S4EP12: Social Psychology and How it Impacts Our Lives with Bo Bennett

Dr. Bennett has a PhD in social psychology. He currently runs over a dozens websites, has written over a dozen books mostly on the topics of critical thinking, and teaches several online courses. He has been in the self-publishing industry for over a decade and has written multiple screenplays. He is the creator of SQUAT! An animated sitcom taking place in a suburban fitness center.

Connect with Bo: 

https://www.facebook.com/thedrboshow/

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:06

Hi and welcome to the Becoming Trauma-Informed podcast, where we help you understand how your past painful experiences are affecting your current reality and how you can shift those so you can create your desired future. I'm Dr Lee, and both myself and our team at the Institute for Trauma and Psychological Safety are excited to support you on your journey. We talk about all the things on this podcast. No topic gets left uncovered. So extending a content warning to you before we get started if you notice yourself getting activated while listening, invitation to take care of yourself and to pause, skip ahead a bit or just check out another episode, let's dive in. Hello everybody, welcome to this week's episode. I am joined by a really, really cool guest today, bo Bennett, and I'm going to allow him to, as we always do, introduce himself, because it's so much more interesting when people tell us about themselves. So, bo, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Sure. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, where do I start? I do a lot of different things. I like to kind of think of myself as the modern day Ben Franklin, except not as successful or important, but in the sense that, of course, like most famous people, after I die 100 years, then people will say, wow, he did a lot of great things, but I don't appreciate it while you're alive.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Anyway, I actually went to school as a undergrad back when I was in my teens and twenties. I got my degree in marketing, so I wanted to enter the working force as a business person. I wanted to do something, start my own business, which is essentially what I did. I ended up doing very well in the internet when the internet was first introduced to the public back in like around 1995. I started a web hosting company and I took that and I really built it up and I sold it in 2001, just before the big bust. So I was like right on the edge of it. So I really lucked out another couple months and it would have been worth nothing, essentially. So I was in the right place at the right time.

Speaker 1: 2:19

With that, that allowed me a lot of freedom to pursue more academic interests, which is what I did. I started writing books. I actually did start running other companies, but mostly I was interested in getting back into psychology, because I was interested in that at the beginning. But I didn't want to actually do that because I wanted to make money. That's what I really wanted at first and I knew psychology wasn't the way to make money for most people. Let's put it this way I had a better chance making money with business than I did with psychology. So I went back to school, virtually because I had a family and responsibilities here, and after some time I got my master's degree in general psychology and then my PhD in social psychology. So that allowed me to enhance my reputation a little bit more at writing books and I focused on, like social psychology. My PhD was in social psychology. I focused on critical thinking, reason, logic, so that's where the majority of my books are. I also have some books on self-development, self-improvement from a more scientific perspective rather than the rah-rah cheerleader type of stuff.

Speaker 1: 3:35

And I did so many things in the meantime, including writing and developing a full sitcom and then eventually producing it as an animated sitcom, and right now it's available on YouTube at it's called SquatspotFitnesscom. If you do that, that'll send you to the YouTube channel and we could talk about that later. But that was really a labor of love. I spent a long time on that and I just loved writing it, scripting it out, getting the voice actors, and I did all the animation myself using some basic software. But that was a lot of fun. And today I'm mostly involved in still writing books, but also working a lot with artificial intelligence, because I see that as really the next stage of our human evolution, not in a strange cybernetic way, but in a way that we evolve along coside technology, and I think that's going to be a big part of how we evolve, just like the internet was a big part of how we evolved 20, 25 years ago.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Wow.

Speaker 1: 4:41

That's great.

Speaker 2: 4:42

You're definitely a renaissance man, for sure. There's a lot going on there, and when I was reading over your bio and all of the information that you provided, I was really just thinking about how few people know that there are different sectors of psychology, because I think a lot of times we just talk about psychology as psychology. And actually I was chuckling as you were speaking, because my bachelor's is in psych and I focused in on neurobiopsych and, yeah, it then went into nursing because I needed to make money. Don't get me wrong, I loved nursing too and I was like this is definitely not going to pay the bills. So I think, yeah, your choice made sense. So can you just tell our listeners a little bit about what is social psychology in relation to other types of psychology? What does it?

