Soul Boom - Why "Try Harder" Isn't the Answer (w/ Angela Duckworth)

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

SPONSORS!👇 🛒 Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code SOULBOOM 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://cowboycolostrum.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠. 🛒 Blueland (15% OFF your 1st order!) 👉 https://blueland.com/soulboom 🛒 Quince 👉⁠⁠ https://quince.com/soulboom⁠ 🙏 Fetzer 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fetzer.org 🛒 Get 15% off OneSkin with the code SOULBOOM at https://www.oneskin.co/soulboom #oneskinpod Psychologist Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, joins Rainn Wilson to rethink what grit really means: consistent effort, feedback, and goals, supported by the right people and circumstances. They explore why environment shapes behavior, how Alcoholics Anonymous creates a powerful community for change, what learned helplessness can teach us about agency, and whether spiritual intelligence can be developed. MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.com/store⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for our newsletter! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW US! Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Executive Produced by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kartik Chainani⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I just, I don't know what a soul is. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I'm not atheist. I'm Catholic. But I'm just saying that I am a beginner, and I don't really know what these words mean. Angela Duckworth, the grit woman.

When that came out, everyone was just talking about grit. And what would you love to reframe about your grit thesis from 10 years ago? Grit is about, consistency over time. People are like, grid, I get it. It's like... Work hard.

Work hard. Work harder. We're harder still. It's consistency of effort with feedback and goals. But what about someone working at Dunkin' Donuts in Davenport, Iowa? How do they develop the grit? This might feel out of reach to people.

How can you take these lessons for just regular old folk? I think there's a message for that person. Frankly, I think there's a message for society. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast.

A really quick thanks to our sponsors, Cowboy Colostrum, Wince, Blue Land, Fetzer, and OneSkin. Links and promo codes on screen and in the description. Enjoy the show. I wanted to start by saying Angela Duckworth is the grit woman. She's grit, grit, grit, grit. When that came out, everyone was just talking about grit. And I thought I read the book back in the day when it came out. Was it seven years now?

It was 10 years. 10 years. 10 years exact, 10 and a half years. Wow. 10 years if you're going to round the nearest 10. What did you get wrong? What would you love to reframe about your grit thesis from 10 years ago? So grit is about individual effort.

Grit is about consistency over time. I mean, let me first explain what I think is the central message of grit, because I think it's important. I don't know if it comes out in the one syllable, like, onomatopoeic, you know, grit, right? Because I think people are like, grit, I get it. It's like, you know, will. Work hard. Work hard.

Work harder. Yeah. Work harder still. Self will. I don't think that's what grit is, by the way. The key to people who become great, and I will stand behind this, people can. People can disagree. You want to be a great chess player?

You want to be a great tuba player? Like, you want to be a great anything. I would like to be a great tuba player. So please finish that sentence. I think you should choose a different instrument. No, one that's easier to carry. Nobody really likes the tuba. Okay, I'm going to get tuba haters.

Okay, but anyway, I think the path is the same. It's consistency of effort with feedback and goals, right? Like, you fill in the blank of what you want to do. And I think actually includes relationships, right? I want to be a better spout. Whatever it is, right? That's the final common path. And I think what people get wrong about grit is that when you look at people who are truly great, you know, like fill in the blank, like Michael Phelps, whoever you worship, Taylor Swift.

I think they think it's about intensity of effort, like try harder. It's really about trying consistently. So if you ask like any great coach, right, I was talking about this recently, Steve Kerr, he's a great coach. I talked about this with Bob Bowman, a lesser known, but I think just as great coach. That's the swim coach for Michael Phelps. They will agree that it's consistency. So Steve Kerr will say of Steph Curry that he gives you 90%. He always gives you 90%.

And by the way, that's kind of intentional because if you give 100, you're like not, you're sort of white knuckling it. Bob Bowman will say that Michael Phelps swim eight out of 10 at practice. Like, really? Like not even nine out of, he's like maybe occasionally, but it was really eight out of ten. But the difference is that it was eight out of ten, 365 days a year for 20 years, right? So I think the message of grit is whatever your natural talent, if you consistently work and you consistently get feedback and you consistently set a goal to do something like you will become much better than anybody could imagine based on your raw talent, that's the message of grit. Do I stand behind that? Yes.

Is the science good? It's not only my own. I think so. I think it like holds up. I think the incompletion is that individual effort is not all you need to be successful. And we could talk about what you need to be happy and so forth. But I'll just say just in the realm of human excellence in skill. Individual effort is not enough.

The situation you're in matters enormously. In some situations, individual effort doesn't actually make sense because there's no return on that effort. Human beings stop trying consistently when their effort doesn't pay off. So the reason I went and studied Bob Bowman, which I did, I studied Bob Bowman in my recent research, not Michael Phelps. If I wanted to study Grit, I could study Michael Phelps. But I wanted to study Michael Phelps' situation. So I wanted to understand his coach.

And then I wanted to understand his mother. and I wanted to understand the other people who are around him. And so I think if you want to, I mean, not everybody wants to get better at something, but if you do want to get better at something, you should just know the final common path is consistency of effort. But who you're around and what you're around matters more than you think. Let me just speak on behalf of what I think of as like how psychologists understand human behavior. There is no psychologist who has a PhD who doesn't understand that like if Rain takes a sip

from the cup or is late for a meeting or on time for a meeting or angry. There's no psychologists who will say that it's only because of the person. Everybody who gets a PhD understands that it's the person and the situation. There is a book that nobody read. I shouldn't say that. Very few people read this book. I wish they had. I read it at my, like, you know, the dawn of my training as a psychologist.

It's called the person in the situation. Maybe the title wasn't catchy enough. Maybe it was too dense. The person in the situation. Person and the situation. Person and the situation. So you ripped off this book for situated. Pretty much.

Very good. You know, I said, who wrote it and when did it come out? It was Dickness Bit and Lee Ross. It came out decades ago. It came out at the beginning of, come on. It sounds so boring. It's actually so great. Lee Ross is dead.

Do you feel bad about this at all? No. No. Not in the slightest. Because I killed him. Oh, well, maybe then you knew about everything then I'm about to say. So you're on the end. Tell me more.

Okay. So what's the person's situation about? By the way, these are both social psychologists. Social psychologists pretty much studied the effect of the situation on behavior. Personality psychologists study the effect of the individual's characteristics. But social psychologists are like, were you in a crowded room? What was everybody else doing? Like if everybody else says yes, do you say yes?

That sort of thing. So what Lee Ross and Dignisbit did is they basically put together all of the evidence up to, I don't know, I'm going to get it wrong. But I don't know. Maybe it was published in like 1980. I remember that Malcolm Gladwell read it at the beginning of his career. So, I don't know, a while ago, it heavily influenced everything Malcolm Gladwell did later, and he later wrote the foreword. So I can tell you that story, too.

But what does this book say? It says that there is like mountains of research showing that a person will be more altruistic in one situation and less altruistic in another, kind in one, unkind another, extroverted in one, quiet as mouse, and another. And you can run these experiments. by like randomly assigning people to situations and seeing their behavior change. But you can also study it this way. If you ask somebody repeatedly over the course of a week, like, what are you doing?

What are you doing? What are you feeling? What are you thinking? There's remarkable range. Like I'm an extrovert. I think of myself as an extrovert. Okay. But there are situations, including being in my house for some reason with my family, where I'm

really like the most, I'm like the quietest person in my family. You can't see that because I'm not in that situation. So when you look at data that way, right, you're not randomly assigning people, but you're just asking people, what are you doing? And then you do these fancy statistics where you're like, how much of this behavior is that it's rain, not Angela? So individual differences, right? Rain has a different personality than Angela. And how much of it is because of variation in their situations, right?

Like in the kitchen, with this person at a party and a traffic jam, there is more. More variation in human behavior across situations than there are across people. In other words, we have a range, you know, a very extroverted person can still be, in certain circumstances, introverted. A very confident person can be deeply insecure. So this is a fundamental discovery. In fact, the term that Lee Ross, I think it wasn't Dignis bit, but Lee Ross, one of these co-auths, he said it's the fundamental attribution error.

that human beings commit when they attribute... When you say attribution error, speak to me like I'm dumb a little bit. Okay, I'm going to like... What's an attribution error? That's like your impulse, your stereotypical impulse,

you look at someone like, oh, this is a successful academic or whatever you type them. Is that right? Let me explain what an attribution is for psychologists because we all do it. Okay.

So the idea is, and I think this is also deeply true, whenever you're observing something happen, like somebody makes a left turn, or like, you know, you're waiting a line at Starbucks and somebody like takes your drink, right? We automatically attribute that behavior to a cause. So first of all, that's what it means to make an attribution. And we're doing it all the time.

Like, we're always asking why. Like, why did that person turn left? Why did that person not return the change? Right. Like, whatever it is. So we're always making attributions. Like, it happens a lot with texts. Like, why did they not text me back?

