Changing Your Mind

Here's one from our bonus vault: you sent in your stories about moments when you found yourselves changing your minds, and we listened. When do we do it? Why do we do it? What does it take? Here are some of your answers.

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, end of the summer edition. We hope that you're doing well out there. And for you this week, we have a re-release of a bonus episode that we did the summer of last year. This episode was our first experiment in having a listener call-in type thing. We loved it so much that, as you can see, we've done it a few more times and are excited to do it more in the future. And this episode is on the subject of changing your mind. How do we do it? When do we do it? Why do we do it? And what does it take? 

We originally put this episode out on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions where we have our bonus episodes. We have a new one coming out soon where I will be talking with Blair Braverman about Baby Island, if you know you know. And we put this out as a bonus because this was an experiment. It was something new we were trying. It was out of our usual format. And now that this kind of thing is in our usual format, we wanted you all to hear it. We'll be back with a brand-new episode in two weeks. We can't wait to see you then. Happy back to school. Happy sweater weather. Happy not going back to school. And walking past the glue sticks in Target knowing that you don't have to buy them, unless you want to.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes Alex Steed is here. Hello!

Alex: I'm so happy to be here, Sarah Marshall. 

Sarah: I'm so happy to have you here. You came to me with an idea for a bonus episode of You're Wrong About that initially I was like, no. And then after about 12 hours, I was like, yes, let's do it.

Alex: I think your rationale for saying ‘no’ initially, it was right on, which was, I'd initially said let's open up phone lines so people can get in touch with feedback, and we'll turn the feedback into a bonus episode. And you, as a person who receives more unsolicited feedback day to day than I do, I can understand not wanting. Because audience scale and gender, I think, changes this a lot.  

So you as a woman who, again, has an audience of large scale, gets a lot of unsolicited feedback. I can understand why the idea of an open call for more of that would be off putting. But you, I think, had suggested how we could narrow this down in a way where we're not asking for an inbox of fire. And then you had suggested, I'd love to hear about instances in which people have changed their minds. This is a thing that seems to happen on a rarer and rarer instance. And it was illuminating to find that the reasons that people change their minds happen for all sorts of reasons. You could find a card on the street and think that it's a sign for you to change your life in some way or that something just extremely catastrophic and antithetical to your worldview happens and makes you reconcile that you have to pivot. 

Sarah: Yeah, we love talking about pivoting in the 2020s. That's one nice thing about our culture. Everyone has to pivot three times a year to keep chasing their health insurance around. 

Alex: This is true. So I am curious, what made you decide that this is the prompt you wanted to go with? 

Sarah: I guess it's just the thing that I'm most curious about. The show is so much about trying to present people with all the available information. Wiping away the mythology that grows around topics like mold. It's like going out and cleaning mold off statues. It's the secret garden. All I want to do is the secret garden. Alex, have you ever read the Secret Garden?

Alex: No, I did not.

Sarah: The garden is a metaphor for the little girl's heart. So they repair the garden and their little souls, little British child souls.

Alex: Beautiful. 

Sarah: And so much of what's happened in America in the past few years has been disheartening to me, partly because there's been this revelation about how much information, how many people are able to just ignore. How there are so many people in America who can be presented with information that would seem to completely support an obvious point and can just be like, no, I don't care what you're saying, that's fake. You're part of the deep state or whatever. And then how much nonexistent information people are able to fabricate and how many people have a worldview ruled by conspiracy theories and so forth. 

And so I think I used to think that changing people's minds was comparatively easy, and you were like, here are the facts. And they were like, oh my goodness, there are the facts. This changes everything! And instead it seems like at least half the time, and that's a generous assessment, people are like, so? And so I'm very curious about just not taking this moment for granted and being like, instead of just expecting this of people, what if we looked at how it happens for people?

Alex: Yes, I think it's an interesting exercise to engage with your audience of You're Wrong About specifically because to get beyond just learning that you were wrong about something and that being an important step, obviously, you need to also be aware of the fact that changing your mind is a good thing or can be a good thing and can be an important thing and is a key to growth and I'm a fan of You're Wrong About, have been for a long time, and the show is great because it always shows me like different like layers and dimensions of things that I hadn't considered before but in a lot of ways, You're Wrong About can also serve as substantiating confirmation bias because a lot of listeners are like, I knew it! You know what I mean? It's not like it's not like I had the opposite opinion. 

Sarah: It's not like I get so many listeners who are like, yeah, I always loathe Tanya Harding and am prepared to be totally thrown ass over tea kettle by your reassessment of her. 