Speaker 1: 5:33

mean, well, when I tell people I'm a psychologist, I usually don't use that because that is kind of misleading. Yeah, the average person, your psychologist, are like oh you know, don't? You're looking at me, so what's wrong with me? Is that what you're thinking? But no, that's not what I do.

Speaker 1: 5:47

That's a clinical psychologist, that's a mental health professional, that's somebody that helps people with trauma and helps people with the different issues that they may have, whereas a social psychologist is on the academic side. So if you take psychology in general, you can kind of break it down into two main arms. One is the mental health and the other one is the academics. So a lot of things fall under academics, a lot of things fall under mental health. I'm on the academic side. Part of what I do also is cognitive psychology, and if there were a degree or a program at my university to get a PhD in cognitive psychology, I would have. I really enjoy that.

Speaker 1: 6:25

But social psychology is extremely close and they did have a program for that. That's why it went that route. So social psychology is basically the scientific study of how people interact with each other, how other people's behaviors and actions influence our own, and what's interesting about that it's not only other people. It could be other like beings, like dogs or animals. It could also be imaginary people. Their behavior could change based on. Maybe they think they're communicating with their dead grandmother or dead Elvis or an alien or something like that. It doesn't matter, but that affects our behavior too. So social psychology studies, all of that.

Speaker 2: 7:13

Yeah, it's so broad, right.

Speaker 2: 7:16

And thank you for making that distinction between academic and clinical, because people always are like, oh, you have a PhD and I'm like, no, I have a practice doctorate, a clinical doctorate, meaning like I take what the academic people did studied, researched, learned and I put it into practice in the world, and I think a lot of people don't know that.

Speaker 2: 7:33

So thank you for clarifying that. And what I think is so fascinating is one of the things we talk about a lot at our institute is metacognition. So like how you think I know you know the definition, but how you think about your own thinking, and so you know this whole idea of cognitive psychology of like how and why do we think of the way that we do, and then also how it connects to other people and how much influence we have on each other and how much influence the outside world has on us and how unaware we are of that most of the time. So is that you know, in the research you've done, the books you've written, I guess I would just be curious about, like, your perspective and what you found around that, because I feel like most people don't know just how much their thinking is influenced by outside things and how much their thoughts are not really their thoughts.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Right, yeah, before I forget, I do want to mention a book. It's not my book, I actually forgot the name of the author but it's a book called Nudge and it's all about social psychology and just about what you were talking about how all little things influence our behaviors Subconsciously. We don't even realize it. A perfect example that's used that's in the book as well is when states changed the driver's license requirement for organ donation yes, instead of check this box if you want to donate your organs, versus don't check it if you don't want to. So they changed it. So the default behavior was you're going to donate your organs unless you do this thing. And the difference was like astronomical, like more than significant, just because and I mean you could argue that some people just don't read it, some people didn't see it and guaranteed that's part of it. But the fact is people kind of accept the default behaviors.

Speaker 1: 9:27

If you think about your own behavior and how you fill out forms, if you see something as the default option, you tend to trust the person who created that form and you leave it that way and that's just the way that we can be influenced. We could be manipulated if it's for a nefarious purpose, but mostly it's just kind of innocuous, just the way that we operate, and people don't have anything nefarious in mind. They just want you to do a certain behavior, maybe because it's for your own good as well or for the betterment of society or whatever. But all those kind of things manipulate us, or influence us is probably the better word. Everything influences some of the things manipulate us, and that's social psychology. I mean, that's what it's all about understanding these things and how we interact with other people and different actions. But a very important point about that and about social psychology in general that I guess that's part of the, the social dialogue right now is this whole idea of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and how you're the creator of your own destiny. Independence there's. Trust me as somebody who is heavily involved in the self-help movement at an early age, I still strongly believe that. But this whole idea of how things influence is, I mean, that's a huge, huge part of it.

