The Debt Trap

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

0:04It happens all the time. The lovely couple with a nice house, beautiful family, and gainful careers unexpectedly find themselves drowning in tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. Debt grew by $93 billion at the end of 2024, and half of that increase came from new credit card debt. Or maybe it's the fresh college graduate who, rather than looking forward to a bright future and a sense of freedom,

0:35finds himself trying to pay back a series of compounding loans, only to watch the balance grow year after year after year. One out of every four Americans with student loans is delinquent. That's nearly triple the pre-pandemic delinquency rate. And then there's the retiree who thought she had enough saved, until one medical emergency wiped out her nest egg. And so you just start chipping away at your savings, chipping away at everything you have,

1:06and ultimately chipping away at retirement.

1:10It's easy to believe this would never happen to me. I would be smarter, savvier, better at saving. And yet, hundreds of millions of people around the world find themselves enmeshed in debt. Some of this has to do with reckless spending, of course. But even when you do everything right, budget, plan, and make reasonable choices, debt has a way of surprising you.

1:39Today on the show, the unseen traps that influence our behavior when it comes to money, the entities that take advantage of our mistakes, and how to win back our freedom.

1:51The psychology of debt. This week, on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms.

2:22Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources.

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3:46We like to think we are good with money. Make a budget, save a little bit each week, open a retirement account. With a little willpower and discipline, we're going to be okay. At Wright State University, John Dinsmore studies financial decision-making, how our minds work when it comes to money, and why our hopeful plans often fail to come to fruition. John Dinsmore, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks for having me. John, I want to start with the story of businessman David Siegel and his wife Jacqueline.

4:18Who were they, and how did they first come into money? Well, David Siegel was the timeshare king of the United States. So, for those who aren't familiar, a timeshare is, let's say you want to have a vacation home in Florida, in Miami. Rather than having to buy an entire condo on your own, you would buy some portion of it, and you would be assigned a certain number of weeks to be able to use at that timeshare location.

4:48But for a company like Westgate, which was David Siegel's company, it would also open you up to a larger timeshare network, so that if you didn't want to go to Miami on vacation every year, you could maybe take weeks at some of their other properties, you know, Las Vegas, San Diego, or wherever. And I understand that Jackie was a former Miss Florida pageant winner, and the two of them met in 1998, fell in love, and had eight kids together. Yes, yes. So he had, David Siegel had been very active with that particular beauty pageant,

5:24and started to court Jackie. And yes, they had eight kids, which is a lot of kids, and so they were living together in what we would consider a very large house. It was like 26,000 square feet.

5:47So this 26,000 square foot home in Florida, it had 17 bathrooms, but apparently it wasn't really big enough, because they started to imagine building an even bigger house. Yes. Well, they said they were just bursting at the seams, which is probably a, you know, they probably have a different standard than a lot of us, but bursting at the seams with 26,000 square feet, and I think they had gone on a vacation to France and seen the Palace of Versailles, and decided, you know what, we're going to build a house just like the Palace of Versailles,

6:22and I think it was going to be like 90,000 square feet. I want to play you a clip of Jackie walking around the foundation of the house as it's being built. She and David are describing their plans for the home. This is from the documentary, The Queen of Versailles. And then he says, I want a health spot. And then I said, we need maid's quarters. I forgot how many kitchens, 10 kitchens. We have a sushi bar. Two tennis courts, one will be a stadium court.

6:53Full-size baseball field. Which will double as the parking lot when we have parties. But this is our ice skating slash roller rink. So life is good. They're clearly living the American dream. What happens next, John? Well, the Great Recession starts. And with the Great Recession, well, Lehman Brothers falls, and the banking industry is in crisis, and so no loans are going out. So David Siegel, with all of his properties, and in particular, a new property,

7:25what, PH Towers in Las Vegas, well, the bank stopped lending money. And so all of a sudden, there was no money to be had anywhere. So they have to figure out not only what to do with David's business, but also with this gargantuan house that they were in the middle of trying to construct. I understand that before your academic career, John, you had a previous life in real estate,

7:58so you understand well the role that money plays in the real estate business. Yeah, so for real estate developers, you know, it takes so long if you're building a shopping center or something like that. These projects are like, they take 10 years to come to fruition. So I was actually out in Vegas when PH Towers was being built. And a project like that probably had started five years before that when the market was really good. But we were, all of us out at this real estate conference in Las Vegas were looking at PH Towers

8:33and another place that was called City Center and just thinking, well, the market was already falling. How are these things going to survive? I mean, it was a very obvious crisis that was unfolding there.

8:51I want to play you another clip from the documentary. This is David Sahn, who was also a vice president of Westgate Resorts, describing the scenario. He will tell you that the lenders are pushers. They got us addicted to cheap money. And once we were addicted, they took away our money. And now we're addicts. We have to have that money in order to maintain the company that we built. It's striking, John, the use of the words pushers and addicts.

9:25It is. I mean, I would argue that he's maybe rationalizing a little bit to deflect some blame. I mean, these are not unsophisticated people. But he is right in the sense that when money is coming to you and it's affordable, the tendency is to think that it's always going to be that way. When, if you take a moment to think about it, you'll understand that, you know, things change. So the stock market is plummeting. It's, you know, once in a century financial crisis, it's called.

9:57What happens to this company and what happens to the Palace of Versailles, the new Palace of Versailles? Well, the company can't do anything if it's not getting money from banks, right? They've already put as much of their own money into it as they have. And then they need regular, they're called loan draws, to keep the building going. And without the loan draws, they can't do anything. So they have to lay off all of their people. And on a personal basis, the Siegel family is looking at this $100 million house that they're building.

10:28And they can't move forward on that either because they don't know. I mean, at some point, they tried to sell it while they were going through this cash crunch. But the difficulty is in a recession like that, nobody has any money. So, you know, they were trying to sell the biggest house in America at a time where no one's buying any houses, let alone, you know, a 90,000 square foot house.

10:58I'm wondering what you make of the story, John. In many ways, these people seem so completely out of touch with reality. They have maids and drivers and private planes, and it's hard to feel sorry for them. And yet, there also seems to be something very human about their story. It is very human. I mean, they seem like nice people, right? Even though they're living this very extreme sort of lifestyle. At one point in the documentary, a friend of Jackie's, I think, is having trouble making her house payments.

11:29And so Jackie sends her, I want to say, $5,000 to hopefully save the house. They had had a good run of success, however much luck was involved. Things had been working well for a while. And then they just got in over their skis a little bit and didn't think that things would turn against them. And all of a sudden, they had to start, you know, making some pretty tough choices as far as, you know, things to give up and how to keep the house and all those things.

12:03So where do things stand right now with this grand house, John? Is it still under construction or what's happened to it? It is still under construction. They had paused construction during the financial crisis because they didn't have any money. They had tried to sell the partially constructed house at one point, but no one was buying. But after a few years and once Westgate Resorts was able to, you know, move forward and become financially solvent, they began construction again.

