Speaker 1: I wasn't worried about things I shouldn't be worried about.
Speaker 1: I was thinking very hard about important things. And then
Speaker 1: I realized, like, oh, maybe that's why anxiety is anxiety. Like,
Speaker 1: if you felt like you were worrying about something that
Speaker 1: you shouldn't worry about, it would be much easier to
Speaker 1: stop doing it, when instead it feels like you are
Speaker 1: spending your time wisely considering all the things that might
Speaker 1: be wrong or go wrong. That's why it's difficult to escape.
Speaker 2: Wow, welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great
Speaker 2: tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 2: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 2: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 2: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just a out thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, How they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Do you ever feel like your brain is running some
Speaker 3: kind of cruel experiment on you. Today's guest psychologist, Adam
Speaker 3: Mastriani calls it having a skull full of poison. And
Speaker 3: let's be honest, we've all been there, the thoughts that
Speaker 3: won't quit, the anxiety that doesn't seem like anxiety. Because
Speaker 3: this time it's really important, the endless loop of trying
Speaker 3: to think your way out of a problem caused by
Speaker 3: thinking too much in the first place. In this episode,
Speaker 3: we talk about why our minds trick us, how mental
Speaker 3: health is like a broken control system, and why real
Speaker 3: change isn't about epiphanies, it's about action. I'm Eric Zimmer
Speaker 3: and this is the one you feed Hi, Adam, Welcome
Speaker 3: to the show.
Speaker 1: Than for having me.
Speaker 3: I'm really excited to have you on your newsletter or
Speaker 3: your sub stack is called Experimental History, and it's one
Speaker 3: of my favorite ones out there, and it's really a
Speaker 3: lot about science and psychology. And we're going to dive
Speaker 3: into a lot of those things here in a minute.
Speaker 3: But let's start like we always do, with the parable.
Speaker 3: In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their
Speaker 3: grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves
Speaker 3: inside of us that are always at battle. One is
Speaker 3: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 3: and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents
Speaker 3: things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild
Speaker 3: stops think about it for a second. They look up
Speaker 3: at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins?
Speaker 3: And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 3: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 3: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 3: that you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's meant a lot of different things at different points,
Speaker 1: and I think what it is meant most recently is
Speaker 1: how do you tell the wolf a part that like?
Speaker 1: It seems like it should be easy, right, one's the
Speaker 1: good one, one's the bad one. But it is easy
Speaker 1: to find yourself inside value systems and to create one
Speaker 1: for yourself where you get rewarded for doing things that
Speaker 1: aren't good. And I feel like this this has been
Speaker 1: the story of the past few years of my life
Speaker 1: of realizing that, like for me, academia was one of
Speaker 1: those value systems that I was getting rewarded for doing
Speaker 1: things that I didn't actually think were good, and I
Speaker 1: could see that, like, oh, everyone was cheering when I
Speaker 1: feed the bad wolf, and so maybe the bad wolf
Speaker 1: is actually the good wolf. And it took a long
Speaker 1: time to be like, no, the bad one's actually the
Speaker 1: bad one, and I need to go somewhere where I
Speaker 1: get rewarded for feeding the good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the other thing to continue your point
Speaker 3: about knowing which one is, you know, a lot of
Speaker 3: listeners are hearing this and they're thinking about their internal world,
Speaker 3: and as your work points out, it's really confusing in there,
Speaker 3: and the so called experts sort of maybe know what
Speaker 3: they're talking about some of the time, and our own
Speaker 3: int tuitions sort of maybe sometimes know. It's just very
Speaker 3: tricky to know how to respond, I think, to difficult
Speaker 3: internal circumstances. And I want to start by going to
Speaker 3: a post that you talked about where you talked about
Speaker 3: having a skull full of poison. So set up for
Speaker 3: us kind of what got you there, and maybe also
Speaker 3: set up, just very briefly, an intro the type of
Speaker 3: psychologists that you are. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm trained as an experimental social psychologist, which means
Speaker 1: I'm not the kind that you go to for therapy.
Speaker 1: If I help people, it's only through a few steps,
Speaker 1: and I'm not licensed to talk to someone one on
Speaker 1: one unless it's on a podcast. So the skull full
Speaker 1: of poison story is that in the high point of
Speaker 1: the pandemic, just started to feel really bad. And at
Speaker 1: the time, I was a resident advisor, a graduate student
Speaker 1: living in a dorm, and I had been in the
Speaker 1: discourse about mental health for a long time, and it
Speaker 1: didn't feel like that to me, Like that felt like
Speaker 1: a very euphemistic way of talking about the way I felt.
Speaker 1: Was it just like undifferentiated bad for no reason all
Speaker 1: the time. The whole post is about like all the
Speaker 1: things that are really weird about feeling bad, Like things
Speaker 1: will seem extremely important that aren't important, things will happen
Speaker 1: for no reason. It was about like navigating that, which
Speaker 1: I'm happy to report that I feel like I'm out
Speaker 1: of now. But I feel like it was this whole
Speaker 1: story that it's not the way I thought it would
Speaker 1: have unfolded.
Speaker 3: Right, So to sort of say that differently, you had
Speaker 3: some degree of professional training as well as you know,
Speaker 3: talking to a lot of people about mental health, and
Speaker 3: you were a little bit shocked by how this thing
Speaker 3: happened and how its experience was different than what you
Speaker 3: thought it might be like when you observed it from
Speaker 3: the outset.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: And so looking back, I want to get more into
Speaker 3: some of the weird things. But looking back, do you
Speaker 3: have any sense would you be able to and I
Speaker 3: know you're not a clinical psychologist, but would you be
Speaker 3: able to give it a diagnosis at this point with
Speaker 3: the hindsight of time and knowing what you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the more surprising and weird things that
Speaker 1: happened was when I ended up working with a psychotherapist,
Speaker 1: which is sort of its own story. At one point
Speaker 1: she was like, Oh, this sounds like anxiety, and it
Speaker 1: had never felt to me like anxiety that I always
Speaker 1: thought anxiety was people being like worried about things that
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be worried about. But I wasn't worried about
Speaker 1: things I shouldn't be worried about. I was thinking very
Speaker 1: hard about important things. And then I realized, like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe that's why anxiety is anxiety. Like if you felt
Speaker 1: like you were worrying about something that you shouldn't worry about,
Speaker 1: it would be much easier to stop doing it, when
Speaker 1: instead it feels like you are spending your time wisely
Speaker 1: considering all the things that might be wrong or go wrong.
Speaker 1: That's why it's difficult to escape.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you say something that I think is really profound.
Speaker 3: You say, I wonder if this is the secret behind
Speaker 3: a lot of skull poisons. You secretly think you're not
Speaker 3: sick at all, and you believe that what you're thinking
Speaker 3: about is actually extremely important. And I think that's really
Speaker 3: very insightful to what happens to a lot of us,
Speaker 3: because I've always said that one of the biggest problems
Speaker 3: with mental illness or skulls full of poison or addiction,
Speaker 3: like my background, or depression or whatever it is, is
Speaker 3: the thing that is trying to figure it out is
Speaker 3: the thing that's i'll just use the word broken for now.
Speaker 3: I don't like that word in general, but it's easy
Speaker 3: to be used. The thing that's trying to solve the
Speaker 3: problem is the very thing that is malfunctioning. Cakes. It
Speaker 3: extremely difficult from your own side of things to sort
Speaker 3: it out because the thought seem really, really true and real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so to overcome them, to deal with them,
Speaker 1: you're going to eventually have to do something that feels crazy,
Speaker 1: the idea of I don't need to think about this.
Speaker 1: It feels stupid. It feels like, no, this is the
Speaker 1: most important thing to think about in the world. And
Speaker 1: even if part of you knows that, like, no, it's
Speaker 1: actually it's the thinking about it over and over again
Speaker 1: that's making me feel really bad. Those thoughts go like, no, no,
Speaker 1: we really need to get to the bottom of well,
Speaker 1: why are we thinking about it over and over again?
