Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Art of Insubordination with Todd Kashdan

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

In today’s episode, Sharon speaks with psychologist, Dr. Todd Kashdan, about the ways in which insubordination can be an effective and valuable way to make the change you want to see in the world. Effective dissent looks like encouragement and collaboration for the good of many. Change does not always happen as an immediate result from going against the status quo, but it does open up others to the idea that there is more than one way to do something. It is healthy to welcome dissent into our lives and into our homes because it makes us realize that our perspectives are not the only approach to finding effective solutions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Always delighted that you're here. And today I think you are going to love the guest that I'm chatting with. His name is Todd Cashton. He has a book called The Art of Insubordination. And when I read this book, I was like, oh man, this just gives me all the brain tingles because I see so much of my own, even childhood behavior of insubordination in just very subtle ways. And I think you're going to get so much out of this conversation and so much out of his book. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm so excited for this conversation today. Todd, thank you so much for doing this. Your book is super interesting to me because I feel like it applies to almost my entire life. So can you just

give us a little bit of an introduction of like who you are, what you do, and then I'm excited to dive into the topic of your book. Yeah, sure. Your enthusiasm is already contagious. So I'm a professor of psychology at George Mason University. I had my stints working on the floor of the New York Soccer Exchange in Wall Street because my grandmother was one of the first women to work on Wall Street. And I've been running the Wellbeing Laboratory for 22 years now. And so we study all the things people wish they were talking about at cocktail parties, meaning and purpose in life, love. How do you maintain romantic relationships, curiosity, creativity, compassion?

You name the interesting topic. Right now we're studying how do you get blues and reds to talk to each other and not pull each other's hair out. That is a useful skill. So your book is called The Art of Insubordination. How to dissent and defy effectively. When I saw the title, I was immediately like, well, I need that. First of all, start with the title. What does that even mean? So immediately I try to take a negative term

that's looked down upon. I mean, you might've seen over the past eight years, there's a number of women and men that were actually fired because of acts of insubordination. And then they actually did something really good. One of the famous ones is Rebecca Jones in Florida, where she refused to falsify data. It's all negative. It's basically, you refuse to obey authority figures and rules in this little triangular social hierarchy that you're part of. And the book's about principled insubordination, which is about you're deviating from social norms, authorities, and rules because you think that there is a better way to contribute to your well-being, to leverage other people's well-beings, or society is pretty dysfunctional right now,

and you want to work towards a more utopian ideal. Principled insubordination. So I was one of those kids who I likened myself to being insubordinate. Although I was never one of those people who was like, screw you teacher. I don't believe in what you're saying. I'm just going to be over here cutting kids hair. Like I wasn't defiant in a way that was wildly disruptive to the classroom, but I did frequently throughout my entire life. This persists today. Just do something different than what was asked. I'll give you one great example. Second grade.

I was always the kid who finished all my work first. And then what we were supposed to do if we finished our work early was we were supposed to work in a workbook that was called seat work. And it was a workbook that had absolutely frivolous activity. At the time, I was like, this is frivolous. I already, I finished the work. Why do I need to do more work when I understood the work to begin with? I don't want to do this.

And rather than being like, I will not do this seat work. This is terrible. like, I will not do this seat work. This is terrible. I would just ignore it. Or I would hide my seat workbook and pretend that it was lost. And I would just do something else instead. Like read a book, like read a real book. I love this because you have a teacher that's penalizing those students who are assiduous about getting their work done. They persevere, they work fast, they're efficient, they're effective, and your reward is more extra work to play with. More work, 100%. That's exactly how I perceived it at age seven. Yeah. I mean, your story resembles a very important kind of lesson that I learned from

Susan Cain's book, Quiet. And it's an important element for principled rebels, which is we think of these loud, aggressive characters. You know, you've got Alexei Navalny, who's going against Putin and kind of saying, listen, we're going to fight for democracy. Now he's in prison. And you think of Rosa Parks kind of clutching her handbag in the back of the bus and saying, I refuse to go to the back seats. Like I got to the seat first that happened there. And then you have Malcolm X, who was this loud, beautiful, inflective voice. But, you know, there's a lot of aggression pent up there from spending years in prison when he did that. What we don't pay attention to is the more quiet forms of insubordination that are often equally, if not more powerful.

