Speaker 1: The idea that someone's going to solve your problems for
Speaker 1: you is a way of thinking that would be acceptable
Speaker 1: for a child, but it's not a mature way of thinking,
Speaker 1: and it's never going to happen.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: 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 about 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. Thanks
Speaker 2: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Paul
Speaker 2: Bloom the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan, Professor of Psychology and
Speaker 2: cognitive Science at Yale University. Paul's research explores how children
Speaker 2: and adults understand the physical and social world, with special
Speaker 2: focus on morality, religion, fiction and art. Today, Paul and
Speaker 2: Eric discuss his newest book, Psych, The Story of the
Speaker 2: Human Mind.
Speaker 3: Hi Paul, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi Eric, Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. We're going
Speaker 3: to be discussing your book, which is called Psych, The
Speaker 3: Story of the Human Mind. But before we do, we'll start,
Speaker 3: like we always do, with a parable. And in the parable,
Speaker 3: there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 3: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 3: are always at battle. What is a good wolf which
Speaker 3: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 3: others a bad wolf which represents things like greed and
Speaker 3: hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about
Speaker 3: it for a second. They look up at their grandparent
Speaker 3: and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
Speaker 3: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 3: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 3: your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: So I hate parabols. They don't sound kind of sappy
Speaker 1: and silly, but I like this one. This isn't maybe
Speaker 1: the only parable I like because it captures something deep
Speaker 1: and fairly non intuitive, where a lot of people think
Speaker 1: the way they become a good person, a good kind person, loving, caring,
Speaker 1: reasonable is to just cry very hard. And the wisdom
Speaker 1: that the parable captures is that it's less direct than that.
Speaker 1: Often I think to become good, and you know, become
Speaker 1: good in any way you could imagine, it's not merely
Speaker 1: a matter of effort and wanting to do the right thing,
Speaker 1: matter matter of setting up your life in such a
Speaker 1: way that you feed the good part of yourself in
Speaker 1: some way. Take something as sort of specific as wanting
Speaker 1: to write a book. We were talking about this a
Speaker 1: little bit before. You don't just say I'm going to
Speaker 1: really try hard to write a book. You try to
Speaker 1: set up the circumstances so that you naturally have a
Speaker 1: schedule for doing it. You have expectations, you have plans,
Speaker 1: you have deadlines, you talk to people about it, you're
Speaker 1: thinking your way through, and some of it's setting up
Speaker 1: your world, but some of it's setting up yourself, reading
Speaker 1: the right thing, thinking about the right things, getting in
Speaker 1: the right space, and to be a loving father or mother, husband, wife, partner,
Speaker 1: and something like that. It's the same thing. You want
Speaker 1: to feed the good part of yourself and starve the
Speaker 1: bad part of yourself. And we could talk about this
Speaker 1: a little bit more, but I think one of the
Speaker 1: problems of everyday life is there's many people desperate to
Speaker 1: feed the bad parts of you, and so I like
Speaker 1: the parable this is the only one. So I'm very
Speaker 1: pleased that that's what you lead with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. Listener. As you're listening, what resonated
Speaker 3: with you in that. I think a lot of us
Speaker 3: have some ideas of things that we can do to
Speaker 3: feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to
Speaker 3: make it more likely that you do it. It can
Speaker 3: be really helpful to reflect right before you do that
Speaker 3: thing on why you want to do it. Our brains
Speaker 3: are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call
Speaker 3: reward value, basically, is this thing worth doing? And so
Speaker 3: when you're getting ready to do this thing that you
Speaker 3: want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on
Speaker 3: why actually helps to make the reward value on that
Speaker 3: higher and makes it more likely that you're going to
Speaker 3: do that. For example, if what you're trying to do
Speaker 3: is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it
Speaker 3: can be useful to remind yourself of why, For example,
Speaker 3: I want to exercise because it makes my mental and
Speaker 3: emotional health better today. If you'd like a step by
Speaker 3: step guide for how you can easily build new habits
Speaker 3: that feed your good Wolf, go to Goodwolf dot me,
Speaker 3: slash change and join the free masterclass. I want to
Speaker 3: move into talking about something that I got out of
Speaker 3: your book that I really loved. I never heard this
Speaker 3: phrase before, but I think it's part of why I
Speaker 3: like the parable. Actually, and you talk about an idea
Speaker 3: that you call motivational pluralism. And part of the reason
Speaker 3: that I like this parable so much is I think
Speaker 3: it normalizes the fact that we all have this competing
Speaker 3: soup of things going on inside of us, these values
Speaker 3: and these desires and these wants. And it's not so
Speaker 3: simple to be like, well, I'm just this way or
Speaker 3: I'm just that way. It's far more complicated than that.
Speaker 3: But I'd never heard anybody use a term to describe it.
Speaker 3: So talk to me a little bit about this idea
Speaker 3: of motivational pluralism and how you arrived there.
Speaker 1: So, motivational pluralism is a sort of fancy term for
Speaker 1: something which I think is true and also a bit
Speaker 1: of common sense, which as we have many different motivations
Speaker 1: or many things we want. And I know some people
Speaker 1: think all we want is pleasure. All we want is
Speaker 1: ultimately to get pleasure and avoid pain, and everything we
Speaker 1: do is for that service. But I think this is
Speaker 1: a terrible theory of human nature. Some people say we
Speaker 1: want meaning, some people say we want to be good people,
Speaker 1: and that's all true, but we want many things, and
Speaker 1: this makes things complicated. This is why it's a bit
Speaker 1: of a soup to use your terrumb because we have
Speaker 1: to do trade offs. I can't just try to maximize
Speaker 1: one thing. I want to be a good person. I
Speaker 1: want to have a good time. I want to have fun.
Speaker 1: I want to have a meaningful life. Maybe there's something
Speaker 1: spiritual going on here. Two and you have to make
Speaker 1: trade offs, and so being a good person is complicated.
Speaker 1: But I think that's a correct description of the situation
Speaker 1: that we're in.