Speaker 1: Let's think about that, right, right?
Speaker 3: And so what did you find that helped you? Because
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people do get to the
Speaker 3: point where they recognize that this rumination we'll call it,
Speaker 3: that is problematic, right, They now suddenly are like, Okay,
Speaker 3: these thoughts are intrusive. I don't like them, they're probably
Speaker 3: they're not good for me. I want them to go away.
Speaker 3: And it's not that simple. So what worked for you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, a few things. One was accepting a longer timeline.
Speaker 1: So at the beginning I always felt like something's broken,
Speaker 1: but it could be fixed immediately, and so all solutions
Speaker 1: are going to be solutions that work right away. Obviously
Speaker 1: none of those end up working. And even when people
Speaker 1: would tell me this, I'd be like, now you think
Speaker 1: that because you haven't found yours, I'm just looking for
Speaker 1: mine and instead, And I was like, you know what,
Speaker 1: what if the way that I deal with obsessive thinking
Speaker 1: is like each time it happens, I go like, oh,
Speaker 1: there it is again, I'm going to stop and do
Speaker 1: something else. And even if like half a second later,
Speaker 1: I start doing it again, then I have to respond
Speaker 1: the same way again. And what if I have to
Speaker 1: do that one thousand times in ten minutes? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 1: And what if I have to do that over and
Speaker 1: over again for three months before I start to feel
Speaker 1: even a little bit better. But that was the only way,
Speaker 1: ultimately that it felt like I ratcheted toward feeling like
Speaker 1: it wasn't important to think about that over and over again. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm writing a book that right now is loosely titled
Speaker 3: How a Little Becomes a Lot, And it's based on
Speaker 3: that very idea, particularly with thought patterns, that the good
Speaker 3: news is, I do believe you can change them. The
Speaker 3: bad news is it often takes a long time, and
Speaker 3: the longer you've had them, the longer that time period
Speaker 3: might be. Yeah, and so it's just that repetition, and
Speaker 3: I think you're right this desire that we are going
Speaker 3: to have an insight or epiphany of some sort that
Speaker 3: is going to suddenly fix it keeps a lot of
Speaker 3: us really stuck and not buying into what you're saying,
Speaker 3: which is okay, I kind of know the issue. There's
Speaker 3: no blinding insight to come. There's just a really hard work.
Speaker 1: The insights and epiphanies I think can help, yeah, but
Speaker 1: they're not the final moment. So there was a moment
Speaker 1: where I had a really long drive back from my
Speaker 1: campus to home, like Boston to Ohio, and as I
Speaker 1: was like an hour into it, I had sort of
Speaker 1: this moment where it kind of the clouds opened up
Speaker 1: and I was like, Wow, my thinking has been really
Speaker 1: obsessive and repetitive recently, and even in that moment, I
Speaker 1: felt like, wow, it's so helpful to have this moment
Speaker 1: of realization, and it's going to come back again. Like
Speaker 1: my head's above the water for a second. This is
Speaker 1: what it's like up here. I got to get back
Speaker 1: here again.
Speaker 3: Totally. I think the insights or the realizations are critical
Speaker 3: to know what.
Speaker 1: Direction to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, right, Like until you have that, you don't
Speaker 3: even know what direction to go. But once you have it.
Speaker 3: There's still a ways to go. But again I love
Speaker 3: that that's what worked for you, was just a little bit,
Speaker 3: by a little bit changing those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I worked with a psychotherapist that it
Speaker 1: was also helpful for pointing these things out and was
Speaker 1: helpful to for like giving me a kick in the
Speaker 1: pants a couple times where I had sort of thought,
Speaker 1: because of the discourse that we have around mental illness
Speaker 1: that like, now, the way you need to treat it
Speaker 1: is with you know, sensitivity, And that's true, but also
Speaker 1: sometimes I needed to be told like no, stop, like
Speaker 1: stop doing this. Yeah, but like you know, I care
Speaker 1: about you, but like this thing that you're doing, you
Speaker 1: do need to stop doing it. It is unacceptable.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think about this a lot because on one hand,
Speaker 3: I think we have become a lot more sensitive and
Speaker 3: we're a lot more understanding, and we recognize that people
Speaker 3: need to feel seen and heard and understood. But I
Speaker 3: sometimes wonder if we've gone too far in that direction
Speaker 3: or we just stopped there. And my experience and I
Speaker 3: got sober twenty five years ago in a pretty hardcore
Speaker 3: twelve step area program and there wasn't a lot of
Speaker 3: I mean, the sensitivity could have been dialed up, and
Speaker 3: certainly is part of what eventually made me not want
Speaker 3: to go, but also just being told very directly like here,
Speaker 3: do this do that turned out to be really really helpful,
Speaker 3: and I think sometimes somebody just needs to be heard culture.
Speaker 3: I think sometimes we also need the next step, which is, yes,
Speaker 3: no one until they feel heard will listen to anything
Speaker 3: you say, so don't bother to try and shortcut that step.
Speaker 3: But there are other destinations beyond that where we do
Speaker 3: need people who are on the outside to say, well,
Speaker 3: here's something I see or why don't you try this? Yeah.
Speaker 1: A big one for me was thinking less about myself
Speaker 1: and more about other people. The thing about obsessive thinking
Speaker 1: of any kind is it's usually about you. And when
Speaker 1: I could realize that, like, wow, I feel better when
Speaker 1: I think about other people a little bit more and
Speaker 1: think about myself less, or when someone could point that
Speaker 1: out to me, it was really helpful because I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be the kind of person who
Speaker 1: is only thinking about how bad I feel all the time.
Speaker 1: You feel a lot better when I can I can
Speaker 1: help lift other people up totally.
Speaker 3: I think this can sometimes take an interest in deviation,
Speaker 3: which is that the worry begins to be about people
Speaker 3: that are around you, and so it seems like it's
Speaker 3: not self referential, but it is in a way ultimately right,
Speaker 3: because whatever that person is happening or whatever they're doing
Speaker 3: is causing an emotion in you that you don't like. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so it can be tricky.
Speaker 1: You think you're thinking about other people, but really you're
Speaker 1: thinking do they like me? Did I hurt them? Rather
Speaker 1: than like are they achieving their goals? Like what do
Speaker 1: they need from me? And like how can I help
Speaker 1: them do the thing that they're trying to do?
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, this is funny. This is just coming to
Speaker 3: mind because a friend of mine, he's much younger than me,
Speaker 3: told me recently they're starting to try and have a kid.
Speaker 3: And it's like, I think parenting just adds a whole
Speaker 3: new dimension of weirdness to dealing with your own mental stuff,
Speaker 3: because on one hand, you are obstensibly thinking about someone
Speaker 3: else a lot, and yet it's a weird space. One
Speaker 3: of the other things that I read, and it's not
Speaker 3: exactly a secret, but as you have a tendency to
Speaker 3: do you wrote about it in a way that makes
Speaker 3: it so obvious is that you say, if you want
Speaker 3: to get a taco, the world comes rushing your aid.
Speaker 3: Everybody's got a taco. Everybody wants to talk about their taco.
Speaker 3: People will vehemently defend their taco stand versus that taco stand,
Speaker 3: or whether al pastore is better than carne asada. But
Speaker 3: you need a therapist, you're on your own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild, but like there's no YELP for therapists,
Speaker 1: at least not one that I found or that worked.
Speaker 1: Which ones take my insurance? Which ones will take me?
Speaker 1: When I was the person who was telling someone like, hey,
Speaker 1: have you ever thought of talking to someone? I had
Speaker 1: no idea that that's the gauntlet that they had to
Speaker 1: face if they decided to do it, at the point
Speaker 1: where they are least equipped to do it, to deal
Speaker 1: with the system that makes no sense, it's super annoying,
Speaker 1: doesn't give you feedback. And then even when you start
Speaker 1: talking to somebody, they don't tell you, I mean a
Speaker 1: good one might that like, we're going to take a
Speaker 1: while to make any progress here. The first time we
Speaker 1: talk is maybe even just to see if I think
Speaker 1: I can help you. I'm not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: do much for you the first of a round. It
Speaker 1: might take a couple of months before we start working
Speaker 1: in any direction.
