The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 177. Intimations of Creativity | Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

This episode was recorded on April 13th, 2021On this Season 4, Episode 31 of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Jordan is joined by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human potential. He hosts the very popular podcast 'The Psychology Podcast'. He is an author, editor, and co-editor of nine books including his newest 'Transcend: The New Science of Self Actualization'.Dr. Kaufman and Jordan discussed cognitive science, behavioral study, and Humanism. They also touched on many points including IQ. tests, personality traits, aggression in hierarchy, dating intelligence, self-actualization, long-form media, and much more.Find more Scott Kaufman on his website https://scottbarrykaufman.com/, in his books, and on his podcast show The Psychology PodcastThe Jordan B. Peterson Podcast can be found at https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/

Welcome to season four episode 31 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Mikhail Peterson. In this episode, my dad is joined by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human potential. He hosts a very popular podcast called The Psychology Podcast and is an author, editor, and co-editor of nine books, including his newest, Transcend, the new Science of Self-Actualization. Dr. Scott Kaufman and Jordan spoke about cognitive science, behavioral studies, humanism. They also discussed IQ tests, personality tests, aggression in hierarchies, dating intelligence, self-actualization, long-form media, of course, and more. I hope you enjoy this episode.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello, everyone. Dr. Scott Berry Kaufman, my guest today, is a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human potential. He received his PhD in cognitive science from Yale University and his taught courses on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He hosts a very popular podcast, the Psychology podcast, and his author or editor or co-editor of nine books, including his newest Transcend, the new Science of self-actualization published in 2020 and just out in paperback as of April of 2021. He wrote, Whyerd create unraveling the mysteries of the creative mind with Carolyn Gregor in 2016 and ungifted intelligence redefined in 2013. He's written major academic works as well. With Robert Sternberg, he co-edited

the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence in 2011, which is a major academic text. He also edited the complexity of greatness in 2013, which brought together leading scholars to discuss and debate the relative contributions of biology and society in determining creativity. In 2015 he was named one of 50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world by business insider. Dr. Kaufman, thank you for coming on my podcast. Dr. Peterson, it's great to be here. I'm looking forward to this chat. It's good to see you. We actually have a couple of publications together, right, from a few years back. But we've strangely enough never sat down and had a lengthy discussion. So hopefully

today we'll have an opportunity to rectify that. So first of all, maybe you could tell everyone just exactly what a cognitive scientist is. Well, I think the important thing to recognize about cognitive sciences is it's an interdisciplinary field. So it doesn't just involve psychology, but it brings in philosophers and it brings in neuroscientists, it brings in computer scientists to all kind of sit down at the table and figure out what is the mind and what are the functions of the human mind, what are the limits of the human mind, how does the nervous system represent mind. So basically everything you have to do with mind, but it's very interdisciplinary and that's

what really it was exciting to me about it when I got into it. I did an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon and I did a computer science degree and I did a cognitive science degree and it was really exciting to me to kind of figure out how all these different things can be integrated with each other. And how did a cognitive scientist who's at least technically more interested, let's say, in the mechanics of thought and abstract cognition, how did you come to be interested in the humanist tradition, which is the focus of this book, which we're going to talk about in fair detail today?

It isn't obvious that those things have any necessary interrelationship. So what happened? Not at all, obvious. Well, so as a kid, I grew up with a real deep fascination for understanding individual differences. I mean, I remember just being a very young kid looking on the playground and wondering why someone could so effortlessly go in the jungle gym and why I was so awkward. And I also had some early learning difficulties that made me try to understand what the only limits of my own, the only limits of my own potential were. So the interest that got me to the field was human intelligence. And I realized after enough years in the field and once my interest brought into creativity, which is the work we did together was on creativity when I was in grad school. And then now self-actualization humanism, I realized that what I was really interested in was human potential, not intelligence.

You know, intelligence I thought was the be all and end all of human potential. And then what I've learned come to realize, you know, throughout my career is that that wasn't, that was just the beginning. Well, Galton, Francis Galton, who, in some sense pioneered the psychometric study of IQ was also interested in human potential, I would say. So in some sense, that's a return to the source. And it is easy to confuse intelligence with, well, the whole range of human talent and ability

and differentiating all those different concepts and placing them in the proper relationship to one another and identifying them for study is no trivial thing. So you worked, you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se. So my junior year in college, I was so curious about intelligence that I called emailed Nicholas McIntosh, who was the head of the department at University of Cambridge, and I said, can I just take a year off of my undergraduate studies and just, will you teach me everything about IQ? Will you teach me everything there is to know about like everything we've known the last

hundred years about intelligence? And so to my excitement, he responded to my email and he said, sure, come over. So I packed my bags and went to England. And this didn't count as a study abroad program. There was no study abroad program. So I just notified Carnegie Mellon. I'm going off to England to study intelligence. And it was just so exciting to me to be able to learn how

to win in that 20 years old, probably. And he responded to a cold letter and invited you over. Yeah, I must have, well, I think that he might have been oppressed with some of that. Like I was a herb simons last research assistant at that time as well. And but I felt like there were limits to what I was understanding about intelligence through the expertise

approach that I was learning from herb simon. I felt as though I wasn't learning about intelligence. I was learning about expertise acquisition and I didn't think they were the same thing. So anyway, yeah, so he must have been impressed on my email. I mean, I was a real, I was really, I'm trying to think of the word an enterprising young man.

I don't know, I'm trying to think of the right word. You know, I was like really excited to learn this stuff. Curious and enthusiastic. Yeah, I like that. And obviously able to communicate that. So you went over to England and you worked with a psychometrician. And so you worked with someone who was very interested in the formalities of measurement

and careful definition of intelligence. And what did you learn as a consequence of doing that about intelligence? Well, I learned a bunch of things. One important thing I learned is that intelligence has multiple general cognitive mechanisms, which contribute or give rise to a general intelligence kind of function. Some, you know, there's this debate in the field about whether or not G or general intelligence is the thing that is causal of things in the world or if it's an emergent property of things. And I learned a little bit about this view that

it's an emergent property of these domain general mechanisms and the biggest one which captivated my attention was working memory at that time. And then that quickly led to me doing and being interested in differences in sex differences in working memory. And I came up with a hypothesis when I was working with him in college about that, which then led me to getting studying with him for a master's degree to actually test that hypothesis. So let's walk over the psychometric view a bit

and I'll say some of the things that I think I know, and you can tell me if they're out of date or if you're convinced that they're erroneous in some way. So essentially what the psychometricians have discovered is an established and I think more credibly than any psychologists have established any other phenomenon within the field of psychology is that there's a common mechanism

or an emergent property that appears to characterize activity in relationship to virtually any set of abstractions. So if you put together a random set of questions that require abstraction to solve, so they could be mathematical questions or general knowledge or vocabulary, the sort of thing that even that you might encounter well-playing trivial pursuit. And you put together a reasonable set of those, and then you add up the correct scores, and you rank order them across all the people who've taken that particular test. You get something that is a pretty accurate estimate of IQ. That's central tendency. It's that powerful. And that's related to long-term life success in attainment, let's say, economic

attainment and career attainment. That accounts for about 25% of the variation between people in the differences in attainment. Is that that that seemed roughly anything? I would I would I would do like a yes and if this was in Probeater, I would yes and and say, a central concept in this is the idea of the positive manifold, because it's really interesting, and this was Charles Spirman's discovery in 1904.

It's interesting that people who tend to do well in one of these kinds of tests tend to do well on other of these kinds of tests, and the thing, which is why I thought the expertise acquisition approach I was learning in college didn't fully explain, is that we're talking even with lacking expertise in, like these IQ test items, abstraction, like you mentioned, they're a lack of expertise

and yet they're positively correlated with each other and it didn't have to be that way, right? Jordan, because one could have proposed, well, the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you'll be in other things because you're devoting all your time and attention to one thing. But instead, we find that actually there is some general cognitive mechanisms that apply to any task, and even novel, especially, I would say especially the novel.

Right, because it actually predicts learning new abstractions better than it predicts real real world performance and we should also note that the level of predictive accuracy is stunning compared to the predictive accuracy of Virtually anything any social scientists have discovered apart from IQ Yeah, I tweeted that out the other day. I said it's ast astounding to me when people say, so matter of factly, like IQ tests are invalid. When it is probably the most valid test we have in psychology. And that, of course, got a lot of comments like, well, that, therefore that just shows your whole field of shit. Yeah, that's completely wrong.

Because the effect sizes in psychology, the valid effect sizes are, what would you call them? Impressive when you compare psychology to other disciplines of its category of generalization say. So the idea that the whole field is nonsense is is only put forth by people who don't have differentiated understanding of the field or of the social sciences that it might be compared with. The psychologists are the most sophisticated methodologists by far and all the social scientists, sciences as far as I'm concerned.

So yeah, there seems to be this misunderstanding or this expectation of psychology that we're supposed to be perfectly reliable, that we're supposed to have perfect reliability of humans. And I don't think any psychologist has ever claimed to have that sort of level of precision. I mean, of course, a lot of people are gonna fall between the cracks with these IQ tests, and I'm interested in those people too, but I'm also interested in the statistical generalizations and the implications for society.

I mean, you can hold both things in your mind at one time. Yes, well, and you can also point out that accounting for 25% of the variation in something as complex as life attainment is unbelievably impressive, especially given how much effect random factors have on determining those outcomes, like health, for example, like physical and mental health, and while in situational variables, like the state of the economy, et cetera, et cetera, the availability of educational resources, across all that variability, you still get this incredibly impressive prediction of this single factor. And we could also point out for everyone that,

you know, you might think that people have good personalities and bad personalities. In some sense, that's unidimensional. But if you do the same statistical analysis with a set of personality questions that you would conduct on a set of abstract questions, you get five factors, not one. So it isn't necessarily the case at all that something will simplify down to a single factor, but that's profoundly the case with IQ. The other thing that is worth pointing out is that bad as IQ tests might be given that there's much they don't explain. They're far better than any other method we have of assessing potential for, let's say, cognitive growth and acquisition. So if you want to predict how well someone's going to do in an academic environment, then there isn't anything that

even comes close to the accuracy of an IQ test. And also to the unbiased, it's also unbiased compared to all other forms of measurement. So, so, okay, so you learned this in in England, but you weren't you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach. And you so you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn't satisfy you. Why not? Yeah, so I really, and I felt this in my bones just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading, I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg, and I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true, that I, you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay and got to

the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity. And that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, Macintosh would definitely agree with that. He, unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago. But, you know, if he were a library, I mean, he would definitely agree completely with that. And he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers

that they never said, you know, like, no IQ research that I ever know, have know, like no IQ research that I ever know, uh, have ever known has said like that IQ is a perfect predictor of everything. Right, you know, yeah, quite the contrary. That's the tend to be conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction. Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually, a unique position in some sense, because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence IQ essentially.

