Why Don’t Facts Change People’s Minds? | Dr. Jay Van Bavel - EP 805

25:44Jay as I was looking at the study, I couldn't help but think of Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety as well. And I wonder if you came to the conclusion after looking at what they were doing, do you think psychological safety isn't the absence of disagreement, but based on what I-House has shown, it's the presence of respect? Is that a good way to think about it? It's exactly how I got to think about our study, John, which is when I wished we had measured psychological safety when we started the study, but it wasn't until I got through the study and looked at all the data and all the qualitative reports we had from people that I came to the exact same conclusion as you.

26:26I thought what they've created here is psychological safety. And I talk in organizations about this a lot and about Amy Edmondson's work. And I always have to tell them the definition of psychological safety, because it's the opposite of the way it's talked about in the public sphere, that universities have safe spaces where everybody goes into a corner and everybody looks like them and they don't disagree. And I'm like, that's literally the opposite of what psychological safety is. It is a space where you're comfortable disagreeing. You're comfortable challenging the status quo. You're comfortable taking risks.

26:59And people won't reject you after, even if you're wrong, even if they disagree with you, even if you took a risk it failed, they value that and welcome you back. And that's really what unlocks human potential. It's what makes it safe to have conversations and understand people who are different than you. And so I tend to think of psychological safety as kind of that key ingredient to unlock the potential of diverse groups and diverse in the broadest possible way across belief systems, identities, cultures, religiosities. And I House just seems to have figured out the magical ingredients to create a culture where it's just psychologically safe for people.

27:42Jay, one of the things that got me excited about this conversation is that I think you and I share a few things in common. I think much of the public conversation is constantly focusing on what's broken in society. And so I've switched the whole direction of this podcast a number of years ago to really increasingly focus on what helps people thrive. And so I'm trying to examine all elements of how do you create flourishing? And I think it intersects beautifully with your work. And so I was wondering if you could give your definition of social flourishing. Oh man, that is a great question. To me, one of the core ingredients of social flourishing is social connection and a real form of inclusion where people value you for who you are.

28:35Now, I talk a lot about social inclusion because social inclusion is not only part of social flourishing, but it affects our psychological well-being. It affects our physical well-being. The research on this and the medical literature finds that loneliness is about as harmful to us as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of our mortality and longevity. So social connection is fundamental to life, to living. Aristotle said it best, we're social animals. This is like part of who humans are. And we become more isolated over time in society. People are dating less, marrying less, having families less.

29:16All of the markers of social connection, they have fewer friends, fewer best friends. And this is, by the way, especially among people who are less educated and lower income. I saw a study on this last summer. A lot of people who have a high school, lower than high school education have no best friends. And so there's inequality on the social flourishing aspect. And I actually, the Surgeon General called it an epidemic and a crisis, and I really think it is. And so I'm really interested in a what we can do to find and create environments that bring people together. And I'll give you an example of this I saw that was really beautiful.

29:55I live in New York. I was not a New York Knicks fan until this last few months. And they won this incredible run and were underdogs and won the NBA championship. And I've lived in New York 16 years. I have never seen the city come to life like that. People were cheering and huge watch parties on the streets, thousands of people giving high fives to people on the subway, singing and chanting together. Spike Lee even noted like crime went down. So there was these stupid videos of people vandalizing something. But if you look at overall crime, especially violent crime, it dropped in the whole city.

30:29And so because people had something that was connecting them to their neighbors. And now what's happening right now the entire United States, but also New York is the World Cup's happening. And I'm seeing all these, I wandered into a restaurant for my stepson's 13 year old birthday party the other day. And basically what happened was we were at this Planet Hollywood restaurant and it was a watch party for the Team Brazil, Team Morocco game. And there was everybody in the Brazil colors, all the Brazilians came to the city or lived here dressed up and the Moroccan fans, and they were singing and chanting and dancing.