Alex: Totally. I think it happens sometimes with people that people aren't willing to offer grace to or people that come up in one way or another in the show that folks didn't realize they were in on the pylon in one way or another. But there's a lot of people who are just like, I knew that the media narrative was what it is, it's really great to hear someone not gaslight me about that and to encourage looking at the media critically in a way that is only recently part of the popular dialogue. 

Sarah: It's a lot of people being like, I always suspected it was capitalism all along and now it's good to have evidence. And also a ton of people over time who have been like, I used to believe the opposite of this, and I thank you. But I would say that, yeah, our core audience is not like people who love Reagan who are eager to be told how much Reagan sucked.

Alex: Right. What is the time in your life that you remember as one of the most monumental mind changes? 

Sarah: I was going to tell the story about how I decided to become a lawyer and then decided not to become a lawyer, which was a really interesting year, but instead, right now, I'm going to tell the story of how I discovered the true meaning of entertainment. Which my allegory for this is there's a movie called Sullivan's Travels from, I think, the early 40s with Veronica Lake and Joel McRea, and it's about this, I think, movie studio executive who has been very successful making comedies. And he's like, I'm going to take to the road and pretend to be a tramp without a dollar to my name so I can learn what's happening in the real America and make a movie of this book by Sinclair Beckstein, who's like a combo, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair parody, of course. And so he tramps around, and he meets Veronica Lake's character, and he at some point, naturally, is hit on the head and loses his memory and ends up on a chain gang. 

So the chain gang is welcomed into a church by a Black congregation to watch movies, and so they show a goofy cartoon. Sullivan has a revelation and realizes that he has to make comedies because everyone is suffering, and the true meaning of America is that everyone is suffering and needs to laugh. And I remember watching that in college and being like, I love this movie. What a great moral. And then getting older and being like, oh, I don't really believe that though. And then the last couple of years being like, no, I believe that. I believe that now. I am Sullivan. 

Alex: That's beautiful. 

Sarah: What about you? 

Alex: So pre- You're Wrong About, we've been friends for over a decade, and pre- You're Wrong About, you've changed my mind about a number of things. And I know that you didn't ask me to come on to talk to you about times that you have changed my mind, but that has happened. One is, I had never considered that Jack McCoy was a bad character. Or not a bad character, actually a great character, but bad in his actions. 

Sarah: Bad lawyer.

Alex: A bad lawyer. And this is Sam Waterston's character in the Law & Order series, who by the way is returning for season 22 of one of the shows.

Sarah: Can't kill McCoy, can't keep a good Irish man down. 

Alex: He's the Harry Reid of the Law & Order universe. You also changed my mind about everyone's just trying their best. Most everyone is just trying their best. I think for a long time I have had pretty unintentionally puritanical Calvinist expectations of labor and morality and showing up and doing the thing. And that's been being undone in one way or another since I was like a punk kid, but I wasn't able to find the vocabulary for a lot of that until we started our friendship. And that's been meaningful to me. 

And then the third, when I was a kid and getting into punk I still had a lot of, I wouldn't say right wing, but definitely libertarian tendencies. And I made a ‘zine and I handed it out, and I think some of those tendencies were hinted at in some of the ‘zine articles. And this guy, Dugan Murphy, who is still around, and he runs these kind of You're Wrong About history tours of Portland, Maine. 

Sarah: Nice. 

Alex: He reached out. And I believe he was an anarchist then, and probably would still consider himself an anarchist. And he very gently was like, “I absolutely understand how you have come to some of these conclusions. Here's some pushback. And here are the reasons why I think that those conclusions are wrong. I think you're coming from a good place. I'm a punk. I love zines. I'm glad this is happening. But here's where I'm at.” And it fundamentally changed my openness to other ideas on the spot, changed my worldview or my willingness to pursue other worldviews very quickly. And I consider that one of the most important pivot points of my life. 

Sarah: And how old were you, like 15?

Alex: 15. Yeah. 

Sarah: Yeah. Wow. I feel like a lot of your stories are about people treating you as if you're capable of adult thoughts from a young age. I feel like that's been influential. 

Alex: Those are always the standouts. I saw someone on Twitter who I think is involved in education in one way or another say something of teenage boys that was scarily resonant, which was, it feels like the trend with white teenage boys is that with everything they encounter in their already existing worldview that is implanted and informed and everything they run into online, et cetera, the natural pathway for them is to end up all right, unless there is an intervention. I could have seen that happening for me if Dugan hadn't reached out and been like, Hey I'm glad you're thinking. But. It seems like you could add an extra step. 

Sarah: It feels like you're sitting at the top of a water slide, and you don't know that potentially you're just like, boy, this feels cool and refreshing and then some older anarchist needs to be like, “Do you know that's a water slide?”

Alex: That's it. Yeah, totally. So thanks, Dugan.

Sarah:  Thanks Dugan. Thank you to all the Dugans. 

Alex: You're a Dugan. 

Sarah: Oh. Gosh, that's the goal, certainly, to be just an older anarchist. I think that just the philosophies of mine that you were just talking about are in harmony with that story. Because my whole approach to looking at the things humans do, sometimes things that make you want to cover your eyes. One of the tenets of that is reminding yourself of the points at which you are vulnerable or could have been vulnerable if things had gone differently for you and how the household you're born into, the resources you have, the resources you don't have, the trauma you endure, almost all of this is just the luck of the draw. Aside from all the other reasons why it doesn't make sense to judge someone's entire character on their worst decision making.

Alex: I don't know. I don't know what I do and don't need to excuse, but I was stupid at 15. 

Sarah: Yeah. Most 15-year-olds are like, if not stupid, then at least naive or ignorant of some, something or another. That's fair to say. 

Alex: Absolutely. And I don't even mean that of the views. I just mean I was bright. But I was stupid. 

Sarah: Yeah, me too. Exactly. Yes. And it's a malleable time. I think that you're very adult in some ways and very childlike in other ways. I'm very excited to hear what everybody has to say and everybody's stories. Let's get into it. 

Alex: Let’s get into it.

Sarah: Okay.

Caller: Howdy, Sarah, and You're Wrong About fam. So the time I remember the most when I changed my mind was early in my marriage. My husband was discussing his salary openly with his friends, and I remember feeling extremely mortified. Like, how could he be just saying his salary? And he's just talking about his salary, and it really bugged me. 

And so later, because I am the person who is Always Right, capital A and R, I talked to him and I said, “Hey, I'm really uncomfortable with you just voicing your salary like that. And now that we're married, that's part of my financial holdings as well. And so I just think we need to keep that information private.” And he said, “Oh, why?” And in my head, I was thinking, come on, where are the good reasons? I know I have the good reasons in here somewhere. I feel strongly about this. So come on, brain, just give me the good reasons. I know they're there. 

Yeah. Unfortunately, it took me a day or two to continue thinking about that to say, whoa. There are no good reasons. Oh, no, I just think this because it was what I was told! The more I thought about it, the more I came across all these super good reasons to always talk about your salary and to always be honest about how much money you make. 

The lesson is, always be open to change and never just blindly believe anything your white boomer parents told you when you were growing up. Oh, and tell everyone your salary all the time because that's how we get the power back from the bosses. Okay, love you. Bye. 

Caller: I changed my mind about astrology in the last couple of years. And I think I had this knee jerk reaction to the influx of astrology memes that cropped up around 2016 onward. This is a very human thing, of course, that happens where 1) a popular thing is so out of control with hype that an individual just retreats into a crab shell of pettiness. And along with that popular thing, there is just an avalanche of technical information or lore that an individual just can't be bothered to engage with for lack of interest. 

But I was also raised as what my dad might term a ‘hardcore atheist’, by which it's meant that the ideology is not just there is no God, but any claim to know or believe is intellectually inferior to the alternative, and any tolerance of that claim or belief is also intellectually inferior. And that is a rotted way of thinking that I have not vibed with since I was a young teen. But I also never thought to apply it to my perspective on something like astrology. I thought people who were into it were also inferior, deluded, and wanted easy excuses for their toxic or even just annoying traits. 

And what really brought me to a shift on that was learning that astrology is way more than the month you were born and a gemstone sold to you like a Disney princess or something. 

And 2) that astrology is a centuries old tradition of how we make sense of ourselves and the myriad of beautiful, gross, contradictory things about ourselves. And 3) the occult as a belief or the acknowledgement or conceptualization of a higher power is as meaningful a form of art or way of thinking or inhabiting the world as any other bullshit that I can think of. The people who really shit on it, I think, often worship at the altar of capitalism or quote unquote objective truth, which are both far more poisonous to the individual and collective body. 

So anyway, about a quarter of my time is now spent reading through astrology charts of politicians I hate and my favorite rom com pairings. Julia Roberts is a Scorpio and Richard Gere is a Virgo.

Caller: Hello! I thought you might be interested to know that this prompt has sent me flashbacks to my GCSE English exam, and it had a creative writing prompt as the final question and this was the prompt. They were asking us to write about a time when we changed our minds, and in this paper I just drew a total blank. I couldn't think of anything that I changed my mind about. 

And I ended up doing the one thing our teachers literally said don't write about this. They said don't write about the beach, because for some reason everyone writes about the beach. But I couldn't think of anything, so I don't even know how I made it about changing your mind. I think I just said I used to think the beach was boring but actually it's pretty? I, who knows. 

So, just thought you might like to know that I'll be listening to this thinking of all the amazing things I could have written about. And I can't wait to hear everyone's much better ideas. But yeah, love your podcast and lots of love from the UK. 

Caller: So the big time I changed my mind was when I went from thinking Mystery Science Theater was pointless, to thinking it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen in my life.

Caller: A couple times I've changed my mind would be, for context, I'm a food service scrub, lifelong most likely. And I have done, naturally, a ton of job interviews. And there have been a ton of times where I'll be almost to a job interview. I'm in my car, I'm in my cute little outfit to be professional, almost there, and then I just turn around because the vibes are off. And I can't explain it, don't know why this happens, but sometimes you just feel it. You just know. 

Caller: Probably the most significant time that I've changed my mind in life recently was a job thing. Coming out of school, I was still working in the field I'd been working in since high school and really didn't want to do it. Then finally I got a job offer in my dream field and I did it. I was really good at it. I got promoted really quickly and I was super miserable the entire time. I was also dealing with my dad who had terminal cancer at the same time, and I really wanted to stick with it because it had been so hard to get there and because there were things about the work that I genuinely enjoyed doing. 

But it was just this slow boiling point where I looked up one day and realized that I kept watching TV shows and being like, oh, it's so weird how people think that happiness exists. So I ended up going back into the field I had originally left and really finding something I enjoyed. 

My job now is something that gives me genuine pleasure, which is really nice and not super common. I am glad it turned out the way it did, to the extent that I can be. I'm glad to have ended up in the place that I'm at, but it's weird because I look back on it and I'm like, how much of that was not liking the work and how much of that was the life circumstances and how much of that was not liking the workplace specifically, but I think it was eye opening for me in terms of it realizing that the thing you do for work doesn't have to be a certain level of professionalism or adult. It can just be something that you like doing. Enjoying your life is probably the most important thing.

Caller: My name's Maggie, and this is the story about the time I changed my mind on my entire career path I studied in undergrad. I got a biology degree with a minor in forensic science, and my plan was I was going to be a forensic scientist. I wanted to be helpful. I wanted to do that classic thing that everybody thinks that they can do and change the system from the inside. And I was very passionate about trying to help homicide victim’s families. And particularly I was interested in helping clear the backlog of sexual assault kits that existed. And so that was my whole thing for all of undergrad. 

And then senior year, the last semester there in March or April, when it was down to the wire and people were already applying for jobs, we took this field trip out to a crime lab somewhere in Southern Illinois. We do a walkthrough of it basically, and the weird obstinance of all of the old law enforcement guys and all of the people that even worked in the lab was just so apparent immediately, and I was so uncomfortable the whole time. 

The thing that pushed it over the edge, I was already on edge the whole time and then somebody asked a question of what happens if you get it wrong? And the guy just shut down and was like, getting it wrong is not an option! And blah blah blah. So I was like, oh, okay. So this is so soaked in the law enforcement mindset that there is really no getting around this. And I am witnessing the carceral system up close in a way that I thought really naively, would not be touched if we were doing science, forensic science. 

And so I basically decided then and there after, studying my entire undergraduate career to do this thing, hey, I'm not going to do that. So now I'm a bacteriologist. It's pretty neat. Yeah, I changed my mind for the better and chose to be a scientist to help with communicable diseases studying parasitic worms instead of contributing to our bogus criminal justice system and a bunch of bogus funk science. Thank you so much for your time. I love the show so much.

Caller: One of the most important things recently that I've changed my mind about is true crime content. I've always been a “big fan”, quote unquote, of true crime and consumed a lot of documentaries, podcasts, read books about the topic. And I always thought that it was for research purposes, learning about killers, how their mind works and how they operate. And at first you think it’s keeping safe because you know what to look out for and other people. 

