The Mindset Economy

The Ideological Brain with Dr Leor Zmigrod

• Leor Zmigrod • Episode 2

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What makes the brain vulnerable to ideology?

In this episode of The Mindset Economy, hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by neuroscientist and author Dr Leor Zmigrod to explore the psychology and neuroscience of ideological thinking and what makes any of us vulnerable to rigid belief systems.

Leor’s research shows that ideology is not defined by what you believe, but by how you believe it. When thinking becomes inflexible, fused with identity, and resistant to evidence, the brain narrows. Cognitive flexibility declines. Empathy can weaken. Even our physiological responses to other people’s suffering can change.

The conversation moves beyond politics into the difference between values and ideologies, the myth that intelligence protects us from dogmatism, and why uncertainty makes certainty feel irresistible. It also explores how AI shifts radicalisation from passive consumption to active dialogue, potentially reinforcing bias and rigidity in new and powerful ways. How often do we confuse conviction with clarity and what would it take to cultivate the kind of flexibility that allows us to think freely in a polarised, AI-accelerated world?

For leaders, parents, and anyone trying to remain thoughtful under pressure, this is a scientific and deeply human exploration of how belief systems shape the brain - and how we might protect our capacity for judgment, empathy, and freedom.


Reading from Dr Leor Zmigrod:
The Ideological Brain: How Rigid Beliefs Harm Our Minds & Bodies – And Why It Matters (L Zmigrod, Penguin, 2026)

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)


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The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

You'd know you're into the realm of ideologies rather than just of values. When it has that strictness and that almost punitive aspect that you think that anyone who goes against that rule that you have should be punished, including yourself. How do ideology shape our lives, and what is the cost of ideological thinking on our mindset? We all like to think of ourselves as independent thinkers. We might believe we weigh the evidence, look at all the facts, and arrive at our own conclusions. But do we most people think of an ideologue as somebody with a strong or extreme opinion? Well, I think it's much deeper than that. It starts with a doctrine, a set of fixed beliefs that progressively morphs into a very rigid system of rules that refuses to bend even in light of new information. Ideologies, refuse evidence, building in us a defensive mindset. That's contributing to an increase in binary thinking and polarization, and that's what we're seeing in the world today. When you adopt an ideology, you stop seeing people and you begin to sort the world into those who belong to the truth and those who are outsiders. And what's more, you eventually turn that judgment even on yourself. You begin to police your own thoughts, your own identity, terrified that you might not conform to the very script that you've sworn to follow. Today we're gonna explore the dogmatic mind, ideologies, and personal identities that counter to what it will take to thrive in the mindset economy by narrowing our field of vision and significantly limiting our metacognition. We're exploring this topic with our incredible guest, Dr. Lior Migra. Dr. Migra is an award-winning scientist and author whose research explores the psychology of ideological extremism using methods from experimental psychology, cognitive science, political science, and neuroscience. In particular, she investigates the cognitive, emotional and neurobiological characteristics that might act as vulnerability factors for radicalization and ideological behavior. What do you mean by an ideological brain? Um, how do you, how do you find ideology in psychological terms? So for me, an ideology is a little different maybe to how it is usually defined for people, which is like as this big political structure or this big historical movement that people might be familiar with, the big isms that we've heard, uh, fascism, communism, all those ideologies. I really think about it and I'm interested in thinking about. What it means for a person to think and be ideological from a psychological perspective, even from a brain-based perspective, really. And for me, someone who is thinking ideologically is really doing two things. The first is that they are adhering to a system of rules, a system of beliefs about how the world works, about their role in the world, about how they should think about what they should think and do and what they should never do. And this doctrine that they embrace is this really fixed system of rules that they live by. And so someone who's highly ideological is very committed to that system of rules, those prescriptions for how to think and be, um, and they resist any evidence that challenges that doctrine. And in addition to that kind of very doctrinal, dogmatic way of thinking, an ide, 'cause I ideological person is not just someone who okay, has a system of rules and lives with that in their heads. They are applying it to the social world. So they really start to create and live by these identities for who belongs to the ideological group, who doesn't, who believes in it, who doesn't. Um, and they start to judge everyone, including themselves according to whether they conform to that prototype that the ideology suggests that they should be. And so that's in some sense, what it means to think ideologically is to be very fixed about that identity and that doctrine. Um, and as you can see, it's really, it's got, this definition has got nothing to do with what the person actually believes or what kind of ideology it is, whether it's left wing or right wing, nationalistic or religious. You know, it can really be any kind of ideology. But I'm more interested in the style of thinking that a dogmatic thinker. Tends to dwell in, um, and tends to exist in. And when we look at that, what we find is that really we can map on a person's ideological commitments and how rigid they are about them to their brain, to the nature of their brain. Uh, and in many ways that's what I explore in the book. We'd love to dive into that, but before we do, um, it'd be really helpful to kind of try and pull apart some of the things that you've talked about here in terms of how people think and their identity and, you know, how they form that identity around themselves. And, and therefore, you know, the degree to which that inflexibility, that cognitive inflexibility is defined by their sense of value and worth in the world versus just kind of cognitive processes. Um, and, and also the idea that, you know, you described it as being dangerous or healthy. Can we pull apart some of these things? Yes, because I think in many ways we hear about ideologies as being really good for us. Uh, that, you know, and what I mean by that is that we hear that having fixed unshakeable beliefs and convictions is a good thing, is the mark of a moral person, of a good person, of an admirable person, really. Um, but I think that the science of the ideological brain really refutes that because it suggests that actually what it means, what ideologies do to us is actually very dangerous. It's actually a kind of narrowing of our mental life, not just in politics, but in every other realm, whether that's business, whether that's a family, whether that's our personal hobbies. When you adhere to an ideology, it makes you think in narrow and rigid ways about any kind of problem you are trying to solve. And so. My view is that actually ideologies are not good for us at all. That those unshakeable beliefs are not things that we should necessarily always admire, um, because they indicate a kind of narrowing, a kind of rigidity, a kind of insensitivity in many ways to yourself and to your surroundings, because you're adhering to a dogma that always has to be right. And so I think that there's a kind of injury that ideologies do to our minds and even our bodies, right? Our brains in the biological sense. Um, and I worry about that and, and I hope that, you know, that if this science does anything, is that it inspires people to really reconsider those convictions that they most cherish and ask themselves, well, what is this actually doing to my mental life? It would seem to me that people hold to ideologies in part because of the sense of purpose and meaning it gives their lives. Um, but you were suggesting that perhaps any ideology is unhealthy. Is it a spectrum? Is it ever useful? Just pull that apart for us a bit. Yeah. So one thing that is important is that there is a distinction between values and ideologies, right? Values can be these guiding orientations that we have towards life, where it can be a cultural value, it can be a