But you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the 90s in particular, and in the 80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education, faculty of education, that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence, essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas? This episode is sponsored by Blinkist. Blinkist is a super convenient app if you want to

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And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas? Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really stupid point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sturmer, Bob over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge. Once I remember all of us walking in the garden, me, Nick and Bob, and Bob was criticizing.

I remember this vividly. Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying, it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence, and Nick was, we're pushing back. But I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff

in either or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics, which, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of the stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual of each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, you know, when you combine it, when you start looking at the world.

So for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beatty who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to kind of view these things as separate, but each one do make their unique contributions, if that makes sense. Okay, so let's go back momentarily to the Sternberg and Psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I encountered

all those ideas. I was trying to predict success in complex environments, academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring literature looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement. And then also reliable measures of achievement,

which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner, in particular, was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable utility from their work. And I couldn't find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the big five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So to even to predict academic performance,

if you use IQ essentially, and the SAT and LSAT, and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently, they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor. And we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school and openness, which is the creativity dimension, we'll talk about didn't predict at all It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduates graduate school performance publications and so on, but we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests Basically assessing executive function could add something to IQ maybe depending on how you did the analysis, but conscientiousness

definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so, and I always thought that was a fatal flaw actually of that literature because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable, critical, intellectual perspective. If you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the evidence that you actually have something, other than something conceptual? So you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ. I did. I'll be very blunt about this.

I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences, and once I started studying the stuff scientifically, I became seduced by the truth. I don't know, I don't know how else to say it. Well, how about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, oh my God, this will go away no matter what you do.

And it is solitary. And it's been well measured. And it's really hard to add to it. And everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me. That's the thing. So once I started studying this stuff with Nick, you know, you, for instance, you would look at like people's attempts to measure garners, multiple intelligences. And in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor. And I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever,

it's going to be G-loaded. The task you're doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other general associate of learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behavioral literature because Nick most will know for his behavioral research.

We were able to adapt some of these associative learning measures to predict G, just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found that there are these general to cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever theory you wanna propose in multiple televisions is these general cognitive mechanisms, you can't sweep them under the rug.

Right, so if you laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything additional to that. Even we added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature, not from the psychometric literature, was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a

large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute. But if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity or whether the neuropsychologists were on to something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed

to it, it still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students and you tell me what you think about this that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure because- As a covariate at least? As a covariate, because it seemed, and I also think the same thing about big five personality for whatever that's worth, is like, we know that IQ exists.

It exists, or at least as much as anything, social scientists have ever discovered exists. So, if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we get results from some measure. And then that would hypothetically be publishable. But then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill, like we looked at values as a predictor,

for example, of academic achievement. And there's well developed values literature. But we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can't get, I don't understand why the field won't accept that. Well, I give you an analogy. It's almost, I think it's analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers don't never use genes as a covariate.

It's like, well, things change. Once you start to include genes as a covariate. It's like, well, things change. Once you start to include genes as a covariate, then you find some of these effects drop away. And it's interesting. It's like, we don't even want to know the truth. And certain circumstances. You know, I've thought about that too. It's not surprising that people don't want

to know the truth about IQ, because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn, and that has walloping, economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that that's, I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but, you know, so for me, it's like IQ does the liberal

and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and, you know, get at it. And the liberals like to say, well, everybody can be trained to do everything. And both of those are wrong because there's a large number of people who are not, who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem. And we have no idea what to do with it. We won't even look at it. Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion if that's okay is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research,

I studied something called twice exceptionality. Actually, I edited a book called twice exceptionality, supporting bright and creative students with learning disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent, but sometimes because they're executive functions, like with ADHD, individuals, it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to what's missed. Absolutely fair enough. Look, there's as we already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory. And the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people who are measured, whose capacity is measured improperly

with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So, and other factors play an important role like conscientiousness, but it's only about, at least as far as we can measure it, and we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests. It adds about, it's only about a third is powerful, if that as IQ. This is how I put it. I say, look, it's only about a third is powerful, if that has IQ.

This is how I put it. I say, look, it's really hard to just get an extremely high IQ score by accident, but there's many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that I could have to do with error variance and other factors. But it's very hard. If you get 160 IQ genuinely, and honestly,

if you didn't cheat, it's hard to like, just accidentally stumble into those right answers. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah, that it's the low scores that contain the errors, and fair enough. And that should be attended to, not least, because we don't ever want to deny anybody with potential, the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from

the SATs, let's say, and because of their perceived and actual shortcomings, but my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out. So, okay, so, go ahead. Well, another reason why the topic is radioactive, of course, is because every time you talk about IQ differences, people, their head immediately goes to group differences. And I just wanna clarify,

we're talking about individual differences. That's what we've talked about so far. Do you know what I mean? And you can't automatically extrapolate. Even when I use the word genes, people are scared of the word genes. That should be the most uncontroversial thing in the world, the fact that individual to individual, our genes place some influence. We don't want an environmentally deterministic world that would be horrible. People don't really think that through. I just wanted to clarify, we're talking about this, you know,

individual, individual level. We're not talking, we're not extrapolating this to group differences. Well, we're also talking about it at a comparative level. It's like, well, the IQ testing process is imperfect. Right. Well, compared to what? Like, you have to come up with a better alternative.

You can't just say this isn't good enough. It's like compared to what? You have to come up with a better alternative. You can't just say this isn't good enough. It's like compared to what? We can't, we could assign people to universities randomly. And you could do this. Imagine that your first year students, anybody could attend first year classes. And then you used first year grades to decide who got to continue. You could see that you could make a coherent social policy based on that. That would give everyone a shot. And then it would allow those who succeeded in the actual enterprise to progress. Now it would be very expensive in the first year,

but that might be beneficial anyways to expose everyone to that kind of education. But you can't do that and continue up to the higher stratosphere of intellectual endeavor because the people who pursue that have to be able to do it. So, well, so we're stuck with it, but we won't have a serious discussion of it, and it's really unfortunate. I would say, well, on caveat, we found in our own paper that IQ was entirely uncorrelated with artistic creative achievement, and I've always been

kind of interested in what to do with that, because it just seems like openness to experience in some of these other cognitions. Like I stayed in push at learning and I found that was correlated with artistic achievement and reduced the latent inhibition. The great work you did with Shelley Carson, I replicated some of that.

So I think there's more of the story if we look at what field are we trying to predict? Yeah, well, the openness dimension is of extreme interest. And because there is something to the personality trait openness that seems to be related, as you pointed out, to creative achievement, but also to not even so necessarily so much artistic achievement, but even to enterprise

achievement, like entrepreneurial ability, we a step that I never published I used it privately. We found a pretty pronounced relationship between openness to experience and entrepreneurial ability practical entrepreneurial ability and as as you well know, that seems to have that openness seems to have something to do with perceptual differences. So open people are, they have, they seem to have a broader perceptual range, something like that. And they're more emotionally impacted by their perceptions too. They're more likely to experience awe. They're more likely to be compelled and gripped by ideas. They're more likely to be curious. They're more likely to engage in associative thinking.

So one concept will remind them of a range of distantly related concepts, more than someone who's more constrained thinking. They're more likely to have insight experiences. And there is something to that that's not purely reducible to IQ because you can be, you can have a high IQ and be non-creative. It's less likely., but not only that, but like, and this, this starting again to the transcend stuff, when you said the word all, A W E, then it starts to get into my newer research

because, you know, I can look, I can, I can pop up a data set right now and show you that IQ is correlated zero with the extent to which you're going to experience all in your daily life, but openness to experience is very strongly correlated with that. Right. And so what do you make of that? What do you think? What do you think about? We've had professional exchanges on this topic, but I haven't talked to you for years. So, where is your thinking gone with real in relationship to openness to experience? And you know it can be transformed by psilocybin mushroom experiences, right? Griffiths show that one standard deviation increase in openness one year later after one mystical

experience stunning, some profound neurological transformation. And Katharine McLean as well has showed that Roy Warg effects. I'm very, very interested in the linkage between openness to experience and self-transcendant experiences. It does seem like certain personality structures are more likely to experience absorption. So I think the major link there and probably our bridge here is the under-discussed topic in the public of, because people talk about flow, but telegens absorption construct is not the same thing as Mihai-Chik sent Mihai's flow construct. And I think that when we talk about opens to experience, I think it is quite linked to these altered states

of consciousness and susceptibility to even hypnotizability, you know? This kind of willingness to take a, take a take a dip your toe into the sea of madness, I would say. What do you suppose? So, do you suppose that the capacity to embody multiple personalities in some sense is the key aspect to openness? You know, because we're incredible mimics. And I want to talk to you

about the relationship between mimicry and awe because I think awe is the manifestation of the instinct to mimic. But I've watched creative people play music, for example. I remember one guitarist I was watching and he was jamming and he was very expert at it. And it was unbelievably interesting to watch and listen to him at the same time because you could see one second he'd be like a black female gospel singer from the 1930s, and the next second he'd be like Morrison from the Doors, and you could see all these musical influences that had inhabited him, and he was playing with them constantly, and it was like watching a shape shifter. And, you know, Our capacity for abstraction means that we can think up abstractions, which are representations of ourselves in some sense, and then assess their perceptions and their actions before

we implement them. And I wonder if open people are able to be more people in some sense. Because I've also known. I think so. You think you're something to that. I think there's a, I actually tested this hypothesis in the sense I look to see whether or not people who were scored higher in open to experience were more likely

to have unreliability in their big five character structure over time. Oh, that's it. Yeah, and I found that they did. They did. You found that. OK, so that means from moment to moment, their personality, and I found they did they did you found that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That means from from moment to moment their personality and over what span of time well over from month to month. I didn't do like Sam like experience sampling

which would be that'd be really cool, but just over a couple of months. Okay. So just to clarify that personality like IQ personality is quite stable across time. What you see across time is that people maintain their personality structures, but they become more agreeable, less neurotic, so less characterized by negative emotion, and more conscientious as they age. So those all seem like good things, hypothetically. But your point is that if you take people high in openness to experience, which is this creativity dimension, their personalities are less stable across time. I also wonder if that accounts to some degree for the oft remarked upon hypothetical association between creativity and instability, because imagine your high in openness and your high in neuroticism.

