Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening and enjoy the podcast. Hey Robert, it's great
Speaker 1: to have you on this show. I'm a longtime admirer
Speaker 1: of your research and work and books. You've in The
Speaker 1: forty eight Walls of Power, The Artist Seduction, the Third
Speaker 1: Three Strategies of War, the fiftieth Wall with fifty cent,
Speaker 1: and your most recent book is Mastery. I wanted to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you if you feel like there's
Speaker 1: any common thread or theme that runs through all those books. Well,
Speaker 1: they're really all about power, and the first book had
Speaker 1: more of the social political side of power, because I
Speaker 1: had noticed a phenomenon in my life as a working
Speaker 1: in many different jobs that people, oftentimes people with the
Speaker 1: most talent didn't get very far in life or as
Speaker 1: far as their talent would merit, because they were really
Speaker 1: bad at the political side. And so I felt like
Speaker 1: that's a key element in the game of power. So
Speaker 1: my first three books were really largely about that. But
Speaker 1: the Mastery I came to the conclusion that too many
Speaker 1: people are particularly young people, I feel I got hung
Speaker 1: up with just that political part of power. And really
Speaker 1: the key in the world today is if you are
Speaker 1: are brilliant at what you do, if you know your
Speaker 1: feel insight and out, if you reached that level of
Speaker 1: creativity that I described in Mastery, that really is the
Speaker 1: ultimate form of power. You can really sort of write
Speaker 1: your own ticket. You'll always land on your feet when
Speaker 1: there's an economic downturn or you're out of a job,
Speaker 1: or your industry changes. And I included in that book
Speaker 1: of chapter about the social political side to sort of
Speaker 1: balance it out. But all my books are about sort
Speaker 1: of the pragmatic path towards power. Yeah, that's really interesting
Speaker 1: that you conceive of a mastery as one of the
Speaker 1: highest forms of power that we can have in our society.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe we could back up for a second.
Speaker 1: You can tell me a little bit what mastery is.
Speaker 1: How do I know if I'm to become a master?
Speaker 1: You know it? You know it by an experience. And
Speaker 1: I start off my book Mastery in the introduction giving
Speaker 1: you a taste of that feeling that you might have had,
Speaker 1: You might have had a fore taste of it in
Speaker 1: your life, and that is that moment when you've been
Speaker 1: working very hard on a project of any kind, putting
Speaker 1: in intense hours, ten, twelve, fifteen hours, and suddenly you
Speaker 1: feel like after several weeks you're on another level. Ideas
Speaker 1: are just coming to you. You could never backtrack and
Speaker 1: follow the chain of where that idea that came to
Speaker 1: you in the shower, where it came from or when
Speaker 1: you woke up or in your dream. You could never
Speaker 1: discover the source of it. It just came to you.
Speaker 1: And that kind of feeling where you know what you're
Speaker 1: doing or what you're thinking about so well that you
Speaker 1: don't have to put even you don't even have to
Speaker 1: think anymore. That's the kind of feeling that you have
Speaker 1: generally when you've mastered your field. So you probably tasted
Speaker 1: it when you had a paper to write or a
Speaker 1: project to do, but this is something on a much
Speaker 1: higher level. You know, if you're a great pianist, you're
Speaker 1: no longer thinking about the music that you're playing. It's
Speaker 1: into your fingertips. You're thinking on a higher level. A
Speaker 1: chess player like a Bobby Fisher would describe seeing the
Speaker 1: field of force on the chessboard itself. He's not even
Speaker 1: seeing the chessboard. He's seeing something other people don't visualize.
Speaker 1: On and on and on. I could go through Einstein
Speaker 1: to Steve Jobs to Da Vinci, the same experience people
Speaker 1: are describing where they're not having to think, they actually
Speaker 1: literally feel the subject that they're trying to express. Is
Speaker 1: this intuition? Well, I try and make the point that
Speaker 1: it's a mix. That's what chapter six is called. It's
Speaker 1: a mix of intuition and rationality. Now, these are just
Speaker 1: words that we're using to define something that isn't verbal.
Speaker 1: So it's difficult. But let's put it this way. You're
Speaker 1: never going to get to this what I call high
Speaker 1: level intuition. We have low level intuitions. Every day we
Speaker 1: feel like somebody is looking at us, and they turn
Speaker 1: around and sure enough they're looking at us, or something
Speaker 1: might happen. We have a daily low level intuition. Talking
Speaker 1: about high level intuition, where you know, a great creative
Speaker 1: idea suddenly comes to you, and my book is full
Speaker 1: of them, You're never going to get to that high
Speaker 1: level point without years and years of discipline and rational studies.
Speaker 1: So the basis of that great intuition that creativity is
Speaker 1: very very much rational. But then if you're purely rational,
Speaker 1: these incredibly creative ideas are never going to come to you.
Speaker 1: And I'm talking you know, Einstein before both of his
Speaker 1: great discoveries, talks about a dream, a vision coming to
Speaker 1: him and the solution appears in that way. And we
Speaker 1: see that in science and arts, etc. That's the other
Speaker 1: key component of mastery. And what happens with great masters
Speaker 1: is they have this intuition and then they have to
Speaker 1: go back and rationalize it. They have to think about it,
Speaker 1: is that really something worthwhile? I need to test it
Speaker 1: and verify it in the laboratory. I need to write
Speaker 1: that idea out in my book. Ah, it was a
Speaker 1: brilliant intuition, something great or No, it was just a
Speaker 1: feeling that didn't pan out into anything that's concrete. So
Speaker 1: you're constantly cycling back and forth between the intuitive and
Speaker 1: the rational. If you cut that cycling thing off, then
Speaker 1: you're never going to reach you know, you're never going
Speaker 1: to have the great discovery or whatever it is you're
Speaker 1: looking for. Yeah, so it looks like your talk about
Speaker 1: creativity and then you also talk about some other cognitive prophecies.
