21:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's really easy to look at other people and say they're so stubborn.

[00:21:14] Michael McQueen: So easy.

[00:21:15] Jordan Harbinger: It's very hard to look at yourself and say that you're stubborn.

[00:21:18] Michael McQueen: I feel like stubbornness is like pride. You can spot it in someone else a mile off or arrogance. You can spot it in someone else that's really hard to detect in ourselves. And so we would like to think like we're super open-minded, like really reasonable and fair. It's everyone else that's really stubborn and obstinate and pigheaded. The reality is, you we can fall into these traps. And so I think one of the encouragement that I try and remember for myself, bear in mind, who's your brain rooting for?

[00:21:43] So in Aussie language, we talk about this word like barracking. So barracking is going for one team or the other. So who's your brain barracking for or rooting for? Because whenever you hear an argument, even if you're telling yourself, "I'm actually really open-minded, I'd like to hear both sides here." I bet there is one side that when they land a point, you're like, "Yes. Yeah, that's it. I reckon they're right."

[00:22:00] Jordan Harbinger: Totally.

[00:22:01] Michael McQueen: As the feel of something. And when the other side who maybe you unconsciously subliminally don't identify with, when they make a point, what do you typically do? You're looking for the loopholes. Yeah. But yeah, but what about? And so we have these reactions that give away where our prejudices lie. And so whenever I get to that moment, seem one of my tells over the years is that hairs in the back of my neck go up. I notice when I get into that, it's like a physiological response. The term is like an amygdala hijack. So it's that part of our brain, that instinctive mind wanted to go on the attack or to go defensive mode. And so I've just noticed when I get into that mode — stop, breathe. Like even last night, my wife and I had a friend over and we got into a pretty contentious topic and we went to like at 11:30 at night last night, talking about the nature of art and beauty. Is any art just beautiful and valuable in its own right, or doesn't need to be valued because it communicates something and helps other people? And so my wife is an artist, runs a theater company. So she was like very strongly of like, "No, just beauty for the sake of beauty." And I'm like, "Yeah, but we've been to so much self-indulgent theater over the years. Like where I walk out and go, I feel like we were doing a favor to the people on stage by being there. Like it was for them, not us." And to me, I dunno, as a speaker, as a communicator, as a writer, like I'm so wired to this idea of you're not adding value. Shut up. If you've got a platform, you've got to use that to be helpful and to serve and to give.

[00:23:18] Jordan Harbinger: I get that. I agree.

[00:23:19] Michael McQueen: And so we had this full debate last night about, is there any value in just art or beauty for the sake of it? I'd done the dumb thing. I started to argue from extremes.

[00:23:28] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:23:28] Michael McQueen: And that's when you know that I'm not actually engaging in this faithfully and honestly and fairly, I'm just trying to make a point here. The example I gave was we've had this one in the news here in Australia in the last few weeks. There was a woman who got a federal grant to do a performance art piece. And the performance art piece was her recording herself artificially inseminating herself. That was her performance art piece.

[00:23:48] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:23:49] Michael McQueen: And she got federal funding to do this. There's been a whole lot of outcry in the last a year or two because the funding was rescinded and then she fought back and appealed it. And so, even in that moment, I'm like that's actually not a very good way to approach this discussion because that's arguing from an extreme.

[00:24:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's the most ridiculous example, which is why it made the news in the first place. Yeah.

[00:24:07] Michael McQueen: Just even being mindful of that in ourselves, like one of the ways we don't approach issues and conversations reasonably, one of the big tells apart from like the hairs going up on the back of my neck is when I start to label and start to box people really readily, like everyone that thinks such and such is. I'm like, "That's never going to be true. It's never going to be realistic."

[00:24:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's true. I have to also note that the example I gave with the abortion thing, I want to make sure that people know that I also realize that not everybody who is against abortion thinks of other people that way. Like I don't want, "You said we're against abortion. We must be a bunch of racists." No. Just the extreme example that I was giving there was the case. I know plenty of people who are completely normal, who are pro-life and they're that way for like religious reasons or something. Not because they don't like poor people or whatever. So I don't want people to get that idea. Because you're right, it doesn't help at all. There were people who heard me express it that way and they were like, "Jordan is an idiot. I lost some respect for him. I can't believe he thinks that." You never do yourself a favor when you use those extremes. And you're right, when you have to pick one of those extremes, I don't know what you would call it, it's not a straw man, because it's a real example, but you're just sort of picking like the absolutely most ridiculous thing. Because if you picked a normal example, your argument wouldn't work.

[00:25:18] Michael McQueen: Correct. Yeah. And you're actually not engaging, reasonably. You're trying to make a point rather than actually make progress in the conversation. If you're trying to make progress, the thing that you would raise would allow the conversation to move forward as opposed to like scoring a point. And I think that's one of the challenges when it comes to trying to change other people's minds is what's your posture going into it? What's your heart, your motivation in this? Because if you're going into win and to trounce the other person, even if they go, "You know what, yeah, you're right. I guess I should change my thinking." I bet they actually haven't. If they feel like they've been cornered or shamed or dominated. Like it's like Dale Carnegie, like 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People. You know, someone convinced against their will is of the same opinion, still. This idea of if someone doesn't feel like they've got a choice or they've chosen to change their perspective because they were able to get there in a way that preserved their dignity and their agency, their mind hasn't changed at all. And so much about persuading other people. It's not about like the arguments we use and how clever we are, it's actually about the posture that the attitude we go into it with. And do we give someone the ability to change their mind without making them have to acknowledge or admit they're an idiot. We back people into that corner.

[00:26:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. You almost have to admit or get the other person to admit that they're stupid in order for them to change their mind. So of course, they're not going to want to do that. They're just going to hold on for dear life. That's the perfect example with the guy who thought that Joe Biden was secretly not going to be the president, and it was going to be Donald Trump before the QAnon guy.

[00:26:39] Michael McQueen: Yep.

[00:26:39] Jordan Harbinger: I put him in a position by mistake without thinking, where he would've had to have, essentially, have admitted that he was a completely brainwashed knucklehead who believed some stupid crap he read on the internet and couldn't discern reality from fiction, or he could just hit the block button. And so, of course, he blocked me. I didn't even have to be mean to the guy. He just already felt stupid and was like, "I don't like this feeling. Block."

[00:27:03] Michael McQueen: Yeah. One of the dynamics that I think feeds into this, and it's a concept I refer to as like psychological sunk cost.

[00:27:09] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:10] Michael McQueen: And we all know what economic sunk cost is, which is what you'll stick to a decision or a course of action that you know is not going to work out for you. This is going nowhere, it's going south, fast. But I've spent so much money, or I've spent so much time already, I'm going to stick with it, even if it disadvantages me. We do the same thing with our ideology and our psychology. So if I've got a worldview or a belief that yet I heard or I read something that's actually more accurate, more up to date, better information may even serve me better and I would do well or adopt that new perspective or mindset, or at least take that on board. But if I've spent so much time and energy and ego, like my reputation is now invested in this worldview, because I've been a spokesperson for it, it's amazing how people will stick with an idea or a mindset, even if they know deep down that they're not right. And even if they know that there's a better option that would actually serve them better to their own disadvantage, stick with a mindset just because of that sense of sunk cost, psychologically. Bearing that in mind, that changes the whole discussion about how you approach someone. Because unless you factor that in, the wisdom of Socrates will have no impact at all.

[00:28:13] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Michael McQueen. We'll be right back.

[00:28:18] This episode is sponsored in part by For Wellness. I am always quite careful about what supplements I try and what I talk about here on the show, so I made sure to give For Wellness' main product a good test run over the last few weeks. And now, I'm pretty stoked on it. It's called The Good Stuff. I know, very catchy. And it's super convenient to mix into your morning coffee. It's got L-theanine, collagen, MCT oil, which is great for keeping your focus sharp, calming those coffee jitters, helping with a little energy there in the morning. I've made it part of my morning ritual, especially on workout days. Plus, it tastes really good. You don't have to add stuff to make the taste go away, it's kind of the opposite. It was originally developed by this famous coach, Dave Phillips, for top-notch athletes, but now, For Wellness is bringing these awesome benefits to everyone's daily health routine. They've got some other cool stuff too, like Superfood Focus Bites that taste just like a yummy brownie, but are loaded with healthy stuff like lion's mane, mushroom and cacao, and they don't taste like dirty mushrooms. Also, they have these things called Recovery Gummies are so good. I just stocked up on more of those. I inhaled the first bag. Maybe don't do that all in one sitting like I did. They even offer a 60-day money-back guarantee.