Speaker 3: And so in that soup, it sounds like psychologists use
Speaker 3: a lot of different terms. They'll talk about values, they'll
Speaker 3: talk about desires, they'll talk about needs. In what ways
Speaker 3: are those things different or similar to you? And how
Speaker 3: important is it to start to tweeze those things apart.
Speaker 1: I think we have different motivations that could be meaningfully
Speaker 1: pulled apart. One way to think about is terms of timescale.
Speaker 1: So you know, if I have some m and ms
Speaker 1: in front of me, I'll scoop them up and pop
Speaker 1: into my mouth one by one and each time getting
Speaker 1: a little, you know, blast of pleasure from it, and
Speaker 1: then a second long But at the same time, I
Speaker 1: have two sons and I want to be a good
Speaker 1: father to them, and that's not a one second thing.
Speaker 1: That's the thing involving big life choices and plans and
Speaker 1: so on. So we have to navigate these differences. You
Speaker 1: could call the first thing a sort of short term
Speaker 1: pleasure avoiding pain, and the more long term thing if
Speaker 1: you call that values. And again there are trade offs.
Speaker 1: I also wouldn't want to be around somebody or I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to be somebody who only focused on very
Speaker 1: long term goals. There really is something about having an
Speaker 1: ice cream on a hot day. There's something to going
Speaker 1: outside when the sun is on your face and eating
Speaker 1: a delicious meal, having an ice drink with friends. Part
Speaker 1: of being a motivational pluralist is that I take pleasure seriously.
Speaker 1: I'm strongly opposed to people who think it's to be
Speaker 1: all and end all. I'm a post it on sort
Speaker 1: of moral grounds. I think that's actually a genuinely awful
Speaker 1: way to live your life. But I'm also a posting
Speaker 1: them on psychological grounds. I don't think that's how to
Speaker 1: mine works. I think you're getting life wrong. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, pleasure is important and avoiding pain is important,
Speaker 1: and I don't think somebody be fully human if they
Speaker 1: disregarded all of that. It just another sense in which
Speaker 1: I'm a pluralist.
Speaker 3: I'm a big believer in the philosophical idea of sort
Speaker 3: of a middle way, which is why motivational pluralism appeals
Speaker 3: to me so much, because I do think we want
Speaker 3: to strike a middle ground between those two things that
Speaker 3: you're describing. And it's also had me thinking a little
Speaker 3: bit about two terms that we often use sometimes simultaneously.
Speaker 3: I think they're different, but you find them thrown together
Speaker 3: in a sentence, which is meaning and fulfillment, right, And
Speaker 3: I was reflecting a little bit and I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, I think meaning is probably largely derived from
Speaker 3: a values based longer term perspective and fulfillment is probably
Speaker 3: also derived, maybe a little bit more from the pleasure,
Speaker 3: and that if you actually want both of those things,
Speaker 3: you kind of have to find the ground that you're describing,
Speaker 3: which is you have those things in some degree of balance.
Speaker 1: And people established the balance in different ways. I'm really
Speaker 1: unwilling to give life advice here. I have set up
Speaker 1: my own balance which satisfies me. It has a bit
Speaker 1: of both. Other people put it on the scale differently.
Speaker 1: Some people, I think, would love nothing more than a
Speaker 1: month long vacation sitting at the beach where they just
Speaker 1: relax and they read novels and they just swim and
Speaker 1: it's nice and eat good food and they drink good
Speaker 1: drink and maybe with a special somebody, and that's just
Speaker 1: wonderful for them. For me, I could do that for
Speaker 1: about a week and then I go bananas and I
Speaker 1: really want a long term project. It has some difficulty,
Speaker 1: so I bring my laptop when I go on vacation,
Speaker 1: and while my partner's sleeping, I got up early in
Speaker 1: the morning and I tried it right for an hour
Speaker 1: or two. And it's not a pleasure as it would
Speaker 1: be to just, you know, to just kind of se
Speaker 1: and feel, you know, have the son on my face,
Speaker 1: or read a novel, but it's satisfying, gives me fulfillment
Speaker 1: in that sense. But you know, your mileage may very
Speaker 1: I know people who can't go a day on vacation
Speaker 1: their workaholics in the best sense, and that everything they
Speaker 1: do is sort of establishing flow and effort and difficulty.
Speaker 1: I go for the middle ground, as you're calling it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you're right, though. I mean, this is
Speaker 3: a hugely personal endeavor, which is both wonderful and as
Speaker 3: the existentialists would say, also sort of terrifying. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: no one can give you the right answer. You sort
Speaker 3: of have to feel your way into it for yourself.
Speaker 1: There's such an appetite for somebody to give you the
Speaker 1: right answer. There's so many gurus online, particularly these days,
Speaker 1: and you know, I could name like ten of them,
Speaker 1: and you can name ten of them. That people they
Speaker 1: really want to hear from somebody this is how to
Speaker 1: live your life. And people can give advice. There's such
Speaker 1: a thing as constructive advice. There's such a thing as
Speaker 1: role models that will help you do things better. Could
Speaker 1: be people, could be books. I'm a big fan of
Speaker 1: chick sent me high book on Flow, which really changed
Speaker 1: how we think about things. There's Victor Frankel's book Man
Speaker 1: Search for Meaning. This could help you. But the idea
Speaker 1: that someone's going to solve your problems for you is
Speaker 1: a way of thinking that would be acceptable for a child,
Speaker 1: But it's not a mature way of thinking, and it's
Speaker 1: never going to happen exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, it would be nice if you could be
Speaker 3: given the answers, but it just doesn't tend to work
Speaker 3: that way you talk about it. One of your favorite
Speaker 3: studies of all time in psychology is a nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: seven paper by Edward Thorndike. You use this when you're
Speaker 3: sort of talking about the fact that we have multiple motivations.
Speaker 3: But I found this, and I think it's probably the
Speaker 3: same reason you enjoy it so much, as it's kind
Speaker 3: of humorous and yet it sort of lays out why
Speaker 3: we're not motivated by one sort of thing. Can you
Speaker 3: tell us about that paper.