12:34But Jackie just posted on social media this year that it is still not finished.

12:42The story of David and Jackie may seem extreme, but it illustrates many of the psychological traps that affect us all. More on how these traps work and how to avoid them when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain.

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14:15This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. John Dinsmore studies financial decision-making at Wright State University. He's also a fan of the hit television show, The Office, where Steve Carell plays Michael Scott, an office manager at a paper supply company whose dreams are much bigger than his reality. In one episode, Michael visits a high school. He's meeting a group of graduating high school seniors whom he first met 10 years earlier when the students were third graders.

14:48During that earlier meeting, Michael promised to pay the entire class's way through college. John, you've seen this episode many times and say that it's based on a real-life story? Yes. There was a man named Eugene Lang who was a wealthy investor in New York City. And so he had visited an elementary school in Harlem where he promised those sixth graders, I guess, that he would pay their way through college. And he had significant resources. He not only followed through on the promise, he put another 16,000 kids through college.

15:22Wow. Was the same true for Michael Scott in the fictional TV series? The same was not true. Michael Scott wanted to be a hero to these kids, but he had no such resources. But he thought that he would one day. But unfortunately, it didn't work out quite that way. I want to play you a clip from that episode. It's both funny and sad. You lied to us. I lied to myself, too. I'm not a millionaire. I thought I would be by the time I was 30, but I wasn't even close.

15:55And then I thought maybe by the time I was 40. But by 40, I had less money than when I was 30. Maybe by my 50s. I don't know. John, you say the story is a classic example of optimism bias? Absolutely. I mean, we all tend to think that our ship's going to come in, that we're going to get our big break, or we're going to get the promotion. We don't really ever think about that. Life is full of surprises, both good and bad. So, you know, we never think that, you know, maybe we'll get laid off from a job where about half of workers get laid off at one point or another, or we don't think we're going to get passed over for that promotion.

16:33But these things happen. But when we think about the future, we never really incorporate those potential negative surprises into our vision of the future. You once saw a documentary about D-Day, which gave you another interesting example of the optimism bias. Can you tell me that story?

17:00Okay, so the documentary was going through the events of D-Day, and then they would flash forward talking to some veterans decades later, recalling their experience. And there was a man who stormed the beach at Omaha, and he recalled getting briefed on the mission ahead. And the commanding officer said, look, two out of three of you are not going to make it through this. And he was 18 years old, and he looked to the man on either side of him and thought, well, these poor bastards.

17:30He never thought that he was ever actually in danger. He thought that, well, the people next to me have 100% chance of not making it through, but I'm going to be fine. And that's very optimistic, and the younger we are, the more optimistic we tend to be.

17:53Talk about this. There's research that shows that younger people tend to have more of the optimism bias than older people. Yeah, so the younger you are, the more optimistic you tend to be. The more you think things are going to fall into your favor. And so this is, it's a great thing for perseverance. Optimism is, it's not always great for dealing with finances. It tends to have us bite off more than we can chew. I'm thinking about all the choices that young people have to make.

18:31When you're in your late teens or early 20s, you might be deciding to go to college. You might be deciding to take on student loans. You might be a young person just starting out in your first job. And if you actually believe that things are going to be rosier than they actually are, you could be in for a surprise. Absolutely. It's at a time where a lot of people, you know, when you're 18, you're thinking about going to college. You're considering student loans. And this is at a time where, I mean, if you're like me, you're not really sure what you want to do.

19:05And if you pick a major, you don't know if you'll enjoy it, you'll be good at it, or you'll even work in it. And yet you are having to take out debt to finance this education for something where you may or may not be making enough money to justify the investment. Hmm. I want you to tell me a personal story. I understand that in the fall of 2005, life was coming at you pretty fast. You had just been offered a job in Richmond, Virginia. You'd also met the woman of your dreams in Washington, D.C.

19:38Tell me about your life at that time, John.

19:41It was a really exciting time. I was working for a real estate development company, and I had met Alyssa up at Glover Park in D.C. There was a dog park there, and we were both walking our dogs. And we started dating in November, and it was a bit of a whirlwind romance, and the real estate company wanted to move me down to Richmond, Virginia from D.C., and I just – we were on the same page of where things were going between me and Alyssa.

20:12So I just assumed she would come, and she was fine with it, but she said, you know, I'm not moving to Richmond with my boyfriend, wink, wink.

20:21So – which was fine. We were – you know, we were both on the same page on that. So we were – we went down to Richmond to look for a house, and separately, I was looking for a ring. So you were hoping to close on a house and then propose to Alyssa. You knew a friend of a friend who was a mortgage broker who was going to help you through this transition. Yeah, it was actually one of the owners of the real estate company that I worked for.

20:54He recommended a friend to me. So we started going through the process of getting approved for a mortgage, and he said there shouldn't be any problems.

21:07You were also buying a ring. Were you planning to pay cash for the ring, John? No. So we were – I was going to put the ring on credit, but wanted to wait until the house was bought so as to not have anything extra on my credit report when we were doing the underwriting for the house.

21:29All right. So there's a lot going on. You're getting engaged. You're moving to a new city. You're trying to buy a house. You're trying to buy a ring. Tell me what happened next. We were about two or three days before closing the house, and then the mortgage broker calls up and said, well, there's a problem, and the mortgage that I told you you would be able to get, we can't get. So you're going to need to do something called a no-doc mortgage. And a no-doc mortgage, this is in the height of the housing craze in the housing bubble.

22:03It was a mortgage you could get without providing any proof of income.

22:10And in exchange for not providing proof of income, you were going to pay a higher interest rate and higher fees.

22:23Well, you must have been taken aback at this point because it felt like the rug was being pulled out from under you. So, yes, I didn't necessarily suspect anything right away. It was more just, okay, well, you know, I don't want to be homeless, and we were supposed to have this house in a couple of days, but felt really stuck. We actually didn't feel like we necessarily had any other option.

22:51So there were a couple of moments when you realized that something was off. First, you had your dad look at the paperwork. Yeah, my dad was a real estate attorney in Virginia Beach, and so he offered to do the closing. And when we were going through the closing, he noticed, first he noticed a prepayment penalty. And he said, well, these are illegal in Virginia, so you should talk to your underwriter to have it removed. But we went ahead because we wanted to close the house.

23:24And I can't remember if I ever talked to the underwriter about the prepayment penalty, but we would refinance some years later, and then we got this, you know, mystery check for $3,000 after the refinance, which was refunding the illegal prepayment penalty. So the people you were working with don't seem like particularly nice people, John. You could say that. I mean, working in real estate development, a lot of times you are swimming with sharks, and it felt at times that I was swimming with sharks.

24:00Now, the other owner of the company, when he had asked me about how the closing went, and I told him, he got just kind of an annoyed look on his face. I think he immediately smelled a rat and said, you know, next time, let me put you in touch with someone. And that was the first time where I really thought, okay, this was maybe deliberate. So the fact that you ended up not getting the mortgage you thought you were going to get, that you had this last-minute switch, how much did it end up costing you over the long run, John?

