The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Dr. James W Pennebaker

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

Dr. James W. Pennebaker is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Executive Director of Project 2021, aimed at rethinking undergrad education at that university. I first encountered Dr. Pennebaker's work when I was working on the SelfAuthoring Suite (www.selfauthoring.com), an online writing program which has helped thousands of college students stay in school and get better grades.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is Episode 11, a conversation with Professor James W. Pennebaker. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson's Patreon or by finding the link in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. So today I'm talking to Dr. James W. Pennebaker. He is professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the executive director of Project 2021,

aimed at rethinking undergraduate education at that university. His cross-disciplining research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology, communications, medicine, and computer science. He and his students have explored natural language use, group dynamics, and personality in educational and other real-world settings. He has demonstrated that physical health and work performance can be improved by simple writing or

talking exercises. Dr. Penaaker has received numerous awards and honors, has written or edited more than 250 scientific articles, as well as nine books, including more recently, expressive writing, words that heal, and the secret life of pronouns. He also happens to be one of my favorite psychologists. Welcome, Dr. Pentebaker. I'm very much looking forward to talking to you.

Well, it's nice to be here. Thank you. Great. So as you may know, what, because I think we've talked about this a little bit before, I developed some computer, online computerized writing programs with my colleagues, one of which we call future authoring, one's past authoring, one's present authoring, and they're a suite of writing programs, and they were heavily influenced in their design by your research. My lab's been interested in narrative for a long time, and also in clinical work, and also in the application of psychology

in the real world setting, in the practical setting. And I spent a lot of time developing tests to help employers screen for employees. And we got pretty good at that. But while I was doing that, I was constantly bombarded with questions from managers of middle managers, usually, of medium-sized and large corporations telling me

that it was all well and good if they could hire better employees. But they wanted to know what they could do with their poorer performing employees because that was a continual and intractable problem. And I thought, well, you don't have that much interaction with them. And it's not that easy to solve people's problems. So there's probably not a lot you could do. But I kind of got sick of telling people that over and over. And so I scoured the literature.

And it was at that point, probably about 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, that I came across your research on expressive writing. So maybe you can start by telling us what you learned and how you got it went about it. OK. A little bit of background. I'm a social psychologist by training.

So I don't have any clinical training. I'm most of my career has just been stumbling upon one idea after another as opposed to approaching anything with a clear set of where I was going. I have been looking at my body issues. I've always been interested in how psychological factor is influenced physical health and mental health. And I came across a finding years ago that just bugged me. And that was people who have had a major traumatic experience in their lives were much more likely to get sick than people who had not. Now, that was an old finding.

But as I dug in more deeply, what I discovered was people who had a trauma and kept it secret were far more likely to have health problems than people who had the same trauma, but who talked with others about it. And it may be wonder, what if we brought people in the lab and had them actually write about it, some kind of trauma, ideally when they hadn't talked to other people about, would that influence their health? And that was really the underlying idea. So the very first study was done in 1983 and we brought in about 50 people. Some of them were asked to write about the most

dramatic experience of their lives, the other half were asked to write about superficial topics. I'm simplifying the study. And they wrote for four days, 15 minutes a day. And they also gave us permission to track their student health center records. These were college students. And this was at a private college where the student health center was right next to the dorms. Well, what we discovered was that those people

who were asked about traumatic experiences ended up going to the student health center at about half the rate as people in our control condition, the ones who had written about superficial topics, over the next three to six months. And this was a really studying finding. It was what I kind of helped with a curve, but I never, I was so thrilled that it actually worked.

And then we did another study that was very similar. And here again, we had half the people write about traumas, half write about superficial topics. And they just, they wrote about trauma or superficial topics. By flip the coin, we decided which are the two topics they write about. And this time we drew blood before we assigned them to condition, again after the last day of writing and then six weeks later. And the blood was assayed by a group of people at Ohio State looking at immune function. And again, we found that writing about traumatic experiences associated with enhanced immune function and also reductions

in doctor visits. And this now takes us to about 1988, and by then other labs are to see what we were doing and the whole technique started to take off. And then over the years, more and more labs, including my own, found generally positive effects, not always, but generally, they're writing about upsetting experiences, had this salutory effect and influence both health, physical health, and markers of mental health, and then later, various labs found it to be related to all sorts of things associated with increased memory, cognitive functioning function and so forth.

So, if I remember correctly as well, when you were doing the earliest studies, you were also influenced by Freud's idea of catharsis. And that was the idea that if people had a traumatic or unpleasant experience, if they were encouraged to express the emotions that were associated without experience, that that would be curative. That was partly Freud's hypothesis. But you... Well, it was a little bit, it's important.

It is absolutely consistent with Freud's initial idea. And what was interesting is, because most people listening to this podcast, will hear catharsis, and they will think that catharsis means blowing off scene, right, venting. And that's not actually what Freud actually meant. And it's interesting in Europe, catharsis has a completely different meaning

than it does in North America. So in North America, we view it as vanting Freud and your and your p.s. You catharsis as Connecting emotions and thoughts and that is actually what I was doing I really I had assumed that Freud meant venting and we had found actually that people who just blew off steam Who you just expressed emotions actually didn't show any health improvements. You were doing a linguistic analysis, right? And that was the things that was really fascinating

about the research. So maybe you can tell us a bit about that too. Well, I wasn't initially, again, I had never been interested in psychotherapy and here all of a sudden I was doing a study that was essentially glorified psychotherapy which got me speaking to clinicians. And then the question was, why is writing about an upsetting experience bring about these changes?

And it's not a straightforward question, but there's not a straightforward answer And my lab and others started looking at all sorts of possibilities and looking at markers of Inhibition, you know that people holding back were more prone to illness and put this in was to loosen them up We didn't find good evidence for that other people had other hypotheses and at some point I started looking at what people were actually saying. And I got groups of people, students who were in clinical psychology to rate the essays that people wrote on all these different dimensions. And what I found was that relying on people to read these essays and come up with some kind of deep understanding or even predicting

if a person would benefit or not just didn't work. It was too hard. The stories were really traumatic. They actually depressed a lot of the people who were in our, who were reading the essays. So it occurred to me, it would make much more sense to come up with some objective marker of reading these essays and a computer program would be what I needed. Well, it turns out back then, this is now the early 90s, there was no such program. And fortunately, I'd taken a little computer science in college. And one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, had actually done some

dent her undergraduate degree in computer science. And so I asked Martha to science. And so I asked Martha to essentially help me do a computer program that could go through and analyze the language of an essay. And the idea behind it is really quite simple. You have the computer go in and look at each word and you would compare each word in the essay with some master list of words. So, let's say we're looking for anger words. We want the computer to count up all the words associated with anger. So, we have this dictionary of anger words. And to get that dictionary, we had to make that ourselves. We had to look in dictionaries, the sources. We had to have students generate anger words.

