495: Todd Rose—One Good Thing

[bass guitar music] Hello, friends.

It's me, Mike Rowe.

This is The Way I Heard It, with what I daresay, Chuck, would be a, uh, let's call it a very, a very important episode.

It is important, actually.

It brings with it the potential for curing what ails this country.

Yeah, man.

Look, I know that sounds a bit grand, but, uh, Chuck is not overstating it.

Todd Rose is my guest.

We're calling this episode One Good Thing, although we could just as easily call it Be The People-

Yeah

... which is an initiative we talk about at length, uh, later in the conversation, but I just wanna mention it now because I think it's, well, it's gonna be a pretty consequential campaign that is going to attempt to rally the country in a way around, call it civic-minded action, maybe some volunteerism, maybe just something that I think a lot of people feel like we've lost over the years.

Doing something good-

Yeah

...

in your neighborhood.

It's a bottom-up solution, which our friends at Stand Together really appreciate.

Yeah, and look, I mean, I'm already regretting everything I've said so far-

[laughs]

... because it sounds too earnest, but it's only 'cause it's important.

And what Todd does, and, and the reason I want you to listen to this whole episode at normal speed, 'cause I don't want you to miss anything, he has an enormous brain, in spite of the fact-

Hmm

... that he got out of high school with a .9 GPA.

Wasn't it a .09?

No, it was a 0.9.

Oh, okay.

I-

0.9.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, he was a disaster.

[laughs]

Academic disaster.

Few years later, wound up, um, being a professor at Harvard, and then a few years after that, set up one of the most important think tanks in the country.

It's called Populus, and they do a lot of, uh, private opinion surveying that has led to an enormous amount of research that, among other things, is being used to debunk a long list of collective illusions.

These are the things that we come to believe with certainty that are not, in fact, rooted in reality.

Hmm.

So the way Todd thinks about the things that are threatening our country, at the top of the list is the danger of the manufactured consensus.

Yes.

And we are awash in them.

We believe so many things that aren't rooted in reality.

We're so sure that we're so completely divided, probably in unprecedented ways, and there is just nothing in the research or the science that proves it.

Right.

There's nothing there.

And Todd is on a mission to share this research with the world, and he's succeeding to a certain degree, but not to the degree that he must, because it's a giant undertaking with huge consequences.

It's a national security issue, which he points out that our adversaries want nothing more than for us to be at each other's throats.

Correct.

Yeah.

There's a clear and present enemy.

We'll discuss that enemy in the course of the conversation, and there's a clear and present strategy which involves, unfortunately, the device you're probably listening to this conversation on right now, and all the social channels that are attached to it, and the reality of bots that are shaping opinion.

And man, he's just so much fun to talk to.

It's a little scary.

Well, it's a lot scary, but it's also wildly optimistic.

Yes.

And, um, I think that the solution, if you're feeling like things are getting a little wobbly up there, and if you're really worried about the country, I implore you to listen to this, especially through the end.

You'll learn some things about Todd that I, I didn't think we were gonna discuss, and you'll learn some things about his research that are truly important, and it all starts with one good thing right after this.