Speaker 1: It's a great little study. It was then by Thorndyke,
Speaker 1: who's a famous behaviorist, but it's not written as if
Speaker 1: it was by a behavioris at all. If you ever
Speaker 1: see a picture of him you will see a very
Speaker 1: sort of form man in a three piece suit with
Speaker 1: a lot of facial hair, looking extremely stern. But this
Speaker 1: was a goofy fun study. He wanted to know what
Speaker 1: motivates people, and one way to know is you ask
Speaker 1: them what they'll pay to get and what they'll pay
Speaker 1: to avoid, and that will give you a mirror into
Speaker 1: how much they care about things. So he gave people
Speaker 1: a long questionnaire and the question is hilarious and some
Speaker 1: of the answers make sense. So people will pay a
Speaker 1: lot not to have their toe chopped off. They would
Speaker 1: pay a lot not to go deaf. They will pay
Speaker 1: a lot not to be trapped in a small house
Speaker 1: for a year, and this sort of fits the sort
Speaker 1: of standard pleasure pain thing. But to also pay a
Speaker 1: lot not to have to spit on a picture of
Speaker 1: their mother. They'll pay a lot not to have to
Speaker 1: walk through Times Square without a hat. This has done
Speaker 1: a long time, but it looks like an idiot we've
Speaker 1: got at They'll pay a lot to lose the idea
Speaker 1: of life after death. They'll pay a lot for the
Speaker 1: protection and happiness of people around them. And one of
Speaker 1: my favorite contrasts is Thorndyke ask people how much would
Speaker 1: I have to pay you to pull out one of
Speaker 1: your front teeth with parapliers? You say, oh my god,
Speaker 1: people say you think of the answer. Yeah, but people say, oh,
Speaker 1: a lot of money, asks us horrible. And then they
Speaker 1: asked how much would I have to pay you to
Speaker 1: strangle a cat? And people ask for more for the
Speaker 1: second one, And that says something about people. It says that,
Speaker 1: however horrible physical pain and disfigurement is, it's even more
Speaker 1: horrible to kill an innocent cat. And this says something about,
Speaker 1: back to motivational pluralism, how important being good is to us.
Speaker 1: It's not just escaping from pain, it's also being a
Speaker 1: good person.
Speaker 3: When you were saying that about spitting on the picture
Speaker 3: of your mother, it made me think of something you
Speaker 3: shared in your substack just in the last couple days
Speaker 3: about opening scene from The Sopranos or it may not
Speaker 3: be the opening scene, but it's in the first couple
Speaker 3: episodes where Tony is going to see his therapist. But
Speaker 3: it made me think more about how Tony the thing
Speaker 3: that makes him the most angry and that gets him
Speaker 3: walking out of therapy sessions early on are not questions
Speaker 3: about him as a mobster. They're about questions about him
Speaker 3: being angry at his mother. His ability to admit that
Speaker 3: he's angry at his mother seems so foundationally against who
Speaker 3: he is that it pisses him off. And his mother
Speaker 3: in the series is just pretty unilaterally kind of an
Speaker 3: awful person. So I just think that's an interesting insight
Speaker 3: into that. Not spit on the picture of your mother,
Speaker 3: how that show sort of shows that with Tony just
Speaker 3: came to mind as I was thinking about mothers.
Speaker 1: It really is. There's another scene where Dony's talking to
Speaker 1: psychiatrists who's figured out he's a mobster, and he's saying
Speaker 1: that people are behaving horribly. There's terrible, terrible behavior. We
Speaker 1: used to be so much more decent, And she's listening
Speaker 1: to them, thinking he's talking about all the murders he's
Speaker 1: done and so on, but it's very clear he's talking
Speaker 1: about people who are rats, who betray the cause, who
Speaker 1: betray the family, who talk to the cops, who squeal
Speaker 1: on her fellow mobsters, and there's genuine moral outrage. It's
Speaker 1: interesting we think of bad people, and Tony is a
Speaker 1: very bad person. As people without souls without conscience. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, there are people with the same
Speaker 1: highly tuned morality that we have, it just has tuned
Speaker 1: in a different direction. Nobody thinks of themselves as villains.
Speaker 1: We all think of ourselves as good people doing good things,
Speaker 1: and this is kind of what makes moral disagreement and
Speaker 1: real political clashes so difficult. If it was just a
Speaker 1: good guys versus a psychopaths, things to be a lot simpler.
Speaker 1: But it's one team of people who see themselves as
Speaker 1: good guys against another team who see themselves exactly the
Speaker 1: same way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There was some other TV show I was watching recently
Speaker 3: and the character was describing why he loved Westerns, and
Speaker 3: he was like, because it was easy to know who
Speaker 3: the good guys were. You just looked for the white hats,
Speaker 3: even if you weren't sure, even if their behavior, you
Speaker 3: just looked for the white hats and that was it.
Speaker 3: You were done having to figure it out. And of
Speaker 3: course real life is far more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There were some children's series that had the League
Speaker 1: of Evil Villains, and you know, of all the things
Speaker 1: about it, that was the most unrealistic because evil villains
Speaker 1: do not think of themselves as evil villains. Everybody thinks
Speaker 1: of themselves as the good guys.
Speaker 3: In the book, you sort of talk about ways of
Speaker 3: thinking about how happy we are, and you describe sort
Speaker 3: of two ways that psychologists tend to do this. One
Speaker 3: is they may just ask you randomly throughout the day
Speaker 3: you know how happy or how satisfied you are, and
Speaker 3: the idea is that the more moments you report that
Speaker 3: it's good, you sort of add all those up in
Speaker 3: the higher the total, the happier you are. The other
Speaker 3: approach seems to be you ask people more for overall
Speaker 3: all satisfaction levels to their life, and you talk about
Speaker 3: how these two things are correlated, but they're not exactly
Speaker 3: the same. Do I have that right so far?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Have it exactly right? Okay? This is mostly the
Speaker 1: work of Danny Kahneman, the great psychologist of rationality and reason,
Speaker 1: who sadly passed away just a few weeks ago. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he drew this sustinction.
