The Rich Roll Podcast - Scott Barry Kaufman On The Science of Transcendence

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

In today’s episode, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman joins Rich to discuss the science of self-actualization and transcendence. Scott is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist who has taught at Columbia, Yale, NYU, and Penn. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale, a M. Phil in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge and a B.S. in psychology and human computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential and hosts the #1 psychology podcast, The Psychology Podcast. His latest book is entitled Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. The video version of this episode is available HERE. Rich’s new book, Voicing Change, Vol. II is available HERE. Full show notes & additional information on this episode is available HERE. Peace + Plants, Rich

Do you have any goal at all of growing as a human being, of being a better person? Is that at all a goal for you? Do you ever feel like there are things pulling you in different directions inside of you that you want to harmonize in any way? You know, feeling comfortable within your own self and not feeling you have to constantly prove something.

In coaching, we have something called powerful questions, right? So what are powerful questions that you can ask to help transform a person? I think a really powerful question in asking all of us, we have something called powerful questions, right? So what are powerful questions that you can ask to help transform a person? I think a really powerful question in asking all of us, you know, is are there inner conflicts within you that if they were resolved, this big grandiose motivation you have would be quelled? Because I do think for most of us, yes, they would.

We often find there are a lot of grandiose, narcissistic dreams and goals we had at one point, which we just totally don't have anymore because we've done inner work. I would also ask as a powerful question, if you get what you want, you get your goal, do the thought experiment, how will you actually feel any different inside, internally?

So these kinds of questions where you really try to help and you work starting from within as opposed to from without. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, people. Good to be with you here today. Welcome to the podcast where today we're going to explore the roadmap for finding more purpose, more fulfillment through the psychology of self-actualization and transcendence and what a good one it is. Our guide for this examination is Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist who has taught at Columbia University, Yale, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Yale, a master's in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge and a BS in psychology and human computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon. Currently, Scott is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential and an honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne's

Center for Wellbeing Science. He hosts the number one psychology podcast in the world, The Psychology Podcast, and in 2015 was named by Business Insider as one of 50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world. Dr. Kaufman's writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and Harvard Business Review, and he is the author and editor of nine books, the latest of which, and a focal point for today's discussion is entitled Transcend,

The New Science of Self-Actualization, wherein he presents this really elegant new hierarchy of human needs for the 21st century, one that allows for the fulfillment of individual potential, as well as the actualization of transcendent purpose and peak experiences. As always, a couple more things to add before we engage the Vulcan mind meld, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment.

And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by

insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at

recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you.

I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so this one is fun and we cover quite a bit of diverse ground here,

including Scott's extrapolation of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and what it means to engage a growth trajectory, to self-actualize and live a transcendent life. We discuss the importance of self-worth, connection, purpose, and peak experiences. We talk about the malleability or lack thereof of personality and the problematic nature of defining authenticity. In addition, we talk about late bloomers and the context of re-imagining education. We discuss modeling healthy masculinity,

the psychology that is driving so-called heterodox gurus and various culture war battles and many other very interesting topics. I found Scott to be really engaging, frank, vulnerable, like I said, fun. I really enjoyed talking to him. So this is me and Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman coming at you in three, two, one, go.

Well, Scott, I'm so happy to meet you. This has been a long time coming yeah it really has and it's a real real honor for me it's an honor for me uh there's so many things that i want to talk to you about uh you have written extensively on subject matter that is dear to me personally um that i'm excited to explore with you today. Of course, self-actualization and transcendence, which you explore beautifully by extension of the work of Abraham Maslow, who we were just chatting about before the podcast

and how meaningful he's been in your life by dint of this fantastic book that you've put out recently, Transcend. But prefatory to that, I think it would be really interesting and also to help kind of contextualize your background a little bit to talk about being a late bloomer. Cause that's something that I'm familiar with.

We have different versions of late bloomer stories, but I think your story and the work that you've done around late bloomers kind of helped set the stage for talking about these other things. Yeah, sure. I'm really interested in potential and studied things from prodigies,

these kids who really start really, really young and you're like, how the heck did they able to play a complete piano sonata without ever taking any lessons, you know, to savants, to all sorts of things. And so there's different ways of thinking about late bloomers. In my specific case, I was in special education very young because I was essentially deaf the first three years of my life. It made it very hard for me to process things in real time. And teachers took that as an indication that I was stupid,

process things in real time. And teachers took that as an indication that I was stupid, not just teachers, but like bullies and everyone, well, everyone. And my mom believed in me though. My parents believed in me. That's important. Yeah, that is super important. So I repeated third grade.

So a late boomer in that sense as well. So I was delayed there and I was kept in special education with, it's a very heterogeneous group in special education. So I was with problem kids, you know, who like the most, you know, acting out, you know, kids in the school so that they would like bully me in special ed. And it's like, why did you put me with my bullies

in the same room? Thank you. Thank you school. But to, you know, autism spectrum, to autism spectrum, there's such a wide range of people that were put in there. And I was kept there all the way till ninth grade, but always did feel as though I was capable of more. I really was confused that on the one hand, the way I was kind of treated by the school, but on the other hand, I knew my inner life. I had a rich inner life. I just loved fantasy

and imagination. And I would like act out like soap opera plot lines in my head where I was like the leading man and I would be continued every day. And then the next day I would pick up in my head, it's all in my head. I would write great stories and novels and things. So there was really this duality within me that was really frustrating and confusing because it was like, well, can I question the authorities at all? You know, like, you know, they, everyone thinks I'm dumb, but I do feel like there is greater potential within me. And it really, it really took, you know,

you feel free to stop me at any time, but. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, I, you know, at some point you, you have this teacher in ninth grade who believes in you and that becomes kind of a lever for you to break out of this paradigm. But what I find interesting about this and I haven't heard you talk about is

the origin of that belief in self that persisted despite all this kind of external input that was trying to tell you that there was something wrong with you. I think about that a lot. I've had some great conversations with like Angela Duckworth who wrote a phenomenal book called Grit about this because my office was right next door to hers

when I was at Penn. Oh, wow. I was running the Imagination Institute while she was running the Character Lab. So we were like, oh, we should like team up and like see what the inner, the conjunction of imagination and grit would be sort of thing.

But we would have lots of like walk home talks as we would walk home from after a long day of work, try to just understand what was it that was really going on with me in my personal life. I think grit is a big part of the story. I think I'd be remiss not to say there was this confluence of passion and perseverance within me. And it's the confluence of the two

that I think is really important. Any one without the other is, if you just have perseverance without passion, that's just like duty. If you just have passion without perseverance, what does that, that's just excitement. Right, but then the question becomes, are those inbred traits that you just had

coming out of the womb, or was there something about the resistance that you were meeting in your world that emboldened them or strengthened them? Yeah, I think that it got unlocked. To use a bad scientific metaphor, it's not like a key that gets unlocked. But there was a point in my life where this special ed teacher took me aside in ninth grade after class and she asked me, what are you still doing here? She was the first one to really just even ask me that question. We talk like in the coaching world, we talk about powerful questions, right? Questions that really cause you to have a huge self-transformation. We'll talk about a powerful question in my life. This woman,

all she asked me, she's like, what are you still doing here in special ed? And I thought to myself, what am I still doing here? Processed what she said. And I said, yeah's like, what are you still doing here in special ed? And I thought to myself, what am I still doing here? I processed what she said and I said, yeah, what the fuck am I still doing here? And something really got unleashed in me, like in that moment, something I had been building up for many, many years. It's almost like I just needed some catalyst

or someone to just even question that maybe I had more potential. And I just like from there, like it was wildfire. Like I just, I called my mom, I ran to the payphone and called my mom and I said, Hey, I'm not, I'm not going to special ed anymore. I'm out. She's like screaming. She's like, what did they do to you over there? But I set up a meeting with the school psychologists, the administrators, the special ed teachers, and they had nothing in the rule books of our school system for that to be the case for a special ed student to break out by themselves.

So you had to like litigate this. It was the first time they had nothing. They're like looking through the, what do we do with this situation? And so what they decided on is they were going to let me out on a trial basis. So I was like, thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. They said, we're going to let you out. You can take mainstream classes. Even I know you want to take honors classes. Fine. We'll let you take some honors classes. But if you fail, you know, you're coming right back in. But in that moment, I will tell you my attitude was, oh, I'm going to prove them. Like, you know, I think a big part of my 20s and from high school, from that point up to maybe the end of my 20s was really driven by the

underdog motivation, which is a phenomenon I'm really fascinated about and I write about and I'm actually working on a bigger article about it right now, but I think it's huge. Yeah. I mean, I can certainly relate to that. I was wondering as you're telling that story, then looking at all of these higher degrees that you've accumulated and you publish with a band and you're just very prolific in your writing, how much of that is motivated? How much of your motivation can be tracked back to still trying to prove those kids wrong

in that classroom? Yeah, a big part of it. Another part of it is I really discovered I loved learning and I felt like I had a lot to catch up on. You know, there was a real feeling of, well, okay, here's the deal. At that point when I got out, I was like, okay, Scott, here's the deal. You're not college bound right now. What is it going to have to take for you even a college to even look at you?

I mean, I had to catch, think about the situation. I was in ninth grade. I was, you know, I got out of special ed. I was not on a college track. And so I was like, I got out of special ed I was not on a college track and so I was like I'm gonna do this and in order to do something like that you know I had to pull all the stops I signed up for everything as many courses as I could for the summer school

classes you know to like catch up I signed up for like honors classes and I was in remedial classes so I didn't even want to take standard I was like let's just go for it so I signed up for like honors Latin and ended up being a Latin scholar. I ended up like, I mean, I wasn't good at everything. I like, I tried a lot of things that like, I am remiss that I tried to like, not remiss, but like West side story. I was like, can't do

this dancing. I dropped out of West side story in theater. But you tried. I did. I did try. I did sign up for like everything. And I was like, I'm going all in on this. And I just had this voracious passion to learn as well. I mean, I think part of the story is also to prove people wrong, but I think there was also like, that's not a sustainable motivation by itself.

I think when you pair that, that kind of passion, passion to prove people wrong, is that still a passion? That's a passion. But I combined it with a real love of learning and just voraciously wanting to catch up. I felt I was so behind, I just wanted to catch up.

So you go on to, you know, basically pursue this very successful career and, you know, looking back in retrospect, it's helped form these interesting ideas that you have about education. You've got this manifesto on your website about, you know, change, you know, kind of altering the paradigm of education is something

that I think a lot about as a parent of a bunch of kids and seeing what they go through and how it could be better. And also just this idea of what it means to be a late bloomer and how we judge people too quickly early in their development that has damaging implications for how they think about themselves and ultimately pursue their lives in the world. Yeah, yeah.

I think we have it all wrong about what the markers of potential are, especially in a K through 12 system. This notion that it's, okay, the kids, we gotta make sure they're getting perfect SAT scores. We have to make sure they're getting into the right college. That's going the wrong direction.

Basically what you're saying is we need to find the kids who are really good at conformity. We need to find the kids that aren't in detention. You know, we've really got it backwards. Yeah, it's completely backwards. It's reminiscent a little bit of David Epstein's book, "'Range," which I talk about all the time. I mean, your ideas and his ideas kind of overlap

in that Venn diagram. The idea of trying to instill in young people curiosity and at least enough gumption or courage to try lots of different things and kind of hold them lightly so that you're like yourself, like trying lots of stuff as a young person that all ends up kind of congealing in the soup of creating a person who becomes ultimately

if they are embracing this hierarchical model of meeting their needs, creates a situation in which they're perfectly suited for what they end up doing in the world. And that's self-actualization. Yeah. That's a really good quick definition of what Maslow meant by self-actualization.

Yeah, so let's talk about that. Self-actualization, transcendence, my favorite subjects. Let me take a sip of this cereal. Yeah, of course. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which most people are familiar with. So why don't we start with kind of defining our terms before we launch into this,

because you have definitions of these things that I think are different from what people might expect. Absolutely. So, Abraham Maslow is a humanistic psychologist, one of the founders of the field of humanistic psychology, big in the 1560s, had this notion of self-actualization. Earlier on in his career, he viewed self-actualization as becoming all that you're capable of becoming uniquely. Like what is your creative potential? What is your highest creative potential? You can differentiate that from the lower needs that we have, which are needs we share in common with other people. So we all have the needs for safety, the needs for connection to a certain

degree. We don't like loneliness, for instance. Need for respect, need for, to a certain degree, a need for self-esteem. These are things we all share with others. They don't make you particularly unique by saying, I really want friends. But if you can play a violin concerto, like no one else in the world can play it, okay, now we're talking.

There's something really unique seed, or you can do anything like that really gets to the core of your own unique being. Then we started talking about self-actualization. But I want to say there was like a pre phase in Maslow and a later phase, which is what I've been trying to kind of carry the baton in a certain way to make clear that towards the end of his life, especially after he had his heart attack, and he survived the heart attack, his whole worldview changed and it changed quite dramatically.

