The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 381. Change Your Mindset, Your Health, Your Life | Dr. Ellen Langer

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and “The mother of mindfulness,” Dr. Ellen Langer discuss her latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way To Chronic Health. From this they explore how intentioned awareness paired with humility allows for a healthier mindset and body, how the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age, the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we may conquer it through faith and hope, and the immense benefits found in carefully considering to what, where, and who you direct your attention. Ellen J. Langer was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she is still professor of psychology. The recipient of three Distinguished Scientists awards, the Arthur W. Staats Award for Unifying Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award, Dr. Langer is the author of eleven other books, including the international bestseller Mindfulness, as well as The Power of Mindful Learning, Counterclockwise and On Becoming an Artist. Her trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her inclusion in The New York Times Magazine’s “Year in Ideas” issue. She is known worldwide as the “mother of mindfulness” and the “mother of positive psychology”. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. - Links - For Dr. Ellen Langer: Order your copy of “The Mindful Body” today https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705365/the-mindful-body-by-ellen-j-langer/ 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with the mother of mindfulness, Dr. Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer was a colleague of mine when I worked at Harvard in the early 90s, and so it's a particular pleasure for me to be talking to her today. We discuss her latest book, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We explore how intentional awareness paired with humility allows for a healthier mindset and body. How the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age, the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we might conquer them through faith and hope, and the immense benefits to be found in carefully considering to what, where, and who you direct

your attention. So I was reading your new book today, the mindful body, thinking our way to chronic health. And you know, we were colleagues back in the 1990s. I suppose we still are colleagues in some ways. That's right. And I was thinking about mindfulness again. And I have a proposition for you and you tell me what you think about this. I was thinking that mindfulness is something approximating paying attention to what you're paying attention to.

But I'm open for definitions. No, I like that. But the way I have defined it is actively noticing. You know, that if you, people give people instructions and say, pay attention, be present, and that's sweet, but it really falls on deaf ears because when people are not there, they don't know they're not there. And all of the research we've done over 40 years has most of us, most of the time, or mindless. So to be mindful, you can do one of two things. The one most easiest for people is probably just to notice new things about the things you thought you knew. And then you come to see, you didn't know them as well as you thought you did, and then your attention naturally goes to them. The other is to adopt a mindset, the only mindset we should have for uncertainty. People don't realize that everything is always changing, everything looks different from

different perspectives, so we can never know. And if you know you don't know, then you naturally stay tuned in. If you were going to, if you thought you knew what I was going to say next, why listen to me? So Jordan, it's fun. When I lecture, I often begin election. I ask people, so I'll ask you how much is one plus one? And people are annoyed with me because they think it's ridiculous. And then they do to say two, but it's not always two. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. Add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry,

one plus one. Add one watt of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one. So in the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal to, as a more often as it does. And the problem is that we're all taught absolutes. We're taught facts that we think are unchanging. And when you get, again, when you think you know,

you don't pay any attention. So that's why I like the one plus one because that's the most basic where people think, surely they have the right answer. That I must tell you. So I was at this horse event many years ago. It changed my life. This man came over and asked me, if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to go buy his, get his horse a hot dog. You know, you

know I'm Harvard Yale all the way through. Nobody knows better. People know as well that horses don't eat meat. They're herbivorous, right? He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that everything I thought I knew I realized could be wrong, which for me was very exciting because I'd opened up a world of possibility. When was that? That was about a long time ago, I'd say maybe even 30 years ago. So I have been in this state of openness for at least, if not for my lifetime, for at least the last 30-some odd years. So you mentioned art, for example, and you mentioned actually that people should pay it, pay more attention to what they take for granted. And one of the things that I've come to realize, I think, they can't pay attention to what they take for granted because it doesn't occur to them.

They're in a robotic state of mind. I'm starting to run. Well, no, no, that's fine. It's it's I had I have written a little bit about the role of art in remediating that because what is the things that happens as far as I can tell you can see this for example, I think it's exemplified well by Van Gogh's painting irises in particular because it's easy in some ways to take what you've looked at many times for granted, but what an artist will do, and this is really their function, is to put a twist on the perception, and then snap you out of that habitual frame of mind so that you see the object that you have taken for granted outside of the strictures

of your preconceptions. And the object always transcends your preconceptions, because there's much more to it than you think. We, we have, so what seems to happen neurologically is that we build up these little modules that specify our perceptions, and then we default to them. But it's possible to stop those modules and to re-navilize the phenomena, and then to see it again in its glory. And that is one of the things that what would you say keeps us falling in love with life? Yeah, I mean, I think that's perfect. The only thing is that once somebody sees it and knew if they think now they know what it is, then they're going to be

mindless again, you know, with just that breeze interval of being mindful. And it's interesting, and I don't know if you know, I started to paint about, after I turned 50, and I'm not one of those kids when I was younger, who knew how to draw, draw. But nevertheless, I took to the whole thing. It was very exciting. And prior to my painting, I had just assumed leaves, for example, on trees were green, you know, except in the

fall when they turned brown. But, you know, then I started looking at the leaves and there are hundreds of shades of green. And so the, the on taking to painting opened my eyes and made me say that again, things I thought I knew I didn't know at all. So whether you're creating the art or observing the art in both cases, it can have that effect as long and it can be an important effect as long as people don't think, ah, now I know. So on this theme of paying attention to what you pay attention to. I want to tell you a bit of a story and get your comments on it. So for years, I was trying to sell tests that help people by, by, by aiding them in specifying better employees.

And I talked to hundreds of middle managers about the tests. I developed them actually when I was working at Harvard in our department there. And what I found was that people didn't want those tests, but what they didn't want to know was how to deal with people, their employees, that they already hired who weren't doing well. And I thought, well, there isn't anything you can do with them because you're just a manager and you don't have the time or resources to deal with people's serious problems. But no one really liked that answer. So I went into the literature and I tried to see if there were any interventions that were scalable and inexpensive and harmless that actually produced a remedial effect. And there was a couple of sources of literature that specified exactly that.

One was derived, one stream was established by people studying goal setting in the industrial realm. And the other stream was established by James Pennebaker at the University of at Austin and University of Texas at Austin. And what Penny Baker showed was that if you got people to write about their past traumas, that made them physically healthier. And people varied his research to show that if you got people to write about their future, that that also made them healthier.

And the goal setting literature showed that if you got people to write about their future, that they became more productive. So we developed this program that was a vision program essentially called future authoring. And you can do it in 90 minutes. It it asks people to develop a vision for their life. And so that means to pay attention to what they're paying attention to, to decide what they want, if they were going to optimize their life, do it consciously, to decide what they didn't want, and to aim away from that,

and then to do that in seven different dimensions of their life. If you have students do that, this is so fascinating. I think, well, I hope you find it fascinating too. If you have students do that for 90 minutes, when they come into college for their orientation, they are 50% less likely to drop out and their grade point averages go up 35%. 90 minutes of... I'm, yeah.

I think that's great, Trent. I'm not surprised because everything that you just mentioned, Penny Bakers' work, for instance, is an instance of making people mindful. If you are writing about traumas that you've already discussed with people, it doesn't have the ameliorative effect. And the thing about coming up with a scale,

it's very interesting because people don't realize that what we're always doing is trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions. So when you're taking a scale, you're assuming everything is staying still, and those people may have, if they did well on those scales, possibly do well at the job as it was defined in the past, but it's going to change. So I have a different approach to all of it, which is essentially the same thing that you're suggesting with this 90 minute interaction for students, which I think is wonderful.

What you're doing is waking them up. And when you're writing about the past where you have to write about something you never explored before, obviously you're being mindful because the idea of being mindful is noticing new things. When you're writing about the future, because you haven't experienced a future, again, you're being mindful. And so, you know, they should be taught just to be mindful from the start, either in your way or added to it or in place of it, and just an understanding that is very unusual, especially

in schools for people to be taught to exploit the power and uncertainty. Again, all of the schools, schools, parents, the army, industry in general, teachers, people, absolutes. This is the way you do it. This is what it is. Horses don't eat meat, one in one is two, you know, and so on. And by teaching people that everything looks different from different perspectives, everything is always changing. Uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. And you don't have to feel bad about not knowing. You should make a universal rather than a personal attribution for not knowing because

nobody knows. And not knowing is good because then it makes everything potentially new and exciting. I'm thrilled that you found this in 90 minutes. Well, it's stunning. Well, it actually shocked me half to death because I started thinking about it. I had been using the same program in my classes because I had people outline a vision for their future. And then I started thinking about the fact that we don't do this in the education system.