24:31Let's see. We had that mortgage for probably about two years. And the original, like, more normal mortgage was going to be about $2,100 a month. And the no-doc mortgage took us to, I think, $3,300. And so you do the math, a couple of years, it cost us about $30,000. Wow.

24:57You talk about a principle known as intertemporal discounting, and it's all about how, in some ways, we imagine that the future is going to be more flush than the present. And this is true when it comes to time. It's also true when it comes to money.

25:11Yeah, absolutely. So if you take the instance of this no-doc mortgage that I found myself in the middle of, there were a lot of components to it where you look at it and there are fees there that are just getting rolled into the loan. And when something gets rolled into a loan, whether it's a mortgage or a car loan or something like that, because it is pushed off into the future and it's bundled with all these other fees, we tend to not really understand how much we're paying for it and how much it's actually costing us.

25:45So in other words, if someone were to tell you, you know, you have to pay $500 more today, you might say, well, I don't have $500. But if someone says you have to pay $500 two years from now, you imagine that your future self is somehow going to be able to come up with that money. Absolutely. Well, and it's off in the future, too. And so it doesn't really seem like $500, as silly as that sounds. I'm wondering how this speaks to the growing interest in, you know, buy now, pay later schemes. These are not just credit schemes. These are just schemes that basically defer payments into the future.

26:18And there are a whole number of marketers and companies that have sprouted up that allow us to buy, you know, seemingly extravagant things today with the promise that we don't have to pay for them today. Right. Buy now, pay later is it continues to surge in popularity. And it's really just a reframing of credit cards. But one of the funny things about how inconsistent we are in assessing the cost of debt is that, okay, we're not going to call it credit card.

26:48We're not going to call it a loan. We'll just call it buy now, pay later. And that sounds very friendly, even though it's the same thing. And if you look at the interest rates on some of these things, they are as high or higher than an expensive credit card. But because we see it, oh, well, this is just, this isn't a credit card. This is, I'm just getting it now and then I'll deal with it later. It shouldn't sway our decision making, but it does.

27:13You know, I was reading a New York Times article a few weeks ago, John, and it was about a buy now, pay later company called Klarna. And it used a term that I had not heard before called Klarna maxing. Have you heard this term before? I have not heard Klarna maxing. I mean, I think if we go back to like the no-doc loans, of course, it's an absurd notion that we'll lend you $300,000 to buy a house without, you know, verifying your income. And that will work for a while. But when the economy turns and economies go through cycles, that's when a lot of these things come crashing down.

27:49Now, I don't know Klarna's specifics in terms of how they deal with this. But if you look at the mortgage industry, their thing was, well, we'll be selling these liabilities off to other people. So I'd be curious to see if they're holding those liabilities or not. Because, you know, once the economy goes in a downward turn, a lot of these people are going to stop making payments. When we come back, more mental traps that can lure us into debt.

28:21You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's no small business like your small business. The Hartford can help protect your company with decades of experience, delivering speed, ease, and accuracy. Get a quote or find an agent at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness.

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29:52I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had an experience in your life where you thought you were getting a great deal, only to find yourself mired in debt? Have you found ways to protect yourself from getting in over your head financially? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the audio file to us using the email address feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

30:24Use the subject line money. Again, that email address is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. John Dinsmore studies financial decision-making at Wright State University. One thing he's noticed is that smart people often think they will never fall prey to debt traps. But while financial smarts and self-discipline can certainly play a role in building good habits around money, some of the mental forces that draw us into debt are wired into the unconscious algorithms in our heads.

30:58Becoming aware of them can protect us from problems we didn't see coming. John, I want to talk about a time you and your wife went on a cross-country road trip. It turned into something of an adventure. What was the plan and what happened? So it was during lockdown with COVID, and so you couldn't really fly to anywhere. So we had an SUV, and it was rated to be able to tow up to 5,000 pounds. So we decided to rent a camper and tow it down to Florida to see my mother-in-law.

31:38And how did it go? Let's see. We're in Dayton, Ohio. By the time we hit Cincinnati, it was overheating, and we still had to get all the way to South Florida. So it was touch and go for most of the time, and then we made it back. It was a good trip, if a little harrowing. We had to buy a lot of coolant for the SUV. And a few weeks after we got back, we were having lunch, and we looked out, and we just heard a pop.

32:08And all of a sudden, there was just auto fluid all over the parking lot. Our car had died. What happened next, John? Did you have to get a new car? Well, first we had it towed to the dealership to have them evaluate it, and they told us, well, it's going to be $14,000 to fix your car. So clearly we weren't going to do that. So it was time to get a new car. So we went shopping, but unbeknownst to us, the car market during that time was, cars were very scarce.

32:41It was very hard to find a car. So even just to find a car was an achievement, let alone to, you know, be able to negotiate a decent price and that sort of thing. I understand that you found a car that was supposed to be extremely reliable. Right. After our SUV had died, we really wanted to, and we had loved the SUV, but it was not the most reliable. So this time, we were going to go for a brand known for reliability.

33:13And because cars were so scarce, we saw them roll one off of the truck, and we literally just said, we'll buy it. Because it was the only car that the dealership had.

33:29I understand that they told you that this was the kind of reliable car that people give to their grandchildren. So this was a pitch that the car was going to be super safe and last for a very long time. But as the paperwork was coming together, they decided to suggest adding a little protection to the car. Right. When they were trying to convince us to buy the car, it was all about safety and reliability. That this, you know, you can't kill these cars, essentially. And so we committed to buying it. We get through the paperwork for buying the car, and then came the pitches for all the add-ons.

34:03And so what was this car is indestructible turned into, but if something goes wrong, it could really ruin you financially. So you're going to want to buy all these extended warranties and protective coatings and all these things.

34:22Did you wonder if this car is so reliable, why are they asking me to buy all these warranties? Yeah, I thought, am I crazy? Like five minutes ago, you were talking about how this thing was the best car on earth. And now it was, boy, you've got to watch out. This thing really could set you back if it breaks down.

34:42So talk about this idea, because this happens all the time when people buy products. They are rated extremely safe, extremely reliable. But at the point at which people are pulling out their credit cards, we're often told that we should buy an extended warranty. We should buy insurance, effectively, to protect the car from its own destruction. Talk about the psychological factors that this kind of marketing is playing on, John. Right. So there's a phenomenon known as loss aversion, right? That we hate losing much more than we love winning.

35:13And so this is why we typically, if we have stocks or investments that are gaining, we tend to sell them too early. And if we have investments that are losing, we tend to hold on to them because we just don't want to lose. If we just hang around long enough, it'll come back and it won't be a loss. Well, this also manifests itself in things like buying unnecessary warranties and that sort of a thing. And all of a sudden, you know, buying an extended warranty for however many thousands of dollars for your car, which might have seemed absurd 30 minutes ago, starts to have some appeal to it.

