Dan Ariely
speaker
111 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dan Ariely’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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People ask about remote work and people ask about remote studying and what do you do with domestic violence and how do you get people to wear a mask and lots and lots of things. And I am feeling this unbelievable height of my career. And all of this is wonderful. And all of a sudden, about four months into it, I get a simple email from somebody. And somebody says, Dan, what happened to you?
What's wrong with you? How did you become that person? And I answer very quickly, what kind of person? This was a person I helped at some point. I volunteered time to help her. I thought this was a good thing. And she sent me a list of links. And this list of links, it's like opening a curtain and saying,
realizing that the world has a very, very different idea about me, something that I had no idea, not understanding. And I'll just describe to you one video. One video shows me in hospital, burns, they got some pictures. It says I was burned early, 70% of my body, almost three years, all of this correct. And then the video goes on to say that this is why I started hating healthy people.
And that's why I joined Bill Gates, the cabal, the Illuminati, to try and kill as many healthy people as possible. First with the pandemic and then with the vaccine when there would be one. And there were many links like that. There was one video of two women sitting like in a living room setting, complaining about me, discussing my downsides. I started getting death threats. It became very tough.
The last death threat came just a few months ago. So it was... First two years, it maybe was once a day. Now it's slowed down, but still. And my first reaction was to talk to those people. And I said, if they only knew, if they only knew that I wake up in the morning and all I try is to help. That's the only thing that drives me is try to help as many people as possible.
I might make some mistakes from time to time, but my only motivation is to help. But talking to those people only got things worse. It was a very tough month. I learned a lot, right? We said you dive into something, you learned a lot. So for example, in psychology, there's a notion of scarcity mindset. And scarcity mindset is usually thought of for people who are very low income.
And the idea is that if you're concerned with, will I have money for dinner? Will I have money to pay bills? Some of your IQ is dedicated to those tasks, and your active IQ dedicated to other things goes down. So people perform worse on IQ tests. It's not as if they have worse IQ. It's just that some of their mind is occupied. For me, part of it was, what are they talking about me now?
When's the next death threat? And so on. I felt I had less IQ. It was just incredible. I had a very, very tough month trying to argue. I joined discussions group and Zooms and Telegram and WhatsApp and all kinds of crazy sites. And at the end of the month, I decided to give up. I said, I'm not going to convince anybody that I'm not evil. I tried for a month. I failed.
I'm a slow learner, but I learned. And I decided to turn it into a learning process. And I said, okay, I am very close to this phenomenon. Very few people in the world have been attacked this brutally, and very few people are social scientists who have been attacked this brutally. I'm in a unique position to both care a lot and try and understand this.
And then I spent two very, very complex, difficult years. For example, there was one guy, these people thought that there will be Nirenberg 2.0 trials in which the people who committed crimes against humanity like me will be sentenced for their trial. And there was one guy who said he wanted to be my executionary. And I talked to him. I said, okay, I'm going to forget the executionary for now.
Help me understand. So I tried to understand them. By the way, I gave ChatGPT my book. And I said, please summarize it in one word. And the word was empathy. And I kind of like that. At the end of the day, it's a very sad story about our time, but I think I ended up having a lot of empathy for my attackers.
So first of all, I think your conclusion that we're all susceptible is very important because it's very easy to say, oh, it's them versus us. We don't need to worry. Because we're good people and it's those people and they need to worry. But of course, it's not them versus us. It's humanity. And we have a machine that is creating stress and information and so on.
And it's leading us down a path toward misbelief. And the first thing that I learned was causing people to question the current narrative and to go for an alternative one is stress. And I don't mean distressed of saying, gee, I have too much email. I don't know how I'll finish. I mean, the stressing, I don't understand the world. Why am I sick? Why did I lose my job?
My parents told me I'll do better than they do. Why is my town losing? I mean, just think about it. What are the Houthis doing attacking American merchant ships around the world? What is Iran exactly doing? And my students, right? They say things like, tell me that whatever profession I'm learning now will still be around in three years. So I'm not so sure.
So we're dealing with a period of very high stress and very low resilience. We don't have the same number of good friends. We don't spend enough time with extended family. At work, we don't have friends anymore. We have work friends. Economic inequality is decreasing resilience. So we're dealing in a very tough period. And look, the stress in the world is the stress in the world.
The hooties are the hooties until we get rid of that problem. It's not something. But the thing that we need to deal with is resilience. I have to say that part of my attempt to try and understand this problem is my attempt to control it. If you're a victim, which I was for the first month, I was just a victim. I was just accused, accused, accused, accused.
And by starting to study it, I had some of my own autonomy, some agency. I said, okay, now I'm studying you. You're the one who's been attacking me. You want to be my executioner? Fine. Help me understand how you got to these beliefs.
Yeah. I needed to understand what was going on. In some sense, what you're asking, and it's very true, in some sense, I was doing what they were doing. So the misbelievers, as I call them, were living in a very, very stressful time, and they were looking for an explanation. And they found Bill Gates and the cabal were doing kind of things. Me, I was also in a very stressful period.
I was also looking for an explanation. But the explanation I was looking for is explanation about the interaction of human nature and technology. I think it's a healthier journey. And I looked at it more as a scientist. But I think, yes, the part of getting control, explaining the story, understanding what is going on, these were very important parts of the story.
By the way, it is tough. There's a good chance that some of them are still after me. There's a good chance that even this podcast, some people would write some really terrible things.
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