So I was teaching kids who had 15 years of education already. And no one had ever sat them down once, in their entire educational history and said, why don't you think about what you really want and who you could be and how you might lay that out? So then I did some research to try to figure out, into trying to figure out why in the world this was because it was as if we have a society that's predicated on literacy and forgot entirely to teach people to read. There's nothing more important than helping people establish visions. So I looked at the history of the development of the education system,

and it turns out that it was developed as a consequence of bringing in Prussian militaristic models of blind obedience in the late 1800s, right, to produce mindless workers who would not be creative and who would not question authority. And so that's actually that rule following, that mindless rule following that you're describing is built right into the system. Yeah, that's great. You know, that I've been studying mindful learning where essentially all you do when you're

teaching is make it conditional. You know, rather than saying, here are three reasons for the Civil War or whatever. It would be, here are three reasons that could explain the Civil War from this perspective or that. So you change things, horses don't eat meat too. It seems that most horses don't eat meat, possibly horses don't eat meat. It could be that horses don't eat meat too. It seems that most horses don't eat meat, possibly horses don't eat meat. It could be that horses don't eat meat. You know, all of the words that

suggest it's not always so. And then you get an enormous difference because people don't learn the lesson and then think, now I've got it, and then close their mind to all the ways it's changing. It's interesting because somebody asked me the other day when I was doing the podcast because I said we should be mindful all the time. I'm not explaining what I mean by that to you in a moment. And they said, you know, isn't it exhausting? And I'll talk about that.

But the important thing was they said, you know, why is everybody so mindless? Doesn't it serve a purpose? And my answer to that, and I'm curious about your reaction to this because I think you're better read in this regard than I, that I don't have any data, but my armchair reasoning leads me to believe that teaching everybody all this mindlessness instantiates the status quo. There's no reason why you and I should have these lofty positions and so many others who would have something else to bring to the table that's no less valuable, don't get

a chance to offer it. And so we'll speak to that and then I'll tell you what I mean by why we should be mindful all the time. Well, I think that you can make a case that, and this is a common case made by, say, social critics particularly on the left is that anything that biases, behavior in favor of maintenance of the status quo obviously benefits people who are highly positioned in that status quo. Right. Now, but there's, there's another psychological reason for that too, which is that if you introduce anomaly into a conceptual scheme, you increase entropy by increasing choice. And increased entropy, if you increase

entropy, and that happens involuntarily, you catalyze a stress response. Now, if you increase entropy voluntarily, you don't catalyze a stress response. You catalyze a challenge response, and the challenge response looks like it's associated with positive emotion, exploration, and play. And so that's another issue where attitude makes all the difference. You see this in clinical work, too, because if people are exposed accidentally to a stressor and they're phobic, that tends to make them more phobic. But if they're introduced voluntarily to a stressor of the same magnitude, then the introduction of the stressor is curative. And then on your final point, you said that it's

also easier, let's say, to default to mindlessness. And the thing is, you know, that's true. No, I don't think it, well, I don't think it's really easier. In fact, I think people don't fully understand what I mean by being mindful. Because they think, you know, when I say, should be mindful all the time, people get crazy, how could that be? Because they confuse mindfulness with just thinking. And thinking has gotten a bad rep. Thinking is fun. What's not good about thinking and stressful about thinking

is worrying about whether you're going to get the problem solved, whether you're going to look stupid when you come up with your answers and so on, which is the stress that you're talking about, and that's debilitating, but all stress is mindless. So, my view is that if you're going to do it, you should be there for it. And that mindfulness, it turns out, is energy be getting, not consuming. And that, you know, when you are, if you came here to visit me, Jordan, since you've never been at my house here, everything would be new. You'd be looking around, you'd

see what books is she reading. Oh, you know, there are all those freedoms that your men who help set this up left around, you know, you would notice. And it wouldn't be hard for you. You're going to trip to Europe. You don't have to practice being mindful. Your expectation is it will all be new. And so you are mindful. And mindfulness is the essence of engagement. It's what you do when you're having fun. So, you know, is there a limit to how much fun and how happy you can be? I don't think so. So we should be mindful all the time. But people say, well, aren't there circumstances where it's your advantage to be mindless?

My answer is emphatically no. I say, let's say you're at the park, and you took a two-year-old with you. And this is a person trying to challenge me. And the two-year-old wanders into the street. Wouldn't it be best to mindlessly just grab the child so that the child doesn't hit by the oncoming car? And my response to that is tooth-fold.

The first is that if you were mindful, the child wouldn't have ended up in the street in the first place. And the second thing that probably in grabbing the child, you want to notice the posture of the driver to figure out whether they're going to turn right or left to know if you should take the child out of harm's way going to the right or left and so on. That the only time one should be mindless, I believe, is when you found the very best way of doing something and nothing changes.

And so clearly, I don't think those conditions can be met. So, mindless this feels good. I have over 45 years of research showing that it's good for your health, people, it's good for your relationships, people see it was authentic, charismatic, and it even leaves its imprint on the things that we do. And given that it's so easy, I can find no reason why people wouldn't begin immediately after understanding us today to become more mindful.

So a variety of things there. The first is the behaviorists, the neuroscience oriented behaviorists, distinguish two forms of reward. There is satiation reward, consumatory reward, technically an incentive reward, and consumatory reward tends to bring about quiescence and sleep. And so I might say, well, you should be mindless when it's time to go to sleep, because it's time to go to sleep. If you're satiated, there are times for rest. With regard to optimized engagement, that seems to be an incentive reward phenomenon.

That's mediated by dopamine, and it's associated, as you already pointed out, with exploration and play. And I would say that is, is it exhausting? I mean, it depends on the level of intensity, but it's definitely engaging. And it's also engaging in an interesting manner because what play does is engage you in a manner that expands your realm of adaptive competence, right?

So you're doing the task, but you're simultaneously getting better at doing the task. And that's an optimized place to stand. That's Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, because you're continually expanding your domain of adaptive competence by playing. And the emotions that are associated with that are associated with engagement and meaning and depth.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned fatigue. So in the mindful body I yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned fatigue. So in the mindful body, I have, I present some research on fatigue. Let me give you the simplest of these. Let's imagine, we have,

let's do it, I don't have to imagine, and I'll report it. So we have a group of people, we have them do 100 jumping jacks, very simple, and tell us when you get tired. So they get tired around two-thirds of the way through the activity around 67. Then we have another group of people they are going to do 200 jumping jacks

and we ask them, tell us when you're tired and they also are tired two-thirds of the way through which is twice as many jumping jacks as the former group. And we do this across all, you know, but ballerinas in all different spheres. So there's a degree to which fatigue itself is a mindset and limits us. But I think that, you know, if you go back to, I made me think about something of somebody you get into bed and you want to go to sleep and you are suggesting that maybe at that point they should be mindless. I think that what happens

to off them is that the stress of the day keeps people awake, you know, and that if they were in stress and stress is mindless, you know, when you're stressed two things are happening. First, you believe something awful is something's going to happen. And second, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. And prediction is an illusion. So if you said to yourself simply, what are three, five reasons why this thing won't happen? You won't feel the test, you won't be fired, your spouse won't leave you, whatever it is that's keeping you awake at night. And you give yourself three to five reasons why it won't happen. Well, you immediately feel better, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't, rather than

it's definitely going to happen. And then turn it around, let's assume it does happen. What are three or five reasons, ways that that's actually a good thing? And if people don't realize that events themselves don't come pre-package, there aren't good things, bad things, that whatever happens needs to be interpreted by us. And the more mindful you are, the more available are multiple interpretations, good, bad, and whatever.

And I don't know why I keep using this as an example, maybe help me come up with a better one. But if you and I went out to lunch and the food was delicious, wonderful, the food's delicious. If you and I go out for lunch and the food is awful, wonderful, the food is awful, presumably out eat less. And that'll be better for my waistline. You know, that, um, um, where, you know, and, and with this attitude, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this clear, but I hope people will think about it. There's a way, I live my life and I fall up. I don't fall down.

My car gets a ding on it. I get it repaired and I fix something else about the car. So afterwards, it's better than it was before. So when you realize that events don't determine how you feel, it's the view you take of the event that determines how you feel, then it's hard to understand why we would come up with explanations that are frightening and stressful. People say everybody has to experience stress.

They just take it as a given. I tell you, Jordan, that there are things, you know, I'm 76 years old, so certainly in my life, there are things that have happened that have been big. But in the normal course of a day, a week, a month, a year, I don't experience stress. And I have this one liner that I think people will find useful. You know, ask yourself when something happens. Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Rarely is it ever a tragedy. The dog ate my homework. I missed the bus. I burnt the meal. You know, whatever it is that causes us stress. And it turns out that almost everything

that we're stressed about virtually all of it never happens. So you talk to the attitude, no worry, take the attitude, no worry before it's time. Yeah. The reframing that you talked about with regards to people's worry at night, that's something that's very much part and parcel of cognitive behavioral therapies that one of the things that you do is involved in the beginning.

Right. Right. Well, you take people who are locked into, say, a depressive or an anxiety-inducing pattern of repetitive thought, and you have them open up a wider realm of possibility, and then you have them practice instantiating that. So that becomes more part of their, well, part of their nature, let's say. You also mentioned the jumping jack study. And it reminded me of studies done by Peter Herman showing that if you imagine you bring people into the lab

and you have them watch a movie and you give them a bag of popcorn. If you give them a small bag of popcorn, and you ask, they'll eat the whole bag of popcorn, and then if you ask them if they want another, they'll say no, but if you give them a bag of popcorn that's five times that big, they will also eat that.