Speaker 1: 10:56

I don't believe that everybody is a blank slate, and neither does science. I mean that's pretty much guaranteed, and like we all don't start out or we all can't be blank slates, that's not the way it works. We're incredibly influenced by genetics and then our environment. So there's a lot of philosophical and maybe psychological experiments saying like, okay, what if you like just the person you are? If you were to grow up in like the worst neighborhood possible, in like a terrible country and where people are killing each other on the streets to survive, would you be the same person you are?

Speaker 1: 11:36

And some people like, of course I am, because that's me. That's completely ignorant. The fact is that even if you had the same genetics and you were brought up in this completely different environment, the chances are vastly the chances are that you would be very different and you would most likely be the type of person who that environment brings up, who that environment influences, and that's just the way it is. So by understanding this, we can have a lot more sympathy and empathy for, let's say, the people who are in prison, because we don't just see them as bad people. We see them as people just like us who were raised either with bad genetics and that's a different part of psychology, that's more biology and some neuropsych but also in a bad environment. And I think, understanding that and now in 2023, everybody should know this how much we are all influenced by our environment and we should really change that. We really change our views on at least the retributive justice at the.

Speaker 1: 12:51

Pigeon Beast and have more empathy for other people. It's a tough game to play because you say, well, if everybody's just a product of their genetics and their environment and nothing is their fault, that gets heavy into philosophy. What is there? What are we? Do we let everybody do whatever they want, and of course not you can't run a society that way. There's a balance somewhere in there. My view is right now that balance is off. We could be better balanced, but it's always a give and take and it's never going to be perfect, but we got to do something.

Speaker 2: 13:27

So two things passed in my head as you're saying this and gosh. This is so important, especially when it comes to conversations around trauma, past painful experiences, because a lot of people don't recognize how much trauma is passed down, both from a nature perspective of as a parent, I've had past painful experiences. I've learned how the quote unquote how the world works. So I'm going to teach my kid this is how the world works, or I'm going to try to not teach my kid shift the world. But the other piece is that genetic piece of how trauma actually gets passed down through DNA. And I'm really glad you're talking about this environmental piece because this is something that I think gets missed in a lot of the conversations. When we look at faults and we look at justice and we look at how we decide punishments or rewards or any sort of who gets what.

Speaker 2: 14:21

There's this landmark study that Nadine Burke Harris talks about in her famous TED Talk around adverse childhood experiences, aces, and looking at we have all this data that if you grow up in an environment that predisposes you to harm, so this can be both individual, like inside of your home you've got parents who have substance use disorder, or there's domestic violence, or there's incarceration, there's significant mental health issues, any of those things or you grow up in a community that has very poor access to food, substandard education, poor transportation systems, a lot of community violence, a lot of these things. Every single one of those things, the more you have increases the likelihood that you are going to end up either significantly physically ill, mentally ill, or you're gonna end up in the justice system and on the side of the perpetrator and not the victim. And it's one of those things where, as I've gone through and kind of been immersed in this world over the last several years, it is so hard to see people who quote unquote do bad things as bad people. Just a lot of times when you look at everything that they've been through and you're like, goodness, who would this person have been? How would they have turned out if they had won the genetic lottery and ended up in a different family and with different genetics? And so I appreciate you bringing that up because that's a huge part of the conversation.

Speaker 2: 15:56

And the other piece is something I work one-on-one with people, not as much anymore, but a lot of times as we are doing trauma work, people get to a point and they're like I don't know who I am anymore, because so much of who I thought I was was what I learned from other people. And so there's this huge psychology component Like my parents conditioned me that I was X. And now that I'm growing up and kind of stepping out of that conditioning, I'm realizing no, I was never X, I was Y, I was just taught to be X. So I'm just curious to kind of hear your perspective on that of you talked about, like, what really is our personality? If somebody comes to you and says, okay, well, if we're so heavily influenced by other people, like how do we know who we are? Like, what would you say to that?

