Something You Should Know - How You Can Be More Powerful & Elastic Thinking: A Better Way to Solve Problems

Episode Date: April 26, 2018

When you go grocery shopping it is hard to resist the urge to buy things you know you shouldn’t. Temptation is down every aisle! So what can you do? There is a simple yet very effective technique that will help you resist those urges.  (http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/OP/Trigger_Apple)  You probably know someone you would consider powerful. So how did they get their power? Where did it come from? And can you be more powerful? Listen to Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor of Organizational Management at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and author of the book Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t (https://amzn.to/2I1hfN4). He explains how anyone can be a much more powerful presence.  Do you like kale? It has been called a super food and it now finds its way into all kinds of salads and other dishes. But a few years ago hardly anyone ate kale. So why and how did it become so popular? Is it really so great? You won’t believe the story. (https://spoonuniversity.com/news/real-story-behind-kale-became-famous)  There is logical thinking and then there is “elastic” thinking. Elastic thinking is a different way to approach problems. Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book Elastic Thinking: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change (https://amzn.to/2JrXqhl) reveals how this different way of thinking works and how it can often be a better way to solve the problems you face at work and at home. Leonard is a fascinating writer (he co-wrote a book with Stephen Hawking!) and I know you will find his insight enlightening.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, how can you resist the urge to buy unhealthy food when you go grocery shopping? I'll have an amazingly simple and effective technique. Then one thing powerful people do to be more powerful is they work on it. And so can you. It is hard for me to believe that many people become powerful unintentionally. There's too much effort required, too much hard work. So I think most people who acquire power do it very foresightfully. Plus, do you eat kale? A few years ago, almost no one did. So what changed? And how to be a more elastic thinker? Why? The payoff is being able to be a more creative problem solver. For example, I'll give you a riddle. Marjorie and Judy had the same mother and father,

and they were born on the same month, the same day, the same week. But they're not twins. What's going on? All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily.

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Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Now that I've got about 170 episodes under my belt here, I'm sometimes asked, you know, what's your favorite episode of the Something You Should Know podcast?

I really don't have one because that's not how my brain works. My favorite episode is always the episode I'm working on. So right now, this is my favorite episode. Because I spend a lot of time putting it together and getting it to sound just right. And so that's my favorite episode. But by the time you hear this, I'll be on to the next episode, and this won't be my favorite episode anymore. But I will tell you that so far, the most downloaded and listened to episode that you

might like to check out if you haven't was released back in September, and the title is A Closer Look at Your Personality and Why You Click With Some People and What It Means. And it really was a very good episode. So if you haven't heard it, I suggest you go to the website, somethingyoushouldknow.net, and you can just search for it. You can just search for the word click, which is how I found it, and it's the only episode that will come up. First up today, see if this sounds about right. You want to eat healthier, but every time you go to the grocery store,

you can't seem to help but buy things that you know you shouldn't. So what can you do about that? Well, the answer is eat an apple. According to the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, if you eat an apple, or really any fruit or vegetable, before you go grocery shopping, you are more likely to buy healthier food, particularly produce. In the same study, when people ate a cookie before they went shopping, they made fewer healthy choices.

It seems to work on two levels. By eating fruit before you go shopping, you're not as hungry, which reduces the impulse to buy unhealthy food. And also, when you eat healthy food before shopping, it seems to put you in a healthy mindset and nudges you to make healthier choices. And that is something you should know. You probably know a person or two that you would describe as powerful. They have power. So where'd they get it?

What makes them powerful? And how can you become and appear more powerful? Well, the person to ask these questions to is Jeffrey Pfeffer. He is a professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and he is the author of a book called Power, Why Some People Have It and Others Don't. Welcome, Jeffrey, and quickly, just explain your interest in and expertise on the subject of power. I began teaching a class on power when I arrived at Stanford in 1979, and over the years have written three books on power, the power of why some people have it and others don't,

reflects what I think people need to know to succeed in a very tough and very political organizational world. So when you talk about power and teach about power, how do you define it? What is power to you? Well, power is the ability to get your way in contested decisions. But operationally, I often tell my students that my objective is to make sure they never have to leave a position involuntarily. And if I'm successful, they won't. But I have to admit admit I'm not quite 100% successful yet. So where does power come from? Is it something that other people give you, or is it something you have to create from within? Where are the origins of a person's power?