And he started to see self-actualization a little bit differently than he used to see it. He started to see it really as just a bridge to transcendence. He says, at one point he says, well, it seems like the function of self-actualization is actually to erase itself. So when done right, we self-actualize is actually to erase itself. So when done right,

we self-actualize our unique creative potentials in such a way where we are giving it out to the world, where our being is so in synchrony with the world. And it's synergy is the word, synergy with the world that what is automatically good for me is good for others. That what I, you know, my being and the things I'm doing in the world, like your podcast, you love doing your podcast,

but it's so much in synergy with what other people wanna hear. People, you know, you're really helping the world by doing something you love. Is that, does it feel like you're self-actualizing every day or are you transcending? I would argue you're more transcending. So the idea being that self-actualization

is aligned with a more individualistic pursuit of self betterment, right? It's focused on the self, whereas transcendence, which is an outgrowth of self-actualization becomes more outward looking in terms of like what you're contributing to the betterment of humanity. Yeah. Or aligning the actions or your behavior

that are the result of self-actualization with that mission of global betterment or the betterment of humanity. Is that accurate? Yes. And I wanna be clear that I don't necessarily mean in some like your life's a failure if it hasn't happened in some hugely

like economically impactful way or like like a quantitative way you know um that the goal is always to uh help a billion people on the planet or help a million people have huge businesses i think there are people who do inquire ways um i i talked a little about this light triad and i don't know if we want to like double click on that yet but there's a certain way of being that I think is underappreciated. And I think that gives back to the world in beautiful ways every day.

I mean, you can have someone who has a company, runs a company and is bragging about how many people they're impacting, but they're an asshole to people in their life every single day of their lives. Well, that counts too. I'm sorry, that counts. I think a lot of my work is really

about being more than doing. And I think doing is very important, don't get me wrong. I think like actually changing the world, but I think we underestimate the extent to which your being can change the world, if that makes sense. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs is commonly understood as this pyramid.

And I wanna talk about how that's not the case. And you have this sailboat analogy that much better kind of encapsulates what he was getting at. But I am interested, I do wanna spend a little time on that difference between doing and being, right? Because that pyramid paradigm sort of connotes like an active verb relationship with these needs. You're working your way through all of these things in lockstep. Whereas being is more of a letting go and allowing process, which is ephemeral and I think difficult to kind of wrap

our brains around how that actually operates. So the distinction between being and doing, yeah. Well, I'm also a personality psychologist. So a lot of being is just a fancy spiritual way of saying personality. What are our patterns of behaviors that have maybe become habits to a certain degree that we, they become so ingrained in us that they're like automatic reflexes now

when we encounter certain things. So when I, for instance, when I wrote my book, Wired to Create, a lot of that book was about how to have creativity as part of your being. Now that doesn't mean you're not doing things in the world. It means that you have certain habits of mind, certain habits of ways of acting and responding to the world that consistently moves you in the direction

of greater creativity. Like openness to experience is a way of being. That phrase, by the way, a way of being was big among the humanistic psychologists, but it's not a phrase that many people use these days. And you don't see many biohackers. The term way of being, you know, when they're selling their products,

they're like, we'll improve your performance, but they're not like, we'll improve your way of being. But I think it should, it should be part of it for sure. Yeah. So a lot of it, I'm talking about personality structure. I'm talking about worldviews, ways of processing the world and ways of being in the world

and interaction and in relation to others. So let's get to the hierarchy specifically and the differences between what we understand commonly as a pyramid versus like this sailboat version of understanding it. Yeah, so many people are probably familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs is depicted as a pyramid.

Have you seen the- Sure. Everyone's seen the pyramid. I don't know if we have one of those things where you can like put in the interview, like a picture of something, but- We could find that. You know, so at the bottom,

you have like the basic need of like safety and then belonging above that and self-esteem above that and then self-actualization above that as though life is some sort of linear sort of trek up some mountain or something and and you reach some basic level of a certain need like need for connection and then there's some voice from above it's like congrats you've unlocked you know self-esteem-esteem or family. Right, moving on to the next stage of the video game. Next stage of the video game. Yeah. Well, first of all,

Maslow never drew a pyramid in any of his writings. As I'm going through, and trust me, I think I read like everything he's ever written, including his like 2000 page, two volume journal, personal journals. He never drew a pyramid. So I was like, where's the pyramid? And he never thought about life as a

video game either. So that's a misunderstanding of his theory of motivation. It's much better to think of life as a two-step forward, one-step back dynamic. We have to choose the growth option over and over again and consciously make those choices. But there's lots of forces, subconscious forces within us, as well as lots of forces outside of us that we can't control. And luck also plays a big factor in this, that is pulling us in directions that are not for our full growth.

So I thought a sailboat would be a better metaphor for that kind of way of life. So the thing with the sailboat metaphor is what's important is the integration of the whole unit, first of all. It's not, you're not like climbing a mountain. It's like, how do all the parts of the sailboat work together? And are they harmoniously working together?

Are you fighting this like civil war inside yourself? That's a phrase Maslow used. Does it feel like you're constantly like wanting to do this, but then something, another side of you pulling you in another direction. But also with an integrated sailboat metaphor, you have the boat itself, which represents the needs, the basic needs. If you have too many holes in the boat, you're not going anywhere, right?

You're going to be focusing all your energies on getting the water the heck out of the boat, right? It's similarly, if you're hungry, right? You're not able to focus on much else. If you're really chronically hungry. If you're lonely, you hungry, if you're lonely, we know how much that affects your whole cognition, your ability to self-actualize. If you're very, very low and you feel like

everything you do, you're not getting respect, right? And that's not just narcissists who want respect, by the way, it's a really fundamental human motive. I think we overuse the term narcissist these days, by the way, like everyone's a narcissist except you, right? It's like, oh, my ex-husband, he's a narcissist. Or, oh, my boss, you know, it's like, we don't look within. But I think the person who is chronically lacking

the ability to enact their plans in life over and over again, that creates a toll. And that's a really human thing if you're really constantly coming up against those walls to focus all your energies on that. But again, that's gonna get in the way of your growth. So that's the boat. But eventually if you can get to a certain level,

not level, I shouldn't even use the word level, but you get to, in your life, you get to a place where there really aren't the significant holes in your boat and you really feel you can move, you're moving, you eventually need to open up that sail. And the opening up the sail, that's where the growth happens.

Because once you open up that sail, you're gonna be vulnerable to the winds, to the waves. There's a vast unknown of the sea. The waves can come crashing down on all of us at once. And then we were like, we thought we were going in our own direction. And then we realized, well, we're all And then we were like, we thought we were going in our own direction and then we realized, well, we're all in the sea together or we thought we're going in a direction

and then we will have to change direction, like so many of us had to do with COVID, right? But opening up that sail, that's where the growth happens. Yeah, what I like about that is it acknowledges all of the many things over which we have no control that at any moment could capsize us, right? And put us back at the very bottom of that hierarchy. But at the same time,

there's kind of an elevated notion here as well, because when you raise the sail, if the seas are calm and the wind is blowing in your direction, you actually don't have to do anything. The wind carries you, right? There's this kind of invisible spiritual alignment when you are self-actualizing in the manner in which you are designed to where,

and I say this all the time, like the universe will conspire to support you in mysterious ways. And that can all go terribly wrong an hour later, but there are those heightened moments that I've experienced in my life. And I love that the analogy kind of contemplates that. For sure, and that's, those are transcendent,

I would call those transcendent moments. Yeah, or I'm sure you've, you know a lot about the flow state in your personal life. You certainly know a lot about the flow state. And that is such a, feel magical. Yeah. You get in the full state with humans, fellow humans too, right?

Like you do probably all the time on your podcast. Yeah, for sure. Or you finish and you're like, well, that was three hours. And they're like, what? Exactly, exactly. I always aspire to achieve that. But I look at this as a mental model

for making sense of the world and a means by which to take control over, you know, kind of how you're thinking about how you're pursuing your life. And I can't help but think of it in comparison to 12 step, which is a model that, you know, is kind of like a default mode in my mind for how I try to understand the world.

And, you know, there are kind of active things that you do within 12 step, the amends and the daily inventory and spiritual practices. But there's also this notion of acceptance and surrender. And when you were talking about Maslow's heart attack, what was interesting about that was that you would think that that would put him lower on the hierarchy because suddenly his security is being threatened because he's being confronted with his mortality. And yet it has the opposite impact on him,

which he found sort of interesting and confusing at the time. But what I see in that is kind of an embrace of these things that we don't have control over that allow us to reach a higher state of appreciation and gratitude and presence. Absolutely, but there's also like a whole paradox that we can go down this whole rabbit hole,

which is really a big mystery I try to solve in my book. And that's this, how come there are some people when they experience these moments of near death experiences in life or threats to their mortality, they feel transcendence like Maslow did, but there are those that have this mortality salience all the time and they're constantly stuck

in the deficiency realm of human existence. So that was a big question I tried to resolve and I only got to it in the last chapter. So I don't know if you want me to do a spoiler alert of like, I had to get sort through a lot of the literature to get to this, to explain this and to understand it. No, I want to hear it. Okay, I'll just go right to it.

But just for people to know- I mean, it's not like a thriller, you know, or it's like, how's it going to end? I wrote it kind of like a thriller. It is a story. But as I said to you before the podcast, it's a love letter also. It is, yeah, for sure.

The way I resolved it, because in one way, I do want people to read the book and like for things to build on each other, like really bit by bit. But I think that what I realized after sorting through all this literature is that there's a certain privilege that Maslow had by having near-death experience, but having

his security needs met when he had that. And I think that's key to being able to experience transcendence. Because there are people who live under really impoverished conditions where every day of their life, they don't know if they're gonna survive. And it's not like they are experiencing transcendence every day, right? They really are focused their attention on surviving. So I think it's one of those things

where if you can hormoniously integrate lots of these lower needs in your life and satisfy them in a certain degree, they're no longer part of your consciousness and you can have a near-death experience. You really can have some of the highest heights of transcendence imaginable, but I don't think that it's necessarily the case for everyone. And so a big part of what I would try to do this book as well is to understand, you know, what are the conditions upon which we really can have some of the most magical states of consciousness in the world.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't really point out that that isn't the case for everyone. Not everyone even has that opportunity for experiencing those highest heights of transcendence. Let's walk through just the process of self-actualization as you understand it i think everybody wants to self-actualize but i don't know that people have the necessary tools to understand what that framework is and a methodology for approaching their life in a kind of conscious and intentional way to achieve that.

Like lockstep through what people should be thinking about in terms of the decisions that they're making about where to invest their time and energy. That is a great practical question. That is like really important. This aligns with, I'm trying to start a form of coaching I'm calling self-actualization coaching, where the purpose of the coaching process

to help the client find a life that works best for them, find a life that is not something they feel like they need to, or they should be a certain way because of societal pressures, because everyone's telling them to do certain things, but really getting in touch with these potentialities within you,

which when realized make you feel most alive in life, make you feel most aspired, make you feel just a great, great sense of calling or purpose. So as far as I'm concerned, living a self-actualized life is a constant direction, but it's not a designation you ever achieve. Same with transcendence. That would suck if like it was a destination you get there,

then what do you do the moment after you transcend it? It's like, what do I do with the rest of my life? There's that adage, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Exactly, exactly. So it's a constantly process of like choosing growth, but what does it mean to choose growth?

What do I mean by choosing growth? I mean, what does it mean to choose the option that is moving you in directions that you really truly want to move in? But also it's a whole process of getting in touch with, well, what is that? What are those most alive centers of yourself? Because I think there's lots of internal forces that pull you away from that. Of course, there are external forces, but I'm actually really, to extent, more interested in the internal forces. There are so many ways we hold ourselves back.

We don't even realize it throughout the course of our lives and like self-destructive things we do. And so much of like choosing the growth, so it's not just so easy, just choose the growth option, you'll be fine. No, there's so many parts of ourselves that don't want us to choose the growth option. Again'll be fine. No, there's so many parts of ourselves that don't want us to choose the growth option. Again, it could come down like guilt or shame.

Shame's a big one. Shame is such a big one. How to live a real fully actualized life. So much of us have even a fear of succeeding. It's called the, Mazzo called it the Jonah complex. The fear of growth. A lot of people have that.

A lot of people don't, they really want to do great things, but they are very scared of what would happen if they were put in a position to do it. What if they suddenly had that microphone? What if they had all these people listening and suddenly that's when all the trolls come running, they come running.

And so there's lots of aspects of the self-actualization process that can be worked on. I think like there should exist a coaching program that is along those lines. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I feel like that should be built into young people's curriculum as a means of better understanding themselves. How can we make better decisions about what we wanna do

if we're completely, I think disconnection from self is epidemic. Most people are disconnected from self. They don't understand what their impulses are telling them. They have low self-worth. They're just, you know, the external forces distract us from ourself, right? But then we have all these internal mechanisms,

as you mentioned, like I'm not worthy or I don't deserve that, or I'm just trying to pay the bills or you don't understand how difficult my life is. All these barriers and obstacles that we erect that insulate us from feeling compelled to do that internal excavation, to kind of parse what makes you tick and what it is

that makes you wake up in the morning and get excited about anything. Like the common thing that I'm sure you hear all the time is I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what's my purpose. How do you begin to unpack that in an individual so that they can start making tiny actions in the direction of exploring that.