35:46Because, well, for most people, you know, the car is the second biggest purchase they ever make in their lives behind a house. So you don't want that to turn into a loser. So you're willing a lot of times to take on the extra expense of these extended warranties. We talked earlier about the disconnect between our present selves and our future selves. You say this plays into a concept called expense prediction bias. What is expense prediction bias, John? Expense prediction bias goes to the fact that we all have too many expenses in life.

36:23And so to actually try and keep some sense in your head of what your expenses are is nearly impossible. Now, we are able to quantify in our heads what they call regular expenses. Regular expenses happen at the same time every month for the same amounts. So your mortgage, you're going to remember that. Your electric bill, you're going to remember that because they happen at the same time for the same amounts. But most of our expenses are actually irregular, right? Car repairs, travel, entertainment, health care, they happen every month, but they don't happen at the same times and for the same amounts.

36:57And so when we try and quantify these things in our heads, we massively underestimate what our actual expenses are. And so when we're looking at taking on debt or making a big purchase that requires financing, we tend to dramatically underestimate our ability to pay for things. So this is not so much something that marketers are doing to us. It's just something that we are doing to ourselves. In some ways, we are overestimating our capacity to pay for our debts in the future. Right. We are all at a disadvantage when trying to figure these things out.

37:29And it's not because we lack intelligence or background. It's just there's just too many things to be able to keep straight in your head. So if you're trying to make an itemized list of all your expenses, you're not going to be able to do it. One idea that we have circled around over and over in this conversation, John, is the idea of self-control. And of course, we've talked about self-control previously on Hidden Brain. But talk about how self-control affects our ability to deal with debt and to handle our expenses.

38:04So self-control is something that enables us to be able to hold off committing to something. But we tend to think of self-control as being a stable personality trait when actually it's a reflection of where we are in the moment. Over the course of a day, a lot of times if we're dealing with a lot of complicated issues or facing some difficulties, our self-control can actually degrade over the course of the day.

38:37So even if you are a very disciplined person, you still are going to find yourself in moments where maybe you are more impulsive than maybe you normally would be. I understand there was one study where gamblers were offered a drink at a casino and it changed how they behaved subsequently. Right. So if you've ever been to Vegas or to any casino, the adage is that once you start winning, then free drinks start coming to you. And people see that for what it is, right?

39:08A chance to maybe degrade people's judgment and have them make bigger bets than they normally would. But a study found that even offering a drinker a drink and them saying no, the act of resisting that degraded their decision-making going forward. I want to talk about the role of compound interest, John.

39:38Many of us have learned about compound interest in school or college, of course, but there's something about compound interest that always feels unintuitive, that it feels difficult to wrap our minds around. Right. There's a quote that's often attributed to Albert Einstein, which is compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And the reason why it's a mystery to so many people is interest is a price on money. And most prices we encounter is something that we incur once.

40:09But compounding interest is a price that is applied to the amount of money that you borrow and it's reapplied constantly. And over time, as interest rates are applied again and again, it becomes exponentially more expensive than we would anticipate. So most people do not understand the true effects of compounding interest. How does this affect our ability to deal with debt? Because so much of debt, of course, is about compound interest.

40:40And sometimes you're not just paying interest on the principal that you borrowed. Sometimes you're paying interest on the interest. Correct. So if you would ask, let's say, you know, someone who's looking to buy their first house and let's say it was a $200,000 house, let's say 6%. If you ask the person how much interest they would pay on their loan, they might say, well, 6%, $200,000, okay, that's going to be $12,000 of interest. No, it's actually about $232,000 of interest on top of the $200,000, right?

41:10But like with trying to predict our own expenses, there's just too many components to it and the prices applied too many times for someone to have a real grip on how much it's costing them.

41:25One of the things that you talk about is the role of rewards programs and how they hijack our brain's desire to pursue financial goals. Talk about this. Everything from airline miles to, you know, getting the 10th coffee free once you buy nine coffees at the local cafe. So if we're going to go with the example of, say, a free 10th coffee after you buy nine, research shows on rewards programs that not only will that reward program keep you loyal to that cafe,

41:58but you will actually increase the frequency of your visits to that cafe as you approach receiving the reward. So that's coffee. But if we're looking at credit cards and, say, miles for travel and that sort of thing, you also find that people increase their purchases and the size and frequency of their purchases as they get closer to some milestone reward, say, like a free plane ticket or something like that. Do you have a personal example of doing this yourself, John? I will say on the retail side in Ohio, there's Grater's Ice Cream, which I think they're nationwide now, but they're from Cincinnati.

42:36And they give you a free ice cream on your birthday. And even if I've already had ice cream cake and I'm not hungry at all, I make such a point of getting to Grater's to have my free birthday ice cream, even if it makes me ill. So I am as susceptible as anyone.

42:55So it's interesting when we cash in on these benefits, when you get the free ice cream that you don't want on your birthday or you get the 10th cup of coffee, we view these as financial windfalls. But in fact, we're the ones doing the paying. Absolutely. Right. But you get this reward. Winning prizes is fun. Now, if you put it in the credit context, these rewards are harmless if you pay your balance off every month.

43:28But I think it's like two-thirds of credit card holders carry balances forward. So for what would be a $200 or $300 roundtrip ticket, people end up paying thousands of dollars in interest for it. We've talked a lot about how our brains work against us when it comes to financial decisions. But it's not just that we have these biases. It's also that money itself does something to us. It changes how we behave. You ran a study once about hormone levels and financial status. Describe the study to me and what you found. Okay. So we took a control group and a treatment group and had everyone give saliva tests to measure their testosterone.

44:04And then one group, we had them handle just stacks of paper in the dimensions of dollar bills. The other group, we had them handle stacks of $20 bills. And the people who handled $20 bills experienced a rise in testosterone when they handled money. And that rise in testosterone made them more aggressive and more self-focused and less likely to donate to charity. Why do you think this happens, John? Why is handling money versus handling paper that's the same dimensions, the same size as money, why does it have this effect on us?

44:40So this study is done in a field known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology looks at what are behaviors endemic to humans that maybe go back to when we were living in caves. So when we were living in caves, the more status you had amongst the other cavemen and women, the more resources flowed to you, the less cooperative you had to be, and the less you had to consider others. Well, back then, status was probably about physical dominance.

45:14Now, status is more determined by economic resources. So people handling large sums of money experience a rise in testosterone, and they become more focused on themselves and less concerned with others. Do you think most people have a good sense of how their own minds are working when it comes to debt and money, John? Probably not, right? There's lots of things that influence us without our knowing it. I mean, as someone who does research on marketing and reads lots of research on marketing, you see things that, you know, tiny influences that change people's preferences and choices without them being willing to acknowledge that it does affect them.

45:58So, you know, when we talked about intertemporal discounting, you know, how you time things can lead to what you call a preference reversal. In scenario A, people want the first choice, but you take that same person and you put them in a different context and they want different things. If you ask people to choose the best option versus eliminate the worst options, they end up making different choices.