Speaker 3: Which is really difficult when you have a skull full
Speaker 3: of poison. Yeah, yeah, right, I mean it's the same
Speaker 3: thing I've dealt with my mother and chronic pain for
Speaker 3: years and years, and you finally find a new doctor
Speaker 3: who's like, Okay, we're great at what we do, and
Speaker 3: you go and they're like, well now we're going to
Speaker 3: I mean, and you're just like, I could be months
Speaker 3: from any relief. It's just really it's really challenging.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially when our level of understanding is so early
Speaker 1: and so rudimentary for anything psychological. We just haven't been
Speaker 1: at this very long. And even though you know, we
Speaker 1: produce these big book of diagnoses, like that book is
Speaker 1: going to be different or entirely gone hopefully, you know,
Speaker 1: fifty or one hundred years from now. And so the
Speaker 1: limit on what we can do for people is also
Speaker 1: offen and not that high, and it really varies by
Speaker 1: what you present with and a lot of things we
Speaker 1: can help a little bit, but few things do we
Speaker 1: know exactly what they are or what to do about them.
Speaker 1: And this is like a limit that you have to
Speaker 1: accept if you're ever going to get better.
Speaker 3: Right, right, I think that is a good segue here
Speaker 3: for us to sort of talk about the state of
Speaker 3: psychology as a science and what we think about the
Speaker 3: state of psychology and what we know is very helpful
Speaker 3: in how we navigate the journey. Right. And one thing
Speaker 3: that studies that seem to keep showing is sort of,
Speaker 3: I guess, for lack of a better word, disconcerting, is
Speaker 3: that we don't really know what makes a good therapist,
Speaker 3: or one type of therapy doesn't seem to be better
Speaker 3: than another type of therapy. Sometimes it doesn't even appear
Speaker 3: to be better than talking to a friend, and yet
Speaker 3: we know it can be. Talk to me about what
Speaker 3: we know about the role of therapy, I think you
Speaker 3: would say you were glad you did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I think about it now,
Speaker 1: especially in retrospect having had a good experience, was that
Speaker 1: like the part of it where I think of this
Speaker 1: person as a practitioner of science like didn't actually add
Speaker 1: anything for me. I would rather think of them as
Speaker 1: someone whose job it is to help me navigate the
Speaker 1: issues in my life, and like they come from this
Speaker 1: tradition where they're very interested in the inner workings of
Speaker 1: my mind rather than say theology or whatever else the
Speaker 1: way that you could get there. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that we have all of these studies that are going
Speaker 1: to make it very clear what they should do with
Speaker 1: me and how I should accomplish my goals or not
Speaker 1: there yet, But it did matter a lot to have
Speaker 1: someone whose job it was to pay attention and listen closely.
Speaker 1: But a lot of experience helping people navigate these kinds
Speaker 1: of situations was informed somewhat by some of the things
Speaker 1: that we know. But it isn't like taking an antibiotic
Speaker 1: when you have an infection, like that's just not the
Speaker 1: kind of result you're going to get, because that's not
Speaker 1: the level of understanding that we have. And so mention
Speaker 1: that the study that I almost wish we could do again.
Speaker 1: Now the window was closed on doing this study. But
Speaker 1: in the seventies there was this very small study where
Speaker 1: people got randomized either to go to a professional therapist
Speaker 1: or to a professor of history or engineering or whatever
Speaker 1: who'd been selected for being empathetic. And this study is
Speaker 1: really small, it's not very well conducted, but as far
Speaker 1: as they were able to tell they couldn't see any
Speaker 1: difference between the outcomes of the people who are assigned.
Speaker 1: You know, an older person who's empathetic and understanding versus
Speaker 1: someone who is all those things but also trained in
Speaker 1: the ways of psychology. And that was fifty years ago,
Speaker 1: but I think you'd get a pretty similar result today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and without going into the science to the degree
Speaker 3: that you do and are capable of. It seems to
Speaker 3: me that general thinking is that rapport is the name
Speaker 3: of the game. Right. If you have a good rapport
Speaker 3: with your psychologist, that's far, in a way the most
Speaker 3: important thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, especially if you don't have that somewhere
Speaker 1: else in your life. Yeah, that if you're at a
Speaker 1: point where your relationship's afraid, or you don't have many
Speaker 1: of them, or there's no one that you feel like
Speaker 1: you can talk about this stuff too, it's a no
Speaker 1: brainer that you could go and work with someone whose
Speaker 1: job to do that. And then I think there's plenty
Speaker 1: of things probably above and beyond that they can do,
Speaker 1: like be an outside observer on your life. Note things
Speaker 1: that you do over and over again. Just ask you
Speaker 1: the question, what have you done to try to solve this,
Speaker 1: and has that worked for you? All these things that
Speaker 1: seem really obvious you could conceivably do with a friend
Speaker 1: or with the mirror, and yet we don't because we
Speaker 1: don't have the structure around it. Right.
Speaker 3: Well, there's this idea. I believe that doctor Ethan Cross
Speaker 3: at the University of Michigan was one of the coiners
Speaker 3: of this term Solomon's paradox, which is an idea based
Speaker 3: on King Solomon, that we can have a lot of
Speaker 3: wisdom towards someone else, uh huh, but it's really hard
Speaker 3: to have it towards ourselves. And I find this to
Speaker 3: just be amazingly true. And I also have found I
Speaker 3: had to write a little reminder to myself at one
Speaker 3: point that even if I think I know what somebody
Speaker 3: is going to say to me when I bring them
Speaker 3: a problem, right, they're going to just pare it back
Speaker 3: my own advice to me or whatever, it still helps
Speaker 3: to talk to them about it still helps somehow to
Speaker 3: get it out of the squeamishness of my own brain.
Speaker 3: That's the wrong word for it, not squeamishness, just amorphousness
Speaker 3: of my own brain. Yeah, right, and talk about it
Speaker 3: with someone.
Speaker 1: Else, Yeah, Yeah, like your own thoughts are squishy, and
Speaker 1: when you have to express them to someone else, you
Speaker 1: suddenly realize like, oh, I really I need to put
Speaker 1: this into words. I need to frame this in some
Speaker 1: way that makes it make sense. And when you do that,
Speaker 1: you can get it to a level of specificity that
Speaker 1: you couldn't get to on your own. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is also what I what I find when I'm writing that,
Speaker 1: Like you can think the same thought over and over again.
Speaker 1: When you have to put it into a sentence, you
Speaker 1: suddenly realize like, oh, I didn't get this or I
Speaker 1: didn't really know what I wanted to say. And I
Speaker 1: think these are all tools of nailing down the thoughts
Speaker 1: that you're trying to have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny. The book I'm writing is based on
Speaker 3: a program that I've taught for a number of years
Speaker 3: called wise Habits. But in writing it, you know, sitting
Speaker 3: down and trying to write the book, I'm like, huh,
Speaker 3: I didn't think that all the way through, or well,
Speaker 3: I'm saying this here, but then I'm saying very like
Speaker 3: almost the opposite that, like just inconsistencies that were not
Speaker 3: immediately apparent to me in putting it into presentations and
Speaker 3: talking it out loud.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a way of dispelling what we call the
Speaker 1: illusion of explanatory depth, of this feeling that you know
Speaker 1: something when you don't actually know it, but like you
Speaker 1: know it as well as you need to know it
Speaker 1: for the purpose that you're doing that, like you know
Speaker 1: it at this level until you bump into something that
Speaker 1: requires you to understand it better. And like writing is
Speaker 1: a way of doing that, talking to people is a
Speaker 1: way to doing that. Teaching is a way of doing that,
Speaker 1: breaking through that superficial level of understanding to the level below.