Yeah, I very much viewed it from like a Viktor Frankl lens of it's more about calling than purpose. The thing with purpose, it sounds like something so internal like I gotta find- Or grandiose. Grandiose, I gotta find that thing that only I can, well, actually, if you listen and talk to people and just open your eyes, you'll see there are a billion callings all around you

that you could pick, just pick one. What I say to my students when I was teaching at Columbia, just, you know, because students all the time would say like, how do I know what my purpose is? It's like, calm down. First of all, you're 20 years old. You're 20 years old. Right, but it's not their fault

because all of the external forces are telling them that they need to have an understanding of their life at that age. I agree. But it's also heartbreaking when you see how stressed they are that they haven't found their purpose yet. It's like, first of all, calm down.

There's 50 year olds that still are freaking out. They don't have found their purpose. But the thing is, there are so many things that you can just pick, like look outside of yourself to what are needs that are being unmet in others. It's not all about your own unmet needs. It's what are the unmet needs of others

that you can help fulfill? And that you do have like a unique skillset to do so and does make you feel like you come alive. Certainly, I'm not suggesting that you pick anything, but there are so many callings, that potential callings, if you're really truly listening, if you're really truly getting outside of yourself, if you're, you know, just read the news, read the news,

you could help just give some aid to people right now in the Ukraine, you know, like that's could be your calling. And that's all I mean by purpose. I think we put way too much pressure on people to find the purpose within themselves and far less pressure to be able to find a purpose outside of yourself that you can contribute to. Well, an important distinction there is this difference

between finding your purpose in this self-serving manner, right, like that is responsive to our culture, which is accumulate materialism. Like how can I get mine and power and money and luxury and comfort and all of that versus this service component, which is a true driver of happiness, right? But is counterintuitive to the Western mindset,

which is looking to gird their own loins and not looking out from a perspective of how can I contribute. Maslow had this phrase he called dichotomy transcendence. I love it, I'm trying to bring it back. Wait, so dichotomy transcendence? I say bring it back, it's not like it was ever part of the societal.

Right, yeah, well, it had a moment. I know that's what I'm saying. Like in 1966. I don't think it ever did. Even that there are so many nerdy things in Maslow's rings that only a true nerd like myself would appreciate. But dichotomy transcendence is something I think so important in the world right now.

And what that is, is we put so many things as opposites of each other. We're seeing in the political warfare, we're seeing in religious, but we do in other ways, just like male, female, evil, good, selfish, unselfish. I wanted to encourage people to think about the fact that there are lots of parts of humanity

that there's a larger whole, that we can actually rise above and go to a higher state of consciousness where we view all these things more objectively. I don't think anything is good or bad by itself. You know, aggression can be integrated in a really beautiful way to help you change the world for the good, right?

Like, it's not like, you're not gonna curb your aggression, right? No, it's about the integration. So the reason why I bring this up with what you just said is I actually don't like to think of the word selfishness as bad, necessarily bad. And I wrote a paper, a scientific paper where I created two scales to really investigate this scientifically, where I made the case that we need a construct called healthy selfishness, and we need to do

more research on pathological altruism. And so the title of my paper was two forms of paradoxical selfishness, because I wanted the field to kind of look at this in a different way. And I created this scale and I found out that paradoxically, the more you have a healthy form of selfishness, where you take care of yourself, where you, what you're doing in your life, yeah, it's benefiting you, but it also just happens to benefit others at the same time, you know, just spontaneously. But the people who have higher forms of healthy selfishness actually have more higher genuine motives for helping others,

real genuine motives for helping others. They love to see other people grow. They love to see other people succeed. It's not all about themselves. Even though they scored higher on this, some of these kinds of items can be viewed selfish, but they're really healthy forms of selfishness. Vice versa, I think we kind of act in our society like there's so much pressure, like give, give, give all the time. There's all this pressure to like, you know, sacrifice yourself. And I call BS on that. And I think it's problematic when we live in a culture where

there's too much pressure to sacrifice yourself. That could lead to all sorts of really like significant psychopathologies. You find people that scored high on our psychological, our pathological altruism scale, like have items like I need to be needed. Like I help all the time, like 24 seven helping people. Aren't I such a good person?

I'm helping. And we found that scale was correlated with depression. That scale was correlated with narcissism. That's the paradoxical part of it. You know, seemingly path seemingly altruistic items were actually correlated quite strongly with a form of narcissism. I've been studying called vulnerable narcissism,

which is different from grandiose narcissism. So I just wanted to look at this in a different way, you know, if that makes sense. Right, but the constant in that is ego and a sort of inflated sense of self-importance, right? If I'm not this martyr and I'm giving everything that I have that the world will stop spinning on its axis. Correct, that's why that's unhealthy selfishness.

But I think we can differentiate that kind of unhealthy selfishness from a healthy form of selfishness. So selfishness need not be bad or be egoistic. It need not be egoistic. Well, we need a different word then because selfish is so negatively connotated. Like you need a different word for that.

I mean, self-care, right? Like you can't be the best servant unless you're first looking after yourself, right? Good point. And that does feel indulgent for some people. No, good point, good point. I think for a lot of people, it's like, well, let's pick a single mom who's working three jobs

and has a bunch of young kids at home, right? Like I don't feel I have the time or the bandwidth or it doesn't feel right to me to take care of myself because so many other people are dependent on me and I have to go out and do all this other stuff. Yeah, no, that's totally fair. There is this egoistic, excessive self-focus, excessive self-focus that is very much related to narcissism.

But I'm very interested in this kind of vulnerable form of narcissism. It's something that really fascinates me and I've been trying to do more research on because it's not what we typically think of when we think of narcissism. And it can be covert. Actually, in the 50s and 60s, the psychoanalysts called it covert narcissism. Grandiose narcissism is what we're obviously seeing a lot of in the media, right?

We're seeing the chest thumping, sort of like, I'm the best, I'm gonna invade a whole country cause I'm the best, that's grandiose narcissism. And that's has its own problems for sure. But there are some of these other forms that are very much, there's the ones that a lot of them end up on this clinician's couch. I want us to have empathy for it.

I mean, is that such a bad thing for us to have empathy for people who score high in narcissism because they're being so self-destructive in their own self-actualization goals. If my goal is to help everyone self-actualize, we need to look very non-judgmentally and with unconditional positive regard at people who are having all sorts of things

that are just getting in their own way internally. I see vulnerable narcissism and grandiose narcissism as well as things that are really, people are just getting in their own way. Things are not going to turn out well for Putin. I don't know if we can bring current events in what we're talking about, but things are not going to turn out well.

And there's going to be a lot of destruction along the way, a lot of unnecessary deaths. And I just think that we need to, if we could just sit down, if we could just sit down, if I could just sit down with Puddin, I'd be like, dude, do you wanna live a life of meaning,

of like growth of satisfaction at all in your life? You know, like you're not making the growth oriented choices. Yeah, and how do you, like if you had to clinically diagnose him and his motivations and what's driving him to make these- There's a rule against us doing that by the APA. There's a rule that psychologists-

Really? Yeah, they bring like the FBI to your room if you do. Oh, wow. And I'm joking about that part, but there is a rule. There is like an ethical standard that if you're a psychologist, you're not supposed to diagnose public figures. With that said, with that said, with that said,

I wrote, before Trump was elected, I wrote an article for Scientific American to try and explain to everyone, like, look, this is exactly how he thinks. This is exactly what's gonna happen if you elect him as president. I was right, I was right. It was that narcissistic of me to say that,

but I think it's very important without putting specific psychiatric labels on people we haven't formally diagnosed as psychologists. We still absolutely, you could see the rings on the wall with the way, the certain pattern, the ways of being. Again, it comes back to ways of being. There's a certain way of being that Putin has, a certain way of being that Trump has, there's a way of being, well, everyone, and Biden has. I don't mean to just pick on, you know, one thing like, or one sort of political venue, because there's a lot of problems every which way you look with ways of being on the political spectrum. But I think that there's a certain megalomaniac sort of way of worldview, of way of seeing the world that is just so destructive, but it's also so self-destructive.

It's not doing good for anything. Right, and what's interesting is that, is the lack of self-awareness around that, right? Like it's evident to someone like yourself how this is gonna play out because that way of being is fairly accurate in terms of behavior prediction and the actions he's gonna take next.

And yet, whether his advisors are pointing this out to him or not, he's unable to see it for himself. Or if it is pointed out to him, he refuses to acknowledge it or to act on that information. And I'm sure it's more complicated than, I wish your mother loved you better. Whatever hot takes are happening on the internet,

but it is fascinating. I saw that video too, by the way. Yeah, I know. That poor woman was maligned. The internet ganged up on her pretty severely for that. But if you could, are you allowed to say, like if you could sit down with him and say, look, man, here's what you need to think about right now.

What would you say? I mean, I think like, what if I was his coach? What if I was a self-actualization coach? You know, really to understand, well, what are your goals? And what I try to do in a very nonjudgmental way with whatever client, what are your goals? And if there are goals that things I personally wouldn't agree with or wouldn't really like, they're not going to, I'm still trying to be nonjudgmental, you know? So like if I had him as a client, I would be, and he was like, my goal is to rule the world.

It's like, okay, okay. Not unconditional positive regard. I'm not going to judge that. But, like, what are the best things you could be doing to along those lines? I feel as though he made a huge error by so robustly and dramatically attacking a whole – all the world to see. There was no strategy there. For someone who's supposed to be such a good chess player, I think at one point he's like the grandmaster of thinking about strategy of war and stuff. This wasn't very good strategy.

I would probably sit down with him. Now I wouldn't want to like, you know, like be like help him with the strategy, but help him really just think through based on your goals. You know, do you have any goal at all of growing as a human being, of being a better person? Is that at all a goal for you? You know, like do you have any goal? Do you want to like have, do you want to, do you probably feel every day of your life? And I probably, he probably feels a lot of inner conflicts, right? Or maybe not. Again, I'd be curious to know, do you ever feel like there are things pulling you in different directions inside of you that you want to harmonize in any way, you know, and the process of, of inner feeling comfortable within your own self and not feeling you have constantly proved something. In coaching, we have something called powerful questions, right?

So what are powerful questions that you can ask to help transform a person? I think a really powerful question in asking all of us is are there inner conflicts within you that if they were resolved, this big grandiose motivation you have would be quelled? Because I do think for most of us, yes, they would. We often find there are a lot of grandiose narcissistic dreams and goals we had at one point,

which we just totally don't have anymore because we've done inner work. We haven't invaded a country to solve that problem. I would also ask him as a powerful question, if you get what you want and you get your goal, do the thought experiment, how will you actually feel any different inside internally? So these kinds of questions where you really try to help

and you work starting from within as opposed to from without. I don't feel like humans are very good at predicting how they're gonna feel when they get the thing that is driving them. That's true too. Because we all think that that is gonna satisfy a certain need and it's only upon arrival

that we realize it doesn't. And then we just double down and keep climbing that ladder, you know, ad infinitum. Daniel Gilbert has done great work on that, you know, effective forecasting. We're terrible effective forecasters. Connection's a big piece here too, right? Like when you're talking about Putin,

I'm wondering what are his relationships really like, right? And connection being integral in this hierarchy. You use, you know, Ikaria as an example, the centenarians who are so inextricably wed to each other and how that creates a level of contentment and purpose in their lives that is like a life force, right? That spills over into every positive emotion that we all want to experience.

And you think of someone like Putin, isolated, probably keeps whoever he's exposed to at a minimum. And he's just an example. It can be, think of your own life and what your relationships are like. And I've done a lot of work around this recently because I've realized that I haven't been as good a friend as I could to my friends out there

because I have kids in this work and this is my social life is sort of doing what we're doing right now. And I feel that missing in this work. And this is my social life is sort of doing what we're doing right now. And I feel that missing in my life. Like that's an incongruity that I know I need to resolve in order to continue on this self-actualization trajectory. That's amazing that you have that awareness though. And I mean, you've made that understanding,

you have that understanding that's something you need to work on. Yeah. I mean, if we ever stop finding things to work on, that's a boring life. You know, like I think that- It never ends. It never ends. And I don't understand what some people come in with the goal that it will end, like some clients, right? Like, or it's just, just people have this notion again, like it's like a hierarchy, a pyramid. I need to check a few boxes. Yeah. It's always good to have something

that's good that you're working on. The other thing in thinking about the hierarchy and reading your book and reflecting on my own path that I found interesting was that I made certain decisions that probably should have come later on this evolutionary arc, but out of pain and necessity was trying to kind of expedite it.

Like I was in a situation where some fundamental needs were not being met. Like we were having a really hard time just paying the bills and logic would dictate like, hey, you should maybe go back to a law firm and get a stable paycheck. And yet I made the choice to pursue these creative things as a different way out that ended up taking a lot longer

and were very precarious and risky at the time. And luckily, like everything worked out fine, but it wasn't like a kind of lockstep rational model for progressing through these various stages. But you definitely chose the growth option though. And again, like self-actualization, I don't think I made this point yet, but self-actualization is not the same thing as achievement.