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[00:29:33] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Stitch Fix. Every new year, I got this little ritual where I go through my closet and I check out clothes I don't wear anymore, I donate 'em. It's my way of making room for a fresh look each year. And honestly, I can't go to the mall. I just can't, especially when they don't have my size. That's when I use Stitch Fix. They've got a team of personal stylists who help me find new styles, new brands, and they've got a ton to choose from, like over a thousand brands. The whole thing is super easy — pop in your style preferences, size, budget and bam, they put together a personalized box of five items, send it right to your doorstep. They've got sizes from extra small to three xl. The best part is I get to try everything on at home, keep the pieces I love, send back the rest. No hassle, free shipping both ways. You can order a one-time refresh. You can set up regular deliveries. Your call. The more you use Stitch Fix, the better their stylists get at picking out stuff that is just right for you. And honestly, having a wardrobe that really feels you, it does a lot for the old confidence. Especially now that we're all back to the office, you got to have to have something else besides pajamas.

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[00:30:39] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, the authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of my network, aka the circle of people that I know, like, and trust. And I know that networking is a yucky word these days, and it rightfully so, in fact. But we have a free course on how to build a circle that is not cringey. It's down to earth. It's not going to make you look like a weirdo. It's not going to make other people feel awkward around you. No cheesy tactics. sixminutenetworking.com is where you can find it. It's a lot of practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. It's great at work, it's great in your personal life. It's great if you're retired and you want to expand your circle or just keep in touch with people better. Six minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com.

[00:31:27] Now back to Michael McQueen.

[00:31:31] Do you think our thinking has gotten worse? It seems like throughout the course of history, we've never really had to make up our mind about so many things with the speed that we have to do it today. And we also have a ton of information that we can use to make those decisions of wildly varying quality. So it seems like making decisions has actually gotten a lot harder. The most obvious example that I'm dealing with right now is, which schools should I send my kids to? Should we commute to Palo Alto? Should we do this? Should it be the bilingual one? Should be the international one? Private, public. If you live in a small town a hundred years ago, there's no choice. You send your kids to the school that's within walking distance or biking distance or whatever from your house, because the other one is a zillion miles away in another town. So, that's that.

[00:32:17] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:32:17] Jordan Harbinger: And now, it's, "Should you send 'em there? Oh no, that one's full of conservatives. You don't want that. Oh, this one's full of liberals. You don't want that. This is the one with all these other folks. You don't want him to be in that environment." It's insane, actually. It's really difficult to make a decision because every choice is bad.

[00:32:34] Michael McQueen: I think part of that is effect function of the way we've organized society. We are far more segregated around ideology. I'm trying to think who it was. There was a book called The Big Sort that came out a few years ago. I'm trying to think of the author now. And he looked at across the US how we've seen counties and districts become far more clearly one or the other, in terms of Democrat, Republican. There was a lot more diversity. So you may well have in your street, you know, a third of the street just voted really differently to you. But you knew them and your kids played with them and you went to football together on the weekend. And all those sorts of things meant that you built relationships so the polarization, that 2D effect of demonizing deifying, it just didn't stack up because you knew those people. But even I think in Washington, that was the way it was. People that were in Congress would often live in Washington and they'd go to like restaurants on the weekend where people from the other side of the aisle, they had relationships.

[00:33:23] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:23] Michael McQueen: As soon as people started to live back in their districts, there was that sense of the big sorting. We didn't engage with people from the other side anywhere near as frequently. So that plays into it. This idea that you tend to have far less swinging states or swinging districts as far. Everything's a little bit baked in now, so that just reinforces geographical echo chambers that we live in, and then we do it online with algorithms as well. So that just amplifies it. But to your point. I think one of the reasons we're so stubborn now is a function of the amount of content that we're exposed to.

[00:33:52] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:52] Michael McQueen: I think it was Michael Easter, in one of the interviews I heard of you with him and he said something like, "In an average day today, that a human is exposed to more information than a human a hundred years ago was exposed to in a lifetime."

[00:34:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:34:03] Michael McQueen: That's so true. There is just so much we're exposed to, it is overwhelming. This fire hydrant of information and ideas and perspectives and viewpoints, but also there's the expectation that you'll make up your mind quickly about all those things. Like which side do you want? Pick a side. You can't be neutral. I think it was Marcus Aurelius who said, "One of the greatest freedoms we've got is your freedom to just say, 'I don't have an opinion' and to hold to that." But that's almost unacceptable today. You've got to choose a side and so because we've got so much information and you've got to pick a side, it's overwhelming. So you just tend to default to what feels right or what do people like me think about this. Who defer to those tribal instincts. And I think so, all of that feeds into this sense of overwhelm means we get really obstinate, like it's just too hard to think about everything. We can't take it all on board, so we just then defer to those tribal instincts.

[00:34:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think you phrased it in the book, something like most of us judge instead of think because thinking takes a lot of effort and energy. And our brains are advanced, but they're also lazy thinking the extra work, the extra effort required. Deliberate thinking is a precious resource that we can serve essentially by using our instinctive mind instead.

[00:35:05] Michael McQueen: I think, the other thing, if you look at what's happening in our brains, it can lead to this. And this is some research done by the University of Chicago in the early stages of the pandemic, and I found this fascinating. They looked at how the physiology of our brain was changing due to lockdowns. And we'd had a theory for decades that actually the amygdala, which is that really powerful part of our instinctive mind that's very fight and flight focused, varying, often trigger happy and outrage happens quickly driven by the amygdala. So what happened, what they discovered is the less social connections you have, the more isolated you become, your amygdala essentially shrinks and changes texture. And so when that occurs, so when your amygdala changes, that means you actually become more trigger happy, more outraged. And is there any wonder that in the lockdown pandemic or pandemic lockdowns, where we just had less connection with other humans, like we're social creatures, we need to connect with other people. And yet, we started doing so much on video calls or remotely, like there's something about being physically with others that just makes our brains function well.

[00:36:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:36:03] Michael McQueen: Our brains are most healthy when we are connected. And so you think about people who — and I have no data to back this up, but I suspect those who are most strongly aligned to say conspiracy belief, I bet they spend a lot of time in discussion forums online, not with real humans. And I think all of these things feed into it.

[00:36:21] Jordan Harbinger: A hundred percent. I would love to see data on conspiracy belief and social circle size or relationship maps or whatever you would call it, because I can 100 percent see that being the case. And you even see how that happens. I think Dan Ariely and I talked about this, right? You start believing in conspiracy, you push away your close relationships because they're all annoyed with you. And Dan Ariely's thing was, "Don't push them away because what they need is a bigger social circle." He didn't necessarily say why, other than we're the only people that can sort of keep them grounded to reality. He wasn't out there with the tape measure in the amygdala or whatever. But yeah, that would be fascinating research, wouldn't it?

[00:37:02] Michael McQueen: Would be.

[00:37:03] Jordan Harbinger: Because we've all noticed. Everybody listening to this is like, "Yeah, during the pandemic, people lost their damn minds." That's one thing we can agree on, no matter where you are in the political spectrum. You know the majority of people somehow online seem to have been off the deep end about 2022 or whatever this thing was sort of like in full swing. It was insane.

[00:37:22] Michael McQueen: I think the thing then you think about, so— I dunno how old your little ones or little one is?

[00:37:26] Jordan Harbinger: Four and a half, two.

[00:37:28] Michael McQueen: So four and a half and two. So we've got an 8-year-old and I look at him and he's not massively into technology. I mean, ironically before this book, the last four books I'd written were all about AI and robotics and where the world's heading from a technology standpoint. That's been my bread and butter stuff for years. Interestingly, I'm actually a pretty low tech person myself and a lot of the technologists are. I mean it's interesting how they tend to raise their kids with very little technology, but they create the devices that hook the rest of the world on them.

[00:37:53] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:53] Michael McQueen: And so we're pretty low tech parents and I look at that and we're trying to consistently be out engaging with people, like for him. Because I just see, even at a young age, there's such a tendency now to be isolated and on devices and they're connecting with their friends, but they're playing Fortnite.

[00:38:09] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:38:09] Michael McQueen: They're playing video games where they've got connections all over the world. It's great friendships. And isn't it wonderful how diverse our young people's worlds are now, because technology's open that up to them. That's not a proxy. It's not the same for having physical connections and the way their brains function. And you fast forward that to say, 21-year-olds, like I'm having conversations a lot at the moment with 21-year-olds who are grappling with returning to the office or working remotely. And some of the research that I found really interesting is the number of Gen Zs, they're hankering to get back to the office.

[00:38:37] Jordan Harbinger: I bet.

[00:38:37] Michael McQueen: They're isolated, they're lonely. And they realize too, being in the office is essential for mentoring and apprenticeship. It's really hard to do that remotely when you're not building relationships with those you're wanting to get mentored by. And so I think, we're social creatures and the more we stick in our homes, doing video calls, disconnected from others, and then social media amplifies and blows up all of these instinctive tendencies of outrage and fear and us versus them, you see how this starts to feed in this very dynamic. So I think some of the simplest solutions for dealing with that sort of polarization is just if we can try and encourage ourselves and others to connect and have meaningful connections more. The difference that makes for how our brains function is profound.

[00:39:16] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of the office, you mentioned this shocking statistic in the book, which is that 40 percent of our professional time is spent trying to convince other people or get buy-in on decisions. Seems incredibly inefficient to spend half your day trying to get people to do the thing that you know needs to get done. It's crazy, inefficient and wasteful.