31:02And it was such a joyous, it's called collective joy or collective effervescence. When people come together as communities around anything and sports is just one example and celebrate together. And it can be based on your national team or based on the local basketball team or something. And people were having watch parties. I was invited to friend's house for watch parties and we got together in ways we hadn't got together with people I hadn't really hung out with in that way. And that's how you build community and connection. And it feels so good. But our world is almost designed to avoid those types of things, to avoid talking to strangers, to make it frictionless.

31:38It's easier to stay home and watch a Netflix show than to go to the movie theater. It's easier to ask for advice to your chatbot than ask a friend for advice now. But I think you need to go to the bar and talk to your friend and walk through it because you're not just going to get the advice. And not only do they know you, but also it's the social connection that's going to be something that is a resource that makes you resilient when you go through a bad breakup or a period of an unemployment or whatever the thing is. And so we've offloaded so much of that to these artificial forms of entertainment and connection, and we're losing those rich forms of social connection that really foster the flourishing aspect.

32:16Yeah, I have to say, speaking of the World Cup, I think everyone has been hearing about the Scots and not only how they descended on Boston, but now 8 ,000 of them marching in unison to see a Marlins game. But I have really liked Norway and how you see thousands and thousands of fans rowing the boat all at the same time. It sure does show what potential communities could be if we all united instead of doing the opposite. I'm so glad you mentioned Norway. So So first of all, I have a position at the Norwegian School of Economics. So I go there every year and give a talk. I've done workshops there in my book.

32:57So I have a connection to the world in Norway. I just got back from there about a week ago. And this weekend I was at a local park and I set up a pickleball net with my son who's 16 and my daughter who's 14. And we were just going to play pickleball, which by the way, is also this amazing way to just meet people. So we set it up in the park. All of a sudden, these two Norwegian fans all the way from Norway walk up and they're wearing like a flag, like as a cape walking around New York and they bought two pickleball rackets and they said, we don't have a net. Can we play with you? And I said, sure.

33:27And so they played against my son and I, and these guys are Norwegian guys are huge. So like six, one is like five and we played them and it was so fun. They were good. They really whipped us good, but it was so fun. They were so friendly. We got talking about the game, their visit to New York. We gave them recommendations of things to do. And then the next night, the Norway game was here just outside the city in New Jersey. And it was just, it has this energy right now where you just can go talk to strangers and make these connections and you can see the pride they have and the joy, but it's also, the World Cup's beautiful because you can cheer for your team and you can connect with other fans.

34:06Notice you're not seeing any violence in the crowds. You're getting hundreds of thousands of people all wearing their jerseys chanting and you think of national conflict throughout human history, but you just aren't seeing it, you can have these identities and celebrate them in a joyous way and be inclusive of other groups and connect with them in a positive way. And this is one of the things I always try to drive home when I talk about identity. When people think about identities, they often think about, oh, nationalism, World War I, World War II, or genocide, or these awful moments of human history.

34:39And I say, you're forgetting what's happening 99.9 % of the time when people are getting together in groups. It's flourishing. It's connecting with strangers. It's supporting one another. It's cheering. It's all these beautiful things. And it also can be something that you can connect with people who are not even part of your group. As long as your group's norms are positive, the rowing thing isn't hurting anyone. It's beautiful. It's fun. It's great to see. And so part of it is also having these really healthy norms that you identify the group, but it's not in opposition to any group in any harmful, violent way.

35:17So I want to do a follow-up on that because I know your recent research has really been focusing on groups and how dramatically they can alter your perception, et cetera. But when I wrote my first book, Passion Struck, I was trying to outline if a person wants to change the trajectory of their life, what are the things that get in the way? And the first thing I went into is like their own fear of failure, their own identity that's been trapped since childhood. But then the next thing I went into was this concept that became the thing I talked about most about the book. I called it the mosquito principle, but it was really about that the next thing that's going to get in your way is your environment, because it shapes so much of the choices that you make.