And then we had all these rules of what account what makes for an anger word versus not. But once you have that list you go through and you have computer look at each word compared with a master's list and any time it finds that anger word it just adds it up and at the end it adds up all the anger words divides by the total number of words and it produces the percentage of total anger words in that in the essay and we did this now for not just anger words or sad words guilt words negative emotion words in general pointed positive emotion words and then cognitive words words that suggested cause an effect

like cause because effect rationale words such as that and then as long as we were doing it, we added more and more dimensions. We had pronouns of prepositions and articles, et cetera, et cetera. We ended up with about, now there's probably 80 different dimensions. But when we went back and started looking at essays, we found that certain dimensions of writing

really predicted health improvements. Now, we found that use of positive emotions was associated with health improvements. So if you can write an essay about the worst thing in your life and still use positive emotions, it's a marker that you're going to show health improvements. The effects are pretty small.

Negative emotion words, using a moderate number of negative So health improvements. The effects are pretty small. Negative emotion words using a moderate number of negative emotions is weakly related to doing better as well. But what turned out to be far stronger was use of cognitive words. Words like because cause effect. Words like understand realize no. These are words that we now know are markers of people working through a problem. So let me ask you a question about that because I thought a lot about that.

I thought that was really an interesting idea. So this question has to do with the function of memory. So it's pretty obvious that we don't and can't store what's the equivalent of a videotape of the entire domain of sensory experience when we're interacting with people. And it is obvious as well that that isn't how memory works and that memory is modifiable across time. And so here's a hypothesis for you and tell me what you think about this. hypothesis for you and tell me what you think about this. It seems to me that the purpose of memory is so that you can remember the good things that happened to you in the past and how they occurred and duplicate them in the future and remember the bad things that happened and figure out why and change your course of life and your pathway in the future

so that they occur less frequently. And so the cause and effect analysis would be something like the adjustment of a pathway map. And it sort of reminds me of the work that was done with route memory because the hippocampus seems to store something like cognitive maps. And maps almost by definition are representations of ways to get from one place to another. And so you could think maybe that you go from one place to another and you fall into a hole. And that's very traumatic. And so you remember the pathway and how you got there, analyze it and reconstruct a different potential future causal pathway so that you don't have to fall into same hole twice. Now, I don't know what you think about that, but...

Well, I think that actually, I think that works is true, both the way you describe it, but also on a much broader metaphorical level. So for example, a person who falls into an emotional hole, that their life is going well, and then their girlfriend dumps them, and they go and get drunk in a bar and wreck their car. That experience is incredibly, incredibly complex. And unlike the rat, the human mind has to figure out what in the world went on with my girlfriend. Why did she leave me? What did I do?

Why did I go get drunk? Have I been drinking too much? And if to process that requires tremendous cognitive capacity, and what happens is if it's something we're humiliated about, we're really reticent to talk to other people about it. And language is a really efficient way to process complex issues. But it's a shared language. That's right.

Well, so what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that I think with people who are traumatized, they often encounter, this is something else I want to tell you about, they often have an encounter with malevolence as well as an encounter with just catastrophe. So it's not only that something bad happens to them, it's often something bad that's being consciously directed at them by another person. And they have a really hard time mapping that, especially if they're somewhat naive people. But then the other people who are detrimentally affected by such things that can't recover are those who have no one to listen to them because people it seems to me that most people think by talking and unless you have someone to talk to you actually

don't get to think through and draw the appropriate, let's call them causal lessons. So, and then you also made this comment about, you know, let's say, the classic example I like to use is that, you know, maybe you're a pre-med student and you write the, the medical, the gene, what is it? What's the one for medical entrance? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you can sue yourself as a pretty solid student. And that's a core element of your, like it's a predicate of the multiple maps of your life that you use. And then you write the MCAT and you end up with 20th percentile scores.

And so then what happens is that not only is your map of the future now rendered null and void, but so is your map of you as a predicate for present actions. And also, everything about yourself that you thought held true in the past has to be re-examined. So it's something like the degree of trauma is proportionate to the amount of the area that of map that's disturbed by the unfortunate unexpected and sometimes a malevolent event. And so then the other thing I was thinking about with regards to this, and I think this is the more germane to the immunological element is, so it's obviously very, very difficult

for the mind to compute how dangerous the environment is because the environment in some senses infinitely dangerous and you never know when something small happens to you if it's the harbinger of something that's terrible. So because an ache in your side can be the cancer that kills you so you might ask yourself given the complexity of of framing an unexpected event, how do you ever manage it? And so, part of its temperamentals, so if you're higher in neuroticism, things hit you harder. And part of it is based on your observed competence, but the other part I think is something like is something like the brain computes the proportion of times that you failed in the past compared to the

prefer to the times that you've succeeded and calculates like a mean danger in deaths. And then it raises up your average cortisol levels in correspondence to how dangerous the general environment is being because that puts you on alert more. And the problem with the advantage to being on alert is that, well, if anything else negative happens, you're more ready to act. But the negative consequences is that cortisol is toxic in high doses across time. And it also suppresses immunological function. And it also tends to suppress prefrontal functioning as well because the prefrontal cortex is more

Involved in long medium to long term planning and less in short term like emergency preparation activities So I also like to know you know Did that that those ideas ring ring about it? They see so so They do that there's an interesting so there's another dimension that ties into this and that is sleep. So we know that sleep is intimately related to cortisol, it's related to depression, it's related to immune function, it's related to, you know, all of these systems are intercorrelated. And the person who is dealing with enough people that they're trying to understand, but they don't have somebody to talk to, end up not sleeping as well.

And part of it is they're trying to process all this additional information and this ties into the idea of working memory, that they have less working memory. They're not sleeping as well. Cortisol is higher. They are also worse friends. So when you talk to them, they're distracted, they're not paying attention. And so all of these things are working together

to undermine the person. Now, the Cortisol hypothesis is a wonderful hypothesis. The killer problem is that the studies that have been done with cortisol and its link to writing and trauma have been, you'd have to stand back and look at the overall studies and kind of squint and there's a weak evidence to support it, but it's not as clean as I wish it were. Of course, this has been the problem with the writing research, but it's also the problem of all clinical research. That there is, you know, once you start getting real data, and this is not just self-reports

of clients saying, oh, yeah, that was really great. When you start to get objective, hard data, everything is kind of off the table that the effect sizes are very, very modest. By the way, that's true of medical outcomes as well for medical disease. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So, well, the downward spiral that you sort of described there too could also account for the negative health consequences post trauma. I mean, so you can imagine that things that first of all is that the traumatized person is going to be more reactive to additional trauma, but also that as they, as they, as the effects of

their failure cascade, say across their friendship, interfere with their educational function, interfere with their sleep, the quality of their life overall is going to decline, and that should also produce multiple small stressors that are going to compromise them, including say the decrease sleep, and maybe also alterations in appetite, and those might accumulate across time and produce the negative health consequences as well. Yeah, and don't forget that they'll smoke more, drink more, take more drugs, stop exercising. Yes, kids, out there when you have a trauma, take care of yourself.