Speaker 1: I was hoping maybe you could help me unpack something.
Speaker 1: This is a debate in our own psychological literature. You know,
Speaker 1: there's this whole research literature on deliberate practice. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the expertise view, and which I was grounded in as
Speaker 1: an undergrad. I was Subert Simon's last research assistant. Who
Speaker 1: was oh Erickson was his post doc. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I come from that tradition. And if I only
Speaker 1: studied that tradition and I never studied any other perspective,
Speaker 1: I'm not convinced I ever would have understood what creativity is.
Speaker 1: So it seems to me like acquire ring it might
Speaker 1: be a necessary but not sufficient condition the intuitive in
Speaker 1: the rational for creativity, or maybe not. I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear what you think. Can you be a master or
Speaker 1: not be particularly creative or can you be creative and
Speaker 1: not have to have mastered Well, okay, it's a great question.
Speaker 1: So you have examples of prodigies of I don't think
Speaker 1: children are ever really truly creative on a high level.
Speaker 1: Children are very creative in associating ideas and creating games
Speaker 1: and things like that, but nothing that we would call
Speaker 1: great art or scientific discovery. But we do have examples
Speaker 1: of great adolescents and teenagers and people who are very
Speaker 1: young who are highly creative. I like to think of
Speaker 1: the great French poet Rambau, who is writing amazing poetry
Speaker 1: at the age of fourteen fifteen. He clearly hadn't put
Speaker 1: in the proverbial ten thousand hours. There is something there,
Speaker 1: and we could say that there is. That's maybe an
Speaker 1: example of creativity without mastering. But it's interesting that a
Speaker 1: lot of these really young prodigies who we could say
Speaker 1: that they never really amount to anything later on in life.
Speaker 1: It's like a spark that happens. Rambau finished writing at
Speaker 1: the age of twenty and he never wrote anything anymore.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes you have people who have that spark, and of
Speaker 1: course it doesn't come from nowhere. They've been practicing and
Speaker 1: doing something for a while, but they're not at that
Speaker 1: level of mastery. Now, can you be a master without
Speaker 1: being creative? No, I don't think so, because by the
Speaker 1: nature of it, I'm talking about ten to twenty thousand hours. Now.
Speaker 1: The difference between somebody who is just an expert and
Speaker 1: a master. An expert is someone who knows their field,
Speaker 1: who's been studying it for many, many years. It's just
Speaker 1: a word I'm using expert, but I make that distinction here.
Speaker 1: An expert could study their particular field and put in
Speaker 1: thousands of hours, but they never move beyond it. Their
Speaker 1: thinking is very conventional. They've absorbed basic patterns when they
Speaker 1: were younger, in university or whatever, and they never moved
Speaker 1: past it. So they could be an example of somebody
Speaker 1: who has years of practice and study in something but
Speaker 1: never reaches the level of creativity and mastery. There is
Speaker 1: a looseness in your thinking that masters have. They are
Speaker 1: able to return to that youthful kind of energy that
Speaker 1: I call original mind and kind of fuse it with
Speaker 1: all of their experience to what I call the dimensional mind.
Speaker 1: So by my definition, it's just purely my definition, you
Speaker 1: are not a master if you are stuck at that
Speaker 1: conventional level. And the problem is, just to briefly put it,
Speaker 1: the paradox of mastery is in a lot of people
Speaker 1: are trapped by the hours of study that you put in.
Speaker 1: You've absorbed so many conventions and so many ways of
Speaker 1: doing things that that becomes sort of a dead end.
Speaker 1: You're never able to go beyond that, ever, able to
Speaker 1: loosen up the thought process to reach that level of
Speaker 1: mastery like a pasteor did or whomever. When you're an expert,
Speaker 1: you're saying, yeah, well you just solved it. You solve
Speaker 1: the puzzle for me, And you're not talking about experts.
Speaker 1: You're telling you so masters is a specific thing that
Speaker 1: makes complete sense because the Simon Tin has shown these
Speaker 1: are just labels, right geniuses, Yes, have an enterprise ideas
Speaker 1: or a network of ideas. So what their main characteristic
Speaker 1: is that they know a lot about a lot or
Speaker 1: they have their hands in a lot of pots. Okay,
Speaker 1: and they fail a lot. So wee quads role. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're familiar with. You know that the more you fail,
Speaker 1: the higher the chances you'll succeed. It is in a
Speaker 1: nutshell that really helped you clarify it for me. Then
Speaker 1: you're not just talking about expertise, but you know you
Speaker 1: talk about prodigies. This is something that I've studied, prodigies, tovants,
Speaker 1: and the whole idea of talent is very interesting trying
Speaker 1: to what is talent? What is inborn? In your book,
Speaker 1: you talk about an inner passion that is reflect of
Speaker 1: your uniqueness. In my book and Gifted, I define talent
Speaker 1: as a passionate proclivity for mastering the roles of a domain,
Speaker 1: and it seems like your conceptualization of talent is very
Speaker 1: much along those lines. If I very much understand it, Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm treading on once again on ground that's
Speaker 1: hard to verbalize, but I do believe there is a
Speaker 1: genetic component to mastery, to creativity, to excellence in any field,
Speaker 1: and that component is you're born with a proclivity as
Speaker 1: you call it, I call it an inclination. There's something
Speaker 1: about you that's very unique, obviously in the way your
Speaker 1: brain's wired, your DNA, your experiences as you get older,
Speaker 1: even at the age of two or three, you've had
Speaker 1: a series of experiences with your parents, etc. That no
Speaker 1: one else has had or will ever have. And so
Speaker 1: there's something extremely different about you. Unique. And the people
Speaker 1: who discover what that is, who have a high level
Speaker 1: of self awareness and who understand this is what I'm
Speaker 1: drawn to. They're the ones who are going to be
Speaker 1: able to push past all of the obstacles that life
Speaker 1: presents in achieving mastery. I want to make the point
Speaker 1: that it's not easy. Okay, so you're going to fail
Speaker 1: a lot. You're going to be criticized, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are You're going to be lonely. People are going
Speaker 1: to say your nuts, your idea, your business is going
Speaker 1: to fail, and you have to have It's going to
Speaker 1: be tough. It's kind of like salmon swimming upstream. There'll
Speaker 1: be millions of them and only four will make it.