Speaker 3: Right, there's that idea that if you want to learn something,
Speaker 3: try and teach it to someone else. For that reason,
Speaker 3: and the fact that we have that illusion is enormously
Speaker 3: helpful in most areas of our lives. Yeah, you and
Speaker 3: I are both talking into a microphone. I couldn't do it,
Speaker 3: the most basic job of explaining to you what is
Speaker 3: happening there, despite having been around microphones not just as
Speaker 3: a podcaster but a musician my whole life. I have
Speaker 3: no idea.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I have friends that could take this thing apart and
Speaker 3: explain every bit of it and fix it, but I
Speaker 3: don't because I've never needed to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you didn't have that illusion, if when you
Speaker 1: got to the studio you were like, WHOA, what's that? Like?
Speaker 1: How could I possibly use this thing? If I don't
Speaker 1: know everything about or you're constantly distracted by that when
Speaker 1: you were in the world filled with things like that,
Speaker 1: like we could never survive or get anything done if
Speaker 1: there was an alarm in your head that went off
Speaker 1: every time you didn't understand something, because it would always
Speaker 1: be going off, like you never have any peace, right
Speaker 1: And so it's helpful to have this thin film of understanding.
Speaker 1: If what you want to do is get by, if
Speaker 1: what you want to do is understand, then you have
Speaker 1: to puncture that envelope. Yep.
Speaker 3: So let's use this idea of understanding to go back
Speaker 3: to psychology and the state of psychology, because I, like you,
Speaker 3: believe we don't fully know what is going on in
Speaker 3: people's brains. I mean, I've worked with enough people one
Speaker 3: on one and my programs to know that for some
Speaker 3: people you say this and for other people they need
Speaker 3: the exact opposite thing. And these could be two people
Speaker 3: who demographically look the same, two thirty five year old men,
Speaker 3: but one of them has a problem speaking up, and
Speaker 3: so you're like, hey, we need to work on that.
Speaker 3: And the other has a problem of just being aggressive
Speaker 3: in conversation. He needs something completely different, yet they look
Speaker 3: exactly the same. And so the number of variables that
Speaker 3: go into even when we're trying to blind control or
Speaker 3: control a study, seems crazy to me, and it makes
Speaker 3: me doubt that we'll ever get a lot further. And
Speaker 3: a lot of people share this view. The mind's too complicated,
Speaker 3: we're not going to get there. But you don't share
Speaker 3: this view. You believe that, well, you say what you believe,
Speaker 3: instead of me saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you believe well. I certainly agree that it's complicated
Speaker 1: and it will be difficult to get farther, and it's
Speaker 1: also possible that we'll never get farther. But the fact
Speaker 1: that it is difficult and is complicated is not in
Speaker 1: fact evidence that it is hopeless that will get farther.
Speaker 1: And the examples that I take are from the rest
Speaker 1: of the history of every other science, where there are
Speaker 1: plenty of periods where things seem like hopelessly complicated. How
Speaker 1: can we possibly make progress? And eventually we do because
Speaker 1: we discover the underlying structure of the system that we're
Speaker 1: trying to work with. And so if you think about
Speaker 1: the alchemists who are trying to change elements into other elements,
Speaker 1: and they have no idea what an element is or
Speaker 1: what they're made of, or that like the position of
Speaker 1: venus does not affect the result of the reaction, but
Speaker 1: like some things that they consider one element are in
Speaker 1: fact a mixture of two things. If they don't understand
Speaker 1: any of these things, there's a real limit on how
Speaker 1: far they can get. But when you start getting those
Speaker 1: little building blocks of like, oh there are things called elements,
Speaker 1: they cannot be reduced further. Just from that you start
Speaker 1: to be able to do a bunch of things. Now
Speaker 1: you can ask like, well, how many are there, how
Speaker 1: does each one react with the other ones? Are there
Speaker 1: ways that we can predict those reactions. What we don't
Speaker 1: have for psychology yet is the equivalent of those elements.
Speaker 1: We don't have a good idea of what are the
Speaker 1: units that make up the world we're trying to study,
Speaker 1: and what are the rules that govern the interactions of
Speaker 1: those units. I think we're still in the prehistory of psychology.
Speaker 3: That's a really good point to think about. The periodic
Speaker 3: table of elements as a reference, because it's not simple, right,
Speaker 3: we haven't simplified it. Right, There's a lot of elements,
Speaker 3: and as you mentioned, how do they combine with each other?
Speaker 3: We begin to learn that. But by having a certain
Speaker 3: number of building blocks we can begin to make progress.
Speaker 3: And it seems that perhaps with psychology, like you say,
Speaker 3: we don't have even these basic building blocks. We have
Speaker 3: these diagnostic ideas that are I use the word amorphous earlier,
Speaker 3: are very amorphous. Yeah, almost to the point of being
Speaker 3: useful to a point in some cases I think is
Speaker 3: the best way I could say it for them. So
Speaker 3: where do you think if you were given the reins
Speaker 3: of psychological science? Right? You talk a lot about how
Speaker 3: you think we should and shouldn't do science if you
Speaker 3: were just for some reason, I mean, our presidents doing
Speaker 3: all sorts of what seems to be kind of crazy things,
Speaker 3: So this would be no crazier. He comes to you
Speaker 3: and says, Adam, you are in charge of psychology for
Speaker 3: the next four years. You got all the budget you want.
Speaker 1: What would you do? Two things? One to be diversify
Speaker 1: the budget in that I have the things that I
Speaker 1: want to do, but I also want to hedge against
Speaker 1: it by trying to find a bunch of other different
Speaker 1: crazy ideas, because this is what I think we haven't
Speaker 1: been doing, or what we're really bad at doing in science,
Speaker 1: is diversifying the ideas that we're working on. The one
Speaker 1: that I would want to work on, and I've been
Speaker 1: working with some friends on this and they're just starting
Speaker 1: to release the series now. Is basically a cybernetic proposal
Speaker 1: for the way that psychology works. Cybernetics being the science
Speaker 1: of control systems and control systems just being a few
Speaker 1: units that work together to try to maintain something at
Speaker 1: a certain level. So I get a thermostat is a
Speaker 1: control system. It reads what the current temperature is, it
Speaker 1: has the desired temperature, and it tries to reduce the
Speaker 1: difference between them. And I have some friends working on
Speaker 1: a proposal for like a lot of psychology can be
Speaker 1: thought about in terms of control systems, that there are
Speaker 1: many things that humans have to keep at the right
Speaker 1: level or else they die. We need some salt, but
Speaker 1: not too much. We need some sugar but not too much.
Speaker 1: We need to be at the right temperature. We need
Speaker 1: to interact with other people, but we can't spend all
Speaker 1: of our time interacting with other people. And so when
Speaker 1: you start to think about that, you might think, like man,
Speaker 1: the error signal in each of these control systems, the
Speaker 1: thing that says when it's out of whack, could be
Speaker 1: what we think of right now as an emotion. The
Speaker 1: feeling of hunger is an emotion your nutrition intake control
Speaker 1: systems saying it's time to eat. The feeling of loneliness
Speaker 1: is a feeling from your sociality control system saying that
Speaker 1: I need to be around other people. And now we
Speaker 1: might start thinking, well, how many emotions are there? Which
Speaker 1: ones are stronger than other one? Like, which ones get
Speaker 1: to take precedence? You know, not all of these go
Speaker 1: from zero to one hundred quickly, some go slowly. And
Speaker 1: now we can start to get something that looks a
Speaker 1: little bit more like a table of elements. Because we
Speaker 1: start asking how many how do they interact? We can
Speaker 1: try to start filling in the ones that seem to
Speaker 1: be missing.
Speaker 3: I love this idea of control systems because I'm a
Speaker 3: big believer in I would just call it the middle way,
Speaker 3: meaning that you can look at most things in life
Speaker 3: and there is a too much and there's definitely a
Speaker 3: too little right and when we're at either of those.