You're right. Right, right, yes, yes. Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing I do with my clinical clients generally speaking is make sure that they're getting enough sleep. Yeah. And try to re-regulate their sleeping and also to make sure they eat breakfast at least because that without those two things it's very difficult for someone to get themselves

back on the straight narrow. So now when we designed the self-authoring program, I think I had read, I think it was researched by Laura King, but I don't remember. Somebody had taken your writing exercises and applied them to the future, had people write about the future instead of the past and found similar effects. Was that Laura King? Do you remember? Yeah, that's Laura. And what was interesting was that study, you would think having people write what she thought, what she'd have people write

about the past versus write about the future versus both. And her idea was that having them write about both would be best. Because in a way therapy sometimes works in that way. So let's work through your issues and what are the implications for the future. She found them writing about both actually wasn't very effective, that having them write about the future was beneficial or just the past was beneficial. And since then there have been a lot of other studies looking at having people write about just positive effects and or just negative.

And what you generally found is right here about positive effects is also beneficial for health. But the- Well what it kind of indicates is the thinking is beneficial for health. You know I think that's that's true and it's also you know the best studies it as I stand back and look at the kind of the broad panorama of research is. Getting people instructions to write really loosely, in the sense of here, you write about the most dramatic experience of your life, but you know a lot of people who haven't had traumas or maybe you've come to terms with traumas, but if you write about those topics that are weighing upon you the most right now, they may be positive, they may be negative, they may be most, or a little bit of both. And essentially, that's what I encourage people to do, is to, if you're having trouble

sleeping, set aside 15 minutes and just exploring your thoughts and feelings about issues that are weighing on you. Maybe something that you don't want to talk about or something you don't really want to address. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when we set up the future, I'll run you by the latest research on the Future Authoring Program because you won't know about all of it.

So basically what we've done with the Future Authoring Program, which is the one with which now we've administered to thousands of university students in different locales with very, very stable results. And the results are quite remarkable, I think. So the way the thing is structured is we first get people to consider six important dimensions of their life. So we're kind of construing the individual as something

that's distributed across dimensions of their life. So we're kind of construing the individual as something that's distributed across dimensions, practical dimensions. So those are intimate relationship, friendships, family, career, education, time spent outside of work, and use of drugs and alcohol, because that's a rabbit hole people can really go down and and having a at least an idea of how you should handle intoxicating substances is better than just

going into it blindly. So the first thing we get people to write about and loosely following following that idea, it's like a free association idea in psychoanalysis, right? It's like, but it also, I think frees people up to make mistakes because they get up tight if they have to do it right. You have to say, look, you don't have to do it right. You can do it badly. It's better than not doing it at all. So we have them write about to envision what they would like if they could have what they wanted on each of those domains.

It's like, okay, it's three to five years down the road. Imagine you're taking care of yourself and as if you were someone you cared about and that things were set up optimally for you. Hypothetically, what would that look like? And what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that people are afraid of specifying their future because they're afraid of hope. But also there's an avoidance element which is that once you specify your criteria for success, you've also specified your criteria for failure. If you keep things vague and ill-defined, then you can stumble along without ever really

noticing that you're lost. And it's a really bad strategy in the medium to long-term, but I think it's effective as a means of, well, it's effective self-deception in the short term. Anyways, they do that first. And then we get them to write for 15 minutes with no concern for spelling or grammar, which I think we took directly from your research And just to sketch out what life could be like three three years down the road if they had what would be good for them All right, and so now that that also gives them something to aim for a and so one of one of the things that we've We've been thinking through with regards to having something to aim

for is the fact that the systems that utilize dopamine, the incentive reward systems, which basically produce most of the positive emotion of the kind that people really like, only respond in relationship to a specified goal. So you feel an incentive reward kit when you're moving towards a value target. And so if there's no value target, there's no positive emotion in life, except in consequence of direct pleasure, say, but there's no ongoing excitement

or enthusiasm about tackling hard problems, for example, because there's no evidence that those are related to a value of destination. And it's the entire dopaminergic system that responds to that. And that's, of course, the system that cocaine and drugs like that effect. And so then we do something else, which we've introduced more recently,

which is we say, okay, now, look, you specified the positive pole, and that gives you something to run towards. Now, we want you to think through the ways, the faults that you have, and the resentment and anger that you hold for whatever it is that you're angry about and resentful about

an unhappy boat, and to consider your bad habits. And imagine where those could drag you three to five years from now if you let them take the upper hand. And so people write about that for 15 minutes. And we think, well, that gives them a negative pull to run away from, like a hell to run away from and a heaven to run towards. And there's some good evidence from the animal literature that animals that are running away and running towards at the same time are

Run faster. They're more motivated And then in the second half they lay out a well-articulated long-term Implementable plan and we try to get them to deeply articulated say well, you know dragged into eight goals Rank order the goals. If you attain goal number one, why would that be good for you? Why would it be good for your family? Why

would it be good for broader society? What would you do with obstacles or roles? Okay, so that's the pattern. And now, at the University of at Rotterdam, at the business school there, so it's the Rotterdam School of Management. I've been working with Michaela Shippers there and her colleagues. We've run about 7,000 people through that now, and the research indicates there's a bunch of interesting things. Overall, it's raised great point average, about% and drop their drop about 25%, which is absolutely phenomenal. It was far larger effects than we would have imagined. But the effects are quite interesting because, you know, with most interventions, if there's

a distribution of performance, you intervene and you raise the higher performing people, even higher. And, you know, absent a ceiling effect. Right, right. But this has the opposite effect. It raises the lower end up. And so at Rotterdam, the students that were most positively affected were the ones who were performing the worst.

