The Rich Roll Podcast - Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer On The Mind-Body Connection, The Power of Mindfulness, & Why Age Is Nothing But a Mindset

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Harvard’s renowned “Mother of Mindfulness,” Dr. Ellen Langer offers an insightful assessment: the root cause of global challenges lies in mindlessness. With an illustrious forty-five-year career and the distinction of being the first woman to attain psychology tenure at Harvard. Her extensive work spans diverse topics, including the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health, challenging the conventional mind-body dualism in Western medicine.In her latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, Dr. Langer delves into the transformative potential of mindfulness for improving health. This conversation dismantles the separation between mind and body, exploring the concept of mind-body unity. She dissects the power of belief, dispels the illusion of control, and offers a novel perspective on decision-making and manipulation. The discourse extends to the psychological construct of fatigue, demonstrating how mindfulness positively influences physical endurance.Advocating for a paradigm shift, Dr. Langer encourages liberating ourselves from past experiences and conventional wisdom. This transformative mindset, she asserts, unlocks untapped potential, fostering increased agency and empowerment. The discussion reveals intricate connections between the mind and body, providing practical tips and cutting-edge research to empower individuals to take control of their health and achieve enhanced well-being. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF 👉 seed.com/RICHROLL Birch: Enjoy 20% OFF + 2 free eco-rest pillows 👉 BirchLiving.com/richroll On: Get 10% OFF 👉 on.com/RICHROLL Momentous: Get 20% OFF OFF 👉 livemomentous.com/richroll Waking Up: get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF 👉  wakingup.com/RICHROLL This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF your first month 👉 BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL.

Most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds. If we could only wake up, life would be very, very different for virtually all of us. Most of us live mindlessly most of the time. Dr. Ellen Langer is the author of several books on mindfulness, including her latest, The Mindful Body. Medical science can only give us probabilities. There are still doctors who will say something like, you have six months to live. There is no way they could know that. Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer showed

that mental attitude can reverse the effects of aging. Her groundbreaking research spanning over 40 years delves into the mind-body connection. Everything you think you know for sure, every limit you place on yourself is a function of your mindlessness. People think they want complete success, not knowing that if they had complete success,

life would be empty. That's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time. Thank you for coming. It's an honor to meet you. I appreciate you coming to do this today. It's a treat to have such a legend in our presence today. You know, one of the things that I love so much

about you and your work is just the kind of novel unconventional approach that you've taken to psychology. And you do it with this seeming kind of twinkle in your eye, like, you know, kind of pushing boundaries. I'm doing what you're doing, but not. But with a beginner's mind and this kind of sense of awe and wonder,

says a lot about your imagination. Like all of these studies, you've done so many studies over the years that the average person wouldn't even concoct in their wildest dreams. And you're just putting them to the test all the time. Like over the course of your career, like what is one of the wildest, craziest studies

that you came up with and tested? We're doing one right now. And all you're doing is watching somebody eat pizza. That's the whole thing you're watching. So we give different instructions. One group is supposed to count the number of times the person is chewing. That's a control group.

The important group is imagining, tasting it and smelling it and feeling on the tongue. So whole- Bringing a mindfulness to the- And so the question is, will they gain, lose or no difference in weight? So that's pretty wild. If they lose weight, I'm gonna have to rewrite physics.

Well, you've already demonstrated that this has an impact on satiation, on hunger, right? Like even with the time that you spent with your friend and she's eating her sundae. And it was amazing. In fact, I'm very external in that way. And whenever I go out to dinner, it's very important to know the time between

when I get there and start watching somebody else eat and when they're gonna take my order. Because I don't want, when you're taking your last bite of that burger for me to now order, because I'm not gonna want the burger in another five minutes. Right.

There's so much to kind of extrapolate from that, right? I think there is some kind of weight loss, like guru protocol that we could divine from that. right? I think there is some kind of, you know, weight loss like guru protocol that we could divine from that. Okay, so here's one. We haven't done this yet, but you know, David Edwards? So David was at MIT. I think he still might be there.

And he has these things, they look like hour glasses and you turn it over and it emits an odor. One of these is the odor of chocolate. And it seems to me that if people smell chocolate and then have available to them also to snacks and chocolates, they're going to eat a lot. However, if they do it multiple times, they won't want the chocolate.

It's like people who you walk by a bakery, you have to have it, but maybe you don't have to have it. But the people who work there, you know, don't eat the stuff very much. Well, you tested that with cheese as well. Like people who- No, that wasn't mine. Oh, that was a different one. Yeah, but it's in the book.

But it was the same idea. Imagining eating a bunch of cheese and then that translates into when you're actually presented with cheese, like you're gonna eat less. Yeah, similar, but the point here would be if you wanted to control your weight by eating less. So the substance you want to eat less of,

you overdose on the smell. At some point you would develop a tolerance for that, I think that we haven't tested that part of it. I watched, remember Mad Men? And every minute they're smoking. So, and I was a smoker, I still smoke. So I walk into the room. No one's listening, don't worry.

I walk into a room and Mad Men is on and he's putting out a cigarette, one of them. And I didn't want a cigarette. Okay, so if they're lighting up, I want a cigarette. If they're putting it out, I don't. And so the, if you break up in your mind, imagining difference, it's not, you know, one activity. It depends on where you are in the activity.

Sure, well, it's that sort of cue behavior reward cycle. Right, so if he's putting it out, it's telling your brain, oh, I've already satisfied the craving. Like what's the wildest study that you would like to put to the test that you haven't yet? Well, one is I would like to take hundreds of people who were just diagnosed with cancer. We could use three, four different kinds of cancer.

And nobody is gonna be happy when they get a diagnosis. So give them three weeks. Then after that measure their stress level every three weeks, four weeks. And I predict independent of their genetics, independent of their treatment, independent of nutrition and the kind of cancer, stress will predict the course of the disease.

That hypothesis comes from where? This idea that you have that stress is really foundational to way more than we think. Yeah, I couldn't tell you where any of these ideas come from, but I'm overwhelmed. I can't get out of bed and walk straight. What is your process? Do you wake up in the morning and jot down ideas?

All day long. You must have hundreds of studies that you want. I have a friend collaborator who's a member of my lab, Philip Myman, he's big in AI. And I know he can't possibly remember these, but at least I feel. So I go, Philip, I have this great idea. I tell him and then it's out. Whether it'll ever come back or not, I don't know.

So the foundation of your work is essentially disabusing people of this dichotomy between mind and body. And when I think about it, and people talking about mind and body, these are just words and people have made them, reified them in some sense. And it seemed to me just the work on placebos alone, that there's more going on.

And the mindful body, when I first, it was first going to be a memoir. So I have lots of personal stories in there. And two that speak to the mind body unity, broadly both about pancreas. And you tell me how many people you know who have even one story about pancreas, I have two. So I was married when I was very young,

foolishly, maybe, maybe not. And I went to Paris on my honeymoon. I was 19 going on 40. And so I have to be very grown up because after all now I'm a married woman. Doesn't follow, but it did in my mind at that time. So we're having dinner in Paris and I ordered the mixed grill

and on the mixed grill is pancreas. So I asked my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? He points to something. I'm a big eater. I love eating. I eat everything else with gusto. Now the moment of truth.

Can I eat the pancreas? And I feel I have to, because I have to prove that now I'm all grown up. So I start eating it and then I get sick, literally sick to my stomach. He starts laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken.

You ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay, so what was going on there? Another pancreas related story with the same bottom line perhaps was my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. And then all of a sudden it was gone

and the medical world couldn't explain it. And so for me, just entertaining the possibility, even if just for heuristic purposes, just to generate new hypotheses, let's put the mind and body back together, see them as one and see how far we can push it. And that would explain both of those pancreas instances. And then we've done study after study

and they just keep turning out to make it so that we don't gain anything, I don't think, by keeping them as separate. And the separate has delayed research because the question it raises is how do you get from this thing, fuzzy thing called the brain to something material called the body? And so everybody's looking for mediators

and put it back together, you don't need a mediator because it's one thing. Right, the findings are so astonishing that it's very difficult to digest. And I think despite the fact that the kind of advent and awareness around mindfulness is growing kind of exponentially right now, there is still this recalcitrance in the Western medicine

kind of, you know, kind of- No, there's no question about it. Corporate industrial complex to resist that notion when it comes to diagnosis and treatment. Yeah, there was an article that somebody wrote about me for, it was the head of the magazine section of the New York Times. And so it took me forever to explain to him,

mind, body, unity. And then when he turned the article in, and these are very smart people who already agreed to publish the article, still they kept asking sort of what's going on under the hood, what's going on inside. And I'm not suggesting that there's nothing going on. I'm simply suggesting that more or less

it's all happening simultaneously. Now, decades ago, the medical model was such that they didn't believe that psychology mattered at all. I mean, it's nice to be happy. I'm sure they felt that way. But that the only way you're going to become ill was the introduction of an antigen, pathogen, what have you. And then that model shifted to the bio-social model.