Speaker 3: A really great solution is just you don't have to
Speaker 3: abandon whatever that thing is, You just have to turn
Speaker 3: it up or down a little bit. But even this
Speaker 3: idea of emotions, right, I mean, people have been arguing
Speaker 3: about what the core emotions are for a long time.
Speaker 3: How would we even get past that to a point
Speaker 3: that we could begin to say, here's our periodic table.
Speaker 3: Because every book I read, there's four, there's twelve, there's
Speaker 3: seventy nine shades of blue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think that this
Speaker 1: cybernetic approach finally has an answer to it, which is
Speaker 1: first a conceptualization of what an emotion is in terms
Speaker 1: of like the units and how they work together. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about emotions, we're usually like, you know
Speaker 1: that thing you feel, But in this paradigm, an emotion
Speaker 1: is something very specific. It's the error signal of a
Speaker 1: control system. If we don't have a control system for it,
Speaker 1: we can't have an emotion about it. And thinking this
Speaker 1: way leads to like calling some weird things emotions. In
Speaker 1: this system, the need to pee is an emotion. We
Speaker 1: don't think about it that way, but obviously sometimes you
Speaker 1: need to urinate, and that feeling is an error from
Speaker 1: your control system, That too, is an emotion. It would
Speaker 1: also lead us to think about, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: thing that we call hunger, that's an emotion too, But
Speaker 1: it's probably a confederacy of many emotions because there's many
Speaker 1: different kinds of nutrients that we have to intake, and
Speaker 1: so there's probably something called salt hunger or sugar hunger
Speaker 1: or protein hunger. And it's easier to do it animals
Speaker 1: and in humans by depriving people of one thing and
Speaker 1: see if they feel hunger and eat another thing. It's
Speaker 1: just one way, as a very schematic way of investigating this,
Speaker 1: and so I think the way we make progress is
Speaker 1: by treating this like we're trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: rules of a board game by reverse engineering it. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what the little tokens mean or what
Speaker 1: they can do, but we do believe there are tokens
Speaker 1: that can only go to certain spaces, and now we're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what those are. Rather than the
Speaker 1: squishy idea of like, well you feel a certain way,
Speaker 1: what are the tendencies that you have or are they constructed?
Speaker 3: That's the difference okay, because one of the core emotional
Speaker 3: theory disputes, and again I'm a lay person in all this,
Speaker 3: is that there are these core irreducible emotions. Every human
Speaker 3: has them, they're the same group. And then there's the
Speaker 3: as you just said, the constructed theory emotion, which is
Speaker 3: that there's basically just a stimulus of some sort, and
Speaker 3: then from there we build everything that goes on top
Speaker 3: of that. Do you have a feeling there? How does
Speaker 3: thinking through that issue tie into control systems?
Speaker 1: So this view, I think would be much closer to
Speaker 1: the idea that there are basic ones and all the
Speaker 1: labels that we apply to them are sometimes pointing to
Speaker 1: emotions that really exist and sometimes calling things emotions that
Speaker 1: are not productively called emotion. So also in this paradigm,
Speaker 1: happiness isn't an emotion. It's a thing that we feel,
Speaker 1: but it's not an error signal, which means that like
Speaker 1: whether it's constructed or not now becomes a nonsensical question.
Speaker 1: It's not part of the list of elements. Original attempts
Speaker 1: at a table of elements included things like light and heat,
Speaker 1: which didn't end up being elements, And a moment of
Speaker 1: progress was when we realized, like those things are different,
Speaker 1: and so it's possible that like, happiness is actually a
Speaker 1: different thing in this proposal for a paradigm. Happiness is
Speaker 1: actually not a signal that something's gone wrong. It is
Speaker 1: the feeling that you get for correcting an error, so
Speaker 1: you really have to pee, you find a bathroom. Happiness
Speaker 1: is the feeling that you get from your need to
Speaker 1: pee error signal going to zero, but the same thing
Speaker 1: you get for you know, I feel lone, I talk
Speaker 1: to someone. Happiness is the thing that you get for
Speaker 1: reducing that error. So it is a different thing. We
Speaker 1: don't have a word quite for it yet, but there's
Speaker 1: a weird way of thinking about it, which is part
Speaker 1: of what makes me excited about it. That like, it
Speaker 1: uses words in ways that are really counterintuitive, because it
Speaker 1: has a strong idea of what are the components of
Speaker 1: the system and how might they work together?
Speaker 3: Right, And I would love to actually spend about an
Speaker 3: hour and a half on this because I am fascinated. However,
Speaker 3: I don't want to make the whole interview about this,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to use it as a pivot point
Speaker 3: because one of the things that you say about psychology
Speaker 3: as a field is that we keep producing paper after
Speaker 3: paper after paper after paper, and that by and large,
Speaker 3: none of it moves the needle much anywhere. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: that the way that we're going to make more progress
Speaker 3: than we have in the time we have so far
Speaker 3: is to begin to think about what you call alien ideas.
Speaker 3: And so I have a question. This relates to something
Speaker 3: else that you talk about strong link and weak link problems.
Speaker 3: One of the things about alien ideas is I agree
Speaker 3: with you, we need them, and when we're in the
Speaker 3: middle of, say something like a pandemic, they seem dangerous,
Speaker 3: and alien psychological ideas seem like they could be dangerous.
Speaker 3: So how do we allow ourselves to take some of
Speaker 3: the shackles off psychology So maybe we can make progress
Speaker 3: in a different direction, but maybe not loose a bunch
Speaker 3: of craziness into the world. Yeah, we need to do
Speaker 3: it all in secret.
Speaker 1: No, I think really, what you're pointing to there is
Speaker 1: there are at least two separable problems that we're trying
Speaker 1: to solve at the same time. And that's why there's
Speaker 1: a tension here when I say science is a strong
Speaker 1: link problem, which is to say that we proceed at
Speaker 1: the rate that we do our best work, not at
Speaker 1: the rate that we prevent our worst work. Is to say,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about science is like the process of trying
Speaker 1: to understand the structure and function of the universe, which
Speaker 1: is separate from how do you make sure that people
Speaker 1: believe the right things, which is a totally different thing
Speaker 1: science communication or public health dissemination or something else. The
Speaker 1: way that you make sure that people don't believe crazy
Speaker 1: ideas that are wrong is different from, and sometimes contrary to,
Speaker 1: the way that we would discover truths about the universe.
Speaker 1: So recently, when I brought that post back up again
Speaker 1: and someone was like, you know, but look, there's this
Speaker 1: paper about vaccines causing autism that like caused all this
Speaker 1: trouble before it was retracted twelve years later, I'm like, totally,
Speaker 1: that's a big problem. From the standpoint of how do
Speaker 1: we solve the problem of making sure that people don't
Speaker 1: believe the wrong thing, it is actually unrelated or mainly
Speaker 1: unrelated to the idea of how do we understand autism.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't the case that when that paper came out,
Speaker 1: all the scientists study autism were like, wow, vaccines must
Speaker 1: cause autism. Many people were like, oh, I don't believe
Speaker 1: this paper at all. And at the time, it might
Speaker 1: have actually been reasonable to think about like, oh, is
Speaker 1: this a possibility, Like it's better for there to be
Speaker 1: more information rather than less. That is different from the
Speaker 1: kind of person who's going to look at that and
Speaker 1: go like, oh, this means I should change my vaccine behavior.