And there, we divided them up by gender and ethnicity. So male female obviously. But then we divided them into ethnic holenders, so mostly Caucasian natives, and then non-Western ethnic minorities. So the males were underperforming the females. It was female, Dutch natives, male Dutch natives, female non-western ethnic minorities, male non-western ethnic minorities. There was a big gap between the Dutch females and the non-western ethnic minority men. Within two years of completing the program, the non-ethnic, western minority men passed the Dutch women. Even though it was very cool. I also increased a little bit. Yeah, so minority men passed the Dutch women. Even though we've got a lot of them.

And also we've increased a little bit. Yeah, so, and then we replicated that more recently in Canada at a little college called Mohawk College. And we found there that men were underperforming women again. And then we divided them into how well they were doing in high school before they came into college. And the worst performing males were the ones who were doing poorly in university before they hit college.

Sorry, the males who were in high school and who had the worst grades were those who improved most with the use of the future authoring program. And they did the whole thing in an hour, madly in one session. That's very, that's very impressive. Could you send me a copy of that? I'd love to see that. Because that's, that's the, you copy the Mohawk paper yet because it hasn't been released. But I can send you, I'll send you the rest of them. But yeah, that's fabulous because these, these are the issues.

Of course, I'm dealing with right now on here you the rest of them. But yeah, that's fabulous. Because these are the issues, of course, I'm dealing with right now here at the University of Texas, trying to find out, you know, and most of the interventions that we are looking at is essentially aiming at lower social class kids who are coming to college for the first time, who face so many obstacles that the upper middle class students aren't even aware exists. So we're trying to think through why this works, you know, and so part of it is I think,

and I've talked this through a lot, part of it is I think that the schools before college never require really require kids to make a decision and they don't teach them how to make decisions. They never teach them that their life is theirs to master, let's say, and that they have to make a plan, but that the plan has to serve them. We also have a suspicion that maybe men won't work unless they have their own plan. Maybe that's associated with trade agreeableness, although we're still investigating that, but there is no doubt that these, at least as far as our research has shown, that these interventions, the future planning interventions seem to have a more salutary effect on men, but the

men are underperforming, you know, so for some reason the women don't have the same problem, but it's something like males won't work unless they have their own reasons to, which wouldn't surprise me given that males are more disagreeable than females. So it's certainly possible. But the effects on dropout at Mohawk Hall is for walloping, about 50% decrease in the first semester. And of course, that's when kids always drop out. So there's something about having a plan.

So we are thinking too that what's happening is, and this kind of goes back to your comments about both positive and negative emotion. It seems to be something like uncertainty reduction. So that reduces the effect of doubt, let's say. And also tagging, you know, having the person designed a future, they also want tags success with positive emotion, and that carries them forward potentially through obstacles. So, yes. It would be very interesting to analyze the essays that these people wrote using our computer program. Yeah, well, you know, I think we may have done that. If I remember correctly, we may have done that

with the Rotterdam study, but it has to look, because we've used your LRWC a couple of times to look for the same sort of phenomena. We've also done that to look at whether or we could extract out big five traits from the right examples, and that's also possible. So I'm less, less, uh, saying what about the big five approach, because language and self reports are really, really different animals. Yeah, well, I'd like to talk to you now, if you would, about, um, about you know, you, you, you, you did the computer analysis of words and that got you interested in different categories

of words, correct? And you wrote a full book on pronouns. That's right. Part of the reason I want to talk to you about pronouns, apart from the fact that I'm interested, is I've been embroiled in a political controversy in Canada for the last five months. There's been legislation here formulated at the federal level. It's already in place and provincial level, mandating the use of what it's been legislation here formulated at the federal level. It's already in place in the provincial level, mandating the use of what

it's being called preferred pronouns. And I don't know if that's come to the University of Texas at Austin or not yet, but the idea is that people of a non-specific gender, let's say, have the right to choose the pronouns by which other people will address them. And that's actually being mandated in Canadian law, which is something I've been objecting to forsepharsely, because I don't believe the government should mandate language content. I think it's a massive error. But anyway, so I have a specific interest in pronouns, and I know also that pronouns are in a closed linguistic category, so they don't change that frequently. But you wrote a whole book describing why pronouns were so significant from a psychological

perspective. Right, and it's more, it's not just pronouns, it's a whole class of words called function words. And if you look at any text or you listen very carefully, most of what we convey are what we call content words. These are nouns and regular verbs and adjectives, most adverbs. And they're the guts of what we're talking about. But we have all these little words, articles, A and the prepositions, two of four pronouns, he, she, they, it, et cetera. And in English, there's only about 180 common pronouns. Now, the average person has a vocabulary of 100,000 words,

but only less than one half or one percent of those words are these function words, yet they account for 60% of all the words we use. They control how we talk. And what they are specifying is how we connect with one another. They and how we connect with our topic and how we think about ourselves and our group.

And by analyzing these function words, you get a really good sense of who a person is. And that's the underlying theory of the work I've been doing for the last several years using this computer program, which is linguistic inquiry and work count LIWC, which I pronounce Luke. And the Luke program is really just a dumb program that mostly is looking at these function words.

So tell us some things that you've found and with specific words. So tell us some things that you've found with specific words. So let's start off with with the most commonly used spoken word, which is the word I. I tell just so much about people. And if you're going to your email, you're going to see that you use I sometimes, sometimes in an email you won't. So for example, people who are depressed use the word eye more than when they're not depressed. People who are suicidal use it even more. So one of our first studies was looking at poets who either committed suicide or didn't

and we analyzed their poetry. The suicidal poets did not use more negative emotion words. They didn't make more references to death. They used the word I more. And why? Because pronouns, including I, tell us where we're paying attention. If you use the word I, you're self-focus. And you know as a clinician that one of the theories of depression

is that it's a disease of self-focus. That people are so rumoured at it and looking inward so much. So let me ask you a question about that. So that seems related to the psychometric finding that self-consciousness is a facet of neuroticism. So let me ask you one other question, along with that. So, because self-consciousness seems to load with the negative emotions, but also what are the things that I often recommend to my clinical clients who are socially anxious?

Because I've watched how they interact and because they get self-focused, they don't look at other people, they don't look at their face, for example, and literally thinking about how other people are looking at them, and they're busily thinking about what they're going to say next. And so what happens is they stop looking at the face of the people that they're they're talking to or listening to them. And so then they're extraordinarily awkward. And so what I've done is instead of telling people to stop thinking about themselves, I've said when you enter a conversation,

really, really focus on the other people, push your attention outward. And because that seems to activate their unconscious and automatized professional, let's say, socialization. That's exactly right. Skills. And then it's flow with the conversation. That's exactly right. Skills. And then it's flow with the conversation.