Speaker 3: And so I was thinking about this question a little
Speaker 3: bit because I am somebody who I've characterized it different
Speaker 3: ways over the years. I at one point would have
Speaker 3: characterized it as I have depression, and maybe I did
Speaker 3: at certain points. Sometimes I would just characterize it as
Speaker 3: a generally melancholic temperament. Other Times I might just say
Speaker 3: it's sort of a general tendency towards a low mood.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about those two methods, and it
Speaker 3: occurred to me that the method where you asked me
Speaker 3: about my overall level of happiness or satisfaction is probably
Speaker 3: a better measuring tool for me, because if you ask
Speaker 3: me and I reflect on my life, I will tell
Speaker 3: you it's pretty dark good, but I'm not sure moment
Speaker 3: to moment I would report that as often. And I'm
Speaker 3: just kind of curious for your thoughts on whether you've
Speaker 3: thought about in certain cases, for certain people, maybe just
Speaker 3: picking one of those is the better model for them
Speaker 3: instead of asking which one is correct, because nobody can
Speaker 3: really seem to agree which is correct. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: looking at myself, I'm like, I think this one is
Speaker 3: going to lead me to maybe the answer that I want,
Speaker 3: which is one of being more satisfied.
Speaker 1: Well, this gets me back to being a pluralist, where
Speaker 1: the only answer I could give to be consistent is
Speaker 1: both right and in some way we make choices. I
Speaker 1: think in some way also, you might want to entirely
Speaker 1: reject happiness to at least some extent. So I might
Speaker 1: choose to do something difficult and unpleasant that doesn't make
Speaker 1: me happy from moment to moment, and maybe doesn't even
Speaker 1: make me happy overall. But I think I'm living a
Speaker 1: good life. I'm doing the right thing, I'm helping out others,
Speaker 1: I'm being spiritual, I'm having a life of meaning. Suppose
Speaker 1: you had to choose. Actually, good friend Dan Gilbert, who's
Speaker 1: a real happiness madeen at Harvard, and he's very much
Speaker 1: into the moment by moment. He thinks people are deluding
Speaker 1: themselves if they say talking about considering your life as
Speaker 1: a whole. So output this to you. Suppose you had
Speaker 1: to choose life one is every minute is just delightful.
Speaker 1: You're just happy, cheerful, having a great time. But whenever
Speaker 1: you think about it, maybe think about it for a
Speaker 1: minute a day, you think, oh, my life is empty,
Speaker 1: my life is terrible. But other ninety nine percent of
Speaker 1: times you're filled with delight versus your life is miserable.
Speaker 1: You're just sad at every moment. But if we're in
Speaker 1: that five minutes, you look back and say, I'm living
Speaker 1: the best possible life. This is a great, significant, important life,
Speaker 1: Which would you choose?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that I would probably choose the former,
Speaker 3: probably mean too yeah, I mean, if I'm just being
Speaker 3: honest about my makeup, I would definitely say the former.
Speaker 1: So those are the trade offs. Now I made it
Speaker 1: very extreme. Yes, some people you know would choose a
Speaker 1: life of momentary happiness regardless of how bad it was otherwise,
Speaker 1: then you know there's a balance to be struck. I
Speaker 1: think we do have to make these choices from time
Speaker 1: to time. We have to figure out whether we're engage
Speaker 1: in something which will make us happy for the moment,
Speaker 1: even though later on we'll say that wasn't really the
Speaker 1: best life for me to be living, or conversely, to
Speaker 1: give up things that would give us happiness, even if
Speaker 1: later on we say that was the right thing. And
Speaker 1: those are just a trade offs, and there's no ready
Speaker 1: made answer to which one to go for.
Speaker 3: So I agree with you that happiness is not always
Speaker 3: the right metric. I wanted to stay with it for
Speaker 3: a moment or two, though I think it's in the book.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I get confused when I prepare for a guest
Speaker 3: because I listen to them on podcasts and I read
Speaker 3: your sub stack anyway. Recently, I've heard you talk about
Speaker 3: this idea, why can't we just decide to be happy?
Speaker 3: We can choose to think about an elephant and think
Speaker 3: about an elephant. Why can't we just choose to be happy?
Speaker 3: And your reason is that because happiness is a way
Speaker 3: of evaluating whether our life is going well and what
Speaker 3: going well means. It could be a variety of different things,
Speaker 3: but that's kind of the reason is because it's sort
Speaker 3: of like a gauge. Yeah, do I have that kind
Speaker 3: of right?
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, And that's in the book. I think
Speaker 1: I got the insight this way of thinking about it
Speaker 1: from Stephen Pinker. And what Pinker points out is that
Speaker 1: happiness isn't a biological accident. It's not some sort of
Speaker 1: weird add on. It's actually part of the motivational system
Speaker 1: that our brains have evolved, and it's for the most
Speaker 1: part in an indicator, like you say, of how things
Speaker 1: are going. We try to tweak it and understandably so
Speaker 1: we want to be happy. The best way to become
Speaker 1: happy is to make your life better so that the
Speaker 1: happiness is a correct indicator. We try to use drugs
Speaker 1: and use all sorts of techniques to kind of get
Speaker 1: around it. Sometimes I'm thinking of it like if you
Speaker 1: think of happiness as like a gas gauge that says
Speaker 1: how much fuel you have to go on, it would
Speaker 1: make you a lot happier to stick on a little
Speaker 1: sticker that always said full, But it wouldn't be very
Speaker 1: very smart because it wouldn't be accurately tracking. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: help you get along with life. And I think similarly,
Speaker 1: sadness isn't necessarily a problem, though it can be. I
Speaker 1: could put a side issues of depression, but being sad
Speaker 1: could be extremely important information. It says things are not
Speaker 1: going well, and act do something different, do something different,
Speaker 1: or at least stop doing what you're doing now. Same
Speaker 1: with anxiety. Anxiety doesn't feel good for the most part,
Speaker 1: but it's a useful indicator that there's something to be
Speaker 1: anxious about, something to attend to, something you should steal
Speaker 1: away your consciousness from other things. And this is a
Speaker 1: different perspective on negative emotions than many people have, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a more biologically grounded one to see
Speaker 1: these as accurate reflections of how things are and useful
Speaker 1: tools for making your way through the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: the most obvious example is pain. Nobody likes pain, but
Speaker 1: pain is a signal you have injured yourself, you are
Speaker 1: in an uncomfortable position, you have to take your weight off,
Speaker 1: you have to get medical care without pain. And there
Speaker 1: are people unfortunate, people who are born photopacy feel pain.