Speaker 1: 16:47

Well, I just want to quote, or maybe paraphrase, a line from a Hitch great movie, when the guy's saying these are my shoes, I wouldn't wear this, and Will Smith says you, you are a very fluid concept right now. But I think that the important part of that is we are all very fluid concepts always, not just right now, but always. We, what we consider ourselves, and again this gets heavily into philosophy. But the whole idea of us and what we are changes moment to moment, and you could see physically. Obviously, if you look at pictures like every decade of you, like oh my goodness, or just of anybody, you see like an 80 year old man and then you see the 20 year old version. How could that be the same person?

Speaker 1: 17:42

And the personality is probably very different too. There's a lot of stable personality traits that we have and we're born with. One that makes a good example is our level of happiness. Everybody has a base level of happiness and, no matter what happens to them in life, they usually return to that happiness. There have been plenty of studies on what happens when somebody wins the lottery and they're you know, hey, this is the best, my life is fantastic, everything is wonderful.

Speaker 1: 18:13

And then, even though nothing like terrible happens with the money if they still have all the money and things are going great their level of happiness goes down to where it was after about six months. The crazy thing is, the same thing happens if somebody gets paralyzed. Could you imagine that? Just thinking, like, what would happen if I got paralyzed? That would be horrible, my life would be terrible. Well, yeah, people think that for a few months, but then after about six months six months their basic level of happiness returns to where it was.

Speaker 1: 18:43

And that's just the way that we are with a lot of standard personality traits. And I should also mention, when it comes to that base level, everybody's at a different base level. Everybody has a different base level, and you could, you could. So that's just one example of one personality trait, if you want to call it that. But you could look at any personality trait, any trait, any characteristic, and we're kind of all over the board as to where we are on the base level. So we're all working with different hardware. I think that's a good way to put it. The software could be the programming that the environment gives us where the hardware, like a computer system, where all some people start with Apple II, ease and some people start with quantum computers, and they have an advantage, obviously, but we're all different.

Speaker 1: 19:28

One thing that you mentioned before that I think is important to talk about is when people say like, okay, look at this guy. This guy was brought up in a horrible environment, his parents were on drugs, they beat him and whatever, and he turned out to be fantastic. He's a rich guy, he's very healthy and wealthy and he speaks to people, he's positive, so if he can do it, anybody could do it. No, that's not the case. That's not how statistics work. You have to look at that Like statistically, you could say, okay, he is one out of, let's say, 20 people who had a similar, like horrible, and I don't know if that's statistic, I'm just throwing it out there One out of 20 people who brought themselves up and led a fantastic life after having that kind of environment.

Speaker 1: 20:21

And now people say, if you go down, if you know statistics a little bit, you may say, okay, so I, essentially, being raised in a horrible environment and having something similar, I have a 5% chance of making it. No, that's not how it works, not exactly because we don't know if he has some kind of genetic factors or some kind of environmental trigger or something that happened that made it possible for him but virtually impossible for the other 95%. Like just because 5% of the population could do something, it doesn't mean that anybody in that 95% could be part of the 5%. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: 21:06

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:08

So there could be factors involved that just make it impossible and I hate to use that word, but we don't know. Like you can't be part of that 95% and say, oh, I got a one out of 20 chance so it's probably impossible for me. That's just giving up. I mean, you gotta try, you gotta see if you are part of that 5%, but if you're not, you're not, and that's the way it is.