Speaker 1: Will you be one of the four that make it?
Speaker 1: So it's not easy, and in order to get pushed
Speaker 1: past all those obstacles that life presents you, you have
Speaker 1: to have this sort of self awareness and confidence and
Speaker 1: love of what you're doing. So if you're aware of
Speaker 1: that unique quality of what you were meant to do
Speaker 1: in life, and you're able to sort of immerse yourself
Speaker 1: in learning, as you say, in learning the rule within
Speaker 1: that domain, that's sort of like the key to unlocking
Speaker 1: the mystery of mastery. You can have that awareness at
Speaker 1: the age of five or three with Mozart and you
Speaker 1: never leaves you, or you could have that awareness at
Speaker 1: the age of twenty three. In my case, I would
Speaker 1: say at the age of thirty six, when I decided
Speaker 1: to write my first book. It comes to different periods
Speaker 1: of your life, but it will not ever come unless
Speaker 1: you have that high degree of clarity about what it
Speaker 1: is that makes you unique. I'm really glad that you
Speaker 1: mentioned that fact that your first book was at the
Speaker 1: age of thirty six, because, if I understand correctly, your
Speaker 1: whole life experience is up to that point. I mean,
Speaker 1: you didn't know it going through, but looking back it's
Speaker 1: almost as obvious. It's so many of these things fed
Speaker 1: into all the ideas in your first book. Do you
Speaker 1: think there's a great lesson to be learned there for
Speaker 1: everyone for moving forward in our lives, that a lot
Speaker 1: of our experiences that we don't think are going to
Speaker 1: be relevant whatsoever to anything. I mean, there is a
Speaker 1: lesson and there isn't. I mean, I gave a Ted
Speaker 1: talk on that subject. I encourage people if you want
Speaker 1: to as a TEDx talk and my only Ted talk
Speaker 1: about that very thing on the show notes Okay, And
Speaker 1: basically in that talk I mentioned that I had probably
Speaker 1: fifty different jobs after graduating college to the point where
Speaker 1: I was hired or I was asked to write the
Speaker 1: forty eight Laws of Power. I failed many, many times.
Speaker 1: I kept trying to become a writer. I knew from
Speaker 1: an early early age that I wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 1: I had that much clarity, but I couldn't figure out
Speaker 1: what I wanted to write. It was novels, plays, theater, television,
Speaker 1: film journalism. I tried everything, and then finally I met
Speaker 1: a man who is a book packager and asked me
Speaker 1: if I had an idea for a book. And, as
Speaker 1: you say, all of my previous experience with all of
Speaker 1: these horrible jobs and dealing with all sorts of different people,
Speaker 1: they just funneled into writing The forty eight Loss of Power.
Speaker 1: I had given myself the absolute perfect apprenticeship for writing
Speaker 1: this book. But if I didn't have that lucky encounter
Speaker 1: with this man, I don't know what would have happened.
Speaker 1: What I tell people is that you have to have
Speaker 1: a sense of what it is that you want to do.
Speaker 1: I at least knew that I wanted to write, So
Speaker 1: you have to have some kind of framework. Is it science,
Speaker 1: is it technology? Is it business? If you're wandering all
Speaker 1: over the place, it's going to be hard later in
Speaker 1: your life to connect the dots into something that puts
Speaker 1: it all together. I was able to put all of
Speaker 1: my writing experience together in creating this book. You can
Speaker 1: try different fields, and I talk in the book about
Speaker 1: a woman Yoki Matsuoka. I consider a contemporary master who
Speaker 1: tries eight different forms of science and now she's this
Speaker 1: incredible master who's able to create links between them. But
Speaker 1: she didn't go in into poetry and physics and music
Speaker 1: and pottery at something you know that was all related
Speaker 1: to it. So you have to have a sense of
Speaker 1: the direction that you want to head in in life,
Speaker 1: and within that framework, you're willing to experiment and to
Speaker 1: fail and to try anything out. The point of it
Speaker 1: all is your most creative years, and it's been demonstrated
Speaker 1: again and again, are in your thirties, your late twenties
Speaker 1: on through your thirties. That's when the greatest discoveries inventions
Speaker 1: are made. There aren't some exceptions, but that is that's
Speaker 1: the optimal years of a person's creativity. You want to
Speaker 1: have prepared yourself in your twenties, learning all sorts of things,
Speaker 1: experiences that enrich your soil, so that by the time
Speaker 1: you're thirty one or thirty two, you can create some business,
Speaker 1: or write a book or do something in which you
Speaker 1: draw upon all of that amazing experience. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if I've answered your question, have a you know, what
Speaker 1: is this PRA free form? You answered a lot of question,
Speaker 1: you asked questions unasked. Okay, what was the last thing
Speaker 1: you said? I actually had a question follow Christen. I'm
Speaker 1: saying that your most creative time is why do you
Speaker 1: think that is the case? People are trying to account
Speaker 1: for that finding in all sorts of ways. One hypothesis
Speaker 1: is there are fluid reasoning declines are IQ you know,
Speaker 1: and that we can't handle cognitive complexity as well. There
Speaker 1: could be so many other factors. Do you have any
Speaker 1: inclination of why. I think it's to me, it's pretty simple.
