Your Mind Is a Propagandist

I'm Michael Kovnat and I'm Rufus Griskan. And this is the next big idea. Today, Why Your Brain is the ultimate propaganda machine. Michael, what a treat to have you hosting today's podcast episode. Who'd you talk to this time? Glad to be hosting Rufus. I talked to an author named Owen Fitzpatrick. Really interesting guy. He's written a book called Inner Propaganda.

And just in broad strokes, the book makes an argument that you might think you've heard before. It's the idea that your brain is in the business of telling you stories. And those stories determine your reality. Really, as much as reality determines reality. Right, and in fact, reality is something that we argue we don't have direct access to, according to any number of neuroscientists and psychologists we've talked to on the show. All we have is is the stories we tell ourselves. Yeah, your brain is a prediction machine, a storytelling machine, there are different metaphors we use. But yeah, basically your brain is making up these stories based on past experience and evolutionary heritage, a lot of things, but these stories end up controlling your life, your relationships, your career, your mental health. And I'd say that Owen goes farther than some of these other psychologists do by going a little deeper and a little darker. He's traveled the world studying things like how propaganda works in North Korea. He's studied how cults work.

He studied hypnotism, he studied screenwriting. He's basically had this career long effort to understand. How do people tell stories that end up influencing other people? And what can we learn from those techniques for ourselves? His choice of the word propaganda is so interesting, right? Because we think of propaganda as as between the state and the subject, but In his narrative, it's we are ourselves, both the source of the propaganda and the recipient. Exactly, exactly. We're we're double agents or our brains act like double agents. Just like these.

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