So now they know psychology matters some. And eventually I think we'll get to the point to realize that it's really in some sense, the whole ball game. That leads me to recall the study around colds and flu. Yeah. That's in the book, which is so wild. Incredible. And it's so funny because I've done several podcasts

once the book came out and I've never talked about it. And each time I say it, talk about the colds. Yeah, please, please elaborate. So basically people come in to the lab or the room and there's a large television and the television is showing a video of people coughing and sneezing. The room is full of things like tissues,

chicken soup, Vaseline, whatever might prime a cold. And essentially without the introduction of a virus, people who believe, for whom we prime a cold, get sick. There's no evidence, I think, I'm not sure of this, but that if your hair is wet and you go outside, that you're going to get a cold. But I believe that if you believe, if you go outside- That's a very persistent

trope. With a wet hair, if you go outside- That's a very persistent trope. That you're gonna get a cold. And which would be a nice test to see, to take people to find out how they believe colds come about and then test them in those circumstances. The interesting thing would be to put them in a situation where you, a different situation from that, where you're introducing a virus

and to see if they get sick. There was some added nuance to that as well, wasn't there? With some interesting prompts, like sort of telling people like, hey, you might be on the verge of a cold or, and then having a control group and seeing what would happen. And then they would start to express symptomology.

And obviously, I guess on some level, we're all harboring viruses and bacteria. So maybe that sort of activates or represses an immune response. When I try to explain it, I thought, well, I mean, where is it coming from? And all of a sudden you become sick.

The weak hypothesis, and I couldn't answer that, but that would be the strong hypothesis. The weak hypothesis is that the last cold you got or the cold before that wasn't 100% cured. And so it's dormant. And what this did was make it active again. Right, human beings are insane. Oh, there's no question about it.

And you've sort of backed this truck up into this world that pulls the covers on like, we think we're sentient and we're making logical, rational decisions all the time, and we're not easily manipulated and that we have agency and control. And the book really pulls the covers on that to reveal a very different picture of how we operate,

how easily we're conjured into believing one thing or the other, how we can be manipulated and the power of belief on outcomes in terms of physical manifestations. Yeah, no, I don't know if it's how easily we're deceived because I think the whole structure, since we're little kids, everything is sort of conspiring against us.

You're taught right and wrong as if these are completely different. You're taught absolutes at every turn. And so then when you grow up and you believe these absolutes absolutely, doesn't seem quite as surprising. Within that structure, then you can prime people and move them around.

Those structures give us this illusion of control or a sense of security, which of course leads to this idea of mindlessness, which is really how you kind of enter this world, not through the traditional Zen Buddhism world of mindfulness, but from the opposite direction. It's even worse than that, Rich. Okay, so I start studying mindlessness. And from the very beginning, I'm gonna have data, so much data showing that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. Then I had a conversation with somebody,

and I wish I could remember with whom it was, because he said to me, I don't know if he said it in this nasty way, but I don't know how you make this nice. You are what you study. I took it seriously. So then I decided to look at the other side of it. And it was only after looking at the other side of it

that I learned all about Buddhism and Eastern philosophy and so on. But my ideas had already been formed. And what was interesting to me was for me from a Western scientific perspective to come to, you know, the same point time after time as this ancient thinking felt that, you know, there must be something there.

The idea that we're mindless most of the time is a disturbing thought. But when you reflect on that, it becomes very clear how true that is. And there's a couple of quotes that I jotted down that you've said that I think can kind of set this up. You said, we don't enjoy our lives enough because we are not actually there.

We are mindless, not mindful. Virtually all the world's ills boil down to mindlessness. Most of us live mindlessly most of the time. Yeah, no, I mean, big, it's even bigger than that when I give talks about it, where I have a slide that says virtually all of our ills, personal, interpersonal, professional, global are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness. Now, when I give a talk on that, I say,

and just among us and the other million or so people I've said this to, I mean all. So yeah, I think that if we can only wake up, life would be very, very different for virtually all of us. Well, let's tease that out a little bit. Like what would be a good example? Like I'm thinking of those moments when you're driving the car

and then you kind of come to and realize you don't even know where you were the last 10 minutes. Oh, yes. It was that example that made me realize it in the first place, you know, that I'm driving and I think I'm gonna be at an exit 32 and I say, I'm at 38, where was I? No, everything you think you know for sure,

every limit you place on yourself is a function of your mindlessness. I mean, we make people more mindful and they live longer. So we're talking about very big changes as a function of giving up this view that you know. The powers that be, I think would like us, even in our democracy, to stay mindless because that instantiates the status quo in some sense.

But I think everybody knows they don't know. They just don't know that they can't know. So they pretend and they opt out. And when somebody acts as if they know, then what you do is genuflect or give them the power of a stage. But because everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives,

you can't know. So when I lecture on this, I often give this example. One thing that everybody thinks they know, how much is one plus one? Well, I'll play along. I've read the book, so the answer is two. Okay, so it is sometimes two, but not always. If you add one wad of chewing gum

plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal two as a more often as it does. Now imagine right after we finished talking, someone comes over to you and says,

Rich, how much is one plus one? You're no longer going to mindlessly say two. What you're going to do is pay some attention to the context and then you're going to answer more mindful and say, it could be. And then you can say, it could be one, it could be two. Right, and what does plus even mean? Exactly, yeah, right, right.

It's simultaneously humbling, but also confronting. And as a scientist who is in a world where the scientific method is everything and there are guardrails and rules and protocols and this is the way we do it and we don't do it like this and this is the way it has to be, I would imagine that you're ruffling some feathers here and there.

Yeah, but I'm oblivious to it most of the time. I just ruffle and then find. I had written in another book about becoming an artist. I started to paint. You're a painter. And I was applauded for not following certain rules. And then I admitted I wasn't, I didn't know the rules because I couldn't find them.

So much of the time when I'm being recalcitrant, it's out of ignorance rather than courage. I think this is really important, especially, but not exclusively, with respect to health. Medical science, like all science, can only give us probabilities. An experiment says, if it's reliable, that if you do it again the exact same way, which you can never do exactly the same thing, you're likely to get these findings. Those probabilities are presented in medical journals, textbooks, what have you, as absolutes.

When you know something absolutely, you don't pay any more attention to it. And people need to know that everything they're told is a probability, is a best guess. So, I mean, I can't imagine, but there are still doctors who will say something like you have six months to live. There is no way they could know that.

And when their prognosis becomes self-fulfilling, then I get upset. Even the diagnosis of cancer, that you have cancer, you could have something that people have called cancer, but is different from it in these ways and those, we just don't know. So, and if I got sick, I'd certainly go to the medical world,

but I wouldn't just hand myself over to them. And any doom and gloom hypothesis, I don't think I would be quite as willing as many people seem to be to accepting the truth of it. Yeah, there is a sense, despite the illusion of control, which we're gonna get into, there is this kind of hopefulness around agency that emerges from the book,

because when you realize that you do have a little bit more control than perhaps the traditional dynamic of a doctor telling you this is the way it is and this is how it's gonna go. It's empowering. Yeah, I mean, for one thing, when you're told you have a chronic illness, the way people understand chronic is it's uncontrollable.

Well, you can't prove that anything is uncontrollable. All we know is that we don't know. It's indeterminate. Now, if you think you definitely can't do something, you're not gonna do it. If you think, who knows, maybe not, even probably not, you may try it. And so there's always a modicum of control we can exert. Even the simplest thing, I believe,

this one I don't have data for, but that if something is ailing, your arm is in bad shape, if you make the rest of your body healthy, you're gonna have a better chance of beating whatever the disorder is. You know, imagine you have an Olympic runner and you have a couch potato

who's, you know, overindulging in bad food or whatever, and they're both exposed to COVID. I would bet on the athlete. Sure. But so then you can't say it's uncontrollable. There's two things operating here. One is sort of the calcification of thoughts and ideas and possibilities on the one hand.

And then on the other hand, it's about the power of language and how we communicate ideas and how potent the words we choose to describe certain things can be in terms of how we think about ourselves, our belief about possibility and the physical kind of outcomes and manifestations

that we demonstrate physiologically. I'm so glad you pulled that out because that's a very important part of the book. But when I start talking about it, I usually just end up with all of the exciting to me studies on mind, body unity, but language, even a simple thing. So I went to visit a friend who had a very bad case of cancer.

She just gets back from the hospital. Hi, Eva, how are you? She said, fine. I said, what'd they say? My cancer's in remission. And then all of a sudden I thought about it. Oh, wait a second. If I went for the very same tests, chances are they'd tell me I don't have cancer.

Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission? And that seemed to me a way of understanding almost everything in this culture that you could have the thing as bad, you have it in remission as better, but they never go the whole distance. There's a better than better way of understanding almost everything we do.

And hopefully I can give examples of that. But to say your cancer is in remission, what does that mean? Is it lurking someplace? No, it's sort of in some ways, the medical world edging their bets on if it comes back. But the understanding that if cancer comes back, it's in some ways the same cancer. That's why we call it cancer. In some ways it's different. And what we need to do is attend to the ways it's different.

The example I use is a cold. You get a cold. When the cold seems to be gone, you don't say you're in remission. You say you're cured. Now, if you get a cold after that, you see it as a different cold. Just like it's cancer, in some ways it's the same, in some ways it's different. By seeing it as different, you're empowered. I can beat these.