[00:39:36] Michael McQueen: Yeah, I think it also just speaks to the fact that so much of economic productivity and with the drivers of what we do in our roles is just, it requires us bringing people on board and enlisting support and selling our ideas and proposals. We spend so much of our time doing it because that's just a fundamental thing that as humans we need to do. Everyone's always selling something. Selling an idea, selling a vantage point, a perspective, a possibility, or a project, whatever it is. The data I came across, and I only came across this after the book went to print, so it's not in there, but there was a study done by a crew at Cornell a couple of years ago and actually used a subreddit group to try and measure how effective people were in trying to persuade other people to shift their viewpoint.

[00:40:15] And I mean, it's a subreddit group of people who signed in and signed on to be a part of it. And so you'd present an idea and someone would argue with that. And then there was something like if you changed your mind, you had to put a delta, in the symbol of a delta.

[00:40:26] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. I know that subreddit, changed my mind.

[00:40:28] Michael McQueen: There you go. That's the one. They tried to measure how many people's minds were changed. But I think before there were any interventions to try and tweak how effective people were, the headline stat, even amongst that group, was you are only effective in changing someone else's mind straight out of the gate three to 5 percent of the time, which is not a great strike rate.

[00:40:44] Jordan Harbinger: No.

[00:40:44] Michael McQueen: So if we're spending 40 percent of our time trying to persuade or influence or just encourage other people to think differently and we're only getting it right three to 5 percent of the time, that's a worrying stat. And I think that's the reality we all feel that we're increasingly in a position where we have to try and enlist people to our perspective and yet if we don't have the tools to do it, that's incredibly frustrating. And that was actually, I mean the genesis story of this whole book and project was one conversation I had a few years ago and I was speaking at an industry association conference and I was the keynote speaker before the lunch break. So I talked to all about the disruptions and the technology was coming down the line for this particular industry. And this woman who came up to me during the lunch break and she was the picture of exasperation. She was so frustrated and she said, "I get it." She said, "I can see exactly what you're saying. In fact, I've thought this for a little while now." She said, "But my biggest challenge is, if my organization doesn't change in the next five to six years, we are out of the game. We are falling behind so fast." And she said, "My biggest challenge is getting my leadership team on board with the need to change because they're so stubborn." So fixed, so sure about how the way we should do things, the way the industry works. And so I said, "What have you tried to, you know, bring them on board?" And she told me the things she'd done and there were all the things that you should do. I think she'd made a really compelling case. She shared lots of data and a PowerPoint presentation. She'd give them all the logical, even the economic reasons why they should change and they hadn't. I remember just walking away from that conversation feeling inadequate, like this idea of I didn't know what to suggest. Because I'm like, "You've tried that and it hasn't worked."

[00:42:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:42:08] Michael McQueen: That seems to be what all the books tell us. And so, essentially, that was the genesis moment of this book was an attempt to answer that question of, in those situations, whether you're influencing up, trying to influence your leadership team to change or influencing your team or just people around you to see or differently what actually works. And I think the thing that amazed me is how many of the things that work are sort of counterintuitive. They're not the things that we've assumed to be true for centuries, and we've only discovered some of this in the last few years. So that was a fascinating experience, just going through a lot of that research.

[00:42:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's frustrating when you hear about things like that. When I was in — I want to say third grade or fourth grade, I wrote this little newspaper that I could print out on my Apple Dot Matrix Printer, and nobody was that interested in it. So I invited my friend, Mark, who was like this really good athlete and stuff and I said, "Let's write this newspaper together." He couldn't write much of anything. He put one story in there that was about basketball, didn't really need it. And then I said, "Oh, this is a newspaper that me and Mark made." And everyone was like, "Oh, cool. I want one." So we sold out. We printed up like 30, we sold 'em all.

[00:43:09] Michael McQueen: Wow.

[00:43:09] Jordan Harbinger: And my mom was like, "You didn't need him for that. He didn't really contribute." And I was like, "Oh, yeah, he contributed, all right." The reason I'm telling you this story is because I think intuitively at that point in my life, I kind of understood what this person in the office didn't, which is her ideas were great, persuasion was theoretically on point, but what she needed was to find the person in the office that everybody liked and have them come up with this idea instead of her.

[00:43:30] Michael McQueen: Yeah. It goes back to some of the basic stuff that's two and a half thousand years old. I mean, Aristotle's three foundations of rhetoric, like they ring true and they're still true. I say it's logos, ethos, and pathos. Now we're pretty good at logos and pathos, like we're pretty good at speaking to those logical faculties and giving good reasons for change. We're relatively good at pathos in terms of trying to bring people emotionally on the journey. Although interestingly in the book, I found them fascinating research about how most of what we do to try and speak to people's emotions about, you know, say giving to charities or feeling compelled to change with say sustainability, they don't work in ways that surprised me. Like we actually — empathy doesn't scale well, for instance. So if you're telling a story, tell one story in rich depth. If you tell the story of 4, 5, 10 people a village that's at risk and you know, "Give money now." The moment you scale empathy, it loses its impact. Our instinctive minds don't have the ability to empathize with scale, so that's like one person only. It's that what I found that interesting. So pathos we're relatively good at, but it's the ethos piece that your friend Mark. What is ethos? Ethos is argument by credibility.

[00:44:35] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:44:36] Michael McQueen: Yeah. It's about the ability to build affinity, which to bring people on board and make them feel they like you and they're on board with you before they get on board with your ideas. And so much of persuasion is about winning ethos. And the tricky thing with ethos is you do not own your own ethos. Ethos is in the eye of the beholder. It is in the perception of other people of how credible you are, how trustworthy you are, how likable you are. And so, a lot of that is about realizing you need to communicate in a way that's going to engage the other person, bring them on board rather than just rely on, I think speaking to the brain or speaking to the heart. Ethos is just as important.

[00:45:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's wild what our brains will do to conform to tribal thinking or group thinking. It's like group think, the social pressure angle is much more persuasive than evidence. And our brains will believe the group think, kind of regardless of evidence, I think. And you mentioned in the book, most people would choose to talk to a stranger who shared their views than a friend who did not share their views, which is actually kinda scary.

[00:45:34] Michael McQueen: Isn't that wild?

[00:45:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:45:35] Michael McQueen: Yeah. That was a study from the University of Calgary. And I thought, doesn't that just speak to the challenge of our age? At this notion of a friend who don't agree with, I don't want to spend time with, but if I don't know you, but you're on my team. What a sad indictment on the fact that we tend to feel most comfortable with people who are just like us and who make us feel comfortable about our views, who don't challenge our views. And yet, how does progress happen? by butting up against people who've got a different perspective. And it's almost, if you think about the metaphor of glasses, that you take your glasses off and put someone else's glasses on and go, "Man, I've never seen the word from this perspective." That's where learning, that's where discovery happens. And what that requires, of course, is humility. I think the challenge is humility is so often lacking. That's the prerequisite for changing your mind is being willing to go, "You know what, maybe there's a perspective I haven't heard yet." And how do you then encourage other people to embrace the posture of humility without saying, "You should humble yourself, be more open." I mean, that's never going to work. How do you give people the space and the permission and the encouragement to just think again, to be willing to consider there is a possibility that's different to the one that they may have held for a long time.

[00:46:38] Jordan Harbinger: The way you phrase this in the book is identity trumps inquiry. So we're always on the lookout for signs that somebody is like us, or maybe that they're different than us when they are making an argument. And logic only comes into play after we make a decision about whether or not this person is similar to us. So basically, "Are you in the tribe? If so, I'm open to hearing what you have to say. Maybe I'll even agree with you. If you're not in the tribe, I maybe don't even want to hear it. I automatically disagree."

[00:47:05] Michael McQueen: Yeah. The story that really highlighted this for me was there was a guy named Ben Bowling, who was giving the commencement speech at a school in Tennessee, and this was during Trump's presidency, and this is sort of Trump heartland. And so he got up to give the commencement speech. He said like so many of these speeches, I'm going to start with a couple of quotes that I found on Google. And so, he shared a couple of quotes that he'd just come across inspiring, reach for the stars, type quotes. And one of the quotes was, "Fight for a seat at the table. But don't just fight for a seat at the table, fight for a seat at the head of the table." In other words, young people, we need your voices in the world in future. And he said, "You know who said that? Our president, Donald Trump." And everyone applauded and went crazy. And he said, "Oh sorry. No, I'm just joking. It was actually Barack Obama who said that." And there was silence. And in fact, a few people booed. Like this very thing that they had just cheered about 20 seconds earlier, now was like, "We firmly disagree with because the enemy said it." And you think, like wow. Isn't that extraordinary?