The idea that it's in some cases important to dissent and defy effectively. Can you identify some areas where you think like, yeah, that's actually, that would be an important place to dissent or an important way or important thing to be defiant on? It's hard to think of an area where it doesn't. So let me go broad and then let's go concrete. So at a broad level, you could think about this where having a single person that dissents from a group. Now that could be your friends hanging out at dinner, making plans for a summer vacation together. It could be at a organizational meeting where you're deciding kind of what your sales team is going to be doing, what your marketing plan is for the upcoming year, super boring meeting. Or you're talking about being in an educational system or the government or having a disagreement with someone.

In every one of these domains, what we know is a single dissenter, while even if you don't agree with their views, what it does is it attitude to have towards senators of the other party, of people that hold the opposite view on climate change, have the opposite view on affirmative action, the opposite view on abortion, the opposite view on immigration. Now, we won't have to get into all these controversial areas, but it's that you all agree. Now, what happens, let's say you're hanging out with a bunch of people that are progressive and the topic's immigration. You might say to yourself, well, I don't know if we want everyone to be coming in and there should be no standards in terms of immigration. Now, that might make people bristle and people might say right away, they

might actually kind of shoot some terms at you that you're xenophobic and that you're privileged and these typical terms that pop up that lack nuance. Even if they argue and disagree with you, what happened is you opened up a portal. And Sharla Nemeth, this great professor in California, has shown that you often don't see change immediately. But what happens is there's a delayed sleeper effect that over time that you've got people just gotten their heads a little bit, little Todd goes onto their shoulder, which says, you know what, what I want someone with the criminal record to come in. Hmm. Like, you know what, I should be more invested in criminal justice reform. So maybe they don't change their view on immigration, but they might change their view on an adjacent topic relevant to that. You've opened people's minds. So just that benefit alone makes you say, we should welcome dissent into our conversations,

even our households, our partners and our kids and our roommates, because it makes us realize that our perspective and our knowledge and our background does not afford us the only approach that's effective to working through solutions. One of the things that I hear from people when we're talking about this idea that we can't work for each other's mutual destruction. The point is not to completely annihilate somebody who disagrees with you, but that actually is a negative thing to be like, well, you've been destroyed. We have to be able to have conversations in which people do not see eye to eye because that actually is beneficial, not just for our own intellectual development, it's beneficial to

society at large, the country as a whole. Hearing other people's ideas is beneficial for all of us. If for no other reason, then it causes us to think more deeply about our own viewpoints. Everything that we talk about, about dissent and rebellion, is really about how do we move towards an aspirational view of our lives? And how do we allow people to deviate, to think Robert Frost-like, to go off the beaten track and live their own way if it doesn't detract from anyone else's quality of life? People are afraid of two things, in my experience. First of all, they're afraid of being, quote unquote, canceled.

of being quote unquote canceled. They're afraid of being, you know, like having the quote unquote mob of internet commenters or just people who are like, how could you take such a horrible, horrible view? You know what I mean? We're afraid of being that person. We're afraid of being disliked. We're afraid of the repercussions of speaking up. So there's two big fears of why people are willing to stick with the status quo, stick with the orthodoxy and conventional thinking. You really hit it, especially as a woman online. I mean, the vitriol has not changed since 1999 in terms of what a woman experiences online and what's been a really great norm buster. And just thinking like kind

of behavioral strategies, jump in the gun here, Pulp Fiction style in this conversation, is having a lot of women online post what they get in terms of their emails and their direct messages. And then all of a sudden, a lot of men have actually realized like, oh my God, I had no idea what it's like. And there's been some really cool experiments. Bumble has done some great experiments where they actually had gay and straight men switch profiles and use their other profiles to see what it's like to be a gay man or a straight man that's online.

And people of different races, Bumble's done some cool experiments of switching up, like what's it like to be an Asian man on Bumble as opposed to a black man or a white man and it's been really revolutionary for people to realize like I just assumed if you were socially attractive and witty and fun and playful and physically attractive that you would get all this positive feedback that people would glop onto you and no it's not the case at all. These variables, these demographic characteristics, it's real. So what makes people,

going back to your thought in terms of not dissenting, it's two things. One is, I have this belief and attitude that other people aren't expressing. There must be something wrong with me because I'm not that smart. It's got to be me that's wrong, not them. Now, let me just, before I get to the second one, which is yours, I want to play with that is that many people in society right now, for the reasons that you mentioned, are falsifying their actual beliefs and they're being inauthentic, not because they're inauthentic people, because we all crave likability. We all crave social belonging, especially the groups that we're part of,