Yes, exactly, exactly. It's like, and what seems to happen is that we set up a target, and the target is somewhat arbitrary, right? So it could be portion size. And then the goal is to hit the target. And the emotions that are experienced in relationship to that target are target dependent. And so, and this is also, it's also part of the trick of setting optimal

goals, right, is that you want to set a goal that challenges you and that pushes you beyond your limits, but you don't want to set a goal that's absolutely impossible to attain. If you set a high goal, the amount of positive emotion that you experience as you move towards the goal increases, but if the goal is too high and it's impossible, well, then that can be frustrating and disappointing. But it's very interesting. So let me tell you how valuable that is. Well, it's interesting because one of the ways

I define mindlessness is to be goal driven, rule and routine driven. You know, that it's fine to have a goal, but you have to realize we're setting that goal at time one. And oftentimes, moving towards something several years in the future. Lots change, and there's no reason for us not to take advantage of the changes and perhaps change the goal.

You know, when we form these goals, where do they come from? Somebody said it's important to be a doctor, for example. And so you're on your way to be a doctor, but you really don't want to be a doctor. Change it. Essentially at the end of the game, you want to feel good about yourself, you want to feel good about your relationships and feel perhaps that you've made some contribution in some way to somebody or to the world at large. And you can do that almost in any occupation.

And I think that there are people who are given goals, I want to be a billionaire. Used to be when I was younger or a millionaire. That's not goals. I want to be a billionaire. It used to be when I was younger or a millionaire. That's not enough. I want to be a billionaire. But I think that if we surveyed most of the billionaires and they were honest, you see most of them are not very happy. So if you sit back and swear one, do you want to be an unhappy billionaire or a happy bike store owner.

I think people might choose differently. So as you're gaining information, pursuing the goal, you want to, in fact, be open to possibility. I mean, so I say to my class that, let's say that on your way to school today, you run into, I don't know who's famous these days that they might like. Sean Penn. Taylor Swift. Okay, Taylor Swift. I'm going to go with Taylor Swift. Sure, that's Taylor Swift. Oh, yeah, yeah, that you are just so cool or whatever word they use.

Please, you know, let's go have a cup of coffee. But you say, no, I can't. I have Professor Langer's class meeting now. That's ridiculous. That here's an opportunity that you're probably not going to get again, something you would really want to do. You should deviate from the plan. You should be in the state of mind so that whatever you're doing

is in a sense what you would choose to do now, not doing it because what you decided to do for you a prior life, you know, years ago. It goes against lots of what people think. I mean, I'm sure you're going to say to me after this, well, what about delay and gratification? And here I have a lot to say that is probably going to be met with, I don't know, disagreement, rage, outrage, who knows. I don't think we should delay gratification. I think that, first of all, since everything is changing, if I decide I'm not going to do this now,

I'll do it next week. There's good thing because next week will be better for me. The world may change and often changes in such a way. Two ways. One, that I may not have the opportunity to do it in the future, as in the going for the coffee with Taylor Swift. Or second, that my is very well made change. Now, so you say, well, what about studying and things of this sort where we have to do the work so tomorrow we prosper? And it's very simple, Jordan, that no matter what you're doing, there's a way of doing

so that it's fun and enjoyable. Almost no matter what you're doing, there's a way of doing so that it's fun and enjoyable. Almost no matter what. If you put away the stress, a failure, of not being able to complete it successfully, and so on, then all the little challenges that present themselves motivate us and feel good. And you know, so there's, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but you should, it's wonderful. There's a YouTube called Piano Stairs. And so what these people did in Scandinavia, they go to subway stations all over the place. And in all of these subway stations, you have an escalator and stairs. And so the film is very clear. Everybody takes the escalator. Everybody.

And so the film is very clear. Everybody takes the escalator. Everybody. Random young person who wants to take the stairs. Then they lay down piano keyboards on the stairs. So it actually makes noise. So now you go, do, do, do, as you're going up. Because it's such fun in a very short amount of time, nobody virtually takes the escalator.

Everybody is taking the stairs. Anything can be made to be fun. And so I tell my students, why wait for somebody to put down the keyboard? One can do the two. I can't say, Rose, I would make it more compelling for you as they go up the stairs. There's a way to make everything, if not fun, interesting, and potentially exciting. Once we take off that layer of evaluation apprehension. Well, one of the things you do, I've got two lines of questioning to explore in relationship to that. One of the things you do as a clinical therapist is help people find a man, the manner

in which they can extract enjoyment from at least in potential necessary tasks, right, to help them recraft the way that they're looking at the world. So for example, one, one way of approaching that is that if, if someone lives in a very messy and disordered environment and they want to put that into something approximating order, you experiment with them to find out how much they could work on that every day until they find an optimized balance so that they're compelled and interested in doing it. And it might be that they can only do it to begin with for two minutes or three minutes, but they can jost with themselves to find out what's interesting and engaging. And it is certainly the case that you can ask yourself regardless of the task that you're

engaged in, how you could orient your attention so that that task would be as engaging and meaningful as possible. And that's a constantly worthwhile thing to do. Now I want to decorate that with something. So this, you might find this interesting. I hope you find it interesting. So you know this, this issue of attention has been an obsession of deep thinkers for thousands of years. I spent a fair bit of time studying ancient Egyptian theology. So there's a set of stories that derive out of

ancient Egypt that were, while they're extremely influential. In fact, some of the symbols we still know. So one of the symbols is the famous eye, you know, the Egyptian eye with the curved eyebrow. So here's what the Egyptians figured out. They figured out there were four deities. They figured out there were four deities. So one deity was the king. That was Osiris. One deity was the king's evil brother. That was Seth. That word eventually becomes Satan.

One deity was Horus, who was a falcon, and the other deity was Isis, who was queen of the underworld. So Osiris is Habit. And Osiris is represented by the Egyptians as a great king who's now anachronistic archaic and somewhat senile, senile and willfully blind. Okay. Now he has an evil uncle, he has an evil brother, and that's set the evil brother of the king.

And he's the proclivity of ordered systems to become malevolent with time. The antithesis of that is Horus. And Horus is the open eye and the falcon. And he's the falcon because falcons can see better than any other animals, including human beings. And so the Egyptians determined that Horus, who was the God of attention, was the force that kept the evil king at bay so destroyed the negative consequences of habit and revitalized the social order. And they prioritized attention as the highest God and so did the Mesopotamian, so they had a

God, Marduk, who was their pinnacle God. So Jordan, they all beat me to the punch. So, this is good to know. And the question is, why has it taken so long for cultures around the world to see the wisdom in all of this? And I'm guessing we go. You think it's partly because if you start to become it's partly because if you start to become mindful, there's also the possibility that you'll bring your shortcomings to mind. Imagine that you do start a practice of attending. As you attend, you're going to learn things about yourself that are interfering with your ability to openly attend. Right? And that can be challenging and off-putting because you can see because you're wondering, well, if this is so obvious, why don't people notice it? Why don't people

just automatically do it? And I do think that part of it is that when you start to pay careful attention, you find things that need to be fixed and that calls you that's one possibility anyways. Well, so let me speak to that because something that's very important to me is the idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else he or she wouldn't do it. And so if one were mindful, they'd be aware of why they're doing what they're doing. And it turns out that every description we have of people, ourselves or others, has an equally potent but oppositely valence alternative. So you want to diminish me because I'm so gullible, which I am.

From my perspective, I'm trusting. You drive me crazy because you're so inconsistent. From your perspective, I'm trusting. You drive me crazy because you're so inconsistent. From your perspective, you're flexible. You can't stand me because I'm so impulsive. That's because I value being spontaneous. So it's interesting, you'll like this as a clinician years ago. We did this study where we gave people about 200 of these behavior descriptions.

And we said, circle those things about yourself that you want to change, but you have trouble changing. Okay, so for me, it would be gullible impulsive, for example. Now you turn the sheet of paper over, and in a mixed-up order, are the positive versions of each of these. And now we ask people, circle those things about yourself, you really value. Trusting and spontaneous. And so as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to necessarily be gullible.

As long as I value being spontaneous, people on occasion are going to see me as impulsive. And when you realize that behavior makes sense, then we don't want to change ourselves or other people in the same way. You know, you might be tired of me because I'm so whatever. And then when you see the positive version of it, you welcome it. And our relationship flourishes and we become less judgmental. Because before you were talking about what do we do with people in industry who don't do well at whatever the task is.

And it occurred to me that everybody doesn't know something. I wrote a little song about this that I sang from my and taught my grandkids. I'm not gonna sing it because I can't carry it to. And although I should, Jordan, because that's what it's about. I do a lot very, very well. So why should I hesitate?

So here we go, you ready? I'm ready. Everybody doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else. So my long term goal is to take the horizontal where we comfortably sit on top and the vertical rather and make it horizontal, where everybody is valued. And so the person who seems not to be able to do whatever it is, will be able to do it differently somehow else.