But then I read an article and actually it pushes a lot of people who already have anxiety to feel even more anxious about other people around them. We're looking out for subtle differences in people that can tell us whether they're good or bad just by the way that they're acting. And I think a lot of the time, true crime content pushes the people who are seemingly liberal in every other aspect of their life into pushing for really stringent prison sentences and mandatory minimums, which we know don't work and we know discriminate against people of color more than they are used against white people. 

And once I started to notice those little issues that were brought up in the article, I couldn't stop hearing it, and now I fully changed my mind on true crime content. I do not consume nearly as much as I used to before. I do still listen every now and again because it was a big part of my life and if it's the right podcast that actually does go into what happened and just what happened and doesn't read into the extra stuff, I do think it can be quite useful to understand how things happened. But other than that I think it's exploitative. I think it is causing a lot of anxiety issues in people. And I think it's making us distrustful of people as a whole.

Caller: The most prominent example of this was at the start of 2020. I was firmly in the camp of there are just some bad apples in the police, and not all cops are bad, and it's just about weeding out those rotten apples. But after everything in 2020, I really started to educate myself. I tried to read up, especially by POC voices and I changed my mind. And now I am firmly of the belief that we should abolish the police. I always figured myself as someone who was on the right side of history, and I'm a little bit ashamed I couldn't reach that verdict sooner, but that's my story. I'm sure there are plenty others just like it.

Caller: I used to love old houses. I loved the interiors, the exteriors. I used to walk down an inner-city row of these hundred year old cottages, untouched, over the generations, and I would feel this palpable sense of gratitude that either incidentally or through intentional policies, they were around for me to see. And my mum works in historical conservation, so I felt grateful for that too. 

But I've completely changed my mind on the subject. We have a very severe housing crisis in Australia, specifically a lack of housing, which has led to prices becoming extremely unaffordable. And one of the big, almost the biggest cause of this is that there are so many rich homeowners who simply don't want the price of their house going down and the various zoning restrictions or historical restrictions that really allow these people who already own a home to drive up the price, and if they own multiple homes, they drive up the price of rent. 

I always thought that there would be some enlightened middle ground on this. I guess I hadn't really thought it through entirely, but my half-formed notion was, oh, there's got to be an inner-city car park or some industrial warehouse that you could convert into apartments. It should be easy enough to just build enough apartments for people to live in and leave those beautiful aesthetic areas that I loved so much intact, but we need houses where people want to live, and you can't trust a system that is by the homeowners for the homeowners. And every time I see a row of cottages now, I just think about how many people could live in this, in a city apartment block, at a time when we need roofs over people's heads.

Caller: Hi Sarah, my name is Case. I was raised believing giving money to homeless people was morally wrong, and assuming they should just clean up and find a job. Because otherwise, my money would be turned into their next drug purchase. It wasn't until I started dating my partner who taught me that, 1) it doesn't matter what they spend that money on, because 2) they are suffering, hurting, and needing so much more than I am. And that whatever I could give would go so far in their survival to allow them to be a little human. And I counter that now by always having lots of bills in my wallet to help folks whenever I can, because it will never hurt me more than how much it will help them.

Caller: Hey, You're Wrong About. So for a long time, I would say that I don't want to have children myself, but I would consider having them with the right person. So a couple weeks ago, I was reading this long discussion online about myths and regrets of motherhood. It made me change my mind about why I don't want to have children. I read a lot of comments by mothers who didn't really choose to be mothers, women who felt conned into motherhood. 

So one of the comments said, “You should ask yourself, would you do it on your own, by yourself? Forget about your husband, forget about your support system, would you still want to go through a pregnancy and have a child if you had to do it alone?” And that comment changed my mind, and it made me realize that as amazing as having a great partner is, it is not a good reason to have a child. It's great support and it's good to have it. It surely helps, but it's not sufficient enough reasons to bring a child into the world. If you lose a partner, if something happens to your relationship, if something happens during your life, you had this for another person and you didn't really want it. I hope this helps. 

Caller: I remember being in a restaurant with my good friend, and a kid was acting up, because they're children. And we both looked at each other, and this was probably early 2000's, we didn't have any kids. We both looked at each other, and I'm like, “Man, some kids just need a good, like a good spanking, a good whatever.” We're both the children of immigrants. This was just how we grew up. Sometimes a kid needed a good whack. 

Fast forward, I have two young kids, and I have not hit them, I will not hit them. We don't spank, we don't do any of that. I don't think that was an active decision or a thing I made up my mind about until I had children, until I started doing all this research or things you just didn't know about, and now you're like, oh, everything I thought about how you raise a child or how you interact with children or how you best lead them is definitely, maybe wrong, or not what I thought it was. 