Speaker 1: Life is far more difficult, yeap.
Speaker 3: The thing about that idea, and this is one I've
Speaker 3: also wrestled with a lot myself, is that makes sense
Speaker 3: if the ways in which life would go well were
Speaker 3: maybe easier to understand. I mean, there's the classic example
Speaker 3: of the evolutionary mismatches that we get. So we get
Speaker 3: these signals that are driven by our evolutionary past or
Speaker 3: wiring that are completely out of sync with the modern world.
Speaker 3: And it seems to me that, particularly as culture has
Speaker 3: begun to play a larger role in our evaluation of
Speaker 3: our own happiness, that I wonder in what cases those
Speaker 3: signals are leading us astray.
Speaker 1: That's fair enough sometimes because of how we're constituted, because
Speaker 1: our evolutionary history, our moods or feelings or emotions make sense,
Speaker 1: but they're actually in fact miscalibrated to the world we're in.
Speaker 1: Anger is a good case of this. So, in a
Speaker 1: small community of people where we're always in constant interaction,
Speaker 1: getting angry at a small slight there's a logic to
Speaker 1: it because it suggests somebody is dominating you. You better move,
Speaker 1: you better respond, or else. This is going to get
Speaker 1: worse and worse and worse. But now we have the
Speaker 1: same emotion and I'm on Twitter and somebody says something
Speaker 1: about me and I get furious. Well, it's unreasonable. It's
Speaker 1: just some schmoders. There's billions of people out there. Just
Speaker 1: block them and be done with it, And it doesn't
Speaker 1: quite work that way. We have these stone age minds.
Speaker 1: So sometimes it's fair enough, that's a fair correction. Sometimes
Speaker 1: our moods, our feelings, our emotions are not accurate indicators
Speaker 1: of how it's rational for us to respond to the
Speaker 1: world we're living in.
Speaker 3: Now, I want to pause for a quick good wolf reminder.
Speaker 3: This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
Speaker 3: see people making. And that's really that we don't think
Speaker 3: about these new habits that we want want to add
Speaker 3: in the context of our entire life. Right, habits don't
Speaker 3: happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the
Speaker 3: life that we have. So when we just keep adding
Speaker 3: I should do this, I should do that, I should
Speaker 3: do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought
Speaker 3: about what we're not going to do in order to
Speaker 3: make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to
Speaker 3: think about where is this going to fit and what
Speaker 3: in my life might I need to remove. If you
Speaker 3: want to step by step guide for how you can
Speaker 3: easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go
Speaker 3: to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join the
Speaker 3: free masterclass. And would we say that mental illness and
Speaker 3: let's set aside more serious mental illness like schizophrenia, let's
Speaker 3: talk about anxiety and depression. Would it be safe to
Speaker 3: say something along the lines of those are examples where
Speaker 3: our signals are increasingly disconnected from reality, meaning that we're
Speaker 3: picking up something that may not actually be there.
Speaker 1: So I think you're onto something. Just put aside something schizophrenia, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is sort of a different our Parkinson's or something
Speaker 1: like that. And let's think of a depression and anxiety.
Speaker 1: So those are the major illnesses people suffer from. This
Speaker 1: is what they go to therapy for. This is what
Speaker 1: they have medication for it can be as simple as
Speaker 1: they're just the way we respond to or we haven't
Speaker 1: evolved in because some people aren't depressed, some people aren't anxious.
Speaker 1: So we have to figure out why is one person
Speaker 1: you know, so sad they can't get out of bed,
Speaker 1: or so anxious they're afraid to leave the house, and
Speaker 1: another person is living a full, normal life. And so
Speaker 1: we get these individual differences. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I think that the key insight that we're getting at
Speaker 1: here is that these things are a matter of degree,
Speaker 1: which is, it makes perfect sense to be sad at
Speaker 1: certain things like a social slight or a loss of
Speaker 1: something you had wanted. It makes perfect sense to be
Speaker 1: anxious about something like anything from climate change to being
Speaker 1: mugged on the street to having you know your partner
Speaker 1: angry at you. It drifts to mental illness not as
Speaker 1: a difference of kind, but as a difference of degree. Basically,
Speaker 1: depression isn't sadness. Depression is too much sadness. Anxiety disorders
Speaker 1: like panic attacks and the like are too much anxiety,
Speaker 1: and so there's a complicated titration process. In some way,
Speaker 1: something like cancer is simple, and in fact, this is
Speaker 1: how we made so much progress on it, which is
Speaker 1: you don't want any cancer. You want to wipe out
Speaker 1: whatever cancer you have in your mindy, And so there's
Speaker 1: medical project is clear and has been actually pretty successful
Speaker 1: over the last fifty years. But you don't want to
Speaker 1: eradicate sadness. You don't want to eradicate anxiety. So it's
Speaker 1: a much more complicated problem.
Speaker 3: Back to talking about depression. I've looked at it two
Speaker 3: different ways over the course of my life and taken
Speaker 3: two different strategies, and I would say that my answer
Speaker 3: now is that there's a time for each of them.
Speaker 3: But one strategy is more based on kind of what
Speaker 3: we've described here, which is that I'm not feeling good.
Speaker 3: Thus something must be off in my life, whether it
Speaker 3: be an internal thing by the way I'm looking at
Speaker 3: a situation, or it's an external thing I'm in a
Speaker 3: bad job, a bad relationship, whatever it is, there's something
Speaker 3: that needs fixed, and I'm going to interpret the signal
Speaker 3: in that way. And then there have been other times
Speaker 3: that I have decided to treat it more like the
Speaker 3: analogy I use is like the emotional flu, meaning that
Speaker 3: when I get the flu, I just go eh, I'm
Speaker 3: not going to figure out where I got this virus from.