[00:48:00] And there was a piece of research done by a university here in Australia at Latrobe University is the name of the group. And Latrobe University did this with a series of people who they got to listen to a standup comedian. So they put them in a sound booth, headphones on, listening to a standup routine, and it was a one-way mirror. And they were telling each of the people who were going through, was quite a large sample size, they said, "We're going to just monitor your reactions to see how you react to what you're hearing." So the first group that went through the first cohort, all they heard was just that the audio of the person giving standup. No other sound. And so they measured how much laughter, the intensity, the frequency of laughter. The second group that went through, they added a canned laughter track on top. Obviously, that meant people laughed more. We've known for decades that canned laughter makes us laugh more. But where it got interesting is the next cohort that came through, they sort of split. And so for some of them they said, "Hey, so the laughter track you're going to be hearing is of a live audience and that's a live audience of essentially people like you. The setting that you'd probably go to, they would vote like you, they think like you." The laughter increased even more than just the standard. Whereas the other group, the fourth group, were told, "Okay, the people you're hearing laughing were not like, don't vote like you." The level of laughter was less than the very first cohort, where there was no canned laughter at all. And it goes to that thing of, "If people who are not like me are finding this funny, I won't find it funny because that's just not what I do." And so you see how these tribal instincts play into so much of the way we reason and think. And therefore, when you're presenting an idea to someone, trying to persuade someone, you need to realize one of the first lenses they're looking at it through is, what do people like me think about ideas like this before I even engage with whether I think it's a good idea or even whether I trust you or whether I think what you've suggested is reasonable and well researched? What are other people like me tend to think. And that social proof piece is massive.

[00:49:44] Jordan Harbinger: I would've fallen for that Donald Trump, Barack Obama quote thing. Because I'm sure you could get me to cheer for something that I agreed with and then be like, "Oh wait, Hitler said that." And I'd be like, "Oh, I don't like that guy." But now I feel awkward about liking this thing that he said, even though I'm sure it wouldn't be related to anything. Like what comes to mind when you think of Hitler? I don't know. Do they disagree with the comment or do they just not like the source? Are they booing the source? It's tough. A more apt example might be the vaccine comments from Democrats and Republicans and they sort of flipped them. They just said, "Oh, leading Democrats said this." And then other people agreed with it, even though it was actually something a Republican said. And they just like, they just agreed with it based on the source. That's also problematic, but totally understandable from a human nature perspective.

[00:50:28] Michael McQueen: Yep. So the herd instinct, while it's incredibly powerful, it can backfire if you don't use it well. So those sort of social proof things and like even I was listening to a whole pile of episodes of your podcast the other week when I was getting ready for this chat, and I noticed how you use that whole herd instinct thing. I think like when you go to one of the sponsor sets, you say, "Do what other considerate and thoughtful listeners do." While I listen to it, I'm like, "Genius." Like there's a reason it works. There's a reason those sorts of things where you are calling out either unconsciously or some cases, quite consciously what others are doing and so therefore the message is do the same thing.

[00:50:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:51:00] Michael McQueen: But this can backfire, though. One of the things I found interesting was a study where the New York metro were trying to deal with fare evasion, and so people weren't paying their faires was costing like $300 million a year in lost revenue. So they had a whole public campaign about, "Don't evade your fair, you need to pay your fair. In fact, here the punishments if you don't." And they flooded the network with enforcement officers. The rate of fair evasion went up from something like 7.5 percent of people not paying fair it at like 9.4 percent or something like that. And so they had the opposite effect. And so they started to look around the world where were other jurisdictions finding they were having success in dealing with this issue. So there were two cities, so one was Melbourne here in Australia and Dublin. And these were the two cities where they had actually had success in addressing fair evasion. And one of the guys who ran the program here in Australia, in Melbourne, that had caused the success of that decline in fair ovation rates, he said, "The problem is when you call out how prominent and prevalent an issue is, it unconsciously sends a message to others that everyone else is doing it. So I may as well too." And he said, "If you focus on the fact that 94 percent of people pay their faires as opposed to the fact that 6 percent of people don't, it flips it." It makes a huge difference in terms of how that social proof is communicated. And so that made a massive difference here in Melbourne, and I think once they implemented it in New York, the same experience there.

[00:52:14] Jordan Harbinger: Does it work even if you're conscious of it, or did you just ruin my persuasive line to get people to support the sponsors?

[00:52:20] Michael McQueen: Hope I didn't ruin it. But I think it actually — even if you know it's there, it becomes that unconscious cue that, "You know what, yeah. I ought to do that. It's the right thing to do. People like me? That's what we do." And I think that's the secret.

[00:52:32] Jordan Harbinger: I like it. The best looking listeners support our sponsors. I know that's true. I got data on that. I'll be sure to supply that at some point.

[00:52:42] This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Michael McQueen. We'll be right back.

[00:52:46] This episode is sponsored in part by Huggies. Huggies Little Movers diapers. They are a big deal in our household. Every baby is unique. Huggies knows this. They are for the best fit with their curve-hugging, stretchy design, dealing with a wiggly active baby, no problem. No more peepee leaks. Huggies keeps everything or worse. Huggies keeps everything snug and secure, making those endless play time marathons worry-free for parents. No poop chunks flying out, folks. Got to love it. And when it comes to leak protection, these diapers are next level offering up to 12 hours of dryness, and boy have we put that to the test. That means overnight peace of mind, even though, 4-year-old Jayden, is just — he's daytime potty trained, but man, he loves to slam a little bit of milk before bed, get a refill, slam that, and he is just a pee machine at night, and Huggies has been a lifesaver holding in everything without any leaks. So if you want a diaper that's comfy, reliable, and a true performer for your little mover and your little pooper, Huggies Little Movers is the way to go.

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[00:54:45] If you like this episode of the show, and I sure hope that's the case, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, those are all in one place at jordanharbinger.com/deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, seriously, email me. Jordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you, me, or Jen or anyone here. It is that important that you support those who support the show, and so we're happy to help with that as well.

[00:55:14] Now for the rest of my conversation with Michael McQueen.

[00:55:19] Another thing that I find fascinating that I'm sure we all see play out all the time is being good at thinking or being smart or being intelligent, whatever, often actually just makes us better at rationalizing existing beliefs. So many people, and I'm sure I'm included in this bucket, right? We assume like, "Oh, I'm good at thinking. I'm good at rethinking." But really, the skill is rationalizing after they've made a decision without thinking.

[00:55:42] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:55:43] Jordan Harbinger: And if I'm really honest with myself, a lot of times, I'm doing that. I'm like, "No, I came to this through careful consideration." Actually, what happened was I really wanted this to be true and then I did a really damn good job of convincing myself that it was.

[00:55:57] Michael McQueen: Yeah, and I think the key point in that is how widely have you cast the net, intellectually. If you've only ever read the journal articles or the newspapers online that you know will be safe and will support what you already think. You get I've read 12 articles where you have, but they've all basically been from the same well, ideologically. Have you read something that is completely different, that is out of the box, so even challenges your thinking. In fact, there is an Ohio State University study that found that we spend 36 percent more time reading an article if we already agree with the premise of the article. We tell ourselves, "Okay, even if I'm going to read an article, but I'll just flip through it. I'll just skim it quickly." Bear in mind, those tendencies I try and force myself to sit in the uncomfortable, like to sit in articles and perspectives and read books and listen to people who I really disagree with, but not to try and pick holes or not even try to imagine my arguments. You know, sometimes when you're hearing someone speak or even listen to a podcast, you think, "If I was talking to 'em, here's what I'd say. and then they'd say this, and I'd say this." You sort of have these fictitious arguments in your mind. But actually, just sit there and consider, is there a part of what they're saying that's true? And the reality is, everyone has got a perspective that even if there's a tiny bit of it is worth considering and it'll sharpen your thinking, and yet, that is uncomfortable. I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes probably said, "It's the rare person who wants to hear what they don't want to hear." I don't really want to. I don't enjoy you listening to dissenting views and things that make me feel uncomfortable, but I try and force myself to do it. And then bear in mind, you know that feeling you're having right now when you are suggesting your view to someone else, remember that's how they're feeling. And trying to change someone's mind isn't just about taking on a new belief or a new perspective, it's abandoning an old one. And I think one of the key things that I loved exploring in terms of the research I was looking at, what are the dynamics that cause us to feel threatened and feel defensive? Because we've been told for years that humans are inherently afraid of change. That's just the way we are. And I've said that for years. I've written about it in books. And yet, the most recent research from a neuroscience standpoint, we indicate that's actually not true. We're not afraid of change, what we're afraid of is loss.

[00:58:00] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:00] Michael McQueen: So the moment there's a sense of loss, I'm going to lose dignity, lose power, lose certainty. That's when we dig our heels in. Even if, we deep down know that the idea being suggested is a good one. And so then the question is, how do you — rather than trying to upsell the benefits of change, how do you lessen the loss? How do you make sure that sense of loss is not so great? And so if you check yourself, when you're listening to someone, reading a book, you're taking on board an opinion that you don't like, what is it that you are afraid of? It's not changing your view, it's the fact that you might lose certainty. You like certainty. I know how the world is and I know what I think. This is clear. And in a world of uncertainty and turbulence and change and disruption, there's something really safe and appealing about that. And so just bearing in mind that, okay, I don't have to change my view by reading this, but I just want to take it on board and just consider it. Hold it lightly, and I might put it down at the end, but I don't have to take it all on board. Because that gives you that sense of safety, that means you can consider it without feeling threatened. Because that feeling of loss, of feeling that will lose certainty or power or dignity, that's what tends to cause us to be stubborn.