It goes back to, you have your teaching and you ask your students how much is one in one and one person in the class says one and what we do now is we belittle that person. We teach the students around to have no respect for that person. We're in my world, what we do is say Johnny, Susie, whatever. How did you come up with that? And then they tell us they added one cloud plus one cloud or however they came up with it. And that we'd learned that much more.

You know, I was lecturing in South Africa many years ago and I was staying at this fancy hotel. And I note I was down at the pool resting one afternoon. And I notice that there was this enormous amount of real estate in the hotel, part of the hotel, that nobody was using. The only person who knew that was the lowly cabana boy. That of course, if we assumed that he had something really to offer, we would think to get that information from him and then make more money, which seems to be the goal of most

of these entrepreneurs or hotel owners. What have you? So we're brought up thinking there's a single way of doing things. There's a single answer to questions, and all of that fosters our mindlessness. And sometimes when I'm lecturing, I look in the audience to see if there's some guy who seems really big. And I'll say, you know, ask him if he'll come to the stage. So let's assume I'm lucky that day and he's six five. Well, I'm five three almost. All right. And so we look ridiculous next to each other.

And then I ask him to put his hand up and his hand is three inches bigger than mine. And then I raise the question, should we do anything physically the same way? Should we hold a tennis rack, a baseball bat, a golf club? And the answer is clearly no. And that the more similar you are to the person who wrote the rules, perhaps the better it is for you to follow, but the more important part of that

is the more different you are, the more important it is for you to find your own way of doing it. And that when people are taught conditionally, you sort of hold the racket like this, or you could hold the racket like this, they're more likely to come up with their own way than somebody who's told told this is the way.

Okay, so I want to sort what appeared to be two competing claims out in my imagination. So on the one hand, as far as I can tell, you're making the case that all things considered an attitude towards the world that's more attentive and mindful is better. So that's a definite... I mean that. Okay, okay. Yes. But now, but you added to that a different conception, which was that every negative trait, let's say, has a positive element, which by the way is something that seems to me to be an appropriate statement.

But there's a... there's somewhat of a contradiction there as far as I can tell, because on the one hand, you're you're flattening out the moral hierarchy and saying, well, there's a multitude of ways of looking at things. And just because you think something is bad, it isn't necessarily bad. It could be good in another way. But at the same time, there is a sort of ultimate example, which is okay. Yeah, yeah. So, so how do you reconcile those? That's right. I don't, I don't. I think that, you know, that in today's world, we all aspire to certain things and given the values that are currently operative, to to meet those values, to live the kind of life that most people seem to want, which is not answering the question about whether they'd be better off living a very different kind of life.

Mindfulness sets the stage for it. And you know that if it's a contradiction, so be it. You know that I think that we can live with contradictions until we accumulate enough wisdom to resolve them. But at this point, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Nothing is good or bad, except it's better to be mindful. So, but you know, I think one of the things that I'd like to talk about if you're willing is some of the health work in the mindful body, Because here, one of the values that we seem to have

is to be healthy, to live a long, happy, healthy life. And one could argue that also that if one is going to live multiple lives, which some people believe, in reincarnation and whatever, maybe that goal is misplaced. But if we take that goal as real, a great deal of the information we've been given is simply wrong.

And I go back to the horse that ate the hot dog. And what people need to realize is that that studies research can only give us probabilities. Do you do a studying? And the study shows you that if you were to do it again, the exact same way which we could never do, we're likely to get the same findings. These probabilities are then taught to us as absolutes.

Horses don't eat meat, one in one is two, and so on. Now, when you're given a diagnosis and you're told, research shows that you have six months to live or whatever it is, I mean, it's insane. Nobody can know that. And when you realize that everything we're taught or maybe is, it allows us to go forward and find new ways of doing things, new ways of meeting our needs, and so on. So I talk a lot in the mindful body about mind body unity. And tell me what you think of this.

I say mind body, these are just words. Imagine we could have had mind body and elbows. You know, that would lead us to a different conception of people. And right now, people think that mind and body being separate and they know well, they're conception of people. And right now people think that mind and body being separate and they know well they're sort of connected, they don't know how, that the problem is for people who separate mind and body is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. So I said, you know, I don't want to pay attention to any of that.

It's all interesting philosophy, but it's not useful. So put the mind and body back together, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And we've done so many studies on this. The first one you might know about, because I reported it earlier on in work, is the Counter-Clockwise Study. Do you know what I'm saying? We retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they're speaking about the past and the present tense, everything is designed to make them think

that now was 20 years earlier. As a result of this, without medical intervention, in a period of time as short as a week, I think it was only five days actually. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they look significantly younger. just by putting the mind in a different place. So you want me to tell you about a couple of the newer ones that are in the new book. Please do, please do, and then all,

then all, I'll respond. Okay, so I'll go in some chronological order. The next one we did was a study with chambermaids. And we asked the chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? They thought exercise is what you do after work, because that's what the surgeon general leaves people to believe, and they're just too tired.

So they don't think they get any exercise. So all we did was take half of them and teach them that their work was exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on. So I think we have two groups. One who sees their work as exercise, the other who doesn't realize their work as exercise.

Just changing that mindset. Eating the same, working the same way, they're not working harder, they're not eating less, they're not eating more. Just changing their mind to now their work as exercise, they lost weight, there was a change in race, waste to hip ratio, body mass index, and their

blood pressure came down. Okay. So now let's go fast forward. Let me just give you one of the new, the newest studies. So we inflict a wound. Well, you know that it would be wonderful. If I could do some, something dramatic and really hurt people, I have no desire to do that. And even if I did, luckily, the review board is not going to let me. So we inflict a minor wound. Now we have people sitting, it's a little more complicated than I'm saying, but just so it becomes clear.

They're sitting in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is real time. And the question is, how long does it take the wound to heal? Well, it turns out the wound heals based on clock time,

perceived time. And we have studies with diabetics, you know, the same thing. We find that insulin increases or decreases based on perceived time, rather than real time. We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got, two hours fewer, or the amount that they got, biological and cognitive functioning seems to follow perceived sleeve. And all of this, this might be a fun story for you. You know, somebody had asked me, where did this come from?

I mean, how did I get into this? And I was married when I was very young. And I went to Paris on my honeymoon. And I was very important that I was very sophisticated because now I was a married woman, even though I was a baby. And I ordered mixed grill in this restaurant we were eating in. And on the plate was pancreas. And I said to my then husband,

which one is the pancreas? This is that one. Okay, so now I don't know if I can do it, but I feel like now I'm so sophisticated, I have to be able to eat the pancreas. I eat everything on the plate with gusto. Now the moment of truth, can I eat it? Well, I start eating it and I'm literally getting sick.

I can't swallow it my stock. And my then husband starts laughing. And I say, what's so funny? He said, that's chicken. You ate the pancreas 20 minutes ago. Okay. So I said, well, what's going on here? You know, it's like you're walking down the street and the leaf blows in your face and you get all startled until you realize it's just a leaf, you know, that our thoughts have enormous control over our health. And we need to pay more attention to that. So, you know, my mother had breast cancer last story. My mother had breast cancer that had metastasized, had pancreas. And that's

the end game, right? Pancreatic cancer cancer. And then magically, it was just gone. And the medical world couldn't explain it then, and they still can't explain it now, and this mind-body unity idea does explain it. And I think spontaneous remissions are much greater in frequency than people realize. You know, you have people who never get to the medical world in the first place, who have tumors that they don't know they have or even you and I

Tumors that are there that you know are magically gone, you know We've all heard stories of people who are told they only have a year to live and they're telling us a story 10 15 years later you know and when we believe again that we can beat whatever this thing is, we organize ourselves differently. And even in a very mundane way, I think that I'm going to live, I start living, I start doing things. The neurons are firing. Where if I believe my demise is only moments away, I shut down, you know,

and help in some sense, the end of my life. Okay, so I've got a variety of comments about what you just said. My wife was diagnosed with cancer. First of all, in principle, a trivial form, and then that was a misdiagnosis, and then she was diagnosed with a cancer. That only 200 people in the world have been reported to have that killed every single one of them in 10 months. And she told me, about six months into the treatment, that she would be better on our

wedding anniversary, which was August 19th. This was three months ahead. She got better on our wedding anniversary. And it's been five years. Yes, it's so, so, so I'm telling you that. Say you're a belayer. Well, I'm telling you that because I've seen strange things happen. Now, I've also seen in my clients, for example, you see this with people who are retiring and retiring is generally a very stupid plan for people because they have a very narrowed image of what retirement means. So they imagine themselves, you know, sipping margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean, which is a real good plan for the first night, but a really law, really bad. Well, right, you just turn into like a fat sunburned alcoholic and no time flat. And like I've seen people around 55 start to decide that they're old. You know, they've sort of decided that they've had the adventure of their life and that

they're done. And that makes, that does facilitate their aging very rapidly. Now, but by the same token, and this is, and this is where all this is going, you know, I understand that the structure of reality is malleable in relationship to interpretation and to a degree that is unspecifiable, right? However, I'm curious about your notion of where the limits to that are. I mean, you took these elderly people and you put them in a situation where they were acting out the proposition.

