Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is a
Speaker 1: wide ranging discussion I had with doctor Jordan B. Peterson
Speaker 1: for his podcast, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This episode
Speaker 1: was recorded on April thirteenth, twenty twenty one, and has
Speaker 1: already appeared on his podcast. Doctor Peterson has graciously given
Speaker 1: me permission to repost it on my own podcast. Hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy it and you're the full breath of interest
Speaker 1: that we both share, as well as our interest in
Speaker 1: making society a better place and increasing communication among people
Speaker 1: who may disagree with each other. So, without further ado,
Speaker 1: I bring you my discussion with doctor Jordan Peterson. It's
Speaker 1: good to see you. We actually have a couple of
Speaker 1: publications together, a from a few years back and so,
Speaker 1: but we've strangely enough never sat down and had a
Speaker 1: lengthy discussion. So hopefully today we'll have an opportunity to
Speaker 1: rectify that. So, first of all, maybe you could tell
Speaker 1: everyone just exactly what a cognitive scientist is. Well. I
Speaker 1: think the important thing to recognize about cognitive science is
Speaker 1: it's an interdisciplinary field. So it doesn't just involve psychology,
Speaker 1: but it brings in philosophers and it brings in neuroscientists.
Speaker 1: It brings in computer scientists to all kind of sit
Speaker 1: down at the table and figure out what is the mind,
Speaker 1: and what are the functions of the of the human mind,
Speaker 1: what are the limits of the human mind, How does
Speaker 1: the nervous system represent mind? So basically everything happen you
Speaker 1: to do with mind, But it's very interdisciplinary, and that's
Speaker 1: what really it was exciting to me about it when
Speaker 1: I got into it. I did an undergrad at Carnegie
Speaker 1: Mellon and I did a computer science degree, and I
Speaker 1: did a cognitive science degree, and it was really exciting
Speaker 1: to me to kind of figure out how all these
Speaker 1: different things can be integrated with each other. And how
Speaker 1: did a cognitive scientist who's at least technically more interested,
Speaker 1: let's say, in the mechanics of thought and abstract cognition,
Speaker 1: how did you come to be interested in the humanist
Speaker 1: tradition which is the focus of this book, which we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about in fair detail today. It isn't
Speaker 1: obvious that those things have any necessary inter relationships. So
Speaker 1: what happened not at all obvious. Well, so, as a kid,
Speaker 1: I grew up with a real deep fascination for understanding
Speaker 1: individual differences. I mean, I remember like just being a
Speaker 1: very young kid looking on the playground and wondering why
Speaker 1: someone could so effortlessly go in the jungle gym, and
Speaker 1: why why I was so awkward. And I also had
Speaker 1: some early learning difficulties that made me try to understand
Speaker 1: what the only limits of my then limits of my
Speaker 1: own potential were. So the interest that got me to
Speaker 1: the field was human intelligence. And I realized after enough
Speaker 1: years in the field, and once my interest brought into creativity,
Speaker 1: which is the work we did together was on creativity
Speaker 1: when I was in grad school and then now self
Speaker 1: factuization human I realized that what I was really interested
Speaker 1: in was human potential, not intelligence. You know, intelligence I
Speaker 1: thought was the be all and end all of human potential.
Speaker 1: And then what I've learned come to realize, you know,
Speaker 1: throughout my career is that that wasn't that was just
Speaker 1: the beginning. Well Galton, Francis Galton, who in some sense
Speaker 1: pioneered the psychometric study of IQ, was also interested in
Speaker 1: human potential. I would say, so in some sense that's
Speaker 1: a return to the source. And it is easy to
Speaker 1: confuse intelligence with well the whole range of human talent
Speaker 1: and ability and differentiating all those different concepts and placing
Speaker 1: them in the proper relationship to one another and identifying
Speaker 1: them for study is no trivial thing. So you worked,
Speaker 1: you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se. So
Speaker 1: my junior year in college, I was so curious about
Speaker 1: intelligence that I cold emailed Nicholas McIntosh, who was the
Speaker 1: head of the department in innversive Cade, and I said,
Speaker 1: can I just take a year off my undergraduate studies
Speaker 1: and just will you teach me everything about IQ? Will
Speaker 1: you teach me everything there is to know about like
Speaker 1: everything we've known in the last hundred years about intelligence.
Speaker 1: And so he, to my excitement, he responded to my
Speaker 1: email and he said, sure, come over. So I packed
Speaker 1: my bags and went to England. While this didn't count
Speaker 1: as a study of broad program, there was no study
Speaker 1: broad program. So I just notified caring Emil and I'm
Speaker 1: going off to England to study intelligence. And it was
Speaker 1: just so exciting to me to be able to learn
Speaker 1: How long were you twenty years old? Probably? And he
Speaker 1: responded to a cold letter and invited you over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I must have. Well there, I think that he might
Speaker 1: have been impressed with some of it, like I was
Speaker 1: Herb Simon's last research assistant at that time as well.
Speaker 1: But I felt like there were limits to what I
Speaker 1: was understanding about intelligence through the expertise approach that I
Speaker 1: was learning from Herb Simon. I felt as though I
Speaker 1: wasn't learning about intelligence. I was learning about expertise acquisition.
Speaker 1: And I didn't think there were say, exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1: So anyway, yeah, I he must have. He must have
Speaker 1: been impressed with my email. I mean, I was a
Speaker 1: real I was I was really uh, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of the word, and enterprising, young man. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of the right word. You know.
Speaker 1: I was like really excited to learn this stuff, curious
Speaker 1: and enthusiastic. Yeah, I like that and obviously able to
Speaker 1: communicate that. So you went over to England and you
Speaker 1: worked with a psychometrician, and so you worked with someone
Speaker 1: who was very interested in the formalities of measurement and
Speaker 1: careful definition of intelligence. And what and what did you
Speaker 1: learn as a consequence of doing that about intelligence? Well,
Speaker 1: I learned a bunch of things. One important thing I
Speaker 1: learned is that intelligence UH has multiple general cognive mechanisms
Speaker 1: which contribute or give rise to a general intelligence kind
Speaker 1: of function. You know, there's this debate in the field
Speaker 1: about whether or not in g or general intelligence is
Speaker 1: the thing that is causal of things in the world,
Speaker 1: or if it's an emergent property of things. And I
Speaker 1: learned a little bit about this view that it's an
Speaker 1: emergent property of these domain general mechanisms. And the biggest
Speaker 1: one which captivated my attention was working memory at that time,
Speaker 1: and then that quickly led to me doing and being
Speaker 1: interested in differences in sex differences in working memory. And
Speaker 1: I came up with a hypothesis when I was working
Speaker 1: with him in college about that, which then led me
Speaker 1: to getting studying with him for a master's degree to
Speaker 1: actually test that hypothesis. So let's walk over the psychometric
Speaker 1: view a bit, and I'll say some of the things
Speaker 1: that I think I know, and you can tell me
Speaker 1: if they're out of date or if you're convinced that
Speaker 1: they're erroneous in some way. So essentially, what the psychometricians
Speaker 1: have discovered is an established and I think more credibly
Speaker 1: than any psychologists have established any other phenomenon within the
Speaker 1: field of psychology, is that there's a common mechanism or
Speaker 1: an emergent property that appears to characterize activity in relationship
Speaker 1: to virtually any set of abstractions. So if you put
Speaker 1: together there a random set of questions that require abstraction
Speaker 1: to solve, so they could be mathematical questions, or general
Speaker 1: knowledge or vocabulary, the sort of thing even that you
Speaker 1: might encounter while playing trivial pursuit. If you put together
Speaker 1: a reasonable set of those and then you add up
Speaker 1: the correct scores and you rank order them across all
Speaker 1: the people who've taken that particular test, you get something
Speaker 1: that is a pretty accurate estimate of IQ. That's central tendency.