Or why did they text me that emoji? Yeah, like, what does this mean? What does it? And it could just be the type the wrong. emoji or they were taking a poop or something. It could be. And the key here is that you just do it. That's human nature. You're always attributing motive or cause. Connecting the dots. Right. And by the way, it's it's for everything. It's for things that are physical too. Like we're always asking basically what's going on. Right. So that's attribution. Okay. Right. We know what error means. Right.

So you're making a mistake. So attribution error. It's called the fundamental attribution error, according to Lee Ross, because it is that we spontaneously attribute behavior. Why do he turn left? Why did he not answer my phone call to the person? And we systematically ignore their situation. So, oh, why is this person not showing up? You know, they're not conscientious. They're not motivated.

It could be. It also could be whatever. We are neglecting our situation systematically. I mean, that book may be much more important than this book because it says we're making a mistake 24 hours a day. We're constantly thinking about, you know, so many people write about you, Rain. It's like, oh, what does Rain really like? And then they have adjectives, right? And we do this for other people we know who aren't famous.

It's like, what is this person like? And we'll say things like, oh, really nice. And we're not wrong to say those things. But half of human behavior, if not more, is because of where we are and who is. who were with. So we should just recognize that the person is important, the situation is important, but we tend to somehow not think about the situation when we think, why'd that person do this? We just think about who that person is. That's the fundamental attribution error. Ball is here, folks. Everyone around you suddenly coughing like they've been hired to spread

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That is a very good way to support our show. Thank you so much. I'm neuroscientist and actress Myambialli. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. On our podcast, Mayambiolix Breakdown, we explore the biggest questions about consciousness, quantum physics, healing, and what it means to be human. Featuring conversations with Neil DeGrasse Tyson,

Michiukaku, and other leading scientists and experts, our podcast is where science and spirituality meet. Listen to new episodes of Myambiolics Breakdown every week. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Watch full video episodes of Myambiolics breakdown at YouTube.com slash Myambiolic. A couple things that spring to mind.

One is I'm writing a book right now on the meaning of life. Is it called The Meaning of Life? Something like that. Something close to that. I'm not going to give away the title right now. But I was talking to BJ Novak, who was talking about the great creator of the office, Greg Daniels, who said to the writers that they 95% of the time want the characters to be in line with what you think the characters would do. But five percent of the time. to have the characters behave in a way that's completely unpredictable that you did not see coming.

And I think that's one of the things that made the office really special is all of a sudden you would see a sensitivity from Dwight that you had just never seen in episodes or you'd see an anger from Jim that he had never shown before or Michael Scott being empathetic in a way that that you hadn't experienced and that there were always these little curveballs being thrown. And you might think of this person as like, oh, look, he's a totally successful, confident person. And then there's other situations and when the person breaks down, right? Right. But then also we're always ascribing people's decisions to what our view of them is and we're not taking into account the situation that they're in.

So both of these things are related in kind of. I think there are like sort of facets of the same phenomenon, right? People are much more complicated than we think. That's what it is. I really like this French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, a French nobleman. And so he was able to, like, retire to his castle and just think. And he would write in his journal. And in French, essay, essay means to try.

So he made the noun form of that. Actually, it's old French. But anyway, essay, that's where the word essay comes from. Essay means to try. It means to, like, write things down and to try to, like, you know, work out your thoughts, right? And they were literally invented by this guy. Like, they didn't exist before, and he certainly coined the term. So Michel de Montaigne, like, spent his whole life, like, you know, writing essays, laundering, right, and observing his own behavior. He was a great

psychologist. And he observed of his own behavior, his inconstancy, as he put it, in French, right? And, like, he noted, he was like, wow, I have a really terrible temper with this, you know, like, or I just observed it yesterday, like, had a terrible temper. It was like horses leaving a barn, but he's like, I'm generally really mild-mannered, like, oh, that's so interesting. I think this is all getting to. People are complicated, and our behavior isn't, if there's not just one Rain Wilson, like, and there's certainly not just one Angela Duckworth. And I don't want it to be like, oh, it's just totally unpredictable.

It's like there's a like a random number generator that's like, oh, and then I don't know how you did the 5% on the office. So you can tell me, I'm curious. Well, that was more in the writer's room, but yeah. And then did they, by the way, was it? like the same kind of 5% so it was like or is it just like kind of random just a curb ball just a curveball just to keep you like occasionally can you tell me why like I need to like ask why like I I get that it creates interest because it doesn't make them more humanizes the characters because it does exactly what you're talking about like you quote in your book Walt Whitman like do I contradict

myself I contain multitudes and so Pam contains multitudes and Dwight contains multitudes and you want to make sure you do that in writing comedy. Otherwise, it can be like two dimensional. Very two dimensional characters. The nerdy guy is always nerdy and is always going to say the nerdy things. And you see that on like old sitcoms all the time. Which is probably why I hate them. I think. I hate is a strong word, but yeah, yeah. But, you know, I like to think that the office rises above that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Like a three dimensionality and like, right. So like, and, and so yeah, yeah, I think that gets it right. Right. I don't know if it's five percent though. I just think, you know, if you really took it seriously, it might be like more than that. And, and it's like,

look, you know, we're in L.A. and it's hot, right? And L.A. has obviously different weather than Boston or, like, I don't know, Miami, right? So it's not wrong to say that, like, what's the weather in Miami like? And somebody can tell you, like, it's generally like this. So I can tell you, I am generally extroverted. I'm generally kind of intellectual or whatever. You should just know that there's a range around that average, right? Because, you know, sometimes it does rain in a dry place and sometimes it's cloudy in a sunny place. So that's the fundamental insight to human behavior, that the situation shapes your behavior. And I think the reason why this exists in a way not only about us attributing like, why did rain do that, but even to ourselves, is that we have a sense of

being the captain of our ship and the master of our soul. It's like, why did I do it? do that. We think inward. Our interior sort of like, well, it's because I wanted this or I'm insecure about that. But sometimes it's just like, why did you eat that? Because it was there, right? Like, one of the reasons why people eat is like, it's there and then everybody else starts eating. And I will tell you, it's a super strong force, the situation. And it's kind of like gravity. It's really powerful, but also invisible. So this book is about what you can do to change your situation. But the fundamental insight is that you are less a captain of your ship.

Here's how Michel de Montaigne put it. Like, we think we go, but we are carried, like a cork on the current. And I think he could recognize that because he did enough reflection and enough observation to realize that his behavior went up and down, his temper went up and down, his confidence went up and down, his intellectual curiosity went up and down, not just because of intentions and what he decided to do, but just because of where he was and who he was with. Are you talking a little bit about peer pressure? pressure? I am. I think that's a big part of the situation. You know, you might wonder,

like, why do the social psychologists, like, why did they pick that brand, right? Because they could have called themselves the situational psychologist, right? But the reason I think is that much of human behavior is shaped by our social situation, right? Like, the people were with. It's also, by the way, shaped by, like, you know, physical objects. But peer pressure is, like, one example of this. I mean, I'll give you an example from my own life of peer pressure. I know it's kind of like you roll your eyes when anybody like brings up the pandemic. I kind of do. I'm like, oh, COVID-19, right? Like, I don't only want to think about it. But I remember the time during the pandemic that like we were first able to fly again. And my husband, Jason, had the idea that we would book a flight

and get out of Philadelphia where we'd been quarantining and we go to Miami. And we were really careful in Philadelphia about masking. Like I had literally written opeds in New York Times about the importance of masking. I was on behavioral science teams where we were trying to get the whole country to mask. I mean, this is like what I thought I would do when I got to Miami because that's who I was. Those were my intentions and I'm the captain of my ship and the master of my soul. We land in Miami and it's Miami. So like nobody's masking. It was like as if there were no pandemic. So at first we were like outraged and, you know, we were like derisive and we're like, oh my God, like literally in an elevator and like, you know what happened by day two? We weren't masking either. That's pure pressure. That's the power of the situation. And when I got back on the plane, I masked again. And when I got back to Philadelphia, I did. And it's one example. But I think we're not, I don't think we're aware of it. I think we mostly have the subjective experience of deciding. Well, this is interesting. Jonathan Haidt calls it the rider and the elephant, you know, because

there's the rider and the horse, but really he's saying it's an elephant. Like, we think we're the rider and we're fully in control, but this elephant could just go, he's going to go where he's going to go based on instinct and impulse and reactivity and old traumas and, you know, and fears and whatnot. And we're kind of hanging on to your life. But you have the experience of being the writer. We think that we're the writer and the one in control. Yeah. So it takes a a lot of humility to say, you know what, I am going to be shaped by the situation. I have an example for you. Okay, go.

I got an argument with my wife the other day. And I, long story short, I wanted to show my friend our RV and we had this dogs were in it. And I opened the door and the dogs were barking and it really startled her. And then I closed the door and he left and then I went in the RV and then she like yelled. She was like, you know, what are you doing? We said we weren't going to do with the, because we had these crazy dogs. She was mad. And she was mad more from being startled than actual like I did anything necessarily wrong.

Yeah, right. But you think that was the elephant maybe. Oh, wait. Yeah. That's part one. But part two is I got really mad back because I felt like I didn't do, I didn't do something really bad. Like I didn't like not show up or or you know. You didn't like grievously.