That's exactly right. And to build on this, the idea of people who are leaders and status, if you look at the two people, you can tell it with remarkable accuracy, who's the higher status, by the person who uses fewer eyes. The high status person doesn't use the word eye much. The lower status person doesn't use the word eye much. The lower status person doesn't, because the high status person is looking out at the world, and the lower status person is your

pointed out, is looking inward. And you can take this to the bank. Go look at your email, and you'll see when you're writing to somebody of higher status, you tend to use eye more, and when you're writing to someone at lower status, you use eye less. You tend to use I more when you're writing to someone at lower status, you use I less. So, so. Okay, so let me, okay, let me tell you another observation that that I've had. Do you tell me what you think about this? I'm going to tell you with a, tell you about an observation from animation first. So I've done some very in-depth analysis of various Disney movies, including The Lion King. And The Lion King involves

a child and then an adolescent lion who matures. And so, and the animators also represented his father. Now, his father has a very interesting face because it looks like this. Like, it's focused forward and kind of staring. Almost, you have to think of almost predatory, because a predatory gaze is locked on someone else. But, and then the adolescent lion, who's kind of naive and imbicillic, in some sense, is like this all the time. And so, it seems to me that there's a relationship

between immaturity and self-focus and maturity and outward focus. In the Lion King, when the adolescent lion undergoes this initiation right, his face changes into one like this, into one of determination. The other thing that seems related to this is that, you know, when people are speaking in front of a group, they often get self-conscious. And they feel all the eyes on them. And that makes them self-conscious. And one of the things that I've recommended to people who want to speak to groups is never

to speak to the group just to look at one individual and then another individual and then another individual because that, well, that seems to foster communication, but it also blows out the probability of becoming self-conscious. That's exactly right. In fact, I have recommended to teacher trainers. Here's what you do at my university for teacher training. You give a practice lecture and you have the camera is in the audience looking at you. That's the wrong way to do it. The way you should train teachers is put a camera behind the teacher at the audience and point out afterwards, look, that guy's not paying attention to you.

That person is. In other words, not making yourself focus, making you that if you're training a teacher, training a public speaker, doing exactly what you're saying, you should give them the view of what the audience looks like and not what you look like. That's the exact wrong training. Absolutely. You know, okay, so tell me what you think about this. When I'm lecturing, I pay attention to the people who are I'm lecturing, I pay attention to the people who are paying attention. Now, I mean, most of the time,

most people in my lectures are paying attention, at least a reasonable proportion of them, but the ones that aren't, well, I don't know why they're not, but there's lots of reasons they might have had a bad night, they might be overtired, they may have taken the course by mistake, I mean, God only knows. But if I'm paying attention to the students that are paying attention, then I can read off their faces

how the audience is thinking, especially if I glance around. But it's that intense communication from individual to individual that seems to make a lecture or an interview or a conversation, really compelling. That's exactly right. And I think that's the secret to one of the secrets to being a good teacher and a good speaker

is really being able to watch. And also to judge when all of a sudden you're starting to lose some, you know, you're also doing little experiments the whole time. You know, one of the things that people who are relatively new is they start to lose people and they start speaking more quickly, which of course is precisely the wrong thing to do. And they start paying less attention because they get self-conscious and want to hide from the audience and then they get into a loop.

And things just go, you know, the worst speakers I'd ever seen stand at the front of the audience with their head down and mumble at their feet. It's just painful. I mean, okay, okay, so that's very interesting. So, okay, so you talked about I, you talked about dominance. What else have you learned about specific words? What else have you learned about specific words? Well, a couple more things about eye mixed with some others. One is honesty. So the ability to detect deception versus honesty as a function of how people talk. And what we find is that we've done many studies where we induce people to lie and tell the truth,

and then we look at the transcripts of the two. And what we find is when people tell the truth, they tend to use I more, they're owning what they're saying. And the person who's lying is psychologically distancing themselves from what they're saying. And then there's another feature is when you're telling the truth, you tend to use more words that are, we used to call them

exclusive words or differentiation words, where you use words like accept but without exclude. Words where you're making a distinction between what's in a category and not in a category. That these exclusive kind of words are, you're being more honest because you're saying what you did, but also what you didn't do. And that's a really complex cognitive task. Whereas if you're lying and you didn't do any of it, to say what you didn't not do is just beyond the capabilities of most people. So both eye-word usage and these exclusive words together do a pretty good job. And another one is also focusing on details.

So, the person is- So, can you do that with political speeches? Oh, yeah. And there's been some nice research on that as well. Jeff Hancock, for example, who's not Stanford, has played with this idea quite a bit when he was looking at all of the rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction during the Bush administration that there that what he found was administrators were being using deceptive language prior to to the US before prior to our going to war. So that opens up the whole completely appalling and interesting scenario.

It's like, I mean, increasingly people are using computer programs to analyze personality and that sort of thing by analyzing people's behavior on the web. That's exactly right. And we've been doing this a lot with political figures. And in fact, one of my graduate students, and I, Kayla Jordan, we have a website that's called Word Watchers, and wordwatchers.wordpress.com. And by going there, you can see our analysis of Trump and actually this whole election from my perspective as a scientist, this has been a phenomenal, like an electoral season, as

a human being, not so much. So I'm going to get you with where I'm going to do it. I'll email you and you can give me some links, okay, that I can put in the description here where people can go look this sort of thing up. So that's interesting. So can you actually rank order politicians in terms of the probability that they're telling the truth? Um, that's how we have, yes, I could,

but I'm not sure I trusted very much. Because one of the interesting issues about deception is you've got some people who are deceptive, but they honestly believe they're telling the truth. And I think Trump actually falls into that category. I think he actually believes what he says, and he might say just the opposite, 10 minutes later, and he'll believe that as well. Yeah, so do you suppose, okay, so that's interesting,

because I've seen in poorly written undergraduate essays, you commonly see, I think about it as fracturing at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy. So, you know, if you listen to his schizophrenic speak, they're actually fractured at the level of the linguistic hierarchy. So, you know, if you listen to a schizophrenic speak, they're actually fractured at the level of the phrase. And then, if you listen to a manic speak, they're more like fractured at the level of the sentence or the paragraph.

They can say a whole paragraph, and then in the next paragraph, they'll say something completely different than contradicts the first paragraph, but there's no awareness of the contradiction. And it's poorly written undergraduate essays. There'll be a claim made on page one. And then a claim made on page two that are completely antithetical. And, you know, it isn't self evident that you become conscious

of paradoxes in your thinking unless you act out both propositions simultaneously and it produces conflict. Because you can hold paradox explanation without ever knowing it. And so maybe what happens with someone who does that sort of contradictory speech is that temperamentally they're very confident. So they might be assertive, for example, and maybe also low or high and stress tolerance. So they're not anxious people. They're assertive and they don't really care so much what other people think. So they come across continually as confident.