Power comes from, I think, a variety of things. One source of power is your position in networks of communication. Lots of people spend most of their time interacting with their close friends and family, which is nice and comfortable, but doesn't necessarily bring you into contact with the high-status people who can bring you power. So you oftentimes, I think, need to get out of your comfort zone in terms of your networking and who you talk to. Power comes from resilience and persistence and a variety of individual qualities, including your ability to be able to put yourself in the other person's place. And these qualities can be developed over time. So power also comes from control over resources. People oftentimes talk about the new golden rule. The person with the gold gets to

make the rules. So there are many sources of power. But there are people that just seem powerful, and maybe we don't know why, but we just assign that to them, that these are powerful people. And maybe it's just, I don't know, the way they carry themselves. I mean, is part of being powerful partly show?

Certainly another source of power is your ability to act with confidence and to act and speak in ways that convey that you are in charge of the situation. Think of Rudy Giuliani on the day of 9-11 when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. There are people who have command presence. There have been studies that show that height is related to both power and, for that matter, salary. But part of that is you don't have to go get surgery or put lifts in your shoes. Part of this is your posture and how you project yourself

and whether you stand up straight and act as if you, you know, and speak with force and conviction or whether you don't. Do you think that powerful people are powerful all the time? It would seem that, you know, it's somewhat situational that people have power in certain situations and not others. It is somewhat situational, but I would emphasize the word somewhat. You take a look at John Corzine, who had power at Goldman Sachs, and then, of course, he took that power and took it into the political arena in one political office in New Jersey.

So power, oftentimes power in one domain, permits you to leverage that in other domains. I see Bill Gates, who, of course, has built an amazing company in Microsoft, now gives talks on education and a variety of other subjects. Warren Buffett has become an expert on charity. So I believe there is this tendency to believe that if people are knowledgeable and powerful in one domain, it more often carries over to other domains than not. I would think there is a perception that power is a byproduct of something, that it's because of where you are, who you are, or the position you're in. But you're saying that power is something you

can cultivate, you can develop. But where would you even begin? How do you start to gain power? I think you start by understanding where it comes from, the personal qualities that build it. And then you ask yourself, you know, to what extent am I, you know, strong or weak on these personal qualities and how can I develop the domains in which I'm weak? If you, you know, don't have enough energy, which is another source of power, you might think about, you know, your eating and sleeping habits and your exercise habits. Energy can be developed. I have a friend who's a surgeon who will tell you that you have to do a bunch of surgical residencies. You learn how to get by on very little sleep.

So you first figure out the personal qualities and how to develop them. You understand how to construct efficient and effective social networks, and you go about doing that. You understand how to act and speak with power. Acting is a skill. People go to acting classes. People can develop speaking and public speaking skills. These are all things that are developable. So my suggestion is you figure out what the sources of power are,

and you work on increasing your score on them, if you will, and on long, many dimensions. Who do you think would be good examples of people you could point to that have done this well, who have acquired power and present themselves as powerful? I think there are a bunch of people who do this stuff exceptionally well. Most corporate CEOs did not get to their positions without having a reasonable set of power skills. You can take pretty much anyone who's reached a relatively high level. Certainly Bill Clinton is a master at this.

You know, as I said, virtually any corporate CEO, you don't get to the top of a large organization, be it university, private sector, public sector, or government, without having a lot of political skill. And in fact, there have been studies that show political skill is an important predictor of who succeeds, who gets positive performance evaluations. You say in your book, so I want to ask you to comment on this, you say, take care of yourself first, don't expect justice. What does that mean? Well, I think, what do I mean by that? It's actually pretty simple. I think many people are looking for, or go into organizations, particularly work organizations, and expect

the organizations to be like their parents, to look out for them, to take care of them, and to, if they do a good job, that the organization will, you know, be fair to them. But in case you haven't been reading the news, that isn't what's going on. Organizations will keep you around just as long as you're useful and not a minute longer, and your boss will keep you around only as long as the boss likes you and not a minute longer. So you have to understand that you are responsible for your own survival and success, and you do need to take care of yourself. And you need to show as little loyalty to the organization as that organization is probably going to show to you. My guest is Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. He is a professor

of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and he's author of the book, Power, Why Some People Have It and Others Don't. I believe I mentioned this before, but we will be launching a new podcast in the near future, and as with this podcast, we needed a website. And I figured it was going to take a long time, there'd be a lot of back and forth with the web designer, corrections to be made, and glitches to be fixed. But this time we used Squarespace, and there was none of that. In fact, I thought it was going to take weeks to complete this website, and it only took hours. Whether you want to showcase your work or publish a blog, sell your products, creating your website with Squarespace is going to save you so much time and trouble.