Speaker 1: It's that powerful, and that's related to long term life
Speaker 1: success in attainment, let's say economic attainment and career attainment
Speaker 1: that accounts for about twenty five percent of the variation
Speaker 1: between people in the differences in attainment. Is that seemed
Speaker 1: roughly anything I would do like a yes end if
Speaker 1: this was in profits, or I would yes end and
Speaker 1: say A central concept in this is the idea the
Speaker 1: positive manifold. Because it's really interesting, and this was Charles
Speaker 1: Spearman's discovery in nineteen oh four. It's interesting that people
Speaker 1: who tend to do well on one of these kinds
Speaker 1: of tests, tend to do well on other of these
Speaker 1: kinds of tests. And the thing which is why I
Speaker 1: thought the expertise acquisition approach I was learning in college
Speaker 1: didn't fully explain, is that we're talking even with lacking
Speaker 1: expertise in like these IQ test items abstraction, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: there are a lack of expertise, and yet they're pausitively
Speaker 1: correlated with each other. And it didn't have to be
Speaker 1: that way, right, right, Jordan, Because one could have proposed, well,
Speaker 1: the more you specialize in one thing, the worst you'll
Speaker 1: be in other things because you're devoting all your time
Speaker 1: and attention to one thing. But instead we find that actually,
Speaker 1: there is there are some general cognitive mechanisms that apply
Speaker 1: to any task and even novel especially actually, I would
Speaker 1: say especially to novel test. Yeah, right, because it actually
Speaker 1: predicts learning new abstractions better than it predicts real world performance.
Speaker 1: And we should also note that the level of predictive
Speaker 1: accuracy is stunning compared to the predictive accuracy of virtually
Speaker 1: anything any social scientists have discovered apart from IQ. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I tweeted that out the other day. I said, it's
Speaker 1: a styling to me when people say so matter of factly,
Speaker 1: like IQ tests are invalid, when it is probably the
Speaker 1: most valid test we have in psychology, And that, of
Speaker 1: course got a lot of comments like, well that that therefore,
Speaker 1: that just shows your whole field as shit. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's completely wrong, because the effect sizes in psychology, the
Speaker 1: valid effect sizes are are what would you call them
Speaker 1: impressive when you compare psychology to other disciplines of its
Speaker 1: category of generalizations. Say so, the idea that the whole
Speaker 1: field is nonsense is only put forth by people who
Speaker 1: don't have differentiated understanding of the field or of the
Speaker 1: social sciences that it might be compared with. Psychologists are
Speaker 1: the most sophisticated methodologists by far, and all the social
Speaker 1: scientists sciences as far as I'm concerned. So, yeah, there
Speaker 1: seems to be this misunderstanding or this expectation of psychology
Speaker 1: that we're supposed to be perfectly reliable. They were supposed
Speaker 1: to have perfect reliability of humans, and I don't think
Speaker 1: any psychologist has ever claimed to have that sort of
Speaker 1: level of precision. I mean, of course, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are going to fall between the cracks with these
Speaker 1: IQ tests and I'm interested in those people too, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, but I'm also interested in the statistical generalizations
Speaker 1: and the implications for society. I mean, you can hold
Speaker 1: both things in your mind at one time. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: And you can also point out that accounting for twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of the variation and something as complex as
Speaker 1: life attainment is unbelievably impressive, especially given how much effect
Speaker 1: random factors have on determining those outcomes like well like
Speaker 1: health for example, like physical and mental health. And while
Speaker 1: in situational variables like the state of the economy, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera, the availability of educational resources across all that variability,
Speaker 1: you still get this incredibly impressive prediction of this single factor.
Speaker 1: We could also point doubt for everyone that you know,
Speaker 1: You might think that people have good personalities and bad personalities.
Speaker 1: In some sense, that's uni dimensional. But if you do
Speaker 1: the same statistical analysis with a set of personality questions
Speaker 1: that you would conduct on a set of abstract questions,
Speaker 1: you get five factors, not one. So it isn't it
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily the case at all that something will simplify
Speaker 1: down to a single factor. But that's profoundly the case
Speaker 1: with IQ. The other thing that is worth pointing out
Speaker 1: is that bad as IQ tests might be, given that
Speaker 1: there's much they don't explain, they're far better than any
Speaker 1: other method we have of assessing potential for let's say,
Speaker 1: cognitive growth and acquisition. So if you want to predict
Speaker 1: how well someone's going to do in an academic environment,
Speaker 1: then there isn't anything that even comes close to the
Speaker 1: accuracy of an IQ test, and also to the unbiased
Speaker 1: it's also unbiased compared to all other forms of measurement.
Speaker 1: So so, okay, so you learned this in in in England,
Speaker 1: but you weren't You weren't satisfied with the expertise approach,
Speaker 1: and you so you became a master of the psychometric
Speaker 1: approach and learned that literature, but that also didn't satisfy you.
Speaker 1: Why not? Yeah? So I really and I felt this
Speaker 1: in my bones, uh, just intuitively when I was in college,
Speaker 1: even sophomore in college, I was reading I wrote, I
Speaker 1: read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg, and I
Speaker 1: felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence.
Speaker 1: I feel like that was this thing that I felt
Speaker 1: to be true that I you know, I didn't know,
Speaker 1: there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive
Speaker 1: psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology
Speaker 1: my sophomore year with Anne Fay and and got to
Speaker 1: the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks
Speaker 1: about the psychological literature and creativity, and that really excited
Speaker 1: me and I and I felt like there was there
Speaker 1: was more to the story than just IQ. And by
Speaker 1: the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He he
Speaker 1: Unfortunately he passed away a couple of years ago, but
Speaker 1: you know, if he were alive, I mean, he would
Speaker 1: definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations.
Speaker 1: It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that
Speaker 1: they never said, you know, like, no IQ researcher that
Speaker 1: I ever know, have ever known, has said like that
Speaker 1: IQ is a perfect predictor of everything, right, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: quite in the contracts that they tend to be extremely
Speaker 1: conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction. Well,
Speaker 1: you're also in a strange position intellectually, a unique position
Speaker 1: in some sense, because you worked with one of the
Speaker 1: leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the
Speaker 1: general single factor of intelligence IQ essentially. But you also
Speaker 1: worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people
Speaker 1: in the nineties in particular, and in the eighties as well,
Speaker 1: who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence.
Speaker 1: I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at
Speaker 1: the Harvard School of Education Faculty of Education that started
Speaker 1: to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially and so well,
Speaker 1: So what did you conclude as a consequence of being
Speaker 1: exposed to both of those sets of ideas. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you're quite right, it's a really stud point. I just
Speaker 1: want to say they had a great affection for each other.
Speaker 1: I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert STRMERC
Speaker 1: Bob over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once.
Speaker 1: I remember us all of us walking in the garden, me,
Speaker 1: Nick and Bob, and Bob was criticizing I remember this vividly.