[00:59:00] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of stubborn, a lot of the consequences of this are also very real world. You mentioned in the book how science breakthroughs are often somewhat obvious after the fact and all the evidence that was needed was previously available, but somebody had to see it with fresh eyes and less bias.

[00:59:16] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[00:59:16] Jordan Harbinger: And I can't remember the exact quote, but maybe you can help me. It's something like, "Science moves forward one funeral at a time." And it's because the person who had the opposite idea literally has to just die first. And then it's like, "Okay, fine. Now we can finally entertain the idea that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth or whatever."

[00:59:31] Michael McQueen: And this is amongst scientists, the people who should be best at reconsidering seeing things differently like —

[00:59:37] Jordan Harbinger: Right, exactly. Yeah. The people who claim to be immune from this are the ones that have to wait until they die because we can't persuade them.

[00:59:44] Michael McQueen: Correct. I mean, it's interesting. So we're in London in July this year, and we wanted to go see like a show if we could, and they're hard to get. I mean, shows are so expensive in London, at the moment.

[00:59:54] Jordan Harbinger: You mean, you're talking about like a broadway or whatever the equivalent is of London play.

[00:59:58] Michael McQueen: It was like a live fetish show. So I think it was something like, the cheapest we could get was 190 pounds each or something, and it was like for the worst seats in the house. Anyway, and there was pretty much sold out. We found this one show, my wife found it like, "Yeah, just go for it. Get it, book it. If there's only a few seats left, we'll get them." We were sitting separate, in fact. That's how few seats there were.

[01:00:15] Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow.

[01:00:15] Michael McQueen: And then I found after she'd booked it, she told me what it was. I'm like, ah, this is perfect. This actually couldn't be a better show. Because the show was all about a guy that I profiled in the book who I found fascinating. And this play was all about his life. So he was an 18th century Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis was basically the dude that figured out the fundamentals of germ theories. So he realized that the death rate of babies being born for doctors who had been working in the morgue before they went over and delivered the babies was much higher. Whereas the midwives who delivered babies in a different wing of the hospital had dramatically less births, babies that had just been born. And so he, over the course of many months, figured this out —

[01:00:54] Jordan Harbinger: Less fewer deaths of babies who had just been born. You said fewer births. That would've made no sense just for those of you following along at home. Yeah.

[01:01:00] Michael McQueen: For all the detail, people. Yeah. And so he figured this out. He then tried to present to the Global Assembly of doctors that had this series of things each year in Europe where they bring all together the latest research, latest findings, and challenge them that they needed to wash their hands in a solution of chlorine before they went in to deliver babies. And the pushback, because these doctors said, "What are you saying, that we are killing the babies of our patients?"

[01:01:22] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[01:01:22] Michael McQueen: So yeah, they were threatened by it. The problem was, and this is where the play was fascinating, it gave you real insight into Semmelweis' view. He was so strong-willed and indignant and had contempt for people who didn't agree with him that he just put them offside. And so, he then spent the rest of his life trying to fight for this change. It never happened. And it wasn't till like 85, 90 years later that Louis Pasteur realized what germ theory was, and that changed the world. But Semmelweis, I mean, think about the millions of lives that could have been saved in that preceding 80 years. But it was because people were unwilling to consider, unwilling to think. Part of it was the messenger. I mean, he shot himself in the foot so many times.

[01:01:57] Jordan Harbinger: He was notoriously kind of a prick. Wasn't that the consensus?

[01:02:00] Michael McQueen: Yeah. Like initially, he just wanted to just usher through change. Then it became part of his identity and he was against the establishment and he called them all, you know, essentially murderers.

[01:02:10] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:10] Michael McQueen: And so that's never going to go well. People don't like hearing that. And so, it is interesting how like that whole, the way that play unfolded gave you real insight into just why he was so profoundly ineffective in persuading those around him, and then the true human cost of this. So yeah, I mean, science progresses one funeral at a time and that was a perfect example of exactly that.

[01:02:28] Jordan Harbinger: You have some of these sort of quick hit persuasion, or I don't even know what you'd call it, like psychological vignettes that I just loved in the book. There was one about expectations and perception, and I guess this is an experiment where they put a violinist in the metro. Can you take us through that? This is so interesting because I think we do this to ourselves all the time and we just are completely unaware of it.

[01:02:49] Michael McQueen: Yeah. So this is a violinist who they planted in one of the metro stations in Washington and he had just played a concert the night before where tickets were hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. And so there he was playing an exquisitely difficult piece of music. And I think actually Dan Ariely was one of the people who ran this experiment in conjunction with the Washington Post, I believe. So they basically put him there to watch how many people would stop, listen and donate, because he was there as a busker. Because he appeared to be a busker, no one paid any attention to him. Here he was playing a piece of music the night before people paid hundreds of dollars for, and there was a standing ovation. I mean it's one of the most difficult pieces of music to play in the violin. And he was actually playing a Stradivarius violin. I mean, we're talking like millions of dollars for this instrument, but because he was in the basement of a metro station and because he was wearing a baseball cap and casual clothes, no one paid any attention at all. And it's almost like that idea that we see what we expect. And so in so much of life, altering people's expectations and shifting people's perceptions is often the precursor, and the term they often use in the research is the primate. That's what gets people ready to see things from a different perspective. And so there's lots of ways you can do that, but I really like that example because I think it was playing for 45 or 50 minutes. There were only like three or four people who actually stopped and only one person who recognized him because she'd been at the concert the night before.

[01:04:05] Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow.

[01:04:05] Michael McQueen: And she stood there like aghast, what is going on?

[01:04:08] Jordan Harbinger: She was thinking how she paid $600 to go see him the previous night and how annoyed she was that here he was in her commute to work for 25 cents.

[01:04:15] Michael McQueen: Correct, correct. It does speak to that point that so much, so many of those things, and they are unconscious signals of whether something is true or worth considering or valid, they can make a huge difference. Whether the message is right or wrong, the way we present it and the way we prime people to be ready for that, to shift their expectations, sometimes about catching people off guard by surprise. Sometimes it's about using metaphors and make people go, "Oh gosh, I'd never actually thought about that in that way before."

[01:04:42] I had this interview recently with Paul Sloane, who's done a lot of work around lateral thinking. He used a great metaphor to set up the reason why even people who are highly intelligent and smart leaders, why they need to think differently. And he said, "Think of it as if you're an expert tennis player, but all you can do is hit beforehand. If you've got a really weak backhand, you'll get so far as a tennis player, but you'll never be world leading because there's going to be times where you need a really solid backhand." He talked about lateral thinking being like the backhand. He said, "You may be really good at strategic thinking and linear thinking, even being persuasive as a thinker and a leader. But if you can't do the lateral creative thinking, it becomes a weak point." And just that metaphor, because I imagine when I was listening to him being interviewed, there'd be a lot of people who are like, "Yeah, but I'm really good at the way I think right now, serves me well. And I'm getting great results in my business or life." but that metaphor just allowed people to go, "Oh, you know what? Even that this is not saying that what I do isn't valuable and I'm not really good at it, but I also need other things just to make me more well-rounded as a thinker." And setting people up to be able to consider a perspective that's different to theirs, that's where the game is at. And that's the whole thing, relativity and framing and priming, these are all often very simple things, but they can make all the difference in terms of how persuasive we are.

[01:05:52] Jordan Harbinger: I would love for you to teach us a little bit about priming. You mentioned that we can ask them a question that primes them first. That seems like a pretty powerful and useful skill if you can teach it to us.

[01:06:05] Michael McQueen: Yeah. So there's a couple of ways to use questions that make a big difference. One of the tools that I found most effective in the book, and I've used it personally in life as well, it's often referred to as motivational interviewing. And I first came across it in some work from a guy named Michael Pantalon, who's based at Yale. And so they've used this in a therapeutic context for decades, trying to deal with drug abuse and alcohol abuse and change people's perspective. What they've discovered is, that idea of having an intervention where we get all your family and friends together essentially shock and shame you, often backfires. So they've been looking for different ways to try and get through to people.