Speaker 3: There's no real point. Just get some rest, take care
Speaker 3: of myself the best I know how. Don't listen to
Speaker 3: much my brain tells me right now, because it's just
Speaker 3: going to be in a negative mood and just wait
Speaker 3: for it to pass. And I have found wisdom really
Speaker 3: in both of those approaches. At times, there are times
Speaker 3: that what I would describe as depression or low mood
Speaker 3: seems to be almost entirely physiological, as in, like I
Speaker 3: can't figure out any mental things that I'm thinking that
Speaker 3: are really different, and I can't figure out anything in
Speaker 3: my life it's really wrong. It's just I feel kind
Speaker 3: of uh. And in those times, this sort of emotional
Speaker 3: flu metaphor turns out to be kind of helpful for me.
Speaker 3: And yet at the same time, like you've said, I
Speaker 3: also don't want to rely on that too much because
Speaker 3: there may be actual useful signals in there. The good
Speaker 3: news for me is that depression is so clearly different
Speaker 3: for me than sadness or grief. It's a deadening, it's
Speaker 3: an almost nothing is occurring inside versus I don't know
Speaker 3: which writer said it. It's almost the difference between caring
Speaker 3: too much about things or not caring about anything at all. Right,
Speaker 3: depressions than not caring about anything at all. But I'm
Speaker 3: just kind of curious what your response is to that.
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I think a lot depends on
Speaker 1: the intensity of something and how long it lasts and
Speaker 1: its effect on your life. But I think there's a
Speaker 1: gray wisdom to sometimes things are going wrong and you say,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna not focus on it. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to live my life and just ignore this, not put
Speaker 1: too much energy thinking about it, which could have its
Speaker 1: own problems, and see what happens, and if it doesn't
Speaker 1: go away, it could be depression, could be answer I
Speaker 1: could be problems, sleeping, could be everything from you know,
Speaker 1: physical exhaustion of some sort. And then if it lasts
Speaker 1: long enough, then you kind of have to investigate what's
Speaker 1: going on. And sometimes it's the world and sometimes it isn't.
Speaker 1: It was in a really dark mood a few nights ago,
Speaker 1: and I'm talking to my wife about it, and I'm saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this is in my life, and this is in my life,
Speaker 1: and she said to me, look, those things were in
Speaker 1: your life yesterday, and you were pretty cheerful and and
Speaker 1: she said to me, you know what I think. I
Speaker 1: think you got a bad linye. And I say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did get a really bad nice sleep. Yeah, get
Speaker 1: a good, nice sleep. If you're a kid, you know,
Speaker 1: if you've ever had a kid, or you ever wore
Speaker 1: a kid, you're probably hungry, a little crabby, and you
Speaker 1: do have a snack. Maybe if you're an adult, sometimes
Speaker 1: you need a snack. So yeah, some things don't have
Speaker 1: deep causes. Some things are superficial, and it's worth pulling
Speaker 1: them apart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the classic line that I learned early in recovery.
Speaker 3: Don't let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired,
Speaker 3: because those things will make you think that you want
Speaker 3: a drink. In your consciousness that will arise as I
Speaker 3: need a drink. Yeah, that's not actually what it is.
Speaker 3: There may be something going on, but it might be
Speaker 3: as simple as like you said, I'm hungry, I didn't
Speaker 3: get enough sleep last night. Whatever those things are.
Speaker 1: It's been a long time since I've been having the
Speaker 1: primary caretaker of a baby. But there's a list you
Speaker 1: go through when the kid's really upset. You know, it's hungry,
Speaker 1: is he tired, is he too cold? Is he too warm?
Speaker 1: Does he need to be held in someone? And I
Speaker 1: think to some extent we should apply to us as adults,
Speaker 1: both to people into ourselves.
Speaker 3: Totally makes a lot of sense. So I would like
Speaker 3: to talk for a minute. You start the book off
Speaker 3: by talking about two of the major psychological approaches that
Speaker 3: most of us will have heard something about, and the
Speaker 3: first being Freud and then the second being behaviorism. And
Speaker 3: I'm wondering if you could just, in a couple sentences,
Speaker 3: give us what each of those roughly are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's opposite as can be. If you've heard
Speaker 1: of one psychologist, it's probably Freud. And Freud proposed this
Speaker 1: very complex theory of the mind, involving eternal dynamics, involving
Speaker 1: the unconscious, involving unconscious mechanim like repression and defense mechanisms,
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff revolving around anxieties, around sex. And
Speaker 1: it's incredibly baroke and complicated theory, and it was so
Speaker 1: successful that we carry a lot of it in our
Speaker 1: heads right now. So you know, if you say he
Speaker 1: has an anal personality, that's Freud. If you say, look,
Speaker 1: somebody says to their partner, look, I'm not your other.
Speaker 1: That's Freud. Doctor Malfie talking to the soprano is Freud.
Speaker 1: Now in some way, partially as a reaction to this,
Speaker 1: you get behaviorism associated with BF. Skinner and B. Skin
Speaker 1: was a total opposite. He said, it's not that the
Speaker 1: mind is so complicated and rich with an unconscious dynamics
Speaker 1: and so on. Rather it's much simpler in that, in fact,
Speaker 1: there's no mind at all. We could explain all of
Speaker 1: human behavior using simple behavior as principles that work well
Speaker 1: for studying rats and pigeons. If you do something, it's
Speaker 1: because you were reinforced for doing in the past. If
Speaker 1: something bothers you, it's because it has a bad association
Speaker 1: with something, dreams, emotions, consciousness, experiences. For Skinner, it was
Speaker 1: all nonsense. Now I talk about these two figures, I
Speaker 1: got to say, I think just about every specific thing
Speaker 1: Freud said was wrong, edible, complex, penis, envy is, his
Speaker 1: theory of psychosexual development all wrong. But his main idea
Speaker 1: was right. His main idea that there's an unconscious mind,
Speaker 1: that it influences us in ways we don't know, has
Speaker 1: become part of bread and butter psychology. It's just accepted
Speaker 1: because it's true. Skinner is maybe the opposite. A lot
Speaker 1: of the insights of Skinner actually have turned out to
Speaker 1: be on a practical level, good for things like training
Speaker 1: animals or certain sorts of treatments of people with mental disorders.