Speaker 3: Right, And I think part of that comes from something
Speaker 3: that I don't think the genie goes back in the
Speaker 3: bottle on, which is the popularization of and the bastardization
Speaker 3: of science into the public consciousness. I mean, you don't
Speaker 3: have to look very hard to suddenly start seeing that
Speaker 3: there's a study. There are people whose job is go
Speaker 3: find a study and then write an article or a
Speaker 3: news article about it. And sometimes they're reporting the study
Speaker 3: relatively accurately, even though there's still a lot of nuance
Speaker 3: getting lost, and other times it's just near nonsense. And
Speaker 3: so I understand what you're saying on one hand that
Speaker 3: science itself, the process of science, needs to be a
Speaker 3: problem where we don't worry about the bad ideas because
Speaker 3: the scientific process will eventually weed them out, and what
Speaker 3: we need to be focused on are the really big
Speaker 3: good ideas. And the only way sometimes to get those
Speaker 3: is to venture way off course from what everybody else
Speaker 3: is doing, and then you have what's done with that science?
Speaker 3: Is this just a problem we have to live with.
Speaker 1: That's a problem that we can get better at. And
Speaker 1: where it starts is in how we teach students about science,
Speaker 1: like from elementary school onward right now, when you get
Speaker 1: your scientific education, it's like, oh, you know, we we
Speaker 1: thought atoms were plum pudding, and then we thought they
Speaker 1: were this other thing, and then and then finally we
Speaker 1: discovered the real thing, not understanding how that process unfolded
Speaker 1: that like for a long time, we like went off
Speaker 1: in this direction and then we did this other direction,
Speaker 1: and like it took a long time for us to
Speaker 1: figure out what was true. And so when you see
Speaker 1: a scientific claim, you should go like, yeah.
Speaker 3: Maybe precisely, yeah, we don't follow that with the thought
Speaker 3: of and by the way, this current understanding could go
Speaker 3: through the same revision, right, Yeah, we just take it
Speaker 3: as now we know, and if you look back at
Speaker 3: scientific history, you realize it's kind of a silly position
Speaker 3: to take.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anybody should be able to trace this through like
Speaker 1: the evolution of nutrition recommendations over the course of their
Speaker 1: own lives. If you're old enough right that, like I
Speaker 1: grew up in every cereal box had that pyramid on
Speaker 1: the back that was like you should eat six to
Speaker 1: eleven slices of bread per day, and then like ten
Speaker 1: years later people were like, you should never eat a
Speaker 1: slice of bread, like both of these extremes, and the
Speaker 1: next year it's going to be something else. And what
Speaker 1: this means is like, we're still figuring out how nutrition works.
Speaker 1: Like we're very early on, and the only mistake that
Speaker 1: we're making is being extremely certain at each stage that
Speaker 1: now we know for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeap, Before we dive back into the conversation, let me
Speaker 3: ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding
Speaker 3: you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried
Speaker 3: to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in
Speaker 3: the way. You're not alone in this, And I've identified
Speaker 3: six major saboteurs of self control, like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
Speaker 3: emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
Speaker 3: the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
Speaker 3: together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
Speaker 3: obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can
Speaker 3: use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
Speaker 3: oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
Speaker 3: towards getting back on track. Part of the problem with
Speaker 3: nutrition is part of what we wrestle with in psychology,
Speaker 3: is not everyone is the same. You know, my partner
Speaker 3: and I wore a continuous glucose monitor for a while.
Speaker 3: We just kind of wanted to see, like what's happening
Speaker 3: with blood sugar. Her mom had Alzheimer's, my dad has Alzheimer's,
Speaker 3: and one of the theories is that there's a metabolic
Speaker 3: issue here. So okay, we want to study our metabolism.
Speaker 3: And it was fascinating to see, like I can eat
Speaker 3: brown rice and it's okay, she eats brown rice, she
Speaker 3: might as well have drank a Coca cola. It's just insane.
Speaker 3: And so people, you know, we keep saying, like you
Speaker 3: should eat this, but people are just very different, and
Speaker 3: we don't know what constitutes the difference enough yet, Yeah,
Speaker 3: to be able to make any sort of like recommendation
Speaker 3: that I should eat the same thing as you. We
Speaker 3: just don't know, but yet we think we do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a problem that I really wish that
Speaker 1: it were so much more apparent to people that like,
Speaker 1: whenever you want to make a universal recommendation, you need
Speaker 1: extremely good evidence, but like we're really willing to just
Speaker 1: like make universal recommendation.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's partially that's a human tendency, and
Speaker 3: I think that people want it. I mean, I think
Speaker 3: that it goes back to what you were talking about.
Speaker 3: You know, when you had a skullfull of poison, what
Speaker 3: you wanted. The desire that emerged from that was not
Speaker 3: to listen to an hour long, nuanced conversation about the
Speaker 3: science of psychology like we are doing right now. You
Speaker 3: wanted somebody to say, here's the one quick trick to
Speaker 3: get rid of your skullfull of poison, right, And so
Speaker 3: we're just in a world that nuance is not in sense.
Speaker 3: I find it personally semi painful as a person who
Speaker 3: my brand is nuance.
Speaker 1: I think yeah. And I also think it's on the
Speaker 1: part of experts making the recommendations, there's this fear that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: people are too stupid to understand nuance, so we can't
Speaker 1: give it to them, even though we know it might
Speaker 1: be there. We just need to tell everybody the same thing,
Speaker 1: or else they'll get the wrong idea, or some of
Speaker 1: them will do the wrong thing, And so we just
Speaker 1: need to be really confident and conclusive about telling everybody
Speaker 1: what they should do, which ultimately just leads the erosion
Speaker 1: of trust, because why would you trust someone who's going
Speaker 1: to knowingly tell you something other than the full truth
Speaker 1: of what they know.
Speaker 3: We sort of hit this, and you may have already
Speaker 3: answered it, in which case you could say we've already
Speaker 3: covered that. What are some of the ideas in psychology
Speaker 3: that you find interesting promising? New? So you've just mentioned one,
Speaker 3: which is this idea of control systems? Yeah, are there
Speaker 3: any others out there that you currently are like? Wow,
Speaker 3: that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: That's the one that I think is most promising. Yet
Speaker 1: I think it is worth looking back at the ideas
Speaker 1: that we have had that were productive and good, and
Speaker 1: now there's a temptation to keep doing them forever, even
Speaker 1: though I think we've gotten out of them what they
Speaker 1: had to give us. So some of those dominant ideas
Speaker 1: in psychology where like, oh, people aren't perfectly rational, they
Speaker 1: don't obey the rules of optimal decision making. This is
Speaker 1: an idea that's been so successful that it's won the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize twice, and I think it's a great one
Speaker 1: and it started, you know, all kinds of lines of research.
Speaker 1: I also think that now we've pretty much gotten everything
Speaker 1: out of it that we're going to get out of it.
Speaker 1: Same thing with situations matter. So this is like a
Speaker 1: revolution in the sixties and seventies that at the time
Speaker 1: it was reasonable to think that, like, you know, there's
Speaker 1: just different kinds of people, and some people are good
Speaker 1: and some people are bad. And then people started creating
Speaker 1: these like little pantomimes and situations where you put someone
Speaker 1: in it, someone who seems normal, and like now they're
Speaker 1: you know, shocking someone to death in the other room,
Speaker 1: or at least they think they are. That was a
Speaker 1: really important point to make. But we can keep doing
Speaker 1: that forever. We can keep inventing new situations and showing
Speaker 1: like wow when you do this, like some people do
Speaker 1: that thing. And I think here too, we've gotten most
Speaker 1: out of it that we're ever going to get out
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 3: So these are both good. Let's take that second one there,
Speaker 3: which is essentially is another way of saying context really matters. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I get on one hand, how like we just said it, right,
Speaker 3: Context matters? Okay, move on, right, But are there useful
Speaker 3: ways of showing in what ways context informs or changes
Speaker 3: based on different things? Like I still think like you
Speaker 3: and I know that, but a lot of people are
Speaker 3: going to take a personality test and they're going to
Speaker 3: go off and believe that that personality test is telling
Speaker 3: them a lot about themselves. And I would argue the
Speaker 3: primary limitation to a lot of those is context matters.