Speaker 1: Before you're in your thirties, you don't have enough experience
Speaker 1: to come up with something that's based on a lot
Speaker 1: of practice and learning from your mistakes. You're too young,
Speaker 1: you're too untested. So anything that you make or write
Speaker 1: or create isn't something to build upon because it's not
Speaker 1: founded on lots of experience. But if you get to
Speaker 1: the age of four thirty, the mind tends to get rigid,
Speaker 1: just like the body gets rigid. You think you know
Speaker 1: exactly how things our questions are answered, and you become
Speaker 1: a prisoner of all of these conventions. So at that
Speaker 1: age of thirty, everything is perfect. You suddenly have years
Speaker 1: of failing, of hardship, criticism, of toughness, you developed a
Speaker 1: tough skin. You've had experience, but you're not yet gotten
Speaker 1: to that point where your mind is tightened up and
Speaker 1: you think you know everything and you just keep steve jobs.
Speaker 1: Compared it to the grooves on a record, where your
Speaker 1: mind just goes around and round in the same groups.
Speaker 1: And that's usually what happens to people when they stay
Speaker 1: in one field and become really good at proficient at
Speaker 1: the age by the age of forty thirty, is that
Speaker 1: perfect storm of fluidity and experience, That's how I would answer.
Speaker 1: Can we modify that to thirty five? Well, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean your thirties, because as I said, I'm not
Speaker 1: to say I'm the master, but for me it was
Speaker 1: thirty six. There are and there are people who maintain
Speaker 1: their fluidity into their forties and fifties and sixties, and
Speaker 1: I talk about that. It's another phenomenon. But yeah, we
Speaker 1: enlarge it to thirty five, don't worry, Well, let's see
Speaker 1: what sort of qualitative differences do you feel from your
Speaker 1: first book to now you're working another book? I think, right,
Speaker 1: And do you notice any differences? Well, I think there
Speaker 1: are things I've lost and things I've gained. It's never
Speaker 1: a pure assent into perfection. I've lost some of that fluidity.
Speaker 1: I know. When I was writing my first book, words
Speaker 1: and phrases would just flow out of me with an ease,
Speaker 1: and so the writing had more of a flare to it.
Speaker 1: Now it's more of a slog I have to beat
Speaker 1: myself like a horse to get to the point where
Speaker 1: I can kind of maybe create that. But what I've
Speaker 1: gained is kind of more experience. I think I understand
Speaker 1: things better so what I'm writing about. Since I published
Speaker 1: the already Laws of Power, I've not only written four
Speaker 1: other books beside that, but I've worked rather intensely as
Speaker 1: a consultant to people in business, in politics, and entertainment,
Speaker 1: very intense situations, and I've learned an incredible amount about people,
Speaker 1: about leadership, what it takes to be successful. So I
Speaker 1: have greater levels of experience to draw upon than I
Speaker 1: did when I wrote my first book. So it's a
Speaker 1: trade off between those two things. But I mean, I
Speaker 1: still believe you probably still believe that your best book
Speaker 1: is probably not even written yet, or it's possible you
Speaker 1: could still have I always believe that my best book
Speaker 1: is what I'm writing right now, and I actually I'm
Speaker 1: hoping my the what I'm working on now is my
Speaker 1: magnum opus at all. Yeah, No, I'm fine. I'm very
Speaker 1: open about it. In Mastery, I talk about social intelligence
Speaker 1: chapter four, and the idea is something we alluded to earlier.
Speaker 1: You know, MASTERI is really about being begining a proficiency
Speaker 1: in your field that leads to this creative and intuitive
Speaker 1: apex that you reach. But it's not just technical proficiency,
Speaker 1: because we're a social animal and you have to be
Speaker 1: good at dealing with people. So you have to learn
Speaker 1: various skills in your apprenticeship period that I call your twenties.
Speaker 1: You have to learn how to observe, how to learn,
Speaker 1: but you also have to learn how to deal with people,
Speaker 1: difficult people, egotistical people, psychotic people, and you have to
Speaker 1: learn how to work with others. So I had a
Speaker 1: chapter on that, and I had a lot of response
Speaker 1: from people from that chapter. They found it very interesting, helpful,
Speaker 1: but they said they wish there was more. I decided
Speaker 1: I would expanded into a book. And essentially the idea
Speaker 1: is that we are this pre eminent social animal. We're
Speaker 1: continually dealing with people on a day to day basis
Speaker 1: in our work and in our personal lives, and so
Speaker 1: much of the time we're in the dark. We really
Speaker 1: have no idea what's going on in the mind of
Speaker 1: that person who has hired us, or who's our colleague, etc.