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please, when you're ready to launch, use the offer code something to save 10% on your first website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash something offer code something. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

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Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to something you should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Jeffrey, when I think of someone who has power, I think of someone who has, you know, a get-it-done kind of attitude that when things go bad, when things get tough, they don't become a victim and lick their wounds, but they take care of the problem. I agree with that completely. I think one of the qualities that brings power, or this may be more than one quality, is persistence and resilience. Everybody suffers setbacks. You know, Martha Stewart went to jail. You know, Bernie Marcus, who founded the Home Depot, with Arthur Blank, if you read their history of the

founding of the Home Depot, they say in the introduction that the Home Depot, with Arthur Blank, if you read their history of the founding of the Home Depot, they say in the introduction that the Home Depot's founding began with two words, you're fired. So there is almost no one that I can think of that doesn't have setbacks and career reversals at some point in their career. And the successful people are those who do exactly what you suggested. They have the persistence and the resilience to get back up and keep going at it. The people that you describe as powerful, do you think they're very deliberate about it? Do you think they work on becoming powerful?

Or is it just because of who they are? Is there a personality type that just kind of absorbs power and then exudes it back out? There are certainly personality differences, but the whole premise of this book and the whole premise of my class and the whole premise of, I think, most of what educators do, regardless of whether they're trying to educate people about power or how to ice skate or how to speak the English language,

is that skills can be taught and that we can all be better doing grammar. We can all do better figuring out chemical equations, and we can all do better with power. So it is hard for me to believe that many people become powerful unintentionally. There's too much effort required, too much hard work, and too much strategic thinking to believe that people just fall into it. So I think most people who acquire power do it very foresightfully. Talk about the importance of paying attention to the small tasks. Because when I think of somebody who's powerful, I think of someone who's making big decisions about big things, and they're not weighted down by the

small tasks, but you say those small tasks are important. Well, I think people oftentimes think that what they need to do is something grand and wonderful, but the inside of organizations, it's often the small, little, unneglected things that can bring you a lot of power. There's, you know, one former student of mine went to work for a hedge fund. You know, nobody's interested in hiring the analyst because the analysts come in and they're only going to be there two or three years. Then they're going to go back to business school. So who wants to be bothered with the analyst, you know, hiring program? People have other more important things to do. They need to run their portfolios, etc. He took on the analyst hiring task, which brought him obviously into contact

with everybody in the firm. The analysts who were hired were very grateful to him, and as a consequence became better known and more central in the communication structure. So that was always a good thing to do. You said earlier that anybody can learn these skills, but don't you think there are some people that just don't have it, and maybe don't want it, don't have the ability to create that power and get other people to recognize them as powerful? Or do you think anybody can learn this? Well, you know, can anybody learn this is, of course, an extreme statement.

But I believe everybody can get better than they are today. And if you get a little bit better, you can wind up in a very different place. It's like the principle of compound interest. If you can be even 5% or 6% more effective in every interaction and every situation over the course of a 20- or 30-year career, that will wind up putting you in a very, very different kind of place. What about the flip side of the coin here, since we've been talking about what people can do to acquire more power,

but are there things people do or characteristics they have that actually sabotages whatever power they do have. You know, I'm thinking of like, you know, the office clown who's never serious. He's always cracking jokes or somebody who's really negative. Things like that that could actually sap someone's power. Well, there are certain things, there are certainly things that you can do that will diminish your power, and I think the most important thing people do to diminish their power is that they don't try. They're risk-averse.

They say, you know, I'm not going to take on this person. I'm not going to take on this situation. I'm going to engage in preemptory surrender. And I think the other thing that people do that winds up giving away their power is they worry too much every minute about what everybody else thinks about them and whether they're going to be liked and beloved by everyone. And, you know, what I oftentimes say is that, you know, likability may bring power, but if you have power, other people will like you for sure. Yeah, there is something very appealing and attractive about a person who exudes that

charisma, that power. That's correct. And there's something very attractive about people who are in a position to dispense resources and who, you know, bridge important social networks and can bring you into contact with people who you want to meet and see. So yes, and so over time you will be attracted to those people and will come to like them. So you need to meet and see. So yes, and so over time, you will be attracted to those people and will come to like them. So you need to become one of those people yourself. And it seems that the more powerful you are, the more powerful you get.