moral value, a moral compass, um, things that we value and cherish, um, or things that we detest in some way and to try to live. You know, against those values. And for me, the difference between a value and an ideology is in its rigidity that a value or a cultural narrative or a cultural story or explanation is one that can be played with. It can, there can be deviations. You can, someone can start to reinterpret a value slightly and apply it in a kind of sensitive way, in a new way. So really values can be these guiding orientations, but they're not necessarily rules, right? They're kind of themes, um, themes that you try to embody in your life. But ideologies are very strict because there's a system of rules, a kind of sense of. What you should do, what you should never do under, and there can be no context, right? There can be no deviation, and you'll treat anyone who goes against those rules in a very harsh way, which you don't necessarily do with a value or a cultural or tradition, right? Many cultural traditions can allow eccentricities, deviations, idiosyncrasies, but ideologies, and that's almost when you'd know you're into the realm of ideologies rather than just of values, is when it has that strictness and that almost punitive aspect that you think that anyone who goes against that rule that you have should be punished, including yourself, right? That, and you, some of us can start to reflect on whether you know. Even in things that don't feel political at all, whether it's our diet or exercise or things we do with our families, right? Whether, how we react to moments when we don't follow those rules, right, that we impose on ourselves or that we feel are imposed on us from other people. Do we feel this major guilt and shame and that we should be punished for not following the rules? That's a sign that you've become maybe potentially a little dogmatic and ideological. Or do you say, okay, well actually life is messy. You're a human being. You don't have to repeat everything and conform to the rules from outside or your own rules. There can be changes in deviations. So that's where I see the line between being ideological and being kind of led by a broad value. What was the, the origin of you getting into this work and the motivation behind it? Was there something that you, you personally, wanted to explore for yourself? I think for me. What really drew me to this was really the question of how we become free or what it means to think freely. And I was curious about this from a kind of scientific angle. I was studying the kind of neuroscience of freedom, um, about 10 years ago. And at the same time when I was looking outside, I felt like there were all these instances of people choosing unfreedom, that people choosing forms of coercion, people choosing restrictions rather than choosing openness in a way. And I felt like the neurosciences and psychology had a lot to say about political questions that we might not have thought were psychological. And 10 years ago when I. Really started to think about this. We had in Europe and also in the US in the west, a lot of young people starting to join isis, this religious fundamentalist group in Syria. People who, young people who lived in western liberal democracies, their whole lives suddenly becoming tempted by an ideology that was really violent, really restrictive. Um, and I was so curious about why, what drew them to it, and whether there's something about the specific brains of the people who end up going for those extreme ideologies. That's unique, that's a little different to everyone else. Now, that difference is not necessarily, um, a categorical one, right? Where their brains are categorically different to everybody else's brains and they are like a pathological, you know, um, kind of Ill example of something. It's really a continuous spectrum. Where, you know, some people have that proneness to those ideological extremisms, and they can be kind of on one end of the spectrum. Other people might be really resistant. There are some people who say, I will never choose a closed way of living. I would always like to keep an open horizon for my thoughts and my life. And most of us are somewhere in between those two polls. And I was curious to explore that spectrum and what were the factors that positioned us on one end of the spectrum rather than the other. So what did you find, um, and, and are we becoming more ideological in the world as a species? Yeah, it feels that way, but that could just be what I'm ingesting on a daily basis. Right. You sort of hear the stories of Extremisms, um mm-hmm. But just here in the US I think politically it feels like people are becoming more ideological. Mm-hmm. I think that it's a little hard to judge. Exactly whether humanity is going towards a more ideological direction or not. Because because it's so vast and so diverse and there are so many, uh, kind of movements towards certain kinds of progress and then certain kinds of regression, um, I think that what is happening is that we're getting, um, first of all the ideologies that maybe. Might seem extreme when you look at them to, people don't feel that extreme and you see that people think that actually it's really good to be radical. That's really good to be extreme. Like I've had so many people tell me, well, actually, but I think radicalism is great. I think you need that passion for something. You need a group to belong to. You need to have a, a closed kind of fixed sense of who you are and who you should be.'cause without it we'd be lost. Um, and you'd be unmoored. Um, so I think that we are living in an age that increasingly glorifies fixed identities that you ought to have a fixed identity and it cannot change. And that is a big catalyst for extremisms to take over in the age of uncertainty. Do you think that's making us more susceptible? Yeah. Identity. Yeah, exactly. Because we're living in times are increasingly more chaotic, increasingly more uncertain, where we're increasingly more atomized from each other, you know, through little boxes on the screen. But the uncertainty is really difficult to live with. And we know from the brain's perspective what the brain wants is coherence. It wants certainty and ideologies really satisfy that need, right? They give us a very certain clear framework for acting and thinking in the world. And when the world feels messy and uncertain, that is really comforting. It's really reassuring to just know who you should be and how to categorize everyone else. But as I write in the book, it's also really misleading that co that comfort that those coherent certain narratives give us is, uh, also really toxic for us. So what, what makes somebody susceptible to ideology? So there's a whole range of psychological factors that make a person more susceptible, and we're really only just now starting to really unpack it all. There are a few that I can touch on that capture what it is about a person's thinking style, their personality, even characteristics of their brains that make them gravitate towards a certain kind of ideology and not another. And this also exists on different kind of axes, right? There are things that make people gravitate towards a left-wing ideology versus a right-wing ideology. And there are ones that make people gravitate towards any kind of extremism regardless of what its mission is. One of the characteristics that I've studied in my research is called cognitive rigidity, which is a trait that. Um, basically captures how flexibly and adaptably you tend to think in any kind of situation, how you tend to solve problems, how you tend to imagine new ideas, how you tend to react to change or uncertainty. And what I've done is I've run experiments with thousands and thousands of participants and studied how their cog, how cognitive rigidity relates to their ideological commitments. And what I've discovered is that the people who are more cognitively rigid in any kind of psychological task or problem, they tend to be the most susceptible to joining an extreme ideology to believe in the virtues of fixed identities, fixed rules, and um. And the way in which I measure people's cognitive rigidity is not just by asking them, how rigid do you think you are? Because no one knows right? PE we are shockingly bad at knowing ourselves. The most flexible thinkers won't know it, and the most rigid thinkers will report to me that they're spectacularly flexible. So we are lacking in a lot of self-knowledge, which is why when I measure people's cognitive fragility, I measure it with these more objective neuropsychological tasks. And, um, in these psychological tasks, they actually really look like computer games, like Tetris or Solitaire games that you might play on your computer in your spare time. But they allow us as psychologists to really understand how a person tends to react, to change, to uncertainty, how they tend to think. And um, in those kinds of games, we. For