They were 20 years younger and they were getting all sorts of feedback from their environment that that was valid. But the painful truth of the matter does seem to be that we all age and that we all die. And so, you know, there are, there are intrinsic limits to, so, so tell me how you, what you make of that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the limit is.

I think that it's to our advantage as individuals and as a culture to assume that we can exceed wherever we are. You know, I think that people, what people used to die, you probably know just when when they were 20 years old and then people were dying mostly at 40 years old. And you'll find this funny. Do you know who Willard Scott was?

I've never said this publicly. Anyway, Willard Scott was the weatherman for a news program. And what Willard Scott would do is every day, every morning he'd say, and happy birthday, Rosie from Michigan, who just turned a hundred. And happy birthday, Peter, who just turned a hundred. And so the idea of turning 100 became,

to my mind, for many people, much more likely. And I think that oddly, despite all the work I've done in the aging area, all the medical work, I think he had a very significant role in extending our lifespan. You know, again, if you think you're going to live a long life, you organize yourself differently. And it's that organization, those thoughts of how to continue growing.

It's very funny. The other day, I was helping this person, this old woman, with something. And my spouse said to me, you know, she's probably a lot younger than you are, which I didn't even realize. So I just don't have a sense of, I don't use age as a measure of do it, don't do it. And I think that that's healthy.

I think that you asked about limits. Interestingly, years ago, I think it might have even been when you were at Harvard. I was on the Division of Aging at the Medical School, and Jack Rowe was the chair of the committee. And I called Jack one day. He was my doctor of choice at the moment. And I said, Jack, how long does it take for a broken finger to heal? And I said, I don't know, let's say a week. I said, what would you say if I said I could heal it

psychologically in five days? He said, okay. I said, what about four days? Okay. What about three days? No. Okay. What about three days and 23 hours? No. Okay. What about three days and 23 hours? You know, where is the breaking point? And so that's the way things progress is in these small steps. But if you follow that logic, you know, if you know that if you can do it in three days and 23 hours, so why not three days and 22 hours? And why not, you know, and then you slowly get yourself to the point, we can do it in three days. And if you can do it in three days, why not two days and 23 and a half hours and so on. And I don't know what the limit is. I just think we're so far from what these limits to what we can do in any parts of our lives, not just our health, that we can far exceed whatever goals we set for ourselves.

I've been writing about, there's a notion that's deeply embedded in the Genesis text, that human suffering is a consequence of sin and not built into the structure of the universe, right? is a consequence of sin and not built into the structure of the universe. It's a strange doctrine in many ways because, as I pointed out earlier, the normal course of human events is that everybody ages and dies. The notion that suffering and limitation is built in seems self-evident. Then there's another part of me that thinks, you know, we all waste an awful lot of our own time in futile pursuits and self-defeating pursuits, and we impose limitations on our

self that are arbitrary and often lazy, and we hurt ourselves by doing that. And then collectively, we deceive each other and we lie, and we don't cooperate well together, and we manipulate. And that interferes with our ability to apprehend things properly and to structure our existence properly. And the wildly optimistic side of me thinks, and I do think there's reason for believing this,

that if we got our act together completely in so far as that's possible and that might partly be by paying more attention, that there aren't any intrinsic limits that would necessarily stop us. We'd still have to figure out, for example, it's an open question to me, and I'm kind of curious,

but you're attitude towards this. No, if you could choose how long you would live, do you have any idea how long you would choose? I mean, in indefinite existence, you know, of hundreds of thousands of years, that seems, it seems to me to be, like, incomprehensibly dramatic and awesome. Right? I mean, it's a long time. Yeah.

But, well, it appears seems kind of short. So I think that, you know, it depends what people should strive for rather than adding more years to their life. They should be adding more life to their years. And by doing that, then you'll want to extend. You know, if today is really exciting, you look forward to tomorrow. If you're miserably depressed today, you're scared about tomorrow. And so that if we were able to create a world

where people were more mindful, where people had more respect for each other by noticing people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it, that I think that there'd be no reason to fear. You can't imagine what life is going. I can't even imagine what life is going to be like in 50 years. And I'm assuming, which is separate from whether I'm going to be alive or not.

Most people would say no, but who knows? You know, AI is changing things the iPhone change things the Railroad change things and all of these so we don't know what the big change is going to be It could be I which planet was it? Was it Venus where they just found ice making space travel to whatever, wherever it was seemingly more possible? I don't know. I don't claim to have any special knowledge about what the deep future holds. So I wouldn't know

how to think about it. So you think that if you concentrated on maxim it. But I do know how to think of it. You think that if you concentrated on maximizing the quality of your life, the issue of how long that should extend would more or less solve itself as a consequence of that exact orientation. Yeah, that seems reasonable. I think so. Alan, can I change the topic a little bit? When we were, when we were, when we were college, well, no, when we were discussing the possibility

of this podcast, one of the things we had talked about a little bit is the state of the university. And I do want to, I do want to approach that with you too. When I, when I worked with you, if you don't mind, when I worked with you in the 1990s, I was at Harvard between 92 and 98, and I really thought, I thought it was a great privilege to be there. I really enjoyed my time. In terms of attitude, there was something interesting that happened then, too, that you might find worthy of contempl given given your attitude towards attitude. You know that the junior professors at Harvard were always destined to leave in 99.9% of the cases, you know, and when I first

came there, I observed that some of the junior faculty who were at the outer limits of their of their brief tenure there, were unhappy that they weren't likely to be considered for permanent status and that they'd have to move on. And I thought, well, I don't wanna be in that position in six years. I think I'll go there and think, if the turnover of junior staff wasn't high,

I wouldn't have got this job to begin with. And that I'm pretty damn lucky to go to Harvard and meet all these people and be paid for it because most people who go to Harvard have to pay to go and I got paid for going. So that was a good deal. And that I should be happy with the outcome regardless of what it was and then move on to wherever I was going. And that was an attitudinal shift that was very helpful to me and made the transition out of there much smoother than it might have been, even though it was accompanied by a certain amount of grief.

Anyways, when I was there, I also felt that it was a very admirable institution and that I was there in a kind of gold age. I thought the university had prioritized the research requirements of the senior faculty as their number one goal, and then they treated undergraduates exceptionally well, and then they were pretty good to junior faculty and graduate students, kind of in that order, and the administrative apparatus was essentially there to facilitate all of that. So it was structured in lovely way.

And I also found that my colleagues, Jr. and Senior alike, were fundamentally focused on their intellectual interests and their research. And they did the what was necessary to keep things moving forward on the administrative front effectively. But that was not anyone's primary concern. So I was thrilled to be there. I can't say that the University of Toronto operated with that degree of professionalism, let's say, and commitment to excellence. And I also saw a decline in the quality of the university enterprise that was quite precipitous over about a 20-year period. And so I'm wondering, well, I'm wondering your reactions to that.

And I'm not happy with what's happened in the university community in general. What's your take on the education front? Yeah. Well, the first thing is that we have to be aware that anything I say may just be the difference of being 30 years old versus as old as I am. Rather than a change in the university itself, my change rather than the university's change. The idea that most people are not going to get tenure was the rule. I was actually, I was, I tenure it when you were there. Yes, you were. I was the first. I was a, no, no, no, then it's much later. Because I was the first tenured woman and the psychology department. There were years

where there was, you know, nobody else. Right, right. And I, yeah, but I remember, you know, I was hot stuff then. I'm allowed to say it because it's the past, right? You know, that, and I suffered, you know, with, am I going to get tenure? Am I not going to get tenure? I was the hottest thing out there. I shouldn't have had to suffer.

And I said to myself, you know, having gone through this, nobody should have to go through this. And it turned out to be positive and that was wonderful. Well, the university changed over time. So now, if you were to come as a junior person, you're very likely to get tenure. It's now just like all the universities in the world. That's a good thing. As far as, and the students are still spectacular, and my colleagues are doing very interesting work and the university supports all of that.

So those things haven't changed. My feeling is that there are more rules and regulations than they were in the past, which interferes at time with certain intellectual activities. You know, if I wanted to, and this has happened over and over again, I want to do research. The research I'm doing is not like in the medical school where you can take one person's head and put it on another person and then see if it works.

Most of the things we're asking people to do are innocuous. And it takes forever. So we have the idea. Then it takes a good, over a year, to get approval to do it. And then we actually do it. It's just, it's too many steps. And so I find for whatever reason, I don't know what the reason is actually, but that when I was younger, it was easier to get these things done. And not because I'm an older person now.

I mean, I think in this way I'm wiser, you know, but things have just become more complicated, you know, I used to have somebody from Europe or Ireland, then the States or even somebody in Boston right next door want to volunteer to be in my lab. Well, it turns out, and that was great because I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, I need an army of people to help me do it.

It turns out you can't take volunteers unless they're Harvard students. Why can't you take volunteers? Well, because unions and whatever has changed so that in one person's lab, somebody found out that they weren't getting paid, they were volunteering, and they were doing the exact same thing

as somebody else volunteering. Excuse me, as somebody else. So same job, one is paid, one isn't that caused a lot of difficulty with the result that I can't take these people. You know, it's things like that that make it hard at any rate. But it's still a wonderful place to be. You've seen somewhat of a proliferation of bureaucratic impediments.