Of course. Most organizational processes are self-reinforcing, and this is certainly one of them. I mean, to the extent that you're seen as a powerful individual, better people want to work with you. If better people want to work with you, you're going to have more power because you're surrounded by more talent. And that's just one example of that dynamic. I think about that power as being the result of something or the byproduct of something, of the position you hold or the thing you do or the last thing you did. But you're really looking at power differently as something very specifically to go after,

and you're really, you know, facing this right in the headlights. Yes, I think that's what we need to do. I mean, I think, you know, in 1979, Roosevelt Moss Cantor, who teaches at Harvard Business School, wrote a famous article in which he said, power is the organization's last dirty secret. And I think the best way for people to become more powerful is to understand the organizational games, to understand the rules of those games, and to be willing to get in the game. Well, great. Good advice. I appreciate it. Jeffrey Pfeffer has been my guest. Jeffrey is a professor of organizational behavior

at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and he's author of the book Power, Why Some People Have It and Others Don't. There is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial.

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Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Sometimes you have to change the way you think. Rational, logical thinking is good for some things, but not so good for other things. Elastic thinking is a way to think that can help you come up with new ideas or different ways to solve a problem. What is it and how do you do elastic thinking?

Well, here to discuss that is Leonard Mlodno. Leonard's a pretty interesting guy. He's written several successful books, one of them called The Grand Design. He co-wrote with Stephen Hawking. He was also a television writer and wrote for MacGyver and Star Trek The Next Generation. His latest work is a book called Elastic Thinking, Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change. Hi, Leonard. Welcome. Thanks, Mike. Good to be back. Yeah, you were on the radio show a couple of times, and it's great to have you on the podcast. So because our world is changing so much, you argue that we need elastic thinking to keep up with the change

and to think differently about the world and how it works. So let's first talk about change, because it does seem, it does seem to me anyway, that some people embrace change better than others, and others of us like the familiar and actually resist change. Well, first of all, I think that the idea that people don't like change is a bit misguided. I think quite often we mistake people not liking negative change for not liking change. I was reading the literature, the academic literature, about how people react to change, and I noticed that the business literature talked about change aversion,

but the psychology literature talked about neophilia, which is an attraction to stuff that's new and exploratory. And what I discovered was that the business literature treats change as negative because the change in business often is negative. People don't mind change, but they don't want to change where change means they lose their job or they have more work for the same money. But if you called someone and said, hey, I want you to do less work for the same money, they'd love that change. So it depends on what the change means. Yeah, I suppose so. But I guess when people see something new, it's like, oh, now I've got to learn this thing.

I just learned the other thing. That could be because in that case, the negative consequence of the change is that it takes some effort that they wouldn't have otherwise expended. So if you look at how people resist change, it's often usually because there's something negative involved. Human beings actually have a gene that promotes their love of change, and it's related to the dopamine in your brain. And as a species, it's one of the things that really helped us survive because we're not the best physical specimens to survive in the wild, but we're clever and we explore and we find new food and water sources

so when times get tough, we know what to do. But in today's world, the same ability is also necessary because our times are changing so rapidly that it's really no longer satisfactory to approach our lives in the way we've always done and we have to adapt. And that's what elastic thinking is about. It's how you adapt. So give me an example of elastic thinking in motion here. In business, for instance, taxi business, logical analytical thinking can help you make the taxi business really efficient.

Elastic thinking gives us Uber. Logical rational thinking helped Encyclopedia Britannica become the best written encyclopedia done by experts that was possible. Classic thinking gave us Wikipedia. It's a whole new approach. In Wikipedia, you have several new ideas that break the mold. One is it doesn't have to be written by experts. It's just written by anybody who wants to, and the crowdsourcing will take care of it.