or we want to be part of. And we all really want low stress lifestyles, even though we know discomfort as actually the path to growing as a person. Life is stressful enough as it is. We don't need people hating us online, which gets the second part. When you are a dissenter in a group, it's the dissenter's paradox. In the short term, you destabilize other people. You interfere with cohesion, interfere with harmony, interfere with positivity. People don't like that. So you're going to be rejected. You're going to be ostracized. You're going to be negatively evaluated and people aren't going to invite you to as many lunches as you were before. And knowing that stops people in the tracks. Yeah. What I really want to talk about is that you have to expand the time horizon and realize is that we celebrate the one named heroes,

is that we celebrate the one named heroes, Mandela, Galileo. We celebrate them because they won. They did the long game. We have to think to ourselves, how will I feel about this if I don't speak my piece six months from now, one year from now, when my kids ask me about it, when young people in my neighborhood ask me about it. And it's enough.

That self-distancing is a strategy that helps you deal with the social persecution of being a dissenter. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing

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Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. What about people who think things that are morally reprehensible? People who are just blatantly racist or sexist. That's clearly one of the things that big tech companies struggle with, that citizens of the internet struggle with is, are we supposed to platform all these ideas? Are we supposed to platform the people who are neo-Nazis? Is that our job to do that? Are we supposed to give their ideas equal weight? Do you know what I mean? Like, this is clearly a very, very hot topic right now, because this is a new frontier

in human existence is the ability to reach millions with your ideas, where before your ability to impact people was much more limited to your immediate social circles. Do you have any ideas about that? Like, how are we supposed to deal with all of these sometimes very, very harmful ideas online? And they probably are dissenters. Most people aren't neo-Nazis. What are we supposed to do with that kind of content? Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm going to offer ideas. If I said I had the answers, you should assume I'm a snake oil salesman.

There's a couple of thoughts about this. One is we should not be providing recruitment avenues that are easily accessible to ideas that are interfering with the well-being of other people. Now, one of the things about my definition of principled insubordination is right in the numerator of the equation is contribution, and that's to protect against psychopathy, sociopaths, and people that actually have these racist, sexist, homophobic, just extreme discriminatory belief systems or ideologies. So what's in there is that you're

no longer in the realm of principled insubordination. I'm not talking about it's a rebellion because you're a small group of people who believe that people that are Jewish and people that are Black should be exterminated. So another strategy is to think about the end game, which is what do you want to do with people who have views that are despicable and they are absolute obstructions and barriers to people reaching their potential? And I think that's the better question, as opposed to what platform should they be allowed on and should they be allowed to speak? It should be thinking about these are human beings that we might be able to have compassion for if they didn't do harm,

like didn't actually harm and attack vitriol towards an exact person, which is they might have had a family background where they learned these ideas. The way for them to fit in was to kind of mirror these ideas. They didn't receive a high level education. And can we find an opportunity to educate them? There was a great documentary about flat earthers that's on Netflix right now. I have nothing to do with it, so I make no profit off of this. Earth Day conference, and he's in a bar talking about flat earthers nearby. And he says, I have no disdain or even dislike for people that believe the earth is flat. I view them as the failings of the education system. We miss them. And it might be due to their parents, might be due to where they're from. But I'm going to say is that we have the ability in the modern world to educate

anyone by giving people free CDs, free DVDs, whatever the technology is now, the access to a free website of like, here's information, here's to be trained about. These are people that want to learn about astronomy. They want to learn about the world. They just happen to have really sucked in on an idea that makes no freaking sense whatsoever, but they want to be educated. And I think there's something about having that compassion and charity that can really help us out in society. All right. Can you give us the formula? Is there a formula for how to dissent and defy effectively. How do we identify things that require dissent? And what's the difference between personal preference and dissent?

Like, you know, have you seen The Office? You watch The Office? Yeah. Where people are like, that's not, I don't like that flavor of birthday cake. I don't like, I need an ice cream cake. Well, I like chocolate. You know, like what's the boundary between personal preference

that maybe we can just like zip it and be like, I'll eat the cake. And things that are important to dissent and defy the social paradigm on. Let's start there. No, I love how you have these multiple thoughts simultaneously. This is exactly the intellectual stimulation that keeps me alive. So one thing that's important about the preferences, we really have to think about the subjective and objective element is a very important way that you persuade people when you're the minority voice.