Yeah. And it wasn't intentional. Yeah. And I just opened the door briefly. And so I got really angry because I felt like when I was a kid, I had a stepmom who would often get very, very angry at me for very small things. Like out of the blue. Like you out of the blue, like you left the sponge in the sink and I told you to leave the sponge above the sink and just like fly into a rage. Flying to a rage about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I can. I don't understand when people fly into rage is when I really like fucked up or dropped the ball. And it's like I get it. You lose your temper. People get mad. Yeah.

But then when they get really mad, it gets super triggering for me. Yeah. Almost like little rain inside is like. So she didn't do anything. You are madder than she was then? Then I got madder than she was. Yeah. Which exacerbates her getting mad.

You know how that stuff goes. Wait, I need to know what happened at the end. We made up. Okay. We've been married for 30 years. We have learned how to apologize and we've learned how to shape that. and to move on and build trust, et cetera. And it was also really interesting to have this conversation about, like, realizing, like,

I got, you got so mad because you were, like, startled in a way that it was fight, flight. Okay. All right. So, Rain is angry. And what's your wife's name? Holly or Holiday. Oh, is her Relenium Holiday?

Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Holiday and Rain experience anger, right? I'm going to explain to you where anger comes. comes from. And I'm going to trace it all the way back to the situation. And if you can imagine three boxes in a PowerPoint slide or on a piece of paper, it's a model that I think actually you can use as a blueprint for understanding anger, jealousy, pride, turning left at the green light,

like literally anything, right? So here's how it goes. Box one is a situation. Box two is the thoughts that you have in that situation. And box three is then your behavior or your response. Okay. So anger is box three. It's like rain reacted with anger. You had an elevated heart rate. You probably got warm. You usually have kind of aggressive thoughts. You experience a flush, right, of anger. We've all experienced anger. Sounds like Holiday did too, right? That's box three. A lot of therapy is trying to understand what creates that emotion. A lot of therapy is like rain. Tell me about what you were thinking, right? And then maybe in the heat of the moment you can't. But you're like, you know, you know, you know, You know what? I think you thought that your rights had been violated. I think that's actually the core thought that makes people mad. Like, you're wronged, right? And it's different from like, there are lots of other negative emotions like sadness or whatever, anxiety or whatever. Anger is like you think that you were wronged, that your rights were unfairly violated. There's like a sense of injustice. And there's a sense of injustice because there's a thought about injustice. So, you know, did you? Do you have a closed caption thing where it like, you know, was all typed out? I don't know. But I bet you had a thought that you were wrong. Am I right about the fact that you felt you were unjustly, like you felt you were on the receiving end of something that wasn't just?

Yes. I thought I was getting unfairly dumped on with anger for a very slight violation. Right. And by the way, accidental, non-intentional thing. Right. Right. Like, how would you know? Right.

I mean, she would think some response. She would explain it differently. She would say, we agreed to not bring the dogs out, which to her also meant to interact with the dogs. And by opening the door to the RV, I was violating an agreement that we had had. But I is, again, it's a misunderstanding. In my mind, it was like, we're not going to put the dogs on the leashes and come out and meet everybody and walk them around.

Like, didn't you think you hadn't done anything wrong? Yeah. And you were like, what the, well, anyway, try not to curse. All right. Okay. So then that's box two to box three. Like your thoughts lead to your responses. And when I say that like that's a lot of therapy, it really is like the last 50 years of therapy research have been like, let's think about why you're depressed. Like what thoughts lead you to feel like you're worthless? It's like so so thoughts do lead to behavior and emotion. But what I want to say is that there's another box. There's box one. Box one is a situation. What in that situation triggers. that thought, that in turn triggered that response. And so if you trace things back, it's like, oh, well, you know, and then, yeah, maybe not in the heat of the moment. You're like, oh, right, it was a misunderstanding. Like, we had had this conversation. You were surprised. Like, that made you, like, in an oral state. Like, the point of, I think, situational, let's call it awareness,

which is in a way the opposite of the fundamental attribution error, is just to trace behavior all the way back, not just to the thoughts, but to the situation. And that requires you to look at the situation and not ignore it. And a lot of, of, a lot of us just ignore the situation and we, we don't think. Here's my question about situated and my question about grit. Yeah. How does it apply to regular folks? How does it apply to someone who's?

How does it apply to someone who's working at a Dunkin' Donuts in Davenport, Iowa? And how do they, you went to hard. Harvard. You went to UPenn. Yep. And Oxford, if you want to throw in fancy. And Oxford. Oxford. I went to NYU acting school, one of the top acting schools where there was a situation of institutional success. They knew how to train actors. They'd been doing it for 50 years. And you learned a lot. I learned a ton. They had a mission. Acting was not just about a series of skills of how to kind of listen better and how to use your text better. But it was

the whole actor. And it was movement and circus and clown and and passion and, you know, delving into your childhood shit. And, but what about someone working in Dunkin' Donuts in Davenport, Iowa who, how do they develop the grit necessary for the success and whatever field they want to enter? How do they enter? And how do they enter a good situation? How do they enter a good situation? And not just someone at a Dunkin' Donuts in Davenport, but in, the inner city and someone who has been robbed of the education that they deserve that the richest country and the history of the world should be giving them and is not. How do these people, because this might feel out of reach to people.

Like, well, grit is determination and discipline and repeating things regularly. And I'm not getting the feedback. I'm not getting the support for my grit. Yeah. I'm not, I don't have accountability for my grit. I don't have support of my community around these things that I'm going to do on a regular basis. To me, it can feel a little rarefied. Yeah. This is for the privilege. Are these books for the elite? Or how how can you take these lessons for just regular old folk? Right, right. Like, yeah, maybe this will sell at Andover, right? But like, what about everyone else? Right. I don't mean to demean your book, but I do. And you have some stuff in there. I just want to press a little bit on how do these big ideas relate to someone at a community college who's making 16, 50 an hour. Right. And maybe like working three jobs, right? Yeah. So I think you're asking about what if what about people who are frankly in losing situations, right? I mean, you could call them that, right? Like they're not. That's a standard American situation. I don't know that it's necessarily a losing situation. Well, I guess it's it's not a situation where there's a lot of return on individual effort, for example. right? Like you're asking a good question. I just want to say, and you could say, look, by the way, this is the mode, right? This is like what most people experience, right? I'm not talking about like the most abject, right? I think it's a fair question. So let's talk about it seriously, right? I don't want to give you a glib answer. I want to acknowledge that there's less freedom for most people to change our situation than I have. And I think you would admit also that you, you have, right? Like, if I didn't want to live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

honestly, I could probably live anywhere in the world, right? Practically, right? How many people can say that, right? And, you know, the guy who's working Duncan Donuts in Davenport, like, can't. How many people... Like, you have an example in here of Taylor Swift moving from rural Pennsylvania to Nashville. And being in an environment that helped her build this career. But she had a family and her dad was like in construction or something. They had some money. They sacrificed and they, uh, yeah, Christmas tree farms and they were able to move to Nashville. And by the way, a functional family, like hyper functional.

Yeah, and a loving family and they're still close. Yeah. But what if you don't have those parents? You know, maybe they're a singer, but they can't move to Nashville. They don't have the $15,000 it would take to kind of relocate to Nashville. Yeah. Okay. So I think it's important just to like dwell, maybe take a moment of silence and just completely

admit that that's true, right? Like actually, I would say that very few, let's see, she was 14 when they moved. Very few 14-year-olds have the kind of family who was supportive enough to do that. And, you know, I brought up Michael Phelps. So I'll just say Michael Phelps had like an amazing mother. I mean, what Debbie Phelps did for Michael, like this little kid with ADHD who was getting all the notes home for being a bad student and a bad boy. Like, so not everybody has a Debbie Phelps in their life. Like, not everybody has a coach Bob Bowman.

Not everybody has Taylor's parents. So like I'll just want to dwell in silence and fully acknowledge that you're right. So obviously situational agency, if you want to accept my term, is not meted out equally. So what is what is the message for that person? I think there's a message for that person. Frankly, I think there's a message for society. But let's just take that person because like if you're that person in Davenport working in Dunkin' Donuts, you might be more urgently concerned with what you can do.

I mean, I might turn the tables on you and say like what would you say to somebody who tells you that they're a struggling actor, but they can't afford NYU. And by the way, they might not get in. And they are stuck in a minimum wage job. And they do have a dream. And they can't move to Hollywood. And they don't actually know anybody in the business. And by the way, they come from a dysfunctional family where everybody's against them. Like, what would your advice be to that person? This episode is brought to you by Fetzer. You know, there's this tendency in modern life to believe that every problem has a material solution. More technology, more productivity, more money, more apps reminding you to breathe while you ignore the fact that your soul feels like a raisin.