Another is that you can make a profit off it without selling it. You offer it for free, and you ask for donations, or in other applications you put up ads. All these different ways of thinking, these new paradigms, were something that the people at Encyclopedia Britannica couldn't get their arms around, and so they lost out to Wikipedia, which saw the new way of doing things. But different and new doesn't always mean better. And for every Uber and every Wikipedia,

there are probably a million other ideas that failed that were new and different, but they just didn't work. Exactly. So one of the tenets of elastic thinking is that you have to embrace failure. You have to expect failure. You're never going to get somewhere with a new idea if you're afraid to fail. Failure is part of changing the way we think. Also being wrong is an important part of elastic thinking. You have to accept the fact that you could be wrong about something. That's the only way you'll let go of your old ideas. Uncertainty is an important part of it. In elastic thinking, it's not guaranteed to get you what you're looking for, but it is guaranteed to have you look at things in a different way so that

you can recognize when you need to adapt and let go of old ideas when you have to do that. So how do you do this? How do you think differently? How do you get up in the morning and do something different than you used to and now you're doing elastic thinking? They want some examples. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for instance, food, okay? Go out, go try something new. Go try to a restaurant you wouldn't normally go to or if you go to a restaurant, order a dish you wouldn't normally eat. Just exposing yourself to new ideas and new ways of thinking, research shows, will help broaden your thinking. Same thing with art. You can go to art exhibits that you wouldn't normally see. Another way is to talk

to strangers. We all have a certain world that we live in, a realm of people that we normally associate with. Well, it's good to break out of that. Go talk to a stranger that's very different from the people you normally talk to. Try to see how somebody who believes differently than you but is still rational can hold that idea. The point of all these exercises is to broaden the way you think and get you to be more comfortable with accepting different approaches. I think people have heard some of this before in the sense of, you know, the creativity guys say,

you know, take a different route to work, eat something different at a restaurant, and it'll broaden your... But so what? I mean, what's the payoff? It's hard to draw a line from me taking a different route to work and me coming up with Uber. I mean, people don't see the line of, why bother? Well, I mean, you'd rather be the one who came up with Uber than the one who got rolled over in the taxi business. So the idea is to work on yourself so that you really, if you're really committed to changing the way you're thinking or to broadening your thinking, you can do that. No one activity will do that for you. You don't just say, oh, I'm going to take a different route to work and magic's going to happen.

But if you work on changing the way you think and the way you experience life and you're committed to it, then you really can change the kinds of ideas you have. But don't you think that a lot of this is just the people that, you know, you can't, I mean, you wrote a book with Stephen Hawking. You can't be Stephen Hawking and think like he did because you ordered things, even if you did a million of the things you're talking about, that there's something about the DNA of some people, the Elon Mus something about the DNA of some people, the Elon Musks or the whoever in the world, who just have that innovative ability that all the different routes to work are not going to make a hill of beans.

Well, there are individual differences in people, but I contest the idea that we can't change, and we can't change the way we think. You might not be Stephen Hawking, but you can move in that direction. He was an extremely elastic thinker. He was someone who didn't accept the way other people believed that physics should run. When he started working on black holes, they told him it was a dead-end field and that no one was interested in black holes. And he said, well, I'm interested in black holes and through

his work other people became interested in it that's the kind of attitude that you have to foster if you want to get ahead why don't we just do this just cuz why don't humans just do or maybe we do do it to some extent maybe we just need to do more of it I what do you think? Humans as a species are very elastic thinkers. We love variety. We love exploration. If you look at other animals, not so. Cats or a squirrel doesn't get bored putting his acorns somewhere. If a person had a job, let's say, peeling potatoes all day, you'd be totally bored. So we all need a certain amount of variety in life. But amongst people, there are huge individual differences. There are the extremely wild

thinkers and the more conventional thinkers. So there's a spectrum. But by the way, I think I'm fear that I might be sounding like I'm negative about rational logical thinking. I don't mean that at all. That's a very important kind of thinking, too. It's just that humans need both kinds of thinking, and the elastic in our changing world is becoming ever more important. But certainly a person like Stephen Hawking, to complement his great elastic abilities, had to have very strong reasoning abilities in order to carry out his theories. But what happens when rational thinking and elastic thinking collide? Well, they don't really collide.

Elastic thinking, using elastic thinking, you can generate ideas, and some of them will be conventional, some will be unconventional. From the unconventional ideas, some will be good ideas, and some will be crazy ideas. And that's where your rational logical thinking comes in. It helps you sort through the ideas to figure out what's useful. So you need that. If you don't have rational logical thinking, then you can end up doing crazy things. You can lose touch with reality.

