Winning Hearts, Changing Minds

applying the principles of Switch to a new global economy

The inspiration for this episode is the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. They cite The Bad Popcorn Study and why you don't have a people problem but a situation problem, Chocolate Chip Cookies vs Radishes and willpower exhaustion, and how to direct the Rider and motivate the Elephant. I apply these to our mission to change the global economy to enable communities to be self-reliant. In the process, I bring in the world's best flourless chocolate cake, my daughter's wedding, my leaky refrigerator, and aerial ballet Buddhas. Let’s get started!

I can’t think of the phrase ‘winning hearts and minds’ without thinking about—no, not faux-humanitarian military campaigns—but Molly Wizenberg’s wedding cake. Molly is the author of the Orangette food blog, which includes the World’s Best Waffle recipe and her Winning Hearts and Minds Wedding Cake. Weddings are uppermost in my mind because my oldest daughter is getting married in six weeks to the man she’s been with for ten years. The wedding is on a rustic covered bridge and we’re very excited.

While waiting for a friend, I picked up the book Switch in a Free Little Library. Written by two brothers, it uses social psychology to demonstrate ways to enable change when change is hard. What we’re trying to do is change the global economy so that communities can support themselves with their own labor and resources—that’s a little bit hard. So I wanted to see if we could use any of their tricks to help.

I also started reading a sci-fi book called Providence by Max Berry, that starts with this quote from John Flavel:

Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.

It reminded me of the philosophy of A Course in Miracles, where I look at circumstances to help me discern the direction I should take. That seems especially important now when things are spinning out of control. Two examples:

• England’s new Prime Minister pledged that she wouldn’t hesitate to nuke the world, to rousing applause.

• California’s Gavin Newsom signed AB 587, stating that “California will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threaten our communities and foundational values as a country.” Each company over $100M must publish their terms of service and submit enforcement reports; violations (of their own terms?) can cost them up to $15,000.

In all this mess is providence working for our eternal good? The only person you can prove anything to is yourself. I encourage you to look at small things in the course of a day that didn’t go as planned, and see if there are ways they turned out better. These little bits of serendipity can be the clues that something larger is at work in the grand inscrutable plan.

---

In the first psychology study cited in Switch, people entering a movie theater were given free buckets of popcorn. Some were medium size, which was enormous, and some were large, which they describe as looking like “it might once have been an above-ground swimming pool.” They were both more than any person could eat and both were terrible—five days old and so stale it squeaked.

On the way out, they collected the buckets. Some irate recipients demanded their money back, forgetting it was free. But when they weighed the returned containers, those with the huge tubs had eaten 53% more. Size matters! It’s not that some people are healthy snackers and some are gluttons, it’s their circumstances.

So their first rule is that “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” Rather than changing people, which is impossible, you can change their situation. This is really important for system change because the premise of my book is that people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame. We need to give people the benefit of the doubt that, if their circumstances were different, they would do what we would do.

---

In the second study, the participant entered a room filled with the aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, of which there was a bowl still warm. Alongside was a bowl of radishes. Half of the subjects were asked to eat at least two of the cookies but none of the radishes, and the other half the opposite, then each was left alone. All did exactly as they were told.

After the ‘taste study’ was over, a second researcher entered with a maze to solve and plenty of tracing paper, to see if college students were better at it than high schoolers. The maze was insoluble but the cookie eaters kept at it for 19 minutes, averaging 34 attempts. The radish eaters gave up after 19 attempts averaging 8 minutes. Their conclusion was that self-control is an exhaustible resource. Rule #2: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

This matters to us because it looks like people are lashing out in anger. Yet everyone’s given up so much during the pandemic—contact with people they love and social occasions—and has been made so afraid, and kept afraid and isolated for so long. There’s an exhaustion that’s set in, and that’s what is lashing out, not the person.

---

In Chip and Dan’s analysis, they see the mind as the Rider but the emotions as the Elephant. If you reach the Rider but not the Elephant, you’ll have direction without motivation. But the Elephant is motivation without direction. So their third surprise is that what looks like resistance is often lack of clarity. To get someone to change direction, they need specific steps.

I think that changing direction is exactly our mission, turning from the trajectory of the last 3500 years of Western ‘civilization.’ The hardest point is recognizing that you’ve gone the wrong way and stopping. Once you take the first step in the right direction, it’s rewarding, there’s a satisfaction that you’re getting where you want to go. You don’t need to reach the goal—all you need to do is take the first step.

To do that, we need the energy and motivation of the Elephant and small clear steps for the Rider, with quick successes. Chip and Dan’s dad would say, you don’t want milestones, you want inch pebbles. But with system change, you can’t change anything without changing everything. There’s not a way to try it out small and then grow it to scale. As they say, you need to shape the path.

What can be your first win is engaging the Rider to shape the path with you, using a computer simulation to try out different models and see how they work. In one of the Switch examples, a sales team had to credit two colleagues by name on every call. I think the simulation game should give points for every idea you steal and kludge, both to the originator and the borrower. This would encourage the best of collaboration and competition.

---

Steve Kirsch has asked “How have you been successful at red-pilling people?” My technique is 1) compliment 2) question 3) opinion if you must. It saved me from being a pariah on the playground when my kids were young and enabled me to engage in small talk while getting my points across.

I also started something called Food in the Hood where I put on dinners with my daughter Cassandra and her friends Fati and Jasmine. (If you follow this link from 14 yrs ago, you’ll see the bride-to-be on the right, their officiant in the center, and Cassandra at 10 yrs old on the left.) We themed the food to the charity we were supporting, people came, ate and donated whatever they wanted.

What the dinners did, psychologically, was enable people to hear about difficult topics without triggering their guilt. By coming to the dinner and donating, they were already on the right side of the issue. So behavior comes first, and belief follows.

This is being used against us with the behaviors of masking, social distancing and vaccines being coerced and then, because people don’t want to think they’re doing something that makes no sense, the belief follows.

But we can use this too if we’re engaging people in the process of planning. It doesn’t take much to change our belief that things will always get worse. It just takes one thing getting better. And to see that the sky’s no limit, here’s the Oakland troupe Bandaloop—come for the dancing, stay for the flying.

---

To follow this theme of turning in a new direction—up!—here’s What’s the Best That Can Happen?:

My daughter Cassandra has a new question, "what's the best that can happen?" I apply this to global events and the coup to take over our bodies, minds and world. I share some of the things that give me joy: Rob Brezsny's Love Bombs, Wendall Berry's The Power of Place, David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, and Caitlin Johnstone's Confused Species in an Awkward Transition Phase.

and this is We Need to Agree to Agree:

As Ukraine and the Great Reset wreak havoc, we need to share a purpose, a process to separate truth from lies, and a plan. And perhaps, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we need to consider six impossible things before breakfast. I look at things I never thought I'd question, like climate change and Elie Weisel. I debate good vs evil, big vs small, Franklin vs Hamilton, and Trump vs no one. And I wonder how to bring together the dozen journalists left who aren't deluded: Matthew Ehret, Robert Malone, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand.