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In this episode, Brian Beckcom speaks with Professor Robin Hanson about the unconscious motives that drive human behavior and their impact on our everyday lives. Brian and Professor Hanson talk about how to confront our hidden motives, examine them, and see clearly so that we can better understand ourselves and our fellow human beings.\\xa0

Robin Hanson is the co-author of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.\\u201d In his book, Robin explains how our minds actually work. He explains how and why we deceive ourselves and others. And he describes how our unconscious motives impact more than just our private behavior; they influence our institutions, art, medicine, schools, and politics.\\xa0\\xa0

Robin Hanson\\u2019s work is relevant today considering the bizarre place we find ourselves in history.\\xa0

Brian and Professor Robin Hanson discuss:

• How he transitioned from STEM fields into social science\\xa0
• Predetermined human behavior and the duplicity of free will
• Why humans act based on hidden motives and why we fail to detect them\\xa0
• How our unconscious motives have shaped the political landscape we see today
• The essence of science and the differences between \\u201cexperts\\u201d and \\u201celites\\u201d
• How to effectively deal with disagreements on difficult topics
• Why so many spouses hate cryonics (the low-temperature freezing and storage of a human corpse or severed head)
• Why we haven\\u2019t seen aliens and when to expect them!
• And other things

Robin D. Hanson is an economics professor at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from the California Institute of Technology, a master\\u2019s degree in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years of experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed Martin and NASA. Professor Hanson has 4510 citations, a citation h-index of 33, and over ninety academic publications ranging from Algorithmica and Information Systems Frontiers to Social Philosophy and Social Epistemology. Robin has diverse research interests, with papers on spatial product competition, product bans, evolutionary psychology, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, self-deception in disagreement, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, and interstellar colonization. To learn more about Professor Robin Hanson, please visit his bio at https://www.overcomingbias.com/bio.