I mean, that's a problem because you have that personality variability that's an intrinsic part of you, but in some ways, that's going to be harder on you because that personality variability that's an intrinsic part of you, but in some ways that's going to be harder on you Because that variability is going to make things more unpredictable. I've had I've seen open people have a hard time catalyzing a single identity And so that can be hard on them This is I couldn't agree more with what you're saying and and I think that there's some really cool Things when you actually look at the interaction effects, you know, I think that there's some really cool things when you actually look at the interaction effects, you know, like that's what's really cool You know, especially what I guess I would call paradoxical traits, you know like you know because you look at the general correlational structure But then what if a person you know really bucks those general correlational structure trends? What's the word for that?

I've been trying to come up with like a term for. You know, most people who are conscientiousness, are conscientious, I guess, tend to be what, less what in the general population? Well, probably less neurotic, but what if you're high neurotic and you're high conscientious? That's just one example. But there are lots of these other kinds of paradoxical traits that I think are worth studying in more depth.

Mm-hmm. So those would be singular people in some sense. So, right, right. So high orderly, high openness would be an example of that too. What is that? Yeah, right. For instance, me, me, I score a Hitler. I think that's Hitler.

Oh, no, I was very eagerly and very eagerly. I wasn't gonna say, I'm not those traits, but here's something I am that's paradoxical. And maybe you are too. I don't know, I'd like to hear that. I score very high in autistic like trait scales, but I also score very high in schizotypy-like scales. So that's something that in the general population,

those are very strongly negatively correlated with each other, but how in the world am I high in both of those things? I think you might be high in both of those things too. You think that's mediated by openness? Maybe that's where it all comes down to. Is that that being yes? So I wonder, like I used to see my kid come home my son, when he was young, he'd come home after playing with kids,

and he would be inhabited by one of the kids' personalities. And often it was a bratty child. And so he'd come home with this whole bag of tricks. And it wasn't just one thing that he would experiment with. It was like he'd picked up the whole pattern of behavior from that play experience and then he'd come home and try out his new tricks. And I wonder, has anybody ever assessed to see if open people are better or faster mimics? Because absorption, imagine two things, okay. So imagine, of all that you have this capacity for awe. And so what that does, you meet someone who's very impressive.

And so there's an experience of awe that goes along with that. Now, you should mimic someone who's impressive because if your judgment of their impressiveness is accurate, then you could be more impressive if you were more like them. So imagine that there's an instinct towards awe-inspired imitation. Okay, now if you were also very high in absorption, you would get into that. And I think that's probably what's happening to open people in movies because they sink really

deeply into the movies. They're entranced by them or the fictional universe. And so they can become possessed by alternative personalities. And then, and that, and of course, that's what we want in actors, obviously, right? We want people who are possessed by alternative personalities to act them out for us. And there's no reason, because you see, one of the things psychologists don't study enough as far as I'm concerned is imitation. It's so fundamental. Well, here's a, here's a maybe a far out link. Do you think people who are higher in openness or more like could

it be ideologically possessed? Have you made that linkage? I mean, I don't know if there is something interesting there, but there might be. To the extent to which people who are higher in openness tend to be more likely to have contagion of other people's emotions and ideas, and maybe have, I mean, could that be possible? Well, I guess I'd think two things about that. If you're open, you're more easily possessed line of reasoning, which suggests that.

But if you're open, you're likely to blow through arbitrary cognitive barriers would act negatively towards that. So maybe what you might see is that who the hell knows that high openness teenagers are likely to be ideologically possessed, but to not be later. Right? So maybe. Yeah, yeah, because the mechanism would lead them to that in the in the early development, but it would lead them out of that as they matured. And moderator, and maybe IQ is a moderator of all this. Maybe going full circle. Yeah, well, that's a tough one too, because you know, I suspect that I would suspect again that in adolescence, higher IQ would be a predictor of more ideological possession.

Well, imagine that you have to be relatively smart to be interested in political issues or political abstractions. So it's a precondition. And then when you first start being interested, well, you're not going to be very sophisticated. So an ideology is likely what you're going to adopt. Well, maybe it's the intellect facet, you know, because open is to experience your pie, you pioneered this work, which I carried forward in my graduate work. There's an important distinction of, at the aspect level, between intellectual curiosity and openness to experience more having to do with the actual experiential aspect of it. And so maybe the intellectual curiosity part is a modifier there there even more so than IQ.

Right. Right. Well, I mean, all we found so far in our investigations of openness and political view is that it's a definitely, and it is an only our lab, obviously, and we didn't originate this idea for that matter. Openness is definitely a predictor of liberal and left-leaning political proclivity. That's clear. And that goes along with a comparative interest in fiction, say, versus nonfiction,

and it's definitely temperamental. And I've been thinking, tell me what you think about this. So, you know that openness and conscientiousness are the best two predictors of political belief. Okay, so then you might ask, and this goes along with your interest in interactions, is why the hell is it openness and conscientiousness, relatively uncorrelated traits? You know, why isn't it openness and neuroticism or or or or extroversion and agreeableness? Why those two? Why political? And so I've been thinking, I think it has to do with borders. And I've been influenced in my thinking by all the new literature on the relationship between contagious disease

and political belief. So there's a huge literature. This is the only literature I've ever seen that has effect sizes approximating those of IQ. So if you measure the prevalence of infectious disease at the city, state, provincial or country level, you find that there's a walloping correlation with authoritarian attitudes, like 0.7. It's ridiculous. It's massive. And there's some association there with disgust sensitivity, although that hasn't been completely pulled out yet. So imagine this is imagine that the open types, so the liberal types, they want the free flow of information. So they don't like barriers, they don't like borders between anything. They don't like borders between concepts, they don't like borders between genders, they

don't like borders, because it interferes with the free flow of information. But the cost of the free flow, borderless free flow, is contamination. And so, and they're both right. You open the borders, well look what happened last year, international society, so we have an international pandemic. So you open up the doors to information flow, you also open up the doors to contamination.

And I would say that's true biologically and ideationally as well. So the analogy holds, so that's why those two things combined to determine political belief because political belief is about borders fundamentally. But the one thing I don't understand about that is that neuroticism is pretty strongly correlated with disgust sensitivity or even the kind of thing you're referring to. So why is neuroticism not, you know, because you said openness and content? We kind of thought, we kind of thought, and some of my theoretical work led me to presume that more conservative types or more ideologically possessed types, it wasn't clear which would be more neurotic, but they're not. If anything, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals

at a trade level. And it's a complex literature because there is some literature showing that conservatives are more sensitive under some conditions to some kinds of negative emotion. You know, and then you can generate up a defense theory of conservative ideology. But it doesn't look to me like it's fear related because it doesn't manifest itself in neuroticism at all, and it should, if that theory was correct, there's something about discussed that's crucial that has been understudy so far, but that's changing. at the aspect level analysis of these things. So the overall agreeableness to mean is not a player,

but once you look at the aspect level, you find that the diverge politeness is higher among conservatives and compassion is higher among liberals. I should just point out for everyone that's listening is that work done in my lab by Colin D. Young, particularly we show that you could break the big five down into 10 aspects, we called them. So you get some

additional predictive utility, sometimes if you use the more differentiated scales. And we did investigate as as Dr. Kaufman just mentioned, we did investigate the effects of that on political belief. And we did find, as you said, that conservatives are more polite, and that liberals are more empathetic or more agreeable. And we don't know what to make of that partly because we don't really understand politeness exactly. It has something to do with, it's something related to deference to authority, politeness. But it manifest like one of the best respect, respect for authority. It seems a little bit different than deference. It could could be

respect. Sure. Sure. And but then you it's complicated because conscientiousness is also associated, I would say, to some degree with respect for authority, right? And so what's the difference? What is politeness adding that

conscientiousness doesn't already cover? So it's a great question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was really excited by the political research, partly, that was done in my lab, but also elsewhere, because it's really, it's quite revolutionary, I think, to think through the implications of the fact

that your political viewpoints are determined by your temperament. Because what it means is that your biology in large part has provided you with a filter for the facts, right? So we like to think, well, you derive your rational conclusions from the set of facts that you're exposed to, but unfortunately, you have to choose the facts because there's just too many of them. And so temperament is playing a major role in determining what you expose yourself to. We found that with fiction preference, for example, is like open people are much more likely

to read fiction and fiction of certain sorts. And so the differences start with the information gathering process itself. Is that what the work with the Mara? Yeah. Yeah, I loved that. I loved that work so much, by the way. We had a hell of a time getting that stuff published, although it's it's crazy. No, when you publish what's going to be published and what's going to have an impact, you certainly can't predict it. But yes, that that all worked out quite well.

So, okay, so back to let's go back to the, if certainly can't predict it. But yes, that that all worked out quite well. So okay, so back to let's go back to the if you don't mind unless you want to take this somewhere else. Let's go back to the humanism issue. Okay, let's just central to your new book. So you got it, you got interested in what what was it about the humanist define it and then tell me what it was that captured your attention. So it was in particular, it was humanistic psychology and I actually distinguished that from the humanism movement that maybe you know, like that's more a philosophical movement. The humanistic psychology movement was in the 50s and 60s a cadet of psychologists who were unconvinced that we were telling the full story about humanity and humans through the Freud approach

or the behaviorism approach. They felt like we were neglecting higher principles. They felt like we were neglecting the investigation of the whole person as a system. Right, Freud focused a lot as an MD on psychopathology, on mental illness. Exactly. And the behaviorists took everything that was related to consciousness and subjective experience, It focused a lot as an MD on psychopathology, on mental illness. Exactly.