Well, it's hard on the research side because if you're an entrepreneurial and creative person, which is what you need to be if you're going to generate a lot of research ideas, there's a certain quickness of mind and approach and striking while the iron is hot that goes along with that, right? Because you have to follow that thread of interest.

And for me, for me to have to delay a study for a year means that by the time the study is possible, I don't even want to do it. Well, not in the least. It's like I, what, I haven't learned anything in the intervening year. Right. You know, what kind of useless bastard would I be

in that situation? Yeah. You know, what kind of useless bastard would I be in that situation? Yeah. So let me tell you something. So I think that this was, I don't remember the year, but it was a long time ago. So it might have even been before things were bureaucratic. You still had people on these review committees who I disagree with vehemently. So I want to do this study. I actually talk about this in the mindful body and this which we ended up doing but the study is we want to see the

difference between seeing your cancer as in remission Versacee it as cured All right now When the cancer is not there it's's, you know, this happened in a friend of mine who had a very bad case of cancer. One day she comes back from mass general and she said, I said, how are you, Eva? She said, great, my cancer is in remission. And at that moment, the life bulb went off. Why is it, if I had the exact same test, they tell me I don't have cancer.

And she has cancer in remission. And you know, once a person is told that cancer is in remission, the endocaine, you know, implication, it may still be there and that you're stressed and that stress, I think stressed, by the way, is the major killer over and above genetics, over and above nutrition. And so a woman with the silly five-year rule, with there's no data for it. You know, the cancer is gone, they're not going to declare her cancer-free in any permanent sense until five years have passed,

five years of stress is awful. And what people need to understand is that if you're in remission, I'll tell you about the study in a moment, but if you're in remission, you're worried about the cancer. If you're cured, you go about living. And if cancer comes back, in some ways, it'll be the same cancer.

That's why we call it cancer. But in just as many ways, it's brand new. And so there's reason to see it as something different. It never comes back exactly the same. And so when you have a cold and then the cold is gone, you don't see yourself as in remission. And when you get another cold, you don't see it as the same cold as before.

It's a brand new cold, even though they both bear similarities, which is why we call them both colds. And so each time you beat a cold, you become in some sense less and less frightened of getting a cold. I can beat this. I've beaten it many times in the past, which is not the case oftentimes with cancer.

So what we did, and here's where the review board comes into play, the first attempt at this was to ask people, women, on a cancer awareness walk, about whether they see their cancer as in remission or cured, and then we'd check back a while later, six months later, to see how their health is progressed. The review board wouldn't let us do this, because asking somebody about their cancer, they thought was stressful. These are women on a breast cancer awareness walk.

And so it required lots of fighting with them. The best one years and years ago, this student comes in, she's gay, and she believes, and I think it's a very reasonable assumption, that if a child is brought up by two women, since mothers are so important to the upbringing of kids, this child is going to be better off. And that would have been worth noting. So what she wanted to do was to go into gay bars, and if there were women in gay bars, she wanted to ask them if they had children. And if they had children,

she wanted to ask them to be in the study. And the review board said asking, I remember in a gay bar, asking people if their gay is insulting. Well, when I heard this, I went crazy, I have homophobic, whatever. Now, the point, the larger point, I guess, is that the people who are on these boards are ordinary people with ordinary biases, things change over time. I couldn't imagine that that study wouldn't get be allowed to be run immediately now for better or worse.

And, you know, so for me, these review boards, while I appreciate their need, maybe, it's always been the bane of my existence because if they do a cost-benefit analysis, you know, should we be able to run this study? Well, let's see what the aggravation and potential harm it's going to do to people and what we're going to. For my work, they almost never think it's going to work, which is why I want to do the study in the first place. And so if you're on the board and you're going to do

a cost-benefit analysis and you don't believe it's going to work, even if I just ask you to fill out three questions, the costs exceed the benefits. So, it's always been hard for me. And, you know, I know that the original nursing home study that we did, where we gave people a plan to care of, encourage them to make decisions for themselves, and they live longer. This was a very important study, not just from the mind body unity idea, but for medicine in general, and I don't think they've let me do it now. And so I think that's a shame. Well, we don't exactly understand the invisible preconditions for the scientific enterprise,

right? I mean, we tend to think of science as a robust enterprise, and in some ways, the self-evident enterprise, and that's stupid, because it's only about 450 years old, and it only emerged once as far as we know in human history, and God only knows why we ever allowed it. I mean, a lot of the great early scientists were independently wealthy or they had a patron like an artist and they were left the hell alone thinking of people like gold and the Darwin. I would love that. Right, right. You know anybody, I'm I'm available. Yeah, well, you know, well, it's really how it's really what scientists should be looking for.

I would say instead of government funding because along with that government funding comes exactly the sort of problems that we're discussing right now, which is, well, you know, is this going to be of broad public benefit? And the answer is, well, if I knew that, I would turn it into a company in a second, right? If you knew for certain for certain that your new discovery was going to be of broad, significant economic benefit, you'd raise money and you'd have entrepreneurs on board in two seconds. So that problem would take care of itself. As you pointed out, too, the probability that a given study will work is inversely proportionate to its daringness and its creative nature. And so those are exactly the studies that are going to be scuttled by anything,

even approximating a cost-benefit analysis, which no one on an ethics committee ever does anyways, because they don't have the technological qualifications for doing so. Now, I think they do far more harm than good. People point to the... Around the same page. and called technological qualifications for doing so. Now I think they do far more harm than good. You know, people point to the... No, around the same page. Well, look, the overall evidence for male fesins on the scientific side of things

in relationship to the treatment of research participants is very, very sparse. There are some egregious counter examples, right? Experimentations in the concentration camps in Germany. Right. Experimentations by the Chinese, the Tuskegee experiment, like you can point to exceptions, but all things considered, well, most scientists who run a research lab would just assume, for example, that their participants might come back again, or that, you know, bad word

doesn't get out about exactly what's going on in the lab. And so, and most scientists who are genuine scientists also have a very high regard for ethical conduct and the truth because if you don't, you never discover anything, right? I mean, you cannot be a crooked scientist and discover something. It's, it's just not possible. So I also wanted to point out, you may know this already, but you know that involuntary exposure to stress directly compromises immune function, right? Because what happens is you produce cortisol

and that heightened immediate responsivity, but it compromises any long-term adaptation. And so the idea basically is, as a fatigue is chasing you around a tree, you can afford to suppress your immune system temporarily, because you want to devote all the resources to getting the hell away from the tiger. Getting away. But if you are stressed, and so it does make the question that you were pointing out with

regards say to the attitude of remission versus cure. If you are stressed even at a low level, but that's chronic, like it might be, by noting that you're now at heightened risk and you're only in remission, that stress might compromise your immune system enough so that the probability of cancer recurrences is, you know, is, is, is, is higher. It's higher. Sure. It's certainly possible. I mean, the physiological, the physiological pathways for that being a reality are definitely there. I wanted to the physiological, the physiological pathways for that being a reality are definitely there. I wanted to ask you about a dark side of, of re-assessment

of illness. Though, look, I was in an elevator once in a hospital. This is when I was doing clinical work. And a patient got on and she was muttering to herself and she was muttering, she was very distressed, she was completely white, ghostly looking like sweating, unbelievably stressed, eh? And she let the people in the elevator know that she was suffering from cancer and that she was extremely guilty because she believed that it was an inadequacy in her attitude that had led her to contract this disease and to be unable to deal with it. And so one of the things that I have wrestled with because I do understand the utility of maintaining, let's say, a positive attitude in relationship to illness and a can-do attitude, let's say. But by the same token,

you know, it's very hard on ill people when they have to cope with the fact that they're ill and suffering. Okay, so what do you make about that? Okay, so I gave, yeah, so I gave it, if I'm understanding you correctly, I gave a talk many years ago to 5,000 women with breast cancer. And at the end, I don't remember, the end of the talk, this man said that, aren't I blaming the victim? Right, exactly. I'm telling you that, and I said to him, no, I'm not blaming the victim, the culture teaches us,

or that we don't have any control over these chronic illnesses. And remind me, I want to talk to you about the attention to variability where we've looked, we have a psychological treatment for big illnesses. And as long as the culture teaches us that we have no control, how can you blame anybody for presuming they have no control? And then he said, and besides that you're wrong because my wife fought the cancer at every turn, and she still died.

And then I said to him, well, let me ask you something. If a little kid, let's say a two-year-old is tugging on your pants, do you see yourself as fighting that little kid? So the language of fighting the cancer already says it's this gigantic beast, very strong, which says also that in your own mind, you're not very likely to win, to beat it. And so I think that as long as the culture teaches us, and it's done so less so now over time because there are so many people who manage to beat cancer. But when I was young, all you knew cancer was a killer. And as long as you believe

cancer was a killer, it was going to be very hard not to succumb to it. And I think that we need to celebrate, you know, the people who beat it. And as with that, living to a hundred example, you know, these small numbers, but they can loom large if we have them vivid and come to people's minds. When my mother was in the hospital, this woman, a very nice woman who she didn't know, walked in because she knew my mother had pancreatic cancer. And, you know, obviously, was told, she didn't have very long to live.

