The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

Today's episode is about how we change our minds—and what political science tells us about the best ways to change the minds of voters. Our guest is David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California Berkeley, and the coauthor, with Josh Kalla, of a new essay in Slow Boring on Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the most persuasive arguments and messages to decide this election. Today, David and I talk about the four biggest myths of political persuasion—and in the process, David will attempt to do something that I’m not entirely sure is possible: He’ll try to change my mind about how persuasion works. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Broockman Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: "What's Better Than Calling Donald Trump 'Weird'?" https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-better-than-calling-trump-weird "Consuming cross-cutting media causes learning and moderates attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers" https://osf.io/preprints/osf/jrw26 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

16 Elo 202444min

Laurie Santos is a superstar in the crowded field of happiness research. She is a cognitive scientist at Yale University whose course on the psychology of happiness was the most popular class in the school's history. She is the host of the immensely popular ‘Happiness Lab’ podcast. Today, she and Derek talk about her favorite lessons from modern happiness research, lessons on striving and anxiety from existential philosophy, our relationship to time, the science of cognitive time travel, temporal mind tricks to reduce anxiety like "psychological distancing," and more. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

9 Elo 20241h 5min

In a special emergency-ish episode, Bloomberg's Conor Sen joins the show to discuss a buffet of economic and financial fears, including a disappointing jobs report, a meltdown in global stocks, the "carry trade" heard round the world, the smartest criticisms of (and smartest defense of) the Federal Reserve's decision not to raise interest rates, and more. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Conor Sen Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

5 Elo 202426min

Derek offers his thoughts on Kamala Harris, the new 2024 reality, and gender polarization in the "boys vs. girls" election. Then we talk about the spam apocalypse. The average American receives one spam call or text every single day, adding up to tens of billions of robocalls and texts per year. Derek welcomes Joshua Bercu, the executive director of Industry Traceback Group, to talk about the history and technology behind robocalls and texts, why it’s been so hard to hold robocallers accountable, how spammers do that thing where they make a call look like it’s coming from a local friend, how we've managed to crush certain kinds of robocalls, and what it would take to finally win the war on spam. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Joshua Bercu Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2 Elo 202452min

It is a general rule of thumb that richer societies are happier societies. This is true across countries, as GDP and life satisfaction are highly correlated. And it is true across time. Countries get happier as they get richer. But there is a caveat to this general principle. Which is that the United States is not nearly as contented as its gross national income would predict. In fact, the U.S. is, as we’ve covered on this show, in a bit of a gloom rut. It has now been nearly two decades since a majority of Americans have told pollsters at NBC that they’re satisfied with the way things are going. This hope drought has no precedent in modern polling. NBC itself reported that “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.” Polls show that faith in government, business, and other institutions is in free fall—especially among conservatives. But they also show that conservatives are generally happy with their life and in their relationships. If conservatives have happiness without trust, American progressives seem to have trust without happiness. In a recent paper called “The Politics of Depression,” published by the journal Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, the epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and several coauthors showed that young progressives are significantly more depressed than conservatives, have been for years, and the gap is growing over time. Other studies, including the General Social Survey, show the same. Why are young progressives so sad? Today’s guest is Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and coauthor of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’ He has written intelligently, critically, and emotionally about happiness, depression, politics, and progressivism. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Greg Lukianoff Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: "People in Richer Countries Tend to Be Happier" https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction "The Politics of Depression" by Catherine Gimbrone et al https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438 "How to Understand the Well-Being Gap Between Liberals and Conservatives" by Musa al-Gharbi https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/ "The Coddling of the American Mind" The Atlantic essay by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ [book] https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224897 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

26 Heinä 202455min

On today's episode: the state of American politics and the future of America's economy. Derek discusses a media myth in the aftermath of the failed Trump assassination attempt and reviews three basic truths about Joe Biden's doomed presidential bid. Then, Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee joins the show to answer Derek's blunt question, "Are you going to cut rates next month?" Plus, they discuss the Federal Reserve, how it works, how he sees the economy, whether high rates are constraining housing production, and whether Trump's signature economic policy idea—high tariffs in an age of global inflation—would help the U.S. economy. (TLDR: No.) If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Austan Goolsbee Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: “Stop Pretending You Know How This Will End,” Derek Thompson, The Atlantic “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” by Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

19 Heinä 202452min

Skyrocketing rates, shrinking affordability: The U.S. housing market is a mess. It's also a bit of a mystery. Why are prices still sky-high, even though many measures of demand are weak? If the supply of new homes is nearing a historic high, how come the inventory for existing homes is close to a historic low? Today's guests agree that this is one of the weirdest housing markets in recent history. Mike Simonsen, president founder of Altos Research, and Lance Lambert, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Residential Club, join to talk about the state of the U.S. housing market—what makes it ugly, what makes it weird, and what would have to happen to make it better. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Mike Simonsen & Lance Lambert Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

12 Heinä 202455min

Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance has created a crisis for the Democratic Party and a set of interlocking debates about whether the White House—or the White House media—covered up his cognitive decline. The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, who first wrote that Biden should drop out of the race two years ago, joins to discuss Biden campaign strategy and the hypocrisy of many Democrats who refused to state publicly what they knew privately: that Biden's age-related blunders were getting more serious. Then we are joined by the busiest man in media, Alex Thompson, political correspondent of Axios, who has absolutely dominated this story in the past week. As a group, we talk about Biden’s age, the Democratic campaign strategy—Project "Bubble Wrap"—that is blowing up in their faces, the failures of the political press and Democratic operatives to see what’s in front of their noses, and the chances that Kamala Harris will imminently replace Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Mark Leibovich & Alex Thompson Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

5 Heinä 202458min