[01:06:36] So the motivational interviewing technique, I call it the rate and reflect process because it's a bit less of a mouthful. But basically, it's about asking two questions in a specific order. And so the first question is, "Okay, I'm just curious. From one to 10, how open or willing would you be to —" and then fill in the blanks. Whatever the idea or the perspective you're trying to get them to consider is. And typically, if you're dealing with somebody who is stubborn and doesn't want to change, they'll lowball it. They'll say two or three. But it's the second question, that's the key one. And it's the question of, "Okay, so I'm just curious, how come you didn't give a lower number? And in that moment, it flips the entire conversation. Now, you've got to do this sensitively. Because if it feels like you're technique-ing someone, I mean there, there are some environments where like asking someone to rate one to 10, it's just going to feel super awkward, like it's just not going to work. I found this recently, we're catching up with some mates, just a group of lads away for the weekend, drinking whiskey on a Saturday night. And one of the guys in the group said, "Okay, lads, so how are your marriages going? Like one to 10." That's serious. There we go. Let's strap in. So we sort of went around the group and everyone gave a number and just like, "How's life going? Let's be honest and vulnerable." And that's the nature of this group of lads, we've been mates for years. One of the guys, in fact, the last guy around the table said, "Ah, if I'm honest, is probably like a three right now. It's pretty rough." And he started to get pretty upset. It was pretty full on, like just sharing what was going on for them. And after about 40, 45 minutes of talking about this, like it had become this quite negative spiral I'm like, "I've got to figure out how to turn this thing around. This is not going well." So I thought, "I'll just try this technique." I mean, I hadn't done the whole rate from one to 10. One of the other guys had suggested that. So I'm like, "I'll use the second part of this technique." And I said, "Hey, so I'm just curious. I know you said you're like, you're a three out of 10, how come you didn't give a lower number?" And in that moment, I was like I was speaking to a different person, who was in a different marriage. Like the whole conversational tone shifted. And I was like, This is not all bad. Some stuff that's gone really well, like we are a great team as parents. And like it didn't negate all the hard stuff we just talked about. But in that moment, it shifted the entire conversation. It changed the frame of reference. So asking questions can be super valuable from that perspective. The other thing about priming, it can be as simple as the tone that you use if you're presenting an issue or an idea to someone. It can be as simple as prefacing it with a phrase like, "You know what, feel free to ignore this, but —" Or I can just, "My sense is —" Or like, "I've just been thinking this. I'm still not sure about, I'd love to get your perspective, your opinion." Like you are prefacing that you're setting up a posture where that person's going to be open. They're leaning in now because you haven't got in going. "This is the way the world is. I'd like to suggest why I'm right and you are wrong." Just even prefacing things like that, that conversation can backfire if you do that in an unhelpful way. Sometimes you can prime people to be defensive, "Hey, no offense, but —" or "Everyone's been saying that." But all of those that are prefacing statements get people on the defensive. So it's about asking questions or using language or in some cases, metaphors, that allow them to see the situation differently or just feel like they can engage openly and honestly, and it's like a safe conversation. They're not going to be caught out or shamed or embarrassed.

[01:09:28] Jordan Harbinger: The power of sequence is something that you brought up. And I've seen this before where it's, "Oh, judges or parole boards or whatever that are hungry, basically the person goes straight back to jail." I mean, I'm making light of it, but it's actually really horrible and shouldn't be happening. Tell us about this because it's scary that there's so much that we allow. I mean, look, judge in a court of law, fine. Even judges on the voice, right? The first person who goes, they get the harshest judging, and the people after that are, it's not even close. What's going on here?

[01:09:57] Michael McQueen: Sequence does make a big difference. And so that study was a group of German judges. And so what they were doing is, they were given essentially a hypothetical case. And so the idea was, if someone who'd had committed this crime was brought to you, what sort of sentence would you give them? But before they were asked to give their estimated sentence, so at least in this case, it wasn't a real person's life that was going to be impacted. But these were highly experienced judges. So given a very clear set of details of this particular theoretical crime, but had to roll a dice. It was a loaded dice with either lender or a three or a nine. They rolled the dice and then they were to give the number of what they would sentence this person to. If people gave a three, their average sentence was something like five months or four months. If they rolled a nine, it was far more likely to be an eight month sentence. These were exactly the same. It was the same crime, similar level of experience of judges, but something about that number, the number they'd rolled, primed them to respond in a certain way. So sequence in that instance can make a huge impact. And that's again, a bit of a worry. But I think it's not just about, in that case, that's an irrelevant anchor or an irrelevant prime. It's a number that was rolled. But to your point, if people are hungry or fatigued, that can make a difference. And the other thing that I found interesting about sequence was what Adam Galinsky has done. And Adam is based at Columbia University and he looked at the sequence. So if you are in a talent show or presenting a pitch, for instance, for VC funding, like what order in the sequence should you go to get the best result? And it is worse to go first, is the simple way to put it. And the reason is, the people who go early in a lineup are being measured against the judge's ideal contestant, which is never going to be a fair assessment. Becasue they're like, "In an ideal order, what would the sort of person do? How would they approach this? How talented would they be?" As you go along, their expectations going to be tempered by the field. Say this is where sort of the average is. At the end, you've also got the law of recency effects, like the people who are front of mine because they saw you most recently toward the end. So, if you can position yourself toward the end of a competitive lineup, you would typically get a far better response. All these things, they shouldn't make a difference, but they just do. And I think it'd be smart for us to bear some of this stuff in mind when we're trying to suggest our ideas. If you're putting a presentation together, don't put all your best ideas up front. Save some of them for the end of your presentation. Finish on a high. Because, again, some of those ideas will be most persuasive toward the end of the presentation rather than popping them at the beginning.

[01:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: You hate to think somebody went to prison for an extra three years because the judge had a ham sandwich that morning or something, right? That's really scary stuff, actually.

[01:12:23] Michael McQueen: Yeah, it is. And there was another study that was — I think this is probably one of the more quirky bits of research that I read, and I can't remember who did this study now. But basically, they got people to do word exercises. They had to decode these word puzzles. It wasn't about the exercise of decoding the word puzzles that mattered, it was the very nature of the word. So the two sets of words that people in this study were decoding. So some of the words were polite and patient and kind. So they were the words that they actually unscrambled. Others were impatient, frustrated, irritated. So the idea was that the end of the experiment, once you had decoded your little word experiment, had to walk to the front of the room, find the researcher who was running the experiment and await your next instruction. So the idea was though, that researcher was actually speaking with someone else who was planted there, essentially having intense conversations for 10 minutes. Most of those people who'd unscrambled the positive words and the nice words didn't interrupt at all for the 10 minutes. Some of them interrupted the nine minute mark. But those had unscrambled the rude words, within a minute or so, they're like, "I'm not waiting. Like, Hey, can I just butt in here?" It's amazing how even the unconscious priming of those words changed their behavior, changed their posture.

[01:13:24] There was another study where they did different things. It wasn't about the nature of the words, but what they were doing is, they were unscrambling words that weren't to do with character trait, but to do with age. So one group were unscrambling words that were all about being elderly and old and frail. Others were about youthful and full of energy. Those who had unscrambled the youthful things, actually measured how quickly they walked the front of the room to find that the person running the experiment, and they basically walked briskly to the front. Those who'd done all the old words, walked significantly more slowly than those who in the other group. And something about just the words they're exposed to change the way that they behaved and the way that they thought after that. So these things, some of them are a bit gimmicky, but it does point to the fact that this stuff really matters. It's not just about social proof, it's actually about using words deliberately that will unlock the very thing you are hoping people to aspire to. So priming can work in some very weird and wonderful ways.

[01:14:18] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about paradoxical thinking. Exposing people to an extreme, but maybe not absurd version of their beliefs.

[01:14:24] Michael McQueen: Yeah.

[01:14:24] Jordan Harbinger: And how that can actually help them reexamine those beliefs. I'd never heard this, but I have seen the Smoking Kid campaign that you mentioned in the book, if you can tell us about that. This is kind of a genius marketing piece.

[01:14:35] Michael McQueen: Isn't it brilliant? So the idea is, if you expose people to a view that is further along the continuum to where they're at, it creates contrast. So if you've got someone who's got a very strong view and then you expose 'em to a much stronger view of that, they suddenly realize, "Oh gosh, I would never think that because that's too extreme." Even in that moment, it unlocks them. Because they realize they're no longer at one end of the spectrum and you're at the other. Their spectrum goes beyond them. And actually, what that means by definition is that they are moderate and reasonable and that opens them to being more willing to consider different ways of thinking. So paradoxical thinking is an interesting one to use. It's almost, say you expose someone to a stronger view and it doesn't strengthen their view or their mindset, it actually moderates it, which is the opposite of what you might expect.

[01:15:16] And the Smoking Kid one is interesting, though. So this was an experiment that was done in Thailand. The Thai health authorities were trying to promote a quit smoking campaign that they had launched. They'd launched a phone number we could ring in and get advice about quitting smoking and it wasn't really being used. And so what they did is, they sent a whole lot of people out to hand out pamphlets to promote this particular quit helpline. And so the idea was they'd go up to random people who are smoking in the street and say, "Hey, can I get a light?" And globally, that's sort of typically the thing that every smoker just complies with that request. It's just a given that you know, someone asks for a light, you help 'em out. And in this instance, what happens when the individual rocked up into the people smoking and said, "Can I get a light?" They didn't get a light, they get a lecture. They go, "You should never smoke. Smoking so bad for you. Now don't you realize if you smoke, you likely get cancer? They have to drill a hole in your throat." Like giving vivid reasons why —

[01:16:05] Jordan Harbinger: These are smokers telling the other person this.