46:29You know, what is the default choice within an array of options usually carries a lot of power. One of my favorites was Starbucks introduced the Trenta, I guess, which is the extra large coffee. And it didn't sell a lot of Trentas. What it actually did was it sold a lot of what used to be the large coffee because all of a sudden it seemed like a more moderate option, even though it was still 20 ounces or whatever it was, because it was no longer the extremer endpoint option.

47:02They viewed it as moderate. So more people started buying it. I mean, in some ways what you're saying is that marketers are taking advantage of these natural gremlins that are in our heads. Yes, I mean, and we are required to make decisions about and pass judgment on things that we can't be experts on. There's too many things to make choices about. And because of that, we tend to look for little signals to guide our choices just so that we feel like it's based in something.

47:33And a lot of times those little signals that we seize on are irrelevant. It's nice to believe that being good with money comes down to basic literacy. Learn how to crunch some numbers, make a budget, and exercise a little discipline, and you'll be good. But often enough, financial literacy is not enough to combat the biases that shape our decisions and the marketers who know how to take advantage of our mistakes. When we come back, strategies for fighting back.

48:07You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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50:28This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had an experience in your life where you thought you were getting a great deal only to find yourself mired in debt? Have you found ways to protect yourself from getting in over your head financially?

50:45If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the audio file to us using the email address feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line money. Again, that email address is feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

51:13We're taught that being good with money is about making smart choices. Spend less. Save more. Avoid debt. On paper, that's true. But real life isn't a spreadsheet. In his book, The Marketing of Debt, How They Get You, John Dinsmore says that being good with money isn't just about knowing what to do on paper. It's also about resisting the forces that lure us into self-sabotage. John, when you buy a house, you're not only thinking about how much it costs, you're also

51:45thinking about home inspections and repairs and the quality of local schools and whether you're going to get along with your new neighbors. Can you talk about the role of exhaustion when it comes to the financial mistakes we make? Yeah, and housing or buying a house is probably the best example of it. There are so many things to do, and it's such an important purchase in someone's life. All of these things make it what psychologists would call like a depleting process, right? And the more complex something becomes, the more energy we have to dedicate to it,

52:19the greater a likelihood that we're going to have a breakdown in our self-control.

52:26The psychologists Donna Webster and Ari Kruglansky refer to this as seizing and freezing, where we basically have a desire to bring the process to a conclusion because we're so tired, we're so exhausted. Yeah, so, and what the seizing and freezing refers to is when you're not sure what's important, you will seize upon one piece of information and then you will freeze out everything else. So, because you're so glad to bring things to resolution that a lot of times you're unwilling to consider new information that would help you make a better decision.

53:00I'm wondering if the same thing happens when people buy cars. You know, the process starts out being very fun. You're taking the car for a spin. You're being told about all the nice things about the car. You get the feel of a new car, the smell of a new car. It's all very exciting. But then after you've spent an hour exploring how fun the car is, the process of actually negotiating the purchase of the car begins, including financing terms and a whole bunch of other things.

53:30Absolutely. And chances are this was not the first dealership you were at that day, right? You've been looking for a while and doing this again and again. And at some point, I mean, it could even be that the car you choose is the result of exhaustion and a breakdown in self-control. But even if it's not, then you get into being offered all of the extras and all of these options. And, you know, it makes it harder and harder to make good decisions going forward.

54:00And, of course, the vast majority of new cars are financed. So now you actually have to negotiate the terms of an auto loan. Is it four years? Is it five years? Is it six years? They're different interest rates. They're different monthly payments. Absolutely. And if you haven't done your homework, and a lot of times people haven't, it means you could take on more expensive loans than you would have to otherwise. What can we do to resist getting sold something we don't really want or need when we are exhausted, John?

54:33Well, I think there's a few things that you can do. So, well, one thing is you can take a break. You can defer. So, if we're going with the car scenario when they start trying to sell you all these add-on things, you can say, you know what, can I come back to you later? Let's move forward right now, but can I come back later? This will give you a chance to take a break. It will also put off the salesperson. The salesperson will always tell you that you can change your mind later about the warranties or whatever. But in the meantime, it will help you just get past that hard sales pitch.

55:07And another thing that you can do is if you're starting to feel, you know, too exhausted and you find yourself focusing on being exhausted and maybe, ah, I'm so tired, right? A lot of times it's helpful just to walk outside and give yourself a little pep talk. Studies have shown that the more you perseverate on being in a weakened condition, the more weakened you actually become. But if you can actually, you know, give yourself a pep talk and tell yourself that you can do this and take a little time to compose yourself, you're going to make better decisions.

55:48Many complex financial deals involve doing math and many people hate doing math. One study looked at brain scans of people as they were doing difficult math problems. Tell me what it found, John. So one study did an fMRI of people who said they had math anxiety and asked them to do math problems. And it lit up the threat detection centers of their brain. So it was like they were being chased by a tiger because they were so intimidated and overwhelmed

56:25at the notion of doing math, which, if you're dealing with financial questions, can be a real problem. I mean, I've often received documentation for various things, and the documentation runs for five pages, and there's fine print and all kinds of numbers. And it's not surprising in some ways that your brain seizes up and says, oh, my God, this is the last thing I want to be reading and thinking about. Absolutely. And we all know the phrase, stress makes you stupid. It doesn't actually make you stupid, but it does limit your abilities.

56:58You're not as capable as you normally would be to deal with issues like home loans. Talk a little bit about how marketers take advantage of our desire for simplicity, John. As a marketer, typically if you want to really highlight something and get people to understand and remember something, you make things as simple as possible, right? And pricing for financial products is not simple. In fact, there's usually multiple components of price, different fees, and that sort of thing.

57:28So what marketers of debt will sometimes do is put a very attractive price up front, and because we will take that simple piece of information and block out everything else, then deep in the fine print or other parts of the website or wherever, you'll see all the kickers that actually escalate the expense of things. But they will make us feel like we understand something when we actually don't. So in other words, I'm told that something has a 0% introductory rate,

57:59and I focus on the 0% and not on the word introductory. Right. We will walk away thinking of 0%, despite the fact that that's only good for, say, three months, and then it goes up to 27% or something like that. Is this related to the idea called partition pricing, John? Yeah, so partition pricing is where a product has multiple components of price, right? So if you think of it, if someone is shopping for shoes in the mall and they see that the shoes are $55 to take home, but you're shopping on a website and the shoes are listed as $50 plus

58:35$10 shipping, people will often go for the $50 shoes that actually cost them $60 because they see that first price and that's how they encode it. And they think of that as being cheaper than the $55 shoes in the mall. So in some ways, it's a little bit like a magic trick. If you're a marketer, partition pricing allows you to hide the real cost of the item. Yes, we typically can only encode one price for a product in our memories. So we see the one price and then we stop looking for other things or don't take other things into account.