Speaker 3: I hate these things. They drive me up the wall
Speaker 3: because it's like, would you rather read a book or
Speaker 3: go to a party? And I'm like, well, I have
Speaker 3: nine questions I need to ask you before for I
Speaker 3: make that decision. You know, what's the party, who's going
Speaker 3: to be there? What book am I reading? Am I tired? Like?
Speaker 3: I mean? Is it cold outside? And so it seems like,
Speaker 3: on one hand, we know context matters, and yet broadly speaking,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that most people do. Yeah, but is
Speaker 3: that a communication versus a research issue? Again?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, Like, I don't know how many
Speaker 1: more demonstrations we can do that. I think. I mean
Speaker 1: the Milgrim Shock experiments from nineteen sixty three. This is
Speaker 1: the famous experiment where probably a lot of people have
Speaker 1: heard of it, but in case they haven't, Like, you
Speaker 1: get brought into what looks like a lab and you
Speaker 1: think that you are doing a learning task with someone
Speaker 1: who's in a different room, and you're supposed to give
Speaker 1: them a little shock when they get the question wrong,
Speaker 1: and they set it up that like, oh, the person
Speaker 1: gets so many questions wrong that eventually it seems like
Speaker 1: you're shocking them to death. Even when you're and there's
Speaker 1: this whole like recording here, you think it's real where
Speaker 1: it seems like they have a heart condition and they
Speaker 1: maybe pass out whatever, And like in that situation, two
Speaker 1: thirds of people kept shocking someone until they ostensibly die
Speaker 1: because the person behind them was like, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: very important you can continue, Like, I don't know what
Speaker 1: better demonstration you can do. And by the way, people
Speaker 1: have tried to debunk this a couple times, and I
Speaker 1: think it has survived the debunkings. A lot of great
Speaker 1: research from that era hasn't, like, I don't know what
Speaker 1: else you can do to show people that like, no,
Speaker 1: that you a very normal person could be put in
Speaker 1: a situation where you could do something that you look
Speaker 1: back on it and think that it is horrifying, Like,
Speaker 1: I think the only way that you can drive that
Speaker 1: point home better is by bringing that person into the
Speaker 1: lab and doing it to them, right, Otherwise it's not
Speaker 1: going to land.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so let's go back to For some reason,
Speaker 3: I don't like the word cybernetic because it makes me
Speaker 3: think about a cyborg or something. But I get it.
Speaker 3: We're talking about systems, and I'd love to talk about
Speaker 3: one of your posts that's all about systems, and it's
Speaker 3: really about the idea of us having a mental heater
Speaker 3: and a mental air conditioner. Kind of walk me through
Speaker 3: this idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this comes from my thinking about the control
Speaker 1: systems of the mind, that there's this naive idea that
Speaker 1: we just want to be maximally happy. I mean literally,
Speaker 1: psychologists will write this in their papers like, well, obviously
Speaker 1: people want to be happy and not unhappy, and they'll
Speaker 1: give six citations for it. But I actually, things of
Speaker 1: you watched people, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Speaker 1: People will do things all the time that do not
Speaker 1: seem to make them happy, like why do we go
Speaker 1: to haunted houses? Like why do we watch movies about
Speaker 1: the Holocaust? If you ask people afterward like did that
Speaker 1: make you happier? People will be like no, okay, well
Speaker 1: why did you do it? And I think part of the
Speaker 1: reason is we don't actually desire maximum happiness. We desire
Speaker 1: the right level of happiness. It is dangerous and bad
Speaker 1: for us both to be too sad. It is also
Speaker 1: dangerous and bad to be too happy. Like we call
Speaker 1: that mania. And when people are stuck in that mode
Speaker 1: for too long, they end up doing things like thinking
Speaker 1: they're the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, or they do a
Speaker 1: bunch of drugs, they spend all their money starting a
Speaker 1: stupid business, and they end up in the hospital. And
Speaker 1: so like it is bad for us to max out
Speaker 1: this system, it is also bad for us for the
Speaker 1: system to be working at its minimum. This seems like
Speaker 1: a case in which we have a control system governing
Speaker 1: trying to keep us at the right level. And so
Speaker 1: when we're too high, it tries to bring us down,
Speaker 1: and when we're too hello tries to bring us up.
Speaker 1: And that's the thermostat that runs with the furnace and
Speaker 1: the air conditioner.
Speaker 3: So with mania, you know, my favorite example, what we're
Speaker 3: not getting across well enough in this interview is how
Speaker 3: funny you are in your writing right, Like I mean,
Speaker 3: you're genuinely hilarious. And one of the things you did
Speaker 3: when you're writing about mania is go look at like
Speaker 3: reddit forums for what people did when they were under mania,
Speaker 3: and my favorite was collected enough signatures to become mayor
Speaker 3: yeah yeah. And if you've seen it, and I've been
Speaker 3: close enough to people with addiction problems and severe psychological
Speaker 3: problems to have been on some psych wards visiting and
Speaker 3: mania is terrifying, you know, when you see somebody who's
Speaker 3: in mania, it is genuinely frightening. So I get the
Speaker 3: idea that, Okay, we don't want to get too high,
Speaker 3: we don't want to get too low. Right, you get
Speaker 3: too low, you basically don't move, and as humans, we
Speaker 3: need to move and do things. You also talk about
Speaker 3: how happiness doesn't tend to change a lot over time.
Speaker 3: Do you then believe that we each have an individual
Speaker 3: happiness set point that we're largely going to return to.
Speaker 3: And if so, why would mine be forty percent and
Speaker 3: someone else's would be ninety percent? And is the fact
Speaker 3: that I am reporting myself as unhappy simply my error system?
Speaker 3: To use your theory my sense of unhappiness is simply
Speaker 3: my internal control system saying you need to be up there,
Speaker 3: because one of the things that I've found I've said
Speaker 3: before about having depression is one of the things I've done,
Speaker 3: I think is get better at it. And what I
Speaker 3: mean by that is I often just don't make a
Speaker 3: very big deal out of it. There are times where
Speaker 3: I'm like, it is what it is, no existential crisis needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean to your first question of whether I
Speaker 1: think different people have different set points, it seems to
Speaker 1: be true empirically that you track people over time that
Speaker 1: some people are consistently at a six out of ten,
Speaker 1: and some people are consistently at an eight out of ten.
Speaker 1: And even when disturbances happen in their lives, even when
Speaker 1: they get a new job that they love, lose a
Speaker 1: job that they love, find someone they love, lose someone
Speaker 1: they love, they obviously go up or down, but they
Speaker 1: come back to that point. And so that seems to
Speaker 1: be empirically true. Now, why would it be that some
Speaker 1: people are stuck at six when they'd rather be at eight,
Speaker 1: or why can't we all be at ten? I think
Speaker 1: for the same reason that we differ in all other
Speaker 1: kinds of ways, Like other control systems also have different
Speaker 1: step points, so we think that weight is probably also
Speaker 1: governed by some kind of control system. Some people weigh
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty pounds and some people weigh two hundred.
Speaker 1: Like why is that? The ultimate answer is genetics and
Speaker 1: then what you get exposed to it in the environment.
Speaker 1: But like, from a broader sense, who would there be
Speaker 1: variants across humans? Like, because it is actually useful for
Speaker 1: people to be different, I think is the ultimate answer.
Speaker 1: That the way that humans have succeeded is by producing
Speaker 1: a diversity of humans who have different ideas and behave differently,
Speaker 1: so that we can benefit from the different strengths that
Speaker 1: different people have. And so like, there may be a
Speaker 1: reason why we don't all have the same level of happiness.
Speaker 1: That would be my guest. We don't really know, but
Speaker 1: that's my guest.
Speaker 3: Now do you think that then what we might think
Speaker 3: of as extreme levels of high which would be mania,
Speaker 3: but the opposite seems to be far more common, which
Speaker 3: is yeah, you know, being very low is a control
Speaker 3: system failure. Because when you talk about weight, right, yes,
Speaker 3: we all have a natural weight. We also know people
Speaker 3: who weigh seventy five pounds and people who are way
Speaker 3: on the opposite end of that that are not in
Speaker 3: what we would probably consider the natural range because we're
Speaker 3: exposed to all sorts of different things. So is that
Speaker 3: what mental illness is is a control system failure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are lots of ways that the systems can
Speaker 1: break that end up looking like different kinds of mental illnesses.