[01:16:07] Michael McQueen: The smokers. And like the irony is, they only stopped smoking long enough to deliver the lecture on why smoking was bad. And then, you know, took another drag. How does that play out? The reason was, those walking up to the smokers asking for a light were 8, 9, 10 year olds, little kids. And in that moment, what it did is that those who were smoking gave the lecture to the kid as to why smoking was a bad idea. The next thing the kid did was say, "You know, you care about me, what about yourself?" I handed them a slip of paper with this helpline phone number on it. And so that quit helpline, I think in the next 30 days, the traffic increased 32 percent. And it stayed elevated for the next six months while they were studying this. In other words, something about saying the very thing, the very advice that others had given them for years, but when it came out of their own mouth, they were far more willing to consider it. And it created that sense of contrast of, "Wow, what I think to be true and what I'm doing don't line up." That sense of cognitive dissonance is often all we need to look for a way to resolve the tension and the awkwardness, and in that case, it was ringing the helpline.

[01:17:07] Jordan Harbinger: Probably a little bit of commitment in there too, right? These people are publicly stating their beliefs, "Smoking is bad for you, it can kill you. You're going to have health complications, the odds are really high." And I think people are probably more likely to change their behavior if they've publicly stated beliefs. Is that accurate?

[01:17:24] Michael McQueen: Yeah, yeah. There is something about that. And interestingly too, if you write down a commitment, so saying something publicly, you're more likely to conform with what you've said you value. But if you write it down, it's even more significant. And a study that looked at that was one in Los Angeles with doctors' practices to address over prescribing of antibiotics. And that's a massive issue.

[01:17:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:17:44] Michael McQueen: Because doctors is giving out far too many antibiotics and it's like the impact on drug resistance now is actually quite significant. And so what they had done is they had asked doctors to sign a pledge that they wouldn't over overprescribe antibiotics. And in fact, some of the doctor's surgeries that had multiple groups doing this experiment, some of them were actually asked to sign that pledge and have it visible in the waiting room. What they found is the doctors who'd signed this pledge and had it visible in the waiting room, gave out 30 to 35 percent less prescriptions for antibiotics when people walked in with the same symptoms. The people that walked into the doctors weren't really sick, but they had the same symptoms. But those who were had gone into the practice where there'd been a public commitment, far less likely to walk out with a prescription for antibiotics. Because something about making that commitment was a primer. It set that person up to follow through with actions and behavior that were consistent with what they committed and said was important.

[01:18:35] Jordan Harbinger: I love the bit of advice to stop defining yourself by your opinions. Because I think, when we mix opinions and identity like we talked about at the top of the show, it's so difficult to change your mind because, again, you don't just go, "Oh, well, I was wrong about this thing." You basically have to be like, "I'm a bad, I don't know, Christian now for not thinking this or a bad Jew or a bad Muslim, or I am a bad person, or I'm stupid." You have to make this beyond self-deprecating conclusion about yourself in order to change your mind, and that's so uncomfortable, but that really only happens when your identity and your opinions are kind of welded together.

[01:19:11] Michael McQueen: Yeah. I think that's the trick in all of us is, you are not your opinions and neither are other people. They are not the sum total of their opinions. And this is the tricky thing when you've got someone, and I can think of people right now who just frustrate me enormously because they're the people who, yeah, may have gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy, belief, for instance. And they share stuff online that is just fundamentally not true and often quite destructive information. In my mind, I just want to write them off. I'm like, "How can you think this? I know you are smarter than this." type thing.

[01:19:39] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:39] Michael McQueen: And this is the challenge I think in that moment, I need to step back and realize that person still has value, even if some of their ideas are dumb. You might lose respect for someone, but how do you not lose regard for them? And I think that's the challenging thing — the moment we're just willing to write people off because of the views they hold. Firstly, there's an inbuilt arrogance in that, that I did that. Maybe there's part of what I'm thinking that's true, that's actually not a hundred percent true and need to be willing to reconsider that. So there's an arrogance there. But it also means that you lose the ability to learn from that person. You cut yourself off from relationship. I mean, to the conversation you had with Dan Ariely about conspiracy belief, what's the first thing that causes people to go down that rabbit hole of conspiracy belief is being ostracized. Being shamed. Being embarrassed by people in their social group or their family or their friend network. And so, I think there's something that's dangerous about when we're willing to write people off because of the opinions they hold. And even people who've got really crazy opinions are still valuable human beings. And I think there's something important about keeping that front of mind and it changes the entire tone then, of the conversation. And it also, hopefully, limits the potential for the arrogance that can creep into that, "That I'm right and you are wrong. I'm spot on. You're an idiot." And we so often see those dynamics play out.

[01:20:48] Jordan Harbinger: In the book, you have this genius little bit about using someone's ideological bent in order to persuade them. Can you give us a Democrat and Republican or conservative example of this? Because I think that this would be so useful for people on both sides of the aisle to put into practice.

[01:21:06] Michael McQueen: So I think what you need to find out is, what is the core value of that person? So Jonathan Haidt would talk about this notion of the five moral foundations. So the moral foundations would be things like harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity. These are the things that typically, they're the big ones that shape our view of the world. How do you share your message in a way that resonates with that thing, with that way of seeing the world? So for instance, if you want to get a message through about making a social change, but if you're dealing with someone who let's say is Democrat or to the left of the ideological spectrum, you need to position that as being an issue of fairness or if an issue of equity. But if you want to position that as an idea that's going to appear to someone on the right end of the spectrum, you need to talk about how this deals with authority, loyalty, the notion of purity, the way society has been in the past, things we value as a community. So you can apply this in any number of things. If you take, for instance, climate change. Climate change is well expressed to people on the right end of this end of the spectrum when you talk about it in terms of technology, innovation, efficiency, doing what we as Western capitalist people do, which is find solutions to problems. Whereas if you want communicate to someone who might be resistant to an issue of climate or sustainability on the left. Let's say, for instance, you want to talk about nuclear power. You talk about how it's a far more fair, a far more equitable, far more sustainable approach to power, even though studies will reveal people toward the left end of the spectrum are resistant to nuclear power as an idea.

[01:22:30] If you position it in a way that resonates with what they value, which typically is fairness and goodness, they're far more likely to be open to it. The tricky thing is, you've got to get yourself into their shoes. You need to see the word from their perspective and genuinely think, "Okay, if I were them, what's the wording? What's the language? What's the tone that would resonate with me?" Because if you just communicate a way that makes sense to you, there's an inbuilt arrogance there. "That the way I see this, makes sense to me. Therefore, you should see it too." And the harder you push, the more evidence and logic you pile on, the more they'll typically dig their heels in. But if it's in a way that resonates with their worldview, they'll be far more open to it.

[01:23:05] Jordan Harbinger: Fantastic, man. Look, we basically ran out of time. I will say, this is super interesting. There's a lot more in the book that are just sort of rubber meets the road persuasion techniques. I'll go over a few in the show close that is not going to be on YouTube, that's always in the podcast feed. So if you're listening to this audio, you'll get that in a second. Before I go, I got to say, I love that you finally were able to put your finger on something that I've known intuitively for a long time, which is things that rhyme seem to make more sense.

[01:23:32] Michael McQueen: Yes.

[01:23:33] Jordan Harbinger: But that is misused by all these like BS self-help influencers. Like, "How you do anything is how you do everything." or whatever. And that might be a bad example because it doesn't rhyme. But there's all these silly, clever catchphrases. And if you ever go to a seminar, I won't name any names. If you ever go to one of those popular self-help seminars, half of it is clever trite bullsh*t that rhymes or sounds good and makes zero sense when you hold it under the light.

[01:24:04] Michael McQueen: Yeah. The problem with that is our brains can confuse fluency with accuracy. If something sounds right, if it's got a good syncopation, if it rhymes, not only is it more memorable, but we'll see it as more accurate or more reliable, even though it may have no basis to it at all.

[01:24:18] Obviously, if you've got a good message that is reliable, if you can make it rhyme, or make it have a poetic symmetry to it, it'll have more impact. So this is a tool you can use in a good way. But obviously, if you're trying to dress up garbage, poor thinking sloganism, unfortunately, you can have the same effect on something that really probably shouldn't be memorable or persuasive. But if it rhymes, it will be.

[01:24:39] Jordan Harbinger: Michael McQueen, thank you very much. We will link to the book in the show notes, of course. Please use our book links, folks, if you buy the books. jordanharbinger.com/books is where you can find 'em. This is a worthy read just because there's so much rubber meets the road. We didn't even get to a lot of it because we didn't have three hours. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it.

[01:24:56] Michael McQueen: My pleasure. Thank you.