Speaker 1: And we think we have an idea, but we're merely
Speaker 1: projecting onto them, usually our own fears, our own desires,
Speaker 1: and because of that we make terrible mistakes in life.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, we're gifted with incredible empathic
Speaker 1: powers for understanding other people by our nature as this
Speaker 1: insanely proficient social animal, but we don't know how to
Speaker 1: utilize this natural empathy that we have. We're blocked in
Speaker 1: using it by all of our self absorption. So this is,
Speaker 1: to me my book. I'm trying to make it the
Speaker 1: ultimate primer on being able to decipher people's obscure, their mass,
Speaker 1: what's really going on behind the mask, And what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about are these sort of laws of human nature
Speaker 1: that I believe go back thousands of years that are
Speaker 1: embedded in our brain, in our DNA, and that are
Speaker 1: the cause most of human behavior, are behind a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that puzzle us about other people. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to immerse you in the study of human
Speaker 1: nature so that and give you many, many clues on
Speaker 1: how to decipher the signs that people are continually giving
Speaker 1: out in their body language, in the words they say,
Speaker 1: in their tone of voice, in their past actions, so
Speaker 1: that you can reach a much higher level in this
Speaker 1: social intelligence realm. That sounds really awesome. Is there a
Speaker 1: publication date? Well, it's technically twenty sixteen, the fall twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: I'm behind trying to catch up, so if it's not,
Speaker 1: then it'll be shortly thereout by every writer ever. That
Speaker 1: really does sound I can't wait to read it, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't help but notice I read so many I
Speaker 1: think of read all your books and over and over again.
Speaker 1: I noticed this common theme of actions reality reality, reality reality.
Speaker 1: You frame things that you frame it in a different way,
Speaker 1: and it really makes me think the ways that in
Speaker 1: our psychological literature we don't frame these things. So like
Speaker 1: social intelligence. You tie social intelligence to reality right in
Speaker 1: your book, and I thought that was really really interesting.
Speaker 1: There's one point in your book used a phrase, and
Speaker 1: maybe this is what you expand more in your new book,
Speaker 1: but you say that everything in this world is a hologram.
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that
Speaker 1: means a little bit for my audience. I think I
Speaker 1: used that in a couple of chapters. But I talked
Speaker 1: about that in Creativity. Can you remind me of where
Speaker 1: it was in Social Intelligence? Oh? Boy, I don't remember
Speaker 1: the exact placement of it. I think it was right too.
Speaker 1: We live in the world, two worlds of outer appearances
Speaker 1: and how things actually function, how their parts work together
Speaker 1: from the whole. How can people access a hidden world?
Speaker 1: It might not have been in a Social Intelligence chapter,
Speaker 1: but it was somewhere in the book. You talk about
Speaker 1: a hologram. Well, I guess if I were to talk
Speaker 1: about the hologram in terms of a person, I mean,
Speaker 1: if I can think about this is the parts that
Speaker 1: they reveal to you tell you something of the whole person.
Speaker 1: So a person is a whole thing. They're not little
Speaker 1: bits of behavior here and there. They're a whole being
Speaker 1: that has an essence. If you want, and every little
Speaker 1: detail is a part of that and reveals something of
Speaker 1: the whole, which is sort of, I guess, like the
Speaker 1: hologram type thing. So this is a trivial example. But
Speaker 1: let's say that a person that you deal with is
Speaker 1: perennially late in an appointment, et cetera. That is not
Speaker 1: a trivial detail. That's just sort of something that they do.
Speaker 1: That is an indication of something deep within them, probably
Speaker 1: a form of passive aggressiveness. It has a purpose behind it,
Speaker 1: It's a strategy that they've used, and that being late
Speaker 1: is part of an entire character, a whole picture. And
Speaker 1: I want you to look at these details as being
Speaker 1: extremely eloquent as to what that whole person is. That
Speaker 1: might be a little bit of what I mean there
Speaker 1: and the reality part that you bring. I'm not the
Speaker 1: kind of a duelist that thinks there's subjectivity and that
Speaker 1: there's a hardcore reality out there. Because we humans live
Speaker 1: in a world of convention and language. Our reality is
Speaker 1: different from a bat's reality. And there's an amazing essay
Speaker 1: I forget the man's name who describes what a bat
Speaker 1: reality would be like L's book, it's an essay I
Speaker 1: encourage everyone, maybe put the link there. It's only thirteen
Speaker 1: pages long, and he tries to describe what a reality
Speaker 1: would be to a bat that lives through sonar. So
Speaker 1: we don't live literally in reality because we live in
Speaker 1: a world of conventions. But there are degrees of objectivity.
Speaker 1: You have to admit that when you first meet a person,
Speaker 1: you don't really have any idea who they are. And
Speaker 1: if you marry them and you're with them for twenty years,
Speaker 1: after twenty years, you have a sense of who they are,
Speaker 1: and that's closer to the reality. That's really what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, but is there benefit to fooling yourself
Speaker 1: or having overconfidence that is greater than the reality of
Speaker 1: the matter, or perhaps daydreaming and fantasy. Is there ever
Speaker 1: value to that? Oh, most definitely there's a value to
Speaker 1: day dreaming and fantasy. In the Creative chapter, I talk
Speaker 1: about this kind of cycle I call the current that
Speaker 1: the mind goes through where you see something and then
Speaker 1: you speculate on what it could mean, which could be
Speaker 1: fantasizing about it or it's going and introspecting on it,
Speaker 1: and then returning to the reality and doing an experiment
Speaker 1: or trying to work with it, back and forth between speculation, imagination,
Speaker 1: and what the world presents you. If you're simply daydreaming
Speaker 1: and fantasizing, you're going to cut yourself off from the
Speaker 1: social reality, that's the real reality of who we are,
Speaker 1: and you're going to end up with some very bizarre things.