When it comes to ice cream flavors, when it comes to, if you've ever been to Japan, there's about 85 different types of Kit Kats, including sweet potato, which is horrific. I just want to put on record. I took my 10-year-old daughter there just to kind of teach her about that the world does not exist solely in the United States. There's a lot of other strange norms that are out there. When we are dissenting, it's one of the effective strategies is to try to find the most objective information that we can project as possible, move away from the subjective to the objective. So when you're talking about, for example, maybe you disagree with the admissions criteria at colleges and universities right now, and you should be.

Anyone that doesn't is, you clearly got the edge and don't want to lose it. You're talking about the fact that I went to Cornell University. It is absolutely absurd that my three daughters have a better chance of getting in over someone else. Like, what does it have anything to do with me that I went there? I mean, I almost went to a different college. So it was almost arbitrary. Second, athletes. It's supposed to be a college. The idea that University of Michigan, the highest paid person at a university of higher education is the football coach tells you that this is not about education. This is a monetary enterprise. So that's a problem. And the third one is there is a history, a long history of that if you had the wrong demographics, you were basically flagged in some way of just looking for something in your essay that says, you know what,

this Jewish guy in 1972 doesn't seem like they really understand leadership in their essay. And what they really meant was they didn't want a Jewish person coming into their university. And that was the reason. So that subjectivity allows anyone to reject anyone that doesn't look like them or think like them. So there's a lot of problems there. So in terms of how you dissent, you go to the objectivity. And you say, OK, where is an admission officer allowed to reject someone because of their own personal preference, which we should be minimizing as much as possible because there are hundreds of people that

could be looking at the same application and thinking differently. This is where it gets great about what awards have you won? How do you spend your free time after you're in high school? What's your social network that you've developed? How have you shown virtuous behavior in terms of temperance, in terms of caring for people that don't have the means that you have? These are all objective things. And once you create criteria that's more objective and you have a more fair and just

process, and you can kind of have a similar attitude about the criminal justice system. One of my big policies, my big kind of platforms I like to focus on when I'm not doing my science or taking care of my family, which is that there are a couple of junctures where subjectivity comes in. So there's this term called cumulative disadvantage. And it's the idea that one of the reasons that marginalized people, and that could be race, and that could be socioeconomic class. It could just be that, you know, you happen to grow up in a, you know, in an area that doesn't have access to resources, some rural area in Iowa. The two places where disadvantage starts to accumulate are very

subjective parts of the criminal justice system. A police officer has unbelievable jurisdiction to do whatever they want for first contact with someone that they believe might be a problem. That's concerning, is that they could just for any reason could decide to start to ask you some questions and pivot and kind of think that there's a possibility that you might have done a wrongdoing. And a lot of things have gone awry from that pivot point. So right there is one of the main areas where marginalized people actually start to enter the criminal justice system. The second one is a criminal prosecutor has great jurisdiction and great opportunity to go any way they want you to say, am I going to let you go? Or am I going to give you a plea deal opportunity where you get to get out of jail free card? Now, this isn't often talked about, but this is the greatest racial difference in the entire criminal justice system is giving plea bargains. It sounds like a good thing, but it's

actually not. It basically means is that you have the potential to have 20 years in jail, or you could do one year right now, and we could just sign a deal, and then we're done. And people that don't have financial means or social capital, they are so scared, and they don't know what the probability is of winning this wrongful accusation. They choose the one year, which just seems so logical. And there's nobody there to help them. So those two pieces right there, lots of subjectivity, get the objectivity as much as possible so we can reduce unnecessary harm to people. So this is a really important element of actually selling dissent

for whatever area that you're focusing on. One of the things is, if you're in the majority, you have power, you have status, you've got that parking spot that's even closer to the building than people that are eight months pregnant, or people that are handicapped. I mean, you're making six, seven figure salaries. Your strategy to influence people is domination. And people might agree with you just because they want to win and curry favor from you. Now, what's interesting is, Sergei Moscovici discovered this in the 1960s, is when people in the majority get people to agree with them and that you influence people, it's often a very fragile compliance and they are not immune to listening to other ideas. It's not as

if it's going to last for a long period of time. You're doing it because you're seeking, you're making a social comparison, which is my life with or without a power figure that's I'm on their side and they've invited me into their group. Now, when a minority, you don't have the numbers, you don't have power and status, you're a marginalized group, you try to influence people, it's a very different pathway. And I really lay this out in the book of if you follow all the steps in this book, you have the greatest probability possible. If you don't follow these steps, you have no chance except for luck of influencing other people. And when we follow these steps, you have no chance except for luck of