Look at how many I've handled in the past. And then the one thing that drives me the craziest is the five-year rule. that a woman has breast cancer, the cancer is gone and they sold it on remission, they would be better off calling it cured. They have to wait five years without it reappearing for the medical world to say it's cured. Believing that it could be there is very stressful.

And we've made clear my views on stress. So in the choice of language, they're keeping people in a state that I think is very unhealthy. And before I did this, by the way, so I had my views of remission cure. Then I called Susan Love. Susan, when she was alive, was a breast cancer,

an expert, the expert. And she agreed with me. So, I felt a little more comfortable going against the many people in the medical world with that. It's not just a differentiation in language and word choice, it's really a different paradigm. Oh yes. Because on the one hand,

these are binary dualistic terms where there's hard lines before and after and kind of a concretism to the whole thing where your whole deal is attention to variability. Everything is in flux all the time. Nothing from any moment to the next is the same in any conceivable possible way. And within that, there is this, again,

hopefulness like a sense of possibility or something being different and an appreciation or in a mindful attention to that offers new ways of perceiving it and ultimately considering and treating it. Yeah, I mean, we have several studies that you know on what I call attention to symptom variability. That's just a fancy way of saying being mindful. Being mindful is noticing change.

When you're given a diagnosis of some dread disease, the assumption most people have is that it's gonna stay the same or get worse. But nothing goes in only one direction. There are always blips. You know, it's like the stock market, you know, goes up, goes down a little bit, goes up. You know, if it's on a course to go up,

you still have moments where it's falling and vice versa, if it's going down. And if we paid attention to when it's better, why is it better now? We'd have a way of controlling it. So we do these studies where we call people at random times of the day and ask them, is that symptom better or worse than before, from the last time we called, for instance, and why? Now, four things happen when we do that. The first is you start this process where you feel in control. You're doing something to make yourself better.

Second, by noticing that now it's a little better, that feels good because you thought, yeah, it was only awful. And there are moments of some relief. Third, by asking yourself why you engage in a mindful search and we have so much data that that mindful search alone is good for your health. Last, that if you believe or look for a cure,

I think you're more likely to find one. Now we've done this with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, arthritis, chronic pain, a host of real things, things that are scary for people to have. And in each case we get a great improvement. And you can do this yourself, which is how it all started, which is people when they take a placebo, the doctor is wearing a white coat, gives you this nothing.

You take it and you get better. Clearly you're doing it yourself. So what do we need the doctor for? And so that's how this attention to variability started. Most people have a smartphone. So you set your smartphone for an hour. In an hour, it rings. And you ask yourself, is the symptom better or worse than the last time and why?

Men set it for three hours and two hours and 10 minutes. Doesn't matter. Just random times in the course of a day, over the week, two weeks, whatever. And that even if you don't get the answer, you're going to end up better for the reasons that I said. Because you are paying mindful attention to what's occurring, which is connecting you more deeply to yourself.

And when the neurons are firing, that's literally and figuratively enlivening. It's energizing, which is something that I often fail to remind people of, because I think we should be mindful all the time. You say it, oh my God, it sounds scary to them, unless you're an academic. It's confused with thinking, and even thinking has gotten a bad rap. It's not thinking that's hard.

It's the worrying that you're not going to be able to solve whatever the problem is that's hard. So what we find is that the more mindful you are, the more energized you are. And the way for people to understand that is if they think of doing whatever they enjoy doing, that the only way you can enjoy it is if you're there for it. So it turns out mindfulness is energizing. turns out that it's good for you, turns out that it feels good. And you know that I've been doing this for so long, there's been lots of opportunity

to put in all sorts of dependent measures. So it's better for everything. People see you as charismatic. It actually leaves us imprint on the products you produce, your relationships improve, your memory is better, so on and so on. So for somebody who's new to this idea of mindfulness or have traditionally associated it

with a meditation practice, something formal like that, what is the process of getting somebody mindfully engaged? What we have people do is notice new things, three, five, really doesn't matter, but people need a number. So we say notice three new things about things you know. Go home and notice three new things about your spouse. Notice three new things about the lawn,

three new things about something at work. And what happens is when you're noticing new things about the things you think you know, you come to see you didn't know them very well. So your attention naturally goes there. Now, the other way, the top down way is to accept that everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So uncertainty is the rule.

Most of us have been taught from day one, certainties. And those certainties are making us mindless. They make us unaware of all sorts of possibilities for every aspect of our mind. For me, life changed when I was at this horse event. You remember, I'm a straight A student. I'm the newest also. Well, we're the ones people hate.

I might've even as a kid, memorized what was underneath the pictures. I student, you were also. Well, we're the ones people hate. I might've even as a kid memorized what was underneath the pictures. I mean, that was terrible. Okay, so I know. Now I'm at this horse event, this man asked me if I'll watch his horse for him because he's gonna get his horse a hotdog. I roll my eyes internally so he can't see,

important to be nice, and I think he's crazy. Horses don't eat meat, everybody knows, or at least all the A students know that. Okay, good. Horses don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that everything changed for me. That everything became possible because all of the things

that were preventing that possibility now just crumbled. There are so many ways that they're wrong. You know, that how many horses were tested in these studies? How much grain was mixed with how much meat? How hungry were the horses? You know, when you're doing a study, these sorts of questions really matter. And they're typically ignored when the results

are being reported and reported in magazines. From there, it's sort of a short leap to this idea of the illusion of control that we walk around with. Like in addition to these rules and these structures and organizational systems that help us make sense of the world that we kind of adhere to that drive a sense of mindlessness because we can just operate within that context.

We have this sense that we are exerting some level of control over our lives and external events while also feeling like we're pretty good at assessing risk when it comes to decision-making. And of course, you know, I disagree with everything. I know, so I'm just lobbing you a softball here. But there's so much, I don't know which one to hit. All right, well, the first thing

is that people hold things still because they think then they'll have greater control over it. If I can say what kind of person you are, now I know you're a whatever, then I can make sure you don't hurt me in that way. But- That's the evolutionary kind of explanation for why we're wired that way.

That's what you're saying? No, no, no, never went there. If I think you're the kind of person who's late, so we're married and I'm going to make dinner. We'll make it very traditional, though I'm too old for you. But that if I know that you're always late, I adjust myself accordingly, right? But you're not always late.

And if I cared more about you and wanted to facilitate things in the relationship I would pay more attention to when you were and when you weren't just like the symptoms that we were talking about a moment before all right but I hold you still now you're that kind of person you're always late you're always cheap you're always whatever we call people and that makes us feel in control as long as I know how everybody else is, I know how I should be. But because everybody is changing and because sometimes you are this way, sometimes

you're not. And even when you're this way, whatever that is, there are other ways of looking at it. You know, so you're being careful with money. You're not being cheap. When we recognize that, then we actually have more control and the relationship improves. We pigeonhole people. We make comparisons all the time that are mindless as a way, I think, to exercise control. But since we're so often wrong, we're actually giving up control.

I mean, if I see you as a snob, all right, what am I going to do? I'm going to avoid you, right? Why do I want you in my life if you're a snob? If I take that same behavior that looks like you're a snob, I see him and he's really shy. You wouldn't expect a tall, handsome man to be shy,

but he's shy. Now, every behavior that was true for you being a snob is also true for you being shy. Once I call you shy though, I want to embrace you. That kind of speaks to this other idea that you have around transcending judgments and getting to this place of understanding. This is the most important, so funny

because in 45 years of research and some of them life and death, changing the meaning of aging, big, potentially big, important things. This is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart, which is behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says,

you know, today I'm gonna be clumsy, inconsiderate, and I'm gonna procrastinate. So when people are doing things that get on your nerves, what is it from their perspective? Now, so I was doing therapy when I was at Yale. At first it was fun, and then I didn't have the patience for it because I wanted to say,

you have all of the behaviors you want, just do them. But of course you can't say that to people, just do it. So what was it that was keeping them from doing it? And then I realized that when people are trying to change a behavior, they're not looking at it as the same way as when they're motivated to do the behavior. So for example, I am scarily gullible.

Really, it's very easy to take advantage of me. Several have. So I want to change. You see how gullible I am. It's not good for our relationship, Ellen. You've got to change. I keep trying and trying and I'll fail. And the reason I'll fail is that because going forward,

I'm being trusting. And I don't wanna stop being trusting, even if it means sometimes people will take advantage of me. So you are so damn inconsistent, it's really hard to tolerate you. I love your flexibility. I am so impulsive that I need to change, but that's because I value my spontaneity. So we did a study ages ago. We gave people 300 behavior descriptions. And we said, circle those

things that you've tried to change about yourself and you have trouble. Goable for me. Impulsive. Then you turn the page over and in a mixed up order are the positive versions of these. Now circle the things you really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting. So in other words, with this, you can see how relationships would improve, right? Because now there's no reason to demean you because what you're doing makes sense.