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Again, try OneSkin for 15% of it. off at OnSkin.co slash Soul Boom. Use promo code Soul Boom. You've probably gotten emails like this. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I would say that you start by getting the best training in whatever field it is you want to do that's local to you. That's possible to you. So the great- Might not be NYU. One of the great things about America is the community college system. And there are some shitty community college. And there are some great community colleges that have professors that are just as good as anyone at NYU or, or, or, you know, or Harvard. That is true. That is absolutely true. So I would say you could further your education

in that way. You can also find there's, you know, acting classes, improv classes, whatever, that are kind of more local and you pay, you know, $280 to do them. And you meet some other people who are trying to do it. Right. So you start that journey. And the great thing about the contemporary world, the modern world, is that with the advent of YouTube and social media, everyone is a content producer. So figure out how to make some content on your own, even if it's reviewing. Oh, I thought you were going to say consume it, but you're saying like create it. Yeah, create it.

Like start your own YouTube. You can watch a YouTube video on how to start your own YouTube channel and you can start storytelling or finding other people to, but also, and then part three would be finding other people. And somehow on meetup.org. Like what do you mean other people? Yeah. It's a building community of like-minded people who kind of be wanting to be doing the same thing. Even if you're in Davenport, Iowa.

Do you think that's very important? I was recently interviewed by a journalist who said it wasn't important for him. He said, like, he became a writer. I was like, do you not have a peer group? You don't have any kind of community. Like, you don't know other writers? He's like, not one. I was like, do you get editorial feedback?

He's like, I always reject it. He's, by the way, very successful. He wanted to, like, contradict this idea that, like, generally were better with a group. I don't. I totally just. I was just like, I don't understand you, but we should have a longer recovery. Something's right wrong with that guy. But you would make that recommendation.

Tell him to call me. Did that happen to you? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was very lucky again. Like, you're not privileged. Like, you're not from a privileged background.

No, my dad worked in a sewer construction. We were very poor. Right. And then your mom got mad at you out of the world. I had food. I got clothes from Salvation Army. I mean, we were, we were poor. So you didn't have a lot of situational agency.

But we always prized intelligence, good grades. doing well in school intellectual ability. So I just got good grades and I always knew that going to a better call. I mean, I was going to go to like University of Washington, which is a good state school. Yeah. You know, but then I was able to go to University of Washington and then I was able to get to NYU. You know what I mean? So then you, I saw that there was a path forward in that way, even though my parents didn't have college degrees.

Okay. So I would give the same advice and I'm, I'm pressed you on it because like we took a moment of silence to acknowledge that if you're working at Dunkin' Donuts in Davernport, Davenport, what was the state? Iowa. Iowa. Actually, Iowa was a great economic growth state. Did you know that? Didn't know that.

The South, not doing so, but the Iowa's great. So, but if you're in this kind of like dead end like thing, you're like, so we took a moment of silence to acknowledge that. And I think if you would then take the next beat. Again, I want to push back on dead end because this is standard American is working low wage jobs or multiple low wage jobs. Well, the fact that it's not, it's not loser and it's not dead end. Well, I didn't want to say they're losers. I'm just saying, like, in some ways, I would argue that is a losing situation. Many people are in a losing situation, right?

I don't, I'm not saying they're losers. Well, then I would say that a majority of Americans in some way, shape, or form are really just what I would call up against it. Yes. Because how are you going to go? The headwinds. Yeah. How are you going to go the best you can do is become manager at the Dunkin Donuts to getting 2450 an hour.

But that's not really going to cut it if you want to buy a house, especially these days. Yeah. Even in Davenport. You should see the real estate prices. For example. Okay. So let's have a society. Did you just throw that?

Yeah. Oh, God. That was a dramatic effect. Yeah. It was very dramatic. Yeah. Okay. So I want to have the societal conversation.

Let's talk about like that person. I mean, I don't have to call it like a cul-de-sac, a dead end losing. All I want to say is like there are headwinds. I think the advice that you gave, I would just say that you said like find a tailwind. Like maybe there are 10 headwinds, but like find one tail. Like change your situation, right? Like just do what you can, right? Like, yeah, like, is there anybody in Davenport who also wants to be an actor? Find that person, right? So that's my prescription, too. And I don't want it to sound like, oh, I skipped over that moment of silence just to acknowledge that I call it whatever you want. I think some people are in terrible situations. And I want to just acknowledge that if they're going to complain about it, that like we should listen to them. But almost everyone. I mean, look, I wrote about Victor Frankel in the book, and you could argue. that when he was in Auschwitz, he didn't have any situational agency, right? Because if you're at a Jew in a concentration camp during World War II,

you can't be like, well, Victor, like, you know, what can you do? Because he couldn't change the physical circumstances. He couldn't change any of his circumstances. But most of us are not in that dire of a situation. And even Viktor Frankl said, because everyone quotes Victor Frankel. It's like, oh, you should control how you respond to the situation because, of course, you cannot change. That's not, that's a misquote of Victor Frankel.

Victor Frankel said, if you can change the situation, that's the very first thing you should do. Otherwise, it's masochistic. So if you're in a terrible situation with 10 headwinds, I mean, just look for that little puff of air that could go your way. And I agree with you and I disagree with the journalist. I think one of the things that anybody can do and you don't have to be privileged or famous or educated or rich is to find another person who's just trying to do the same thing. You know, somebody else who's like really. struggle with their weight. And they also want to lose weight. They're struggling with alcohol. They also want to beat alcohol. Like, they want to be an actor. Like, they want to get into graduate school. Like, that you don't need any credential to find because they're also looking for you or they should be, I think. And you talk about this community in terms of AA. You have a beautiful chapter. Oh, my God. I could have written the whole book on AA. What do you think about A.A.? You should. Well, I'm a card carrying member. Do you still like- I don't want to violate any of the traditions. But I've talked about, you know, being in 12-step recovery.

and I think you talk about the social elements, the peer group and the support and the accountability that a group gives you in 12-step recovery. I think there's some other elements to 12-step recovery that also make it. Tell me. Well, I think that talking about the writer and the elephant, right, we are, we tend to operate off of kind of a limbic reactivity. That is, you know, the amygdala fires up and we want to, we want to, we. We have these impulses, right?

And everything in the 12th step programs is designed to move your brain from your kind of midbrain, animal brain to your prefrontal cortex. Yeah. So more to the rider. So more meditation, more prayer, more reading, journaling, writing out the steps, speaking with people, calling your sponsor, having a trigger of some kind of. your life. Oh, I'm going to a family reunion. Calling someone, sharing about it, processing it, doing it, keeping tabs of your character defects. All of this stuff really, I mean, Bill W didn't know it. But when it was being created, what it's all doing is moving impulses from that midbrain to your forebrain. So, so, so and that combined with the social element, which also does

the same thing. Right. That you think that's the magic of AA. I think, well, I think it's all, it's all like, it's hard to like, you know, take it apart and be like, you know, it's just. this. And it doesn't work for everyone, too. It doesn't work for everyone. By the way, who does it not work for, do you think? Do you have any speculation? Because it doesn't work for every. It's the single most effective and enduring treatment for alcoholism, according to research, you know, by professors at Harvard Medical School and other places. Well, Bill W. talks about that. But it doesn't work for everyone. Why, why, why does it, for whom does it not work? He says that it's the founder of A.

The founder of A.A. That it doesn't work for people that, that just don't fully surround. Fully go into it. And I think... What do you think, to... Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think I've seen over the years that all the 12-step programs, gambling, food, you name it, you have to hit some kind of bottom that is going to...

Like, make you realize that, like... A real change. You want to talk about, like, grit and dailiness? Like, when you're on your knees and your life has fallen apart and tears are streaming down your face, that is when you're like, I'll do anything. And that's a great part of the 12-step programs too is because you've got a sponsor and you're going to take direction

and you call it, like, I'll do anything. Okay, today I want you to journal X, Y, Z. And you're like, okay. Right, and you just do it. You just do it and it helps you build that grit, that dayliness, right? Right, that consistency.

So again, this is a, that's a thing. 12-step is a container that has all of these different ways to help kind of, I believe it's divinely inspired. I believe, you know, Bill W had this spirit You think that first revelation really was like a spiritual revelation like God? Absolutely.

There's no question. Yeah. Like in the hospital? I think that I think that 12 steps is a divine revelation to Bill W. Oh, wow. In some way, shape, or form, he's a minor prophet that has transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. True.

That all of these tools that he kind of assembled and had these kind of, and by the way, he's one of these really like fucked up prophets too. You know, he was having affairs. What? Later in his life. Oh, yeah. Wait, what? He gave the proceeds of the A.

a big book to his mistress. What? Are you sure? He was doing... I just watched a biography of him. He was doing LSD and he was talking about like, yeah, he was sober from alcohol and doing like lots of like psychotropics. Yeah, so he's... I need to fact check you, Ray.

Okay. Seriously? Yeah, yeah. He's a deeply flawed person. It's okay. Bill, I love you. We're all flawed. We're all, we contain multitudes.

Maybe it's appropriate. Maybe we contain multitudes. And Bill W contained a lot of multitude. Extra multitudes. Wow. I'm just trying to process this. I thought I had thoroughly researched AA and Bill W. I also hadn't thought about the, I mean, you know, the spiritual element is debated, right?