I think it really helps that there's a whole generation of people actively trying to dismantle what their parents did, or how they thought was just the normal way, and continue to change their mind about it. Of course people, children should have privacy and I shouldn't really police every single tone and their emotions are growing like it really makes sense. It was just something that I had to actively change my thinking about and will probably continue to change as my kids get older. It makes you think what else am I thinking about wrong?

Caller: Hi, my name is Megan and I wanted to talk about a time that I changed my mind about something. And I would say about 9 or 10 years ago, I had a good friend who had made a decision that she was going to have a home birth. She wanted to have her baby at home. I had just had my baby the year previously and decided that this was a crazy thing for someone to do. I just could not fathom what in the world she was thinking of. And I really felt that way. I felt very rooted in the fact that she was making a decision that could be harmful to her and her baby. 

And looking back, even in this memory now, I'm realizing that I probably said some of those things to her directly. I’m such a good friend, where I just felt like this is crazy. And after she had her baby, I remember going to see her that afternoon and she was at home in her bed nursing her baby, just looking wonderful and lovely and eating food from her kitchen. And I had this moment of just, this is lovely. 

I'm now a midwife who, I actually do deliver babies in the hospital, but I'm a huge advocate for women who are low risk and healthy and good candidates for having a baby at home, actually, it's safer in this country to avoid going to a hospital if you are a good candidate to stay out of the hospital. I made a complete 180 from feeling like you're going to kill your baby if you have your baby at home, to now feeling like if you want a healthy baby and a healthy delivery and you're an appropriate candidate, being at home is probably the better option. That's my story. Thanks.

Caller: Liv here. I'm a longtime listener of the podcast. I didn't enjoy the sex I was having with men, though I pretended too often for my own safety. And it was definitely made worse when even the smallest amount of consent was taken away by my ex. 

So after a series of less toxic relationships with men following that one, I changed my mind about men in general, and I came out to my parents as who I am, which is a lesbian. I changed my mind as well about wanting a fixed relationship in life and decided that I'm going to be my own primary partner in all of this, because at the end of the day I belong to me.

Caller: Hi, Sarah. I change my mind all the time. But I will say one of the biggest times I changed my mind on something that I was really hard set on is when I started going to therapy a few years ago and met my therapist, Bernie. One of the patterns he saw in me was I was conditioned from many vantage points in my life to be a pretty affable, helper personality, and I didn't know how to turn that off. And sometimes that would result in me becoming a very serviceable and manipulated person in a lot of my relationships. 

And when you are in friendships or relationships with people who take advantage of that, you start to get beaten down in ways, especially in your communication skills. At least I was, and he pointed out to me, “Rachel, when you are in this kind of personal assistant mode, you feel like you have to read between the lines of what people are saying to make them happy in ways that are not your responsibility. You do not have to take anything they say outside of face value.” And that was eye opening for me. I was like, wow, because up until that point, I thought I had to be everything to everyone all the time. 

And then I realized I can't sustain a life that way. I'm not a mind reader. I shouldn't have to be and people who treat me the way, as if I should, are not people I should be willingly. engage in conversation with, and that's opened doors for me and made my life a whole lot better. 

Caller: I'm Tom Rotobot. I'm a professor of psychology. When I was at the end of my undergraduate education, say, ‘96, something like that, I thought a lot about what I ought to do next. Whether I might go into literature, become an English professor, literature professor, something like that, or go into psychology, into science. 

And so I thought a lot about it, and I developed this opinion that the only ethical thing to do was to go into science. Because in science I could discover facts, and facts would be how I could improve the world and improve people's lives. And therefore the only ethical thing to do would be to go into science, since I had some capacity to do that. And I've changed my mind about that. 

So what changed my mind, 1) is that I learned how difficult it is in science to, first of all, find out something that's definitely true. And second of all, to get something that's true back out into the world in a way that definitely helps people. It's not impossible, but it's hard. Maybe especially in psychology. 2) I learned about the reproducibility crisis in psychology where it turned out that a fair number of people were doing psychology in such a way that they basically ended up writing stories with some numbers attached. They didn't mean to, and hopefully we're doing better now, but a fair amount of what I learned in graduate school turned out to be a nice story as opposed to something that had a lot of evidence behind it. 

And the third thing was that one time while I was jogging, it really occurred to me that, like many other times, I was jogging while listening to a story. And that listening to that story really felt like it was doing some good for me, which is of course something that psychologists could study, but largely haven't and largely don't have the resources to. And so I concluded that knowing what the right ethical field to go into and thinking that I knew what that was in 1996, it's not so much a mistake, it's just something that you can't really know all that easily.