36:05and it made me want to ask you based on your research, how much of human behavior is individual choice versus environmental influence? So this is a debate that goes back about 70 years, 60, 70 years to Kurt Lewin, who is really considered one of the fathers of social psychology. And he said even back then that it's most things are interaction. So it's not even just that personality drives you and your biology, which does matter a lot, or the situation. It's often an interaction. It's a person by situation interaction. So an extrovert is going to act very differently at a party. They're going to be the life of the party and going to really flourish there than when they're sitting at home watching TV or watching or reading a book.

36:52And so it's like they have that potential as a person and they might opt into those situations. But when they're in them, it brings out that potential in them. And so I like to think of it in kind of these dynamic interactions. The other way that we often talk about this in biology is nature versus nurture. Is it your nature or is it nurture the society around you? And almost always, we've now come to the agreement that it's both. But you're totally right that if we ignore the nurture, if we ignore the social influence, we're going to misunderstand why people are happy, why they succeed, how they can flourish.

37:28Because if you have a mismatch, you have the wrong person, maybe the right person, but in the wrong situation, you get a job that just doesn't fit you, you can be miserable. And the same person in a different job can flourish and have all this incredible potential and success. It is really important that we understand what situations are going to bring out the best in us, given our unique personalities. But I also drive home that when we talk about self-regulation and goal pursuit, there's a huge amount of research and books and discussion about how it's really at the individual. I got to have willpower and work hard and grind away, hustle culture.

38:04And there's a truth in that, but it's also just as critical to be in the right situation because if you're surrounded by the right people, they're going to support you and make it easier for you to succeed. This is something they say, for example, to people who are trying to say, quit drinking. If you're an alcoholic, and I've had family members who are, one of the first things you'll get advice to do is stop hanging out with your friends who are all heavy drinkers. Because otherwise, you'll never be able to quit. If you're always just hanging out with those friends at the bar, it's going to be impossible for you to have enough willpower to overcome that.

38:37You're going to have to hang out with a different set of friends or develop a different set of hobbies so that it's not triggering you all the time. If you want to lose some weight or get healthy, join a running group. Because guess what? You're going to meet people, but you're going to start running and it's going to be fun and you're going to get supported. And it's going to keep you going or get a workout buddy. And so those are the things that make it way easier than just fighting through willpower or trying to build the right habits is finding the right groups that are going to support you to flourish.

39:06And I would say this in your career, if you want to be successful in your career, find people who are going to push you to be successful, who are going to mentor you, who are going to challenge you, who are going to expose you to the right role models and ideas and ways of working. And if you look at one example of this, one of my favorite shows is The Chef's Table. Every episode on Netflix is one of the world's best chefs. And almost all of them went to a three-star Michelin restaurant and interned there and learned from one of the world's best people. And then they took those lessons and came back and built their own restaurant with its own culture and identity and cuisine.

39:41but they learn from the world's best so that they could then be that kind of next generation of excellence. It's like the bear, the best show I've ever seen on this. Yeah. It was funny. I was, I'm friends with Will Gadara and I happened to bring up to him, are you familiar with the show, the bear? And he said, no. And I said, I think they're using your entire book to create this show. And so he said, I have to start watching a couple episodes. So he starts watching a couple episodes. And next thing I know, he's on the show because they were. Yeah. Oh, man. That show is amazing. It's one of my favorite shows and my wife's favorite show to watch.

40:21And if you think of Will's work, I didn't expect to bring this up, but it really intersects with what we've been discussing because he talks about hospitality in a restaurant. But all of that is really about creating the community inside the restaurant, but then how they want their customers to feel with unreasonable hospitality. Isn't that a good way to think about it? So it's all about creating an experience. The world's best restaurants are about creating this experience, making you feel really valued when you come in and it's customized to you. The other thing about them that struck me, so I actually assigned Chef's Table all the episodes to my lab one summer, because I said, this is actually a great model for also a research lab, because a research lab is you're mentored by some top scientist, then eventually you become your own professor, start your own lab.

41:09But you eventually also need to figure out what your culture is going to be and how you're going to pursue your own excellence and with your own sense of creativity. And all of them have that. They have like excellence and a real aspiration towards creativity, but also culture. It's not just ever one person, all of these amazing restaurants have these incredible teams. And that's also what they show in the bears. All these people are building their skills the whole time. And then they all also go and do these internships in these other world's best restaurants to learn the skill that's relevant to their job to make a truly world-class team.