Speaker 1: Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's not reductionistic, like
Speaker 1: it's showing us nothing about intelligence, and Nick was we're
Speaker 1: pushing back. But I feel like there was a great
Speaker 1: affection at the core among all of us. I think
Speaker 1: that what I really learned from all these perspectives is
Speaker 1: that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff
Speaker 1: in either or terms and do a lot more integration
Speaker 1: in our thinking about these topics, which and I'm sure
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about this when we get to
Speaker 1: the hierarchy of needs, because believe it or not, this
Speaker 1: is related. Is that we need to we need to
Speaker 1: think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchy
Speaker 1: than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are
Speaker 1: completely a contextual of each other. So the more I
Speaker 1: got into it, the more I realized how the interesting
Speaker 1: questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity. You know,
Speaker 1: when you combine and when you start looking at the world. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beattie, who's
Speaker 1: a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that
Speaker 1: both the executive attention network and the default mode network,
Speaker 1: which is more way to creativity or imagination, when they
Speaker 1: are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't make any sense to kind of view
Speaker 1: these things as separate, but each one do make their
Speaker 1: unique contributions, if that makes sense. Okay, so let's go
Speaker 1: back momentarily to the Sternberg psychometric debate. So I was
Speaker 1: really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I
Speaker 1: encountered all those ideas. I was trying to predict success
Speaker 1: in complex environments, environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard,
Speaker 1: and also in business environments, and I was trying to
Speaker 1: extend the prediction that was capable with IQ, and so
Speaker 1: I was scouring literature looking for reliably measurable methods of
Speaker 1: assessing anything that would predict achievement, and then also reliable
Speaker 1: measures of achievement, which which is a separate problem. But
Speaker 1: what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular
Speaker 1: was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable
Speaker 1: utility from their work, and I couldn't find anything in
Speaker 1: it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now,
Speaker 1: I also at that time was studying the Big five
Speaker 1: personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was
Speaker 1: something in that that was actually measurable. So even to
Speaker 1: predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially, and the
Speaker 1: SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into
Speaker 1: that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently
Speaker 1: they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor. And we
Speaker 1: looked at prediction of performance in graduate school and openness,
Speaker 1: which is the creativity to mension that we'll talk about,
Speaker 1: didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted
Speaker 1: with graduate graduate school performance publications and so on. But
Speaker 1: we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests basically
Speaker 1: assessing executive function could add something to IQ, maybe depending
Speaker 1: on how you did the analysis, but conscientiousness definitely did.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature,
Speaker 1: and so I always thought that was a fatal flaw
Speaker 1: actually of that literature because from a scientific perspective, and
Speaker 1: I also think from a reasonable critical intellectual perspective, if
Speaker 1: you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's
Speaker 1: the evidence, what's the evidence that you actually have something
Speaker 1: other than something conceptual? And so you must have run
Speaker 1: across the same problem when you were trying to expand
Speaker 1: out from IQ. I did, and I'll be I'll be
Speaker 1: very blunt about this. I went into the field it's
Speaker 1: so excited about there is multiple intelligences, and once I
Speaker 1: started studying this self scientifically, I became seduced by the truth.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know how else to say it. Well,
Speaker 1: how about horribly impacted by the truth. That was my
Speaker 1: experience with IQ. It was like, oh my god, this
Speaker 1: will go away no matter what you do, and it
Speaker 1: is solitary, and it's been well measured, and it's really
Speaker 1: hard to add to it, and everything else looks bad
Speaker 1: in comparison. It's it was quite a shock to me.
Speaker 1: That's the thing is. So once I started studying this
Speaker 1: stuff with with with Nick, you know you, for instance,
Speaker 1: you would look at like people's attempts to measure Gardner's
Speaker 1: multiple intelligences, and in every single instance you'd be able
Speaker 1: to still extract a G factor. And there there's no
Speaker 1: And I've come to the conclusion that as long as
Speaker 1: you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going it's
Speaker 1: going to be loaded. What the task you're doing is
Speaker 1: going to bring in working memory processes, It's going to
Speaker 1: bring in some other like General associative learning was another
Speaker 1: process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associve learning,
Speaker 1: but Nick and I published a paper showing that we
Speaker 1: could adapt some of those measures that have been used
Speaker 1: in the behaviorals literature. Because Nicholas is most well known
Speaker 1: for his behavioral research, we were able to adapt some
Speaker 1: of these associated learning measures to predict g very just
Speaker 1: as well as working memory, for instance. So we found
Speaker 1: that there's there are these general cogniicans that won't go away,
Speaker 1: Like you could have whatever whatever theory you want to
Speaker 1: propose a multiple intelligence is these general cogno mechanisms. You
Speaker 1: can't sweep them under the rug. Right, So if you
Speaker 1: laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence
Speaker 1: measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction,
Speaker 1: and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as
Speaker 1: a proxy for IQ, if you got anything at all.
Speaker 1: And what really what really stunned me was that we
Speaker 1: couldn't add anything a day to that. Even we added
Speaker 1: a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature,
Speaker 1: not from the psychometric literature. It was all clinical tests,
Speaker 1: mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a
Speaker 1: large battery and computerized them and added them to the
Speaker 1: IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and
Speaker 1: the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute,
Speaker 1: but if you did a factor analysis and extracted out
Speaker 1: one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that
Speaker 1: factor was the best predictor. So I could never find
Speaker 1: out from my own research whether we had just expanded
Speaker 1: the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predicta validity,
Speaker 1: or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it was
Speaker 1: striking to me that even these tests derived from a
Speaker 1: purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition
Speaker 1: and was actually opposed to it, still ended up measuring
Speaker 1: exactly the same thing. I always told my students, and
Speaker 1: you tell me what you think about this, that it
Speaker 1: was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also
Speaker 1: adding an IQ measure, because at least as a covariate,
Speaker 1: because it seemed and I also think the same thing
Speaker 1: about Big five personality, for whatever that's worth. It is
Speaker 1: like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at
Speaker 1: least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists.