Speaker 1: And then the forty eight laws of power. I have
Speaker 1: a story of a man, a great Renaissance painter, who
Speaker 1: was determined to create the ultimate frescoes, and he holds
Speaker 1: himself up in these rooms and he never went out,
Speaker 1: and he spent four years of such isolation that the
Speaker 1: frescoes that he created are like of a mad man,
Speaker 1: and they're kind of all they're frightening, and nobody looks
Speaker 1: at them. So that's what happens when you isolate yourself
Speaker 1: and you're so totally in your head. But fantasizing and
Speaker 1: daydreaming and speculating certainly has a very important role in creativity. Excellent.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you said that, and I know that you
Speaker 1: do say that in the book. I was trying to
Speaker 1: set you up for this. Oh okay, this notion of
Speaker 1: social intelligence. Per second, it just dawned on me reading
Speaker 1: it that it seemed like a very rational approach to
Speaker 1: something that in this ecology literature, emotional or social intelligence
Speaker 1: is usually related more to like an automatic like empathetic feeling.
Speaker 1: So you refer to social intelligence as like seeing emotions inside.
Speaker 1: Other people are being aware of this, And it just
Speaker 1: had me thinking, for those who are naturally high in
Speaker 1: social intelligence, doesn't their compassion, empathy, and perspective TA can
Speaker 1: come more automatically to them, whereas some other people might
Speaker 1: need to earn these skills, but they can still learn
Speaker 1: these skills. Maybe there's different individual differences in this. Well,
Speaker 1: certainly there's a spectrum people with autism mora asprospergers have
Speaker 1: a default when it comes to this sort of natural empathy.
Speaker 1: And then in the Mastery, I talked to you know,
Speaker 1: interview Temple Grant and who was autistic, and she describes
Speaker 1: very eloquently what it means to lack this basic empathy
Speaker 1: that we humans are born with, and it's very interesting.
Speaker 1: So there is a spectrum of people who may not
Speaker 1: be autistic, but are more veering towards that and have
Speaker 1: less of it and then need to develop this more
Speaker 1: as a practice. But in general, for most people we
Speaker 1: are born with a natural empathic skill, and there have
Speaker 1: been remarkable studies recently about the relationship of infants to
Speaker 1: the mother. Newborns. The incredible high level of empathy a
Speaker 1: two day old baby will demonstrate in relating to the
Speaker 1: smile of the mother, something that monkeys, no other primates have.
Speaker 1: It is unbelievable. We can demonstrate an incredible empathic relationship
Speaker 1: between the mother and the infant. That's to say that
Speaker 1: we are born with this, with this power. That it
Speaker 1: is not just a baby is born with it. It's
Speaker 1: in relationship to the mother, back and forth, relating to
Speaker 1: her smile, to her looks, to her expressions when she's
Speaker 1: not in the room, etc. We're born with it, but
Speaker 1: we lose it as we get older, as we become
Speaker 1: increasingly self absorbed, we fail to pay attention to people.
Speaker 1: I'm currently as I'm writing the book, I'm doing these
Speaker 1: raised experiments on myself in my social relationships to see
Speaker 1: what it is that kind of blocks us from accessing
Speaker 1: that empathy, from looking at the other person and trying
Speaker 1: to imagine their world, their feelings, getting inside in that
Speaker 1: kind of pretty verbal sense. Because the end, there's no
Speaker 1: way you can actually verbalize what empathy is. It's a feeling.
Speaker 1: And you know, I have reasons things that I think
Speaker 1: are blocking us. One of them is our incessant little
Speaker 1: voice inside of us that's comparing ourselves to other people.
Speaker 1: The other person says something, we go, my god, are
Speaker 1: they inferring that I'm not? Maybe I'm not as good
Speaker 1: at this as they are. And we're kind of constantly
Speaker 1: relating what they say to ourselves and our experience in
Speaker 1: a comparing way. Are we inferior? Are we superior? And
Speaker 1: it just draws us inward and we miss all of
Speaker 1: these signals that people emit through their tone of voice,
Speaker 1: through what they say, etc. So we have the natural
Speaker 1: powers to really understand people on a high level, but
Speaker 1: we have these major blocks that come through years of
Speaker 1: becoming increasingly self absorbed. There's an amazing study from the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan where they started they were able to
Speaker 1: kind of quantify levels of empathy in college students. They
Speaker 1: have a test, they started giving it in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and they've noticed that these empathy levels are going down
Speaker 1: and down and down with each successive generation onto the millennials,
Speaker 1: who are showing the lowest levels of empathy that they've
Speaker 1: ever seen, largely as the effect of technology. People are
Speaker 1: not interacting with other people on a day to day
Speaker 1: level often enough so that that's another reason why these
Speaker 1: levels are while we're more and more increasingly blocked. I mean,
Speaker 1: you really hit the nail on the head there, and
Speaker 1: it's focusing attention outward instead of inward. And when you
Speaker 1: bring attention to something that is not usually a discussed
Speaker 1: and relationship to emotional social intelligence. All these business books
Speaker 1: about emotional intelligence, right, they don't frame it in quite
Speaker 1: that way, but I think it's very valuable to do
Speaker 1: so this idea. It's tied to me your notion and
Speaker 1: a lot of what you talk about is very much
Speaker 1: tied to mindfulness. Yeah, do you practice mindfulness meditation at all?
Speaker 1: Because I think that might help people who lack in
Speaker 1: social intelligence. Maybe that could be something to help me
Speaker 1: in such a dificual stove. Well, very much so. I've
Speaker 1: been doing meditation for over four years now. I did
Speaker 1: it prior to that, but religiously to the point where
Speaker 1: I do it an hour every day for over four years.
Speaker 1: And that is in the benefits of that are beyond
Speaker 1: social intelligence. They also benefit my work and my stress
Speaker 1: levels and what I hope my creativity, but on the
Speaker 1: level of dealing with people very much so being able
Speaker 1: to be in the moment and not hearing that voice
Speaker 1: inside of your head, because a lot of that meditation
Speaker 1: that you're doing is cutting off that voice and just
Speaker 1: sort of experiencing things in the moment. So that could
Speaker 1: be extremely helpful. I mean, there are other things that
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about in the book that are
Speaker 1: kind of strategies that you can employ, but that would
Speaker 1: be an overall larger strategy that would be very helpful.