And the behaviorists took everything that was related to consciousness and subjective experience completely off the table. And we should part out that that had utility. Both those movements had tremendous utility, but there was this lacuna, let's say, that the existentialists addressed in the 50s, the existential side of it, just and then the humanists in the 60s. By the way, I loved your lecture about Carl Rogers and the phenomenology approach.

So that was really cool. I liked that. Yeah, so in a big way, there was still a respect for those prior approaches. They weren't saying they were a complete shit. Like Abraham Maslow did really rigorous, great work in grad school and rats, you know, you're looking at reaction time tasks, but he got bored with it and he felt that there was more

to the story of humanity. So I guess what really captured my interest is this notion of studying the whole system, the whole person and how all the parts work together. I think that we both agree in our philosophy that nothing is actually objective or absolutely good or bad. No psychological trait. It depends how it's integrated into the system. You know, this is why I don't, I'm critical of the distinction between positive and negative emotions. Like we can absolutely classify which emotions are positive and absolutely classify which ones are negative. As opposed to just, we have comfortable emotions, you have uncomfortable emotions. I mean, you can have the experience,

but then we put the label on top of the experience. You've said, you've had some good lectures about the potential benefits of integrating your anger or integrating, I mean, anything you integrate in a healthy way into the whole system can be beneficial. You know, that has the potential. That's the crucial issue there, right? Yeah. It's the crucial issue that the existentialists in a healthy way into the whole system can be beneficial. You know, it has the potential. That's the crucial issue there, right? Yeah. It's the crucial issue that the existentialists and the humanists and Jung as well,

as far as I'm concerned, concentrated on, which is, well, when you're talking about integration, let's say, and so the psychoanalyst, a psychoanelitic approach, even Freudian approach would be to uncover something repressed and to bring it into the whole personality. Well, what exactly do you mean by the whole personality and what do you mean by integrated? And so the humanists, for me, the humanists were the entry point to the answer to that

question. Absolutely. And so, okay, so you're updating Maslow with this new book. And so, walk us through. In one way, I'm updating Maslow, but in another way, I'm actually setting the record straight about Maslow because there's so many misconceptions and things he never even said. So, first of all, he never drew a pyramid. There is, in none of his papers, did he ever draw a pyramid

to represent his hierarchy of needs. He didn't even really think of it in that way. In fact, I was talking to someone who knew him personally, and there's a story where he was having lunch with him, and he saw on the dollar bill, or I think it's the dollar bill where there's a pyramid. He looked at me and he said, I hate that fucking pyramid. So look, he didn't like, that's not how he thought about. He actually says in his writings, he said, I would like to present my integrated hierarchy of human needs. And he, he was very clear to call it integrated. He, he said

it's, it's every single need rests very carefully upon the lower need. But just because life is not like a video game where you reach one level of needs and then like some voice from above is like congrats. You even walked to the next level and then you never go back to the prior level. Integration fundamentally means that every single higher need depends on the lower need that came before. It depends on in a very important way. They get dismissed by the way it's often represented in moderns, even psychology textbooks. I really think we need to update the psychology textbooks about this. Yeah, well, lots of great thinkers are poorly represented

by their lower resolution representation. I mean, Piaget, John Piaget, the developmental psychologist, who's basically taught as a stage theorist, which was a tiny fraction of what he did. And certainly not the most important thing, he was fundamentally interested in reconciling the distinction between religion and science. And I never heard Heidner hear of that till I started reading Piaget, well, the translations I couldn't read it in the French original. So, you know, the ideas of creative geniuses are filtered through the through lesser minds when they're taught and much of what's complex and interesting

disappears and what's simplified is what remains say La Vie. So, do you want to walk us through a bit the theory and then what you've done with it and what what it's done for you and what you think it can do for other people? Absolutely. And I'll also bring in how some of your own work influenced it. So, okay, so the hierarchy of needs as as Mazzo originally proposes that we have a hierarchy of prepotency and that's the word he used, prepotency, various motivations that given certain deprivations calls our entire consciousness to be very narrowed down to those to pay attention to this thing. So if we severely lack food, our consciousness sees everything as a potential source of food.

If we severely are deficient with our connections and belonging, he says we show a very kind of needing love. So everyone looks like, everyone's utility value is to satisfy this whole in ourselves of connection of our loneliness. Same with self-esteem needs. If we're severely deprived of any opportunities for mastery or esteem from others, we become very needy and demand-respect. But he argued that the deprivation realm of human existence can be distinguished from the being realm of human existence. He said, once we can, it's like putting on a clear set of glasses for the first time when you've only been seeing very very unclear glasses. And when you put on the clear glasses and you enter the being realm or the growth realm

of human existence, you no longer demand for the world to conform to your deprivations, you start to see the world on its own terms. You start to see the world. And even dare I say admire, and this is where transcendence starts to come into play. Admire and love people for who they are independently of you, independently of their utility value for your own deprivations. So to me, I thought that was the most important distinction in Maslow's theory that had been lost.

Okay, so let me ask you a question there. So there's two distinctions that are being made, and they seem to be conflated to some degree in Maslow, but maybe that's a misunderstanding on my part. There's an implication at least that the higher the more transcendent values or perceptions make themselves manifest once the deprivation states have been taken care of. That's sort of the high. But then, but there's a conceptual distinction that's equally important, which is that there are deprivation-motivated perceptions, motivations and actions, but there's another class as well,

and those should be separated. And I have more trouble with the first presumption than the second, because, well, when I was thinking through Maslow, for example, in the courses I've taught on existentialism and humanism, Solzhenitsyn talked, who's a great existential psychologist, as far as I'm concerned, and talk, who's a great existential psychologist as far as I'm concerned, talked about people who were in the prison camps in Russia, who were starving and deprived in multiple different ways. And Frankl did the same thing with regards to the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. And he describes in painful story after story, people turning to what Maslow would consider being needs in the midst of severe deprivation and finding sustenance and profound sustenance there.

So he talked, for example, about a group of intellectuals who were starving to death in a work camp, who had a weekly seminar where they discussed their specific academic specializations and, you know, which shrunk over time as each of them died of malnutrition. But and so is it and produce is a very powerful critique of the idea that the being realm, let's say in Maslow's terms, can only be accessed once the deprivation realm has been taken care of.

And well, I found that in interesting argument to say the least. And it's very interesting, but I would modify and say, at least, you know, this is where maybe what Maslow said and what Scott Barry Kaufman is saying might start to diverge because what I try to argue in this book is that it's all about how those deprivations are integrated, not the fact that they're gone.

So for instance, in my chapter on purpose, I cover what I call the Hitler problem. And that's the very, I think a reasonable question, did Hitler have a higher purpose? And what would that even mean in the whole hierarchy of needs model, considering that I put purpose as a higher need in the growth realm? Or am I saying that Hitler entered the being the growth realm?

And the way I resolved that is that I argued that some of the most pro-social or most positive aspects of manifestations of the higher need of purpose occur when one's sufferings are integrated into one's higher order structure, but it's not the only thing that's driving their whole system. So I just really do like viewing this from a whole system perspective, because once you can integrate kind of this suffering you had and the anger you have for the suffering, but you integrate that with this need for exploration as I talk about as a growth need, as well as, um, be love, which is a mazo called a be love, love for the, just like humanitarian sort of concern or as, um, Alfred Adler called it a good shuup on the

Freud. I can never pronounce the word, but you know, social interest. If, once we have a higher level integration of all these things, I think you get something much better as the sum of the parts than any of the parts themselves. Does that make sense? Yes, well, and we can also walk through this argument in some more detail. I mean, it's obviously the case that deprivation can reach a point where nothing but the deprivation is salient. I mean, if you're in enough pain, for example, if you're hungry enough, etc., etc. So there's limit conditions that make up these deprivation states that skew everything. If you're dying of thirst,

for example, you're not going to, in all likelihood, engage in a philosophical conversation, right? So at some point, deprivation takes the reins completely. But then there's, that one of the dangers in, in Maslow's approach, as far as I was concerned, and this is partly why the writings of Theodore Dell Ripple have been so interesting to me, because Dell Ripple talks, he worked a lot in really, in the, what would you say, the disp, he worked a lot along, among the dispossessed class in inner city, uh, brit, british cities, in the, in the, in the innermost confines of, of british cities. And he described a culture of, of poverty that characterized the, the dispossessed.

And they weren't poor so much. If you thought about poverty in terms of absolute deprivation. So he had worked in Africa as well among people who were by any reasonable standard much more materially deprived than the members of the population. He was addressing in psychiatric practice, but he, his fundamental diagnosis was that the multi-generational poverty, cycle, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, anti-social behavior that he saw was a consequence of a profound philosophical disequilibrium that was the primary agent that was driving all this rather than something that could be addressed, for example, by attending by social attention being paid, say, to, you know, like a guaranteed basic income or something like that. And so there are, I mean, getting this straight is really of crucial importance, and it is really complicated. So, and Maslow always felt to me, look, I learned a lot from the humanists, and I would say they were an entry point to me

into the domain of practical, philosophical, slash religious thinking. The humanists offered within the field of psychology, spirituality for people, for atheists. That's what it looked like to me. And I'm not denigrating that. I say that with all due respect. And they did introduce spirituality,

let's say, back into the scientific community among psychologists. So that was extremely attractive to me. And... Well, let me tell you how I tested my model, I think, carefully, because I published a paper where I attempted to integrate this theory into

modern-day personality psychology. And this is where you come in quite frankly and your own ideas and work. So I had a hypothesis, which Colin thought was a good hypothesis, and then I should run with it, that the deprivation and being realm that Maslow talked about would map on to stability and plasticity in the big five that these two higher order factors of the big... And I found that to be the case. I actually developed and validated a psychometric scale of all the self-actualization characteristics that Maslow wrote about.

And I found that I could validate 10 out of the 17 that he mentioned, and that the 10 were just really strongly, positively correlated with plasticity and uh... Okay, so let's take that apart for sec for everyone. So, work done in my lab again by calling D Young and other people had looked at two factor solutions too, but we showed that agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness, neuroticism reversed, and conscientiousness together seemed to make a superfactor so they were somewhat correlated and so did extroversion and openness, and Colin in particular has gone off and developed all of that into a theory with neuroscientific underpinnings.