Speaker 1: Observations he made about reinforcement and so on it seemed
Speaker 1: to be true. His big idea was totally wrong. His
Speaker 1: idea that humans are like rats, that you could study
Speaker 1: human behaviorout appeal to the mind is just I think
Speaker 1: the biggest mistake psychology has ever made, and we're just
Speaker 1: slowly still dragging ourselves out of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a behaviorist I don't remember which one that
Speaker 3: said it. It somewhere in your book where the behavior is
Speaker 3: basically claimed, like, you know, give me any human and
Speaker 3: I could make them be a banker, a lawyer, a beggar,
Speaker 3: a thief, whatever it is. I could turn anybody into
Speaker 3: anything simply by what I reinforce, which is wrong on
Speaker 3: all sorts of different levels.
Speaker 1: This is John Watson's famous boast. It's from the Jesuits
Speaker 1: who said something about raising kids that he modified it
Speaker 1: for behaviorism. But what Watson would say also is the
Speaker 1: difference between how you behave as a person, and a
Speaker 1: dog behaves and a rap behaves just a matter of
Speaker 1: different environmental contingencies. And if that seems ridiculous to you,
Speaker 1: it's because it is ridiculous. There's a human nature. You
Speaker 1: have capacities that a dog will never have, and to
Speaker 1: some extented dog has capacities you will never have. But
Speaker 1: we have a nature to us, a nature that compels
Speaker 1: us to be social, to give us the power for
Speaker 1: abstract font, to give us capacities like language and behaviors.
Speaker 1: Have ignored all of that, And so the revolution that
Speaker 1: displaced behaviorism was largely led by Noam Chomsky, the famous
Speaker 1: linguist who's still around and in his nineties doing podcasts
Speaker 1: and Everything and the Making Trouble. Chomsky pointed out the
Speaker 1: poverty of Skinner's conception in her mind and argued, among
Speaker 1: other things, not only do we have rich mental capacities,
Speaker 1: but a lot of these are inborn part of our nature.
Speaker 1: And while some of Chomsky's specific claims have proven wrong,
Speaker 1: I think the main idea that there is a human nature,
Speaker 1: that we are born with powerful mental abilities that other
Speaker 1: creatures don't have, is something which is also part of
Speaker 1: bread and butter psychology. Is also broadly accepted because it's true.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the other thing that behaviorism is missing,
Speaker 3: in addition to the fact that we're not like a rat,
Speaker 3: is that I'm not exactly like you either.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: That's the sort of idea. Are we a blank slate
Speaker 3: or not? Right? And anybody who's had little children can
Speaker 3: see pretty clearly like, no, we kind of come with
Speaker 3: some proclivities, you know, we come different than each other.
Speaker 3: And you can see that in little children right away,
Speaker 3: the ways that they're different from each other before they've
Speaker 3: been conditioned.
Speaker 1: I think that there are sort of two separate claims here.
Speaker 1: One is about a different in humans and other creatures,
Speaker 1: which I think is powerful and part of our nature.
Speaker 1: But the one, as you're saying, is difference to beeting
Speaker 1: different people, and this falls into Rubrica behavioral genetics. There's
Speaker 1: been a lot of interest in the question of why
Speaker 1: are people different. You know, I look around the world
Speaker 1: and some people are quicker on your feet than others.
Speaker 1: Some people are extroverts, some people are aggressive, some shy.
Speaker 1: Some people are good at picking up languages and have
Speaker 1: great spatial skills and are terrible at music. Others are
Speaker 1: the opposite, and where do all these differences come from?
Speaker 1: And Skinner would say, you know, it's just it's how
Speaker 1: they were raised, how they were reinforced their environment. There's
Speaker 1: so much evidence now that it's not true, and there's
Speaker 1: so much evidence that a lot of the difference, and
Speaker 1: some say, let's roughly say fifty percent of the variation
Speaker 1: between people on every personality trait you could think of,
Speaker 1: is carried by the gens. What just means is, if
Speaker 1: I want to get a good guess about what kind
Speaker 1: of person you are, I could learn a lot from
Speaker 1: looking at your biological mother and biological father, even if
Speaker 1: they didn't raise you. If they were schizophrenic, there's a
Speaker 1: better average chance that you'd be schizophrenic. If they were
Speaker 1: gifted that music better an average chance you'd be gifted
Speaker 1: at music. Highly religious, that too, iq pnality, extraversion, introversion,
Speaker 1: and so this is another attack on the Scnarian conception
Speaker 1: that it's not just a human nature, but we have
Speaker 1: individual natures that in some way are of course malleable.
Speaker 1: I think early experience and later on choice can largely
Speaker 1: shape your destiny, but in some sense aren't constrained by
Speaker 1: your gams. Just as I am not going to be
Speaker 1: the world heavyweight boxing champion because I just don't have
Speaker 1: the body for it. I'm not going to be a
Speaker 1: mathematical genius. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think this idea is really interesting because it's not
Speaker 3: one that people often like to say that, you know,
Speaker 3: some amount of what we are is as a result
Speaker 3: of our genes. Right, And there's been you know, psychological
Speaker 3: theories around growth mindset. You know what I find interesting
Speaker 3: about that is that people take anything too far. Yes,
Speaker 3: my beliefs in how much better I can get it something,
Speaker 3: or whether I'm good or not good at something absolutely
Speaker 3: influence it. And as you said, like I'm not going
Speaker 3: to be an NBA basketball player, it doesn't matter if
Speaker 3: I devoted every second of the rest of my life
Speaker 3: to it, even if I had started that when I
Speaker 3: was eighteen. Now that's not to say that I couldn't
Speaker 3: have become a damn good basketball player. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: matter of degree, and these things do play a role.