Speaker 1: The book Mastery are they're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: in your future book, in my new book, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it really is a game change or thinking
Speaker 1: of this. I can notice it. It's striking. I mean
Speaker 1: even right now, right, I have these notes on the
Speaker 1: other side of my screen, and it's taking me away
Speaker 1: from you. Right, I'm not seeing every and so I'm
Speaker 1: trying to actually force myself to be in the moment
Speaker 1: and just see what it is. Right. It really is
Speaker 1: a different perception, it really is. It's like a neckro cube.
Speaker 1: It's actually really interesting. I try to practice this. I
Speaker 1: try to listen to people without any judgment or any
Speaker 1: inner voice at all. Just listen and look at them.
Speaker 1: And when you actually do that, you see something different.
Speaker 1: At least for me, I actually see something different than
Speaker 1: when I'm thinking, you know, like in my own head,
Speaker 1: like or this I'm trying to like do predictive text,
Speaker 1: you know, what their emotions are saying everything, and I
Speaker 1: just let it. I just watch and observe it. It
Speaker 1: really is a game changer, really is. Yeah. And then,
Speaker 1: as I said, I said this in Mastery, but I
Speaker 1: will just go into it more in the book. It's
Speaker 1: not like you're just in the moment, because you're also
Speaker 1: a rational creature, so you want to go back and
Speaker 1: reflect on it. And what I often do is I'll
Speaker 1: have an encounter with the person. I'm in the moment,
Speaker 1: I'm using all that empathy. I'm really trying to absorb myself,
Speaker 1: and then when I go home, I'll take some notes
Speaker 1: on it. I'll write about it. What did that really mean?
Speaker 1: What is it that I'm picking up? Or you just
Speaker 1: think about it in some level, because if you're only
Speaker 1: in the moment, you're never going to build on that experience.
Speaker 1: You're never going to be able to kind of figure
Speaker 1: out what all these signs mean. So that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's another area, another component. I was going to ask
Speaker 1: you if you had some tips for people to increase
Speaker 1: their social intelligence. But I feel like we just we
Speaker 1: covered so many things implicitly without explicitly asking that question.
Speaker 1: Would you agree yes? And I would? I would, I would.
Speaker 1: I would advise them to read my next book. I'm
Speaker 1: happy to promote that when that comes out. You know,
Speaker 1: we're almost done. I just wanted to have to come
Speaker 1: work questions because this is a this is a really
Speaker 1: good opportunity for me to discuss some of these issues
Speaker 1: with you, trying to make linkages to what I study
Speaker 1: in my own field. What is supreme acceptance and why
Speaker 1: is that important for mastery? Are you talking about in
Speaker 1: the apprenticeship phase? The kind of radically a context here.
Speaker 1: I admit I really liked the phrase and I wrote
Speaker 1: it down. I'm sorry, I don't remember where it came from. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I have. I talked about it in the
Speaker 1: fiftieth Law, and I also talked about it in Mastery.
Speaker 1: I think the contexts are a little different. In mastery.
Speaker 1: What I'm talking about is you're in your twenties or
Speaker 1: you've finished university, and I want you to accept the
Speaker 1: fact that you're basically an ignoramus. You've entered the world
Speaker 1: now and you don't really know anything. You think you
Speaker 1: know everything because you're a hot shot and you went
Speaker 1: to Yale and you've got a degree, but in fact,
Speaker 1: you don't understand anything about people, politics, social situations. And
Speaker 1: you really have no technical expertise because you're just filled
Speaker 1: with lots of books knowledge but no practical knowledge. That's
Speaker 1: your reality, and you're starting from zero, and you're there
Speaker 1: to absorb everything around you. You're there to learn the
Speaker 1: rules of the game, the social and political rules in
Speaker 1: that office that you now join in your first job.
Speaker 1: You're there to learn all the technical rules that go
Speaker 1: into proficiency in your field. You're there to learn who
Speaker 1: has power, who doesn't have power, what's going on in
Speaker 1: the larger context of your field. That all represents this
Speaker 1: reality that you have to absorb and that you know
Speaker 1: nothing about when you enter your apprenticeship, and you just
Speaker 1: have to accept it. You have to accept it in
Speaker 1: a really deep way because when you look at a
Speaker 1: three year old, three year olds learn at a rate
Speaker 1: that's far beyond anything that happens later in life because
Speaker 1: there are sponges they're absorbing. They feel inferior. They feel
Speaker 1: so inferior to their parent and the people around them
Speaker 1: that they have to hurry up and learn what it's
Speaker 1: going on in the world. That sense of inferiority where
Speaker 1: you don't know anything. There's a world out there, it's
Speaker 1: slightly threatening. You have to get ahead. Feeling that way
Speaker 1: is going to make you learn at a much faster rate.
Speaker 1: But if you think you know everything, you're divorcing yourself
Speaker 1: from the reality of the picture. In the fiftieth law,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about something a little deeper, and it's more
Speaker 1: about a Zen Buddhist type thing where you really never
Speaker 1: completely in control of circumstances that are out there in
Speaker 1: the world, and there's so much you have to learn
Speaker 1: and accept about all the givens that are out there.
Speaker 1: And from that position of kind of radical reality where
Speaker 1: you understand this is what the world is, you then
Speaker 1: actually have greater power to change it in the direction
Speaker 1: that you want. That's a little bit different, though, So
Speaker 1: I didn't know you were that was the next one answer.
Speaker 1: It was in mastery, Okay. I just really like that expression.