And she said, Sylvia, my mother's name, they told me 20 years ago, I only have six months to live. I went and I spent all my money. I'm still alive, but now I'm poor. You know, and everybody knows of examples like this. They don't, they should never say anything like that because they can't know. And so as long as you can't know, then for as long as you're alive, you should be living. I was gonna write a book many years ago, entitled Life Before Death,

because sadly for all too many people, their lives, their sealed and unlived lives. And that's what all my work is designed to do is to help break that seal. Well, when you're suffering, I've also been looking at the book of Job, you know, and Job is a book that exemplifies human suffering. And one of the morals in the story. Steve Job. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, it's the older Joe from way back with. Yeah. And so everything possibly bad that could happen to someone virtually happens to

him. And one of the morals that's embedded in the story is that regardless of that, and also regardless of the relative unfairness or perceived unfairness of the fate, your best and most appropriate attitude psychologically is to keep faith and hope alive. And that story in particular is very dramatic in that regard because the reason that Job suffers is because God himself has a bet with Satan that Satan can torture Job enough to make him lose faith. You know, and that's pretty rough, right? If you're going to have forces arrayed against you, God and Satan is a pretty rough battle. And what happens in the story of Job is that he determines

to abide by his faith and hope regardless of circumstances. And so maybe you can say to people who are suffering, say, from a terminal cancer diagnosis that obviously a large degree of compassion on the part of themselves and observers is in order, but that they will make the best of a terrible situation by reorganizing their attentional structures so that the maximum amount of faith and hope can be present at every moment. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll win, so to speak, in the final analysis. But it might mean that the course of the cancer is going to be less like hell than it could have been. And that's also nothing. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that's terrific. You know, I think I speak to many people who are given these dread diagnoses and they're stressed, they're angry. And I simply ask them, not in an aggressive way, let's assume for a moment that that's correct, is this the way you want to live for last year or last days or a month? And when you realize that, no, I mean, you know, first thing I want to do is go have a half-funch Sunday, you know, whatever it is, one thinks that they shouldn't do that, you know, now why not do it.

So yeah, I'm in agreement with that, but the interesting part of that, I think, is that when you then make the decision to make the moment matter, and that's all we have. You know, when you're talking about people who are depressed, one of the best things I think in as far as therapy goes is just deal with the moment. And then the next moment, and a moment is easy to deal with. And if they are mindful in the moment, they will probably end up beating the cancer. They stand a good chance of beating the cancer. Let me give you an example of something, John. I don't know if you remember in the book, I talk about what we call the borderline effect. Now, so let me explain this. Let's say you and I both take an IQ test,

and you get six, you get seven day, which means you're normal, and I score 69, which means I'm not normal that I'm cognitively challenged. Nobody in their right mind, they don't need to know anything about statistics, to know there's no meaningful difference between 69 and 70. I could have sneezed, so I read the question wrong and so on. But my life in your life will diverge from that moment in dramatic, quick and extraordinary ways. And you will be growing and I will be coming less and less because now I'm cognitively challenged at least to call it retarded. Okay, so it starts out,

there's no difference, but in some sense that diagnosis causes the difference. All right, that's the same thing for all different diseases. So we did some work with diabetes and cancer. There is some point on some tests where one of us falls right above that borderline. And so we're told we have it, whatever the it is, one of us right below it. And so we find that those who are given that diagnosis fair terribly, the people who are just like them, right before they get into diagnosis, do fine,

which suggests again the control we have over our health. In this case, not using that control. And that issue of the edge case is very interesting. health in this case, you know, not not using that control. And that issue of the edge case is very interesting. I mean, it's so you can tie a bunch of things that you just discussed together. So the first is you said, you know, you should pay attention to the moment. And there's a gospel injunction in the sermon on the mount to do exactly that, right? Is to focus to make the concerns of the day sufficient thereof, essentially. And what that means is that you want to occupy a time frame that optimizes the challenge

within that time frame without it being too stressful. So one of the things you do, for example, with people who are depressed or anxious, is you narrow the time frame over which they're apprehending their behavior. And if you're like, if you're really suffering, if you're really in pain, you might narrow your time frame to the next minute. Like you might not be able to handle the next day, right? And so you want to never bite off more than you can chew, and you can do that partly by minimizing the time frame you're computing over and attending more particularly to that narrow time frame and also by narrowing the scope of your activity, which we discussed a little earlier too. If you can't take on a major task, you can't put your family in order,

you might be able to say something kind to the sister you haven't seen for five years. You can take that incremental, tiny step forward. There's real power in that minimal transformation. Now, you also talked about attention to variability in the edge cases. How do you reconcile that with the apparent necessity for categorization? At the edge of every category is an indeterminate margin. You said, well, if you're in category A versus B, that can have a massive effect, even though there's no real distinction. That's a very important question. You know, that am I saying people should never be given

diagnoses because there has to be, you know, these have it and these people don't have it. I'm not saying that. What, first I use the borderline studies as a way of showing if there's no meaningful difference between two people when they start and they're given the diagnosis. And then the two groups come apart.

That means that this group that's given that diagnosis could do whatever they were doing that was similar to the other group and diminish the negative consequences. So it was a way again of showing the mind body unity and we have control over our health. Whether we should or shouldn't be given diagnoses, I don't know. But I do know that if you or anyone you love is given a diagnosis, you make them aware that it's a best guess. That these diagnoses are based on research, they're based on probabilities, not absolute facts. And when you are told that you may have it, you know, that is very different from you do have it.

When you're told it may run its course in the following way, is very different from being told, it will unfold in this way. You know, and I think that's crucial for us. Behavioral psychologists aren't very positively inclined to psychiatric diagnosis. And the reason for that is that they're very pragmatic. And so the orientation of a behavior psychologist is, well, let's differentiate your problems to the point we can envision potential solutions to them. And the meta-construct isn't all that valid.

I think there's an exception, possibly. And you tell me what you think about this. I found diagnosis useful and salutary in my clinical practice when it helped people bind their otherwise catastrophic anxiety and when it pointed to a direction forward. So someone might come in and say, look, man, I haven't been able to get out of my house for the last five years. I'm completely out of my mind.

I'm the only person in the world like this and there's no hope. And you say to them, look, your agaraphobic, lots of people have this problem. Here's the associated symptoms. So you're not the only one. You're not uniquely insane, and we know how to treat it. Well then diagnosis has a binding capacity, right? It boxes in the issue, and it has a direction. Yeah. Now you go to the doctor and your stomach is hurting, and you leave, and he tells you

I've gastroenteritis, which just means the stomachache, and you feel better. I think, for sure, I want to ask you something before I forget about depression. So I've often thought that if we were able to give people a placebo or convince them in whatever way that their depression will only last another three weeks, that they would instantly become better. That the most depressing thing about depression is that you assume that's all you're going

to see going forward. Yeah. Well, I think there is evidence for that on the treatment front because one of the things you do in cognitive therapy with depression is challenge the assumption of eternal permanence. So depressed people tend to think, okay, I feel awful right now. I have always felt awful. Every single day is unending awfulness, and that will extend indefinitely into the future.

And so what you do, one of the things you do is you have people track their moods over a week, hourly. And you show them that there's substantive variability in their mood, even though they were blind to that. And then you also often have them. So first of all, that shows that it's not permanent and unchanging. And then you often do a very detailed history that helps them understand that they have experienced this

before and almost invariably it has receded. Like it's almost invariably cyclical. It doesn't feel like that when you're depressed. Sure. That's perfect because that's what we were doing with major diseases, teaching people, attention to symptom variability. So when you have a major disease, you assume your symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. All right, so what we did was we would call people and we'd ask them, how do you feel now? And is it better or worse than before and why? And three things happen.

The first is, wow, I thought I felt this, whatever the pain is all the time. Now we see there are moments I don't feel it, so you feel a little better. Second, by asking why, the search is mindful, and as we've said now enough times, that that mindfulness feels good and is good for your health, the neurons of firing, and it's good for you.

And third, I think that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for it. So we've done this with biggies, with stroke, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, even depression. And in each case, we have very, very positive results. And so, you know, when I first proposed this, I was seeing it as an antidote, well, you can't give yourself a placebo. You have to, when you're given a placebo, somebody is fooling you into thinking that it's real medication and then you take it

and it's not the medication clearly. It's a sugar pill, so you are helping yourself. So I was trying to think, well, how can we have people give themselves placebo, and this was a way. So imagine that you have chronic pain, and you set your smartphone to ring in an hour, and then you ask yourself, is it better or worse than before and why?

And then at that moment, set it to ring in two hours and 10 minutes. You keep doing this over the day, over the week, if you need more time. And the results have been phenomenal. And I think all of this work, again, supports the idea that I keep coming back to that virtually everything in the world is mutable. We can make it fit for us better than it does at the moment. And that our own health is largely under our own control.