And he started doing that at the University of Toronto was continued for the last, it's got to be near 20 years. And so we found stability, we called the super factor stability and plasticity for a variety of reasons. But and so you just said that you mapped stability onto the deprivation realm and plasticity into the being realm. The being realm. And I think that that's how that's my modern day flavor on this like integrating it with personality psychology because at the end of the day

I'm really an individual difference. That's my focus is individual differences cognitive science and personality. And I think that the optimal and what I argued in this paper is that the optimal cybernetic system is one that has a deep integration of both stability and plasticity. Right. So it really isn't an either or question. It's a matter of, do you have the skills that allow you to resist distractions against your high or goals, and do you have the flexibility to change course when it's no longer serving those higher goals? And that's how I tried to integrate Maslow's theory with modern day cybernetic and personality

theory. So I've been, you tell me what you think about this. I've been working on the presupposition that that balance is it manifests itself as something that's analogous to Chick-Sent, Mahalese flow, although I think it's more like it's active engagement and a mersement. You experience that when you're having a good conversation, let's say, and you're not attending to anything, but the ideas that are being bandied back and forth, you're not aware of the broader context, you're not aware of the flow of time, you're focused and engaged and interested in what's happening.

And that happens as far as I'm concerned when optimal information flow has been established. So you want to maintain the integrity of your current perceptual frameworks, essentially your current interpretual frameworks, essentially your current interpretive frameworks, you don't want them to fall apart, but because they're limited, because you're limited, they have to continually transform at some rate and expand. So as you become more competent and as the world changes around you, so it seems to me that the instinct of meaning is the manifestation of an internal signal that you've optimized information flow for your particular nervous system. So you're not getting more information than you can stand. So it's not knocking you into uncertainty related anxiety.

But you are incorporating information at a rate that's optimal with regards to your continued adaptation and growth. Well, I love that. I absolutely love that. I think that manifests itself as the sense of meaning. And I think that's what music produces. It's an annal, when you listen to music and you're deeply engaged, you get an analog of that.

And it's like a model. It's like this is what your life could be like, this musical beauty, if you were in the right place at the right time, all the time, which is what you should, should, should, could strive to attain. And there's something that never runs out about that idea. I would love that and just add, is it worth distinguishing between the kind of meaning that is a pre-wired, you know, programmed through the course of human evolution that are universal forms of meaning that all of us would agree, give us meaning versus individualistic forms of meaning that maybe touch more of our unique traits and.

Well, I would say that's probably a matter of level of integration, which is that the more universal the trait, the meaning experience is, the more it's related to an emergent integration. So, so, you know, I like that. As you, as you already pointed out, we all differ in our temperaments, and quite substantively. And so there are going to be things that we find particularly interesting that other people won't find interesting. That might determine something like the choice of our careers. It's not trivial these differences there. But as you integrate, it makes sense

that as you integrate, the thing that's integrated becomes more similar across diverse places. I mean, how could it be otherwise? And that's where I think you get into the realm of universal human values. And I think they are their emergent properties of reciprocal games, something like that. And so let me tell you something interesting. You tell me what you think about this. So, you know, I've been very, what would you say, opposed to the idea that the typical hierarchical social structure is based on power. You know, there's a political argument going on everywhere now. And at the extremes, the claim is something like, well, hierarchical structures that characterize the West, that characterize capitalism, or maybe that just characterize the West in general

are based on power. Okay, so first, I talked to Richard Tromblie this week, who's one of the world's leading authority on the development of aggression in human beings. Okay, so what he showed quite clearly is that aggression is there right at the beginning. So it's one of these built-in motivational systems that you already talked about. The most aggressive age is two.

If you group two year olds together, the probability of kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing is higher than it is if you group any other age together. And that declines precipitously with socialization. Okay, so the general trend is from aggression to less aggression. And then you can differentiate the aggressive kids into three groups, the two-year-olds into three groups. Those who are never aggressive even at two, 30% of the human population, those who are aggressive sporadically, 50%, and

17% who are chronically aggressive. It's from that category, if those kids aren't socialized into peace over the course of their developmental history, most particularly by the age of four, they're the long-term permanent offenders. Okay, so but what's interesting about this and crucial, I believe, is that the developmental trend for negotiating success in human hierarchies. And it's more like, it's more something like reciprocity. And we need to recognize that because it really is the case that you're much more likely to be successful if you're productive and reciprocal. And I think that's an emergent,

that emerges out of hierarchical organization. And I think it's the same across cultures, you know, with variation, but that's an emerging, that emerges out of hierarchical organization. And I think it's the same across cultures, you know, with variation, but that's a universal human truth. And I think we're adapted to it. And we recognize that in others when we see it. And that produces awe when we really see it. That person's hyper productive, they're hyper generous. I want to be like that person. So competent and relational, will those be synonyms for those two words as well? Yeah, absolutely. It's competent and generous. What a combination. And you know,

the thing about generosity is that it allows competent people to store the fruits of their labor. Right? I mean, if you and I collaborate and I'm generous in our collaboration, then you're going to collaborate with me again, maybe sometime down the road when I really need it. And vice versa. You know, when I was struck, I talked to Jocco Willink two weeks ago and Jocco's this like hypermasculine warrior type of character, you know, he's Navy SEAL and I'm very intimidating physically, unpsychologically. And he told me in the Naval Seal training, for example, the primary dictum is, you have your buddies back.

It isn't biggest, meanest, ape wins. And that doesn't even work for chimpanzees, as friends, to all is shown. So there is an ethic, man. And one of the things I liked about the humanists and about your book is that, you know, you're pointing out that there is this integrative tendency that is associated with values

and that there's something universal about it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. And if I may go to a territory that may seem completely unrelated, but I don't think it is, I wrote a book called Meeting Intelligence Unleashed that co-authored with an evolutionary psychologist, Glenn Gehr. But we found that the male,

the male that was most attractive to women was the tender defender. And I feel like you're kind of describing a tender defender. I really want to talk to you about that. So, okay, so I've, I've been involved in an email exchange with Richard Dawkins. And I asked him to come on my podcast. He wrote back very politely and in a detailed letter, pointing out why I wanted to talk to him,

which was very surprising to me. I said I wanted to talk to him about sex selection, particularly. And then he identified a paragraph from a talk I did with Sam Harris that nailed exactly why I wanted to talk with Dawkins. Okay, so Dawkins is the blind watchmaker guy, right? And he's anti-teleological to the core and also anti-religious, etc. And people know about Dawkins and Dawkins as an admirable person intellectually. But the evolutionary psychologists are not taking the issue of sexual selection seriously enough in relationship to value.

So let's take what you just said. All right, so imagine this. You tell me if you think this is wrong because I really want to know if it's wrong. Men, women do this too, but we're going to sex differentiate for the time being. Men organize hierarchies around tasks. They want to get something done. Okay, and it's something that everyone in the group wants to get done. And so as soon as they aggregate themselves towards the task, a hierarchy of competency emerges because there's individual differences. And if the group's functional, they let the guys who are better at the task rise to the top. Okay, now imagine that across tasks, there's a proclivity for some men to rise and others

not to. And those would be men who are competent and generous across tasks. And so they're more likely to emerge as successful in the domain of task-related hierarchies. All right. Now, we know that women are what's the word they made across an up hierarchies. It's one of the relational. Yes, there there. Men made across and down hierarchies women made across an up and that's obvious. women mate across and up. And that's obvious. Cross culturally. It's ameliorated to some degree in countries like the Scandinavian countries, but it's there across culturally. They like men who are a bit older and they like men who are a bit above them in the hierarchical game, let's say.

Men vote on who the most valid man is and women peel from the top. And that value game drives evolution. It's not random. It's not random at all. And so that's, you said, tender defender. And I do think that's generous productivity. And so we're selected for that. And sexual selection specifies that even more completely

and intensely, intensely. So men can gain that by displaying trappings of wealth and like the pickup artists types, they mimic tender defender. And they can fool women that way. But women, you know, by and large, are looking for cues for exactly that, competence and the capacity to protect, the ability to protect. that way, but women, you know, by and large are looking for cues for, for exactly that competence

and the capacity to protect the ability to protect. Why out? What else would you want for your children? You know, you, yeah, I mean, what you're saying, Link, so much as a hobby is handicap principle in evolutionary psychology, you know, that you need honest, reliable signals. reliable signals. Like women are pretty smart at seeing bullshit. You know, like, yeah. Well, they're the survival of their children depends on it. That's why. They're extremely smart at it as they should be. And like, I don't, I don't believe that it's a misreading of the evolutionary literature to point out that one of the reasons that we have diverged so rapidly from our common ancestor with chimps, chimps seem much more similar to that common ancestor than we are, is because

chimped females are non-selective maters, whereas human females are highly selective maters. This manifests itself, and if you look at these charts, they're quite comical in some sense. If you look at how men rate women on a typical dating site, it's pretty much a normal distribution. The average woman gets an average rating and, you know, the nine out of 10 gets a nine and and and so forth. It's distributed as you would expect, but it skewed way to the left for men. Like 60% of men are like a four or lower. And so even in just instantaneous ratings of attractiveness, there's exactly sex differences. So you put it what you put it very well though when you said it our survival or species literally depends on it. I love it. I just want to double click on that.

Okay, so then the question is, and this ties into this humanist idea. What is it that we're aiming at? Well, part of that is, well, what are the elements that make up competence and generosity? Well, we know what competence is made out of IQ and conscientiousness. That's a huge chunk of it. So in general problem solving capability, that's IQ. Consciousness is diligent application of that. Okay. So then you pair that with generosity and openness to experience. Yes. Well, there'd be there'd be a niche there. Because that's

where you get creative types and they can be radically I think of creativity as a high-risk high-return game. You're highly likely to fail But I'm just linking that to Jeffrey Miller's Hypothesis about creativity being a reliable indicator of genetic mutation load Which is why it would be so sexy? You know from from the selector point of view. Oh, you'd have to elaborate out that a bit because this this is also the case for Like all sorts of other species, right? Do you bow or birds for example exactly and even fish for God's sake? There's have you ever seen those sculptures that puffer fish make at the bottom of the ocean?

It's incredible. It's very aesthetic and they're beautiful and they're complicated and they take a lot of work It's like Birds select highly for creativity in many cases. And so you see this, you see this emerge out of evolutionary process and species that are quite distant from ours. It points to something underneath that's common, you know, even that's common across creative fish and creative people. It's quite the damn gap. Well, this goes back to like a lot of things we're saying, because human intelligence, human creativity is so complex.