41:45And that's very much what science is like. And I think there's all kinds of fields like that. And so I think of it as when I think of how to be a successful professor or scientist. Some people have this theory of the scientist as Einstein, right? The lone genius. But almost none of us are lone geniuses. Pretty much every great scientist now has a whole lab or research team. And even if you look back to Einstein, his wife never got credit, but she was brilliant. And she was a brilliant physicist who helped him with a lot of his early major papers. And so almost everybody is doing it with a team.

42:19And so you really want to build a great culture with practices and procedures that leverage the insights and creativity and brilliance of everybody. And if you do that, you can do brilliant work for years and years. And it doesn't matter if you have a bad idea, someone else is going to root it out or find your error and correct it or have a different perspectives that you didn't see. And so it's really about harnessing a group to create an amazing culture. Let's take that a step further, because I was going to ask you the question, if you're going to design a community from scratch to maximize human flourishing, what would the ingredients be?

42:55But how about we go back to the I-House findings? Because what they showed was repeated contact, shared experiences, diverse perspectives, belonging, meaningful conversations, and psychological safety were the ingredients that were making that environment so successful. If you look at those ones I just mentioned, And which one do you think is most important? So it's like describing a recipe for a cake and saying, which ingredient is most important? The flour, the eggs? I think actually you unlock the potential for a place when you have the kind of four or five of those altogether. I think any one of those might not be successful without the other pieces.

43:37You can have contact, but if you don't have mutual respect, then the contact can backfire, can lead to conflict across differences. There's lots of evidence of that throughout history. And so you really need four or five of those three or four or five of those things together to create the cake and then have it emerge. But I will say one of the interesting things about I-House is almost everybody there is going to a university in New York, right? A lot of graduate students, master's students, PhD students, professional students. One of my favorite quotes I got when we interviewed all of them was one of the students was at Columbia University, which is an Ivy League university.

44:14Columbia is regularly in the top 10 universities in the world. And the person was going to Columbia full-time in some graduate program. And she said, I'm getting a better education at I-House than I am at Columbia. And how could that be? You got into one of these world's most exclusive universities. You have the top best professors, the best resources, massive endowment of support, great hit, incredible history, great resort facilities. And yet it's the place where you have dinner that you're learning more. And so I thought that kind of captured to me the essence of it is it's, you can put all these other things together, but if you don't have the right culture there, then you're not going to harness all the benefits.

44:56Whereas another place, even if they don't have a formal curriculum, even if there's not professors teaching you and you're not required to read textbooks, you can be learning more just by absorbing all the experiences of the people around you. If it's a situation that allows you to engage with them deeply. And so I think that's the thing. The culture is more important than all the expertise and resources and textbooks in the world. And if Columbia, Columbia's had a real, I don't want to come down too hard at Columbia. It's still a great university, but I have people in my lab who spent time there in the last few years.

45:28And it's really gone downhill in the last four or five years. It was like the student protests. And then they had a police campus. And then they had people occupy the buildings. And then they had the Trump administration take$400 million away. and then they had three presidents get fired in a row. And it has just been, you can have the world's best place and it's mismanaged. And it's really eroded this environment that is at one point, I think it will be again, one of the world's best educational institutions. But the culture there is not good. And it doesn't have the right leadership. People are in constant conflict from the students to the professors to the administration.

46:05Whereas I host, you feel much more synergy. There are disagreements. It's no place is perfect. but the culture is, seems to be like a hundred times better. And so people who are having that kind of apples to apples comparison are realizing and identifying and articulating that's the place they're learning more from. Maybe they need to put you and Scott Perry Hoffman in charge of cultural reinventegration. Scott would be fantastic. Yeah. So one of the things, Jay, I've really been working on over the past four or five years is studying the science of mattering. And speaking of Columbia, one of the people I interviewed for this is one of their prior provosts, Claude Steele.