instance, can really capture how a pers how adaptable is a person when suddenly the rules of the game changes. And do they tend to be adaptable and be like, okay, yes, the rules of the game have changed, but I can change in response to that. Or do they tend to hold back and say, no, no, I don't want this world, this game world to change. I'll try to stick to everything I've learned up till now. And so these kinds of games can give us a lot of insight into how people are learning, how psychologically they tend to approach the world. And actually the resonances between people's psychological habits and their political ones are a bit astonishing even to me, uh, as I've been doing this research and thinking about it. Because we really see how a person, the way in which a person solves any kind of. Problem how they solve Tetris or something like that might foreshadow how susceptible they are to extreme ideologies. So it's troubling and fascinating. Um, but, but has so much room for also further exploration too. I'm just wondering, 'cause we had, um, Steve Fleming, who's a metacognition, um, specialist, talking to us about, um, the idea that, and I know it's not quite the same thing that we're talking about, but metacognition, the ability to think about thinking was independent of iq. Mm-hmm. So you can have someone who's very smart, but is unable to evaluate their own thinking. And I'm just wondering what, did you see a similar sort of thing there that, that people with the cognitive rigidity, it's not, it's not a function of intelligence in the traditional sense. That's right. Yeah. So. I've, for many of my studies also measured IQ and looked at whether, you know how IQ and cognitive flexibility relate to each other and interact, and they are independent, of course they can be relate. And many people, they do coexist. Yeah. A very intelligent person can also be a very flexible person, but they have different roots. And so it's important to understand that cognitive ability, what we call IQ, is not the same as cognitive flexibility. And that I think is also really important because sometimes people have these prejudices that like, oh, if you're really intelligent, you're gonna be this very flexible thinker and you're gonna be so nuanced and complex in your thinking, but actually it's not enough. Actually. You need to also have that flexibility of thought as well. Well, I, um, it's interesting because, you know, we do have this, uh, kind of shortcut that we go to because somebody's ideologically predisposed to believe things that, you know, most people would think is crazy, that they must be daft stupid or low lacking in intelligence, and that that isn't necessarily. The origins of this at all? No. And we really stick to those images, those metaphors of people who are radical having been diluted in some way, or stupid or silly or just gullible. Um, but I think those are images and metaphors that oversimplify the picture. And actually when you look at ideological brains, you see that it's much more dynamic. And that actually when a person joins an ideology and commits to its radical and violent conclusions, that's an active choice. That's not a brainwashing that erases any responsibility or personality. That is an active choice. And there are active processes in the brain that change as well as a result. So. Those labels that we sometimes give to the extremists that we detest can really mislead us. You are listening to the mindset economy where your beliefs, resilience and adaptability aren't just innate qualities we should take for granted. They're your new currency In an automated world. How you feel, think, and see the world will largely define your success and satisfaction. Make sure you subscribe so we can explore this new world together. This might be a good place to talk a little bit about our constructed view of reality.'cause I think many of us wouldn't think that we hold an ideology as much as we just hold a more accurate perception of reality than our poor friends who are, you know, less accurate than, than we are. So can we talk a little bit about that idea? Yeah. When we're in an ideology. We do think that it's reality. We're convinced we're actually more convinced than anyone else that our grasp of reality is the right one. I think that just thinking about whether an ideology is a true representation of reality or a close one, or whether it's very far from it's conspiratorial in ways that seem, uh, foolish and unlikely is not always the right way to think about it, because it's really not always about, oh, how distant that ideology is from reality as to what it does to the minds of those believers, which is of course, it does create a kind of barrier between them and their direct sensation of reality because you're making them, um, you're encouraging them to say that either things exist that don't exist, that there's things that they, um. They might sense are irrelevant, you know, if they sense, if they feel a certain discomfort, that that's not important, that they should continue to live by the ideology regardless. And so there is obviously a distance that ideologies put between us and reality, but I think that many ideologies do that. It's not just the ideologies that we say we disagree with. And that's why I hope that you know, the book and these ideas encourage people to confront, well, even if I think that my ideology is right, let me look not just at like what I'm believing, but how I'm relating to it. Am I relating to it without doubt, without nuance, without complexity? Am I demonizing anyone who believes otherwise? Um, because if you are. I think you're not just dehumanizing the people who believe something else. Mm-hmm. You're also dehumanizing yourself in a way, because what ideologies do is they make us think in more narrow terms, in less sensitive ways. We become less empathic, and I think ultimately less free. And so we dehumanize ourselves in that way because we make ourselves a bit more, a bit less authentic and more conforming to a certain prototype, a certain kind of model for what this ideological person should be. So to, to kind of hold this construct of what reality looks like, that you are essentially right and you have to shut off any kind of data, information, views that count your perspective. Um, you, you have to kind of create this barrier to the world. What else in your research did you see, um, in terms of damage or dysfunction to the brain that happens as a result of having to maintain that sort of illusion about the reality of the world? One of the angles, one of the lines of research that really interests me is how the ideologies that we hold, shape our bodily responses, our physiological responses to things in the world. And there's a really interesting line of research that looks at how, for instance, our ideologies about inequality. Whether we believe that inequalities are fine and natural and good, that we need steep inequalities in our societies, and that, you know, society shouldn't do anything to correct those inequalities. Um, that's one kind of approach. And other people think that no equality between like dramatic inequalities between people are. Bad that maybe there are things that as a society we should try to correct or diminish. And what the researchers did there is they looked at how the bodies of people who believe in those two different visions for the world respond to the suffering of someone who's at the bottom of that economic hierarchy. Someone who is homeless, who they've asked participants to watch a video of someone who is homeless, describing the adversities, the challenges of their life, and they measure their physiological arousal, their, um, all these different autonomic indicators. And what they saw is that if you believe that inequality is not a good thing, that it's something that we should, as a society, try to correct that your body really reacts with this intuitive empathy to the person who's suffering. Your heart rate will accelerate as you watch them discussing their suffering. Your kind of physiological markers will spike your body without you knowing it will be distressed. By the suffering of this person. But someone who believes in an ideology where inequality is good, natural, fine, their body doesn't react to the suffering of someone at the bottom of that economic hierarchy. Literally, their heart rate does not accelerate. Physiologically, they're unmoved, they're numb to this person's pain at the most unconscious levels. And what this shows is how these ideolog certain ideologies can really restrict our, our reflexes, our intuitive emotional reflexes. And so, and we see that across the board, that when someone is highly ideological, they will. Be so much less sensitive to the humanity of anyone who disagrees or anyone who represents a threat to their ideology. So that's one way in which our ideologies really condition our bodily responses to, to others. It's fascinating. How