It's very hard to fake. It goes back to the way I said earlier, you can't just accidentally get a 170 IQ, even there's lots of reasons why maybe it missed a lower IQ as representing your IQ. But this does relate to the fact that reliable indicators of these things are important from a sexual selection point of view as well as other points of Well, that's crucial, you know, because the blind watchmaker types they say well evolution is just a random process and there's unfortunate political Imple and philosophical implications that instantly emerge from that everything's bloody pointless. There's no direction There's no such thing as real value. It's like wait a sec, wait a sec. There's random mutation on the creativity production side. So the life capitalizes on chance as an extra domain of creative production. Just, and you see that in

creative thought in people too, because there's a kind of a randomness about creative thinking. You open up the gates and let ideas mate, promiscuously, let's say. But there's no reason to assume whatsoever that the selection mechanism is random, especially when you add in sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce consciousness, I think you introduce sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce sexual selection, you introduce directionality and so much for randomness. You can't derive. So the, the people that, that processes that make the watch might be random, although, you know, what's happening down at the genetic level is pretty damn complex and even bacteria exchange DNA with each other. So there's a plenty of play down at the genetic level

as well as room for mutation. But once you get up to the selection level, to me, conscious choice is the fundamental determinant of evolutionary progress. And I can't and look, even Darwin, because Darwin was a genius, he stressed sexual selection much as natural selection, but biologists for 100 years never paid any attention to that. And no wonder he liked its revolutionary. To be fair, I do think Jeffrey Miller,

to be for Jeffrey Miller, I think he did a good job in his book The Meeting Mind, kind of bringing to consciousness of the fact that creativity of may have evolved due to sexual selection processes, you know, itself. And as well as human consciousness itself may have evolved due to sexual selection. Look, I mean, look, plenty of biologists have been assessing sexual selection in the last 30 years, but it was it was under stress to a huge degree for a long, long time. And it is a game changer because sexual selection among human beings, I think, is more important determinant of successful reproduction than natural selection. I mean, they're the same at some level. Women are acting as the gatekeepers, and so they are natural selection, in some sense.

But how can you deny the role of conscious directionality in that? And I don't see flaws in my reasoning. I mean, it is the case that men arrange hierarchies around competence and generosity. Fundamentally, it's not power. Even bloody chimps don't use power. You know, they baboons. There are a bit of a different story, but power is too unstable. And so, and I think it's of advantage to men to elect men, even though that gives some men a wider range of mating

opportunities, because the net benefit of enhanced productivity, especially when coupled with generosity, is so high that the downside of the hierarchical ranking is trivial in comparison. You want the best warrior leading your rating party, obviously. I mean, we want the best person in power, whether it's a man or woman, right? I mean, we obviously want a really competent woman in power as well. Of course.

And men select competence in women too, but there's differential selection to some degree, because men will mate across and down, whereas women mate across and up. So the men aren't putting the same selection pressure on those attributes of femininity that women are putting on men. Men put their own attributes on. I'm not saying, like youth, for example, is a tremendous determinant. I think you're saying a lot of really stimulating things.

I'm trying to wonder, is there a second to be like, do you think, no, I mean, you're stimulating my head in a million directions, but do you think that there's a sex difference in that, do you think men are more likely to abuse positions of power when they're in power as opposed to women? Has that ever been still needed? I think there's actually data showing the reverse.

Very interesting. I'm curious to see data on that. Yeah, unfortunately, and I don't have this at hand, there isn't research going on into Machiavellianism among status achieving women. And some of that's done at UBC. And I can't give you the details because I just came across it.

I'm just running it, you know, I'm just starting to process it. But no, I don't think men are more likely to use power. I also think it's also mostly as a general rule, it's really counterproductive. I want to ask you something too. You tell me what you think about this. So in terms of deep pleasure that's associated counterproductive. I want to ask you something to you, tell me what you think about this. So, in terms of deep pleasure that's associated with higher order values,

one of the things that I've noticed about extremely competent people in positions of authority and productivity is the delight that they take in mentoring. and productivity is the delight that they take in mentoring. And I don't know what it's like in your personal experience, but my experience is being that there isn't anything that's more rewarding than that. All things considered. Do you think that's right? Well, think about what that means for the emergence of value, you know, as a biological idea.

If there's something unbelievably pleasurable about finding someone competent and of high moral caliber, let's say, and opening doors to them and then watching them progress. You know, Jordan, that gets to the heart of my whole project of this book of Transite is. That's why I'm bringing it up. That's it. That's it. Is I want people to, you know, I want to be able to spot the potential in people that they don't even see in themselves. To me, that's special. Right. You know, I agree. I agree. I don't think there's anything more. Look, I was talking to this kid. It was 27. He interviewed me a couple

of days ago. And he was this, he worked in nightclubs for years. He's an attractive guy, a charismatic guy. And so, you know, from the perspective of young men who aren't successful in their life, he was doing just fine because he was charismatic and attractive and he had a whole nightclub life thing going. And so he'd kind of mastered that. But he started a podcast and started to pay very careful attention to what he was saying. And it's a human development podcast. And now he's getting letters from people who are saying,

man, you know, you're really helping me out. It's really making a difference to my life. And he told me that successful as he was in his sort of man about town persona and everything that granted him, it was nothing at all compared to the intrinsic pleasure that he experiences when someone tells him that. And I think that's right. And that's, you think there's almost nothing more antithetical to a power philosophy than that. It's like, no, than that. It's like, no, the pleasure and domination, which is resentful and bitter and cruel and short-lived and counterproductive, that's nothing compared to the pleasure that you take if you have

any sense in finding someone with some possibility and opening doors for them. They're not even in the same universe. I'm going to go further and say not just pleasure, but what greater source of meaning in one's life? Yes, could, could so and have meaning the pleasure secondary, but the meaning is so deep that it is pleasure is an epic phenomenon. Yeah. So yes, I mean, I see that in your book. I know what you're up to, you know, I mean, you're, you're trying to at like the humanists in general. And I found them extremely helpful. Rogers was reading.

Rogers was very useful to me in Maslow as well. It's like there's something within you that needs to be developed that's of great benefit to you and to everyone else simultaneously. I liked Jung in the final analysis. I thought I put him at the top of the panoply of psychologist of this type, because him at the top of the panoply of psychologist of this type because he took the study of transcendence into the religious domain and

That seemed to me while I found much much a much deeper Comprehension of of its limits as a consequence of reading you I try to get there. I try to get there in this book to the spiritual level of transcendence, but I felt like I could only get there after very carefully in an integration way, put all the other pieces in place because I think there's a lot of pseudo spirituality that you see these days, a lot of spiritual transcendence, where it's transcendence built on a faulty foundation of basic needs and actually being driven by deprivation needs, like the need for a steam, for instance. You'll see a lot of these gurus who really, it's there.

I'm gonna say that with ideology too. You know what I mean? Yes, driven by unrecognized deprivation. I see a lot of unresolved Freudian familial psychopathology driving a dealogitism. I mean, the idea, for example, that the patriarchy is authoritarian and fundamentally based on power. It's like, well, how is your relationship with your father just out of curiosity?

Oh, my God. Have you ever had a positive relationship with any man in your entire life, whether you're a man or a woman? It doesn't really. Have you asked that question? Have you asked all of my questions? Well, it's not a good way to make friends, Jordan. Well, generally, don't hit people with questions like that if I see it.

I know because it's instantaneous surgery if you're accurate. And it's not. So you don't, I don't do that, but I see. I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it. No, no, but it's definitely worth, you know, true consideration because you've got to ask yourself, well, why would you reduce your political theorizing to that particular unidimensional proposition?

And for me, that, well, this is again, what partly why I like like your book, and this line of work in general, is like, no, no, you don't understand, is that functional human organizations are actually predicated on, they work way better for everyone if they encourage the manifestation of the highest possible human values. And my experience in both in the academic world and in the corporate world is that companies that abide by those universal principles do much, much better in every possible way. And that doesn't mean that, you know, I think when structures deteriorate, they become dominated by people who play power games, that happens all the time. We have to be awake to that. It happens all the time.

But that doesn't mean that functional hierarchies have that structure. And I agree, and I'm really deeply concerned about that. That's another topic. I mean, I feel like we're trying, we're actually in real time integrating about 40 different threads. But I think that is the power games going on in society right now, something deeply, deeply concerns me. I feel like even, I think I feel like I've learned in the past couple of years that I'm too naive as a human and I've been trying to actually improve that because I tend to treat everyone I meet in good faith. I mean, I don't care who you are. Like, let's talk.

That can be courage, you know, like, because say it's naive to begin with, and then you get walloped and you're no longer naiv, but then you get cynical and bitter. And that's actually improvement. But then you think, no, no cynicism, no bitterness. I'm going to open myself up again and take the goddamn hits. And that's courage. I feel like that's where I'm at right now, actually. I feel like that's where I'm at right now. It's been a real transformation for me a real real Yeah, it's been a growth journey. So what did you see? Okay, you said naivety So what have you why didn't I know I didn't know that that sometimes because I'm a caring person and I'm empathetic so

Some people I've started noticing that I would say things like I would say research findings or things that I just am curious, just purely curious about. And people would say, you know, that hurts. Like, you shouldn't talk about that stuff or do you know that some of this can cause damage to minority populations, et cetera. And I'm a caring person, so that really kits me in the gut, because the last thing I want to do is hurt a minority. I mean, I don't want to hurt a minority anyone.

But then I started to realize, in some instances, definitely not all, obviously. But in some instances, there was a power game being played that was outside of my level of comprehension or outside my level of understanding that wasn't personal against me, but actually there's just something being played out where if you have a certain ideology, there are certain terms, buzzwords and things that you just, you just, that they're just off limits from even bringing into a discussion. And I may have inadvertently sometimes like, it's like

I inadvertently tripwire things sometimes that are outside of my level. So many tripwires that you, yeah, the game that people who are playing that game is playing are playing is the laying of unavoidable tripwires. Because it's a dominance game. And all I have to do is put enough tripwires around you and you will definitely stumble across one of them. But how is a caring person supposed to navigate trip wires? Like, give advice for that? How is a caring compassionate human being possibly supposed to navigate trip wires? I should say a compassionate person who also has come into the truth.