46:47I've interviewed about 250 people for my book, The Mattering Fact, which comes out in October. And I wanted to ask you a question on this as it pertains to mattering. Do people become more defensive and tribal when they stop feeling like they matter? I think mattering is one of the most fundamental of human needs. I told you about this AI study I ran on chatbots and sycopency. One of the reasons I think the flattery from the chatbot resonates so much is because it signals to people that they matter, that they're being seen. And we actually created a new version of the chatbot that disagrees with you.

47:25But if it disagrees with you after making you feel seen, that's the one that people actually are willing to engage with, even if it disagrees with them. And it was inspired for me by Carl Rogers, who's arguably the most famous therapist. He was big on unconditional positive regard, which is basically that people, you can't get through to people and help them until they feel seen and that they matter to you. And he says, once you do that, by giving them unconditional positive regard, you can actually help them and work on the things that are their challenges they're facing and help them grow. But without that, they can close off and become defensive.

48:04And so I think that's why the mattering thing is so important. If you don't feel that people respect you or see you or think you matter, it's incredibly diminishing for people, has all kinds of terrible consequences for their mental health and physical health. So that's why I think that's a real fundamental, basic aspect of human nature. Well, this is where I disagree with our former surgeon general a little bit. He calls it an epidemic of loneliness, like we talked about earlier. I think loneliness is just one of the symptoms of the epidemic of not mattering, which I think is sitting underneath so many of these feelings that people have today, loneliness being one of them.

48:45But that's for a bigger discussion. That's interesting. I like it. It's very provocative. If you start thinking about disengagement, burnout, helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, they're all growing in epidemic proportions. When you look at what all of them have in common, it's mattering is mattering touches all of them. It's the foundation that all of those things are built upon. So that's what I keep coming back to. It's taking me a while to get there and a bunch of research, but that's what I'm finding more and more to be the root of it all. I think you're onto something. Like I said, I think it's really essential.

49:25And I think also connects to things like inequality, why it's challenging for people. If you feel like you're at the bottom of a hierarchy and you don't matter, that's really devastating. And it creates, I think, a lot of resentment, a lot of bad movements in political systems where you want to tear down the system if you feel that you don't matter or you've been demeaned or a group you belong to has been demeaned. And so this is a real core issue at the heart of a lot of the problems we have in society. I was actually talking about it a few months ago with Rick Hansen, who you may or may not know, but also with Joshua Green, I brought them both on to do this conversation on moving from us versus them toward a broader sense of shared humanity.

50:08And it was interesting because what we were talking about is that mattering helps people expand their circle of concern without feeling like they're losing their own identity or community. Do you see that as well? I think that's a really great insight. I think people need to have that sense of community. But also, again, even within a community, people need to feel like they're someone, that they have some value, that they have some social status. And so mattering is a good way of, I think, connecting to that basic need that people have. If they don't feel it, then they won't be identified. This is like, cuts to my research on identity.

50:48If you don't feel like you matter in a community, in an organization, in a relationship, you're going to become very disenchanted as it gets disengaged very quickly. I think, Jay, that begs the question. What do you think is harder today? Building cooperation within groups or building trust across groups? Okay, so you asked a question. I think it's harder to build trust across groups. I think trust, although I'm starting to study it more and more, I think trust is also one of those linchpin basic things. We're dealing with a loss of trust in institutions, a loss of social trust in our neighbors, and countries that don't have trust are lack resilience.

51:29When a crisis happens, people don't support one another. And so social trust and trust in institutions are two of the most fundamental things for a flourishing society. So now we're talking going from an individual to a society. If you don't have trusting institutions, societies fall apart. If you talk to political scientists and they say, how can we build up some country that's suffering? They'll say the first thing you have to do is build trustworthy institutions. And then if you're talking about how to build up a community, you need to have that social trust that I don't have to worry about locking my door.