Self-actualization is not the same thing as making money. In fact, I watched an interview with Maslow's wife, Bertha, after Maslow died. And Bertha said something very interesting. She said, Maslow always, when I asked him, who's the most self-actualized person you think exists in this world? He would always say my mom.

So Bertha's mom, and then she ended up, she described her mom as just the most loving person, the most like really comfortable in her own skin, just always like lit up a room, but like not very unassuming as well just always like lit up a room, you know, but like not very unassuming as well, not having not achieved a lot, right? Maslow could have like chosen anyone, you know, like as, as, and he chose, like he mentioned Bertha's mom is a great example of a self-actualized person. I think a lot of that comes down to what you yourself

really want to do in your life. How will you feel most alive? How you feel most creative? How will you contribute the most? But part of that self-explanatory process is doing that despite the pressures, societal pressures for money, despite the societal pressures to achieve, to have more Twitter following, to be an influencer on Instagram.

That's a big thing these days. It's all that pressure. You can kind of feel like a loser if you go on Instagram and you get like five likes for saying something, but you can kind of feel like a loser if you go on Instagram and like, you have like, you get like five likes for saying something, but you see someone who says the same exact thing you said and they have like 500,000 likes. You could feel like a loser in life,

but that doesn't mean that you're not self-actualizing. It doesn't mean that other person has self-actualized. I can't tell you the amount of people that I've talked to, just like people I'm in awe of, people I think they've accomplished so much. And I talk to them and I get a beer with them or whatever, and whatever the choice of drink is. And they're like, I'm depressed.

I'm like, how the heck are you depressed? There's still things they're doing in their life, they're not actually self-actualizing. So I think we need to do that right away. We need a divorce self-actualization from these other constructs we have that we have made in our society to be out like that success. When I reflect on the people that I know

that are pretty advanced on the self-actualization scale and perhaps living a transcendent life, there's a certain energy, like when they're in the room, like you know it, right? You feel it. Like this is a person who knows who they are're in the room, like you know it, right? You feel it. Like this is a person who knows who they are. They're confident, but not arrogant. They have healthy boundaries,

but they're also incredibly gracious and curious and loving. They just, they know who they are and they exude a certain kind of energy that's this mix of like love, gratitude, presence, appreciation, like I said, confidence. And it's almost as if there's something in the human brain that is calibrated to recognize and appreciate that. And you're like, I wanna be like that, right? What is that?

They're comfortable in their own skin and scientifically I can break down what that means. I mean, they're not fighting a civil war within themselves. They're not fighting. They're not parts of themselves that are going in so many different directions. I mean, you can take the converse of what you just said. And you kind of like when someone walks in a room who like is fighting this internal war. You know it.

Holy moly. You're like, I need to get away from that person. It's like, you know, and those people actually tend to be the ones that tend to be very manipulative. They tend to be the ones that like, are you like constantly scheming, you know? But I do find it an interesting phenomenon that those who are very, very comfortable

in their own skin don't feel as much a need to manipulate others to satisfy their, it's because they're not coming from a place of deficiency. They're coming from a place of growth. Maslow made this distinction between deficiency realm of existence and the being realm or the growth realm of human existence. So many people are stuck in this deficiency realm where all their motivations are being driven by their deficiencies. And that's what I'm talking about with the person who's not comfortable in their own skin because they'll come in a room,

but their ways are focused on like, they know they need something. So then they're searching for who can give them what they need. Everything is transactional. But you're talking about the kind of people walk in a room, they just wanna grow. They wanna play, they wanna explore.

I love people like that. Right, and they just wanna grow. They wanna play, they wanna explore. I love people like that. Right, and they will be equally interested in other people, right? That curiosity. And that's very different from the person who's pretending to be interested in you because they're trying to extract something out of you. And even if the words are exactly the same,

the energy is completely different and you know it immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of dovetails into some interesting ideas that you have around authenticity. Like authenticity is sort of this catchphrase that has- I love that topic. Yeah, been sort of, I don't know, commodified, I suppose.

We're all aspiring to be authentic and there's a high premium for people who are authentic online. So what does that actually mean? And there's some interesting science that you've written about, about perhaps, you know, authenticity kind of all being an improper rubric or perhaps just a complete fallacy.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of things we use the phrase authenticity for that aren't really authenticity. So there's the idea that if you just say what's ever on your mind at any point in time, like, oh, I'm just being authentic. No, you're being an asshole. No, the term for that is asshole, not authentic. Or this idea that if you realize all your darkest impulses all the time, you're really being authentic, you know. I view authenticity like I view everything else. So I said earlier that I don't think anything

is really good and bad by itself. I think there's a healthy flavor to it and there's a deficiency motivated flavor. We could say a growth oriented flavor and a deficiency motivated flavor. I think authenticity is the same. So what I tried to talk about is the construct of healthy authenticity,

which is how can you realize your potentialities in a way that you're really truthful, but it's helping you learn and grow, helping people around you grow. So authentic relationships, I think are ones that are very honest, but there are ones that are honest. You're not just having authentic relationship

when you just say like, hey man, you're ugly. I'm just telling the truth. I'm being your friend, tough love. No, I think like authentic relationships, you're not just having authentic relationship when you just say like, hey man, you're ugly. I'm just telling the truth. I'm being your friend, tough love. No, I think like authentic relationships, truthfulness is a part of it, but I think there's a flavor of healthy authenticity

where there's a genuine spirit and motivation that we're both here to help each other grow. And I wanna, and you wanna grow as a person. So sometimes that means that the authentic choice in my definition is having self-control over certain of your urges, regulating certain things you say, you know, do you have this is like really thinking through if I say this on Twitter right now, is that really me being authentic? Or is that, is that a healthy form of authenticity? You know,

is it a way that it's going to signal to the others and is going to of authenticity? Is it a way that it's gonna signal to the others and is gonna help anyone? Is it gonna make the world a better place? Is it gonna make me grow in any way if I say it? Then don't say it. So I think like healthy authenticity has a different flavor than deprivation motivated. Right, well, motivation is important, right? What is the motivation behind that behavior or that action?

And in order to develop self-awareness around that, you have to do enough internal work where you get a better understanding of what your presets are and your motivations and your deficiencies and your character defects and the like, right? Like if you're operating impulsively or reactively to the world,

you're not really in touch with the interior space that is compelling these behaviors. So how does one like, you have to, that's the work, right? Like you gotta be able to excavate your own self to understand all of that. And again, I go back to 12 step because that's the model that I've used to, we call them character defects

and trying to understand what's behind them. Yeah, so I have like various components of healthy authenticity. Two of them are ones you basically just touched on. Self-honesty and self-awareness are two huge ones. You can just work on those two to start with. Not just you in particular, but everyone. Not saying you need to work on this.

I have plenty I need to work on. Me too, me too, but just be clear. If anyone can start working on those on a path to healthy authenticity, I think those are good phases. There's more to healthy authenticity in those two. But if you, how many of us are really self-honest? I did something a bit cheeky in my book,

which you rarely see in a self-help space, which are like, I'm here, take this test of narcissism. Take this test of psychopathy. Are you a psychopath? Maybe you are. Be really, really piercingly honest with yourself. I feel like I am constantly honest with myself and I do it with a sense of humor and love though. It's really good, I think, to laugh at yourself. I think that people, people who score real, really high on psychopathy lack self-humor. And there's, this is a well, the correlation is almost perfect. Can you think of anyone in your head, like who is a big public figure who is like severe lack of empathy.

It's so obvious they have a severe lack and they ever laugh at themselves. You never see that, you know? So I think a big part of that is self-honesty, self-awareness and having and cultivating relationships that are grounded in truth, but grounded in truth in a way that has a direction to it. And this, by the way,

some people might disagree with that. There's, I get disagreements sometimes with my heterodox friends, intellectual friends. Right, put a pin in that because we're going to talk about that, but go ahead. The idea of truth at all costs, you know, we can talk about that because I actually disagree with that. I think truth, I'm not saying lying is good, but we don't have to say everything. We don't have to do everything. I think cultivating a real authentic relationship where you genuinely care and are listening to the other person divorced

from your own real felt needs, right? So it's not like you're always trying to get something out of the other person. You're actually with wonder and curiosity, witnessing a friend, I think is a big part of an authentic relationship. And in your experience, how malleable are these traits? Curiosity, empathy, like these things, you know,

we come with our presets obviously, and there are things that we can do to cultivate or breed them, but you know, somebody who is pathologically narcissistic and lacks any kind of empathy, is it possible for that person to become more empathetic or how do we cultivate these traits that can elevate us on this self-actualization path?

Well, that's a billion dollar question. If I had the magic sauce and if we could put it in the water supply for everyone to have. But I think a lot of it does come down to a matter of perspective. It come down to a matter of perspective. It comes down to a matter of frame of reference. There are self-transcendent states we get

in their self-transcendent practices that allow us to glimpse moments of what that could look like. Aided or unaided by drugs. I'm not anti-drugs by any stretch of the imagination. There's some really exciting research coming out about psychedelics, the extent to which it can change our frame of reference.

But I think an even more interesting question is how can we get those states of consciousness without having to take, you know, whatever your psychedelic drug of choice is. And I think there are things that we can do. I'm really interested in the emotion and psychological phenomenon of awe, A-W-E. It's a concept I've scientifically studied

with people like Dr. Keltner and David Yadin, trying to create a scale and having people report on their experiences of awe. So we did a large scale study where we had people just free form, tell us about your greatest moments of awe and try to collate and find the commonalities and we create a scale, the all experience questionnaire

based on that had six facets to it. But the point here is that when you look at these descriptions of the all state, you find that they're infused with other, with getting outside yourself. They're infused with ideas of a complete shift in perspective. In some cases, a quite profound shift in perspective,

like things like, wow, my whole life, I thought that this was my path, or I thought that the world only worked in this way. And then I discovered or witnessed something that was so beyond my comprehension, so outside of myself that I realized I had been so self-focused this whole time. So I think we can get these moments. Some people, religious people may find it in prayer. Meditation practices show a lot of promise in it. There are a whole wide range of, you call them spiritual practices

or transcendent practices. I like to secularize it, you know, but pairing it with, sometimes even pairing it with psychedelics has been found to show huge, huge positive effects. Right. The psychedelics will deliver you a guaranteed response, right, that you're gonna have to reckon with,

but there are all these other modalities for tapping into that. I mean, you, you know, the Grand Canyon, right? You talk about these different various peak experiences that we can have. I've experienced them as an athlete. I've experienced them in meditation and in other contexts in my life,

but also is not like connection to other human beings back to the connection piece, like being in communion with other human beings, the ultimate breeder of empathy, because the more people you're connected to or the more cultures and also travel and exposure to different things is gonna make you a more empathetic human.

The broader you can develop your understanding of the human condition. Yeah, empathy and compassion are different things. And I think that is an important distinction. A lot of people call themselves, have you heard people who call themselves, they self identify as empaths? Yes.

Well, we did a study on that. You're gonna love this. We found actually that that's core with narcissism. Well, that's the whole, the spiritual narcissism thing that you've written about, which is a super interesting topic because I'm kind of part of that, I'm tangential to that world. I'm very familiar with the condition

that you're talking about. Yeah, and I also wanna make clear before I get hate mail from empaths, which is funny and that idea is funny in itself that I would get hate mail from empaths, but I'm not talking about perfect correlation. I'm not talking about all everyone who's also identified empaths is really narcissists.

I'm not saying that, so calm down empaths. There are people who are generally have an abundance of empathy. They immediately feel what other people feel like. And it can be overwhelming for them because they are constantly have very little boundaries between self and others. And that can really exist. But there are those who self-identify as empaths that have this notion that like they're really special in some really like narcissistic way. Like I'm a real healer, but no one, you know, I'm,

by the way, you find that the higher proportion of this among those who call themselves healers. Again, not all, but there's this idea that like, I and only I can save you, right? And then there's a kind of grandiosity there that may not take into account the real felt needs of another person. But I think compassion is a little bit different. With compassion, you don't have to feel what another person is feeling to want to alleviate their suffering. Because you see the suffering

right in front of your eyes. You can be more in tune with the real felt needs of others. There are a lot of people who, in a narcissistic way, view themselves as healers or helpers, but they're actually causing destruction in the person they're helping because they're not paying real attention to whether or not what they're giving the other person is actually what the person needs. It's actually more, it's correlated with intrusive ways of intrusive helping. There's a whole concept in psychology called intrusive helping. My mom does this sometimes. I love her so much, but she'll be like, she'll like mail me like all these food, like all this stuff. She's like, see what I did. I gave you all this. I was like, I don't even want half of this. You know, it's like, I mean, God bless her, right?

Like she's wonderful. But like, just to give you an example, like, like sometimes we do things for, to make ourselves feel good, but we need to actually ask, is that really what is really in best for someone else? I think compassion is really being able to look at the real felt needs of others and to really try to alleviate their suffering in a way that even if you don't feel what they're feeling, because sometimes we get in all sorts of trouble by thinking that we know exactly

what someone else is feeling. We're presuming that, well, we just get exactly what someone else is feeling. We're presuming that, well, we just get exactly what someone needs because we feel what they feel, and we're not really doing them the best good for themselves. Or we're approaching it from a perspective of trying to meet our own needs. Like you can tell yourself

that you're trying to help your friend, but really what you're trying to do is make yourself like, oh, if I solve this person's problem, then I fulfilled some need within side myself. It's deficient. That has nothing to do with that person's need, right? Yeah, it's like a deficiency motivation.