But it's unquestionable that he did have a revelation in the hospital, right? Like months before he met his co-founder. Right. Yeah. And he had also interacted with someone from the Oxford group, which was kind of using some of the tools of AA. Sort of emerging, which I think has to get some credit for the idea of fellowship. Right? The idea of a mutual aid society.

But also when you break it down to the three different parts in the big book, it talks about the mental obsession. The physical allergy, because some people really especially have a physical allergy like you drink alcohol and your body just reacts very differently than someone else. So the physical allergy, the mental obsession. Yeah. Like you're thinking about it all the time. And the way that you kind of get into thought loops and your brain convinces you that someone said at a meeting the other day, they said, I have a disease that tries to convince me that I don't have a disease. And it's really the only one that does that. It's the trickiest kind of disease there is.

Tricky. Very tricky, tricky. And third is the spiritual malady, which is trying to fill that God-shaped whole with something, anything outside of ourselves. Alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, porn. Like, what is the rate of alcoholism? 14%. 14%? No, I'm just 14 people.

I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not a data guy. I'm just a dumb actor. A lot of people. Tell me what you're finding is around because it really was going back to this idea of community. So I wrote about AA. I studied it a lot, but I am not a member of AA.

I will tell you as a psychologist, I have never come across and I don't know that I ever will. an institution, an organization, an idea that is as psychologically wise as Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, let's just like pause to consider for a moment that it is just like a circle of chairs in a church basement, right? With like a lot of people who frankly are struggling, no leader, no endowment, no budget. Like it's just these traditions, right, and these steps and these rituals. And it is the single most enduring and effective treatment. It beats pharmacological treatments. It beats individual therapy?

Like, what? So I wrote about it. And actually, by the way, after I thought about A.A. As having, in some ways, like, all of the features of a situation that would enable an individual. Of a situation. Right. Like, A.A. is a situation, right? And by the way, there's rain without A.A.

Right. And there's rain with A.A. Like, that's the power of the situation, right? Like, that is how profound, I think, the idea of the situation is, not my person. book necessarily, but the idea. I mean, after I learned about this, by the way, I went to go study the research of, I think his name is John Flynn. He's a professor. He's like the first endowed chair, I think of addiction at Harvard Medical School. And I interviewed him. I said, like, why did you dedicate your career to studying AA in particular? And he said, well, because alcoholism

is not like, you know, you skinned your knee and it heals, right? It's just like a lifelong condition. And everything that I had been studying before was sort of like, oh, you do this for a week. And then, you know, like, and surprise, surprise, the person goes back to drinking. He's like, this is the thing that works for life, right? So after I studied it and I'm like, oh, I'm like studying the 12 traditions, the steps and like the way that the sponsors work, I went to go look for like other things that were like A.A but not A.A. And maybe you're right about Bill W. And I went to ask people who run group therapy. Like somebody's got to have replicated the magic of A.A.

I don't know how many people are alcoholic rain, but not everyone's alcoholic. What do the non-alcoholics do? Like, where do we go? Well, first of all, there's a hundred different 12-step programs. You can't think about AA. You have to think about it. Right, narcotics anonymous, a reader's anonymous. Yeah, but there's, I've heard someone was like, there was like rageaholics anonymous and like people, no, for real, like, perfectionistic anonymous.

And now that because of Zoom meetings, you can just find all of these programs. Which, by the way, do you think the Zoom meetings are as effective for AA as like in person? I don't. I don't think so, but I think they're great in a pinch. Better than nothing, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think they're 85% as effective. Okay.

That's pretty good. That's pretty positive. And definitely better than nothing. But okay, so there were all these other things. Was it, I think it was the Dalai Lama said that the AA is the greatest spiritual movement of the 20th century. Did the Dalai Lama say that? I think so. I know Carl Jung was a fan.

Yeah. Carl Jung was integral to the, to Bill W's. To the spiritual malady component of it in particular. Right. Right, because there was like, you know, the wall of human solidarity, right? He was like, you know, he had like this lovely metaphor for like, you know, it's only in fellowship with other people who are suffering through something the way you're suffering through it. Like that you really feel. I like the term solidarity seems to like capture it.

Yeah. But the point I wanted to highlight is that yes, it's, I love hearing your love for it from a psychological standpoint. But also like what other movements like great spiritual. movements should and can emulate the 12-step program of recovery because do you think they do no but they can and this is in soul boom which you read which i did read okay fist pump uh big up listen to you listen to you know the whole thing the the the kind of grassroots leader without a leader community led service oriented kind of change that's going to be required for a spiritual revolution is found in 12 steps. And I think that spiritual movements could learn a lot from how grassroots they are.

What gets it like as close to like the, I don't want to call it perfection, but oh my God, like the magic of AA? Like what religious tradition in your view comes closest? Baha'i faith, bro. But I'm a Baha'i. I know you are. Yeah. But no, for real. But it is actually, right? It is. There's no clergy, right? So there's no hierarchy, right? So there's no higher hierarchies like that. Yeah. And then it's service oriented. It's community.

Is it service oriented? Yeah. Yeah. How is it like? The kind of work in the spirit of service is worship in the eyes of God. So kind of the highest form of worship is not like necessarily like saying a prayer like that. Yeah.

But actually doing something useful for another person. And those are prayers. They're the same as prayers. They're not. Oh, interesting. It's not like a separate kind of thing. Yeah. By the way, after I read soap when I started praying more and I went and read that.

book, Help, Thanks. Wow, by Anne Lamont. Yeah. I like the thesis. Like, help. But those are components. But you were saying acts of service art in the Baha'i faith, they are prayer. What's the definition of a prayer?

That's a great. That's a great question. You know what I mean? What is prayer? Well, what's interesting in my faith tradition, the Baha'i faith, the making of art is the same as prayer. And service is the same as prayer. And Abdul Baha, the son of the founder of the Baha'i faith,

strive day by day that your actions may be beautiful prayers. So they're like devotions, are they? Are they like? Well, this is what's interesting. And we also have Baha'i prayer books. You can also say like, you can make up your own prayer. You can be like, oh, God, help me get a job or help me through this tough time. You can read a more formal prayer.

Or you can have actions that are prayers. So I view it as like anything that links you to something greater than our animal impulses, anything that links you to something bigger than yourself, the making of art, the service, mastery in your craft is considered a prayer in the Baha'i faith. So even just being a great accountant is from, I'm speaking about my tradition. Yeah. But I think that it's something that connects you to something larger than yourself. I think that's exactly what, you know, if people are going to read Mansearcher meaning and quote

Victor Frankel, I think that's actually what they should. take from Victor Frankel, which is to transcend your own personal concerns and to be part of in service to something greater than yourself. You've read Mansourtramine. Sure. Right. I mean, when I ask my MBA students at Wharton, like, what is the single book that has changed your life? They don't say grit, by the way, they very often will say, not all of them, but a lot of them will say mansurcher meaning. And I think what Victor Frankel put forth in that, account was not just, you know, how he survived Auschwitz and so forth. As you know, at the end, there's Logo therapy in a nutshell, right? You didn't skip that part, did you? No. Do you know he

wrote it first? No. Like the end of the book. So, okay, so the story is that... Logotherapy for people is about meaning therapy. Correct. Finding meaning, that finding kind of happiness, balance, and wholeness through searching for meaning, meaning, or connecting to meaning. Hence man's search for me. Thank you. Like, and by the way, logo, if you ask people like... Like, what's a logo? They'd be like, oh, the swoosh for Nike or whatever, the three stripes for Adidas. But the meaning of the word logo, it sounds Greek, so I'm going to say it's Greek. The meaning of the word logo is meaning. So logotherapy is psychotherapy through meaning. It's healing the soul and the mind through meaning. But I read Mansearcher meaning many times, including, you know, not just for this book, but, you know, I teach it and so forth.

I defy you to find a sentence in that beautiful masterpiece where Victor Frankel actually defines meaning. He just uses it. He's like, oh, meaning. But my read of Victor Frankel, and I can't quote them verbatim, is that the definition meaning is to be part of and in service to something larger than yourself. And I would say purpose is a synonym for that. So meaning or purpose is being part of and in service to something larger than yourself. And when you do get to the end of Mansearcher meaning, because a lot of people just stop reading. So, like, it's kind of a page turner, right?

Like, it's how he survives Auschwitz. And he's a beautiful writer. And, you know, it's a classic work. And then there's this part where you're like, what? It's like an appendix. It's literally called Logotherapy, right? Meaning therapy in a nutshell. And then it gets really technical.

It's obviously not written, actually. I think for lay readers, it's kind of written for psychotherapists. It's like, you would do this. And, like, you know, if the person has insomnia, like, you would try that. So the history of this book is really interesting. Victor Franco was a prodigy. He was actually, like, he wrote his first essay on the meaning of life, since you're going to write a book on this. He wrote an essay on the meaning of life when he was 16, and it was so good that he was asked to, like, deliver a lecture on it at the local university.