I was just mindlessly saying it in a rigid way. There's always a reason for the behavior and what you're referring to are the values that motivate and underlie the behavior. So trust is a value that is important to you. And the manifestation of that is gullibility. You can change gullibility and still hold on to trust. You can set healthy boundaries and do,

I think there's ways you can play with that. No, what you're saying is you can be a little less gullible by being a little less trusting and sure. But the two are the same. It's the same thing. But I think getting to the values that are driving the behavior is the pathway to understanding. And to your point that every behavior is motivated

by some reason that makes sense to the person who's perpetrating it. It's this idea, my wife says this all the time, like every man or every woman is right from their perspective. And if you can understand that and embrace that, I think it allows you to kind of have a little bit more grace

and a sense of empathy and understanding. Yeah, I think that because we're brought up mindlessly, which means we seek single explanations for events, that if you see something different from the way I see it, I see it the way I see it, it must be right. Because if it weren't right, I would change it, right? So anything you do that's different from me means that you're wrong.

And so we have to open up all of that. And all of that stems from strangely, I think, a belief that the things that we're after are scarce. That we both can't be important, happy, full people. There's always this, who's better on which dimension, whether it's with friends, relationships. And I think we're taught that in the beginning, we're taught that in schools

by there being a normal distribution for grades. Harvard had this thing, this was years ago, where we got a printout that compared the grade you gave the student with the grade that student got in other classes, basically saying you shouldn't give that student an A because the student is a B student. And I don't know, I think why sometimes I give all A's because they all deserve A's.

Well, it's interesting how rules and institutions and structures drive that sense of a scarcity mindset from the moment we come into the world, right? And we're not even kind of consciously aware of it. And you have a whole chapter on this in the book, this difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset. Well, this came to pass with somebody that I knew who,

I'm like a little kid and I went, you know, you wouldn't believe this, I got these sneakers on sale. Okay, big deal, right? You have a lot of energy. I do. And this is your third podcast today. So this mindful approach is working for you. Yeah, no, mindfulness is energy beginning.

So I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight because I'm gonna be too energized. Anyway, so I come back and I say, I got these sneakers on sale, excited. My mind, what I'm doing is sharing, right? I got these sneakers, you get the sneakers, I'll tell you where to go. She thought I was bragging and it took me so long

to figure out how could I was bragging. And it took me so long to figure out how could I be bragging? But because her mindset was one of scarcity. So if I got them, now there are fewer available for other people. Mine was sneakers can be gotten at this price. Which led to her resentment or jealousy. But how does mindfulness work to disabuse us

of a scarcity mindset? Well, for one thing, you see how things are more abundant. You see how several things can be used in several different ways. You know, we have notions of natural resources. You want more natural resources, call more things natural. You know, it's, I mean that, you know, we have notions of natural resources. You want more natural resources? Call more things natural. You know, it's, I mean that, you know, half seriously.

Yeah, the things that we care about, but people don't know that this is what they care about are not limited. They're not scarce. As I said a moment before, despite all the normal distributions we set up saying, some people should have a lot, some a medium amount and some very little, whether it's talent, beauty, money, health.

The things we care about are not limited. That we can live in a world, you can, just forget the world, have a relationship where both of you prosper. It doesn't have to be, you know, here's my domain where I'm better than you, here's your domain, which is when the good relationships work tend to be that way. Scarcity isn't unrelated to control issues either, right? No, of course.

Like if you're driven by a scarcity mindset, you wanna kind of control what you have access to, et cetera. And that kind of gets into this idea of future casting and probabilities and how we as human beings think we have a sense of what's gonna come next. And your whole thing is like, virtually nothing is predictable. This is so hard to communicate to people.

People think they can predict all the time, because they're making predictions. And then if I make a prediction that you're going to smile, you see, but I could have- You're a manifestor though. I could have left it for three days, right? And at some point you're going to smile. So it's very easy seeing that our predictions are right.

We think we can predict because we're so good at post-dicting, looking back. So an example, John and Mary are at a party, they're fighting. And if I said to you, you think they're gonna get divorced? You say, how do I know? People fight. But if we don't have that conversation,

you see them fighting, a month later, two weeks later, it doesn't matter, somebody says to you, hey, did you know John and Mary are getting divorced? I knew it. You should have seen them go at each other. And I think that people don't understand that while you may be able to predict for the group,

nobody who knows anything about numbers believes you can predict the individual case. So what does that mean? If I were to say to you, here's a used parking lot, a lot of cars in another parking lot, and here's a Mercedes dealership. Now you go and we pick 20 cars at random. We look at 100 cars, and we just try them once. Chances are, more Mercedes are going to start than the used cars.

But I don't know if anybody who'd take the bet for all the money, all the future money you're going to make, and I'll match it, that any Mercedes that we pick at random will start. Because we know things happen. If I'm in a foul shooting context with Michael Jordan, whoever's the lead now, I could win if we only shoot one ball. I sometimes get it in. He sometimes misses.

If we do many, the difference in our talent will reveal itself. And most of the time, what we're doing is making decisions about individual cases. Now, when you know you can't predict, it throws everything into disarray, but it also makes life easy. Most people get themselves crazed with, should I do this or should I do that? The decision is based on a prediction, right? Should I do this is should I do that? The decision is based on a prediction, right? Should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great or this, which will be great, which will be greater, I don't know, and so on. When you can't predict, it doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then life actually becomes easy. So my bottom line, rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.

Randomly choose. Now, you can randomly choose if you want an Almond Joy or a Snickers. Nobody's going to care, right? But it's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not. Getting married or not. taking the job or not. Doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small, you can't know. That's a very confronting idea.

Yeah, well, I mean, you can only live one life. If there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids and live a life as somebody who has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids. Maybe I can make a comparison, but you don't have that available to you. So I say to my students, so let's say, should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale? So they made a decision to go to Harvard. So let's say it's terrible. You know, they screw up royally and they say, oh, I wish I had gone to Yale. There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse,

better, the same. And that's why regret is so mindless because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming would have been better. And you know, there's no evidence for that. But we have this predisposition to haunt ourselves with these sorts of things, looking retrospectively over our life

and wondering what could have been or what should have been, had this or that gone differently. You only do that when your present is not happy, right? Exactly. But the labels, good, bad, better, worse, are all words and subjective thoughts that we place on top of these things and they become real or emotional experience

only by dint of the fact that we've made that decision and labeled them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And mindfulness is a way of putting distance between you and that. Well, the way you put distance between it is by seeing it in a multifaceted way. So here are five ways it's good here, five ways it's bad.

I don't have to. What is good or bad? Well, but if you're using that language for yourself. Right now we have, if it's good, I have to kill people to what I can to get it, right? Stay up all night. I mean, I have to get that thing because it's good. And if it's bad, I have to do everything I can

to stay away from it. Now, when you know it's neither good nor bad, I don't have to do that thing because it's good. And if it's bad, I have to do everything I can to stay away from it. Now, when you know it's neither good nor bad, I don't have to do anything, whatever. If this podcast is wonderful, that's great. If the podcast turns out the cameras aren't working, it's also great because I can enumerate all the advanced, this is funny. The other day I was told of this very, very large prize.

If you can extend life, which is what I've been doing, right, for the past 45 years. Okay, so somebody- Is this the Peter D. Maness thing? Somebody tells me about this, $100 million. Okay, so I'm driving by myself. I have an hour drive. So, oh, okay. Now, first to the government,

I don't live in that moneyed world, but I'll assume the government wants 50 million. What am I gonna do with the other 50 million? And it's taking me my whole ride home. You're already mad at the IRS for taking away so much money from you. No, I didn't care about that because the 50 million wasn't enough for me.

And if I give this to you, oh, then you're gonna be upset that I didn't give as much to you. At the end, I was fine not having the money. Uh-huh, you created your own like sort of accelerated suffering as a result of trying to experience what that might be like.

That's very funny. With everything good, there's a way of constructing it, understanding, construing it so that it's not so good and vice versa. And people need to understand outcomes are in our heads, the value of outcomes. The outcome is nothing. The way you understand it will determine

your emotional response to it. And there, the more mindful you are, the more ways you can look at it, the more choices you actually have. How well do you practice that yourself? I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, I virtually never experienced stress. Wow.

Yeah, I mean, I've had some big things happen in my life. Major fire that destroyed 80% of what I own. My mother died when she was young, these sorts of things. But when the house went up in smoke and I called the insurance agent, came the next day, and he said to me in his 25 years on the job, this was the first time that the damage was worse than the call. Oh my God, oh my God, is what most people say. I can't, oh, and it's nothing, right? Here, it was a lot. But my feeling was I had already lost the stuff.

Throwing my sanity away wasn't going to get it back. And I also felt I'm not so attached to things. I love nice things, but I don't need them. And those things were all part of my past. As long as you have a rich present, you don't need the mementos from the past. What I extracted from that story is like the sort of golden lining or the benefits of this

was like a new kind of understanding of the meaning or importance of material things in your life, realizing like, okay, that wasn't so great, but like, I'm actually fine. And then going and lecturing without your notes and having a kind of revelatory experience of finding something new and different. Yeah, that one.

