Shankar Vedantam

There is some evidence that if you give people nudges to focus on accuracy, they'll kind of pause and reflect and be more accurate and be less likely to believe or share misinformation.

We have new data suggesting that that doesn't really work for people at the political extremes.

Their identity is overpowering these nudges for accuracy.

So we're going to have to think about addressing those people in different ways if we're going to want to reduce misinformation.

And I was a big hockey player.

And I picked a desk in the sub-basement of our building in the same room as Dominic, who had been there for a year.

And I had such a small apartment that I had no room for my hockey equipment.

So I brought it in and I said, I'm just going to store this here.

And this basically chilled our relationship.

For the next several months, Dominic barely turned around to talk to me.

He was pretty burned about the idea of me storing my stinky hockey equipment in our shared office.

Yeah, so one of the rituals of being a graduate student at most universities is they bring in guest speakers.

As a grad student, you're at the bottom of the pecking order, but you get to meet the speakers, take them for lunch, and then they often have a nice wine and cheese reception.

And so at the wine and cheese reception, you know, I was a poor student.

I was eating as much cheese as I could, drinking as much free beer as I could, and I wasn't paying attention to what I was eating, and I dropped this cheese cube.

It was about the size of a dice.

into my throat and it got plugged in my throat and I started choking.

And I tried to rinse it down with some beer, but that just made the situation worse.

At that point, I had zero oxygen going to my brain.

And I thought back to the times I used to work in the oil field of Alberta.