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. How does trauma play into all of this? I mean, humanistic psychology is really about the elevated states of the human condition. How do we sort of ascend as opposed to looking at clinical deficiencies in humans per se. But I feel like we live in these loops that are calcified when we're young

and these stories that we tell ourselves about who we are. And we're unconsciously aware that so much of our worldview and behaviors are originate from something that happened to us before we were complete, our brains were fully formed, et cetera. So when you're thinking about these elevated states, like do you not have to still rely upon, you know, different modalities of psychology

to help people, you know, unpack those things in a more traditional mode to get to that place? I didn't say that very elegantly, but do you know what I mean? There's just a lot there in what you just said. Like there's a lot there, a lot to unpack. Different modalities. Yeah, because- You mean like CBT, like, you know what I'm saying? I do. And it's just such a complicated, complex question because believe it or not, we haven't all figured this out in psychology. Believe it or not- You'd be out of a job. We don't have our shit together.

We'd be very, I'd be very hubristic to say, okay, here's the answer. Because there are different factions in psychology. There are those, there are different, you know, some people think like this approach is the best, some people, to trauma, some people, this approach is the best. I'll tell you what I like, I'll tell you what I like

in the most modest way, in the sense that it's not necessarily going to work for everyone. But I really like Stephen Hayes and his ACT approach. The ACT approach is grounded in the idea that we need to stop avoiding our experiences that we're scared of. Avoiding, you know, a lot of people with trauma, what they'll do is they'll run from any trigger, right? They're scared of being triggered, right? That's a word triggered, right? And even you see that in college campuses

with like trigger warnings and research shows that backfires. The best available evidence on this suggests that if you even set up that expectation beforehand, that like, just so you know, what I'm just about to say to you, what I'm about to say to you is going to trigger you. That already sets your, that's already like going to set your expectations in a way. It's basically saying you can't handle it.

You know, what we want to do more, I think is build deep reserves of resilience in people where they, they're like, I can handle it. You know, I've been through a lot and because I've been through a lot, it has strengthened me. So therefore who cares about a couple of words that might trigger me, I can handle that. You know, we want people to have more resiliency. So I really like the ACT approach because it's moving in an approach oriented way

towards in line with your values. So value is a big part of the ACT approach. So you're still saying, and as long as you're moving with your values, you don't avoid these things. Right, this is consistent with Susan David's approach, right, emotional agility. As well, yeah.

You have to expose yourself to these things too. It's just, it's like exercise. You have to use your muscles to get stronger. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of confluence between Susan's approach and the ACT approach. I really like, well, both of them are my friends. I like both of them and I like the approach very much. But this whole idea of experiential avoidance

is a psychological construct and has just been shown in hundreds and hundreds of studies now that it's in almost every context imaginable that it's just not good. Yeah, I'm thinking of people in my own life that practice that and what that's reaped in their lives and it isn't good. Yeah, it's really, it's core depression,

it's core, it's just, you're constantly reinforcing the wound as opposed to healing it. But post-traumatic growth is a whole different field than post-traumatic overcoming just post-traumatic stress. Cause I think there's more that we can do to just go from negative 10 to zero. Some people will go to a clinician and their goal, their stated goal,

I just wanna stop having ruminations about the events, the trauma, I wanna just stop feeling so shitty all the time. But I think we can do better than you're cured when you just stop those things. I think we can go to the positive 10, positive 20 and actually grow from those experiences in really profound ways, like seeing a real fundamental reordering,

reshaping of your priorities in life, feeling a greater sense of connection to others and a greater sense of love for humanity, creative growth. You know, you find lots of different areas. People can grow from these traumas in really profound ways. Shame is a big issue in terms of getting people to confront this stuff, right? For everything.

Yeah. Can I double click on shame for a second? Yeah. I think it is the one thing that's in common, at least the personality trait neuroticism has, but shame is very strongly correlated with neuroticism. It's the one thread that runs through every form of diagnosis in the DSM.

If you had to find one thing to unravel, we're all, you know, shame, neuroticism, you know, negative emotions. But shame is such a big one because the moment you start to accept real radical self-acceptance for a part of yourself you don't like, it doesn't become an issue anymore. Right. That's one of the most powerful things about being in 12 step. When you sit in these rooms and you see people get up in front of groups of people, large and small, and tell these insane stories about stuff that they've done and they laugh about it and they inject it

with all kinds of color and drama. And you just cannot believe that this person is so comfortable telling this chapter of their life that would be horrifically shameful and embarrassing to anyone else. And what it does is it gives you the permission to look at your own relationship with shame and your past behaviors and own it in a way

such that it no longer holds power over you. And when you share that with other human beings, it's a very attractive, infectious thing that I think is very powerful in helping other people confront their own shame. I completely agree. Can I stand up for one second? Yeah. My butt hurts.

No problem. Isn't that super comfortable chair that I got? It is. Do you need to go to the bathroom or anything? We take a quick break. No, I just want to like, you can capture this. Yeah, there you go. You're being filmed, Scott. All right, Scott had to shake his booty. Where were we? What were we talking about? Self-acceptance. Oh, it was about, you know, owning your behavior in a way that basically dissipates shame? Man, shame is, it plays a role in so much of the work I do in my life.

Like I'm really interested in like neurodiversity, for instance, I really wanna champion people whose brains are wired in all sorts of different ways from like autism spectrum to like bipolar disorder to dyslexia, schizophrenia, like having self-acceptance like bipolar disorder to dyslexia, schizophrenia, like having self-acceptance for having a uniquely wired brain

is a game changer for these individuals, right? I think you're also seeing this play out more controversially in the sort of trans movement. A lot of these individuals who have gender identities that are extraordinarily mismatched to their physical bodies. And by the way, that is a real scientific thing

that can happen for your psychological gender to differ so dramatically from your physical genitalia that experience is disorienting for people. The question, and what's controversial is what do you do with that?

Do you call yourself a different gender or do you deal with it in other ways? And that's open for discussion and I think debate. But nevertheless, if you can have self-acceptance over the fact that you are out there on a bell curve in an extreme way, and you can get a self-acceptance for that, that's a huge game changer for them as well. I mean, that's what, isn't that what we're all craving in a way? There's a sort of a common humanity there I'm trying to, even though I'm bringing up these disparate examples

of these diverse examples, we're all human at the end of the day. And whenever we have any sort of extreme trait or something that puts us out on a bell curve, to have self-acceptance for that and to not have shame over it is gonna be a huge part of that self-actualization process. Well, the self-acceptance provides the basis for esteem.

And you need that esteem in order to create a rounded sense of self and healthy boundaries. One of the things you talk about, I wanna talk about love and this difference between D-love and be love. I love that topic. Well, when I was looking into the writings of Maslow, I came across a concept called being love.

And what does it mean to be love day in and day out? And he distinguished that from unneeding love. So he distinguished needing love from unneeding love. So when you have needing love, that's more like a need for connection. Like you need to connect with people all the time. You need to constantly have that sort of find people with similar values, similar ideas.

But I think be love is a higher form of spiritual love where you can love people, even if you don't connect with them. Like you can be with someone even it's the opposite. Like they're on the complete opposite end of a political spectrum from you. It seems unheard of these days that you could potentially, that you could love someone who has a complete opposite

of a political spectrum, but you can. There's no rule. There's no like God, like thou shalt not love thy neighbor who disagrees with you on this dimension of politics. No, you can. And I think that that's why it's a way of being.

It's an attitude. It's a verb, right? You know, like it's not necessarily a feeling. Yes, you may not feel love for that person, but you can be loving toward that person. You can, I think a big part of be love is what's called a quiet ego, is lowering your ego just enough

where you can actually listen to another person's perspective. Because when our ego is in full force and that volume is turned up all the way, we're not listening at all to what the other person is saying. We're already right and they're wrong. Most people are looking at love

as something they're trying to extract from another human being. They're trying to get it. They're trying to fill some hole or some need that they have. The boat has a lot of holes in it. Yeah, and the idea of being like, I will be complete when you complete me. Like when I meet that perfect mate and we're together,

then everything is gonna be great. As opposed to this idea of be love where you're exuding it, you're looking to contribute love. And I just know for myself, when I descend into self obsession, or I'm picking my fingernails and gnawing my teeth on whatever is frustrating me in the moment

or why this isn't working out or whatever, like I have to practice the habit of like, how can I contribute? How can I contribute? How can I exude my next encounter with something positive for that person? And the more that I practice that, which is not, this is not my default state, Scott. Like I'm a curmudgeon.

No, not at all. I just know that I feel better. The other person feels better. Everything's better. And that self obsession begins to wane. But it's a practice. It's just like a muscle, it's a habit that I have to cultivate.

And more often than not, I don't think about it or I resist doing it, or I don't wanna do it. I think, how can you integrate it more though into your being? Because I think there's probably really positive aspects of that curmudgeoning guy. Like you've asked me some really critical questions today. Like even just coming back with me some stuff,

I wouldn't call it curmudgeoning at all. That's not what I'm saying, but that side of you seeps through sometimes today. And I view it as like a real positive, because it's like, maybe it's a more critical side of you or more like thoughtful. So I guess just like,

how can it be integrated is my question. Yeah, I mean, I think what I'm getting at more is, as somebody who is devoted to, trying to self-actualize on some level, I'm constantly daily, hourly reminded of these default sets that I have, which is to not be grateful, but to be resentful or to be irritated by other human beings.

Like, it's like petty shit, right? But no matter how much devotion I have to personal growth, like this is like, these are weeds that continue to grow up and probably will for the rest of my life, no matter what I do. But the only solution is to persistently like double down on these habits or these little practices that I know

keep those negative behaviors and emotions at bay and kind of present a better version of myself. I know keep those negative behaviors and emotions at bay and kind of present a better version of myself. And it's sort of an act as if thing, like you fake it until you make it kind of stuff. And that's a whole other sticky wicket, but that seems to work for me. But I guess my question is like,

do you ever get to a point where that practice becomes second nature and that default position is no longer the default? Like in your practice of working with lots of people over the years, have you seen that? Yeah, sometimes I do see it as sort of an entire way of being is replaced over time through habit change, but not always necessarily. Like you're saying to me that no matter how many podcast interviews you've done, how much you've exercised that way of being, it's still not your default. Is that what you're saying?

Correct. That's fascinating. But it's also similar to, listen, if I wanna be a good runner, I gotta go out and run and train. Like I'll never just wake up one day and be good at that thing unless I'm

consistently practicing it. I guess there's a philosophical question here, which no one can answer, which is at what point have you changed the habits of your personality structure so much that it has now become your new personality? Right. I mean, I'm interested. That's a broader subject of like personality, malleability overall. Yeah, and I've written a bit about the science of that. And there are limits, but we can quite profoundly change, but there are biological temperaments.

And I think this is what you're hinting at, that that may be your, you consider your default. People, I have friends, people who they say, I'm biological, I'm an introvert, but in terms of my actions in the world, I'm very extroverted, right? Because there are people I would assume they're extroverted, but they're explaining to me their inner experiences.

Biologically, I'm an introvert. And that might not be something that ever goes away, right? But when you're acting extroverted and you're doing those things, is it you or not you? I mean, that's the philosophical question there. And I would argue that it's still a part of you. It's still an authentic part of you. You're not faking it.

It's just that there are certain default biological temperaments that also exist, but those only influence the sort of probabilities that you will be in a certain mode of being. But it's not saying there's other modes of being aren't you. So this gets a little philosophical. Yeah. Yeah. I guess an extreme example of that or a thought experiment would be to take somebody who is on one far end of the political spectrum, like an AOC or a Bernie Sanders type individual. And that person saying, okay, I'm going to now behave as if I'm the person on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum and everything that comes out of my mouth and all the content that I consume

and all the interactions I'm going to have, I am going to mimic that person on the other end of the spectrum. If they do that long enough, do they ultimately become that person? Do they shift or will they rubber band back to being that person that they were prior? The scientist in me is saying, well, we have to being that person that they were prior.

I, as the scientists in me is saying, well, we have to do that experiment. Right. We have to do that experiment, but I do think there are ways we can change and grow profoundly. But I think at the end of the day, we have to still be in line with a certain core set of values or else it won't feel authentic.

I pondered this exact question. I wrote a couple articles for The Atlantic about this. Can you change your personality was one, but the other one was, I forget the title of the other one, but it was really much along that exact answering that question, looking at the research. And the research shows that you have people who, even if they're acting in a different way,

if it's not in line with their values, they still feel authentic. There still has to be a reason for why you're doing the personality change. And often the reasons for the personality change are still grounded in your biology. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Like for me, if I, let's say I set out a goal tomorrow, I wanna be a huge asshole. That's my goal. I want to completely change. I'm tired of people pleasing. I'm tired of having to smile all the time when I meet someone. It's exhausting.

I want to just become the biggest asshole. And so then I just like, I look up, who's the biggest asshole in the world? And I mimic them all the time. Will there ever be a point where that will become authentic? And probably not, probably not. There probably is, you know, you have to change for a reason, right?