Speaker 1: So if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing
Speaker 1: you should do is get what you already know out
Speaker 1: of the way, and that made research in my lab
Speaker 1: much more difficult because we'd get results from some measure
Speaker 1: and then that would hypothetically be publishable. But then as
Speaker 1: soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures,
Speaker 1: it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values
Speaker 1: as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement, and there's
Speaker 1: well developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly
Speaker 1: with IQ and personality, and I can't get I don't
Speaker 1: understand why the field won't accept that. Well, I'll give
Speaker 1: you an analogy. It's almost I think it's analogous to
Speaker 1: the fact that that all these environmental determinants of X
Speaker 1: papers don't never use genes as a culvariate. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, things change once you start to include
Speaker 1: genes as a covariate. Then you find some of these
Speaker 1: effects drop away. And that's interesting. It's like we don't
Speaker 1: even want to know the truth. You know, it's in certain, certain,
Speaker 1: certain circumstances. You know. I've thought about that too. It's
Speaker 1: not surprising that people don't want to know the truth
Speaker 1: about IQ because it's it's quite nasty. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn,
Speaker 1: and that has met walloping economic and social consequences, and
Speaker 1: so there's there's a bitterness in that. That's I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we still have to address it and take
Speaker 1: it seriously. But you know, so for me, it's like
Speaker 1: IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspective's incredible
Speaker 1: damage because the conservatives are likely to say, well, there's
Speaker 1: a job for everyone if they just get up and
Speaker 1: and you know, get at it, and the liberals like
Speaker 1: to say, well, everybody can be trained to do everything,
Speaker 1: and both of those are wrong because there's a there's
Speaker 1: a large number of people who are not who have
Speaker 1: enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in
Speaker 1: a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a
Speaker 1: huge problem, and we have no idea what to do
Speaker 1: with it. We won't even look at it. Well. Something
Speaker 1: I would like to bring this discussion, if that's okay,
Speaker 1: is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with
Speaker 1: neurodiverse people, because I've found in some of my own research,
Speaker 1: I studied something called twice exceptionality. Actually I edited a
Speaker 1: book called twice Exceptionality, supporting bright and creative students with
Speaker 1: learning disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent, they're like they're they're very intelligent,
Speaker 1: but sometimes because their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals,
Speaker 1: it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I
Speaker 1: do want to still leave that window open for us
Speaker 1: to what's absolutely fair enough. Look, there's as and as
Speaker 1: we already pointed out, IQ is only covering twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of the relative relevant territory, and the tests are
Speaker 1: by no means perfect, And there are people who are
Speaker 1: measured whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate,
Speaker 1: no doubt about that. So and and other factors play
Speaker 1: an important role, like conscientiousness, but it's only about at
Speaker 1: least as far as we can measure it, and we
Speaker 1: can only really measure it still with self report or
Speaker 1: other report personality tests. It adds about it's only about
Speaker 1: a third is powerful if that as IQ. This is
Speaker 1: how I put it. I say, look, it's really hard
Speaker 1: to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But
Speaker 1: there's many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test
Speaker 1: that could have to do with error variance and other factors.
Speaker 1: But it's very hard, Like if you get one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty IQ genuinely and honestly if you didn't cheat,
Speaker 1: it's hard to like just accidentally stumble into those right,
Speaker 1: answer asolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the low scores that contain the errors. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: fair enough, And that should be attended to, not least
Speaker 1: because we don't ever want to deny anybody potential the
Speaker 1: possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else.
Speaker 1: But you know, so many universities now are moving away
Speaker 1: from the S A T S let's say, and and
Speaker 1: and because they because of their perceived and actual shortcomings.
Speaker 1: But my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced
Speaker 1: with is likely to be way worse on virtually every
Speaker 1: imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out.
Speaker 1: So okay, so sorry, go ahead. Well, another reason why
Speaker 1: the topic is radioactive, of course, is because every time
Speaker 1: you talk about IQ differences, people there their their head
Speaker 1: immediately goes to group differences, and we're I just want
Speaker 1: to clarify, we're talking about individual differences. That's what That's
Speaker 1: what we've talked about so far. Do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? And you can't automatically extrapulate, you know, even
Speaker 1: when I use the word genes. People are scared of
Speaker 1: the word genes, you know, like, like that should be
Speaker 1: the most uncontroversial thing in the world, the fact that
Speaker 1: individual to individual, our genes play some influence. We don't
Speaker 1: want an environmentally deterministic world. That would be horrible. We
Speaker 1: don't want to you know what I mean. People don't
Speaker 1: really think that through, you know, so I just wanted
Speaker 1: to acquirefy we're talking about this, you know, individual individual level.
Speaker 1: We're not talking we're not extrappling this to group differences. Well,
Speaker 1: we're also talking about it at a comparative level. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: the IQ testing process is imperfect, right, well, compared to
Speaker 1: what like you have to come up with a better alternative.
Speaker 1: You can't just say this isn't good enough. It's like
Speaker 1: compared to what we can't We could assign people to
Speaker 1: universities randomly and like so, and you could do this.
Speaker 1: Imagine that your first year students, anybody could attend first
Speaker 1: year classes, and then you used first year grades to
Speaker 1: decide who got to continue. You could see that you
Speaker 1: could make a coherent social policy based on that that
Speaker 1: would give everyone a shot, and then it would allow
Speaker 1: those who succeeded in the actual enterprise. To caress now
Speaker 1: would be very expensive in the first year, but that
Speaker 1: might be beneficial anyways, to expose everyone to that kind
Speaker 1: of education. But you can't do that and continue up
Speaker 1: to the higher stratospheres of intellectual endeavor because people who
Speaker 1: pursue that have to be able to do it so well.
Speaker 1: So we're stuck with it, but we won't have a
Speaker 1: serious discussion of it, and it's really it's really unfortunate.
Speaker 1: I would say, Well, on caveat, you know, we found
Speaker 1: in our own paper that IQ was entirely uncorrelated with
Speaker 1: artistic creative achievement. And I've always been kind of interested
Speaker 1: what to do with that, because it just seems like
Speaker 1: openness to experience in some of these other cognitions. Like
Speaker 1: I stayed in puss It learning and I found that
Speaker 1: was correlated with artistic achievement and late and reduced lead
Speaker 1: and inhibition. The great work you did with Shelley Carson,
Speaker 1: I replicated some of that. So I think there's more
Speaker 1: of the story if we you know, if we look
Speaker 1: at what field are we trying to predict? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the openness dimension is of extreme interest, and because there
Speaker 1: is something to the personality trait openness that seems to
Speaker 1: be related, as you pointed out, to creative achievement, but
Speaker 1: also to so not even so necessarily so much artistic achievement,
Speaker 1: but even to enterprise achievement, like entrepreneurial ability. We've found
Speaker 1: that data I never published, I used it privately. We
Speaker 1: found a pretty pronounced relationship between openness to experience and
Speaker 1: entrepreneurial ability, practical entrepreneurial ability. And as you well know,
Speaker 1: that seems to have that openness seems to have something
Speaker 1: to do with perceptual differences. So open people are, they
Speaker 1: seem to have a broader perceptual range something like that.
Speaker 1: And they're more emotionally impacted by their perceptions too. They're
Speaker 1: more likely to experience awe, They're more likely to be
Speaker 1: compelled and gripped by ideas. They're more likely to be curious,
Speaker 1: They're more likely to engage in associative thinking, so one
Speaker 1: concept will remind them of a range of distantly related
Speaker 1: concepts more than someone who's a more constrained thinking. They're
Speaker 1: more likely to have insight experience, and and there is
Speaker 1: something to that that's not purely reducible to IQ because
Speaker 1: you can be you can have a high IQ and
Speaker 1: be non creative. It's it's less likely. But not only that,
Speaker 1: but like and this, this is starting to get into
Speaker 1: the transcend stuff. When you said the word all awe
Speaker 1: that then that starts to get into my newer research
Speaker 1: because you know, I can look, I can I can
Speaker 1: pop up a data set right now and say that
Speaker 1: IQ is coreleib zero with the extent to which you're
Speaker 1: going to experience all in your daily life. But openness
Speaker 1: to experience is very strongly correlated with that right now.
Speaker 1: So what do you make of that? What? What do
Speaker 1: you think? What do you think about open We've had
Speaker 1: professional exchanges on this topic, but I haven't talked to
Speaker 1: you for years, So where is your thinking gone with
Speaker 1: in relationship to openness to experience? And you know it
Speaker 1: can be transformed by psilocybin mushroom experiences right well, Griffiths
Speaker 1: showed that one standard deviation increase in openness one year
Speaker 1: later after one mystical experience stunning some profound neurological transformation.