And so that would be more like temperamental confidence, which is a form, it's a funny thing, because it's not exactly the same as telling the truth, but it is something more like believing what you say, or believing in what you say. That's right. not exactly the same as telling the truth, but it is something more like believing what you say or believing in what you say. That's right. And what I think the text analytic approach is better at is when a person knows them well, they're telling a lie.

And that's when our tales do better. There's another phenomenon, it's called a performative. It's one of my favorites that you can do here and that is Performatives are used in linguistics and they're usually a phrase and they might be something like Let me assure you or as I've said before or believe me what I say and If you have a performative, it makes the entire sentence, you're not able to detect if it's true or not. So you can't establish the truth value.

Let me assure you that this is a glass of water. Now is that true or not? Well, it's, yes, actually it is because I want to assure you it's a glass of water. It's true because I want to assure you that that it is even though it's not And what happens is Consciously we don't know we do this, but it's almost so our brain It's kind of trying to protect us and we throw these up and there's I have another web page that has a

Number of performatives that you see in president after president where the president says something that the beginning Sets it up so it's a performative and then the second half sure enough is it is a line Yeah, well, so do you suppose that okay? That's Yeah well so do you suppose that okay that's interesting so do you suppose that so is the performance a marker for for deceit is I think it is something to say yes I think it is and it's and it's fact, Trump's great, his best would is believe me. So I know more about the army than the generals. Believe me. Right.

Is this fight against himself? He is, and it's a form of performative, which is he's really saying, please believe me that I know more that that I, right, it doesn't, it doesn't close it that way, but that's what it essentially is. So it's, right. Well, you kind of makes you wonder if he thinks that if people believe him, that makes it true.

Yeah, exactly. No, because it's a funny thing because there is some truth to the idea that true things are what other people believe Now obviously you don't want to go too far down that road But there is something I mean because for example a contract holds no truth unless there's consensus around it So whenever the reality is dependent on everyone agreeing to do the same thing Then consensus is actually a very good marker for truth the reality is dependent on everyone agreeing to do the same thing. Then consensus is actually a very good marker for truth.

You know, because there's lots of situations where you say, well, if we agree on all this, then it's going to be true. That's what a contract is. So, so it's, it's almost as if using words like that is an attempt to establish a contract where no contract can genuinely be established. I mean, we can have a contract about whether or not Iran has weapons of mass destruction, but we can certainly have a contract about whether or not we'll go to war over it. Yeah, yeah. So what does this start with regards to two interesting words?

Because that was fast. There's a whole, we could go for hours on this actually. So another one that I've been quite interested in is using these groups of words and looking at how two people connect in terms of these function words. So what we could do is we could actually calculate the percentage agreement we have in our use of pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and so forth. And we call this language style matching. And the closer two people are in their in their use of these words in a given conversation, the more they are in two.

Oh, another. Wow. That's being on the same wavelength. That's exactly right. And it's not necessarily liking one another, it's being absolutely paying attention to one another. So two people in the midst of an argument tend to and trained really closely, just like two people medley in love. Now, we've done analyses of transcripts of speed days. And what we find is we actually can predict who will go on a subsequent date at rates somewhat higher than the people themselves.

So what's happening is the rapid establishment of mutual imitation. That's exactly right. That's exactly what happens from the P. A. J. Indian perspective when two children start to play. That's exactly right. Cool. And we looked at one that I particularly like was we studied, we looked at 86 dating couples. These were freshman in college and freshman in college are in

notoriously unstable relationships, which from my perspective is perfect for research. And to be in our studies, they had to do instant messaging at least daily with each other and to give us 10 days of their IMs, which they did. And what we did, and we also asked them how good is your relationship, how likely will you be together in several months? And what we found was that we did a shockingly good job

predicting who'd still be together. Those people who were a, if we just average got their, their style matching score, their average in, in training score and we just got the top half 80% were still together three months later. If they were in the bottom half only 50% were still together. Wow. And, and, and, and and self reports, people's self reports about their relationship was Absolutely unrelated to whether or not they were still together. So that's like dancing Mm-hmm. It is. I've always thought this as a chance

That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, because so so what that really means in some senses that Think think about it this way is that the two the two people come together and the two of them, it's as if they're making something, they make something jointly that they're both acting out so that they're uniting into something central. That's right. And you might think too that in order for that to happen, they have to be paying close attention to each other.

That's right. And so you can't entrain with someone unless you pay close attention each other. That's right. And so you can't entrain with someone unless you pay close attention to them. And certainly one of the best markers for the utility of a relationship is going to be whether or not the people pay attention to each other. That's exactly right. That's why children are so absolutely

desperate for adult attention. That's the currency. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. Wow, that's really cool. Well, if you go to another one, I've got another one. A few, three or four years ago, I started working with much bigger data sets.

So this was with about 25,000 college students who have been admitted to my university over four years. And I got their admissions essays. And these essays are people explaining why they want to come to the university, you know, how they have overcome a difficult time or something like that. So each person wrote two essays. And we went through and started to do some kind of general analysis of word use focusing on these function words. And found that there was a central dimension to language.

This is a fundamental dimension. And it's what I'm calling it is analytic versus narrative thinking. People high on analytic thinking are using high rates of articles and prepositions. At the other end of this dimension are people who are using high rates of pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, negations, and so forth. It is a coherent dimension and that any text can be put along this continuum. And in fact, it's like a fingerprint. People who use words at this level tend to do so in other emails, other emails or network conversation, etc. So are the narrative people using more metaphors?

Yeah, they probably would. So tell me how you would tell the difference if you were. Well, let's say before we get into metaphors, metaphors are going to take us down to rabbit holes. So let's, let's, before we fall down the hole, let me just point out this analytic thinking was so cool about it is we were able to track these students grades over the next four years of college. And the higher they were on analytic thinking, the better they did in college. And in terms of grade, it was correlated about point two. And it did matter if they were physics majors or fine art majors.

If they were in engineering, psychology, music, social work, that this, you could take this to the bank. The more analytic a person is in their essay, the better they do in college. And part of it is, his college is based on analytic thinking. But it's also correlated with intelligence, it's correlated with SAT, which is probably about 0.35. Oh yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty hard. Yeah, it is really quite striking. And what's interesting is, is that we can now use this as kind of a remote sensor to get a sense of how smart somebody is. So we're analyzing.