And some of that does come back to who you actually biologically are to a certain degree. That's so interesting. It's a fascinating topic, isn't it? Now I do think I could use to be like 25% more asshole and like 25% less people pleaser. That I think to certain degrees. And if you're so exhausted by having to smile all the time,

then isn't your true self somebody who shouldn't be smiling all the time? Well, I mean, I was joking about that actually, love smiling, but I was just doing a thought experiment. Yeah, but you're right. You're absolutely right. Like what is, and it goes back to that question of like, is authenticity a real thing?

And what does that mean specifically? Yeah, I don't think there's a real self. I mean, people in the spiritual world, they can't touch with your real, you listen to meditation things. I disagree with some of the things people say in these meditation apps. Like, am I allowed to disagree with it?

Like, close your eyes, you are enough as it is. It's like, no, you're not. And they'll say things like, your real self is all you need. It's like, no, it's not. I don't know. I think we let people off the hook too easily sometimes in the spiritual space and we don't encourage growth.

But I do believe in growth as well. But I don't think there is that real self. I think there are just multitude of selves, right? And we are constantly shifting between them. We have evolutionary evolved selves, like the kind of self that becomes triggered in a mating context, right? And like that has an all evolutionary foundation

going way back. Is that not your true? You know, no, that's a part of you. But I think we have other sides of ourselves. I think we have probably higher, we do probably have higher selves. That probably is a coherent construct, not real self. You would have to believe in that

if you believe in Maslow, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is your whole thing. Yeah, but the idea that the higher self is your coherent construct, not real self. You would have to believe in that if you believe in Maslow, right? I mean, this is your whole thing. But the idea that the higher self is your real self, I don't agree with that. I think that there are lots of real parts of the organism. Right, but we all walk around with this delta between the person we actually are and the person we aspire to be.

Or, and maybe there's an additional delta in there between the person we are, the person we aspire to be. We aspire to be. Or, and maybe there's an additional Delta in there between the person we are, the person we think we are, which is usually puts a positive spin on who you actually are and the person we aspire to be, right? So the person we aspire to be, being that higher self that we're all consciously and unconsciously trying to work towards to reduce that Delta.

And then people who have really grandiose ambitions and think that they're capable, because there's something deeper there. It's not just who you want to be. So you think you're capable of becoming and you want to be. And it's interesting because, you know, would that be a great tragedy to think in your head that you are capable

that you could be this person and then find out near death bed, like, no, you of, that you could be this person and then find out in your deathbed, like, no, you just, that wasn't possible. It was never in the cards for you. That really wasn't you or possible to be you. And then does it feel like you've wasted so much of your life? You know, I mean, these are really deep,

profound questions that get at the heart of human existence and what it means to have a human existence. Yeah, but anyway. Well, that also works in the opposite direction, right? Like if you have some success, then your sense of personal possibility expands. Yeah, it does, it really does.

I mean, I'm into the growth mindset. I'm not like a fixed mindset guy. You're on long walks with Angela Duckworth. I mean, come on. Yeah, yeah. No, we're down with Carol Dweck's work. It makes sense. But it's constantly calibrating.

Carol Dweck, sorry, I misspoke there. Oh, no problem, no problem. No, but Angela talks a lot about growth mindset. So that was apt as well. But the constant calibration process is key. Constantly grounding yourself in the reality of who you are in your pursuit of who you want to become. Because I think we can get, especially if we get power and you see that, you see that power intoxicates people,

makes them start to think that they're capable of becoming all sorts of things that makes them have decisions that actually do the exact opposite. You know, it can be, it can fool you into thinking you could accomplish all sorts of things that you get into this kind of mania state. So I think, look, I think it's, it's tricky because we, we want to absolutely encourage people to dream and to have high ambitions, but we should also have them constantly calibrate who they are right now

and who they really truly are capable of becoming. Because in the long run, being in line with that reality will lead to a better outcome, won't it? If you're actually in line with who you could become. Yeah, yeah. Back to that point that you were making about self-help or outcome, won't it? If you're actually in line with who you could become. Yeah, yeah. Back to that point that you were making about self-help and meditation apps and your sort of reaction

to some of those statements. There is something interesting about the inherent tension between or the paradoxical kind of relationship between this idea that expansion, self-actualization, is actually a lot of work. Like, you know, you're not, you don't just get it, right? Like you have to actually work towards it. And it's something you have to apply consistently

over extremely long periods of time, versus this notion that we already have everything we need, right? And we just have to expand our conscious awareness and recognize it. And that is more of the ephemeral allowing kind of thing. Right, so how do those two things like coexist for you? Sounds like you're more on the former, less on the latter. Yeah, it's true.

And I talk about this in the book Transcend, in the book Transcend, Maslow's students at Brooklyn College, he said they had this notion of self-actualization that it was impulsivity. It was just acting on your whims, just doing what you want. It was easy, you know, if you just were in line with yourself. And he made it very, very clear that self-actualization requires commitment

and requires a lot of hard work because it's tough choosing the growth option day in and day out. You said, you told me you're, thank you for being vulnerable, by the way. You told me your own personal struggles with that, with your default versus the person you know you're capable of.

And you are capable of it, right? You're right now, this guy in front of me is this incredibly non-curmudgeon-y, thoughtful, kind human being, right? So it takes a lot, but it takes a lot of work. And were you asking though, my own personal life? Like, were you asking me personally how that plays out? No, less just, more just like theoretically,

like how you think about psychology in general. Yeah, theoretically, absolutely. I think there's a difference between spontaneous and impulsive. I think self-actualization is, there is a certain spontaneity there. There's a certain sort of playfulness and exploration and curiosity,

but that's different than kind of impulsive, not seeing the bigger picture or the long-term or working very, very hard at something that might not pay off for 10, 20 years. Self-actualization process in a lot of ways is being able to have that foresight and being able to work really hard towards that future vision.

Yeah, I think the impulsivity thing is a really important point. The way I think the impulsivity thing is a really important point. The way I think about that is someone who is saying, I am acting in alignment with my highest nature because my intuition is telling me X. But if they've short circuited the hard work, how can they trust their intuition or their instincts because they are disconnected?

And this plays out in the recovery context when people are new and they've stopped drinking or using, and suddenly they're just a live wire of emotions and they have no way of controlling it. Their instincts are unreliable. They're trying to solve their problems with the mind that got them there in the first place. And they're taught, were taught, I was taught

to abdicate making big decisions and making sure that you run them by other people because your instincts are unreliable. Like you have to do enough internal work before you can have a trusted relationship with whatever those impulses are telling you. And I think there's a lot of people out there who believe that they are on this path

towards self-actualization when instead, they're really just reacting to unconscious impulses that have been driving them all along. Does that make sense? Does that like feel right to you? Spot on, yeah, spot on. I'd love to double click on that moment of real sheer vulnerability where you stop doing the drug

or you stop drinking and you're raw, you're emotional, and it's craving this other side of you that you so consciously desperately don't wanna become that person. That, can we double click on that experience? What does that experience like? What is it? How does, what are the strategies

that people are taught in the program to be with those emotions and to overcome it and not give in, not give in? Because there's a huge payoff for not giving in. I mean, people who can resist it and go through that torture and come out on the other side, feel, report such an increased sense of meaning

in their life. There's a meaning making that can happen from that resistance. Sure, but unfortunately that payoff is long-term. Long-term. The immediate payoff of indulging the addiction is guaranteed. Yeah, oh, totally.

So it's very difficult, you know, to get people to wrap their heads around the long-term benefits of sobriety when they're just trying to get through the day. So it's all about what are you doing in this very moment and creating community and accountability around that individual and providing them with some pretty basic tools

to just help them get through those intense periods of craving so that they begin to understand that those feelings are not facts and that they will shift over time. And if you can weather that intense moment of craving, then it provides you with some confidence that you could do it again.

And you just start to stack those experiences. But relapse is a big part of recovery. And I think relapse is often looked at as failure, but sometimes it's just really good information about what your triggers are and what kind of interior emotional experiences lead you to indulge that behavior. Yeah, well, I mean, everything you're saying,

I agree with so much that I'm like, I have nothing to add to that. No, I think that's exactly right. Addiction is its own special topic, right? Within psychology, that's a whole different thing. And addiction is absolutely a big inhibitor of self-actualization. For the same reason that having a severe deprivation

of any of your needs is significantly inhibiting who you could become. Well, it's all consuming. I mean, you can't think about anything else. So there's no room for any kind of personal development when that is active. Yeah, whenever there's any, well, we can actually generalize

this to a role. May had this idea of the demonic. Always liked this concept, never understood why it didn't catch on more in the general public, but we can have like the demonic, but that's not what he's talking about. He's saying there's a side of ourself, whatever is within us, they can overtake the whole person. He calls it the demonic, D-A-I-M-O-N-I-C. And it's not necessarily bad. It could entirely take over and cause self-destruction and destruction of others, or it can be channeled in a way that can lead to creativity like you've never seen.

So many people take their pain, their suffering, and they take their demons and they use it as fuel for being able to think more longer term about how they're gonna just use it as fuel. Use it as fuel for the work they do, the field they do to help others who have been addicted, to help others who are in similar situations themselves. Whatever it is, they integrate in such a way

that the demonic becomes their creative fuel. Yeah, it's interesting. I question how sustainable that fuel source is because pain is akin to other base emotions that tend to be unhealthy in terms of being primary motivators. But I do like this subject of pain being a lever for growth. And I think when I was on your podcast,

I believe we talked about this, like change is always accessible for us. We always, in every moment, have the opportunity to make a better choice about something about us, right? But we generally don't do it. Pain can actually put us in that place to confront that thing we don't like about ourselves

and make the better choice. And I just know, I know for myself that pain has really been the true motivator in getting me to do anything different than I have historically. So how does that work in terms of this self-actualization process or cycle? Because it is very powerful when you can channel it

in a positive direction. And I'm very reluctant to intervene in someone's life who's having a painful experience, because I recognize that although it looks bad and as a compassionate human being, you wanna ameliorate that in somebody you care about, but also you don't wanna rob them of that experience because it might just be their greatest teacher.

It really might, yeah, yeah. So there's different ways of getting into that question. One is, well, as a therapist or as a coach and you're working with someone directly and you want to help them grow, who is experiencing that? I think that that's quite right is you want to, you don't want to tell them how to live their lives. It's very important to not give people exact steps that they need to follow to curb something, but to help them be with things and help them get more in touch with their values. Again, we go back to the ACT approach to therapy, which I really like. It's a constant reorienting towards these higher values.

And sometimes it's a matter of shift, of increasing that in your attentional field, like writing it out on a piece of paper, whatever, make it your freaking screensaver of your phone. Every time you open your phone, it's like, oh, that's what I'm doing in my life. Because we can so easily forget there are so many inner forces within us.

I mean, this happens to me all the time. I'm human too. I'll get down, I'll be on Twitter and I'll find myself down some rabbit hole fighting with some anonymous person with no name and no picture about the most minute thing. And I'm like, wait, Scott, wait a minute. That's not what I'm on earth to do. And then I recalibrate. And sometimes when I get in those moments, I will say it energizes me to go back to my mission in a way even before I've, you know, it's like, oh, because I know what it feels like

when I'm working on my mission, when I'm working on the things that are of value, I can differentiate the different feelings. So also it's helping people. If like, if you're in a kind of a healing helper role with someone who is suffering or going through this, it's also getting them in different states and having them explore and have the self-awareness

and understanding of how these different states feel. What kind of states do you wanna be in? What, who do you want to become? A lot of that is really non-judgmental and non-advice giving, but helping explore the full depths of human experience with that person and being there with them, supporting them in their journey of that.

Yeah, I mean, just from my own non-clinical kind of modality of dealing with that, I just try to be present and loving and express to them, like, I'm here for you. And I believe in you. Like, that's it. Like, I'm not gonna solve your problem. I understand that you're in a painful moment

and that that's difficult. And I can empathize with that. Do you know why I'm laughing? Ultimately, yeah, why? Cause my butt hurts right now. Oh really, in the chair again? I feel like you're there. You're the only guest that's had a problem with the chair.

You're with me on this journey. Am I the first guest? Do you need to adjust it? Because the thing is, I'm sure it's like objectively a really like profoundly comfortable chair that everyone loves. This is why I'm weird. I'm so weird.

It's not ergonomically fit to you. Do we have one of the- No, no, that'd be ridiculous. We have the stool. Do we have one of those stools? Or do we have, I. We have the stool. Do we have one of those stools? Or do we have, I mean, we have a couple more of these chairs. I was laughing because I was like cheekily thinking

as you're telling me about being one with someone with their pain that I was like thinking. Your butt's hurting? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's okay, I'm just being a little cheat. I'm just injecting a little humor into our conversation. No, it's good. Yeah, try this.

That one goes up, that might be better. Are we really changing the chair? Yeah, I want you to be comfortable. Okay, okay. And it goes up and down. Is that better or is it worse? Let's try it, let's try it, let's try it. You're not sold.