influencing other people. And when we communicate to people, we have to realize is that we can give a trailer, a teaser about we're going to offer a new way of interacting or communicating or thinking or norm that's going to be better than before. You give a little bit of information and then let the audience ask you questions because you didn't provide everything to them. That collaboration, that's where you actually kind of spark curiosity and make them people that are invited to be with you as opposed to someone that you're trying to change their mind. I love that. I really love that. If you give us one tip for how to be ineffective

at insubordination? How would we know like, well, that's not effective? How would we know we're on the wrong track? If you're using language that's about I and me and your accomplishments. You're using language that defines yourself as an outsider. And so the plural language brings people in. The problem that we have in these faculty meetings is we don't ask ourselves how much time is spent and how much money is spent every time we have a two-hour meeting. Guess what? I calculated us. We as a collective, it costs $12,000 by our salaries in terms of how we make per hour every time we meet for two hours. So when you think about $12,000, and here's a list of things that we could be spending for $12,000 with all of the collective intelligence in this room.

And I bring this up because I want to ask which one of us has something else we prefer to do with two hours of our time. So we should be asking the question constantly, is this something that we need to meet with that requires $12,000 of energy, or do we want to save that $12,000 and actually we can put in the effort and do this by email. That is a lot more effective if you're trying to alter the norm of excessive meetings in your organization, as opposed to saying, can we do this by email? That's such a great real world example of how centering yourself and be like, I don't like your cake. I don't like your meeting. centering yourself and be like, I don't like your cake. I don't like your meeting.

Your meeting's dumb. I don't want to be here. That's how you become that person that everybody's like, oh no, why is she here? There's a really cool example that it's on the cutting room floor of the book. So again, raising three daughters. So I think about this religiously is that women are less likely to ask their manager or their boss for a pay raise on a random Tuesday compared to men. Fact. So the question is, what's going to persuade people to have a little principled rebel inside them that's going to ask for the money they deserve because a bunch of men keep on asking for pay raises and they're making less money than people who don't have the expertise, the experience that they do, much less creative ideas. One way that people have discovered is women are more pro-social,

thinking more about other people than they do themselves compared to men. The effects are small, but they're there. So when women are told, which I'm going to do right now, think about two different strategies. One, what advice would you give your friend if they thought that they were making less money than the other people in the workplace as a woman? So now that's a self-distancing strategy. Most people would say, I would tell them exactly how to talk to that person in their office, make sure it's face-to-face. So one is, what would you say to your best friend? The second strategy is, imagine that by you making more money, you create a precedent where it'll be easier for women in the future to make more money and not have to do the hard, assertive work that you have to do. So if you put the pressure of the entire sex on your

shoulders and say, I'm doing it for the future generations of women, women are much more likely to pop in there two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, knock on the door and say, listen, here's the reason that I think I should make more money. I'm not just doing this because for the money I'm doing it because it creates a culture where people are getting money based on what they're doing, not by how they look like superficially that happens there. I love that. That's how women got the right to vote, right? Is women who were willing to be the person who was asking for something for the entirety of womankind and not just, I think I should vote. I'm smarter than my neighbor who didn't even finish third grade. Like I should be able to vote. Obviously that wasn't the strategy. The strategy was about womankind and playing the long game. It took a long time for women to be

able to vote, obviously, but they played the long game. And we now can just waltz into our voting locations without a second thought of like, am I going to be allowed to vote because I'm female? And that is because of the people who have gone before us and just played that long game. Yeah. So there's a couple of scientists at Carnegie Mellon and they took, I know you mentioned Reddit earlier, and they took 10 years of Reddit conversation to see what happened in the 10 years that led up to gay marriage being legalized. And they were able to show is that the first half of that century, almost nobody that was fighting for gay rights was talking about policies.