Speaker 2: 21:36

I, first of all, I'm like completely nerding out over here because statistics are, it's a hyperfixation. You know, that is one of the things that I actually used to get so riled up around, you know, especially in the nursing world and when people would say like, oh, there's this statistic, so like, if this, then this, I'm like there's so many other factors we're not talking about here, like we're, and I think that social psychology is just such a beautiful place to highlight that, because I can't remember who says it. But there's the saying of show me the five people that you spend the most time with and I'll tell you who you are. And about 70% of me is on board with that statement, right, where we do know that If you surround yourself with people who have higher levels of happiness, if you surround yourself with people who have higher levels of resiliency, higher levels of optimism, all of these things that typically, generally, you will start to adopt more of those qualities, because it's kind of like you're bathing yourself in those waters, right. And the other thing that I think is really fascinating is so many people are like, well, just change your circumstance, right, just change your situation.

Speaker 2: 22:56

And kind of, as you were speaking to, I have to have the hardware that is compatible with that software, or I have to even know that that software program exists. A lot of people are out there like, well, these are just the people that I grew up with, these are the people that I meant to spend time with, this is the neighborhood Like, this is my life. They don't know that there are other software programs, so to speak, that are compatible with their hardware, and so they never even think to try to install them, and part of that is because they've never seen anybody else do it either. So it's just this idea of absolutely. Can we change who we are, can we shift how we show up in the world? Like absolutely, with a big asterisk of you have to. We have to have access to that Meaning. We have to know that those newer software or more improved software programs exist and how to install them, and we've got to have hardware that actually allows us to do that, and some people don't have that.

Speaker 1: 23:59

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Are you a fan of modern family? The sitcom.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Oh, absolutely yes.

Speaker 1: 24:07

We're rewatching it again and I just saw an episode that really kind of hammers on this point, where Alex, the daughter, was with she's like a brilliant girl for the people who don't watch modern family and she was going off to college and she had her boyfriend who was also like this genius decide to break up preemptively, like at the end of the summer, because they know that like 18% of couples actually make it in for long distance relationships.

Speaker 1: 24:37

So they were actually making that mistake at the beginning, saying, oh, 18%, that's not very good, so let's break up. And then Alex, at the end of the episode, she had an epiphany. She said well, wait a minute, we're not at the bottom percentage of anything, we're at the top percentage of everything that we do, so the chances that we're going to be part of that 18% is extremely good. So with that new information, she realized that it's not 18, she doesn't have an 18% chance. The general statistic is 18% percent, but because of who she is and who they both are, they have a much better percent chance than the 18%. So they ended up getting back together which a spoiler alert. They ended up breaking up later.

Speaker 2: 25:21

They didn't make it. But how many of us as humans do that? We're like oh, there's a one in 50 chance that this is this is going to work for me, so I'm not going to go for it. Right, Right there.

Speaker 1: 25:32

There's a 50% chance it's going to work for me. No, no, 50% or 50% chance, whatever's going to work for the general population or for the group that was ever tested, or whatever. That's different.

Speaker 2: 25:46

Yes, I am a generally very optimistic person, and it's been fascinating because we've had a lot of, like really big changes happen in our life recently, and I actually said this to my husband the other day. I was like I just need to stop being so optimistic. And he's like that is never going to happen. You are never not going to be an optimistic person, he's like. What we can do, however, is we can make sure that you are surrounded with people who are more realists and then that you trust that you listen to.

Speaker 2: 26:17

So, when you have this super, like bright, shiny, optimistic idea that your wise counsel can be like greatly, we know that you'll bring this to fruition, because you always bring what you're going to bring, what you want to bring, to fruition. And how can we like double the timeline? How can we plan for this to cost twice as much as you think it's going to like? How can we put realism around your optimism so that you don't have to try to shift who you are at your core? And we can make sure that, like, we have contingency plans for if things don't go in the best possible way that they could.