Speaker 1: And Katherine McLean as well has has showed that really
Speaker 1: large effects. I'm very very interested in the linkage between
Speaker 1: openness to experience and self transcendent experiences. It does seem
Speaker 1: like certain personality UH structures are more likely to experience absorption.
Speaker 1: So I think the major link there, and probably our
Speaker 1: bridge here is is the is the the underdiscussed topic
Speaker 1: uh uh in in put in the public of because
Speaker 1: people talk about flow but intelligence absorption construct is not
Speaker 1: the same thing as as me hih Chick sent me
Speaker 1: High's flow construct. And I think that when we talk
Speaker 1: about opens to experience, I think it is quite linked
Speaker 1: to these altered states of consciousness and susceptibility to even hypnotizability,
Speaker 1: you know, this kind of willingness to take a take
Speaker 1: a to dip your toe into the sea of madness.
Speaker 1: I would say, so do you do you suppose? So?
Speaker 1: Do you suppose that the capacity to embody multiple personalities
Speaker 1: in some sense is the key aspect to openness? You know?
Speaker 1: Because we're incredible mimics and I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about the relationship between mimicry and AWE because I
Speaker 1: think AWE is the manifestation of the instinct to mimic.
Speaker 1: But I've watched creative people play music. For example, I
Speaker 1: remember one guitarist I was watching and he was jamming,
Speaker 1: and he was very expert at it, and it was
Speaker 1: unbelievably interesting to watch and listen to him at the
Speaker 1: same time, because you could see one second he'd be
Speaker 1: like a black female gospel singer from the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and the next second he'd be like Morrison from the Doors,
Speaker 1: and you could see all these musical influences that had
Speaker 1: inhabited him, and he was playing with them constantly, and
Speaker 1: it was like watching a shape shifter. And you know,
Speaker 1: our capacity for abstract into abstraction means that we can
Speaker 1: think up abstractions, which are representations of ourselves in some sense,
Speaker 1: and then assess their perceptions and their actions before we
Speaker 1: implement them. And I wonder if open people are are
Speaker 1: able to be more people in some sense, because I've
Speaker 1: also don't think so you think you think there's I
Speaker 1: think there's something. I think there's some I actually tested
Speaker 1: this hypothesis in the sense I look to see whether
Speaker 1: or not people who were scored higher in opened experience
Speaker 1: were more likely to have unreliability in their Big five
Speaker 1: character structure over the time. Oh, that's yeah, And I
Speaker 1: found that they did? Did they did? You found that? Okay? Yea.
Speaker 1: That means from moment to moment their personality and over
Speaker 1: what span of time, well over from months to months.
Speaker 1: I did. I didn't do like SAMP like experience sampling,
Speaker 1: which would be that'd be really cool, but just over
Speaker 1: a period of a couple of months. Okay, So just
Speaker 1: to clarify that personality like IQ, personality is quite stable
Speaker 1: across time. What you see across time is that people
Speaker 1: maintain their personality structures, but they become more agreeable, less neurotics,
Speaker 1: so less characterized by negative emotion, and more conscientious as
Speaker 1: they age. So those all seem like good things hypothetically.
Speaker 1: But your point is that if you take people or
Speaker 1: high in openness to experience, which is this creativity dimension,
Speaker 1: their personalities are less stable across time. I also wonder
Speaker 1: if that accounts to some degree for the oft remarked
Speaker 1: upon hypothetical association between creativity and instability, because imagine you're
Speaker 1: high in openness and you're high in neuroticism. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a problem because you have that personality variability that's
Speaker 1: an intrinsic part of you. But in some ways that's
Speaker 1: going to be harder on you because that variability is
Speaker 1: going to make things more unpredictable. I've had I've seen
Speaker 1: open people have a hard time catalyzing a single identity,
Speaker 1: and so that can be hard on them. This is
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. And I
Speaker 1: think that there's some really cool things when you actually
Speaker 1: look at the interaction effects, you know, like that's what's
Speaker 1: really cool, you know, especially what I what I guess
Speaker 1: I would call paradoxical traits. You know, like you know,
Speaker 1: because you look at the general correlational structure, but then
Speaker 1: what if a person you know, really bucks those general
Speaker 1: correlational structure trends. What's the word for that. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to come up with, like a term for that,
Speaker 1: you know, like, you know, most people who are conscientiousness
Speaker 1: are conscientious, I guess, tend to be what less what
Speaker 1: in the general population, Well, probably less neurotic. But what
Speaker 1: if you're high neurotic and you're high conscientious. That's just
Speaker 1: one example, But there are lots of these other kinds
Speaker 1: of paradoxical traits that I think are worth studying in
Speaker 1: more depth. Mm So those would be singular people in
Speaker 1: some sense, so right right, so high orderly high openness
Speaker 1: would be an example of that too. What is that? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 1: For instance, me, I score a hookler. Oh oh no,
Speaker 1: I was very I wasn't gonna say I'm I'm not
Speaker 1: those traits, but but here's something I am that's paradoxical
Speaker 1: and and maybe you are too. I don't know. I'd
Speaker 1: like to hear that I score very high in autistic
Speaker 1: like traite scales, but they also score very high in
Speaker 1: schizotippy like scales. So that's something that in the general population,
Speaker 1: those are very strongly negatively correlated with each other. But
Speaker 1: how in the world am I high in both those things?
Speaker 1: I think you might be high in both those things too.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's mediated by openness? May? Maybe? Maybe
Speaker 1: that's what it all comes down to, is that? Guess?
Speaker 1: So I wonder like I used to see my kid
Speaker 1: come home, my son when when he was young, he'd
Speaker 1: come home after playing with kids, and he would be
Speaker 1: inhabited by one of the kid's personalities, and often it
Speaker 1: was a braddy child, And so he'd come home with
Speaker 1: this whole bag of tricks, and it wasn't just one
Speaker 1: thing that he would experiment with. It was like he'd
Speaker 1: picked up the whole pattern of behavior from that play experience,
Speaker 1: and then he'd come home and try out his new tricks.
Speaker 1: And I wonder has anybody ever assessed to see if
Speaker 1: open people are better or faster mimics because absorption. Imagine
Speaker 1: imagine two things. Okay, So imagine first of all that
Speaker 1: you have this capacity for awe, and so what that does.
Speaker 1: You meet someone who's very impressive, and so there's an
Speaker 1: experience of awe that goes along with that. Now you
Speaker 1: should mimic someone who's impressive, because if if your judgment
Speaker 1: of their impressiveness is accurate, then you could be more
Speaker 1: impressive if you were more like them. So imagine that
Speaker 1: there's an instinct towards awe inspired imitation. Okay. Now, if
Speaker 1: you are also very high in absorption, you would get
Speaker 1: into that. And I think that's probably what's happening to
Speaker 1: open people in movies, because they sink really deeply into
Speaker 1: the movies. They are entranced by them or the fictional universe,
Speaker 1: and so they can become possessed by alternative personalities. Yes,
Speaker 1: and then that and of course that's what we want
Speaker 1: in actors obviously, right. We want people who are possessed
Speaker 1: by alternative personalities to act them out for us. And
Speaker 1: there's no reason because you see, one of the things
Speaker 1: psychologists don't study enough as far as I'm concerned, is imitation.