59:09How do we get around this problem? How do we, given the fact that we have these limitations, that we focus on things that are right in front of us, we have this desire for simplicity, we don't like to do math, how do we solve this? I wish I had a more attractive answer for you, but the answer is to do the math and to do the work. If you're aware of these biases or shortcomings, you're more likely to be able to process them and deal well. I mean, one of my, one of the studies that I came across was from a couple

59:40of economists named Stango and Zinman. And what they found was the price that people pay for debt, the biggest factor is how much effort people put into shopping for debt. It's not your credit score. We tend to think of credit scores as something, you know, that comes down from heaven and it is what it's going to be. And that's the price we pay for things. It's, it's more about effort and shopping around and finding competitive pricing. In other words, if someone offers you a loan or a mortgage, make sure that you are doing some price comparisons to make sure that

1:00:15there isn't another loan next door, that's, that's a better rate for you. Absolutely. I mean, my story about buying the house, the truth is we probably, we did have options. We could have shopped around, but we felt like we couldn't. Some years later, we're living in Ohio and we got to refinance our house here. And we dealt with a mortgage broker who at the last second wanted to introduce an extra $1,500 fee. And we just walked because we knew better. I mean, we had learned the hard way and we found a mortgage with a lower interest rate as a result from walking

1:00:50away.

1:01:00One of the phenomena that you have studied is something called the endowment effect. We've talked about this previously on Hidden Brain. Talk about the role of the endowment effect in debt and how we can deal with it as consumers. Okay. So the endowment effect, again, we hate losing much more than we love winning. So if you look at the Queen of Versailles example, at some point where things start to go south with the tower in

1:01:30Vegas, all of the associates of David Siegel are saying, why don't you just sell this tower? This would solve all of our problems. And he refuses to. It's his. He tends to think it's more valuable than it is. And, you know, the market will tell you what it's worth. And so he holds on to it and holds on to it, creating lots of financial stress for everyone. And the tower ultimately gets foreclosed upon a couple of years later because it was his and it was so valuable to him. He wouldn't make what was

1:02:03to everyone else a very obvious and common sense decision of getting rid of this thing that you couldn't afford. I mean, there have been multiple studies that have been conducted that show that if you give somebody even, you know, a trivial thing, a trinket, a pen, an eraser, within seconds, they start to assign value to that pen or that eraser so that if they were to part with it, they would want to be compensated for parting with this thing. And in some ways, it's the endowment effect, again, that once you have something that's part of your endowment, part of your property, if you will, you tend to want to

1:02:38guard it zealously. Yes. And even if that thing is draining you of all of your resources, but because it's yours, you think it's more valuable than anyone else does. And so you tend to hold on to it when you shouldn't. Now, one of the interesting ideas you explore, John, is that we can sometimes use the endowment effect and loss aversion to our advantage, especially when it comes to retirement savings. How so? So there's an ability to take a lot of these phenomena and kind of turn them around and use

1:03:09them to help you, right? So with the endowment effect, when you get money, it's harder to let go of that money. So if you're looking at something like saving for retirement, once the money hits your account, if you have to actually then write a check to put money into a savings account or retirement account, you become less likely to do so. A reason why social security has been such a successful program is because it is money for retirement taken out of people's checks before they get them, right? So you can do this for yourself by having automated savings, whether it's college fund for

1:03:46the kids, your retirement, or just savings in general, and have the money taken out of your check before it gets to your account. And when that happens, people don't miss the money as much as they would if it had hit their account, and they find that over time, they're able to save a lot more as a result. In other words, if my salary is, let's say, $1,000, instead of having the $1,000 come to my account, and then have to write a check for $200 to my savings or to my retirement account, what you're saying is

1:04:19it's helpful to set things up so that that $200 gets deducted up front, and I only receive a salary of $800, and I don't think of that $1,000 as my endowment now. I think of it as just $800. Right, right. And probably most people have had the experience of you get a raise and you think, all right, but I'm still going through all my money. And it's because when the money comes into your account, there's always something that's legitimate that's there to have money to be spent

1:04:51on. But the truth is, if it's put away in an account, a savings account away from you, you're going to figure out how to make do on the money that you have. Talk about the role of status branded credit cards, John. How do they work and what should we do about them? So if you think back to the American Express gold card, which was the real first status branded card, it was a massive success. It immediately became this status symbol

1:05:30in the culture, right? And so what credit card marketers figured out was, wow, people really like these things. So over time, most of your credit cards became, you know, diamond or sapphire or platinum or whatever. And what we found, what studies have shown is that, and this includes credit cards to people with bad credit, with few resources. And what studies have shown is that if you are someone who feels like you're lacking status, like having less money, but you have a status branded card, you have a tendency to use this card a lot more, particularly if you're using it in

1:06:04front of people whose opinion of you, you value. In other words, I might not actually have the ability to pay for this super expensive restaurant meal, but I feel good to pull out this flashy credit card and drop it on the table and pick up the check. Absolutely, right? You're sending a strong signal to the people around you, to the people whose opinion you care about. It would be otherwise, you know, would it be like having a Ferrari and never taking it out of the garage? It's a beautiful

1:06:36fast car, yes, but a reason for having a Ferrari a lot of times is so that other people can see you in a Ferrari. And status branded credit cards can be a lot like that. I mean, in some ways, it's a genius marketing move, isn't it? Because it's taking advantage of this desire we have to look perhaps wealthier and more successful than we actually are in the eyes of other people. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of aspirational marketing, you would call it, right, for people who may not have the resources, but who can have this thing that makes it look like they do.

1:07:08And I don't know if branders of credit cards thought more about it other than people like this brand will put this brand on every card. But over time, the data should show them that, you know, people with lesser means are using these types of cards more often and more than they can afford. What do you think people should do with their status branded credit cards? Well, the flip side of it is studies have also shown that if you have a credit card that's branded

1:07:40with some sort of value brand, like say, you know, Goodwill or Walmart or something like that, that it reverses the effect. So I'd be less enticed by a platinum card and more enticed by a card that maybe communicates financial good sense.

1:08:03You know, there's an irony here, John, which is I think the people who might be most drawn to status branded credit cards are often people who want to show that they have status. And it's probably because in some ways they don't feel like they have status, whereas people who actually might be wealthy or well off might have less need to demonstrate their status either to themselves or to others. And so precisely the people who need to get the thrift branded credit cards are not the people who are actually getting them. Correct. Yeah. So if you feel like you're lacking in status,

1:08:39it may be that this credit card and just the way it's branded may be one of the maybe the only signal of status that you can send out to people. So people of lesser means will gravitate towards them.