[01:24:59] Jordan Harbinger: I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, I wanted to give you a quick bite of the episode I did with Mark Cuban of Shark Tank and Dallas Maverick's fame. Mark gives advice to entrepreneurs and founders in these uncertain times, tells us how he stays on top of trends and technology and how the US can compete with China.

[01:25:18] Mark Cuban: When everybody's afraid, the best way to deal with it is by coming together. It certainly seems a lot bigger than anything we've seen, you know, in my lifetime. And the combination of the protests and looting and the pandemic, all these things combined together to make for really uncertain times. And when people are uncertain about their future, that's why people rebel. Martin Luther King said, "Writing is the voice of the unheard." The only surprise is that it's taken this long. Kaepernick didn't even bring the focus to himself. He just happened to be taking a knee and somebody caught him with a phone camera.

[01:25:53] Jordan Harbinger: What would you have done in that moment, if that time? If he were your player, how would you have handled that?

[01:25:57] Mark Cuban: I'd hug him.

[01:25:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah?

[01:25:59] Mark Cuban: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:26:00] Jordan Harbinger: If you were a president, how would you improve race relations?

[01:26:03] Mark Cuban: I mean, I'd hug a few people.

[01:26:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:26:06] Mark Cuban: I'd walk out there and listen. I'd take advice. I wouldn't think I had all the answers.

[01:26:11] Jordan Harbinger: This piece you wrote, "Dear White people, we're the ones that need to change." this is probably controversial. I would imagine you get some blowback from something like that, for sure.

[01:26:18] Mark Cuban: A lot of people felt I was calling them out as racist, which I wasn't doing. In order for things to change, then people need to take measures and understand. Be very self-aware about what's going on with them and how people are living their lives.

[01:26:32] Jordan Harbinger: A lot of people don't seem to have much to look

[01:26:34] forward to right now. What do you think we should be looking forward to, as a nation?

[01:26:38] Mark Cuban: I mean, look, there's no better time ever, to start a business than right now because all businesses are effectively going through a reset. And so, there's a lot of advantages. And with the protests and the riots, it gives us just one inkling of hope that maybe we'll make progress. Maybe this time we'll listen.

[01:26:55] Jordan Harbinger: For more with Mark Cuban, including the future of the technology economy, check out episode 362 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:27:04] I love practical episodes like this. I really think there's so much here that can be, well, we can use immediately. There's a just clearly a big difference in what happens when our thinking mind is triggered first. When we are inquisitive first, we can stop rushing to judgment. We can stop sort of the knee jerk reaction. However, if we use our instinctive mind first, we start to rationalize that conclusion that we came to, right in the beginning, and that is just a sure-fire recipe for stubbornness. I think a lot of people are like that. I mean, most people are probably like that. Many people that I know, and I'm sure you've seen this as well online or in person, they're afraid that if one sacred belief unravels, the rest of their beliefs might follow. I don't know if this is a conscious thing. I think most people just kind of feel like they have bedrock beliefs and if they're challenged, they don't even want to face the possibility of what that might mean. So it's deeply unsettling for them. Too uncomfortable for most people. Also, expectations and perception. I recently had a acupuncture session. I'm not a big believer in alternative medicine. You may have noticed with Skeptical Sunday that I don't believe in a lot of that stuff. Placebo though, well-documented for pain relief. We've done whole episodes on placebo and there's probably more to come. But painkillers and pricing, at more expensive painkillers, kill pain better. It has nothing to do with the drug. It can be a sugar pill. There's many studies like this. So I recently had acupuncture and I was like, "Okay, this is going to take the pain away, but probably not do too much more." and boy, did it work even better than I thought. I still have all the mobility restrictions. It was on my shoulder. I still have all the mobility restrictions that I had before, but the pain is, I would say at least maybe 50, 60 percent gone. And it's because I expected it to work. And believe it or not, I expected it to work even when I knew that it was limited only to pain and it was almost certainly only placebo. So this stuff works, folks, even on yourself.

[01:28:56] Speaking of which, those of you who have teenagers at home, I don't have that yet. I have a three-nager who's kind of just as bad in many ways except he can't drive. We know that demanding compliance from these people is often a fool's errand. So what Michael says in the book is to ask questions. This is better than demanding compliance. So instead of, "Be home by 11.", you say, "What time do you think you will be home?" And often, the teenager will give an answer that is roughly appropriate or roughly accurate, and then they are much, much more likely to stick to that. Now, anybody with a teenager knows this is far from foolproof. But if you have a teenager, give it a shot. I think a lot of people who have grown kids have figured out how to deal with teenagers, and I would love to hear from you because, well, life comes at you fast and my kids are growing up and I need all the help I can get.

[01:29:42] People are more likely to focus on the upside of changing than they are to focus on the downsides of not changing. And this is a really interesting point. I wish I had more time to dissect here on the show with Michael because it should guide a lot of our decisions when we are trying to persuade someone, especially if we are trying to persuade someone to do something for their own good, right? So if we're more likely to focus on the upside of changing than on the downsides of not changing, that has strong implications for somebody where we are trying to get them to, let's say, stop smoking or get fit, instead of saying, "You're going to die if you don't stop smoking." You might want to say, "You'll be able to play with your kids and keep up with your son on the bike and go skiing with them, if you get rid of the smoking habit." Or, "If you get fit, you might live longer. You'll be able to see your grandkids. You're going to be able to get down on the floor and play with your kids." That's what finally got me off my fat lard butt and lost all that fat and got a trainer and everything through workout. I wasn't like, "Oh, I don't fit into my clothes anymore that much, and I've got a belly and my waistband rolls in my underwear when I bend over." Which is all true, right? No. I was like, "Wow, I can't really get down on the floor and play with Jaden, who is two at the time, because it takes me 13 seconds to get down and 38 seconds to get up." I didn't really time it, but it took forever and it hurts the whole time. So I thought, I need to figure this out. It wasn't about losing fat and finally fitting into my clothes or having less underwear band rolling, it was, "I want to be able to keep up with my kids and I want to be able to do fun stuff with them and not croak early because I wanted Chinese takeout all the time."

[01:31:14] Fear, on the same token, fear, it doesn't really persuade unless the person you're looking to persuade is already anxious. And it seems like brands know this because they make scary news headlines. But if fear doesn't persuade, then what are they doing? They know that we are already anxious. How do they know? They're doing it to us. They are encouraging us to be as anxious as possible. They want a sort of climate of generalized anxiety because then they can use scary news headlines to persuade us. It shows up everywhere. Brands do this in advertising. You see people do this with everything from dating to even your random run of the mill five o'clock news where they dramatize everything and make everything seem way worse than it is. We want to focus on benefits here. Because even if people are already anxious, let's not add to that. Focusing on benefits is always better. We want to reframe messages to promote hope, not dread. This is still persuasive. It's not sugarcoating, it's optimism and it's still effective. It's just not as ham-fisted as the other way around. And it's a net add to society instead of a net takeaway, which I believe fear and anxiety are, and I think most of you would agree.

[01:32:24] One last tip. This is à la Robert Cialdini, who's also been on this show a zillion years ago. Ask for advice. We call this the Benjamin Franklin effect. I use this in my life all the time. I talk about this on Feedback Friday all the time. If you ask somebody for advice, it links them to your problem. So if I ask for advice on a specific issue, people get more emotionally invested in helping me if I'm asking for their advice and trying to solve the problem. They are much more likely to, one, give me good advice. Two, connect me with other resources that might help me solve the problem. And three, actually care if I solve my problem. Because they're not worried about my problem per se, they want to make sure their advice was valuable because it ups their status, their social status, their self-esteem, whatever it is that you want to call it. So it really does work quite well. Ask for advice from people and it will link them to you, emotionally, in a very positive way. As long as you're not a needy weirdo about it, that's pretty easy to avoid, though. So I love that. It's called the Benjamin Franklin Effect, and it is brilliant. And if you need to know more about it, you can Google Benjamin Franklin effect, and there's this little apocryphal, possibly apocryphal story about how Benjamin Franklin borrowed a book from somebody that didn't like him and they ended up being friends because it was essentially him asking that guy for a favor, and then that guy rationalized that he liked him. It's not the exact same thing as asking for advice, but it is really the other side of that same coin.

[01:33:46] Hope y'all enjoyed this episode. I sure did. All things Michael McQueen will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes as well. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter and every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and we dissect the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show and I sure hope you are, and you want to recap of important highlights and takeaways or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a really good place to do that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. The Logical Fallacy Flashcards are almost done. Just figuring out how to put those online. It's proving to be a little bit annoying because it's not like a text file or a PDF. And you'll find out about those logical fallacy flashcards because we will send them to you if you are on the newsletter at jordanharbinger.com/news. Six-Minute Networking at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter or Instagram. You can connect with me on LinkedIn if you so choose. I actually use that platform.

[01:34:44] This show has created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in persuasion, psychology, how the brain works, decision making, definitely share this episode with them.

[01:35:08] In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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