Let's try it. Don't they just have normal chairs? What's wrong with these people? I'm debating whether or not this was healthy authenticity on my part though. I try it. Don't they just have normal chairs? What's wrong with these people? I'm debating whether or not this was healthy authenticity on my part though. I appreciate it. Okay, good. I took a risk.

No, this is good. Like let's dissect this. I would much rather you say like, I got a problem with this chair, then like sit there like clenched jawed, you know, feeling like you can't tell me what's going on. Thank you. So this is a healthy.

Thank you. Good, good, good, good. What we talking about? Oh, we were talking about being- We were literally talking about being with someone who's in pain. Yeah. And how do you interact with them?

How do you help them and guide them in their journey? And that's the point is you just guide people in their journey and they have to figure out for themselves what they, how they can, resiliency is something that you can only like build that muscle within yourself. Like you can't like force someone to build those muscles. I wanna shift gears a little bit. You mentioned getting into Twitter spats.

Can we talk, spend a few minutes talking about the psychology of the quote unquote culture war right now that is transpiring on social media at least and spilling out into the world with real life consequences. It does feel, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I find myself fascinated and captivated by the sort of ecosystem of secular gurus online right now. And how that plays into the root causes

of what is currently dividing us, how we can heal as a nation and trying to understand it better. And I'm concerned about the incentives that are at play online and this appeal of heterodox thinking and thinkers that appear to dominate certain issues and which a lot of people find very powerless to resist.

So whether it's politics or health, nutrition, vaccines, there seems to be this allure like a tractor beam to this manner of issue dissection that lures for better or worse, many people into thought bubbles that become calcified. And I'm not necessarily interested in parsing the validity of various ideas, but I'm more interested in the kind of psychological drivers behind all of this

and the binary nature of all of it, because it seems to be breeding a level of acrimony that is extremely unhealthy. And even yourself who's so studied in all of this, find yourself getting into spats with people online. And I know because I follow you on Twitter and I see the engagements that you have. And I know because I follow you on Twitter and I see the engagements that you have. And I know that you're very aware of kind of the dynamics that are playing out right now.

I am very aware. And what's crazy is I'm getting in spats with my friends, like people that, my colleagues, people I've long known and published with, they've gotten a really big presence and I'll disagree with something. And then now it all of a sudden becomes a war. It's like, what? Like, why is disagreement a war all of a sudden? And a big part of it is in-group disagreeing. If you just disagree a little bit or critique something from your in-group, you somehow appear,

you come across as disloyal to your in-group, which I don't view it that way at all. It's like, oh, we're just having a conversation. I mean, do you think you're perfect? Like, I don't think I'm perfect. Like, feel free to like criticize something I do, but there's such an us versus them mentality that is driving this.

Psychologically, of course, tribalism is nothing new, right? In the human species, it's deeply ingrained us versus them mentality that is driving this. Psychologically, of course, you know, tribalism is nothing new, right? It's not in the human species, it's deeply ingrained and you can explain it evolutionarily. When you go all the way back, you know, in small bands, we had to have a very tribal mindset to survive, right? But that tribal, that same tribal mindset to survive is it's not necessary to tear,

what's the word that's used a lot now? Destroyed, Ben Shapiro destroys the libs. Destroyed. Everyone's trying to destroy each other, but we're not trying to learn from each other. To tie it back to Maslow, I feel like identification with certain groups online has almost superseded the importance of our connection

to groups in the analog world, right? So the messaging that occurs on places like Twitter is all about placement or kind of where you sit with respect to your identification with a certain group, which makes the whole thing very treacherous, right? And I think drives that binary nature of it. Like, are you a member of this group or are you not? And before you say that,

you better think about how this might reflect upon whether you're a member in good standing of community X. That's right. The system is so, the incentive structure, everything is so guided towards taking a side and being transparently in a particular identity or a particular ideology

that people like me and there are others out there, I don't think I'm the only one, but we're trying so hard to be integrative and nuanced. And there's no word structure for that right now. Well, first of all, you need like a 20 tweet thread to even begin to broach any kind of nuanced take on anything. And the incentive structures are such that it doesn't reward that, it rewards the hot take,

the tweet that's gonna travel, the, you know, outrageous perspective and the clickbait title. And it's all being driven by audience capture, which further, you know, calcifies these respective camps and drives us apart. And psychologically, like this is not good for us. It's not good for humanity. And it's causing some pretty severe real world problems.

And there are good actors, but there's a lot of bad actors out there right now. Smart people that I think are behaving incredibly irresponsibly. I agree. Absolutely agree. The big one right now that makes my head explode is the woke anti-woke cultural war.

I didn't know if you wanted to be a name or something in particular. Like wokeism caused Putin to invade Ukraine. I mean, it's insane. Yeah, yeah. And, but then like, you know, there's this whole anti-woke crowd that, and the thing is, they make some legitimate criticisms,

but legitimate criticisms, it shouldn't be like, I think there's a healthy, again, I'm gonna just be on brand here, cause I'm talking about healthy versus unhealthy motivations. I wish there was more healthy criticism in a way that caused groups to talk to each other, right? Like, I think there's a lot of, on the so-called woke side, there's a lot of people who feel in their lives, they are experiencing a lot of racial discrimination, right? Like, see it from their perspective, like their own personal life, they are experiencing day in and day out a lot of discrimination that is really dehumanizing and inhibiting their own

self-actualization. You have people on the other side, they're like, why are those people always complaining about race? I don't see race at all. I'm race blind. Why can't they just shut up about race all the time? Why does everything have to be about race? Okay. Look, maybe there's some valid critique on this side that like, okay, we shouldn't view everything through the lens of race, but there should also be a compassion and an extending of graciousness to at least acknowledge that yes, while your whole personal life doesn't survive around race, that race doesn't play a big issue in your own life. There are people in their lives for which race does, their race does play a role in how people treat them in their own daily lives. So I would like to see more an extending of graciousness

on both sides. Does that make sense? Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, compassion. Compassion. Empathy, like basic. In a way that like allows them to talk, because right now there are people

that are just not talking to each other whatsoever, right? And there are like some valid critiques on all sides. I mean, it seems mind boggling to think, could we ever get people together to actually just listen to each other on both of these sides of the cultural world? I should be like, hmm, like, okay, well, fair enough, but I'm just gonna give you this little critique here. And then for the other person to be like, you're right, maybe I have been a little too race obsessed because I haven't thought about your point.

The other person says, huh, you know what? Actually, I can see how, because I'm white, I actually don't have any of these issues that you actually legitimately probably do have. That's a fair point. But the thing is, there's not just a mature. I'm not very sanguine that that can transpire. Well, that's just be a mature way of talking.

I know, it seems super basic, but the way you describe it feels like it's a South Park episode. Yeah, I know. Something that would never happen. It'd be a parody. Right? I think behind it, is this growing distrust of institutions

and there's good reasons for that, right? Like there's a breakdown in our trust in government, in politics and the way that the media communicates with us and we can have arguments about the validity or lack thereof of all of that. But I think that's a real thing. And I think behind the scenes, that's a real driver of like, quote unquote,

heterodoxy, right? Which has become this big thing of having a contrary take on everything. And packed into that is this idea that I think is misplaced, which is that the heterodox take is always the right one. And it's this purview of the free thinking rebel

who's wailing against censorship, versus those who side with the more conventional take that's supported by the quote unquote experts who are then maligned as sheeple who are being duped by the previously mentioned corrupt institutions that are hell bent on controlling your mind. I completely agree. I like to think I'm just a free thinker.

I'm not a free thinking rebel. The second you put in rebel, then that puts too much pressure on yourself. Now that means every single thing, like you free think something, but what if it's not rebellious? What if you're like- The only take that travels online is the heterodox take.

Correct. And with that, there's this belief that the heterodox take is always correct. The true one. In fact, sometimes it is, but most of the time it's not. Sometimes it's not. Because there's all these people behind the scenes who are working really hard on these problems, who are not going on podcasts and are not on Twitter,

who actually study subject X for a living and have a pretty good take on it. And chances are they're probably more trustworthy than pontificator Y over here, who's got a big following on Twitter, but is just basically a bloviating mouthpiece. Yeah, sometimes the truth is boring, right? And like, if you're a true free thinker,

if you're like a true free, you sign me up and you're all in to be a free thinker, you have to say boring things sometimes. Like if you're a real truth seeker as well, that's not just a free thinker, but truth seeker, you'll be balanced. You'll say like, okay, well, that's true on that side. That's true too.

You're looking for the truth. You're not looking for the fight. Your ego is not tied up in a particular position. Which puts me in a tough position sometimes, Rich Roll, because sometimes I say something that doesn't please anyone. No side gets what they wanna hear from what I said. And so it's like, fuck you Scott. It's like, well, it's like, well, no,

are we all in this for the truth? Or are we all in this to fight? Are you in this? And I think that reveals biases sometimes. Yeah, well, it reveals who's a good faith actor and who's acting in bad faith. But from a psychological perspective and trying to understand this,

I feel like there is a characterological distinction between certain camps. Like on the one hand, you have people who are very concerned about freedom and liberty and the kind of more libertarian perspective. And that's really like a prime driver and focus for those people. And on the other hand, you have people who are thinking

about collective responsibility and empathy. And I think these are individuals who just have very different dispositions and worldviews and probably are good people in their own rights or whatever in terms of like how they're just wired differently. And so that's informing a different kind of siloed perspective. There's a common humanity there

that I'd like to just call out for a second. So it's usually the case, like you care about the vulnerable because the collective one you mentioned, I would say a lot of that is about caring for the vulnerable, caring for those who are marginalized in some way. You often find you care more about those issues when you yourself have been marginalized. I will say those who seem to be the other side, the second that they, like let's say they get canceled and they become marginalized, suddenly they care about marginalization.

So I would say there's a real common humanity here to the extent to which if an issue is not affecting you personally, you tend to not be as concerned with that issue. When I would want to make the case for living in a civilized, I would argue a civilized society is one where you care about real issues that are happening to other people, even if it's not happening to you personally. Because I would say that even people on the right, they get quite angry and they feel like victims. They can be prone to victimization just as much as the people on the left when they feel that they've been victimized. And then suddenly they do care about the vulnerable, the vulnerable, those who have experienced

something that they have had. The definition, the specifics of the vulnerability differ. Whereas on the left, it may be racism, it may be other things. On the right, it may be those who have been canceled and they're fighting for their fellow people who've been canceled. But still fundamentally,

there's a basic human thing on both sides there, which is you're fighting for someone who's been wronged or someone who's been vulnerable in some way. Once you look beneath the surface there. Right, and you being this bridge between the two trying to broker a peace. Like I just, I sort of see you doing that and I don't know how well that's going.

I try and so hard brother, I'm trying. What is the, how do you see it? Cause you actually know a lot of these people too. I do. Yeah. I'm in a weird position where I feel like I am really good friends with people who wouldn't talk to them,

who they themselves wouldn't talk to each other, but they're friends with me. You're a safe harbor for- I'm like a safe space for the right and the left in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, it's, one of my goals actually is to get people talking to each other who wouldn't ordinarily talk to each

other because they have a common friend in someone else. I think we need more of that. We need more of that, but it's tough. It is really tough. There's constant pressures every day to take a side, constant pressures to take a side in a way that you alienate the other side. The thing is, I'll take a stand. I'm not like, I'm not a pushover, sir. I'm not trying to make the case that I'm not a pushover. And I think there's a difference between that. I will state what I really believe to be true

and I will do so passionately. But often what I believe to be true has nuance and that's not what gets rewarded today. I will be passionate in saying like, no, I don't think that's correct. But the things that I'm pointing out that have the nuance are not the things that are not the kinds of stances of what I believe to be true.

They get incentivized very strongly like amongst, you know, there are people out there though, that like nuance and care about that sort of thing. No, there are. And we were talking about this before the podcast. I feel like there's a new ecosystem that's slowly percolating up that is, you know, trying to make sense of all of this stuff

and, you know, guide well-intentioned people in a better way. But it's a difficult problem and I just see it metastasizing and it just gets hijacked by whatever the issue is of the day and everybody kind of falls in line. And here we are, and this is what we're fighting and yelling about today.

Yeah, I've decided that a much better route for me is to kind of stay in my lane to a certain degree, because the more that I can help people self-actualize and teach these principles of self-action transcendence that are apolitical, that are a, I'm not convinced that getting into the political muck is really in line with my highest self.

No, I don't think it is. Yeah, you agree, you agree. Yeah. And I think about that more and more. And you don't have to have a take. That's right. You don't need to have a take. That's right. You don't need to take on everything. I look at it and I'm like, do I need to weigh in on this?