Speaker 1: I told mean that there's a whole literature. Are you
Speaker 1: familiar with the dark Triad? Wow? No? What is it?
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like this is the literature that
Speaker 1: you have that Robert Green has to know about. It's
Speaker 1: it's maca alianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, and psychologists are starting.
Speaker 1: It's a whole emerging literature. I'm going to bring out
Speaker 1: a book and see if this is what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Is it like like this emotionally moral? Uh? No, okay,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a whole You know, past ten years
Speaker 1: there's been hundreds and hundreds of journal articles about us
Speaker 1: trying to understand the dark triad in the general population,
Speaker 1: so not the clinical, not psychopathy in the clinical setting,
Speaker 1: but people who are very manipulative in macavail and it's
Speaker 1: called maladav alianism. Yeah, psychopathy and arcisism, and when they
Speaker 1: have all three of those traits, try and understand those
Speaker 1: traits and what they're correlated with. And research does show
Speaker 1: that people who have those traits do have higher social
Speaker 1: intelligence as you define it, but they don't have empathy,
Speaker 1: so we'll use it to manipulate others. They have empathy,
Speaker 1: you know, with the word that you want to use
Speaker 1: because they're able to understand the weaknesses of other people
Speaker 1: or what's going on in their mind, but they don't
Speaker 1: have emotional connection to them, and they use that knowledge
Speaker 1: to exploit people. And that's not the definition of empathy. Well,
Speaker 1: so I go by the definition. Very famous psychologists Samed
Speaker 1: Heinz Cohut are you familiar with code? He is one
Speaker 1: of the first psychologists that actually used and described and
Speaker 1: defined empathy. And it's not necessarily an emotional thing. It
Speaker 1: actually has a heavy intellectual component, and it's the ability
Speaker 1: that I have to put myself in the place of
Speaker 1: the other person. Now after I do that, that can
Speaker 1: either make me feel that I like this person, that
Speaker 1: I have compassion for them, that I understand them on
Speaker 1: a deeper level and I want to help them, or
Speaker 1: it can mean I now know how I can screw
Speaker 1: with them and I will use that knowledge to do so.
Speaker 1: But the first step was actually moving inside that other
Speaker 1: person and trying to figure out what their reality is like.
Speaker 1: And very manipulative people or con artists have high levels
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, and there are people who are on
Speaker 1: the borderline, and they're the ones that fascinate me. So
Speaker 1: for instance Lyndon Johnson, who is probably our most fascinating
Speaker 1: president if you read the Caro four volume biographies. But
Speaker 1: I'm one of my major sources for my next book
Speaker 1: is Master of the Senate by Carol the third volume,
Speaker 1: believable book. Johnson had an insane level of empathy. He
Speaker 1: could get inside you like no other person couldn't. He
Speaker 1: describes it and get anything. He used it both to
Speaker 1: manipulate on the highest levels, because that's who he was.
Speaker 1: He was a master manipulator, but he also used it
Speaker 1: to feel what was going on inside of you. Had
Speaker 1: made him be right. You know, he's involved in the
Speaker 1: first civil rights building. He basically that weren't for him,
Speaker 1: would have never been passed. He had great levels of
Speaker 1: empathy that he used for both of those. And I
Speaker 1: find that a lot of very successful people live on
Speaker 1: that border line where they have both sides of that
Speaker 1: psychop what you call psychopathy, and also an emotional attachment
Speaker 1: power that makes them be actually very successful. Absolutely agreed.
Speaker 1: So what's the biggest killer of the creative force? Well,
Speaker 1: I have like seven or eight of them in Mastery
Speaker 1: that I list that are liketional blocks that you have
Speaker 1: that you develop generally as you get as you get older,
Speaker 1: you know, the sense that you lose a sense of wonder,
Speaker 1: You become very skeptically. You think you know everything, you
Speaker 1: have all the answers, just basic conventional thinking. And I
Speaker 1: encounter it so much every day that I just absolutely startling.
Speaker 1: But you know, like, just as a banal example, we're
Speaker 1: going to be doing hopefully a version of the forty
Speaker 1: eight Laws of Power for the History Channel, kind of
Speaker 1: a documentary version. And the producers they go, they hear
Speaker 1: from the people at the History Channel that one time
Speaker 1: they were really impressed with a proposal for a series
Speaker 1: because these people had an ending, a surprise ending, a
Speaker 1: twist at the end of their little real that they
Speaker 1: put together. And so now we have to scramble to
Speaker 1: figure out how we can have a surprise twist at
Speaker 1: the end of our story that's going to sell them
Speaker 1: on doing the forty hours part. What a bunch of
Speaker 1: stupid nonsense, Like you have to repeat the last thing
Speaker 1: that was successful, Like there's this formula. What you know,
Speaker 1: history doesn't come with little twists and ribbons at the end.
Speaker 1: And people aren't that stupid that they need that for
Speaker 1: every single story that they hear, you know, and maybe
Speaker 1: you can be a little more interesting with Okay, maybe
Speaker 1: do put a twist at the end, but it's not
Speaker 1: like the other one. And you encounter that in politics,
Speaker 1: in business, in how people respond to the bolo epidemic
Speaker 1: and whatever you want to call it, again and again
Speaker 1: and again repeating what was done a year ago or
Speaker 1: the last person who was successful and getting out of
Speaker 1: that is what I wrote my whole book about. I
Speaker 1: love that. Well, let's end on that note, because I
Speaker 1: think that's perfect. Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to The Psychology the Podcast with doctor
Speaker 1: Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just
Speaker 1: as informative and thought provoking as I did. If you
Speaker 1: don't like to read the show notes for this episode
Speaker 1: or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology
Speaker 1: Podcast dot com.