So I didn't care really about anything that I lost in the fire, except that in a short time from the date of the fire, I had to give a large lecture class and my notes were destroyed. And so what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? So what I ended up doing was calling a student who took the class the year before and I borrowed her notes,

like a telephone game. And because they were somebody else's notes, even though they were basically copying down from what I had said, I involved myself. I engaged myself in the preparation for each lecture in a way that I hadn't done in a while. The problem PowerPoint slides are wonderful, but once you have it, it's sort of hard to change your thinking about all of it. So here, since I didn't have any of the slides, everything was new. And I think it was the best class that I had taught.

Do you have a formality in the way that you bring mindfulness into your moments and your hours and your days? Or is it now just a muscle memory where? It's none of those things. I mean, I think that it's the way I do everything. It's sort of up and out, you know, in some sense. A lot of people ask about my doing a study,

has the study changed my life? The results of the study surprise me or whatever. And I don't know if I do this backwards, different from other people. But for me, I do something and I notice the doing of it. And then I say, well, do other people do this? And if not, why not? And then I set up the study. So I already have evidence. I don't have evidence that it's going to be broadly done, but at least evidence that at least I do it. It feels like a natural inclination that you have as a result of this, that you can kind of see things through a unique, different lens that other people don't see. And that energizes your imagination.

It's not that I see it the way you see it and I see it the way I see it. And you know that many times I'm oblivious to the fact that you're seeing it differently, you know, and it's only then talking about it. I remember, and even because that was, had a lot of memoir stuff in it, that when I was an undergraduate and I had been helping this professor with something and I came up with something that she didn't come up with, which is going to happen. But she then decided it was because I was creative, which was never a label I had for myself.

Those were the people, the kids who could draw or who were in band. So now I'm creative. Then almost at the same time, I had written a program text for a paper, a final paper in a class. And the teacher wrote back, got my A's. I wrote back, I have such chutzpah. Well, it's Yiddish.

You know, it means you're able to go out there, break the rules and do whatever. And, you know, wish I never saw myself that way. Now I had double permission. Creative chutzpah, you know, telling me that I can break out of a structure that is stifling for people. I wanna get back to this idea

of how much agency and power and control we unknowingly kind of yield over the wellbeing of our bodies and our minds, not to be dualistic about it. But I think a good way to kind of elaborate on that is some of the work you've done around aging and belief. And in particular, maybe, you know, start with the counterclockwise study.

Yeah, well, the counterclockwise study was the first test of the mind, body, unity hypothesis. Again, mind and body, if it's one thing, wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily going to put the body. So we have a host of studies where we put the mind in strange places and take our measurements.

In this case case what we did was to um retrofit um a retreat to seem to be 20 years earlier and we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves so uh they would be talking in the present tense about things that had passed um the books, all of the props, the TV shows that we showed, everything said this was 20 years earlier. The comparison group stayed in the same retreat, not the same time, and talked about the same thing, except they were talking about it in the past tense. And it was clear that now is now and then was then where those emerged for the first group.

And their results were big, I think, that in this period of one week, these are men in their late 70s, 80s, and that was 1979, So lots of years ago when 80 was probably like a hundred. Yeah, it was different. Yeah. Anyway, so without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved,

their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. In a week. One week. One week. And you were measuring all these biomarkers. Yeah, yeah. Well, the funny thing is before I started this and I was trying to get the measures together,

I called all the geriatricians that I could think to call. And I said, okay, if I have a 50 year old man in one room and a 75 year old man in the other, what measure do you want me to give you so you'll know who's who? They couldn't come up with anything, you know, so whatever that means. So what do you extrapolate from that finding? Most of the deterioration we experience

is a function of our minds. You know, that, you know, we see with old people, I experience it myself, I forget something. Oh my goodness, you know, we see with old people, I experience it myself. I forget something. Oh my goodness, you know, am I becoming demented? And, you know, for me, it's odd. I mean, I teach undergraduates. They don't get a hundred on the test. You know, they forget also.

The thing is that they don't worry about forgetting. As we get older, we stop ourselves. We presume we can't do things. So we don't do them. And by removing that, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. You know, that you can do the same things you did before, maybe it's better to do them differently.

You know, I'm thinking about when I played tennis with these young kids, and I was playing very differently from them. They were 16-year-old boys, full of energy, running all over them. But I knew the game. And I knew if they're standing there, the ball's going to come here. If they're standing there, the ball's going to go there. I don't have to be racing around quite as much as they did. And so if you assume that as you get older, you become wiser, you should change some of your behavior. But if you're not aware of changing your behavior

because of these positive things, we tend to always make negative explanations for why we've changed. It's always based on you can't. And I don't think that there's any, we can never prove that we can't, which people don't seem to understand. Right.

And trying is a whole ball game, which this is the piece that, I don't know how this came about, but this massive misunderstanding where people think they want complete success, not knowing that if they had complete success, life would be empty. So an example I'm fond of using, you play golf.

Go. If you got a hole in one, every time you swung the club, there'd be no game, right? You know, an example I used earlier today, you're in the elevator, you're a little kid. You try to reach that button. You can't, you can't. Your father picks you up. You press the button.

Wowie, wow. Then you get a little, you still can't. Now, finally, you're tall enough. You press the button. Tell me how many times you've been in an elevator where you were excited about pressing. So once we can do it, it's no longer meaningful to us. Right, I got you. But what I do do is I always press the door close button.

Oh, me too, even if it doesn't work. And I know it doesn't do anything. And I know you've written about this as well, but I still do it every time. Yeah, me too. In reflecting on the counterclockwise study, I can't help but wonder if part of it is the sense of hopefulness,

like the idea that you're younger, there's a future that's unwritten that lies ahead that kind of drives a sense of youthfulness, as opposed to the person who is sitting in their older years and looking in the rear view mirror where life is about memory and the sense of possibility for the future seems much more curtailed.

That's what people say. My own feeling is that if we're both here now, we're in the same now. And that, you know, I don't, it's nice for you to decide in 10 years you wanna do X, but it would be stupid, mindless, if you really had a commitment because you don't know what you're going to wanna do

in 10 years. So I don't think most of us, when I was younger, I didn't spend that kind of time thinking about the future. People say that, but at least for me, it wasn't true. So do people ask you what your five-year plan is or your 10-year plan? I tell you that it's worse than that. I was in Australia and I gave a talk

and there were several people giving talks. Then the person who organized this had us all come out on the stage and surprised us and asked, what is your bucket list? Which is the same sort of question, right? About the future. And so each person, big shots, is your bucket list? Which is the same sort of question, right? About the future, what is it? And so each person, big shots, give their bucket list. She comes to me and I don't have a bucket list.

First, I felt bad I didn't have a bucket list if everybody has a bucket list. And then I said, wait a second, if I don't have a bucket list, it's good that I don't have a bucket list, why? And then I realized, you can't make the moment more full than when it's full. And so, it'd be nice if I were unhappy here now,

I might long to be in Paris again, not having the pancreas, but just being in Paris. If I am filled up while I'm here, mindfully engaged, enjoying myself, I don't need to be anyplace else. That's a beautiful way to think about that. But it's the same thing with looking in the past or looking for the future. Yeah. If you're fully present for what is happening right now, that sense of yearning for something better over the horizon isn't nagging on your soul.

We've all had that experience of looking at photographs from a bygone generation. What does a 60 year old look like in 1880 or 1920? And then looking at photographs of people today at the same age. And it's very clear that we have a different relationship with aging. Like people do look younger now. And I have to believe that that's because

we have a different sensibility around what it means to be a certain age. There's some crazy illustrations of this same thing in the work that you've done. Like in the studies that you talk about in your book, like I think one of the ones that stuck out the most for me is the ones that you did with the diabetics around perception of time and perception of sugar intake.

Yeah, so we have people come in who are type two diabetes and we give them all sorts of tests and then we sit them down at a computer. And the reason for what I'm going to say next will become clear at the end of the sentence. So we're going to have them play computer games, and we tell them, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. That's to ensure that they'll look at the clock that's by the computer. The clock is rigged, but they don't know it.

So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice but they don't know it so for a third of the people the clock is going twice as fast as real time for a third of the people it's going half as fast as real time for a third of the people it's real time most people would assume that blood sugar level will follow real time what's the difference what the clock says our hypothesis hypothesis, which was confirmed, was that blood sugar level will follow perceived time, clock time. Now, it's the same thing we did with people in a sleep lab. They go to sleep, we changed the clock, so they think they got more sleep than they actually got,

less sleep or the amount of sleep. Cognitive and behavior functions seem to follow perceived amount of sleep. And this is also relevant to a larger thing than if we talk about fatigue. So fatigue is largely a psychological construct. As an athlete, this is really fascinating. Yeah, I mean, you know,

but people believe that the body is such, and if you don't do your weights and build yourself, you know, you're gonna peter out. That's all there is to it. Now it now you know the more mindful I get over time now the more animated but so the first thing we do is I give people I ask people to do jumping jacks simple very simple study to start do a hundred jumping jacks tell me when you're tired they get tired at 70 we have another group do 200 jumping jacks tell me when you're tired they get tired at 70. We have another group do 200 jumping jacks. Tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 140.