Right, right, right. No, you know, the world will continue to spin. I don't have to participate. That's right. And it's just pain when you do anyway. I feel like, I feel a bit cheekiness, but I also feel real in a lot of my values and delight when I get Instagram, like private messages from people saying,

oh, your book really touched me. It helped me in life. And then I look at their profiles like Trump supporter, right? I'm like, no, that actually makes me feel good that like I can get people who are so disparate who would hate each other, but I can still reach them in a way that helps them be a better person

in a way that helps them be a better, you know, live a life of meaning, that makes me feel really good. That's what really makes me feel most authentic and alive than getting stuck in this muck. Yeah, that's something that I wrestle with because like yourself, I wanna cast a wide net. I'm here to be of service and help as many people as I'm capable of helping irrespective

of your political affiliation, God forbid. And how does that measure up to, the idea that if you have a platform, you have a responsibility to kind of speak your truth. And that truth might be divisive and alienate certain people who would otherwise be happy to listen to you or, you know, talk about things that are quote unquote more in your lane. Well, this is another big source of the issue

is that we now treat experts as experts in everything. You know, like you get like, you get Jordan Pearson on, by the way, you know, Jordan's a friend colleague, but so no shade, but you get him on Rogan and Rogan's asking him about like climate change. Well, they're talking about climate change. That's the galaxy brain. Like I've been celebrated in this one field. So suddenly I'm a genius about every subject. Why would that mean you know everything?

And I don't feel like things used to be that way. I think something has changed. Like I remember the days when I would be on podcasts and they'd ask me about what I damn know about. Now people, you know, it's like everything. Suddenly, if you're an expert in something, then they're like, oh, well, what are your thoughts on race relations? It's like, do I need to be an expert on race relations? I didn't study that. Yeah. I think there is some relationship between that and our dissolving confidence in institutions,

right? Like the idea that, well, the people, you know, who are quote unquote qualified to speak to that have been proven unreliable or liars or whatever. So now we have to look to these people that we deem to be intelligent and we grace them with much more leeway and bandwidth than they're deserving of. And that cycle, it creates in their minds,

the idea that then therefore they are experts. Sure, yeah, it builds upon itself. That's the cycle I'm seeing. And then the power, narcissism, and all of that starts to accelerate. And that's really, I think, what you're seeing in this secular guru space right now. Because a lot of these secular gurus, as you put it,

will start to think, oh, maybe I am an expert on COVID vaccines. No, you're still not an expert on COVID vaccines just because your followers tell you you are. Like there's something it means to be an expert on that and you're not it. Right, right.

The psychology professor who is now an expert on nutrition. Right, right. I mean, it's crazy, man. I'm not at my best when I go so out of my lane, I'm really not at my best because, and there's a reason for that. It's because I've put my heart and soul and studied something that I know pretty well.

And the other things I don't know as well, like it's not rocket science why I'm not at my best when I go outside my lane. But you understand human behavior and human motivation. That casts a white net. Which makes it understandable why you are on Twitter so much. I'm trying to understand what is going on.

Good luck with that. What is happening? This massive human experiment that's being conducted right now. What is going on? Where all these brains are colliding with each other in ways productive and not so much. I mean, I can say the most innocuous,

seemingly innocuous statement to try to bring love and joy and peace. And all people respond, stop virtue signaling simp. I mean, it happened the other day and I was like, what is, like, I wanna understand this. I'm not actually hurt by that. I'm more curious. Like, I want to understand the psychology of someone who reads a tweet of something that's like, let's just have more like, let's peace, love, you know,

be like, stop virtue signaling simp. Like what causes it? What is it within you that causes you to like interpret through that lens? It's just, it's fat. Isn't it fascinating? Well, you're the psychologist. Yeah. Well, it's a deprivation motivation for sure. But it's, you know, it's one that's becoming increasingly common on social media where we're now being so cynical that, that anyone's attempt to improve the world is some cynical political power move. And that's what worries me because I see a lot of genuine attempts. I mean, I still see the good in people. I'm sorry, like, I don't know why at the fight,

I have to fight to tell people they're still good in humans. And that seems like a fight that I should never have to have. It's very strange. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. Well, we can't end this podcast on that note, right?

Like let's get back to- Well, I did say there's good in humans. That's a good thing. I did say that. Listen, humans, I believe in the goodness of humans too, but there is something about this specific dynamic that brings the worst out. Cynicism. Cynicism that none of us have that goodness.

All right, well, let's switch back to a little bit of transcendence and self-actualization. Better to end on transcendence. I always try to end these things by putting myself in the seat of the listener or the viewer or the person who is perhaps struggling with meeting some of the baser needs along the hierarchy.

Like I'm just trying to be a little bit better. I'm living an average life. I work a normal job. I don't have that much free time or that much expendable income. How can I begin the process of just trying to ascend this hierarchy a little bit and build a little bit more meaning and purpose

into my life? I mean, you referenced earlier in the podcast, some simple things that can be done to kind of initiate this process, but let's kind of continue on that thought. Yeah, I mean, I have in the book, a bunch of exercise to help get you more in the B realm of human existence.

I think that a big part of it is becoming aware of when you are becoming deficiency motivated and really becoming self-aware of that and seeing how it really feels in your body and realigning yourself with, constantly choosing the growth option, constantly aligning yourself with your values, but also seeking out beauty more in your life,

seeking out people that are beautiful. And I'm not just talking physical beauty. There are people who are beautiful. And I'm not just talking physical beauty. There are people who are beautiful. Surround yourself with those people. There's so much muck and ugliness on Twitter. There's so much, they can start to make you think as though that's all there is to the world. So I think a lot of it is really your attention.

Where do you put your attention? Where you put your attention is where you put your life. And I think that so much derives from that knowledge of that fact. Some of the greatest lessons I learned from these mindfulness gurus, like people, friends I have who are expert meditators is that you can have the pain, you can have this thing that annoys you. And if you're focused on it or annoy you and it keeps annoying you so much, and have this thing that annoys you, you know, and if you're focused on it or annoy you,

it keeps annoying you so much. But if your attention is just focused on the good and the beauty in the world, you know, you start to just like forget these other things exist to a certain extent. Now it's also true that if you have pain, the more you focus just on the pain, the more it subsides as well.

So this stuff is nuanced, but I will say that, you know, I just want us to not forget that there is a higher nature to humans. And this is where Maslow really wanted to go with all. I read his unpublished essay. Right, his work was not done, right? And a big part of the book is you extrapolating on where he was heading and trying to, you know, reinterpret and reimagine where that might land. Yeah, and a big part of it was that there is an innate, intrinsic, higher nature to humans

that is just as real as our lower nature, but it takes more work to transcend all of the forces, internal and external that are really keeping us away from being able to see it. But there are things we can do. There really are. And I think it really is about simple choices that you start to make.

And there's a momentum that takes place over time when you begin to practice those things with some regularity. I'll tell you one thing, when a surprising intervention in clinical psychology for someone who is feeling depressed, someone who is feeling, they're saying, I always have these obsessive ruminations over and over again. Help me. Here's the hack for that. Stop thinking about yourself so much.

Come on, easier said than done. Well, but one of the interventions that has been scientifically studied is something called moral elevation. So this is a concept that my colleague, Jonathan Haidt, studied, moral elevation. So research shows that a better way to help people with these kinds of issues than to keep obsessively talking about these issues

and to talk about their feelings and how they always feel negative emotions is to get them in touch with role models, with examples of moral humans that are doing incredibly inspiring things that can elevate your whole emotional system. So there really is something to helping people get more into transcendent states of being,

getting you outside of yourselves and to not be so neurotic because neurotic is a form of narcissism. You know, you're so self-focused and some of the best ways of overcoming this is just shifting your attention outside of yourself. Yeah, in 12 step, the sort of simple tool for getting out of your self obsession

is to immediately go help somebody else who needs help. There you go. Like pick up the phone and just call somebody. They had it all right to me. We don't even need psychology. It's divinely inspired. It's an incredibly profound text and rule book for living that feels so ahead

of its time in certain ways. So true, when I'm around someone who's a morally elevating individual, I just like forget about a lot of my problems. You know, I just like, I'm just like, how do I want, how do I be more of that guy or girl or woman, whatever your gender is? How can I be more of that?

Yeah, but another person who's perhaps struggling a little bit more might look at that person and just be resentful and angry. And that happens to me sometimes. I mean, like I said, I get these comments. You never would expect such a comment, right? Like you write something positive, inspirational and then go like, fuck off, you idiot.

Well, because being earnest is somehow a threat. Yeah, I haven't really somehow a threat. Yeah. I haven't really fully figured that one out. Like what is it that is a threat? What is it the threat to people when you're being positive or when you're trying to- You're a weak beta. It's a sort of a beta thing.

So strength is this sort of notion of masculinity as not showing empathy or not showing emotion. How can we make compassion cool? Like I almost wanna say again, but I don't think it's ever been really cool. But how can we make compassion just as cool as like standing up and owning someone? I'm trying to do that.

I think the way that you do it is you model it in an aspirational way. And you find a way to channel it through a certain type of masculinity that's attractive to that wayward young man who's looking for a mentor or some kind of guidance. But you do it without the toxic aspects of what it means to be masculine, right? So that's why I think athletes hold a special place

in the public discourse, because for a certain type of young man, like that type of physical prowess means something. It's demonstrative in an active way. And I think it's incumbent upon athletes to understand that and take responsibility for that in a way that can be positively impactful for younger people who are looking up to them.

It's an opportunity to model masculinity in a way that provides space for compassion and empathy. And I do it through, in a way that provides space for compassion and empathy. And I do it through, veganism is a good way of doing it. Like if I can be fit and physically active, but also be like a voice for the animals, which is considered to be kind of a beta thing, right? But recast it in an aspirate. I mean, do we have three hours to talk about that?

I mean, I wrote an article. The role of masculinity in food choice is like a whole strange psychological sticky wicket. So like paleo is like manly. Yeah. Yeah, because you're eating. It appeals to a certain type of person who's looking for an identity.

Like the role of identity in the nutrition world is like a super interesting thing. So- Yeah, and I know that that is a topic for another day, but I wrote an article called myth of the alpha male, because I think that young men who are trying to figure out how to have more women in their life, they need to look more along the lines

of what the science says about what women actually want, not what men think women want. Imagine that. Because men have it wrong. Let's start there. Men actually have it wrong. A real man to a woman, it tends to be a little bit different than what a real man is

when it comes to male to male competition. Right, like what a man would think a real man would be to a woman versus what a woman is actually looking for. And what a woman really considers a real man. Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like those normative definitions are in flux right now, you know, in a positive way.

In a largely positive way. I don't know. What do I know? Not much, Scott. Not as much as you. That's definitely not true. Depends on the topic. Depends on the topic.

Cool, man. Well, I think we did it. How do you feel? I feel, my butt feels good. You feel good? You like that chair better? I like this chair much better. Yeah, yeah.

No, I feel very good. Do we cover all the stuff? We covered a lot of good ground, but like, let's keep up the conversation. Yeah, I'd like to have you back. Yeah, we can pull on some more threads. We're at similar spaces and I really like your way of being a lot.

Thank you. A lot. Appreciate that, likewise. If people want to learn more about you, of course, please pick up Scott's latest book, "'Transcend the New Science of Self-Actualization, which you can find on his website, which I'll link up in the show notes or on Amazon or wherever you buy books.

Also, tell me a little bit about this new, I mean, you've moved from the East Coast, you're no longer captured by the Ivy League institutions. You're free on the left coast here to fly your freak flag. And you've got this, like you opened up this institute, right? Yeah. I started the Center for the Science of Human Potential. And we do courses, like we're doing an eight-week transcend course to help people. We're working on all sorts of collaborations and working on collaboration with Second City Improv to do like improv for self-actualization. I'm working on a self-actualization

coaching certification program that can be used in different sectors of society, including education. I'd love for teachers to start to rethink their role in the classroom or self-actualization coaches. Yeah, I really feel like I'm living my values, the things I wanna do to help people

realize their potential. And I get to do a lot of edibles on the beach. So that's good. Am I allowed to say that? Good for you. Hey, listen, I would if I could, I'll just leave it at that. Awesome, well, let's do this again sometime soon.

You can learn more about Scott at his, your website, scottbarrykauffman, here I have the hyperlink here. Yeah, it's scottbarrykauffman.com. But I have a book coming out this year called Choose Growth that I think it'll help a lot of people. It'll be, it's the workbook companion to Transcend.

Transcend was published during the start of a global pandemic. I would not wish that on anyone publishing a book. This one with a little more forethought planning, we actually have a book that can help people grow from the pandemic itself. So what I did is I used the situation and I made lemon out of lemonades, right? I published a book that like, of course, no one read because it came out the day the pandemic started. And I used it as a way of like, you know what, I'm going to work next couple of years on a book that I'm going to get ahead of this. I'm

going to get ahead of this and really help people specifically who had some sort of setback during the pandemic, you know, as I did with this, you know, with lots of things we, and we all had. So I think we can really grow. So yeah, it's called Choose Growth. Cool, man. When's that coming out? That's coming out September of this year. I co-wrote it with Jordan Feingold, who's the founder of a field called Positive Medicine.

And she was also a former undergraduate student of mine at Penn. She came into my office as an undergrad telling me that she wants to go to med school and what was positive psychology. And I was like, you should start a field of positive medicine. And she's like, really? I was like, yeah, here we are almost 10 years later,

she has her MD and she is the leader of the field of positive medicine. Couldn't be more proud of her. So we teamed up on this book to really figure out how we can help people, not just body, not just mind, but body as well. Yeah, cool, man. Well, when that comes out, come back

and we can talk about that. Thank you. All right, man. Peace. Peace. Peace. 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

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Namaste. My butt hurts. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!