Man, you're a dangerous man. I'm a dangerous man. Very dangerous. Yeah, yeah. So that's another one. We've been playing with many other things. We've been doing a lot of work on author identification. So we published a cool article,

one of my graduate students, Ryan Boyd, and I have been focusing on a lost play, or a play that was attributed to Shakespeare, but people didn't know if it was or not. And we were able to do some really smart analysis showing pretty clearly that it was written by Shakespeare, probably co-authored with another guy, John Fletcher. And we've looked at some other manuscripts that have been called into

questions that have come out of the 17th century. So we know we've been taking this work in all of these different directions. Cool. Okay, so let's close this off by, why don't you tell us something about what you're doing with regards to revamping undergraduate education at the University of Texas and what you and what your aims are and also why it was that you were Exactly It all gets into my analysis of language. I was doing all of this work trying to understand into my analysis of language. I was doing all of this work trying to understand could I get a group of initially two people, but then it's been you've five people to interact with one another on the computer. And if so, could I track how they are interacting with each other and

get a sense of how the group was working. And I working with some computer scientists, we were able to come up with a really slick program to do that. And then it occurred to me, when to be interesting to do that in a large class, because I taught a large introductory psychology class with a colleague of mine, Sam Gosling. And we had 500 students in the class,

we had them bring a laptop to class one day. And we were able to break the class into small groups of five each. They could interact with each other. And we were able to track how they were interacting. And we could get feedback to the group, trying to get the group to work better. So we, using the style matching, we could tell people

whether or not people of the members to the group were paying attention to each other. Or someone was talking too much, we could ask them to not talk so much and so forth. And it worked. The next semester, we realized, you know, we could use this idea and revamp the classroom top to bottom where we got rid of the textbook. So all readings were online. We'd have a quiz at the beginning of every class. We would have, break the class into interactions more frequently. In other words, started to rethink the classroom top to bottom. And then we moved it into an online class so that we were able to broadcast out and we

switched the format of the class that was like a TV show. So we were behind a desk, we'd have fake news, we'd have, or at least one of us would be in front of the green screen or somewhere in some other place. I'm not sure that that's a problem. No, no. People used to know what I meant, but as soon as I said that I realized I can't use that anymore, but this idea of one of us would be on in front of a scene somewhere on Earth, you know, so one of us, you know, I would say, Sam, where are you? It looks like you are in a balloon today. And, you know, it looks like he's in a balloon and so forth. In any case, the point was we turned this

into a television show and what we found was that by broadcasting this out to 1500 students, we sent it up because there was testing every day that students were in class every day. They were focusing more on the material. They were more engaged and it turns out that their average performance went up compared to when we taught it in the past. And more impressively, we, people who took our online class did better in the other classes they were taking that semester.

Oh yeah, that's impressive. And the classes they took to semester afterwards. What kind of improvement did you get? It wasn't huge. It was like a difference between a 3.1 versus a 3.25. And we reduced the disparity between upper, middle, and lower middle class students in terms of their performance. So that historically, we found one letter grade between the upper, middle, and lower middle class students. in terms of their performance. So that historically we found one letter grade

between the upper middle and lower middle class students. And now we had reduced it to point four letter grades. Okay, that's big. That's big. So that's what the analogous to what was happening with the future offering program. That's right. And so how do you account for that?

Why do you think it had that differential effect on the lower performing students? Well, it turns out we came across some previous research that had found similar effects, but it deals with frequent testing. The idea is kids who come from lower middle class backgrounds by and large went to crappy high schools. And in these high schools,

these were, by the way, our kids are all smart. They're always most of them are the top 7% of their high school class. But if they were at a crappy high school, they learned to get by by memorizing because the tests were memorization tests. And so these kids were great at memorizing. And then they come to a real university where you're not tested on memorization, you have to think conceptually. Right, right. And historically when we taught those classes, the classes we had this usual three or four tests over the course of the semester, I would always get students in my office

walking in after the first test saying, I have never made a B in my life and I just failed your first test. That's impossible. How is this even possible? And I would say, how did you study? Well, I had flashcards. I did this.

I memorized this. And I said, I told you, memorization doesn't work. You have to think conceptually. And that doesn't mean anything to these kids. But now you've got to test every day. And you fail that first test, pow. You fail the second test, pow. And all of a sudden, you're realizing, wow, pow, and all of a sudden you're realizing,

wow, it's true, memorizing doesn't work. I see. So, okay, so you think what's happening is that they're learning that memorization doesn't work faster. That's exactly right. That's really funny. And they use these skills in their other classes, because they realize memorization is not working in the other classes either. So, how do they catch on to the... Okay, so now they know that memorization doesn't work. How do they figure out what does work? Well, it's been interesting moving to the online world. We create all of these videos, which basically there's a video on how to study. There's another video on how to take a test. And another video on how to manage your time.

In other words, now we understand the problem a lot better than we did before. And so students are taking advantage of these resources and end up doing better. That's cool. How long have you been doing that? So after, so we started the class the first year in 2011. And then, in the years afterwards, I started talking to people

at the University of Texas and elsewhere about kind of the big picture of education, which was, what the hell are we doing in education right now? You know, the world has changed. That's the worst it has ever been asked in myself. I know, but the world has changed. Why do we have three hour courses? There's no logic for a three hour course. Why do we have a semester that goes from the first of January to sometime in May?

There's no reason for that. Why do we have a half hour course? Why do we have a seven hour course? In other words, why do we put things together with the way we do? And it turns out there's really good reasons because in the early 1900s, we need a standardized way of talking about credit and so forth. And then we built computers to program this in and we built buildings that we knew how to use time and space and location and and so that your computer will tell you this class is going to meet in this room at this time and your final exam will be at this place in this place. We don't need all that.

Yeah, well that's all it's analogous to the conservation of physical structure and evolution. That's exactly right. And what's interesting is the University of Texas computer that the Registrar uses can't have make it a half hour course. It can't change the semester. It can't do any of these things. And a modern student information system computer costs an unbelievable amount of money. And so what I'm doing is I am working with the university

and the entire infrastructure to start to rethink everything. What should be the curriculum? We don't need all these required courses that we use to have. It makes no sense. You know, a lot of our requirements made a lot of sense 50 years ago. And a lot of our classes were flunk out classes. We don't need flunk out classes anymore. And we can come up with really brief classes, half our classes to learn a basic skill. For example, we have a requirement.