much of this do you think is nature versus nurture, right? Mm. Is there a, is there a dog machine? Is there, uh, what's the, what's the role of, you know, genetics and epigenetics and all of that and versus environment growing up in a very ideological, um, household Teasing apart this nature versus nurture dilemma is really, I feel like at the heart of the book because in many ways I am looking at the biological factors that propel people towards. Certain kinds of ideologies, including their genetics. So I have done some studies that look at how a particular neurotransmitter that many of us know dopamine, which typically we hear of as governing our sense of excitement and surprise, that dopamine rush that we often seek in our life. But. It is responsible for these things because it fundamentally governs our learning, how flex. And so it also governs how flexibly we respond to change. And what I've found is that there are particular genes that affect how dopamine is created within our bodies and how it's distributed within each individual brain. That actually can create a biological propensity for thinking in more rigid ways. And so there is a biological component. And sometimes when people hear that, they get a bit nervous because they say, well, you're saying that really it's rooted in our biology. And if it's rooted in our biology, then supposedly it's determined, predetermined and deterministic. And to that, I say, well, actually no, because in the same way that we might have certain genetic risk factors for different health conditions, different. You know, personality, um, traits, those are really dependent. The expression of those is really dependent on the environments we're in, the choices we make, and so there's an epigenetic quality to it as well. Which is that, you know, a mind that might have a biological or psychological sensitivity predisposition to thinking in radical ways might not necessarily end up being this rabid ideologue, right? It depends on the environment they're in and the choices that they make. And similarly, you can take a really flexible mind with supposedly all of the best protective features that make them resilient. But then you put them in a really stressful environment, in an environment of major adversity of war, pandemic, stressful situations that make them think in more narrow ways. And suddenly you can get someone who you'd never thought would be an ideological person becoming a lot more ideological. And I think many of us saw this in moments of adversity. People in our lives, we suddenly saw. Joining ideological sides that we never imagined before. And that's why looking at, rather than it being nature versus nurture, it's really understanding how our nurture, our environment, conditions, our nature, and vice versa. So looking at how, you know, the brains we have shape, the ideologies we choose, but at the same time, in certain environments or even in certain ideological environments, those our brains can really be shaped back by those processes. Well, as you just said, you know, there, there are so many things that can lead us down in, in subtle ways to this adopting ideological positions, be it economic climate change, AI and so on. How do you know? How you start to track when you start, you're down that path where you're starting to become cognitively rigid, but you don't think you are. And have you, have you ever experienced it yourself? I mean, is it something you are watching in yourself in reaction to things? I think it's something we constantly have to watch out for because really we live, especially now in a political climate that really there tries to rigidified us in many ways. There are so many, uh, pressures on us to just think in narrow ways, to think in dogmatic ways. And when I work, um, with leaders or people in any kind of realm, educators, people in any kind of domain who are interested to explore, well, how dogmatic am I? Then I do encourage them. I kinda actually give them some of the. The, the tests that I use to measure a person's dogmatism, not necessarily the same as the games to measure someone's flexibility, but different kind of, uh, reflective positions on yourself. So for instance, initially if I asked you, how dogmatic do you think you are, most people would say, I'm not. I'm so open to evidence, and I'm so open to alternative perspectives, and people will feel like there are these flexible, nuanced, um, masterminds, really. And initially, I'll give you a kind of a question. I'll say, well, to what extent do you think that you are open to evidence? And you'll say, I'm so open to evidence. And to what extent do you think you are open to hearing counter arguments to your belief? You'll say, yeah, I'm, I'm pretty open. Like I'm pretty open to hearing, uh, alternative views. And then I start to drill a bit deeper and I ask you to reflect, well, you know, when someone really challenges. Your belief, do you take it as a personal attack sometimes? Do you feel like it's personal? And then people start to say, well, yeah, actually it's sometimes I do. Sometimes I do want to shut that down. And I take it as though, although it's an intellectual counterargument, I take it as a personal attack. And so gradually when you start to drill into those nuances of what it means to think dogmatically, sometimes arrogantly, then you could, people can start to see, actually, maybe I can see some of those features in myself. Hmm. I can feel a lot of people wincing right now. But the key thing is right, that you can change if you want to. I'm not telling anyone to change if they don't want to, but, but if you want to be a more flexible, less dogmatic thinker, you can, our brains are so plastic, so capable of change. But you have to choose, you have to decide that that is the kind of value, maybe that you'd like to embody. That kind of flexibility. See, John, there's hope for you yet. Please. I'm glad you said that and I, I wanna stay with that a bit longer because you pointed out a really important truth earlier too, which is that we are, um, often fundamentally lacking in self-awareness. Mm-hmm. Um, so to your whole point about, you know, evaluating ourselves, thinking we're not really to the extent that we are, you know, listen, I could picture listeners right now saying, well, in any area that I am, yes, I would love to become more flexible, but we have these blind spots. How do we do the work of becoming more flexible? And, and I'm wondering too, is, is part of the process learning to dis-identify with belief? Hmm. I think so. I think there is a process where you have to disentangle from those convictions and realize that. That you are separate from those identities. Right? And in many ways, actually, that's often how we measure how committed someone is to a group or a kind of ideology, is to say, how, how intertwined do you feel like your personal identity is with this larger political identity? And the people who are most fused with it tend to be the most ideological. And the people who can see that independence tend to be the most flexible. Now, if you wanted to nurture your flexibility, if now I've scared you a little bit and you're saying, oh no, I feel maybe like I'm on the verge of being dogmatic and I don't want to be, um, give me, give, give me, give me a way out. Well, I'm not going to give you a set of rules or a recipe for how to be flexible thinker because the second I created, if I created a system of rules and routines for you to follow, I'm kind of creating another ideology. So. I don't wanna do that, and I don't think that's the right, I don't think you combat ideological thinking with a different kind of ideological thinking. But I can, uh, talk about some, some questions that you can ask yourself, some things that you can reflect on in your daily life that maybe you might like to change if you want to be a more flexible thinker across the board. And there are basically two things that I typically recommend. One of these things is something that I think you might want to interrogate and question about your life. And another thing is something that you might like to pursue more kind of actively in your life. The first thing is to look at all of the rules and rituals and routines that you have in your life. All those forms of repetition or restriction that actually might be. Making your life more homogenous and that narrow your thoughts in some way. And when you look at those rules that you live by, whether those are from outside or whether you impose them on yourself and you start to think, well actually, what are these forms of repetition doing to me? Usually what they're doing is they're removing the possibility for uncertainty, for change, for things to go in a different direction to what you planned. And so I think that when we start to question those rituals and routines, and not that, not that I'm saying stop eating your five a day or you know, you know, stop doing things that