That's what I should say. How in the world do we navigate the trip wires? You try to say things that you believe are true. And you take the consequences. You know, when you do it carefully and you pay attention, you pay attention, but I would say more importantly, look, you, you have this podcast and I have a podcast and we're both educators and in a, in a broad sense. And I believe that that's our ethical responsibility given our training and,

and our, now our reach. It's like, well, the way I navigate that that's our ethical responsibility given our training and our now our reach. It's like, well, the way I navigate that landscape is I have conversations like this. They're better. And that's what we've got. When you're trying to diminish malevolence, let's say, an ignorance, misunderstanding, willful or otherwise. Your best bet is to do something better and use that as a model. And that works. And I'm so hardened by this. I can give you an example. So I've been working with this musician. His name is Akira the dawn. And he has taken quotes from my lectures, which I hope are meaningful and positive, and also not naive, I hope. And he's been putting them to music. And so he has this genre that he calls

meaning wave. And it's not like it's a huge subculture, but it's it numbers in the tens of thousands. And he's had his success completely underground because no popular media ever touches this. And you go on the websites, I was just interviewed by him and he played some of the music and so on. On YouTube, every single comment is unbelievably positive and uplifting in a non-naive way. It's like these people they've caught into this music, it's all positively oriented and Akira is trying very hard to make it that way without being naive. And all these people are doing something positive and they're all supporting each other in the comments. It's like you think, wow, that's a YouTube comment list and there's hundreds of them or

thousands of them. It's so wonderful to see that. And so you, we have these podcasts available to us now. So we can have these long-form discussions, right? So you and I, we have some shared expertise. We can talk about it as high-level as we can possibly manage, as honestly as we possibly can, and is engaging as possible a manner, and we can share it with hundreds of thousands of people. It's like, well, that's a great deal. Man, it's great. And there's something about this long-form communication that just opens itself up to that.

And I've watched the comments, and people are happy about two things. They're happy about the content. But they're happy about watching the process. Right? And the process, right? And the process is more important than the content. So we can model that balance that you already talked about between plasticity and stability.

We can model that in real time. And that's completely an ethical issue, right? As long as the more you and I can listen to each other and attend and say what we believe to be true and dance, the better the bloody podcast is going to be. Well, this is obviously what I live for these kinds of conversations like we had today. And I don't feel like everyone that I meet is coming at me with the same sort of, hey, let's have a shared understanding of the truth here.

Let's get, let's try it, let's let's talk about this and get to some sort of generalizable principle. I just feel like a lot of conversations, there's a different, a different energy in the conversation where it's, the, the, the, the lot of people are lecturing at each other but not having conversations with each other. And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how, when I get, when I find myself in a lecturing at situation, it takes me out of my comfort zone

so much that I don't, it's almost like someone speaking Russian to me all of a sudden, and I don't understand Russian, you know? Well, I can tell you what I advise people to do under those circumstances. The first is to realize that you are not where you think you are. You're somewhere else. That's that feeling of being taken out. Hey you think you are. You're somewhere else. That's that feeling of being taken out. Now you're somewhere else.

You don't know where you are. Okay, that's fine. You don't know where you are. What should you do? Shut up. That's the first thing. The person you are talking to is not interested in your opinion. They're interested in something else.

You don't know what it is, but it's not your opinion or your thoughts or your ideas. It's something else. Then you watch a tend. It's like this is a mystery unfolding. If you attend, you'll see what's happening and you'll be able to react carefully. But the crucial issue is to recognize that you're not where you, because what you'll try to do is impose your desire on the situation. You want this to be the kind of conversation you just described. As long as you keep doing that, you actually lose. That's something I learned at least in part from reading Jung in depth, because he talked about how to handle yourself in conversations where how to handle yourself in conversations where something had possessed the conversation, essentially, something you didn't understand had possessed the conversation. Sometimes the person you're talking to is possessed by something that wins if you argue, doesn't matter what you argue

about or what you say or what the fact is, if you engage in the argument you lose. So, but having said that, I still think the better alternative, all things considered, is just to do a better thing, not to have consciousness. Model something better. You know, I try so hard. Yeah, and explore while you're doing it. Yeah, I try so hard to model car Rogers notion of unconditional positive regard. And I really try, I can honestly say I try my best to model that in my life. And it does often get good results.

Well, I can tell you what I made of that as a clinician because I was never I was never comfortable with that idea. I didn't like it exactly. I knew there was something to it. I what I didn't casually discard it, but it lacks differentiation. So if you're a clinician and someone comes to you, there's a bunch of things in their life that aren't right and aren't good.

And there's a bunch of things that could be promoted. And partly what you're doing is you're on the side of the part of the person that wants to grow and develop. And you're not on the side of the part that doesn't. And you can make that explicit and people are actually relieved by it. And you can say, well, I'm going to make mistakes in my judgment and please correct me. But so the contract, the therapeutic contract is, you're going to come and I learned some of this from Rogers too. So it came along with the unconditional positive regard.

It's like, okay, you and I are going to aim for what's better. We're going to mutually discuss what's better so that we agree that that's better. And then we're going to strategize about how to go about doing it. And we're going to test the strategies, but that's the deal. Another deal is part of that deal is you're going to tell me what you actually think. And I'm going to tell you what I actually think. That's that. What did he call that congruence and what was congruence and honesty. And so, you know, if a client says something that upsets me, I'll say, I just have this emotional reaction to what you said, negative emotional reaction.

We should take that apart, or if I observe that in them. But it's not unconditional positive regard because there's judgment. There has to be. You want to keep the wheat and throw away the chaff and you want to participate in that with the people that now you could say overarching that is a benevolent motivation. And that motivation is I want you to be better and I want you to be better so that everyone else is better. That's fine, but Jung pointed out that every ideal is a judge by necessity. And so you have to wrestle with that in relationship to unconditional positive regard.

You know, you just maybe realize that I don't think I practice unconditional positive regard. I think I practice unconditional regard. Let's just take the word positive out of there for a second. Okay. Because there's something I try to do with any human who's in front of me and it's it's unconditional their past there all the things that you know It's like I don't even want to know all the things that came before this conversation

You know, I want to see someone on my with my own eyes freshly, you know I don't want to be influenced by you know people will say like don't talk to this person don't talk to that person Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yep. Yep. Oh, that's why I was so fascinated by the ancient Egyptian worship of the eye. And the mess of Damians had it too. Their greatest god, Marduk, was had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words. It's like, yes, that's exactly right. But what you're saying is that's attention. It's attention. I want to watch and see what's right in front of me

and it's not thinking. It's something completely different than that. And it's akin to what you just described. And then you see what is. I'm not going to say it again. It's almost like a scientific perspective. I want to see what is. I want to see what is.

I don't want to be colored by the Egyptians regarded Horus as the revitalizing agent. Ossiris was the dead king, right? The the worn out state, the the no longer functional ideology. And Horus was the I. And it was the I that was the revitalizing source because it saw what was and replaced presumption with what was. And it's sort of, it's, it's, it's their watching to see and being willing to see. And certainly that's an integral part of any real scientific process. Absolutely. Okay, so let's, let's cut off the unconditional word then as well. I try to practice regard. Well, then there's two things you've got. You've got this regard, which is focused attention, but then the differentiation element is

also crucially important. It's like, well, let's figure out what's right here and what isn't. And we'll let's have a bunch more of what's right and not so much of what isn't. And that should never be imposed. And that's something else I learned for Rogers is like, you can't, you can't really give advice to well to anyone for that matter, but certainly not to therapy, to clinical clients, they have to be fully bought in for it to work.

So imposing it isn't gonna help. You can't rip off the defense mechanisms, you can't rip them off people. It's a terrifying thing. Yeah, well, that's, yeah. Yes, there's plenty for us to be defended against. So I mean, though that fear you had, let's say, about being in conversations where you don't know what the rules are, I mean, what I observed among undergraduates was that

continually was that that would be there at a surface level now and then, but I could trust the undergraduate spy and large that if I gave them something that was substantive, they'd be so excited and so interested that it was just ridiculous. And so, even that ideological cynicism or resentment is often relatively shallow and you can entice people away from that with something better. I agree. I just like to tell you a little bit of my personal experience at Columbia University, I teach the course called The Science of Living Well. And you know, I just on the first day of class, I just let leave at the door any kind of ideology or just all that crap. Basically, you're all welcome here. Like let's just start there., you're all welcome in this class. And I care about finding the greatest potentiality within each and every one of you in this class and the way and the style that works best for you

and how you want to own your decide how you want to live your life and then take responsibility for that life. And students love it. I mean, I don't, there's no controversies. There's no, I mean, I love my students. You they, they, when you kind of frame it in that way, I mean, students, they're all on board. There's no reason to divide. There is no reason to kind of lead with division in my, in my point of view, you know.

I agree. And I've always had faith in my undergraduate students, and they've always delivered on that faith. Like, every year it was always the same. And so if I was interested in what I was doing and I found it meaningful and if I was trying to get at the heart of things, they were like completely along for the ride. But I've also found exactly the same thing in the podcast and when I went on public lectures it's like, you know, I had discussions of this sort, I would say of this intensity with Sam Harris, for example, about religious matters. And you know, there were 10,000 people watching that

and they were captivated by it. Well, that was how it appeared. And so you can trust that in people. And, and well, what has been your experience with your podcast and why are you doing it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, regarding the, I'll tell you something funny. I had a four hour debate with Sam Harris

on my podcast about the nature of free will. And he actually said to me in an email, I think I'm allowed to say what he said to me. He said, what I'm a compatibleist, he said, what I'm trying to do with my compatibleist version of free will is what Jordan Peterson's trying to do with trying to redefine God. So he put me in you in the same camp there, so in a way. So I think we're on a similar frequency in some sense that I don't want to have such narrow conceptualizations of something that no longer has practical utility construct value anymore.

So tell me what's happening with your podcast and why you're doing it. Because I mean, you're an educator like me and now you have this technological means. And so what have you experienced and what do you want from it? You know, my podcast has become one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life.

It started seven years ago as just me turning on the microphone. I wouldn't have nerdy conversations with my colleagues about psychology. But it's really turned into a different beast. It's really something's really emerged, which I'm really pleased about. And that's that I have guests on my show who I treat with unconditional regard.