So, Ellen, with depressed people, what one of the things you do, and this is true for psychological misery in general, is you ask them to adopt an attitude of open eyeed ignorance about their own nature. So, you think you know who you are, it's possible that you don't really know about yourself, then you know about anybody else. Like you think you have privileged access, but you're pretty damn complicated and you're not an open book. And so one of the things we could do is let's say track the variation in your well-being across time. And then what we're going to do we're gonna focus on those times when you feel better. And we're gonna try to figure out what the hell

you were doing during those times. So with depressed people, for example, you find that they wanna isolate themselves, but if they go see family and friends, they almost invariably feel better. And if they try that, yeah, right. So while you can see that the same thing might apply in a situation that's characterized by illness, So while you could see that the same thing might apply in a situation

that's characterized by illness, and you could also imagine that that would have a profound physiological effect, because imagine that you're in a situation now and you're suffering from cancer and you're having a relatively good day. Now, because you're having a good day, you're not stressed out, you have more positive emotion and hope, and there are situational determinants of that. Now it could easily be if you could maximize the probability that you would stay there and then look for improvement even in that, that you would tilt your physiology in a direction of having a better probability of combating the illness itself. It could easily be the case. I think for sure, another area that

lends itself to this attention to variability is stress. There are some people who think they're stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. So if we call them periodically, and how gonna stress a you now, and is more or less than before and why and so on. Then what happens is, Jordan, you might find out that you know you're really stressed when you're speaking to Ellen Langer,

but not when you're not. Then the solution is simple. Don't speak to me. There's something else that I want to get your view on, which is, I was very active in the beginning, the creation of, you say, cognitive behavior therapy. And people have asked me, well, what's the difference between let's say a mindful therapy and cognitive behavior therapy? And so I want you, I'm going to tell you what I think. And then the question to you is, is it a difference that makes a difference? So you go to the therapist with some problem, and you tell him you see the world in this particular way, and the cognitive behavior says,

well, perhaps it's this other way. Okay. Now because the therapist is an authority figure, what I think people too often do is then take the therapist's frame of reference as real. And mindful therapy would be to come up with many explanations. And the more explain, you know, it's just like when I was saying about stress, that if you think of five reasons why it might not happen, the situation changes. You know, how else might we understand this? And you come to CG, you don't know. And when you know, when

you know you don't know, then you tune in. And that's the bottom line to, to how to be healthy, I guess. So two, two things on that. The, the psychoanalysts observed first that if you impose a solution on a client or a patient, even if it's an intelligent solution, there's a high probability that you'll produce resistance. And part of the reason for that is that you're stealing the person's destiny. It's like, look, if you come to me with a problem and I give you a solution and you implement it, it's not your victory. It's my victory. And so I've stolen it. And if you fail, it's your failure, not mine because you're going

to suffer for it. And so people are naturally inclined to tell an authority figure to go to hell if they impose a solution. A good cognitive behavior therapist won't say, here's another way of looking at it, although there may be situations where that's necessary because of an emergency say, what they will do instead is say, look, could we collaborate on imagining alternative conceptualizations about situation, right? And what you really want, you want the person to come up with the alternatives. And I think that actually does the rewiring, right? If you deliver really want, you want the person to come up with the alternatives. And I think that actually does the rewiring, right? If you deliver the, if you deliver the alternative, people

don't act it out and they don't remember it. And I think it's because they haven't undergone the cognitive reorganization necessary to actually expand their horizon. You want the client to lead always. That's why Freud used pre-association, for example. Yeah, no, and I think that's beautiful. What I'm adding to it is that one should seek multiple potential understandings. Yes. When we have the client now come up

with a different understanding, it doesn't make that right. And it doesn't make the original one wrong. And by recognizing that this thing you were sure was an X could be a Y or a Z leads you to think of most, when I said to you before, when the horse ate that hot dog, it didn't just change my mind about whether horses are herbivorous or not.

It changed everything for me, one event. And so if the person in therapy is dealing with, you know, you're sure it's this, and then the therapist helps you to come to, could be this, could be that could be the other. There are many people who can walk away from that one instance now with an entirely new life before them. Well, okay, okay.

So you do that. That's actually being technically termed collaborative empiricism. So the notion would be the person's in a fixed mindset. You help them develop a proliferation of alternatives. And then you say, well, look, go home for a week and try this attitude and watch a tend, be mindful. Come back and tell me how it went. And we're either going to find out that it's better or the same or worse and you'll be able to

tell me if it's the same or worse we'll try another attitude. Right exactly exactly. And then and that goes two things as you you pointed out it may lead to a proximal solution to the proximal problem, but it also teaches the person that they're the sort of creature that can generate alternative hypotheses and then test them and evaluate. And that's kind of a meta-learning, right? That would be more learning not to be attentive to the situation, but to be attentive, period, to make that a habit of mine. Yeah, yeah. So, and a good, a good cognitive behavior therapist would do that. They won't impose top-down solutions. They'll generate a, with the client, a multitude of possible solutions and then test them.

Do you know the early study I did with therapists and labels? This was good. We had an interview between, it was actually a professor at Yale, when I did this when I was a graduate student. And so we take this interview and we call the person being interviewed either a job applicant or a patient. And then we showed them to a therapist of all different stripes. And almost always, when we called them a patient, they saw him as sick, potentially having this in that disorder. When we called him a job applicant,

they saw him as well adjusted the same person on the same tape. It was interesting because, excuse me, behavior therapists, since they were more attuned to the specific behaviors, were a little less likely to do this. But I think that, I think a lot of therapy needs to be reconfigured because whatever lens you put on

is determining what you're going to see. And it doesn't make sense to go pay a therapist top dollar for telling you how wonderful you're telling them how wonderful therapist top dollar for telling you how wonderful you telling them how wonderful you are, them telling you how wonderful you are. And so the focus on problems, in some instances, at least I'm sure itself is a problem. So, the therapist, I think, has to always say that in this small realm, this is what's going on, not, you know, because as soon as you walk into a therapist's office, you're declaring yourself a patient.

Well, that's why the therapist now says client. Well, behavior therapists have said clients forever, for exactly that reason. And I don't know. There might be an underground, that might be an underground consequence of your early influence on the field. But it's always, I always referred to my clients in that manner because I'm not the authority. If I'm the authority in the session, they're paying to boost my ego, right? Yeah, that's all.

They have to be the authority. I can listen and we can exchange ideas and we can investigate. But in the final analysis, the decision to attend and to change. And Carl Rogers knew this too and laid it out beautifully in his work on humanism, humanistic psychology. The impetus has to come from the client, him or herself. Otherwise, it doesn't work. It has to be voluntary and and attention focused. On the same note, humorously, that if you charge $5 for the hour versus, let's say, $5,000 for the hour, in the second case, the person would get better faster. Not because it's

costing so much money, but because they value it so much more. That's very interesting in regard to pricing period. We've developed a variety of psychological interventions and tried to determine how to price them. And you might think that the compassionate thing to do and the generous thing to do would make them free. But it's not. Well, it's not. No, it's not at all. And it's partly because the act of paying first of all is fair exchange. And that keeps the interaction like neutral and morally untrammeled. There's no charity in it. And second, it is the case that part of how you determine whether something is

valuable is whether or not you've had to exchange something. And why are you for it? Exactly. You bet. for it. Exactly. You bet. You bet. Exactly. So, there's research. Well, we're coming to the end here.

So, what I should do is allow you the opportunity. If you have another thing, if you have something else you want to bring up, I have so much to talk to you about Jordan, because it's such fun talking to you that, you know, we should end here. We can go on for another three hours. So, it's such fun talking to you that, you know, we should end here. We can go on for another three hours. So it's your show you decide. Well, we are going to talk for everybody watching and listening. Many of you know this. We're going to continue for another half an hour on the daily wire plus side. And if

you found this conversation interesting and compelling, which was the point, then please do join us there. Otherwise, I'll just let everyone know again the name of Ellen's new book, Dr. Langer's new book, The Mindful Body Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, and that, when is that coming out? It's interesting that it seems to be already out in Canada. I don't know how that happened. Well, we're so quick. The publication date is September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th.

September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th.

September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September 5th. September People ill and healthy alike will find what we talked about interesting and perplexing and thought provoking. That's the idea. It's a very complicated talk. I found it. Yeah, well, the relationship between attitude and brute reality is unbelievably complex. It's a constant source of mystery and need for investigation. And so attitude makes a lot of things.

There's no doubt about that. And we don't know the limits to that. And your work is certainly being at the forefront of making that idea what scientifically investigatable and widely publicly known. So thank you very much for that. And for talking to us today for everybody watching and listening. Thank you for your time and attention and to the Daily Wire Plus folks in the film crew here in Northern Ontario. The film crew in, are you in Cambridge? Now I'm in Dartmouth, Mass. You're in Dartmouth. To the film crew in Dartmouth, thank you for facilitating this as well. And Ellen will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, uh, we'll rejoin each other on the Daily Wire Plus platform, momentarily. Bye-bye everybody. Take care now.