Freud actually was kind of a mentor to him. I mean, maybe not super close, ultimately, but like Freud actually saw that he was a prodigy in psychology. So Victor Franco was a practicing psychiatrist. I think he was working with like severely depressed adolescent boys in Vienna. But then, you know, World War II, Hitler, the concentration camps. He had written a complete manuscript on logotherapy, this therapy he invented when he was working with these young men who were suffering, whatever they were suffering from, you know, depression, anxiety, loneliness, rejection.

He thought that the prescription was the same. The prescription was to be part of and in service. to something larger than themselves, to bring their attention outward versus inward, to direct all of their energy to other people's concerns and not their own. That was the cure. He writes this entire manuscript. It's very technical. It was not designed to be a bestseller. It was like written for people who were going to be clinical therapists. And it got destroyed or something or lost. He sewed it into his like coat, right? It was his most prized possession. But then at some point, you know, in the journey like to concentration camps, I think, you know, a guard found it and they

burned it. And he would later say that rewriting it in the concentration, which he didn't have paper, right? So he'd like find his like scraps of napkin, right? And he'd try to commit things to memory. He rewrote the book while he was in the concentration camps. And by the way, that was his cure because he was now part of in service to something large and he had something to live for. He was like, I need to deliver logotherapy so I have to survive. So that's the real story. So when you read Mansearcher meaning, you're reading it in the wrong order because you get to logotherapy in a nutshell at the end and it's really dry and you're like, I'm not a therapist. I think I'll put this down. What happened when Victor Franco escaped the concentration camps is first of all, you know,

he discovered that his entire family had been killed, right, including his wife and his parents. He hadn't actually needed to stay, but he stayed with them. And he had an opportunity actually to leave on his own before he was in the concentration camp, but he stayed for them. But they were all separated. And then he gets out of the concentration camp. And the first thing he learns is that they've died. He falls into a deep depression. And in the course of something like 11 days, he wrote the entire Mansearcher meaning sort of like part where he, you know, wrote about his, you know, content. His journey.

He asked his publisher to put it at the end of his logotherapy book, right? So he rewrote the logo therapy thing. And then he was like, oh, I had this one chapter about how I lived through the concentration camps and how I applied this. But the publisher was like, I'm going to flip the order. the American publisher changed the title. Now it's, of course, this iconic book. But the reason why I think this is also important is that when you ask the question of this, like, great psychologist, right? Like, how should we be living? Right. Like, what should we do? Like, you asked about, like, you know, I keep calling a deaden job, you know, like, but if you're in a terrible

job in a Dunkin' Donuts and like wherever you are, like, I think that there's another thing that Victor Franco would want to talk about, which is not what the individual can do for the themselves, but what we should be doing for each other. I mean, Victor Frankel, I think, would be appalled at how our society is directing its energy right now. Like, we're not taking care of each other in any way. Like, I should care about the guy in the Dunkin' Donuts. And frankly, like, you know, that's why I wrote about in the book. Like, Victor Frankel thinks we should have or thought we should have a statue of responsibility on the West Coast to complement the statue of liberty on the East Coast.

And I think he thought Americans... Wait, slow that down. Say that again? What? So Victor Frankel, after he escaped the concentration camps and he... He thought we should have a statue of responsibility on the West Coast. Yeah, so Victor Frankel, you know, after he recovered from his depression, too, right? And after he rewrote his book, he went on to write like three dozen other books, right?

Like, you know, anyway, they're all about meaning. And they're all about this approach to a lot. life. And he toured the world. I mean, he was really kind of like, you know, like on the junket. By the way, he was. He was. And I just watched this documentary of him where it's like, you know, original footage. And so you can see him like, you know, holding forth like inexhaustible, right? Because he felt like he was, you know, he had to tell people this message. He had to carry this message. So he traveled to America, right? And when he came to this country, he made very precise observations about what he thought was wrong with American society. And this is not in

2026, obviously. This is decades ago. Before I was born, really, probably a lot of it. But he felt like our American culture was, like, radically individualistic and that we were obsessed with our individual freedoms and, like, you know, what we could do for ourselves and, like, not having our rights being violated. But the reason why he said that America needs a statue of responsibility on the West Coast is that he felt like, we were missing the point of life. We were missing the point of being part of and in service to other people, right, to other people's lives.

So, yeah, and they're actually building it. There's a design. It's two hands that are classed, one hand reaching up in supplication, the other hand reaching down in service, and they're raising money. And you know where it's located? Davenport, Iowa. Boom. Maybe.

I'm going to fact check you on that. Let's talk a little bit about Marty Sulligman. Do you have him on Sulegman? No, can you get him for me? 100%. He's my hero. He's my hero. He's deaf.

He can talk to you without reading. Okay. We'll figure it out. Okay. Yeah. I'll come out to the East Coast. It's fine. Oh, yeah.

I did Adam Grant out in Philadelphia. Oh, wow. So you'll, the Martin. But he's the godfather or the father of positive psychology. What can you tell us about studying with Martin Seligman? He has a new book out, by the way. I'm going to plug his book. It's called agency. Marty Seligman was my PhD advisor. Marty Seligman got his Ph.D. when he was like 23 or something. He was a wonderkind. He was a prodigy.

He went to college, young. He got his Ph.D. in record time. And right out of the gate, he was one of the most famous psychologists there was. Because what happened very early in Marty's career was he was doing these animal experiments, like rats and dogs. and he observed what nobody else observed, which is in the treatment conditions where dogs were in cages. And they were experiencing, are you a dog lover that's a little, I have trigger warning. It's kind of like the dogs get shocked, so sorry. But the dogs were getting electric shocks. Okay, that's terrible.

It's terrible. Marty's a big dog lover, I should tell you. But anyway, painful but not fatal, terrifying electric shocks. there was this condition where the dogs were getting shocked randomly. And that's actually not what anybody was trying to study. They were trying to study how dogs learn from patterns. Like, oh, if the light goes on and the shock comes out like two seconds later and the light goes on, and the shock comes out two seconds later, and the light goes out, that's a pattern, right?

But you need a control condition. So it's like, oh, let's just have lights and shocks in random order, right? So it's like shock, shock light, light. I'm just random. Wow, that's torture. It's okay. So this is what Marty observed. He's just looking at these dogs.

in this condition that nobody cared about because it was just a comparison condition. And he saw them getting depressed. Like basically, they stopped eating. They stopped drinking. They looked depressed. They, like, laid down. And actually, when you put them in a situation where they could change, like, the outcome, they're like, oh, you could just, like, walk over here and there's no shocks.

Like, you all you have to do is move. Those dogs were depressed. They didn't move, right? So Marty got really famous, very early in his career, for studying what he called learned helplessness, that when life. shocks you and there's no pattern in random ways you're like and dangers pop up here and there yeah and nothing you do has any effect on it you're hypervigilant it doesn't even really help nothing helps yeah that's called learned helplessness and it was the first animal model of clinical depression it was

the first insight like all you know all the other theories are oh like your childhood whatever but your mother didn't hold you enough and that's why you're depressed yeah yeah yeah like you have an id that's like in conflict and you think about people that are in really dire economic circumstances. You know, broken families, violence in their neighborhoods. That's the same thing as getting shocked randomly. They're in the cage. And then you're like, why don't they do something for themselves?

Why don't they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Why don't they have grit? Yeah. Right. Yeah. So by the way, that's why this model is so important. Like Marty would say, like, you know, they're demonstrating helplessness. Like, he actually did trace it to thoughts.

He had to go to people, not dogs for this. But he started studying clinical depression. in people, he actually became clinically trained after he got his PhD. He was like, oh, wait, now I need to study helplessness in humans. He saw that it was connected to clinical depression. He trained as a clinical psychologist. And the thoughts that lead to the experience of hopelessness and sadness and lethargy and anadonia and stuff, really are thoughts like, I can't do anything.

Like, nothing I do matters. Like, my life is going to be shit and nothing can change that. That's the box two thought. And the box one is basically, yeah, life is throwing new things in like random order and it's all bad. Yeah. So that's Marty's early career. Why is the father of positive psychology? Because it sounds like so far we've got the father of negative psychology, right?

He sounds like a sadist with him and his shocked dogs. Do you know the hate comments we're going to get around this conversation? Yeah, Marty's gotten like, yeah. But you should see the dogs. He has a new one. It's a cute little like puppy. It's brown. that's how much I know about dogs. It's like a small puppy. It's brown and has curly hair.

Okay, so what happens next? So then Marty asked the question, not all the dogs become helpless. He observed that two out of the three dogs who were experiencing uncontrollable shock got depressed. But one out of three were resilient. One out of three were like, I can do something. Like, I'll still move. Like, I'll still try. Like they just kept trying to find ways to escape. So then Marty asked the question, like, Who are the people who are resilient? And like, how can somebody go from depression to optimism? How do we rescue people? And then he basically finds that there are ways to rest some agency out of our situations.