are healthy for you. But I think. Question, question, those forms of repetition, because they might be narrowing you in ways that you might not expect and making you less resilient to moments of uncertainty and change so that then a new ideology, a new extremism comes along and it fills that need for structure and uncertainty and coherence that you're kind of habituating yourself to by living a life of de like various deeply established structures and repetition. So that's the thing I'd suggest people individually interrogate in their lives and question. And the thing to pursue that I think is really fundamental to creating that strength against closed authoritarian ways of thinking is creativity. Because really what creativity is, a true creativity is one that doesn't just follow the rules. It toys with rules, it plays with assumptions and instructions and tries to break the mold. And when you infuse your life with that kind of creativity, I think it makes you a more exploratory, open thinker. And this can be in anything you do, whether you're following cooking recipes, or whether you are solving engineering problems or solving bigger social issues, whatever it's that you're doing, rather than doing it in the pre-established routine recipe way that you've learned, try to make to open it up. Try to see if you can think about it from multiple perspectives, playing with the ambiguity that's inherent in any problem. And when you infuse your life with that kind of flexibility. And you can start to solve problems more adaptably, I think you can become more resilient in the face of those closed ideologies. That's super helpful. Yeah. I really, I really love those two thoughts. I mean, they are, they're quite challenging. Mm-hmm. For, for most of us, first, the first one particularly to kind of trying to separate the healthy and the unhealthy, uh, um, rules in, in your life. But, um, can we actually, I wanted to go back a step and talk about, you know, what first got you into this, which was the, the people choosing to go and join isis, um, from very comfortable lives and go into now it was, I'm sure some of those were very young, naive individuals who didn't really know what, you know. What they were doing. They had a sort of romantic or whatever notion of, of, of this adventure they're gonna be on, only to be met with the horrors of the reality of that. Mm-hmm. But what did you learn about what was going on for them? Mm-hmm. That was a, you know, you pull that aspect apart, you know, what was fundamentally happening to them that made them do that? I think what was fundamentally happening to them was not what we and the media expected, which was not that okay, they're just vulnerable because of demographic, cultural, economic factors. I mean, they were, they were potentially vulnerable for those reasons too, but that they were vulnerable because their brains were tuned to ideologies that gave them. Uh, that kind of rigid structure, that clear sense of who they are. And most of them were young, like you mentioned, you know, they were teenagers. And we know that teenagers are highly susceptible to extreme ideologies because they're their, their adolescent brains are just brains are really trying to explain the world, really trying to understand reality. And suddenly here comes along a narrative that gives it to them, that gives them a sense of here's who you are, here's how to behave in the world, and, uh, here's who you can be and feel meaningful, valued, even if it's in some small, small context. And so I think that for the people who ended up, you know, going and choosing that kind of unfreedom, their personalities, their brains are really a cocktail of risk factors that make them tuned. Whether that's because of their cognitive rigidity. There potentially a lot. I, in my research I find that a lot of people who choose those kind of more violent uh, ideologies tend to be emotionally impulsive. So they tend to be seeking that kind of thrill and those sensations that many ideologies offer people. Um, and potentially there was even something about the very brain structure of those brains naturally didn't study the ones who left. But what we do know about, um, brains of people who are highly ideological is that there are subtle changes and subtle differences in their brain circuitry, basically to the extent that we can even see that there are certain brain structures that are bigger in people who believe in certain ideologies and smaller, and people who believe in something else. And so we can really see that the beliefs people hold can become biological realities for them. And parents listening to this, you kind of terrified that their child will be lured into some ideology that un, un un, you know, takes 'em in a bad direction. What, what advice would you give to parents to help, um, younger people whose brains aren't fully formed and, and for, you know, those two things that you talked about. The creativity part of it might be easy too for them, but, but the first one might be more difficult. What, what advice would, might you give them? Hmm. I think a lot of parents are rightly worried because we do see actually the rates of radicalization happening much more, uh, widely and also at much younger ages than we ever saw before. So, whereas 10 years ago, the average age of like a young person getting radicalized was broadly 18 or 17. Now it's going down to 14 or 13. It's really painful and heartbreaking, and I think that to understand that we need to remember that. Okay. There are some minds, some young people who have particular risk factors because of the way their brains work, the way in which they think about the world, the ways in which they reason, and so on. But then you take these minds and you put them in one of the most radicalizing environments, which is social media, and soon ai, and you create this really dangerous storm because when you look at the algorithms that govern social media, for instance, those are designed to give you the most binary information, right? The most rigidified, black and white framing about the world and the most emotionally volatile, the inform the content that's more negative, more threatening, more fear inducing. And then those are also exactly the properties that make a mind susceptible. And so you're putting minds that are already at risk in environments that just amplify those risks in, into just greater and greater heights. And that's really dangerous. Now that just sounds like I've been fearmongering and just saying, well, this is just an increasingly terrible intractable problem. But it isn't necessarily, first of all, I mean, different parents can choose different things regarding how they allow or facilitate their child's interaction with the world and with social media. But I think you can equip any young person with those skills, with the skills to understand what is potentially propaganda or what is advertisement implicitly, or what is information that you should be able to fact check and that can have a basis in science. And that's why I think we need to promote that notion that to be a responsible citizen isn't just to be politically active. It's and. First of all, you have to have that digital literacy to understand how to exist online safely. But you also need to learn how to exist flexibly. And by flexibility I also mean that you are receptive to evidence, that you are receptive to changing your mind when there's credible evidence that actually what you believe before might not necessarily be true. And so there are ways in which you can encourage your child, your student, to be more creative, to be more flexible, to be more grounded in evidence in the way that they think about the world. And also. As we said before, to kind of dis-identify a little bit from those beliefs to REM to help them remember that they have an identity that is separate from those other political identities that they might be developing, and that they need to understand that the relationship between the two is not necessarily a, always a constructive one. And so, although this all sounds quite negative about the risks to teenagers and adolescents, I also think that there's a lot of hope there because adolescent brains are actually amazingly active and dynamic and plastic and able to change and able to incorporate new ideas. But you have to prepare them for that openness in order for them to do so. Does the age of a brain, does it really matter much in terms of one's susceptibility? Um, mm-hmm. I'm seeing a lot of 80 year olds at MAGA rallies spending their social security on this is the But did it, did it start early? And they just found an outlet for it. In a world that's becoming more, uh, politicized or, or, you know, in, in later years, does the coveting of some identity or some sense of assuredness. We talked about the brain's proclivity towards wanting things to feel known and certain, you know, so can, could somebody develop a