But if you don't have elastic thinking, you're never going to get ideas. But the pragmatic in me is thinking, well, if I need to come up with a new idea or I need to figure out this computer problem, I'm much better served by sitting down and figuring it out than by taking a new route to work or going and ordering something different at a restaurant. Working on the problem solves the problem, not that other stuff. Of course, I'm not saying that when you have a problem to solve, you should start going to art museums. I'm saying as a lifestyle, you should open yourself up. You know, this country, for instance, many people are resistant to immigrants. To me,

talk to immigrants, talk to people with different ideas. That's how you become a person with different ideas. One of the things that I've always wondered about, and you'd be a good person to ask this, is, you know, this talk about, and you've said it yourself, your lifestyle of opening yourself up, you know, going to art galleries. And it all sounds great, and it sounds like it shouldn't, it couldn't do any harm, but how do we know it really does any good? How does my going and looking at pictures in an art gallery really do anything other than my going to an art gallery and looking at pictures? Researchers have done experiments in laboratories where they essentially do that.

They expose people to other strange ideas, and then they test their problem-solving and their creative abilities, and they find that it has an effect. What's the effect? What's the benefit? What's the payoff? The payoff is being able to be a more creative problem-solver. For example, I'll give you a riddle. Marjorie and Judy had the same mother and father, and they were born on the same month, same day, the same week, but they're not twins. What's going on? So this is the kind of challenge that they give sometimes in the laboratory and they measure how, what fraction of people can solve the problem, how long it takes. The answer here is that they're not twins because they're triplets.

Now, what kept, what was analyzed, what kept you from seeing that right away. When I say Margie and Judy, you picture two women or two girls in your head, and that picture is an implicit assumption that you're making that stops you from solving the problem. Once you learn to identify such assumptions, the logical, rational reasoning you need to solve the problem is trivial. Once you say, oh, I'm assuming that there's two and there might be more, then it's an easy jump to say they're triplets or they're quadruplets. But learning to see what the hidden assumptions are, that's the real talent that you have to develop. That's good. That's a good example, because you're right. I assume that there were two of them, and most people, I think, do. They do, and that's what the researchers do,

is they have all sorts of problems like that. And then they study how people solve them and how you can encourage or nurture that ability. It's pretty dramatic. And there was one type of problem of that sort that I won't go into what the type of problem was, but there was a Buddhist monk who approached it. And

they gave him problem after problem and he couldn't get any of them and he was about the worst performer this researcher had ever seen. And so the researcher was embarrassed to continue because this was a very highly respected person.

He interrupted the experiment and said, okay, I think we can end here. Thank you so much for coming in. And then the monk said, just a minute, I'd like to keep going. Just give me a minute. So he gathered himself together and then they continued the experiment. And now he got them all one after another. Now he was at the top end of the spectrum. And so after the researcher talked to him, he not only had never seen, rarely seen anyone so poor at it, so bad at it, and then so good at it, he had never seen someone change like that.

And he said, what happened? And then the fellow said, well, I started out by using logic to solve the problems. And obviously that didn't work because these problems were designed to be resistant to that. Then when he realized that that wasn't working, he changed his mindset and he relaxed himself

and he let the ideas just come to him in a way that I describe in the book as an elastic thinking way. He had sudden insights that would give him the solutions to the problems. Lastly, I'd like to talk about alcohol. You have a chapter in your book about alcohol, and I've had the experience of, you know, having a glass of wine or two and coming up with

an idea that I don't think I would have ever come up with otherwise, and there may be something to that, huh? Well, I mentioned those filters in our brain that keep some of our ideas from coming to consciousness. Alcohol suppresses those cerebral structures that do the filtering. Other drugs do as well. Marijuana does it too. By taking these drugs, you can increase the diversity of ideas that come to mind. The downside is that all these drugs have other effects. They can be unhealthy, they can turn off your executive function so that you're totally unguided in your thinking. So, you know, one has to examine all the different effects of them. But it does show that those filters are there because when you have a glass of wine, then

the filters tend to disappear and your thinking changes. This is really interesting. Leonard Maladno has been my guest. His book is Elastic Thinking, Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Leonard. Well, thanks, Mike, and thanks for having me. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn

between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine. First while monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Rudolf Buntwine. Wherever podcasts are available.