That's the title of his new book, by the way, agency. He finds that, for example, what happens to a resilient person is that they look for ways in which what is happening is temporary, changeable. Right? And it's not their fault. If you have the attribution, I mean, we all use this word attribution, sorry, but psychologists are like, oh, what, like, we're trying to make sense of your situation. Marty would say that a depressed person says, this is everything is ruined, right? It's never going to change. And it's my own goddamn fault, right? That's the attribution that leads you to be depressed. But if you have the opposite, like, oh, it's just this one day. Like, it's just this, you know, one thing that I do. It's like, okay, I burned the pot roast, but I'm not like a worthless human. being. And by the way, I can learn to make a new pot roast. And, you know, it's not entirely my fault, right? This oven sucks. Right. Marty would say, like, we can learn to have different box two thoughts. And he would agree with me because I just talked to him because he is my advisor and, like my second father. He is my second father. Like, he also believes that, like, if we put ourselves in certain situations, there are people who bring out our optimists? There are people who bring out our pessimists? Like, a lot of it is pure pressure. You know, are you in AA? Are you not in AA? Do you have a sponsor? Like, are you an actor who's trying to make it on their own? Who's goes to bed every night crying, or do you have like a friend who's also going to bed crying and you can at least cry to each other? Like, I think Marty would agree with me that what he ended up studying actually was agency, the opposite of helplessness. And he would locate agency, not just in forcing yourself to do things, not just in thinking a different way, but I think

he would also locate agency in your situation, like whatever small thing you can do to change it. So that's the arc of Marty's career. He's 83 now. and his latest book is called agency. It's the following provocative thesis. Marty has gone from trying to understand your agency and my agency and how it can lead to resilience versus depression to understanding the whole arc of human history. So he goes back to ancient Greece and ancient China.

And what he says is that early in human civilization, people did not feel like they had agency. Like the gods basically decided what would happen. We had destinies, but we didn't have agency. And then he traces this through like, Iliad and the Odyssey through like, you know, the 18th century to the 19th century to the 20th century. And basically what Marty says is that over the course of human civilization, we have come to believe that we have power over our circumstances and our futures.

And it's increased. And he wants to go one step farther. He wants to say that this is what drives human progress. Like all human progress is driven by the motor of people feeling like they have power to change things. And I think it's actually, you know, his most like triumphant work. Wow. So if it's not a bestseller, it's still iconic.

This podcast, we talk about spirituality. You had a conversion to Catholicism? I did. Yeah. How are you with your Catholic church and belief? Should I tell you how I converted? Sure. I went to a Catholic wedding.

My sister got married to a Catholic. And I had to be like at these rehearsal events and I met the priest. I was 24 and I knew nothing about Catholicism. So it asked him these questions. I don't know why. There was a lot of waiting around in the preparation for my sister's wedding. I don't know why we were waiting around. But there was this time spent in church with this priest, Father Cannon.

And I didn't know anything. So I was like, oh, like, what's the? difference between Catholicism and Christianity? And he was like, I think you mean the difference between Catholicism and the Protestant faiths. And I was like, okay, go there. So he would just tell me these things. And I'm like, what are the Ten Commandments? Like, oh, you know, what is a cardinal sin? And like, why can't you get married? I mean, I was just asking these questions. I don't know why. I was very, not in a romantic way. I was very attracted to him. I think I'm attracted to people who feel like more spiritually evolved.

And in this case, I just, I just was like drawn to him. I was raised and so as my sister with like no faith. Like I once asked my dad, do you believe in God? And it was this if he never considered the question. He was like, well, that's a good question. I mean, he just kind of considered it on first principles. So I had no faith tradition. And when my sister got married, I was actually coming back for her wedding from Oxford.

So when I went back to my fancy fancy graduate program and Oxford, you know, Oxford is basically just like one big church. It's just like all Gothic, you know, and they have really good music. And I just started going to church. I was like, oh, I'll just go to church, you know, I'll just like do this. And obviously those weren't Catholic churches, but there were a bunch of road scholars. I feel like I'm name-dropping everything. But anyway, there are a bunch of road scholars and they were super Catholic. And they were like, hey, Angie, do you want to like go to Bible study? So I started going to Bible study with a bunch of Catholic Rhodes Scholars. And there are two monasteries at Oxford, the gray fires and the black friars. And these are

like the most intellectual Catholics you'll ever meet. Like half of them have PhDs, if not more. And when you go and ask them like, tell me about the cardinal sins. Like what does it mean to sin? Like what does it mean to be in communion with God? They just like give you lectures. They're like, well, you know, let's take that from 17 different angles. So I found it like very intellectually attractive. And I think at that point, I had some kind of like inchoate spiritual longing. Like Rain, I really did want to be like a better person. So over the course of the next year and a half, maybe two years, I guess it was, like I basically made the commitment to become Catholic. I got baptized. I did instruction. I had a godfather and a godmother who I'm no longer

in touch with. But basically, if you fast forward, I would just say that I have had a up and down faith journey. Like, I don't know that I would consider myself, I don't know what the word devout means, actually, but I don't go to Catholic Church. Well, you know, devout has the same root as devoted. So there's a clue. There's a clue. How do you define devout? I don't know how to define that. It's very interesting, right? These words where you're like, hmm, like, we know what observant is. That's kind of behavioral, right? Like, are you going to church and so forth? I mean, I guess I am kind of observant. I guess that the only thing I would say about devout is that there seems to be, an internal connection and an outward action, right?

Someone who's devout has a deep faith, a flame of faith, and they put that into action. I don't know that everyone would define it that way. I think this is reflecting your Baha'i sensibilities, right? Because I think a lot of people would say devout is just inside you. Do you think a lot of people who are you devout and they would just be like, do you believe, right? Not are you acting? I mean, I like the way you want to define it. Maybe you could be right.

But I, so my husband and I belong to a church that's Presbyterian. Like, I don't know. My faith journey, like, I don't really understand religion, but I'm very attracted to it. Like, I texted you. I don't know that you actually texted me back because I was like, well, you've had texts to me back. But I'm just saying, like, I remember texting you and being like, oh, rain, I had this folder of studies that I've collected on the psychology of religion.

And I was like, do I me to mail them to you? Because, like, I'm not using them anymore. And I don't think you give me a mailing address, but I really do have this manila folder that I keep not throwing out because I think like maybe Rayne Wilson will want them. But I'm very attracted to religion. I don't know what spirituality even means. I know that you talk a lot. I read your book or I listened to it. And I didn't do it like while I was multitask.

I mean, I guess I was doing other things, but I really listened to it. I don't even know if I understand what the word spiritual means. Well, let me ask you this. Is there anything that's sacred in your life? Can I ask you to define the word sacred? No, you know what it means. I just have to answer it. You know what it means.

I really don't know if I know what it means. Why should I know what it means? Sacrosanct. Does that help? But I think it actually needs a definite, like, like, what does it mean? Something has what? Something that has a luminous meaning that is important to not be defiled. Like, okay, right, right, right.

Because I think sometimes people are like, oh, you know, kissing my kids before night, that's sacred. But that's not what you mean, right? Like, I would never not do it. I think I'm actually like, I don't think I'm very spiritually evolved. So nothing is sacred to your family? I'm not saying that nothing is sacred to me. I'm just saying that I think.

Or family dinner or a holiday, a place where someone passed away, where someone was born. I don't have any secret spaces that I can think of like that. Look, you know, you know that spirituality, God, I'm just going to keep going with all the name dropping in the theories, but do you know about the theory of multiple intelligences? Like we have verbal intelligence. That's different from musical. Like this theory from Howard Gardner. Okay. It's very influential.

Howard Gardner is at Harvard. He was a MacArthur fellow. He's a genius. The reason why he got a MacArthur, I think, is that Howard Gardner said intelligence is not just like he's smart. she's stupid whatever like we have multiple intelligences you can be musically intelligent and you know emotional intelligence yeah emotional intelligence is one of them many would say including my wife that i very lacking in really yeah oh that's so interesting i'm working on it yeah maybe through it like you know you keep doing the podcast like but but like a lot of us grit i have grit for emotional intelligence well then you'll

then there's hope for you right like you'll eventually get better practicing sensitivity reps reps yeah with feedback um but there is an intelligence so we're Howard Garner started off with distinguishing between math and verbal, right? Like then math and verbal, artistic and musical. Then it's like kinesthetic, right? Like you have intelligence about your body. But his latest writings, I think, have spiritual intelligence. Like the spirituality itself is a kind of sensibility or intelligence. If I rank ordered my intelligences, I think at the top would be like probably analytic and verbal, right? Toward the bottom, you're getting to like musical, whatever. But I think my spiritual intelligence is like at the very bottom. I don't think, maybe that's

why I was attracted to. I was like, oh, what is this thing? Like, who is this person? I don't really know what the word spiritual means. And I don't know what the word sacred means. And when you're like, oh, but isn't anything in your life sacred? I'm like, okay, I guess I'll just come up with an answer. Like, my children are sacred. Is that what you mean? Like, you know, but I don't think I have, I don't think I'm actually that spiritually developed. I really don't. That's just like an honest answer. I mean, I'd like to be. Well, that you need to have some, you need to put yourself in the right situation, which sounds like you have a good church and some grit, which is some daily accountable actions.