more ideological brain much later in life when they might have been more flexible earlier? Yeah, totally. And we see every kind of change you can imagine, from people who grew up in really ideological settings and left those behind to people who actually grew up in very secular, tolerant environments, and then for one reason or another, choose to commit to a very radical ideology later in life. And so, on one hand, yes, young minds. Are susceptible, but as you say, actually there can be susceptibility across the board and there can also be, we know about the dangers to older people who are also less familiar with the technology, with the kind of information environment that we're in now, and that that's very different to what they grew up with. And so one of the things that I really enjoy ex exploring in the ideological brain are those different trajectories are the people who were ideological in their environments and their families and their upbringing and left those and the people who entered it, and the people who never changed and understanding all the different psychological profiles for those different people. Hmm. You, you know, sometimes I'm asked. Oh, so what is the ideological brain like? And recently I've been thinking, well there isn't one ideological brain that's not a single type. There are as many ideological brains as there are brains, but what we can see are specific characteristics that can, that often occur for people who are highly ideological, but there's immense diversity in there. Alright, just pausing here, John, I'm learning so much from Lyor throughout this conversation and it was really helpful to be reminded that ideologies aren't just about what is happening in the extremes. Certainly it includes that, but ideologies can. Influence everyone and in a really material way. And what this conversation also did for me, uh, though, is, is to be more attuned to observing the power of ideological thinking. And since we had this conversation, there have been tragic events folding in the streets of my country that could have been avoided. And what I've been amazed by is the number of good people who in response have prioritized ideological over moral thinking with what they're witnessing, trying to either ignore or minimize what's happening because it is in congruent with their ideological informed identity. When individuals are confronted with situations that contradict their narrative, the amygdala and the insular cortex in the brain register the conflicting information, not as ethical problems, but as a direct existential threat to the self. And that triggers motivated reasoning, a process where the person is actively filtering out distressing evidence to avoid the agonizing psychological pain of cognitive dissonance. So even good people can become functionally blind to suffering in their own neighborhoods. Their brains effectively mute their capacity for empathy and social processing to protect the integrity of their ideological neural fingerprint. Yeah, our brains, um, may naturally choose the comfort of ideology. Not really considering that it is an ideology, but that we're acting out of our own personal set of values, which is not the same thing. And we do this over the pain that it causes us to update our beliefs in light of new realities and new information that runs counter to what we want to be true about the world. But if we don't grapple with this and work on our own metacognition, the world will only continue to become more polarized and our ability to thrive in the mindset economy will be significantly diminished. Okay. Let's get back to the conversation with a question you asked Lior about the influence of ai. How do you, um, think about AI and its influence in this conversation? And I'm thinking specifically about, you know, our relationship with an a, with a, with an ai. Partner and how, how people are convincing themselves that the AI loves them or is giving them, you know, life advice that's independent and so on. How, how do you see the ideological brain developing in that context? Yeah, that's actually something I've been writing about recently because I think AI fundamentally and categorically changes the game because up until now when people are radicalized, and even now when people are radicalized online, which is a pretty new phenomenon, even when they're targeted for online radicalization, what they're doing is they are passively consuming content. Now they're passively consuming content. That content might be increasingly more extreme, increasingly more violent, increasingly more conspiratorial. But what they are, they are consumers. What is changing about people's interactions with ai? Is that when people interact with ai, it's not passive consumption anymore. It's actually an active engagement, an active dialogue. And so we are now suddenly becoming really dependent on the integrity of these AI systems and whether these models are designed in a way that's committed to a non-ideological, non radicalizing force, or if they do, if there is a kind of implicit or explicit ideological agenda there. And I think what we're about to see in the next year or two, definitely three, is that we will, and we're already seeing the precursors of this, are separate AI models for different ideological groups that are really genuinely designed to radicalize people further into those ideologies. And so that is something that I think is going to be a radicalizing force for people in a way that's hugely, hugely different. And hugely, hugely more toxic than what we've seen up till now. So that's why as a society, we need to demand some kind of accountability by tech companies, by governments in order to have those safeguards. Because otherwise we're already seeing, even in, uh, mainstream AI models that don't supposedly have an explicit ideological agenda, we see that because of the people pleasing properties of these AI models, they confirm and affirm people's biases and can make them stronger and more extreme. Hmm. So this is a huge, um, kind of watershed moment. Then if we start to have a, one of the most powerful technologies ever developed that has an ideological component to it. Mm-hmm. The potential for. Polarization, segmentation of different belief systems around. I was just thinking about that in the context of work. For example, you know, I've got a, you know, left-leaning AI helping my people doing work. Scott obviously has got a far right way, Hey, couldn't be further from the truth, but, you know, like we're right in the middle. But, um, you know, the, that, that, that's kind of like a very challenging notion that we're, we're working with in there. And how does that actually, from a neuroscience perspective, what kind of, um, results is that that gonna produce for the kind of brains working together in the future? Hmm. So you're thinking a bit more about people working together basically, and like collaboration? Yeah.'cause I think people in echo chambers already exists. Yes. But people, if, if AI is a co intelligence at work, for example, where we're all kind of environments, you, you either go and work for a. Right-leaning organization or a left-leaning organization, or a Islamic fundamentalist organization or whatever. Can you, can you see that, you know, that might be a possibility? Can you think about the implications for us in terms of what that looks like in our brains? Yeah. I think it's a very, very real, very real possibility. And the implications are, are they too big to even, you know, start to describe. Right. Um, I think that's why we need to both have some kind of regulation to, to make sure that, right. When we, when we talk about AI and we talk about intelligence, the idea is that it's a reliable source of information and synthesis. But when you start to have ideological ai, you are starting to have AI that's not. Necessarily governed by evidence or credibility or reliability. It's governed by the, the pool towards a certain political agenda. And I think that will make it incredibly hard for people to collaborate to understand each other. But that obviously depends on how people engage with these AI chatbots, right? Whether they can see them as external tools that are not always intelligent in, in the human sense or reliable, or whether there will be such a massive dependency, such a massive like humanization, both a, a humanization, but also a reverence for what this AI says that will mean it becomes this kind of authority for us that is illegitimate, but trusted. And that's, that's very worrying. So. Thinking about what that means for education, for leadership, for, um, any kind of teamwork will require us to, to continue being moored to the offline world, I think to the human world. I love that, that thought of kind of illegitimate authority.'cause it's not media, it's not, it's not coming with a, an elective point of view that you can subscribe to from that perspective. It's, you know, the