Speaker 2: 26:54

I bring this up right now because I think a lot of times from a trauma perspective, if we have past painful experiences where we've been taught like, oh, it's wrong to be optimistic or it's bad to be optimistic or the opposite, you know, kind of whatever your baseline level of happiness, like it's wrong to be that happy or it's wrong to be that I don't know that E or that like pessimistic If that's kind of where your baseline personality lives like, instead of trying to shift yourself. One of the great things I've learned is can you surround yourself with people who think a little bit differently than you do, that you trust that can kind of mitigate that, so that you don't have to make yourself wrong for being who you are, and yet we can also make sure that things are more likely to work out.

Speaker 1: 27:41

Sure, I've got some wisdom to please to drop on that.

Speaker 1: 27:47

The way that I see optimism, pessimism and realism is a little bit differently. I don't see realism as a competitor to optimism or pessimism. I don't see it on the same scale, like it's not either pessimistic, realistic or optimistic. No, there's optimism and then there's pessimism, and then a completely different scale is realism or being realistic, and I hope I could do this justice by explaining it. But, yeah, think of being realism or being a realist as somebody who which I think that from what I know of you already, from our conversation for 30 minutes or so, I believe that you are you're somebody who appreciates data, appreciates statistics, could see the world for for what it is. Yeah, and with that information then you can choose. Well, you could maybe not choose, because part of it again is really ingrained, but you could be optimistic or pessimistic about that particular data. So, for example, I think you mentioned an option of like home improvement or something, or yeah, so okay, home improvement project. A good example there is like, as a realist, you could say you know enough about home improvement to say this is going to cost, given the estimates, given the fact that contractors are frequently under budget, or say, on this, quote under budget and come up head over budget. You know realistically that this will cost $10,000 this project. So that's the realist part. And then from your experience, you could look at your past experience and you can say, with the past experience they tend to be maybe like a week late, two weeks late, and that's your baseline for the realism. Like everything data driven tells you that that is the realistic stance.

Speaker 1: 29:47

Now you could be optimistic about it or you could be pessimistic. You could say, I think that optimistically, I think we're going to do better this time, I don't think it's going to be as bad. Or you can think pessimistically, I think it's going to be a lot worse this time. But as long as you have that realistic baseline and you know what the realistic expectation, the outcome is, then that's it, the optimism and the pessimism. That's something that you really don't have a lot of control over. Yeah, if you, if you have the realistic baseline and you are a realist and again, a realist is all about knowing the data, knowing the probable outcomes. That's completely different and then you have this kind of like this visceral, more emotional part of you. Will look at that, that realistic situation with all the data, and how do you feel about that Again? Do you feel like, oh, I think we're going to do better than the baseline, or do you think we're going to do worse? And that's kind of where the optimism and the pessimism comes in.

Speaker 2: 30:46

Okay, you just blew my mind and I'm like taking notes over here. One of the things we've been talking a lot about in our spaces is around acceptance versus judgment, so acceptance versus approval or disapproval. So acceptance is that realism of like this is what it is, and then the optimism versus pessimism is that like and I use the word judgment not with, like the negative connotation that I think a lot of people put on it, but evaluative, right, the evaluation is Okay, this is what it is. And I am a human who likes to like, put on the optimistic glasses and emotionally connect with the positivity and possibility around this Versus.

Speaker 2: 31:26

I am somebody who has a tendency to put on and this is my husband and I absolutely love him for it, because he is the guy who's going to go what is everything that could go wrong, what is everything that's not gonna work, and oftentimes he brings that's his process.

Speaker 2: 31:43

He brings like two or three very real concerns to the table that are so helpful.

Speaker 2: 31:50

So he's gonna put on that evaluative lens of like, what's everything that could go wrong? I'm gonna put on the evaluative lens of what's everything that could go right, almost, and then we oftentimes bring that together and go okay, now we've got an idea of and a sense of this is what it is, and here are the evaluative pieces based on our experience of how this could go, and what I love about that is that there's no one of the things we talk about is like shame and guilt and being compassionate towards yourself and I know that this is a place that a lot of people have trauma around is like getting excited about things and getting disappointed or going you know what. This absolutely isn't gonna work and then having it not work and say, see, I told you so, right. So there's a lot of self judgment and a lack of self acceptance in that process, and what you just explained is here's how to actually go through this process and be like accepting of who you are, while also still being accepting of what data you're being presented with.