Speaker 1: So my friends who write under the name Slime Mold
Speaker 1: Time Mold are releasing a whole series about this, so
Speaker 1: hopefully by the time it comes out, it'll be out
Speaker 1: there for people to read. They have a whole series
Speaker 1: of papers about how different way that you break the
Speaker 1: system produce different things that look like depression or anxiety. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, if you turn down the errors on all
Speaker 1: of your control systems so you get no error signal,
Speaker 1: you will look like someone who is extremely depressed. You
Speaker 1: won't do anything because you have no errors to correct.
Speaker 1: This looks ultimately like that kind of bedrock depression where
Speaker 1: that person doesn't move. If you increase the sensitivity on
Speaker 1: all of your control systems so you're getting super high
Speaker 1: errors all the time, now you start to look like
Speaker 1: someone who's manic because you're rushing around all the time
Speaker 1: trying to correct your errors, and you're feeling great about
Speaker 1: it because you're always corrected, and then they pop up
Speaker 1: againting and correct them again. So you're playing whack a
Speaker 1: mole and it feels wonderful. There's like ten other ways
Speaker 1: that you can break the system. But it starts to
Speaker 1: lead you to think about, like, Okay, when people feel
Speaker 1: bad or feel really good, like what is going on underneath?
Speaker 1: Like not at necessarily the level of like chemicals, which
Speaker 1: is I think has been a real dead end for us.
Speaker 1: Like what's the software that's running on the mind that
Speaker 1: could possibly produce this pattern of results?
Speaker 3: Obviously at the end of the day, the brain is
Speaker 3: firing off electrical signals and chemicals. Is your belief that
Speaker 3: that software is Ultimately that's how it does what it does, right,
Speaker 3: is through those things.
Speaker 1: Yes, So like often when I tell you about this,
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, okay, so you think all psychology is
Speaker 1: just neuroscience, And I'm like, no, ultimately it does have
Speaker 1: to work on the machinery of neuroscience, right. But this
Speaker 1: is just like saying, if you want to understand how
Speaker 1: a subway system works, you're not going to talk in
Speaker 1: terms of like atoms of like carbon and oxygen moving around.
Speaker 1: You're going to talk in terms of there's trains and
Speaker 1: stations andassengers, and all those things are made up of
Speaker 1: smaller things. Yeah, and whatever I say about a train
Speaker 1: has to be possible at the level of the elementary particles,
Speaker 1: but that it makes no sense to explain it in
Speaker 1: terms of like, oh, a massive carbon is moving. What
Speaker 1: you want to say is the train is arriving in
Speaker 1: the station. So there's different levels of analysis that are
Speaker 1: useful for describing things that are happening in the system.
Speaker 1: The train and station and passenger level is the one
Speaker 1: that we're trying to get to. In psychology, got it.
Speaker 3: When we talk about happiness set points, sometimes people just
Speaker 3: take that as like, well, this is just where I am.
Speaker 3: I'm fixed, right. We do know that if we follow
Speaker 3: your theory, it's possible that you're not at your actual
Speaker 3: set point of happiness. You're at the point that you're
Speaker 3: at because of these errors and the control system, and
Speaker 3: we can do things to fix that. And so like
Speaker 3: I can look at myself and be like, Okay, twenty
Speaker 3: four I was a homeless heroin addict, which I'm going
Speaker 3: to just make a grand interpretation here and say I
Speaker 3: wasn't doing so well heading in of all that, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think I can look back and go, Okay, there
Speaker 3: was depression happening in all of that, and so I
Speaker 3: think that I've changed obviously from there to here, and
Speaker 3: then within that, I think there's this point where things
Speaker 3: get tricky. And this gets back to kind of some
Speaker 3: of what we talked about with your Skull full of Poison.
Speaker 3: Let's just say that I've got my control systems kind
Speaker 3: of working fairly well, and I'm a six. If I
Speaker 3: keep thinking I have to be an eight, I might
Speaker 3: be then turning myself into a four.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: Right, from everything that we've talked about and from your
Speaker 3: own experience with this, how do you think about this
Speaker 3: in navigating your own internal world?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I guess one thing to say is that,
Speaker 1: like consistency over time is in itself like not necessarily
Speaker 1: evidence of a control system. It's consistency against disruption. So
Speaker 1: if you put me in a cell for the rest
Speaker 1: of my life, I'd be pretty unhappy. And you could say, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I came back and checked you twenty years later,
Speaker 1: and you were a four. Four must be your set point.
Speaker 1: But actually to know that four is my set point,
Speaker 1: you have to put me in a cell versus like
Speaker 1: you know, I have to dive into a swimming pool
Speaker 1: full of gold coins. Like if I'm a four across
Speaker 1: every situation, it suggests something is trying to keep me
Speaker 1: at a four. So when you're in a situation like,
Speaker 1: situations can keep you at a four for a long
Speaker 1: time if they're really strong. These things can change over time,
Speaker 1: and we can see this in some of the systems
Speaker 1: that we understand a little bit better. For instance, if
Speaker 1: you take lithium as a psychoactive medication, which usually they
Speaker 1: do for bipolar for a lot of people, that causes
Speaker 1: them to gain weight. For some percentage they lose a
Speaker 1: lot of weight. On average, they gain weight, Which is
Speaker 1: also interesting that there's these paradoxical reactions. Right, we know
Speaker 1: that it is possible to change the set point of
Speaker 1: people's weight by like introducing foreign substances, So like the
Speaker 1: fact that works for one control system suggests it's possible
Speaker 1: for other ones that you can change these set points
Speaker 1: either by introducing chemicals that at the chemical level make
Speaker 1: things different, but you could probably also do it, you know,
Speaker 1: at the trains and stations and passengers level, to make
Speaker 1: things different. So I think this is what a lot
Speaker 1: of us are trying to do when we're trying to
Speaker 1: to live a more balanced life. Is like, Okay, this
Speaker 1: isn't going to be a matter of what substances. I mean,
Speaker 1: some of it might be a matter of what substances
Speaker 1: I put in my body and that change my set point.
Speaker 1: But like, what are the things that I might consistently
Speaker 1: do that could keep me artificially lower than I might
Speaker 1: otherwise be? Yeah, for me, some of these things are
Speaker 1: are obvious, Like, well, if I don't sleep enough, if
Speaker 1: I eat poorly, I'm going to be a consistently at
Speaker 1: a lower level.
Speaker 3: Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Speaker 3: Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
Speaker 3: didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
Speaker 3: it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
Speaker 3: harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
Speaker 3: I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
Speaker 3: free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
Speaker 3: hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
Speaker 3: break through.
Speaker 2: Them.
Speaker 3: If you're ready to take back control and start making
Speaker 3: lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed dot net
Speaker 3: slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today one
Speaker 3: you feed dot net slash ebook wonderful. Well, I think
Speaker 3: this is a good place for us to wrap up.
Speaker 3: You and I are going to continue in the post
Speaker 3: show conversation because we need to talk about eating frogs
Speaker 3: and the statement that demons are real, which seems like
Speaker 3: an odd statement from a I guess you wouldn't call
Speaker 3: yourself a rationalist, but a guy who's on that side
Speaker 3: of the spectrum. Listeners. If you'd like access to this
Speaker 3: post show conversation with Adam, as well as ad free
Speaker 3: episodes and to support this show, then go to oneufeed
Speaker 3: dot net slash join and become part of our community.
Speaker 3: We'd love to have you there. Adam, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: I've gotten so much pleasure out of reading your substack.
Speaker 3: We'll have links in the show notes to where people
Speaker 3: can get to it, and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
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