Caller: Hello, my name is Rachel. My sister is four years older than me. We've always been really close. And about maybe when I was seven or eight years old, we were at this restaurant with my family, and I always got chicken tenders and fries. I was a picky eater when I was little. And so we were putting everything into to go boxes as we were wrapping up dinner, and we would draw on the boxes with crayons while we were waiting for our parents to finish up the bill. 

So I'm drawing on my box and I write ‘Rachel's chicken’. And then my sister took the box and was drawing on it, the sister who's four years older than me, and she wrote ‘Moo’. And I said, “Why did you just write ‘moo’ on my chicken?” The logic wasn't there. And she looks at me and she goes, “Rachel, chicken comes from cows.” I'm younger than her. I'm like seven or eight. And I look at her and I'm like, “No, it doesn't.” 

But she's my elder. I'm like, am I wrong? Is she wrong? I had genuinely no idea at this moment who was right. And so I turned to my parents and I'm like, “Hannah thinks chicken comes from cows.” And they look back at me and they're like, what? 

Turns out, after some investigation, Chick-fil-A just thoroughly confused her because their mascot is a cow, and it says, “eat more chicken”. She thought chicken came from cows because Chick-fil-A cows were always telling her to eat more chicken. And honestly, I can't really blame her. And she got ‘You’re Wronged About’ by me, and that was a pretty funny moment that I definitely never let her live down. 

Caller: Hello, my name is Tasha. I live in Brooklyn, and oh my god, so many things I could talk about. But one thing that came to mind was Miley Cyrus's 2013 VMAs performance, which is the one where she twerks on Robin Thicke, launched a thousand memes, captivated the world in a way that I just don't think would be possible now. And then also the Wrecking Ball video. 

So my read on this as a teenage girl with a ton of internalized misogyny who's very #notlikeothergirls. It's like she's lost her damn mind. And this is based on a ton of what I now realize was really harmful rhetoric around Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. 

But the thing that really got me thinking about this was for work last year, I was really reading her Rolling cover story from 2013. And she says in it, quote, “I know what I'm doing. I know I'm shocking you”. What really struck me about this is just the self-awareness that I think is not afforded women. I think when women do these kinds of stunts, it's just always assumed that the joke is on them, that they can't possibly be self-aware of it. 

And then also it was like the Wrecking Ball video, she says, “I think people are going to hate it. They're going to see my ass and be like, oh my god, I can't believe she did that.” That, plus the retrospective and like puritanical culture, the amount of hyperfixation on virginity and her body that she had just makes me in hindsight be like, damn, why was this such a big deal? 

And I'm not trying to sidestep the legitimate criticism she faced around cultural appropriation, because I do believe there's merit to that. But the amount of pressure and obsession that was put on her and just the assumption that she couldn't have been thinking any of it through because why would women do something so silly? Anyway, that was my read on that. Thank you so much.

Caller: Hi Sarah, this is Robin, also known as @PaminaQ from Twitter, the one who always tags you in cute, tiny things and horny ‘70s cookbooks. Anyway, I've changed my mind about tons of different things over the course of my life, and I've also changed my mind about changing my mind and whether or not it's a good thing. 

I grew up evangelical, and the key to getting into heaven and being a good person and making sure that your kids get into heaven and are good people is like, maintaining this set of very specific, pretty rigid, correct beliefs no matter what. So growing up, changing your mind wasn't framed as growing or adapting to new information or things like that, it was framed as losing your faith or being inconsistent. All of which is supposed to be bad, right? 

But two things stand out. You can change your mind and still have consistent values. In fact, that might even be a hallmark of it. You love your neighbor, you love your kids, and you're constantly learning how to do that better in more practical ways. I also wish that we were all a little more comfortable just being wrong about things and knowing that doesn't mean that we're stupid or bad. A lot of resistance that I see to learning seems to be because people are scared that if I'm wrong about this, then I guess I'm just a bad person and everyone's done with me forever. 

But that's not really true. Being wrong about stuff doesn't mean that I was bad. It doesn't mean that other people are bad. It's really what you do once you have evidence that you were wrong about something important. Are you able to love the truth and the people around you more than you love the sense of security of being right about things? Anyway, thank you for telling me all the things that I've been wrong about over the years. I've learned a lot from your show, and I love it. Bye! 