MIT study a few months ago that was published showing how people get more stupid, less retentive information and so on, but just even a relatively short amount of exposure to using ai, um, you know, becoming non questioning mm-hmm. Of not even your own beliefs, but of, of, of that is a very worrying feature. Yeah. And it makes you think about, for those who have some familiarity with Hana ens, the origin of totalitarianism. Like that was written close to. Soon, it'll be a hundred years ago almost, and a little less. But the processes there of making people glorify a kind of authority figure or, um, a source that makes them less atomized and less connected to other human beings is this immensely powerful way to control people, um, and to make them less reflective, less nuanced. Um, and that's why I do return to freedom because I think that the more that we, um, not just relinquish, but really like hand over our mental faculties is a way for us to hand over our capacities for freedom, for authenticity, for a capacity to see things in that wide complex way. Yeah. John and I do a lot of work together, um, leadership development, helping leaders to see more, uh, make better sense of the challenges before them. Mm-hmm. Uh, better understanding of what's going on in their interior world to make better decisions and better choices for their teams and their businesses. Given all that you've studied in this space, if you were to design leadership development, what would you, what would you bring to it? How would that inform how you approach developing the leaders of tomorrow? Well, I am doing some of the work now to work with leaders of, whether it's tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, um, financial institutions that are trying to understand how do we exist as both workers, people, and, uh, organizations within a world that. Is undergoing so many tectonic shifts politically and socially, and, and how do we find that balance between following the values that we believe in, but without relinquishing or, uh, without suddenly starting to subscribe to the most contemporary ideological position. Right? So how do you, if you are, for instance, a company that wants to be more committed to sustainability in the future, but you're living in a political world now that's actually quite hostile to that. How do you balance those values and those ideologies both in your executive decisions from a top level, uh, and, and in what you promote in the company culture? And I think that there's actually immense role for leaders here to be able to separate all these things, the technol, the technological changes, the political changes, and the almost newfound psychological changes that are happening to workers in both a polarized world and un an uncertain world, and an AI driven one. And so I think that there are, there, there is a lot that you can do both bottom up and top down to make your organization more resilient. And by resilient it's both strong but adaptable. What, you know, if you're thinking about the, like the top two or three things that you would do with leaders to help them there, what, what, what's at the top of that? That kind of priority list? Mm-hmm. I think there are. There are a few, um, a few initial steps if you want to enter the space. Um, first of all, it is about starting to map out. Values versus ideologies versus other kinds of principles that you either already embody as an organization or leader or want to embody. And then starting to really understand where are your dogmatic pressure points and what are the sources of those? Are those economic? Are those personal? Are those kind of managerial, organizational? And starting to see what is it that you want to loosen up and what is it that actually wanna firm up, right? Because sometimes people think that, uh oh, that flexibility is kind of a weak position, that if you're flexible, that maybe you're endlessly persuadable by any new input or any new information or any new argument. But that's actually not what it is. To be flexible is to find the balance between being open to evidence but not. Giving into any new information. So intellectually, you're, you're finding the balance between arrogance that makes you closed to new perspectives and gullibility or persuadability that makes you too open. And in between that you can find flexible thinking, which is, I think, an active and strong position. That's re that's resilient. That's not one that is like a, sometimes people think of flexibility as a flip-flopping. It's not. It's finding that active position and understanding how to maintain it, but without rigidity. Right. And that's a really nuanced point that I think many leaders can, and should and do reflect on. So in a world that's changing faster than ever. Leading to temptations in all of us in some ways to hold on for dear life. Right. To sort of like, this is what I believe, this is how it works. This is what I want to be true. This is what, you know, I understand. Leading to all of us to have more ideologies and more fixed thinking. How important will it be for flexibility? You know, that sort of almost the opposite of instinct to, to our own success and our future in this world that's changing so quickly. You know, I think that actually flexibility can become instinctual. It will require work because you are going against those pressures to make you think in more narrow terms and more fixed terms. Uh, but I think with practice, when you become more practiced in thinking in that adaptable kind of multi-perspective oriented way, then it can become a bit more of a second nature to you. Hopefully a fundamental nature. But, um, that's why I think that the power really does rest with individuals, right? When we're talking about how to combat this polarized world, sometimes we come up with all these kinds of systemic solutions, social solutions, economic solutions, technological solutions, and we need those. We definitely need those. But I see a lot of power. In the individual person to develop an instinct that is more flexible, more critical, more tuned to evidence and sources of evidence. And when you develop that instinct, I think you can, you can combat all these things in a better way and in a more sustainable way too. And, and when you, uh, you talked earlier on about, you know, kind of like the, the reaction, the defensiveness that sometimes we have when, uh, you hold up the mirror and ask, you know, sort of like, uh, when you take it personally. Mm-hmm. Um, have you done any research in looking at the role of emotions and emotional defensiveness in our ability to be open-minded and, and to be cognitively flexible? Hmm. I think in many ways when we're studying. People's cognitive flexibility, which is something that might sound a bit cognitive, sounds a bit cold, like analytical and reasoning. Um, but there is an emotional dimension to it because in many ways it's about how you react to change, right? And people have different responses to change. Some people are pretty cool about it. Like, okay, so things have changed. I'm open to exploring a new possibility. But those who are more rigid will have an emotional reaction when suddenly there's a change. They will hate the change. They will detest it. They will do everything in their power to deny that they need to change their behavior too. And so actually there's both a cognitive and an emotional element to being flexible. And part of that is overriding that maybe fear, uh, that discomfort that we might have with ambiguity. So when, when you are helping leaders to kind of confront their feeling of vulnerability around the fact that maybe they're not right. Mm-hmm. Maybe they're getting it wrong and you know, and so on. How, how do you help them with that? So what I do when I work with leaders is I encourage them to think about the, how they can separate ego from intellect. And when you start to realize that those two things can be separated and actually should be separated for the rationality of your decisions, you become a lot more empowered to make decisions that are more advantageous to both you and others. And you become more open as a listener to alternative perspectives and realizing that having those alternative. Perspectives and different views isn't necessarily a threat and it doesn't have to be a threat. And you can find ways to synthesize. You can also find ways to reject ideas that you find to be unsuccessful or, um, not useful. But learning to live with that kind of, uh, divorce of the intellect and the ego is really powerful. It strikes me that kind of comes back to your idea of real freedom. Yeah. When your, your ego isn't driving the show from that point of view, you have real freedom to, to think and to make better decisions around things with others, and that, that feels like a really great prize to have for, for people. Yeah. I agree. I love that you also point out, um, the need for tapping into direct sensation as