Then we have many of these sorts of things. Now, I say to my class, how far is it humanly possible to run? These are smart kids. They know the marathon is 26 miles. They know I wouldn't ask the question if the answer were 26. So they start guessing, and it becomes like an auction. 28, 30, 35. no one ever goes beyond 50. Whoever says 50, everybody groans, right?

Impossible. Then I play a video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's a video of the Tarahumara, a tribe that lives in Copper Canyon, Mexico. I had the author of Born to Run here. Oh, okay, there you go. These people can run 200 miles without stopping.

Now, to my mind, the difference between those who can run, I haven't, not that I can't, but I've never run five miles. The difference between, let's just say 26 and 200, metaphorically is the difference I'm saying between what we think we can control now and what we actually can control and maybe beyond. That we're nowhere near living the lives that we could live

and to go back to what you're saying about language, all our language conspires against us, saying we make a little progress and we think that's the end. You know, I was thinking today about another thing. I don't know if it's the medical world. I don't know who to blame for this, but that as soon as you take people,

we have people who can remember lots and we call them super memories and super tasters and super whatever, making it as if that's a closed category that the rest of us can't get into rather than that it's on a continuum and these people do it a little better. And so maybe we can proceed in the same way. And I believe that any category where you have a super is something available to all of us. That's maybe the most inspirational monologue

I've heard in a long time. I love it. And I got a new video you're gonna wanna show your class because we had a guy in here the other day who ran 450 miles. Oh, wow, yeah, I have to see that. 200 ain't nothing anymore. Yeah, so that's incredible.

But to tell you these videos, the other thing, do we talk about piano stairs? No. Okay, so one thing that people have to understand. So when I say you wanna be mindful all the time, you see from the way I am now, mindfulness is energy beginning. Mindfulness is the way you are when you're having fun.

So these people, I think Scandinavia, let's say Sweden, turns out, I didn't know this, then subways all over the world, they're the same. You have an escalator and you have stairs. And all over the world, everybody is taking the escalator. The random athlete like you will run up the stairs, the young boy up the stairs. Now what they do, they lay down a piano keys on the stairs.

So it actually makes noise. Now, in almost no time, everybody takes the stairs because it's fun. And what I say to my students is, why do you have to wait for someone to put the keyboard down there? You can do this in your mind. It's like, do, do, do, you know, whatever. Everything can be made to be fun. And the world has taught us quite the contrary.

You're not supposed to have fun at work. So you have work versus play. Studying is hard, college is hard, all of these things. Yeah, and it all keeps people in place and it's not a good place to be kept. Framing, this is something you did with the chambermaid study as well. Like, is it work or is it exercise?

Yeah, first thing that was interesting, we take these chambermaids and we ask them how much exercise they get. This was surprising to me, because these women, all they're doing is exercising all day long, but they don't think they do exercise because to them, exercise, according to the surgeon general, is what you

do after work. So for those who sit in a desk all day long, they're not really exercising. It's when they go to the gym afterwards. Okay, so now imagine we didn't do this, but those who exercise, the chambermaids are exercising, should be healthier than socioeconomically equivalent people who are not exercising. But they're not. So what we do, very simple study. We take the chambermaids, divide them into two groups and one group. We just teach them. Do you know your work is exercise?

Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym. Sweeping is... Okay. So all we've done is change their minds from not realizing their work was exercise to seeing that their work is exercise. We took lots of measures to start. When the study is over, we want to find out, is she working any harder, expending any more energy than this? No. Are they eating any differently? Those who see it as exercise, no differences. Nevertheless, those who now see their work as exercise, we get, they lost weight, a change in waist to hip ratio,

body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. And the control group, no change in the other group. It's so crazy. Now it's interesting, but let's talk about mindlessness that when I give these findings, I could just save a lost weight, but doesn't it have more of a scientific heft when I say there was a change in body mass index

and waist to hip ratio? And how are these results received by your colleagues? Oh, the people in the world love it because now they can see themselves as exercising and losing weight without exerting more energy. You know what Mark Twain, I'll get to the question if I remember it, Mark Twain said about exercise?

No. Sad, you'll hate it. He said, every time the urge to exercise comes over me, I know if I just sit still for a moment, it'll pass. Right. Well, what if you just sat down and imagined yourself exercising or tried to visualize or experience what it feels like to be fatigued from exerting yourself?

Your imagination is far, far more powerful than most people believe. There are studies by others of people who are flexing, you know, their muscles and that imagined versus real. And the outcome is basically the same. Imagine exercise. That's a hard one to believe. It's not mine, so I don't care if you believe it or not.

But to go back to the question, what are people's responses to my work? The people who hate it or whatever don't come to me, so I don't know. And I think that, I've been in the field for so long that I think that people assume that it's true. When we think of placebos, we think of thebos, we think of, you know,

the sugar pill or the, you know, capsule that we're given that we're either told or not told, you know, is a medication or not. But placebo is actually a much broader concept. It's an expectation and our expectations control our behavior in ways that we're not aware of. And a simple example, most people have used the Snelly night chart

to see your vision. And this whole thing is so remarkable to me that people buy this. You look at letters that make no sense in a doctor's office, which is necessarily stressful for so many people. And the doctor gives you a number and you see that's the way you see,

it wouldn't occur to me. I just did that like two weeks ago. Okay, and I see you're wearing glasses. Okay. I've worn them my whole life though. Then I started to feel bad about it. I don't want you to feel bad about it, but we have remedies.

Anyway, so I look at this chart and we've agreed implicitly that I'm bizarre. And when I see the eye chart, I don't see it the way other people see it, I think, if they think anything. I see it as this is a setup. The letters are getting progressively smaller, which is leading me to expect not to be able to see. So we come up with a different eye chart where now the letters get progressively larger, creating a different expectation. Now the expectation is soon I will be able to see. And what happens is that people can see what they couldn't see before. One more expectation study.

Most people assume when you get two-thirds of the way down the eye chart, you're gonna have trouble seeing it. What we did was we took the original eye chart, we just took the bottom two thirds. So you don't need those big letters anyway. Two thirds of the way down there are much smaller letters than on the original, but they both occurring in the same place, right? Two thirds of the way down. And again, people saw what they couldn't see before.

You also did this study with pilots, fighter pilots. Yeah, they're different variations on the same thing that if you believe you can, then all of the things that prevent you from doing whatever it is are eliminated. Pilots are seen to have excellent vision. So what we do, we put people, we test their vision. We put them in pilot uniforms.

We have them go into a flight simulator. Have you ever been to flights? It's very real. There's an oncoming plane. And we want them to read a very small set of letters that was taken from the eye chart on that oncoming plane. When they're pilots, they can see it. And the ones that were in the control group

who were told the simulator was broken. They were unable. They had to simulate everything. Exactly. They didn't score as high. I mean, if you had trouble doing something and I had you put on an outfit of Superman, you see yourself, I think you would be able to lift more weight. If you were Einstein, you know, I have people because they think that I am less afraid than

they with certain things. So if they have to go into fighting with a waiter or somebody, employer, they pretend that they're me. That's fine. But I believe I can sing. If you saw me, not saw me, but heard me in the shower, and when I'm being Maria Callas or Barbra Streisand, I get a lot of notes. But it's me, right?

They're not there. So I think that we all, not all, but many of us tend to underestimate our abilities. And so some of these studies just sort of free us from whatever is holding us back. It's very encouraging and empowering to understand that belief can drive better outcomes for ourselves. And if we can get to a place of disabusing ourselves

of all the assumptions that we make about how things work and don't work and what our limits are. For somebody who's watching or listening to this, who's saying, well, that's great. And that's super entertaining to hear that. But like, how do I begin to construct my version of this? We already said that if you take on the assumption

by the assumption that everything is uncertain, there's a way that you naturally approach things more mindfully. But if you take any explanation, if you have children and they ask you a question, don't answer it with a single answer. Answer it with multiple answers. Answer it with answers that then take those answers

and show how, gee, you know, these are negatives, even though they seem positive and vice versa. Just open everything up and it will all happen naturally. The other, in a more mundane way, that most people are stressed most of the time. That stress means that they're making predictions about things that can't be predicted. And they're oblivious to the fact

that they're in charge of their experience of that. So think of the things you were scared of in the past and how did it turn out? It almost always turns out fine. So going forward, you don't have to be so afraid. Well, anything you worry about, it either doesn't happen, which means that was a waste of energy and time, or if it does happen, it happened.

And there was no reason worrying about all that time that you wasted worrying about it before it happened. That's the main thing that, so there are people who I wrote about this, I think it might even be in the book, about defensive pessimism. And some people, so you have people like me who are clearly optimistic,

but everybody thinks that they're realistic, right? I don't think that I'm thinking positive, but deep down I know it's negative. This is the way it is. And the negative person is not being negative. This is the way they experience the world. But defensive pessimism is basically the idea that what you should do is hope for the best,

but expect the worst. Okay, now that would be fine if the world existed independent of human presence, where you could actually count things without influencing them. That if you're expecting the worst, you're gonna see the worst. human presence where you could actually count things without influencing them. That if you're expecting the worst, you're gonna see the worst.