1:08:53We talked earlier about the optimism bias. So we assume the future will be better than the present, and therefore we'll have more money in the future. You say that one way to combat this kind of bias is to seek examples that run counter to it. How would we do this? Right. So psychologists refer to it as counterfactual thinking. So any kind of bias, whether it's optimism or anything else, what's helpful is to challenge yourself to think of something that is the opposite or

1:09:24like an example that is the opposite of what you're currently thinking. So if you're thinking to yourself, well, I'm going to have lots of disposable income in the future, you know, ask yourself, well, have you ever had disposable income? Right. So these are ways to challenge your notion of the future. If the past or the present can't provide you with any examples of what you're reimagining for the future, well, then that will help you have a more restrained or rational approach

1:09:56to things. Is basic financial literacy something that could help us here, John? Absolutely. I think about 25 states have made financial literacy part of high school curricula, which is great. Financial literacy helps. It's certainly better to know than to not know. The other part of it is the effects of financial literacy can fade over time. So it's always worthwhile if you're approaching a significant financial decision to either reacquaint yourself

1:10:27before you do that or to get help from someone who is dealing with those types of decisions all the time. In other words, if you're buying a house, for example, you know, maybe spend 15 bucks and buy a book that basically says, here are financial tips on how you can buy a house. Right. Absolutely. And on the other side, the lenders, they live in financial decisions. So they're going to have an inherent advantage. So you need to kind of bone up. Even if you've already read that book, it's good to refresh yourself before decisions like this.

1:11:00I'm wondering, with all that you have learned about financial decision making, John, have you made better financial choices in your own life as a result?

1:11:17Well, the worst decisions that I've made often have been because I felt helpless or that maybe I, being afraid to ask for help, I think is part of it too. Convincing myself that I understood something when I really didn't. Often, and I don't think I'm alone, it's embarrassing to ask for help sometimes. But what's more embarrassing, losing $30,000 on a mortgage or asking a friend to look at something for you? One of the themes underlying how we think about money is our aversion to doubt.

1:11:56We don't like to question our assumption that of course we'll be making more money a decade from now. We don't want to sit with questions about how much we're actually paying in interest on our dream home. It's uncomfortable to ponder the prospect of future car repairs, so we agree to the expensive warranty that the salesman is pushing. What we crave is certainty in money, in love, and in many other dimensions of our lives. But are there times we should be embracing our doubts?

1:12:30We recently heard a powerful story from a listener named Suzanne. She called in to tell us about a time when she went to get a routine flu shot at her pharmacy. During the pandemic, I went to my pharmacist for my flu shot, and I looked at her and she looked so tired. And I said, you know what, even though we have an appointment, it's late at night, I'm sure I'm your last patient. Let me come back tomorrow. However, she said, no, no, I've got time. Suzanne had to make a decision. She was worried the pharmacist was fatigued. Was it wise to proceed?

1:13:02Could something go wrong? My intuition was, step away. She wasn't in a good place to give me the shot. But I wanted to be a pleaser and not contradict her ability to help me out at that time with our appointment.

1:13:19You've probably had moments like this. A voice of doubt creeps into your mind. And you have a quandary. Should you listen to your doubts or push them aside in favor of certainty? Suzanne decided to ignore her doubts. She agreed to stay to get the flu shot. And I said, do you want me to sit? She said, no, I can. I can just stand above you. I was going to face a certain direction. And she placed the needle into my rotator cuff, which left me screaming. And

1:13:54she said, relax, relax. I feel like I'm going to break the needle off. Well, she completely tore my rotator cuff, which has been a problem that's plagued me since the pandemic. And I've done all sorts of medical interventions, but it was a very bad situation that has led me to difficulty.

1:14:20We're often told, don't be a doubting Thomas. Plunge in. Full speed ahead. But there are times when taking a pause and listening to our doubts can help us make better decisions. How can we identify the moments when doubt is our friend? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:15:58To listen, understand, and support you on your terms. Schedule sessions conveniently via the app and talk to your therapist by video, phone, or live chat. BetterHelp mattresses you with a therapist who's with you through life's ups and downs. Because no journey should be alone. Sign up now and get 10% off at betterhelp.com. That's betterhelp.com slash hidden. That's betterhelp.com slash hidden. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant.

1:16:38Whether at work or in politics, we tend to prefer people who are decisive, who never appear to question their own thoughts or actions. But is that always a good thing?

1:16:54At the University of Virginia, Bobby Parmar studies the science of the unknown. He joined us for a recent episode titled, Trusting Your Doubt. Today, he returns to the show to respond to listener questions about the science of doubt. Bobby Parmar, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me, Shankar.

1:17:16Bobby, we talked in our last conversation about how the human mind is hardwired to prefer certainty. We don't like the feeling of doubt. Why is it that our brains are built like this? You know, for so many of us, certainty feels so good. There's just this great feeling that we get when we can predict what's going to happen, when we've mastered our environment or the way that we think about things matches the world in which we find ourselves. And certainty requires very little cognitive effort. There's a lot of research that shows that we find cognitive effort costly and

1:17:52aversive. You know, it almost feels painful to exert cognitive effort. Psychology is a science. Unlike physics, we don't have lots of laws. But one law we do have is the law of least work, which is the idea that if there are two options and they both have the same amount of reward, most organisms are going to choose the option that requires lower effort, lower physical effort, lower cognitive effort. You've given your students different scenarios where they have to grapple with

1:18:23their own doubts. One was a thought experiment involving an airline pilot and whether he should be allowed to fly a plane. Talk about the scenario and what it tells us about doubt and decision making. One of the ways in which we train our students to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty is to give them practice in lots of different types of examples. And so this is an example that we've used in the past as an exam case or as a classroom discussion where there's a pilot for an airline and through his own routine testing in his personal life discovers that he has the

1:18:55gene for hunting this disease. And this is a disease that basically causes the neurons between the brain and the muscles to atrophy. And so sometimes patients can lose control over their bodily movements. Sometimes it can happen very gradually. Other times it can happen very suddenly. And the pilot discloses this information on social media and then takes it down. But you, as let's say a leader in this airline, learn about this and now you have to figure out what to do. Do you allow this person to continue to fly? Do you take them out of the cockpit? Do you put in

1:19:29safety protocols? How do you handle a situation like this? And I'm assuming it's a little tricky because health information is confidential information, is it not? Absolutely. And particularly information around someone's genetics. We have laws that prevent the use of that in a work setting. But one loophole in the law is if someone discloses that information on social media. So companies are allowed to use that information if you voluntarily disclose that information. And so now you're in a position where legally you can use this information because this

1:20:04person has disclosed on social media. But morally, you're not sure if this is the right thing to do for the pilot, for your company, for passengers. And it's a really tricky scenario because we can interpret it in multiple ways. What is our primary responsibility or obligation here? Is it to protect our passengers? What do we owe this pilot? Privacy, transparency, care. And students really struggle with the uncertainty and the doubt in this kind of scenario. I understand that some students reach for a very quick conclusion, while others are willing to sit

1:20:39with the doubt and uncertainty a little longer. Yeah. And you can really see it in the way that they respond to the scenario. So some students will very quickly say, look, I don't think we should have this information. I feel bad about the situation. I'm going to allow it to fly and I'm not going to pay attention to the fact that I learned this information. It's a very quick, intuitive reaction that they then justify by picking a couple of pieces of information that are aligned with their gut feeling. Hmm. Other students are able to examine the situation from multiple perspectives, thinking about