Speaker 1: 32:57

Sure.

Speaker 2: 32:58

That's so good. You've got my brain abuzz, okay. So if somebody wanted to learn more about because you've got a lot of different places we can go We've got the YouTube show, which, by the way, we were chatting about this before we started recording and y'all. I actually pulled this up on YouTube to watch and we're done, and we were just connecting over the fact that you bring a lot of the social psychology and the explanations of, like these bigger concepts into this show in a way that people can really resonate with. What are some of the biggest takeaways you think that people get from the show in terms of social psychology?

Speaker 1: 33:37

Well, it's all about a fitness staff, like a staff of trainers, the owner of the gym manager and so forth, and how they interact with some of the guests. And that's kind of the comedic element of it, Because I've been going to a gym since, basically, I was 10 years old a fitness center of some sort and there are just so many hilarious things that have happened in stories. That's what sparked this thing on, Like, why not put it all together? But it is all about human interaction and how people behave in front of different people around different people, how they kind of change when they're in a different environment, and a lot of what I put into the sitcom has to do with critical thinking and reasoning.

Speaker 1: 34:23

I knew after a long time of writing my first books that, yeah, they sell well and some people will read it a very small percentage of the population, obviously Because people like to be entertained more than they like to learn, which is unfortunate, but it's just the way we are, and if you could be entertained and learned at the same time great.

Speaker 1: 34:46

So that's kind of what sparked this Like let's put these really I wouldn't say that they're very difficult concepts to grasp, but they're difficult concepts for somebody to accept. I think that's a good way to put it. Just if I told you like, hey, you should really accept the fact that something, then you're like, well, I don't believe that and I'm not going to just accept it. You could tell me that, but in my experience it doesn't work that way or whatever. This way is through the sitcom, through the animation, through the storytelling, it's a way that they could experience something, and they could see something first-hand that they may not have experienced before. So it will help them to accept the idea a little bit more. I don't want to make it sound like this whole thing is an academic endeavor, because it's just a whole lot of fun and I hope that everybody will find it hilarious, but there's also an academic arm to it.

Speaker 2: 35:46

I think that you hit the nail on the head about the education and the entertainment when you can put those two things together. If anybody's ever heard somebody tell a powerful story, stories are meant to teach us things when they're told in specific ways, and they're also meant to entertain us. If you look at any Disney movie, if you look at talk about influencing, you look at a lot of the movies that are out there. Barbie is a huge one right now, which I have lots of conflicting feelings about that. We don't have time to go into. But from a social psychology perspective, you are learning something while you are being entertained.

Speaker 2: 36:28

I think a lot of people don't recognize that, and I just learned this the other day. Maybe I was naive, but I didn't realize it's a constant for situational comedy. I was like, oh okay, so they're putting you into an experience. That then, where you're seeing things through the lens of this experience, while also laughing and having that comedic element to it. It's something we do on our TikToks too. I absolutely love to do that and I think it would be really cool to actually see some of your shorts on TikTok, but they'd be really popular. But what I've found is so interesting is that when you can take these really complex ideas and make them simple for people, all of a sudden they're like oh okay, I get this. So I think it's really cool that it's fun and it's a passion project and also you're pulling that your knowledge and your experience or expertise into it. I think that's awesome. I get so jazzed and I see other people doing that because it's such a great way to take your genius to the world in a way that they can digest it.

Speaker 1: 37:35

Sure.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah, for those of us who actually are entertained by reading, who listened to this conversation and maybe who want to learn more about the things that you've talked about, which of your books would you have them start with? We'll make sure that we tag it in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 37:51

Sure, from based on a lot of the things we talked about, maybe year to success.