So they weren't talking about gay marriage. They weren't talking about if you weren't married, if one of you died, could your gay partner then gain access to rights and privileges to your and they focused on policies. The interesting thing about gay marriage in the history of humanity, it has never moved more quickly, such a profound social change. And the reason that I bring it up is that as we're talking about being really kind of strategic of how each one of us in our lives can kind of really kind of push and poke at dysfunctional norms and, and absurd ideas that are kind of moving around the mainstream, is that sometimes, as you said, we have to play the long game. And I know in the world of Twitter, and the world of fast thinking, we have to think of, is there an unintended consequence where you're setting a precedent where it's so easy to pull people out of their jobs and prevent people from being a fully functioning member of society who

can take care of their family? What precedent are you setting that when you make a misstep, a mistake, the same thing will happen to you? Is that the foundational elements of a healthy society that lacks charity, lacks reconciliation, and lacks forgiveness? And I think about this all the time, irrespective of whether I like someone who's being challenged and questioned and trying to be tossed from society, I really think about, do I want my children? Do I want your children? Do I want any of the listeners' children or nieces and nephews to grow up in a society that is so stressful that you cannot make mistakes and errors? And we know that they were kids and young people require, much less adults, require trial and error as the world keeps on changing of what's

the appropriate speech to use, what's the appropriate behavior. It was good in the 1980s. Now it's actually not only an anathema, it's illegal to act that way in 2022. With that, can we create a society that allows missteps and mistakes where you are penalized, but you get a pathway to be reconciled and reenter society. What do you want somebody who reads your book, The Art of Insubordination? What would be like, just make your little heart sing if they took the following thing away? What is it that you would love them to know or take away from your book? Well, that's got so many things. You know, there's one topic we haven't talked about, which is forming friendships and alliances, because the myth of the lone genius has to be remembered is that you can't make these

creative contributions. You can't be a niche carver. That's the name I gave it of someone that kind of takes a path that deviates from everyone else to live their own way. The people that decide I want to be single forever. I don't want to have kids. Society tells you you're supposed to get married and you're supposed to have kids. Well, who says so? So anyone that wants to be an innovator, a defender, a niche carver, the one thing that I want people to take away with is there is no courageous personality. It's really about two things.

Can you sit with fear and can you make an approach move anyway? And it's just these moments. We get these choice points. We decide, do I decide to make an approach move with my heart racing and my hands shaking because I know something did something that was inappropriate. It was wrong. It was unjust. And I'm going to squeak out some words, even though I feel like I can't even stand straight right now that happens there. Your whole life is a bunch of choice points. Do I approach or do I avoid? And what I want people to really hold on to is all courage is a 60-second burst of doing something that you know is the right thing and the thing that is aligned with your values for 60 seconds and just squeak it out.

And as you do those moments repeatedly, you will build up this muscle to be more courageous, more regularly, more frequently. I love that too. I have a friend who's a life coach and she asked me about a year and a half ago, like, do you have a word for 2021? Like, what's your word? You know, how people have their, like, I want to focus on whatever contentment. And I was like, I think my word for 2021 is courage. And she was like, Oh no. Do you know what happens when you focus on courage? And I said, well, what she said, you're going to be given a lot of opportunities to be courageous. to be courageous. And that might sound real good on paper of like, I'm going to be courageous. But in reality, it's a tremendous number of opportunities to feel very afraid and do it anyway. Yeah. There's another thing as well is a real appreciation of individual differences

is that, you know, when you listen to this conversation and you hear you're obviously high on bravery and then I'm high on unnecessary intellectual thinking is part of being a principled rebel is figuring out like what feels right in terms of your sources of meaning and your sources of pleasure that you want to invest in. And if you want to be obsessed with comic books and video games as an adult, good on you. And if you decide that you don't want to live with your long-term romantic partner, you want to have separate houses because you like having your own space, who says you're supposed to live with each other? And if it ends up being that you're the type of person that wants to live in a van and you want to go to place to place, just get all you need is Wi-Fi and you're going to meet new people and strangers.

That's amazing. And I just want people to realize is that part of principle rebellion is not just about fighting big systems. It's also about creating the niche that fits right for you, no matter what your parents told you, no matter what your best friends are saying, and no matter what the people you respect are doing, because you're honoring your single scarce life and you only get one. So true. This is really fun. I feel like we could probably chat for a super long time, but tell everybody where to follow you and where they should buy your book. So, I mean, the books on Amazon and Barnes and

Noble and everywhere else, hopefully it'll be an airport someday. The art of insubordination. Yeah. And if you follow me, Todd Cajun, that's my website. That's my Twitter handle. That's my Instagram handle. My 15 year old twins forced me to make some TikTok videos. Just be delicate. Don't judge too much because it's because of them. And it's I'm being forced. It's part of being a parent. Is that your dream for your book is like someday it's going to be at an airport?

My dream is that my kids would actually read the entire 200 page book. That would be that would be that would be the dream. Well, Todd, thank you so much. This is really fantastic. No, it's my pleasure. I love hanging out with you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor, would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review, or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories

or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.