Speaker 1: It's so fundamental. Well, here's maybe a far out link.
Speaker 1: Do you think people who are high in openness are
Speaker 1: more likely to be ideologically possessed? Have you ever made
Speaker 1: that linkage? I mean, I don't know if there is
Speaker 1: something interesting there, but there might be the extent to
Speaker 1: which people who are hired and openness tend to be
Speaker 1: more likely to have contagion of other people's emotions and ideas,
Speaker 1: and maybe have I mean, could that be I guess, well,
Speaker 1: I guess I'd think two things about that. The if
Speaker 1: you're open, you're more easily possessed line of reasoning would
Speaker 1: suggest that, but the if you're open, you're likely to
Speaker 1: blow through arbitrary cognitive barriers would act negatively towards that.
Speaker 1: So maybe maybe what you might see is that who
Speaker 1: the hell knows that high openness teenagers are likely to
Speaker 1: be ideologically possessed but to not be later right, So
Speaker 1: maybe yeah, yeah, yeah, because the mechanism would lead them
Speaker 1: to that in the in the early development, but it
Speaker 1: would lead them out of that as they matured. Who
Speaker 1: moderator and maybe I accuse a moderator of all of this.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's going full circle. Yeah, well that's a tough
Speaker 1: one too, because you know it, I suspect that I
Speaker 1: would suspect again that in adolescence, higher IQ would be
Speaker 1: a predictor of more ideological possession because well, imagine that
Speaker 1: you have to be relatively smart to be interested in
Speaker 1: political issues political abstractions, so it's a precondition. And then
Speaker 1: when you first start being interested, well, you're not going
Speaker 1: to be very sophisticated, so an ideology is likely what
Speaker 1: you're going to adopt. Well, maybe it's the intellect facet,
Speaker 1: you know, because the openness to experience you pioneered this work,
Speaker 1: which I carried forward in my graduate work. There's an
Speaker 1: important distinction at the aspect level between intellectual curiosity and
Speaker 1: openness to experience more having to do with the actual
Speaker 1: experiential aspect of it. And so maybe the intellectual curiosity
Speaker 1: part is a modifier there, even more so than IQ. Right, right, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean all we've found so far in our investigations
Speaker 1: of openness and political view is that it's a definitely
Speaker 1: and it isn't only our lab obviously, and we didn't
Speaker 1: originate this idea for that matter. Openness is definitely a
Speaker 1: predictor of liberal and left leaning political proclivity, that's clear,
Speaker 1: and that goes along with a comparative interest in fiction,
Speaker 1: say versus nonfiction, And it's definitely temperamental. And I've been thinking,
Speaker 1: tell me what you think about this. So you know
Speaker 1: that openness and conscientiousness are the best two predictors of
Speaker 1: political belief. Okay, So then you might ask, and this
Speaker 1: goes along with your interest in interactions, is why the
Speaker 1: hell is it openness and conscientiousness relatively uncorrelated traits? You know?
Speaker 1: Why isn't it openness and neuroticism or or or extraversion
Speaker 1: and agreeableness? Why those two? Why? Political? And so I've
Speaker 1: been thinking, I think it has to do with borders.
Speaker 1: And I've been influenced in my thinking by all the
Speaker 1: new literature on the relationship between contagious disease and political belief.
Speaker 1: There's a huge literature. This is the only literature I've
Speaker 1: ever seen that has effect size as approximating those of IQ.
Speaker 1: So if you measure the prevalence of infectious disease at
Speaker 1: the city, state, provincial, or country level. You find that
Speaker 1: there's a walloping correlation with authoritarian attitudes like point seven.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous, it's massive, and there's some association there with
Speaker 1: disgust sensitivity, although that hasn't been completely pulled out yet.
Speaker 1: So imagine this is imagine that the open types, so
Speaker 1: the liberal types, they want the free flow of information,
Speaker 1: So they don't like barriers. They don't like borders between anything.
Speaker 1: They don't like borders between concepts, they don't like borders
Speaker 1: between genders. They don't like borders because it interferes with
Speaker 1: the free flow of information. But the cost of the
Speaker 1: free flow, borderless free flow is contamination. And so and
Speaker 1: they're both right, you open the borders, Well, look what
Speaker 1: happened last year international or international societ So we have
Speaker 1: an international pandemic. So you open up the doors to
Speaker 1: information flow, you also open up the doors to contamination.
Speaker 1: And I would say that's true biologically and ideationally as well.
Speaker 1: So the analogy holds. So that's why those two things
Speaker 1: combined to determined political belief, because political belief is about
Speaker 1: borders fundamentally. The one thing I'd understand about that is
Speaker 1: that neuroticism is pretty strongly correlated with discussed sensitivity or
Speaker 1: even the kind of thing you're referring to. So why
Speaker 1: is neuroticism not you know, because you said openness. We thought,
Speaker 1: we kind of thought, we kind of thought, and some
Speaker 1: of my theoretical work led me to presume that more
Speaker 1: conservative types or more ideologically possessed types, it wasn't clear
Speaker 1: which would be more neurotic, but they're not. Like, if anything,
Speaker 1: conservatives are less neurotic than liberals at a trade level.
Speaker 1: And it's a complex literature because there is some literature
Speaker 1: showing that conservatives are more sensitive under some conditions to
Speaker 1: some kinds of negative emotion, you know, and then you
Speaker 1: can generate up a defense theory of conservative ideology. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't look to me like it's fear related because
Speaker 1: it doesn't manifest itself in neuroticism at all, and it
Speaker 1: should if that theory was correct. There's something about disgust
Speaker 1: that's crucial that has been understudied so far, but that's changing.
Speaker 1: I think that's super interesting, and I've also been interested
Speaker 1: in at the aspect level analysis of these things. So
Speaker 1: the overall agreeableness to me is not a player, but
Speaker 1: once you look at the aspect level, you find that
Speaker 1: they diverge. Politeness is higher among conservatives and compassion is
Speaker 1: higher among liberals. I should just point out for everyone
Speaker 1: that's listening, is that work done in my lab by
Speaker 1: Colin DeYoung particularly, we showed that you could break the
Speaker 1: Big five down into ten sub aspects we called them,
Speaker 1: so you get some additional predictive utility sometimes if you
Speaker 1: use the more differentiated scales. And we did investigate, as
Speaker 1: as doctor Kaufman just mentioned, we did investigate the effects
Speaker 1: of that on political belief and we did find, as
Speaker 1: you said, that conservatives are more polite and that liberals
Speaker 1: are more empathetic, are more agreeable. And we don't know
Speaker 1: what to make of that, partly because we don't really
Speaker 1: understand politeness exactly. It has something to do with it's
Speaker 1: something related to deference to authority politeness, but it manifest
Speaker 1: like one of the things that just respect, respect for authority.