Speaker 1: 37:58

That was the first book I wrote back in 2004. I've updated it a couple of times. That's really good. That's really motivational, positive, inspirational and has some really good philosophies in there. After I did get my PhD, I did go through there and sanitize it, because a lot of the stuff yeah, that's not really true. Yeah, so I did update it.

Speaker 1: 38:22

For those really focusing more on the critical thinking and the logic part of it check out Logically Fallacious. Oh, actually, that's a really good one, but that's more about argumentation. The new one that I have out is called the Biased Brain. That's all about cognitive biases. There's 200 or 300 cognitive biases in that book. It's huge and it's really complete.

Speaker 1: 38:48

You could find out how our brain works. Essentially Well, it is how it works, but how it has these little hiccups and it doesn't work as expected. Because you think, or what most people think, is that our brain works and by works we think that it's supposed to align with logic and reason Right, and the way the world actually is. But that's not the case. Our brain was wired to work so we could stay alive and reproduce. That's all it cares about. It doesn't care that we can logically evaluate something. It doesn't care that we get to the truth, especially if the truth isn't actually good for us. It only cares again, our brain only cares that we learn things, that we see things the way that helps us survive and helps us reproduce. That's it.

Speaker 2: 39:45

Yes.

Speaker 1: 39:46

That's the way evolution works. So if you understand that, you could stop and you could say, okay, am I biased here and how am I biased? And by knowing the cognitive biases you'll get a much better understanding of yourself and hopefully you'll start to see the world for the way that it really is and not just through your lens, which for many people maybe from what I understand about your podcast and your audience, could be harmful the way that they currently see it, Negative, and a lot of this could be because of these biases. So if you understand the biases, it's a way of retraining your brain to start to see the world that it actually is, not the incredibly negative view that somebody may see it as.

Speaker 2: 40:33

I'm actually really excited to check all of these out and yeah, we'll make sure that they're. All three are in the show notes and you know you are the biased pieces. You're just speaking to my soul right now. I was worrying about something last night and I texted my husband and I was like let's talk about it in the morning because, like, I don't know that I'm going to be logically you know logic and clearheaded right now and he said something and then we actually ended up talking about it and I heard myself say like, no, I know I'm right. And then I was like you know what? It's 107 in the morning, I do not know I'm right.

Speaker 2: 41:09

And I said that to him and I was like you want to know how I actually think that I'm right right now is because I'm stopping and saying to myself I might not be right and I never do that. So I was like but you know what? Let's just talk about it in the morning. He was, and he, he was so shocked because that's not how I typically do it. He was like, yeah, okay, and we just went to bed and but that's been one of the big things that I've personally been working on is like questioning Anytime I hear myself say I'm right. How do you know that? How do you know that?

Speaker 1: 41:37

And in the morning did you, were you right?

Speaker 2: 41:39

We haven't had a chance to talk yet, but I still think that I think I was like. You know, this is going to just be such a beautiful both and statement. I think I was right and I think he was too, so I think we were both right. You talk about those two things optimism, pessimism and realism like being on separate scales. We were on two separate scales and we were both right, so, yeah, so I just wanted to pull that in because practically like that can make such a difference if you're somebody who has a lot of past painful experiences and like a fight, threat, response, like I do, where I'm like no, I'm right and really starting to evaluate those things be able to take that step back, something we work a lot of on in our programs. And so I'm excited to read this now because I feel like I'm definitely going to learn some things. So, ok, well, if people would like to connect with you, best place to do that.

Speaker 1: 42:32

Go to bobenetcom. That's where you can find all my books. That's my personal website and there's a contact form on there where you could ask me questions or whatever.

Speaker 2: 42:40

Perfect. Ok thank you so much for joining us. All right, thank you. All right, y'all, we will see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Invitation to head to our show notes to check out the offers and connections we mentioned, or you can just head straight over to InstituteforTraumacom and hop in our email list so that you never miss any of the cool things that we're doing over at the Institute. Invitation to be well and to take care of yourself this week and we'll see you next time.