Inner Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick

In 2006, I sat on a hillside above Quito and drank ayahuasca with a shaman. For a few hours, my entire reality came apart: dragons, monsters, grudges dissolving into nothing. Not one fact of my life changed that night. My whole experience of it did.
That gap between the facts and the story we run on top of them is the idea underneath everything I want to share this week. Your mind works like a news channel, selecting a handful of moments out of billions and spinning a narrative around them. The editor making those calls is your mood.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the four Ms I use to manage my own mental health: mood modulation, metacognition, mindset, and meaning. I share a UCLA brain scan study on naming your feelings precisely, walk through the cognitive distortions most of us fall into daily, and unpack the mindsets that decide how every difficult moment gets covered before it even happens. 
What you will discover:
Why a negative belief feels like fact while a negative thought can be argued with
The precise skill of affect labeling and why vague words like "stressed" do not work
The most common cognitive distortions and the questions that dismantle them
Four mindsets- agency, growth, antifragility, and solution focus- that reshape how you handle pressure
Why the meaning behind your hardest moments is a story you can choose to rewrite
In other news, I also want to say a huge thank you for the incredible response to the book since launch. If you have picked up a copy, a quick Amazon review would mean a great deal to me. If you have not yet, you will find it at innerpropaganda.com.
Get your copy of Inner Propaganda: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Owen-Fitzpatrick/dp/1646872444
Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/

For years, a voice in my head told me I was worthless, and it never once sounded like an opinion. It sounded like the truth. It took thirty years and trips to some of the most propaganda-heavy places on earth to understand what that voice actually was.
This week my new book, Inner Propaganda, is finally out, and it is built entirely around that discovery. The most convincing propaganda you will ever hear speaks in your own voice.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the three biggest insights behind the book. I walk through the Asch conformity experiment and what it reveals about how easily we abandon what we can plainly see, the five types of truth we mistake for objective fact, and why you are allowed to change a belief without it meaning you were weak or wrong. I also break down the three gates every belief has to pass through: feeling, identity, and logic, and why logic rarely gets there first.
What you will discover:
Why believing something with total conviction tells you nothing about whether it is true
The five kinds of truth, and which ones we usually mistake for fact
Why changing your mind can be the strongest thing you do, not the weakest
The three gates a belief must pass before it sticks: feeling, identity, and logic
Why hearts change before minds ever do
My brand new book, Inner Propaganda, is out on 4th August: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Propaganda-Leading-Through-Turbulent/dp/1646872444/

Picture the most wrong person you know. Now consider that somewhere out there, someone is just as certain about you. In this episode, I explain why we all feel like the last sane person on Earth, and why that feeling itself might be the actual delusion.
Psychologists call it naive realism, the belief that we see reality as it is and anyone who disagrees is misinformed or brainwashed. I wanted to build an episode that gives you the manual nobody ever handed us for how our own minds work, especially in a world that feels louder and more polarized by the day.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore 12 ideas that sit at the heart of my new book, Inner Propaganda, each one designed to stand on its own. I cover why a single word can plant a false memory, why a failed doomsday prophecy made a cult more certain rather than less, why AI bots outperformed human debaters on Reddit by studying people rather than facts, and why intelligence often just makes us better at defending the wrong conclusion. I also share a personal story from coaching a university football team the night before the biggest game of their lives, and what I learned about the difference between statements and prompts.
What you will discover:
Why certainty is a feeling your brain produces rather than proof you are correct
How the words used to describe an event can rewrite your memory of it
Why AI works as an amplifier of whatever you already believe, not a filter for truth
Why overwhelm, not deception, is the most common form of manipulation
Why nuance, not certainty, is the closest thing we have to seeing the world clearly
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my brand new book, Inner Propaganda, launching August 4th and just named an August must-read by the Next Big Idea Club. 
Pre-order now and you will get a free masterclass, a workbook, and behind-the-scenes interviews.
Pre-order Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/
Free masterclasses: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/summer

During the Second World War, up to forty percent of the German army tuned in nightly to a radio host they trusted completely. He never existed. He was invented by a British propagandist, and his death on air was staged theater.
That story is the doorway into something I think about constantly: we don't experience reality and then tell a story about it. We feel something first, and our mind writes the story afterward to explain it. The voice that does the writing rarely announces itself as fiction. It sounds like your own voice, stating facts.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the research behind why stories are so much more persuasive than facts, including a Princeton study on how a good story literally syncs listeners' brain activity with the speaker's, and an experiment showing that an emotional story can spike oxytocin and change how much money people give to charity. I also share the six stories I believe most of us default to without noticing, and a two-word phrase I use with clients to catch themselves dramatizing an ordinary moment into a disaster.
What you will discover:
Why you feel first and invent the explanation second
How a compelling story can sync your brain with someone else's
Why the tidiest explanation is often the least trustworthy one
The six stories almost everyone lives inside, and what each one costs
A simple way to catch yourself turning a tough moment into a trauma
Pre-order Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/
Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/
Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the sharpest minds of his era, spent years publicly defending photographs of fairies made from paper cutouts. He wasn't fooled because he was naive, but because he was brilliant, and he desperately wanted it to be true. We are not rational animals. We are rationalizing ones. The smarter we are, the better we are at building a convincing case for whatever we already wanted to believe. Logic, when we trust it blindly, doesn't lead us to the truth. It defends the conclusion we'd already fallen in love with.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore how logic actually works, where it comes from, and where it quietly breaks down. Drawing on Aristotle's three types of reasoning, the psychological concept of dysrationalia, the Allied deception at D-Day, Isaac Newton's financial ruin, and the deep canvassing research by Broockman and Kalla, I walk through two ways to use logic well: building a genuinely strong argument using the Toulmin framework, and, more powerfully, asking the investigative questions that let someone else change their own mind. I also explore why wrapping logic in credibility and story is the difference between a point that gets made and a point that actually lands.
What you will discover:
Why high intelligence often increases susceptibility to motivated reasoning rather than protecting against it
The three types of reasoning Aristotle identified, and a practical way to stress-test each one before you trust your conclusions
What dysrationalia is, and how it explains everything from wartime intelligence failures to market losses among the most sophisticated investors
Why Adam Grant's concept of logic bullying describes the most common and least effective way people try to change minds
How the deep canvassing research demonstrates that non-judgmental questions shift beliefs more durably than any amount of evidence-throwing
Pre-order my new book, Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/
Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/
Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/