a strategy for combating, combating ideologies. And you referenced the scholar, uh, Susan Sontag, who said, what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more essentially this idea of interceptive sensitivity and experiencing the world instead of chronically predicting it or interpreting it, rather. Um, can you talk to us a little bit more about the idea of the physical component in addition to the cognitive and the emotional? Yeah. Because when you are in an ideological mindset, you are. Putting something, there's a barrier that you're allowing in between you and your sensations, and those can be your sensations of your own feelings, your own sense of discomfort or anxiety or fear that you are overriding because you believe that you should follow what this ideological doctrine is saying. And there's also the sensation that in terms of outwardly sensation of how you feel, how you see what is happening in front of you. And the more that you are able to learn how to remove those ideological filters from your life, from how you approach work, politics, family life, the more you remove them, the more you see things for as close to what they can be for what they are. You know, you can see a person for their full humanity rather than. As the role that they're supposed to play for you. You can also see yourself, your own amorphous, ambiguous self as amorphous, malleable, and ambiguous rather than defining yourself into narrow boxes. And so I think that if you want to have that freedom and that kind of elasticity of thought, you have to, like Sontag suggests in the context of art return to feeling and not being afraid that those feelings will always be hijacked by ideologies. But learning to feel your body and to feel, to be in tune with your body. And that's really the root for authenticity, because authenticity is that independence from what external pressures are telling you. It's that kind of inner will in a way that you can feel and listen to. So. Um, I think in many ways, if you want to combat these group minded ideologies that tell you what to think, you have to find that that authenticity that's both cognitive, emotional, visceral bodily. Hmm. So what, what haven't you covered so far that you are really intrigued about? What, what's next for you that, that's burning in your mind? Well, at the moment, I am kind of deep into the process of really talking about the book and these ideas and this research a lot because fortunately, the book has been translated to over 15 languages. And so there are now a lot of different cultures, geographical reasons, countries, languages, that are now thinking about these ideas. So I am now still very much in the world of the ideological brain and thinking about how the ideological brain, uh, operates. In very similar ways across very different, uh, political contexts. So one of the most, um, interesting and enjoyable aspects has been that I have readers in Korea saying this speaks to our particular specific moment now in Korea. And I have German readers saying, this speaks to our particular moment now in Germany. So, um, I'm learning a lot from readers about how these ideas resonate to them. And in many ways what you get from that is a sense of the timelessness, um, or kind of geographical universality of these processes that wherever someone is and whatever cultural, political setting they're in, they will witness some of these ideological processes and pressures and how those seem to really be sculpting people's brains in ways that are insidious unconscious, but very deeply profound. What led you here personally, I can tell this is much more than just a interesting topic to you, right? This feels like it was profoundly important to you personally. Like what drew you to explore all of this? I think I have this really acute sense that ideologies can genuinely damage people's mental lives and the, the, the trajectory of their whole lives because the people are so in pursuit of fulfilling the needs and dictum of that ideology, and people start to fashion themselves according to certain ideologies that are favored by their family, their nation, their community. And honestly, I, I feel such sadness for the Lost for Freedom freedoms of people who are bound. By ideologies within which they don't fit within, which, um, they are constricted in various ways, but which, where they struggle to get, come out, get out of those narrow boxes that the ideology gives them. And what excites me about the science is that it has the potential to really speak to those processes that people are experiencing in their lives and to show them in some ways, a way out to show them that actually, regardless of how repressive, restrictive, narrow the worldview of the people around you is, you can find individually a way out. And that, of course, it's very difficult to think flexibly. It's an arduous never ending task, but there are just huge rewards for your personal and mental freedom that. I think that's really what being a human is all about, right? It's about, um, being able to think widely, feel deeply, you know, be this idiosyncratic particular individual unlike anyone else. And ideologies try to erase that individuality. And I hope that this science shows people how to get that back. Yeah. I mean that's a, that's an amazing, um, thought that actually probably the, the, it's the opposite of what most people are imagining when they're in that thrall of, uh, an ideology. They think it's actually giving them some form of identity and freedom. Yeah. Um, but it's, it's, it's doing the opposite. Um, what, what do you think is the lightly kind of chances that. The work you are doing is going to be, is going to be, uh, adopted or embraced by our, our leaders, our political leaders, particularly in terms of thinking about the culture that they're creating in their, their countries. Mm-hmm. The societies they're creating. Mm-hmm. I think most ideological leaders want ideological citizens because that's the way in which they can be controlled. Mm-hmm. And that's why in many ways I speak to any kind of individual who is curious and open and wants to learn how their bodies might be molded by the ideologies around them and what it means to seek freedom. Um, I think there are leaders who are maybe not political leaders, but leaders in other domains that are keen to find non-ideological or even ideological ways for, and so. It's been exciting to have those conversations with leaders who understand the problems of thinking in that obedient, conformist way that negates creativity and innovation. So I think certain leaders are very open to this, but ideological leaders less so. Your book, your work couldn't be more timely. And I think part of what you said earlier on about, um, the resonance, it has an international level is it's this confluence of a new set of realities, people feeling, um, diminished hope. And what you're talking about here is a way of providing, um, but at a very deeply personal level hope, um, by taking control of things that, that, uh, you have the power to influence and create that freedom inside your head. And that, that is gotta be an amazing, uh, prize to aim for. So, um, just wish you continued success in what you are doing and, you know, keep, keep giving us this, uh, slew of insights from your research because we desperately need it. Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it and I really enjoyed our conversation. It was our pleasure. Thank you so much. John, one of the economic drivers of the mindset economy is the role of our beliefs and how the frames we hold directly influence how we feel and what we do and how adaptable and how resilient we are. And during this conversation it became clearer and clearer to me that even in trying to hold the right beliefs for developing the skills and capabilities needed in this automating world, those beliefs and frames we hold could easily become rigid and fixed and work against us instead of for us in this new economy. Uh, this is a really important way to think about ourselves and to recognize just how easy it can be to become influenced unconsciously by our environment, by the news and the people we spend time with. Recent research is throwing up the real possibility that our environment is a driving factor in evolutionary responses that's much more significant and faster than we imagined in its impact. So this isn't just changing our minds, it's goes far deeper into who we're becoming as a species. Dear, dear listener, where do you find the belief and your identity merging, and how might that be leading you to close off to other people? What stories and beliefs are no longer serving you? Where in your life do you need to become more open? I think we all need to regularly reflect on these questions with honest curiosity, self-compassion, and a bit of courage. This is part of what it will take to succeed and live well in the mindset economy. Be sure to join us next time.