Speaker 1: It seems a little bit different than deference. It could
Speaker 1: could be respect, sure, sure, but then you it's complicated
Speaker 1: because conscientiousness is also associated, I would say, to some
Speaker 1: degree with respect for authority. Right, And so what's the
Speaker 1: difference what is politeness, adding that conscientiousness doesn't already covertly Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it it. While I was really excited by the
Speaker 1: political research, partly that was done in my lab, but
Speaker 1: also elsewhere because it's really it's quite revolutionary, I think,
Speaker 1: to think through the implications of the fact that your
Speaker 1: political viewpoints are determined by your temperament, and because what
Speaker 1: it means is that your biology in large part has
Speaker 1: provided you with a filter for the facts. Right, so
Speaker 1: we like to think, well, you derive your rational conclusions
Speaker 1: from the set of facts that you're exposed to, but
Speaker 1: unfortunately you have to choose the facts because there's just
Speaker 1: too many of them, and so temperament is playing a
Speaker 1: major role in determining what you expose yourself to. We
Speaker 1: found that with fiction preference, for example, it's like open
Speaker 1: people are much more likely to read fiction and fiction
Speaker 1: of certain sorts. And so the difference is start with
Speaker 1: the information gathering process itself. Is that what the work
Speaker 1: with mar Yeah was that. Yeah, I love that work
Speaker 1: so much. By the way, we had a hell of
Speaker 1: a time getting that stuff published. Although it's it it's
Speaker 1: crazy though, way when you publish what's going to be
Speaker 1: published and what's going to have an impact. You certainly
Speaker 1: can't predict it, but yes, that all worked out quite well.
Speaker 1: So okay, so back to let's go back to the
Speaker 1: if you don't bind unless you want to take to
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Let's go back to the humanism issue. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's just central to your new book. So you got
Speaker 1: interested in what was it about the humanist? Define it
Speaker 1: and then tell me what it was that captured your retention.
Speaker 1: So it was, in particular, it was humanistic psychology. And
Speaker 1: I actually distinguished that from the humanism movement that maybe
Speaker 1: you know, like that that's more a philosophical movement. You know,
Speaker 1: the humanistic psychology movement was in the fifties and sixties
Speaker 1: a cadet of psychologists who were unconvinced that we were
Speaker 1: telling the full story about humanity and humans through the
Speaker 1: Freud approach or the behaviorism approach. They felt like we
Speaker 1: were neglecting higher principles. They felt like we're neglecting the
Speaker 1: investigation of the whole person as a system. Right Freud
Speaker 1: they focused. Freud focused a lot as an MD on psychopathology,
Speaker 1: on mental illness exactly, and the behaviorists took everything that
Speaker 1: was related to consciousness and subjective experience completely off the table,
Speaker 1: and we should probably out that that had utility. Both
Speaker 1: those movements had tremendous utility, but there was this lacuna.
Speaker 1: I let's say that the existentialists addressed in the fifties,
Speaker 1: the existentialist just and then the humanists in the sixties.
Speaker 1: By the way, I loved your lecture about Carl Rodgers
Speaker 1: and the phenomenology approach, So that was that was really cool.
Speaker 1: I like that. Yeah, so in a big way, you know,
Speaker 1: there was still a respect for those prior approaches. They
Speaker 1: weren't saying there they were complete shit. You know, like
Speaker 1: Abraham Aslow did really rigorous, great work in grad school
Speaker 1: and rats. You know, you're looking at reaction time task.
Speaker 1: But he got bored with it and he felt that
Speaker 1: there was more to the story of humanity. So I
Speaker 1: guess what really captured my interest is this notion of
Speaker 1: studying the whole system, the whole person, and how all
Speaker 1: the parts work together. I think that we both agree
Speaker 1: in our philosophy that nothing is actually objective or absolutely
Speaker 1: good or bad. No, no, no psychological trait, it's it
Speaker 1: depends how it's integrated into the system. You know, this
Speaker 1: is why I don't. I'm critical of the distinctions between
Speaker 1: positive and negative emotions, Like we can absolutely classify which
Speaker 1: emotions are positive and absolutely classify which ones are negative,
Speaker 1: as opposed to just we have comfortable emotions, you have
Speaker 1: uncomfortable emotions. I mean, you can have the experience, but
Speaker 1: then we put the label on top of the experience.
Speaker 1: You've you've said you've had some good lectures about the
Speaker 1: potential benefits of integrating your anger or are integrating. I mean,
Speaker 1: anything you integrate in a healthy way into the whole
Speaker 1: system can be beneficial. You know, it has the potential
Speaker 1: issue there, right, Yeah, it's the cusual issue that the
Speaker 1: existentialists and the human humanists and young as well as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned, and you concentrated on. Which is well,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about integration, let's say, and so the psychoanalyst,
Speaker 1: psychoanalytic approach, even freud In approach, would be to uncover
Speaker 1: something repressed and to bring it into the whole personality. Well,
Speaker 1: what exactly do you mean by the whole personality? And
Speaker 1: what do you mean by integrated? And so the humanists,
Speaker 1: for me, the humanists were the entry point to the
Speaker 1: answer to that question. Absolutely So, So okay, so you're
Speaker 1: you're updating Maslow with your with this new book and
Speaker 1: so walks in what you were. In one way, I'm
Speaker 1: updating Maslow, But in another way, I'm actually setting the
Speaker 1: record straight about Maslow because there's so many misconceptions and
Speaker 1: things he never even said. So first of all, he
Speaker 1: never drew a pyramid. There there is in none of
Speaker 1: his papers. Did he ever draw a pyramid to represent
Speaker 1: his hierarchy of needs. He didn't even really think of
Speaker 1: it in that way. In fact, I was talking to
Speaker 1: someone who knew him personally, and there's a story where
Speaker 1: he was having lunch with him and he saw on
Speaker 1: the dollar bill or I think it's the dollar bill
Speaker 1: where there's a pyramid, and he looked at me and
Speaker 1: he said, I hate that fucking pyramid. So look, he
Speaker 1: didn't he didn't like. That's not how he thought about
Speaker 1: He actually says in his writings he said, I would
Speaker 1: like to present my integrated hierarchy of human needs. And
Speaker 1: he was very clear to call it integrated. He said,
Speaker 1: it's it's every single need rests very carefully upon the
Speaker 1: lower need. But just because life is not like a
Speaker 1: video game where you reach one level of needs and
Speaker 1: then like some voice from a bove is like congrats Eve,
Speaker 1: unlocked to the next level, and then you never go
Speaker 1: back to the prior level. Integration fundamentally means that every
Speaker 1: single higher need depends on the lower need that came before.
Speaker 1: It depends on it in a very important way that
Speaker 1: gets missed by the way it's often represented in modern
Speaker 1: even psychology textbooks, like I really think we need to
Speaker 1: update the psychology textbooks about this. Yeah, well, lots of
Speaker 1: great thinkers are poorly represent by their low order, their
Speaker 1: low resolution representation. I mean P. P the developmental psychologist
Speaker 1: who's basically taught as a stage theorist, which was a
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of what he did and certainly not the
Speaker 1: most important thing. He was fundamentally interested in reconciling the
Speaker 1: distinction between religion and science. And I never heard hide
Speaker 1: nor hair of that till I started reading PJA while
Speaker 1: the translations I couldn't read it in the French original.