1:21:12perhaps what policy should the airline have regarding genetic testing in the future, thinking about what does it mean to protect this particular pilot and his interests and his, you know, goals for his career. And what they're able to do is to generate a set of solutions that are sensitive to all of those different aspects of the scenario. They've, I don't like to use the phrase sitting with doubt or sitting with uncertainty because they're actually playing with it. They're active and they're using that doubt to

1:21:43learn about what's possible to do. And so their recommendations are much more robust. They're much more well thought out. They have plans in place to consult with doctors and to report things to the FAA under certain conditions. They're partnering with the pilot in question to put in safety protocols to protect his privacy so other people don't learn about his condition, to make sure there are safety protocols for passengers so their risk isn't increased in any way, shape or form. And this kind of effective problem solving can only really happen when decision makers are comfortable with not

1:22:15knowing. Hmm. One of the things that I find interesting about doubt is that there is something of a Goldilocks dimension to this emotion. The right amount of doubt can help us to look around corners, address problems before they emerge, but too much doubt can become paralyzing. We received a question about this from a listener named Chevenise, who says she struggles with too much doubt. My doubt has shifted from something that's occasional to something that's frequent. And I have a mind of my own and should be taking full responsibility of my decisions, whether acting independently or choosing

1:22:50to go along with others. But I often second guess my judgment. As a result, I started defaulting to letting others make decisions, not because I don't know, but because if I'm wrong, I feel safer when the potential shame belongs to someone else rather than myself. So how do I move past that? Bobby, do you have any practical advice for people like Chevenise who doubt themselves too much? Such an important question and one that so many of us struggle with, whether it's doubting too much,

1:23:20like Chevenise pointed to, or not doubting enough and running headfirst into a set of solutions or alternatives. You know, one thing that is helpful in identifying that Goldilocks zone is something that I call the principle of requisite variety. And the idea is that it takes complexity to notice complexity. Take, for example, your immune system. If your body only had antibodies for, let's say, two types of cold or two types of virus, then you'd get sick all the time if your

1:23:52environment had lots of different types of viruses in it. But if your immune system could represent all of those different types of viruses and had antibodies for all those different types of viruses, you could deal with the complexity of the situation that you find yourself in. And so ideally, if we bring this back to thinking and making decisions, the way that we think about things has to match the complexity of the situations that we find ourselves in. And so we can make two types of error. We can make the error where our thinking is too simple for a world that's more complicated, or we can make

1:24:23the error that Chevenise has pointed out to, which is that our thinking can be way too complicated for a situation that we're facing. And so there's a couple of things that I think are helpful in this regard. The first is to remember that the point of engaging doubt is to act better, not to get the right answer. And so sometimes we ruminate and we go back and say, look, I want to make sure I get the perfect answer here. And that's why I'm thinking over and over again about what's happening. And a better way of assessing your thinking is to say, did this help me run an experiment that was worthwhile?

1:24:58Did this help me take the next step in a way that I feel proud of and confident in? And so one of the things we want to ask ourselves is, do I feel like I know enough that I can act? And can I act in a way that maybe isn't an all or nothing decision? But it's a next step that allows me to learn more, gain more confidence, and iterate from there. Chevenise's struggle to control her feelings of doubt feel really relatable and common. Interestingly, it also gets at deeper questions about free will that are currently raging in the

1:25:30academic world. You say that doubt can be a bellwether in the debate over free will? I think that's exactly right. Currently, the debate is framed as a binary. Either we have free will and we can make choices that are divorced from our context and our biology and our history, or we don't have free will and all of our choices are determined by our context, our genetics, our history. And I think doubt provides a really interesting lens on that particular debate.

1:26:02When we experience certainty, we don't think that there are other options. It's kind of like certainty constrains our thinking, and we have these conditioned, quick responses to the situations that we're facing. Doubt kind of disrupts those subconscious or unconscious scripts that we have and provides a pause between stimulus and response. And in that pause, we can think of other ways of interpreting what's happening around us. And now that we can choose between alternate interpretations,

1:26:35is this person giving me this difficult feedback because they want to hurt me or because they care about me? I don't know. But now by choosing between those different interpretations, I'm opening up some degrees of freedom. It's still not completely divorced from history and context and biology, but it is a degree of freedom where I get to shape and author my life in ways that I couldn't if I didn't see alternative choices. I mean, in this model, exercising free will is almost a skill. It's not something we have

1:27:06or don't have. It's something that we can choose to have. That's exactly right. Because when we take the time to learn about what's happening around us and not default to whatever dominant interpretation is in our environment or the first thing that occurs to our mind, then we're building the capacity to exercise our free will by changing the way that we interpret the world around us.

1:27:29We've all heard the phrase, trust your gut. We typically interpret that to mean that we should act decisively. Listener Michelle has a question about that. How do you reconcile radical doubt with the idea of embodiment, particularly the role of gut feelings or bodily signals in decision making? Many of us are encouraged, especially in modern talk therapy, to listen to our bodies or notice somatic cues as sources of insight. But as Bobby discusses,

1:28:01those signals can also be shaped by fear, bias, or past experience. So how do you practice embodiment while still exploring your doubt? So Bobby, we hear a lot about paying attention to bodily cues like your heart rate or butterflies in your stomach. Sometimes these signals can be helpful in alerting us to danger, but sometimes they can also be debilitating in keeping us from performing at our best. I think Michelle's question is insightful. Are these physical cues the manifestations of doubt?

1:28:33I love this question. I think it's such an important one. And Michelle is exactly right. We're always told to pay attention to our gut and the body knows what the right answer is. And if we take that seriously, the body is giving us really important signals. Those somatic cues, whether that's sweaty palms or butterflies in your stomach or feeling your jaw tighten because you think this is a situation that is making you angry, those are really important signals, but we might not treat

1:29:06them as commands. We might not treat them as the final interpretation of the situation that we're facing. We want to treat them as important information that is teaching us something about our own history. Why is it that we're having this set of somatic reactions? Maybe something happened to us in the past and our body's trying to warn us. That warning may be very wise. It may be unwise in the specific situation we're facing. And so treating those somatic cues as another hypothesis to say, huh, my body's telling me I should get out of here. What else in this environment is consistent

1:29:40with that hypothesis? And also what else is inconsistent with that hypothesis? It is very important to take the time to retrain your body. And so when we look at all different types of therapy, particularly exposure therapy. So, you know, in my past, I have this vivid memory of taking my daughter to a discovery museum. You know, she was three years old and going down these giant slides and dad come with me and I'm going down the slide and you know, and it's like a completely covered slide like a tube. And halfway through, I am

1:30:13having a panic attack. I am stuck in this slide. I'm an adult. I don't know if I'm going to get out. And, you know, my body is telling me I got to go. I'm in danger. Now, once I got out of the slide, of course, you're not in any real mortal danger. Right. And you're you'd know that that wasn't the right interpretation. It was important for me