Do you think it is like a skill? Yeah, absolutely. You would think so. Really? Absolutely. Just like I'm working on my emotional intelligence. I think that spiritual intelligence, spiritual sensitivity. Spiritual sensitivity.

Sensitability. Yeah. You could start with five-minute meditation every day. contemplation, finding something that's beautiful, having a gratitude list. Let's get really specific about that. If I were going to do a five-minute prayer, contemplation, like, give me a little guidance. Well, prayer is different than contemplation. Oh, it is?

Yeah. Okay. How? So, well, meditation is going inward. It's being, it's being open to receiving. It's being in the moment, maybe connected to breath, right? It's anything you can do. Yeah, non-judgmental awareness.

And you know this from studying cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then prayer is sending a signal out. You know, if meditation is being a satellite dish. You're receiving versus sending. And sending. Oh, that's what prayer is for you.

Yeah, yeah. Hmm. So that's a good place to start. And then I think really finding what is sacred to you would be. What's sacred to you? Oh my God, there's so many things that are sacred to me. Like what? Well, I think that my marriage is sacred, not just in terms of like a social union,

but that there is a bond of love that is kind of has higher meaning. And we've certainly had our ups and downs, but I think that that's something I hold. I think the sanctity of our family, I would say, you know, I talk about in Soul Boom, the hospital hallway where my son was born in an emergency C-section under great dire circumstances is actually a sacred place. A sacred space now for you. For me, I don't think I can get there. I don't think they'd let me in.

But I have a meditation bench that to me is very sacred. This is a spot that I go to receive and to commune and to try and ride. above my, you know, my mirror kind of animal pachinko ball head impulses and to transcend. There's from my faith, there are sacred spaces, temples, places of worship and prayer, the Baha'i holy land in Haifa Israel is a sacred space. But I think any place where people make mention of God is sacred. So I think synagogues and churches and temples are. Are they physical usually?

When people say like what do you hold sacred, do they usually think of, I mean, you mentioned marriage and that bond. That's not a physical place. For some people, ideas can be very sacred. You know, some people like the idea of freedom of speech is a sacred thing. Sacred, right. It's like it's not just a social construct that's in the constitution. It's like, it's sacred. Does it have for you and maybe would you say for most people like it has the meaning of divine?

Like there's something, there's a cosmology behind it, right? It's not just like, oh, this is that inviolable or read it like. Maslow. Yeah. Abraham Maslow. In the book I talk about it. Yeah. What he put as on his deathbed.

As his epitaph? Yeah, as the final need. Self transcendence. Self transcendence. I did know that because I am a psychologist. Because that. Which nobody knows, by the way. Yeah.

It's just been coming out recently that he added that. Like literally as on as his final act. And you know like Franco's influence on Maslow, right? That's it all comes around. It all comes around because they were like sparring with each other. I mean, yeah, they were in, not like angry, violent debates. I don't think they came to fisticuffs. Yeah.

But, you know, Maslow published the hierarchy of needs in 1943. And he never drew a pyramid, but he did say it was a hierarchy. So then I don't know. Other people drew pyramids. Yeah. Or something drew a pyramid. Right. And it was like your basic needs, like survival needs, and there was safety, and then there was to love and be loved, and there was esteem. And then the fifth one was like the top. And it was like self-actualization. You know, the poet must write and the musician must make music. And that's what he thought in 1943. But he was only 35 years old or something like, I think he was 35 in 1943. But he lived into his 60s. And as he progressed, not only on his own, but in this conversation that he had ongoing with Victor Franco, who was his contemporary.

Right. Like Abraham Masla was an American Jew who like grew up in Brooklyn or something or Queens. But Victor Frankel, of course, was a European Jew. But they both had this question of like, what is the meaning of life? Like, what is the highest form exists? Like, what are our core needs? And Frankl said it was self transcends. He's like literally wrote articles about how Maslow was wrong. And they wrote in correspondence. They debated each other. And so he came around at the end of his life. And I would credit Victor Frankel for. at least some of the revelation that the hierarchy of needs is not capped by self-actualization, which is you and your pursuit of your life and your liberty and your happiness, but it's capped by the desire to be part of and service to other things like I would credit, at least in part, Victor Frankel. That's beautiful. Well, I would say going back to the sacred is perhaps the sacred is something that transcends self and the divine does as well and that's what spirituality is is anything that transcends the

self when i met that priest and i had this sense that he was more evolved in this dimension of spirituality he had one foot in a spiritual realm and i was like what is this person like who is he i I think I am, if it's skill curve, right? I think I'm just like, you know, not where he was. I just think it's a very crude and rudimentary sensibility that I have. I have some attraction to it, though, obviously. Like, who becomes Catholic when they're 26? Like, what?

But why do you want to give me this brief of religious studies? Why don't you make that your next point of study? Me? Yeah. Why don't you, the psychology of spirituality? very few academics kind of. Like take it seriously. Take it seriously.

And yet it gives so many people meaning. And it has driven so much of human history. And it drives so much of human lives. We talk about the animal instincts and how much they drive like the writer and the elephant, right? But how much does altruism drive people? And where does that altruism come from? And because I do think that spirituality leads to altruism. Can you be altruistic without a religious faith, without spirituality?

Of course you can. You know, even animals sometimes have been found to be altruistic, sacrificing their lives for the betterment of their group or their tribe or of someone else. But doesn't that impulse to self-transcend, isn't that ultimately a spiritual impulse? And that ties back to AA, where, you know, the God-shaped whole and the spiritual disease is we're trying to fill this need with gambling, shopping, porn, whatever it is. Simulation award. Yeah. Anesthetizing, whatever. Yeah. And it's something. outside of ourselves, that we're frantically trying to bring into ourselves, but self-transcendence

is outward, right? Coming from inside out. Yeah. There might be a psychological study there. Can I influence the entire course of your trajectory? Career. I think a lot of research is research. And I think being that I am like a rookie when it comes to spirituality, I don't know that I would

be very good at studying. I mean, maybe that would make me agree, you know, whatever. This would be a great next book. This would be like, I'm spiritually illiterate and I'm going to go on a spiritual quest. I'm going to go on a journey. I'm going to document it because I am a spiritual neophyte and a spiritual idiot. Soul idiot. Soul idiot.

Angela Duckworth. Yes, right, the final edition. I think you have a different experience of writing books than I do. I actually think like this is the most selfless thing I've ever done. And I don't think I can do it again. So I'm not going to write any more books. I'm going to live like five years less. Don't say that.

I was finishing soul boom and I was like, I'm never writing another fucking book in my life. Right. And then six months later, then I pitched another book. Really? Yeah. But wait, can you tell me why you said that? Like, why did you say that? Because it's so hard.

It's so hard. And like, you know, I can do a TV show and 50 million people can watch it. And like I write a book and, you know, what, 50,000 or something like that. You know, I don't know, 100,000. Yeah. Books sold. How many people actually read? read the damn thing except you.

Yeah. And it's hard in the revisions and the, and. Was it hard for you? Was it, it couldn't have been as hard for you as it was for me. Wow. What, what do you want? You want to go head to head? Yeah.

No, I don't think it was as hard for me as it was for you. No, I don't think it was as hard for me as it was for you. Yeah. Well, I'm glad. You're saying I don't want you to suffer. Yeah. Yeah. It was so hard.

I really struggled. Not wanting other people to suffer as a spiritual impulse. That's where compassion is. We don't want other people to suffer. Hmm. Well, maybe there's hope for me yet then. Because we want to prevent our own suffering. Everyone doesn't want to suffer.

Yeah. But then when we don't want other people to suffer, and then we take action to prevent the suffering of others. There you go. So that's what you really mean. Like spirituality is feeling part of. And so like, right, like really kind of like, oh, you know, in some ways I am the elbow and you're the wrist.

A part of and you will take action. In service to. In service to. One question we ask every guest. Short answer or a long answer. Either way. Soul boom. What does the word soul mean to you?

Oh, God. I don't know what the soul is, Rain. I really don't. How would you define it? Can't. When you say, wow, that music has soul or that painting has soul or that person has soul. I don't say those things. You think those things?

No, I don't. I'm being honest. I don't know what the soul is. You've flunked soul boom. Can I tell you that there is a professor in my department named Paul Rosen? He is 90. Very famous, by the way. Last one I'll mention on this podcast.

But he recently convened the faculty because he wanted to talk about the soul. And he said, we should have a science of the soul. And we should have a psychology of the soul. How come nobody here is studying the soul? And I went to the meeting. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? about. Like, I just, I don't know what, I don't know what a soul is. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I'm not atheist. I'm Catholic. But I'm just saying that I am a beginner and I don't

really know what these words mean. That's an honest answer. I love your honesty. I'm working on it. Soul Boom is also on Spotify video. If you've got Spotify premium, you can enjoy it free of Spotify ads. If you don't, you'll get even less. If you hit subscribe to Soul Boom. Also enjoy on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, or wherever else you get your stupid podcasts. We make Chevrolet vehicles, but what you do with them makes them so much more.

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