You have to have a statistics course to take out for division psychology classes. Do you really need the statistics course? Well, most of you don't, and if I ask my, the people teaching statistics asking them, do the statistics you're teaching, are they relevant to today? And they all say, oh, not at all. I mean, I don't use analysis variants. I don't use TTS. I use linear regression. I use this. I use that But we can't teach that and my view is if you're gonna take my upper division class You better know correlations and you better know correlations up and down

I can teach a correlation course that would be a point seven hour course. Yeah, and Yeah, well and download it and take it any time. I don't care where you take it. Yeah. Well, one of the, I mean, I've been using YouTube a lot for the last three years, you know, and that's right. I put it started putting my lectures online, just, just take with an iPad, you know, and by, by the beginning of 2016, I collected about a million views. And I thought, oh, that's a whole different thing than I thought it was. I thought YouTube was for cute cat videos. And then I started thinking it through and I thought, oh no, look, here's the situation,

man. For the first time in human history, the spoken word has as much staying power and reach as books. No more reach. You could publish faster. And it could be broken up and communicated in all sorts of chunks. It's like this is absolutely revolutionary. That seems to me that while your universities are at a race against time. That's exactly right.

Because this is the new world order. And it's like every other part of our world right now, where we're dealing with the future of AI and the future of everything, that this really messes with the world order, because so much of what we can teach can be put up there and it you know because correlations have a change to hell of a lot in the last hundred years you don't need to update your lecture on correlations. Right there's something one really good lecture on correlation. The more 10,000 of them. That's also very frightening. That's exactly right. And, but then we do need, you know,

you know, we're talking now, 15th century, we do need a guild mentality. If you're going to become a therapist, a scientist or this or that, you need to have some serious lab experience. You need to have some serious experience doing things in addition to learning how to think and to get some smart feedback on how to think, how to come up to get up to the level to understand what's involved in

trying to make new size to make new advances. It's a incredibly exciting time and I'm working with all parts of the university. I have 200 people working with me. I've got various, you know, we're dealing with the development studio working on new ways of thinking of online and other technologies. I've got a big research and methods group trying to find out what even works. We don't even know what works and what doesn't. We're having to deal with extended campus in terms of how we can push out our classes, our information to the world in a way that has some kind of financial value to the university.

So we, and this office, that really, you guys have been thinking about accreditation because it seems to me that the problem is the biggest. The thing is is that the ability to disseminate valuable information was once that university in some sense had a hammer lock on that. That's gone.

No more. That's right. That's right. What the thing that the impediment to mass education at the moment, in some sense, is the problem of mass accreditation. That's right. And universities still have a hammerlock on that, but there's no reason that they need to. So I'm curious when you're thinking about the mass distribution of education material,

what have you been thinking about in relation to the current? The problems and the complexities of this are unbelievable. So, some of it is the nationwide bureaucracy. So there are accrediting agencies that don't know how to use deal with fractional credit. Don't know how to deal with a variable calendar. We've got financial aid issues because they're based on these old systems as well. We're dealing with intellectual property in terms of who owns the IP of a class?

Is it the instructors at the university? Can the university resell it? How do we rethink this? You know, the idea of having free open classes is great, but it's not a very good business model. And this is one of the problems with Coursera and ad act and you're putting your videos on online for free because It the reality is the cost I've been using patreon, you know

Hey, you know about patreon. No, it's really interesting. It's a it's a platform that That that was developed because of the difficulties that creative people were having in monetizing their production. And so with Patreon, people can voluntarily buy a monthly subscription. If they find that the content that you're producing is worth supporting, then they can donate monthly to your Patreon account. And they can either do that on a monthly basis so they can pay you a donation per video that you put up. And that's being a very, you know, I thought with my YouTube content because I wanted to professionalize what I was doing to some degree

to hire a film crew and to increase, improve the audio and all of that. And I threw up a Patreon account online last April when I found out about the technology, just a curiosity. And I got about, I don't know, 60 or 70 people subscribing in the first month. So that was kind of interesting. And it's enabled me to hire a film crew

and that sort of thing. But it's quite interesting because the Patreon people, although there's some perks they get, like I send the hire donors a signed copy of one of my books, for example, but mostly they don't get access to any content that everyone doesn't get access to. But people have a strong sense of reciprocity, and they're not completely comfortable with the idea of getting

something for nothing. And the Patreon account has been extraordinarily useful to me. It's very interesting. Yeah. Well, it is. And these are issues that we're struggling with at the university in terms of how do we do it? Because to do one of our courses is really quite expensive and you know, you know, ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars and trying to figure out the model for it. The one thing that we can do is we can give university credit. So that's one that's one that's one hold that we have. But it you know it really does deal with a broader issue in our society which is knowing the material and knowing what and knowing how to think

sufficient to get by in the real world or do you need the official credential and yeah, well, you hopefully eat both. Yes, or you know, if it was a just world, just knowing the material would be sufficient. Yeah, well, the problem is it gives you no rapid way of telling the sharmacans from real things. That's the big issue. And that's the big issue. And then another problem is that as the credential

becomes more important, the knowledge becomes less important because you use the credential to play the system. That's right. That's exactly right. So these are the kind of things that I've been dealing with. That I'm trying to change a giant bureaucracy. Turns out it's not real easy. Yeah. And you said why it has all these built-in assumptions that are part of the structure,

not only part of the cognitive apparatus, but actually built right into the infrastructure. That's exactly right. And what I found is that people at the university have been very supportive. I thought for sure I would run into major obstacles. Faculty, students, administrators, even the legislators, because this is a public university, are all really supportive. And even though I've got support all around, it's still just like swimming through molasses because there are all of these rules and regulations that have been there sometimes for 100 years that's no longer server-perfect. Well, you know, maybe you know, maybe you don't know,

but the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years. And the typical family fortune, three generations. And it's for the reasons that you just describe is what happens is that the structure itself becomes so inachronistic that not even the people within it can change it. And so something comes along that's younger and that's built on different presuppositions. It just takes it out.

And the probability that that's going to happen to the universities, in my opinion, is overwhelmingly high because because of exactly the sorts of things that you described. It's structural. It's built for a different century. Yes and and I built for the late 1800s. Well it is and actually if you think about it university started in the 1400s and it's amazing that they have survived as well as they had. Yeah that's for sure that's for sure. Well, it was really good talking to you. I've enjoyed this myself. I've been a great admirer of your research, and I don't say that lightly because there's

a handful of psychologists that have had a profound effect on me, and you're certainly one of them. I would also say you're a spectacular rarity among social psychologists in my estimate. So I know that's a nasty thing to say, but being partly a social psychologist, I guess I'm allowed to say it. I would also like to talk to you again at some point in the future, maybe, you know, six months down the road or something, because you have all sorts of things that people need to know about, and this is a really good way of telling people about them. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon page or purchase

the self-authoring programs at self-authoring.com. The links are in the description. Thank you for listening. you