52:01Or if my kid's playing out front of my building, my neighbor will have an eye on them. I don't have to worry about them being kidnapped or something. And so having high degrees of both forms of trust is really fundamental to every aspect of society flourishing and being successful. And we've lost that. We have a lot of bad incentives that are making it worse. a lot of attacks on our institutions, a lot of things that are eroding our sense of cohesion and connection with our neighbors. But I tend to think those are two of the most important things to a flourishing society. And I'm very worried that we're on such a bad trajectory.

52:35I don't know how we build those back, with the exception that if we have some source of collective joy that can bring us together, like the World Cup or the Knicks or something, those can quickly shift our psychology in ways that make us feel that connection to our neighbor again. But we definitely need that. And we also need to think, I say this as a scientist, there's been a lot of criticisms of science. We talked about the replication challenges of our field before. I think the burden is on us to produce more trustworthy research. And there's been a couple of reports recently in universities.

53:09One was by Yale University. They commissioned a report to go, how do we become more trustworthy again at higher education. And there was another one last week that was commissioned. And one of the things they said is we have to do work that is more trustworthy. We can't be too activist in our work. And we have to have really rigorous methods. And if we abandon that search for truth and rigorous methods, the public's not going to trust us. And guess what? In our world, they're not going to want to fund our research. They're not going to want to fund our universities. They're not going to want to send their kid to our classes.

53:40And so I do really think that a lot of academics feel very under attack right now. And I understand why the administration is attacking a lot of universities, cutting their funding. But I also think we have to do a lot of soul searching and look at why we've lost so much trust over the last 20 years, 30 years, and work on our end to make things better and make our work and our institutions more trustworthy. So I do think that's a burden that we have. And it's going to require a correction in course. We got to get better. So I've recently become aware and have been looking at the study that's going on of Microsoft.

54:14And I'm not sure if you're aware of this or participating in it, but given that they're Microsoft and the employees work for Microsoft, as I understand it, Microsoft has been storing all this data. So they've been looking at Zoom records or their equivalent. They've been looking at Teams meetings. They've been looking at emails. They've been looking at texts across their computer systems, and they've been trying to analyze whether people should work remote or come back to the office. And what I'm seeing the researchers are finding is that being on these Zoom calls and being remote is allowing them to build cooperation in their group itself, but it's drastically eroding the trust across the broader organization.

55:01And hopefully I'm interpreting this because it Seems like you're aware of this. I love that study. It was an analysis of 61 ,000 Microsoft employees and they tracked them right up because they had all their data right before the pandemic. And then right when the pandemic hit and went remote, they find working remotely, you can be just as effective as an individual. And it turns out you're just as effective on your individual team, the people you meet each week. But what gets eroded is your connections to other people in the organization and organizational trust and identity. But also the other thing that's potentially lost is innovation.

55:34Because a lot of innovation doesn't happen within a team, but at the intersections of teams or groups. So bumping into someone from sales at the water cooler, if you're from research and realizing that you have an idea that they can then take to the world or that they're realizing there's this gap of what they need and that you then realize, oh, you could help fill that. But you have to have those interactions with people from different groups to have those innovative breakthroughs as well. I saw this firsthand when I was a senior executive at Dell and three quarters of my employees were in other continents other than the US and people would ask why do you travel so much.

56:09It's because if you weren't there physically sharing meals with them, walking the halls, talking to the employees, they didn't trust you. So to me, it was really important with everything that we had going on to change the organization that you needed to be present to instill the trust to get them to follow your direction. That's something. So one thing I've talked to organizations about this, one thing I say is you either need to have regular in-person meetings. And so for me, after the pandemic, I told my lab, come in on Tuesdays and Fridays, and we'll have all our meetings and our guest speakers and stuff then.

56:45But at least everybody's in. And so you get those real in-person interactions. And then if you want to work from home the other days, read, write, do deep work. That's really important. And block off that time so you're not disrupted. Do that, and that can be really useful, and you don't have to commute in. But we have to have days where we come in together. Because the worst case scenario is some companies were forcing people to come back. but then they would stagger the days they come back. And then you just come in and do Zoom calls all day from your office. And that's the dumbest possible strategy is I'm going to do the commute, get dressed, come in, and then not see anybody in person all day.