And if you're gonna see the worst, it's going to have a very different effect on you. And that the alternative is to see the best. You know that if you worried this, I wrote this for people at school about worried about being COVID. And that worrying about COVID is only making you weaker. Should you have to deal with COVID?

What you need to do is develop a plan at the time. So it was, okay, I'm gonna wear a mask. I'm gonna wash my hands. Okay. And I'm gonna stay away from people who are coughing in my face. Now I have a plan. Now I'm just going to live my life.

Now, if it turns out, if instead of this, you worry about getting COVID, your stress, as we said many times now, is very bad for your health and you may get it or not get it. So you start off, you're doing these things, you can get it or you cannot get it. If you don't get it, as you've said,

you've wasted all this time. If you get it, all that time you've spent worrying makes you less able to handle it. Right, because the stress and anxiety has impaired your immune system. It's not six of one, half a dozen of the other. People keep thinking that. Glass half full is not the same thing as half empty.

If you see it as half empty, you spend your time being thirsty, worrying about where you're gonna get your next glass of water or whatever, the martini, whatever's in that glass. And being in the presence of somebody who is so beautifully and eloquently mindful and practicing this idea and kind of exuding

the sensibility is actually contagious. Yeah, we have studies on contagion, but let me tell you that there are times I'm mindless. My response to my being mindless is probably different from your response to your being mindless. When I'm mindless, I say, yes, I'm right. It's out there. I mean, I've been studying this, caring about this

for 45 years or more. And still there are moments where I do something mindlessly. But the more mindful you are, I suspect, the more questions arise and the more uncertainty becomes apparent because things aren't as they seem the more you're paying attention. Exactly, exactly.

Now, the way it's contagious, there are several ways. The first is that when you're mindful, you tend to be more charismatic. And so people are giving you more attention, more affirmation, positive regard. And that allows you to feel better and then to be even more mindful. But if I'm mindful, there's a way when I'm talking to,

let's say you are usually hiding what you're feeling or whatever may be the case, you feel safe. And if you feel safe, then you're going to be more mindful because it's better, okay? It just leads to all sorts of good outcomes. So that's one thing. Another is that it actually seems, this is wild, to be in the air. So what do I mean?

This is a study we did with meditators, actually. So we have meditators meditating in a room. They leave. Now the participants come and we give them tests, cognitive tests, memory and things like that. Or there's no one in the room and the participants go into the room taking the same tests. When people had just finished meditating,

the participants perform better than in the empty room. Somehow it's in the air. Now, I make clear that these studies and the others like them are at the end of the book, you know, with enough disclaimers, you know, I'm just telling you what I found. I'm not telling you what you have to believe. That's fucking crazy.

But the idea being that there's a residual like vibration, they meditate, they leave, there's some energy force in that room that is influencing the test takers. Yeah, next time we do the study, if there ever is, we should have a fan. So whatever is there, it blows it out and then you shouldn't get it.

So you have meditators. Is it waves or is it particles? We're going quantum here, right? Yeah, like- But the more, the less crazy, not crazy, but different, are things like with autism. So now I think another thing that you can pull out of my philosophy of life, if it is a philosophy,

is that every group that is diminished in some way probably has some asset that's being overlooked. And so I thought, you know, I don't know anybody autistic. So this is purely, most of the things that I come up with come from experience. This is just derived. What if most people are mindless? And if mindlessness is off-putting, which it is, I have other data. What if most people are mindless and if mindlessness is off-putting, which it is, I have other data,

you know, where you're interacting with a mindful or a mindless experimenter, and just it's uncomfortable when the person is not there. And we have expressions like the lights on, but nobody's home to acknowledge that when someone's not there, you know, you don't like being with them. Okay, what if the kid or adult who is autistic

is hypersensitive to other people's consciousness, more aware that in that regard, that means that if you're mindless, it's going to have a bigger negative effect on me. So what we do is we take autistic kids and we have them interact with adults being mindful or mindless. And when the adults are mindful,

the kids are just like, well, the other kids. Another example of that is- But the point being that that just abuses the idea that autism is about like an incapacity for emotional intelligence. Yeah, exactly. It speaks to the opposite of that. But I'm not, you know, this is one study, one brief thought. I'm not suggesting that now I'm an expert on autism

or that this explains everything, but it'll end up, I think, a piece of the puzzle down the road. But the other study, so there are people who drink a lot. Yeah. Now, nobody, okay. Well, once upon a time, Ellen. Okay, but so nobody drinks to hurt their liver. That's the first thing.

So when you tell people you have to stop drinking because of these things, again, it's what I was saying before, behavior makes sense going forward or else people wouldn't do it. Mix and match 20 different things here. Another way of helping people have a drinking problem is keep a diary. This is attention to symptom variability.

Make a column. Columns where you're going to note different times of the day. Did you have a drink? Yes or no. Did you want a drink? Yes or no. Did you want to drink? Yes or no. And you do this even for the course of just a week. You're going to see there are times you didn't drink when you wanted to drink. You're going to see there are times you drank when you didn't want to. And all of a sudden, despite what people argue, shows you that you have some control over your drinking.

And then the decision to stop or whatever is much easier to make than make you feel that you're this low down, whatever. People who drink, if I said to you that here's John, John gets stressed. And when he gets stressed, he does X. And then he's unstressed.

There's nothing irrational about that, is it? Mm-hmm. So now we put in, he takes a drink or too many drinks. All right. So I think that many of the people who are serious heavy drinkers are extra sensitive to other people's consciousness, just like the autistic person.

And that drink is to settle them down. So now we run a study, it's a wine tasting study, and you can drink as much as you want. All we wanna know, you believe, is your view of the wine. The experimenter, who's blind to the whole study idea, but the experimenter is mindful or mindless? Well, it turns out when that experimenter is mindless, you drink more.

I really like that study and this note. Like I do believe that there is something to the hypersensitivity of the alcoholic that study and this note, like I do believe that there is something to the hypersensitivity of the alcoholic or the drug addict. And, you know, I'm somebody who's been in recovery for a long time. And I think that sensitivity makes the world kind of a scary or uncertain place.

And a coping mechanism is drugs or alcohol or whatever. Which is not irrational. Right, it's a survival mechanism to reduce anxiety and stress and kind of eradicate that uncomfortable feeling that you have. And we all know addicts or normal people, whatever, when you go into a room and there's somebody on the other side of the room

who you don't know and you know immediately whether that person is safe or unsafe, like you can feel that energy. And I think there is this idea that perhaps some people are more sensitive to that than others. And that leads them towards behaviors that are not in their best interest. But energy is real. Like, we all have had those experiences

or we walk into a room in a house that we've never been in before and we feel something. Yeah, well, that's what I was trying to capture, but it is still a little woo woo. When I first wrote the book, the chapter was called the woo woo chapter. You know, say, look, it was, I had an experience that I took out, several of these woo woo experiences. Your know, say, look, it was, I had an experience that I took out several of these.

Your editors are like, this is too much. Yeah. All right, but you're gonna tell it here. I'm gonna tell you because I don't understand it, but it happened. So I had just gotten back from Japan and I'm having dinner and we're talking about, let's go someplace. And so my partner says, well, it's too expensive.

Now, which is itself silly because somebody is always paying for these trips, but somehow we still managed to spend too much money. Okay, where should we go if we go? And we can't remember the name of the place. At that time, it felt very exotic. Then we remember Kuala Lumpur. Okay, she says, we can't go because it's too expensive.

I say, maybe I could get the Harvard Club to pay for it. Now, this was insane. I never had any interaction in my life with any Harvard Club. I don't know what I'm talking about. The next day, I get an invitation to Kuala Lumpur from the Harvard Club of Kuala Lumpur. Now I've had conversation after conversation,

this is a long time ago, with statisticians. We'll be very nice to each other and all of a sudden they walk away from me. I just wanna understand it. How do you understand it? What do you make of that? I don't, first I thought, I wonder, did I have a sense where I'm picking up things

or am I putting them out there? Cause you can't tell from that experience, right? That if I'm picking it up, so the mail is coming, the qual and poor and I don't know. All I know is that we know so little about the things we think we know that if we only recognize that, these sorts of phenomenon wouldn't seem outlandish, necessarily wrong from the start. You know, I mean, so I turn on the television and I'm watching people in New York. How could that be? You know, I mean, and I turn on the television and I'm watching people in New York.

How could that be? I mean, and I can give some electrical, electronic, I don't really understand it. And most of the science explanations that we have are just naming things. And when you go up a level of analysis in the name, it's like you understand that you go down a level, but it's really, so, you know,

when I realize I don't know that, then my not knowing something else, I don't know it, but I accept it, makes it easier for me to accept other things like this. So when you turn on the TV and it's not New York, but it's a congressional hearing around UFOs, what's going on in your mind? You know, I think that, you know,

what do we mean by a UFO? There's so many unidentified objects that I don't know. I, you know, I know that I don't take a hard line about anything not being true. You know, I just don't know, but I also not going to put myself out there and argue that it is true. I don't have a position one way or the other,

but people do have strong positions about some of the things that we're talking about. And they say it's impossible. And I think that we just lose an awful lot by that view. So to me, everything is possible. Everything is potentially interesting. Life is fun. And if we could all inhabit a level of mindfulness

that you speak about in your work and in your writings, we have a chance at approaching this mindful utopia that you talk about. So, yeah, so this was a tease. At some point I'm going to write the book about mindful utopia because I, so my goal in life, right now, life, the world is vertical. You have people like us who are near the top,

and, you know, people are ordered. You're not so good, you're okay, you know, and so on. And I find that offensive, and I want to take the vertical and make it horizontal, that none of us are better than, you know. When I say to somebody that I don't think anybody is better than I am, she admonishes, but I don't think I'm better than anybody else.