Speaker 3: I mean, unfortunately, you could look at my parents and
Speaker 3: I have both the double whammy of the fact that
Speaker 3: I have their genes and they raised me, right, But
Speaker 3: you could look at them and you could see some
Speaker 3: of where I come from right, you know, depression, mental
Speaker 3: illness in the family. Some of that I come by again,
Speaker 3: sort of the double whammy of both genetics. And then
Speaker 3: at the same time, I am a dramatically different person
Speaker 3: than I either of my parents were at the age
Speaker 3: that I am as a result of the experiences that
Speaker 3: I've had, the choices that I've made, the ways I've
Speaker 3: chosen to try and get better or be different. It's
Speaker 3: just back to where we started around pluralism. It's the
Speaker 3: nature nurture thing. The answer is obviously.
Speaker 1: Both yeah, and I think that the physical analogy you're
Speaker 1: making works well. Nobody's surprised to hear how tall somebody
Speaker 1: grows up to be has something to do with how
Speaker 1: tall their mother is and how taller father is. It's
Speaker 1: not a perfect connection. You can't predict somebody's child's exact
Speaker 1: hyper's variance for all sorts of reasons. Just as that
Speaker 1: much is true, it's also true that you know your
Speaker 1: abilities in all sorts of ways are to some extent
Speaker 1: constrained by your genius. But of course it's also true
Speaker 1: that you know. You go to chess camp, you learn
Speaker 1: how to play chess for a couple of months, you
Speaker 1: get trained in it for hours a day, you get
Speaker 1: better at chess. Nobody shows you a musical instrument in
Speaker 1: your whole life, and that'd be really bad at music.
Speaker 1: We have natural gifts and natural deficiencies, and then environment
Speaker 1: comes in and builds on that and it kind of
Speaker 1: makes life more interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really like that. So listener and thinking about
Speaker 3: that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode.
Speaker 3: If you were going to isolate just one top insight
Speaker 3: that you're taking away, what would it be. Remember, little
Speaker 3: by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by
Speaker 3: us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give
Speaker 3: you a tip on that, and it's to start small.
Speaker 3: It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits
Speaker 3: to often start smaller than we think we need to
Speaker 3: because what that does is it allows us to get victories.
Speaker 3: And victories are really important because we become more motivated
Speaker 3: when we're feeling good about ourselves, and we become less
Speaker 3: motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting
Speaker 3: small and making sure that you succeed, you build your
Speaker 3: motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like
Speaker 3: a step by step guide for how you can easily
Speaker 3: build new habits that feed your good Wolf. Go to
Speaker 3: Goodwolf dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass.
Speaker 2: So I thought we.
Speaker 3: Would end here you and I are going to go
Speaker 3: into the post show conversation where we're going to be
Speaker 3: discussing how much clinical psychology, which is the psychology that
Speaker 3: tries to make people better, how much it's improved or
Speaker 3: not improved over the years, whether it's stagnant, and whether
Speaker 3: it's worth engaging in a spoiler alert, as you say,
Speaker 3: if you're in distress therapy. So I'm not going to
Speaker 3: make people pay to hear that. That's the takeaway, But
Speaker 3: it's an interesting discussion we're going to get to. But
Speaker 3: for right now, I thought we would end this episode
Speaker 3: with talking about two attitudes people might take towards psychology
Speaker 3: these days, on the field as a whole. Right, you've
Speaker 3: done this big overview of the whole field. You showed
Speaker 3: about what's good about it, what's not good about it,
Speaker 3: and you say that there's two attitudes you think that
Speaker 3: might be useful for people who are looking at this
Speaker 3: field as a whole.
Speaker 1: So this is how I end the book, and I
Speaker 1: think both attitudes are important to have. One is humility.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm on social media way too much, and
Speaker 1: I hear many of my colleagues talk about with great
Speaker 1: confidence about the pronouncements of psychology and how it's going
Speaker 1: to change the world, and how we should listen to psychologists.
Speaker 1: But there's so much we don't know. We don't yet
Speaker 1: have a good theory of consciousness, which is in some
Speaker 1: way the most fundamental aspect of being a person. We
Speaker 1: know how genes, the contribution genes make what we were
Speaker 1: just talking about the personality intelligence, but we know very
Speaker 1: little about what aspects of the environment are to other
Speaker 1: fifty percent. You are in many ways not like your parents.
Speaker 1: Why what was it? What's the secret sauce that turns
Speaker 1: a poor student and do a good one? What are
Speaker 1: the factors that cause somebody with some propensity to schizophrenia
Speaker 1: to get become schizophrenic as opposed to their identical twin
Speaker 1: who doesn't. And we don't know that. We have some
Speaker 1: theories as to why people do what they do, but
Speaker 1: we can't really predict behavior, either on an individual level
Speaker 1: or on the ground level. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: cause for human and also and we're going to get
Speaker 1: to later on. We have some ability to treat mental illnesses,
Speaker 1: but it's nowhere near what it should be. We have
Speaker 1: somebody at schizophrenia, it's not like you could take them
Speaker 1: and cure in a month later they're better. Or depression
Speaker 1: or anxiety, we're just not at that level, So humility.
Speaker 1: The second attitude is optimism. I think, and I talk
Speaker 1: about this and psych I think we made some extraordinary
Speaker 1: discoveries about language, about memory, about emotions, about morality, about
Speaker 1: brain using the methods of science, extending it to ourselves,
Speaker 1: and I don't think there's any reason to expect things
Speaker 1: to suddenly stop working, to expect our science to suddenly
Speaker 1: grind to a halt. So my own feeling, but to
Speaker 1: feel I love is that we got a long way
Speaker 1: to go, but there's no reason to doubt that we'll
Speaker 1: get there.
Speaker 3: I think that's a really great attitude. Again, back to
Speaker 3: sort of the pluralism we've been talking about before. It's
Speaker 3: kind of holding both those things to be true. We've
Speaker 3: made a ton of progress and we've got a long
Speaker 3: way to go. Like I said, you and I will
Speaker 3: talk in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like
Speaker 3: access to the post show conversation ad free episodes, a
Speaker 3: special episode I do each week called a teaching, a
Speaker 3: song and a poem, and be part of our community
Speaker 3: our community meetings. Go to one feed dot net slash
Speaker 3: join Paul, thank you so much. I've really really enjoyed this.
Speaker 3: I appreciate you being here, Sane.
Speaker 1: This has been a delight. Thank you for having me.
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