And I don't care who they are. Like, I want to engage them in the moment on ideas and try to come to some mutual understanding of the truth. I mean, I've had controversial guests on. I've had non-controversial guests on. I don't even like to think of it in that way because none of the episodes have been controversial. So it's almost like people say like, oh, you're going to have a controversial guest on as though they're expecting that the episode need be controversial. And what I want to show is that doesn't need be the case.

You know, like, why does that need to be? Is there some role from Moses 10 Command? Well, I think it's cheap and fast. And I think some of that was actually imposed previously by our technological limitations. If you're trying to attract attention in a limited bandwidth world, you need something flashy and quick because the attentional space is unbelievably expensive and you have to waive a red flag. But now we've got time, right? We can let things unfold.

And so, you know, I'm inviting political figures onto my podcast and I hope I can get people from across the ideological spectrum and and offer them the opportunity to unfold their ideas over two hours without sound bites and without the intermediation of the journalist so to speak. I'm going to ask questions obviously, but and that's all become possible because of this technological transformation. And I think it's going to I had Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, who's I think the most conservative senator in the house, according to his voting record. And he laid out his thoughts over two hours. And what's been so gratifying is that the comments in the main aren't foolish and knee jerk.

On either side of the political spectrum, they're more like, oh, when he laid out his arguments, I found them interesting and I learned a lot from listening. And that's left wingers are saying that and right wingers are saying that and hooray. And so it would be so nice as far as I'm concerned if that was how we conducted our political discourse. It's like, what's your idea? Can you lay them out over two hours and still be there and still have something to say? And I've also found, I don't know what your experience is, but my experience with these long forms is that they brutally punish any facade or dishonesty of any sort, any editing, misbehavior or anything like that.

It just doesn't fly, man. It doesn't have to work. What do you mean? What do you mean, just can you unpack that a little more? Well, for example, if I put up a YouTube video and I've cut some of it, people are immediately skeptical about what I've got. Oh, absolutely. Actually, I cut out a bathroom break the other day

and I actually got YouTube commencing. What are you trying to hide? I'll say, well, you don't want to hear me peeing. So, but have you found, and I found this to be the case, that if I treat people as human, they tend to act human. I don't care who they are. I mean, I don't care. Very rarely have I encountered anyone in my life.

And I've encountered so-called controversial figures that I'm supposed to even hate, even before talking to them. That if I treat them with humanity, at least engage me with humanity. That's been in the main, that's been overwhelming my experience. However, I have, yeah, and pronounced exceptions. I mean, I've had interviews with journalists

that were where I did the things that you just described. And the consequence was that they wrote something that was absolutely deceitful and reprehensible and they knew it. And that's been a continual shock to me, even though it's happened many, many times. So I would say almost all the time when you invite someone to play, they play nicely, but not always, not always. and so it's unfortunate, right? It is unfortunate. Hmm. It it doesn't mean that we don't stop trying a lot of damage. No. Well, right.

I don't want to become like an ultra-synch. I guess is what I'm trying to say about humanity. I want to keep my humanistic. There's no reason for that. Yeah. There's no reason for that. It's no reason for that. The data don't support the conclusion. I mean, I've looked very deeply into the problem of malevolence, and I've taken it very seriously. And I don't think that I'm particularly naive, but it's still definitely the case that your best bet is like arms open and welcoming, and even though you know that that invites you in catastrophe now, and then it's still,

it's the most appropriate ethical stance. So, what do you think is going to happen to the universities in light of all this new technological possibility? I mean, have you thought, do your thoughts go in that direction? You're an educator at a elite university, but now you have all this technological power. It's like, what are the consequences that going to be?

Yeah, I tweeted out something along the lines of my predict that in 20 years or so, I think I may have said 20 years, universities will be considered very archaic and pointless to a large degree. Now, it got a lot of comments because that's obviously a pretty superlative statement. But I do think that we're going to look back at some point in the future and think that the sort of elitism of the educational structure that we have at university is going to be a bit silly considering

there's so much high-quality information coming out that's going to be accessible to so many people, and that so many people are going to be learning things that they do in which they do with their lives, not through university. And once that starts happening and kind of the tables get turned in a way where the people in power and society to a large degree are, if not self-taught, but taught through channels other than the most elite universities, I think that it's, that things are going to look a bit silly about the current structure. What do you think, how did that land with you? Well, it seems to me that the landscape is going to transform itself so that people will turn to further education to discussions like the one that we just had, because why not? Right? I mean, I see. We just conducted

something that approximates a high-level graduate seminar spontaneously. I mean, you've worked for decades on these sorts of things, and so have I. I mean, even as a professional in an elite institution, I would say the opportunity to sit down for two hours with another respected figure in the field and have a conversation like this are relatively few and far between. But now you can do that whenever you want, assuming people will accept your invitation. And then you can invite like 500,000 people to take part. So how is that not just going to win? It's great.

And it's much more interesting than the typical lecture because the typical lecture is dull and horrible. I mean, you get exceptions to that, but generally that's the case. And I mean, you go to an academic conference and my God, it's, it's, it's so no one would watch any of that almost unless they had to. And so yeah, that's just, I can't compete it out. I can't go. Yeah, I can't go back to Columbia in the fall. After going a year of, you know, there's virtual classes I didn't even protect in the virtual, but when I come back in the fall to in-person classes, there's no way I'm going to go back to business as usual.

It feels so weird to stand up there and lecture the students after I've experienced clubhouse and the potential for that, for I don't know if you've discovered clubhouse, but I think that's going to be a big wave of the future. I experienced the podcast format, I experienced all these other formats of discussions. There's no way I can go back to the typical lecture style. So I'm actually trying to reformulate exactly what a classroom, what a science of living while classroom even looks like.

Well, I think that what will emerge to it, a accreditation institutions will emerge. You know, increasingly the cost of education will be driven down to something approximating zero. And I think that's how it looks to me. And I think we'll get the people who really want to teach and who are teaching something that people want to listen to will be radically successful at it at an individual level, primarily. And then there's the problem of accreditation. And perhaps universities will solve that, but I suspect not. I suspect upstart private companies will solve that problem.

You know, because you could imagine a situation where all the lectures are free, but the exams are very expensive and almost no one passes them. So it's breadth of education, but strenuous evaluation, strenuous accurate evaluation, and then accreditation, and the accreditation would have some value. It's already the case that,

if you hire someone from Harvard, part of what you're getting is the initial entry process, right? It's really hard to get into Harvard. You have to be, you have to have a very high IQ in so far as the SATs are you? Unless you're one of these celebrities and you pay for your DC that on the screen. Yeah, there's, there's exceptions. But you're going to have a bitch of a time if you go to the university and you're, you're not intellectually qualified. It's going to have a bitch of a time if you go to the university and you're not intellectually qualified. It's going to be a horrific experience.

Your point is well taken, your pencil. Self punishing. So you have to be very, very smart and you have to have accomplished generally three or four other things. So when you hire someone from an Ivy League Institute because of the stringent selection process, which is made possible, at least in part by the plethora of applicants, you know that regardless of the educational quality, you're getting a person who had those attributes to begin with. So it's a proxy for, it's a proxy for competent generosity, all things considered.

And then the education adds something to that. But, but you can imagine that accreditation institutions will pop up that, that are capable of assessing that. But you can imagine that accreditation institutions will pop up that are capable of assessing that, and there's real value in that. I'd like to do that, but I don't have the wherewithal to manage it. It's too complex. What I love about the competent, that you brought in the competent relational aspect there is, I mean, that's the highest level of integration of my whole book like that's where I'm that's where I mean I feel like we just like a ride that like independently but I mean that's that's we've thought along the same track to that that's true and that's very true that's very true that's very true but you know if you ask me what is what is transcendence I don't define define transcendence as some sort of thing where you're above other humans. In some sort of, I'm superior to other humans sort of way.

But a very, I define it as a, as I call it a synergy between self and world, where you're, and you could, you could frame in terms of competence, your competence is so influential and powerful in making the world a better place that there's such a little separation between you and the world so that what's good for you is good for the world.

And that's what my book's trying to get to. So I love that. I believe that's true. I believe that's true is that you can have your cake and eat it too. And I think that the pleasure of mentorship that you can have your cake and eat it too. And I think the pleasure of mentorship is really an example of that. It's like, well, what would make you more happy

than anything else? Well, who knows? Let's take a look just out of curiosity. Well, is it a fast Mercedes? Is it sexual gratification on demand? Is it wealth? Is it power? Is it status, et cetera, et cetera?

And you can get more sophisticated than that as well. But my experience has been that there isn't anything more pleasurable than seeing unrewarded talent and possibility and facilitating its development. It's like that's in its own universe. And so that's deeply meaningful to me. But then it's also something that's clearly of high-level social benefit. And so I think as you do integrate in your sense, you integrate internally, which is what I recommend people do and concentrate, but at the same time, you're integrating things externally. There's no separation there, not fundamentally, which is also why cleaning up your room turns out to be a very difficult act.

There's impediments there that you just don't realize. And you can't get your room in perfect order without simultaneously getting the world in perfect order. So it's a great. I don't explain Einstein's desk then. There can be periods of creative disorder. But it's not a consequence of avoidance. Okay, fair enough.

I always see that picture of Einstein, you know, like there's a famous picture of him with his office, was that a control? Sure, well, you know, he probably knew where everything in it was. Mm hmm. Right, so there's that too. It's like order is not necessarily evident on the surface.

That's true. So that's true. So all right, well, look, well look, that was wonderful. I appreciate the fact that you took the time to talk to me. And it's good. I'm glad we finally had a chance to have a prolonged discussion. I wish you good luck with your book, Transcend. And it's true. I hope that it has the effect that you want it to have

and that your podcast does as well and that onward and onward and all of that. Thank you. And I hope this conversation modeled what a conversation could be in the world. We'll see because people will tell us. I guess they will. I guess they will. I was interested in it. So I got an absorption. I got in the absorption aspect. Yeah, well, that's a killer marker, isn't it? You know, it really is. You're not assuming you're not too corrupt. What you're absorbed in is perhaps what's most important

because why else would you be absorbed in it? So why can't we assume that's a reliable marker? Or the most reliable marker, even? I think it is. So. All right, great. Thanks, Troy. Thanks very much. Thank you.

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