You know, there's a different way of understanding how we might be living. And so I wrote this little song for my grandkids and I was just talking about this earlier today. Actually, I'm gonna sing it. I'm not gonna sing it for you. But it says it all. Everybody doesn't know something.

Everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something. Everyone can do something else. Now it's hard in two minutes to get the full feeling of that. But I'm in the car. The kids are five years old, twins. One of them starts whistling.

I say, Theo, you're such a good whistler. The other one says, Grandma Elle, when Theo was learning how to whistle, I was learning something else. You know, it just seemed to me perfect. So he doesn't have to feel bad that he can't whistle. He doesn't have to feel one down. He doesn't have to compete with his brother.

There's no scarcity. There's no competition. There's something for everybody. The world is infinitely abundant. Everyone doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else.

When I start, I have a little video where I start and I say, I can sing, but I like singing. Why shouldn't I sing? There are lots of things I can do. And then we break into the little ditty. I don't know, it could be simple-minded. I think it's rather profound. Because that's the world that I see

that we could be living in. I don't see that there's anything that really prevents us from getting there, except that a whole lot of mindlessness. Well, along this continuum on the evolution of consciousness, like where do we currently reside? Where would you like to see us going?

And I know that, you know, predictions are not your bag, but we're heading into kind of a- No, I think there's been an evolution. You know, a tricky year and I do, you know, I am interested in the concept of elevating conscious awareness. Yeah, I think, you know, as you said, I don't have to predict

because we can predict. And this one in particular, we can predict. It's a very strange time. But there'll be a lot of good things that come from it. And I think we're in the midst of an evolution in consciousness.

And it can only be good. I think some of the stuff with AI, which I don't claim to be an expert on, people just keep finding things to worry about. AI is a tool and it'll help us. I remember years and years ago, I came out of a movie in New York. Neither of those are necessary to tell you for the story,

but, and this person wanted me to sign a petition because he felt that VR videos, what are they called? Virtual reality, oh, VCRs? No, no, no, no, VCRs were going to put movies out of business, you know, and they were threatened. There's always somebody threatened, but that's also what leads us to progress in many ways.

So there'll be that. but that's also what leads us to progress in many ways. So there'll be that. I think that if AI is able to help take over lots of jobs that will free people to be more innovative, creative or mindful in my terms. Once you start paying attention, you can take all that I've said and use it to reform almost everything. Yeah, there's infinite applications.

Yeah, so for hospitals, hospitals I don't think have changed in important ways since they were created. And that it seems to me insane, if I may borrow a term from my field, that here's a place that you go into and are stressed when you enter it, just as I said with taking the eye test, and you're going there to be healed.

You know, there's no reason that hospitals can't be more spa-like. There's no reason that we have very high burnout in the medical profession. And burnout is a function of being mindless. So if the nurses were taught to look for the smaller changes in people, it would actually help their health.

People, when I'm mindfully engaged with you, you feel seen. Everybody prospers. So it's a way of making everybody in the organization more mindful. There's no reason, you know, we have washing machines. We don't need to have so much white. There are so many changes.

People, we know that social support is really important for people's health. Yet in hospitals, everybody is kept separate, you know, and so on. So I have a list of these, if I constructed the mindful hospital, if I constructed the mindful organization,

it would also share, you know, have many differences. You're gonna love this. So I was reading this part of the book, which is at the end of the book this morning, sitting in a waiting room at a diagnostics lab down the street here, because I was getting my blood drawn for a blood test. And I'm reading about the mindful hospital

and all the like everything that you just described. And I looked up and took a mindful assessment of my environment. And I was in this waiting room and there were some people who were like staring at their feet. The walls were peeling, the wallpaper was peeling off the walls. There was a like bulletproof glass window

with no, that was sort of opaque and there was no human being behind it, except there was a little sign on it that said, please don't bring firearms in here. And then there was an iPad where you could check in. And I literally felt like I was in a room waiting to meet with my parole officer or something. It was the most dispiriting dystopic,

like environment where you're going to into this room to kind of be vulnerable and have like this procedure done, et cetera. It's a clinic, it's not a doctor's office, but the point remains like, there's a lot of room for improvement here. Yeah, I know. I had many years ago had to go to court.

I don't, I think I was taken out of restraining order. I don't remember what it was. There's probably a good story behind that. Well, no, it's a boring story, but the point is it was all fixed in some sense. The person who took me there had already, everything was wired in some sense. I hadn't done anything.

It was, you know, I was on the accusing end. And, you know, being a public speaker for so long, all of this, right, At Harvard, Lofton University, I go into this courthouse to make this request for, and I felt scared. I already had the answer. And I look at these other people, it's just, it's criminal to borrow a term.

You know, that I think that the way we've constructed so many environments is a way of again, instantiating the status quo, keep people in place. Have you had hospital administrators or any healthcare executives approach you as a result of- Well, I haven't had this out there, the book came out in September. This one thing I was talking with people in China

about doing a mindful hospital. I don't know if that'll happen. It's interesting to me because I have mindful schools that are vastly different from our current schools. And they're people from India and Canada, nobody in the United States. It's out there, it's out there. It's out there whether I lead it or somebody else,

it will have an effect, it can't help but. It's pretty cool, I mean, if you just got one up on its feet and then you can study it and then you have a test case. I know it's one of those things where it's a fabulous bet, that I just can't imagine that the mindful hospital or the mindful school wouldn't be successful. It almost can't be as bad as things are now.

Yeah. Really. It's not good. No, I mean, when you think about school, you have the kids who get Ds and Fs, they become our killers or whatever, right? You know, nobody's letting you think well of yourself. You have to make a reputation some way.

The kids who get Bs and Cs, they are average. Who wants to be average? But then you take those of us who get As. Now, we don't know how we got the A. Everybody expects us to get As. We don't know if we're gonna continue. It's stressful. Nobody wins.

Also, you're being evaluated on an irrelevant metric, which is your ability to memorize stuff and take tests. Yes, I mean, it's totally insane. It's also the case that the tests are designed to find what you don't know. Everybody knows something. You know, when I give a test, tell me what you do know. What does it mean that there's,

who decided that this thing that you don't know is so important that you can't pass the course without knowing it? It's ridiculous. So if you found yourself- As a teacher, yes. If I found myself teaching, my exams would be different. Right, well, I was gonna broaden that.

If you woke up and you were the secretary of education, or maybe you were the new surgeon general, and you have this agenda to roll out the mindful hospitals and a re-imagination of education, like you could wave your wand, what does it look like? Oh, I mean, I've written about such, you know, the hospital you get an inclination from here. And, you know And the mindful school,

everything about school now is mindless. The looking for single right answers to things, giving teaching information in an absolute way. Horses don't eat meat, one in one is two. You can change the content to make it more sophisticated, but it's the same idea that doesn't lead you to look more broadly at things, but rather helps you close your mind. So in the Mindful School, one of the things that we were going to do,

and I can't do all of these things at once. I say yes to everything because everything is exciting, and that's why none of this gets done. But I would find if somebody wanted to do this, could afford to do this, this would be more interesting to me than the secretary of education, or you said health, whatever.

Surgeon general. Surgeon general, yeah. No, I would like to just be able to do it. And so what I wanted to do was to build the school with the building itself is upside down. So everything about it says, this is different. And, you know. There should be some Silicon Valley person

who's up for that. If they call me, I'm happy to listen. Hopefully you'll get a call. Your class must be very popular at Harvard. Is it very hard to get into? Is there like a long waiting list? Like how does that work? No, no, no, no.

You have to decide early on. So, and then they petition and they petition and they plead. You get letters slid under the door of your office and stuff. I almost always say yes. So I don't know how long I'm gonna be teaching this particular class. And I already told people at Harvard

that I want it open to everyone. Right now you have to have certain requirements, which you don't really have to have. So that'd be my last hurrah. Well, I'd like to come and take it. Does that mean I can come and take it? Yeah, I would like it to. You're an absolute delight and an inspiration.

This was really fun. Thank you. I enjoyed it too. Your work is really important. It's revelatory. We are in an evolution of consciousness or perhaps even a war of consciousness. That implies a duality, I don't know. But I think the way in which you address these topics

from your lived experience and all these experiments that you've done is really, it's fun. Like reading your book is fun and also mind blowing in many ways. So I encourage everybody to pick it up if you haven't already, The Mindful Body. And will you come and talk to me again sometime?. So I encourage everybody to pick it up if you haven't already, The Mindful Body. And will you come and talk to me again sometime? Oh, I would love to.

This is great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit

the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show

is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo,

with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis.

Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.