57:19So you really have to have a thoughtful kind of coordination around ways to have in-person connections to build those relationships and trust. Jay, last question for you. If every listener or viewer wanted to contribute to a more civil, connected and flourishing society. What do you think is one practice they could begin today that would have the greatest ripple effect? I would say, reach out to someone and say something positive that's affirmational. That'll give them a sense of meaning. It turns out that, and I'll just go to one of my favorite studies on this, people underestimate how much pleasure they take in interacting with another person, even a stranger.

58:00So this was the study you might heard of on, it was on commuters in Chicago and they randomly assigned people on their commute to talk to a stranger and no one wanted to do it. They didn't think it would be fun, but once they did it, they enjoyed the entire day more. And even small talk, those small social connections, build social capital, build connections, build trust. And there's another study on this also from a different research group in Chicago, that even having conversations with someone who disagrees with you politically, people expect it to go way worse than it is. And they often find it's more enjoyable than they expect.

58:34And so again, our expectations are holding us back from talking to people who we'd otherwise benefit from and that would enrich our quality of life intellectually and socially. So that's what I'd say is reach out, make contact with one person today in a positive way. And it could be a stranger at the cafe. It could be someone you might otherwise think you might disagree with, but just try to have a positive, open-minded conversation with them and see where it goes. Awesome. Sounds like one of those studies was Nick Epley's work. Nick Epley, I thought you might've heard of it. Yes. Awesome. Well, Jay, where's the best place listeners can learn more about you, your work, and also your interview that you recently did with Oprah.

59:15Yes. So I have an interview coming out with Oprah on her TV show and podcast on August 6th. So it'll come out on Amazon on her podcast, but you can learn about everything. The best place is my Substack, which is the Power of Us Substack. And we share our research studies summarized in simple prose. So if you want to keep up with the research, but we also give practical advice. We also give things that people can use. Our Substack that came out today had teaching and educational materials for people who teach in high schools or colleges or in organizations. So we try to create practical things that people can use to enrich their lives, enrich the groups that they're part of.

59:54Awesome. Jay, such a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you as always, John. And again, fantastic questions. I was not expecting most of those, and I really enjoyed all of them. So super stimulating. Be sure to contact me when your book comes out. I'd love to do an interview with you for my sub stack. It sounds right up our alley. That's awesome. I hope today's conversation with Jay Van Babel leaves you thinking differently about one simple idea. None of us becomes who we are alone. Our identities are shaped by the relationships we build, the communities we invest in, and the cultures we participate in.

1:00:30While we often focus on changing our habits or strengthening our willpower, Jay reminds us that one of the most powerful ways to change our lives is to become more intentional about the people and the places that are shaping it every single day. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. And if you know someone who could benefit from this discussion, please send them this episode. One meaningful conversation has the power to change a perspective. And sometimes a changed perspective can change an entire life.

1:01:07And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to our YouTube channels, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. On Thursday, we're continuing our exploration of what shapes the lives we lead with Neil Shore, whose new book, The 25th Hour, challenges one of the most deeply held assumptions, that we simply don't have enough time. In our conversation, Neil shares a different perspective. He argues that the problem isn't that our days are too short, it's that we become disconnected from what deserves our attention in the first place. If today's conversation asked who is shaping the person you're becoming, Thursday's asks an equally important question.

1:01:46How are you choosing to spend your time on the life you're becoming? I think you're going to love it. The us are very negatively contagious and they spread very quickly. And it is absolutely part of what drains time and energy and focus. So it winds up being, oh, I got to go to that meeting or I have to sit with this person again or, oh, man, I really just don't want to go to that event tonight. And that negativity that we forecast and we spread winds up just being a presence that we create, that we can manage, that winds up just being like weights on our shoulder, just weighs us down. Until then, remember this, the environments you choose, the relationships you nurture, and the communities you build are all shaping who you are becoming.

1:02:47I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.