Caller: I was raised by very conservative parents who always voted Republican. And when I was young, I often parroted talking points back to them because it made me feel smart. It made them praise me. And it wasn't until I moved away from home at the age of 18 and I began to learn more about the world, and I was exposed to a wider variety of people. And I realized that they were not the monsters that my parents had made them out to be. And my political beliefs have completely changed. And I'm very grateful for that. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to be exposed to the wider world. And now that is probably the greatest change I've ever made. I believe I changed my mind, and I changed my heart, too.

Caller: I was raised in a pretty Christian household and homeschooled for my entire life. I was also raised by a mom,, who at the time really hadn't figured out modern technology and also didn't really understand my unfettered access to books at the library. 

Something that I changed my mind about was when I was younger, I was taught that conversion therapy was a valuable option. People would come speak at my church who were victims of conversion therapy, talking about how great it was for them. And at the time, I was like, yeah, that seems to be working out good for them, You can live your life not in sin, easy peasy, great. 

But, as I got older, started making choices for myself, I went on an internal campaign to read more diverse books. And so one of the things that I did was I found a list about LGBTQ recommendations, and one of the books was The Miseducation of Cameron Post. I read that book and had this fictionalized first-hand account of what it was like to realize that you're queer, and then also you'd be forced to go to conversion therapy and just how damaging that was and abusive. And it really changed my perspective and my belief in people using and promoting conversion therapy. 

Yeah, I'm pretty ashamed of the thoughts that I used and beliefs that I had when I was younger, but I was also just really happy that I was fortunate enough to have kind of the unfettered access to the internet, to find lists of those books, and then also not a really restrictive library card. If my mom had known I was reading that, I would have definitely been in trouble. But, luckily, she didn't. And I get to be a better person because of it. 

Caller: Hello, my name is Rachel. Growing up, I've always been extremely stubborn, very independent. Ask anyone in my family. And growing up I always thought to myself, I would never be in an abusive relationship because I'm just too stubborn. And it wasn't because I thought people who were abused by their partners were weak or anything like that. I understood that though they were manipulated and controlled, I just thought that I was too stubborn to ever fall under someone's control. 

Fast forward to me being 18, brand new in college, and I met this guy on Tinder, and it ended up being a very abusive relationship, mostly just emotionally. But I didn't even realize that it was domestic violence until after the relationship. When a therapist told me about the domestic abuse cycle, and I knew what abusive relationships were, but I had no idea about the abusive cycle, and it just all made so much sense, and I couldn't believe that I had fallen into it. But he manipulated me so much, and I thought I loved him so much that I never considered it abuse. Which is, news flash, how a lot of people in abusive relationships are. They love their partner so much, they don't consider how they're treating them as abuse. 

And something about the domestic abuse cycle is that the victim can get caught up in it and not necessarily be abusive themselves, but can partake in some of the abuse that happens because they're fighting back. So it's really important, I think, for people to know what the domestic abuse cycle is and what it looks like, because that is such an insight into abusive relationships and how they work. 

And had I known that, maybe I would have actually seen what was going on at the time. So that's my You're Wrong About. I was wrong that I would never end up in an abusive relationship. And unfortunately, I don't want anybody to relate to this, but I think people could relate to it. 

And I think it's really important just considering the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial that's going on. It's important for people to know what an abusive relationship even is. It's not just someone yelling or hitting. It's a cycle, a continuous cycle that people get trapped in. Nobody ever means to get trapped in this cycle, it just happens. 

Caller: I changed my mind about love when my husband threatened my cat. I used to believe that love, once you'd gotten married, was forever. I wanted to spend my older years with the same person I'd spent my younger years with. I believed in ‘always’, and I knew that sometimes when men are unhappy, they are angry. 

I knew that the man I loved got angry sometimes, but he showed me anger I'd never seen before after we got married. He told me he hated me, he called me disgusting, and he called me a burden. And he asked me to give up more and more parts of my life, my job, my friends, my family. And I gave them because I believed that love meant making one person happy. When his anger was directed at me, I thought love is forgiveness. But when he angrily said, “You're lucky I didn't kill that fucking cat,” I decided that it was time for me to get a job. And now that I have a job, I intend to pay my own rent. And as of today, I live alone with my cat. I changed my mind about love. It does not exist forever. It exists as long as it is taken care of.

Sarah: And that's our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for sharing your story if you're one of the people who did here or in another episode or will in the future. We hope you do. We listen to everything that everybody sends in, and it makes our hearts and brains bigger. And we love you so much for it. See you in two weeks.