Speaker 1: So you know, the ideas of creative geniuses are filtered
Speaker 1: through the through lesser minds when they're taught, and much
Speaker 1: of what's complex and interesting disappears, and what's simplified is
Speaker 1: what remains se lev So do you want to walk
Speaker 1: us through a bit the theory and then what you've
Speaker 1: done with it and what it's done for you and
Speaker 1: what you think it can do for other people? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and I'll also bring in how some of your own
Speaker 1: work influenced it. Okay, So the hierarchy of needs as
Speaker 1: as Maso originally proposes that we have a hierarchy of
Speaker 1: pre potency. And that's the word he used, pre potency
Speaker 1: various motivations that, given certain deprivations, calls our entire consciousness
Speaker 1: to be very narrowed down to those fit to pay
Speaker 1: attention to this thing. So if we if we severely
Speaker 1: lack food, our consciousness sees everything as a potential source
Speaker 1: of food. If we severely are deficient with our with
Speaker 1: our connections and belonging, he says, we have, we show
Speaker 1: a very kind of needing love. So everyone looks like
Speaker 1: everyone's utility value is to satisfy this whole in ourselves
Speaker 1: of connection of our loneliness. Same with self esteem needs.
Speaker 1: If we're severely deprived of any opportunities for mastery or
Speaker 1: esteem from others, we become very needy and demand respect.
Speaker 1: But he argued that the deprivation realm of human existence
Speaker 1: can be distinguished from the being realm of human existence.
Speaker 1: He said, once we can, it's like putting on a clear,
Speaker 1: clearer set of glasses for the first time when you've
Speaker 1: when you've only been seeing very very unclear classes. And
Speaker 1: when you put on the clear glasses and you enter
Speaker 1: the being realm or the growth realm of human existence,
Speaker 1: you no longer demand for the world to conform to
Speaker 1: your deprivations. You start to see the world on its
Speaker 1: own terms. You start to see the world and even,
Speaker 1: dare I say, admire, And this is where transcendence starts
Speaker 1: to come into play. Admire and love people for who
Speaker 1: they are, independently of you, independently of their utility value
Speaker 1: for your own deprivations. So to me, I thought that
Speaker 1: was the most important distinction in Maslow's theory that had
Speaker 1: been lost. Okay, so let let me ask you a
Speaker 1: question there. So there's two distinctions that are being made,
Speaker 1: and they seem to be conflated to some degree in Maslow.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's a misunderstanding on my part. There an
Speaker 1: implication at least that the higher, the more transcendent values
Speaker 1: or perceptions make themselves manifest once the deprivation states have
Speaker 1: been taken care of. That's sort of the hut. But
Speaker 1: there's a conceptual distinction that's equally important, which is that
Speaker 1: there are deprivation motivated perceptions, motivations, and actions, but there's
Speaker 1: another class as well, and those should be separated. And
Speaker 1: I have more trouble with the first presumption than the second,
Speaker 1: because well, when I was thinking thinking through Maslow, for example,
Speaker 1: in the courses I've taught on existentialism and humanism. So Janitsen,
Speaker 1: who's a great existential psychologist as far as I'm concerned,
Speaker 1: talked about people who were in the prison camps in
Speaker 1: Russia who were starving and deprived in multiple different ways.
Speaker 1: And Frankel did the same thing with regards to the
Speaker 1: concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and he describes, in painful
Speaker 1: story after story, people turning to what Maslow would consider
Speaker 1: being needs in the midst of severe deprivation and finding
Speaker 1: sustenance and profound sustenance there. So he talked, for example,
Speaker 1: about a group of intellectuals who were starving to death
Speaker 1: in a work camp who had a weekly seminar where
Speaker 1: they discussed their specific academic specializations, and you know, it
Speaker 1: shrunk over time as each of them died of malnutrition.
Speaker 1: But and Sojenitzen produces a very powerful critique of the
Speaker 1: idea that the being realm, let's say, in Maslow's terms,
Speaker 1: can only be accessed once the deprivation realm has been
Speaker 1: taken care of. And well, well, I found that an
Speaker 1: interesting our argument, to say the least, and it's very interesting.
Speaker 1: But I would modify and say, at least, you know.
Speaker 1: And this is where maybe what Maslow said and what
Speaker 1: Scott Barry Kaufman is saying might start to diverge, because
Speaker 1: what I try to argue in this book is that
Speaker 1: it's all about the how how those deprivations are integrated,
Speaker 1: not the fact that they're gone. So, for instance, in
Speaker 1: my chapter on purpose, I cover what I call the
Speaker 1: Hitler problem, and that's the you know, the very I
Speaker 1: think a reasonable question did Hitler have a higher purpose?
Speaker 1: You know? And you know? And what would that even
Speaker 1: mean in the in the whole hierarchy of needs model,
Speaker 1: considering that I put purpose as a higher need in
Speaker 1: the growth realm, you know? Or am I saying that
Speaker 1: Hitler entered the being the growth realm, and the way
Speaker 1: I resolved that is that I argue that, you know,
Speaker 1: some of the most pro social or most positive aspects
Speaker 1: of manifestations of the higher need of purpose occur when
Speaker 1: one's sufferings are integrated into one's higher order structure. But
Speaker 1: it's it's not the only thing that's driving their whole system.
Speaker 1: So I just really do like viewing this from a
Speaker 1: whole system perspective, because once you can integrate kind of
Speaker 1: this this suffering you had and the anger you have
Speaker 1: for the suffering, but you integrate that with this need
Speaker 1: for exploration as I talk about as a growth need,
Speaker 1: as well as be love, which is mas Well called
Speaker 1: it be love love for the just like humanitarian sort
Speaker 1: of concern, or as Alfred ad Or called it, a
Speaker 1: good shoot bunda freud. I can never pronounce the word,
Speaker 1: but you know, social interest. Once we have a higher
Speaker 1: level integration of all these things, I think you get
Speaker 1: something much better as the sum of the parts than
Speaker 1: any of the parts themselves. Does that make sense? Yes, well, well,
Speaker 1: let's we can also walk through this argument in some
Speaker 1: more detail. I mean, it's obviously the case that deprivation
Speaker 1: can reach a point where nothing but the deprivation is salient.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're in enough pain, for example, if
Speaker 1: you're hungry enough, et cetera, et cetera. So there's limit
Speaker 1: conditions that make up these deprivation states that skew everything.
Speaker 1: If you're dying of thirst, for example, you're not going
Speaker 1: to in all likelihood engage in a philosophical conversation, right,
Speaker 1: So at some point deprivation takes the reins completely. But
Speaker 1: then there's that one of the dangers in Maslow's approach
Speaker 1: as far as I was concerned, And this is partly
Speaker 1: why the writings of Theodore dal Rymple have been so
Speaker 1: interesting to me, because dal Rymple talks he worked a
Speaker 1: lot in really in the what would you say, He
Speaker 1: worked a lot among the dispossessed class in inner city
Speaker 1: uh British cities, in the in the innermost confines of
Speaker 1: British cities. And he described a culture of poverty that
Speaker 1: characterized the dispossessed, and they weren't poor so much if
Speaker 1: you thought about poverty in terms of absolute deprivation. So
Speaker 1: he had worked in Africa as well, among people who
Speaker 1: were by any reasonable standard much more materially deprived than
Speaker 1: the members of the population he was addressing in the
Speaker 1: psychiatric practice. But he his fundamental diagnosis was that the
Speaker 1: multi generational poverty cycle, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, anti social
Speaker 1: behavior that he saw was a consequence of a profound
Speaker 1: philosophical disequilibrium that was the primary agent that was driving
Speaker 1: all this, rather than something that could be addressed, for example,
Speaker 1: by attending by social attention being paid say to you know,
Speaker 1: like a guaranteed basic income or something like that. And
Speaker 1: so there are I mean, getting this straight is really
Speaker 1: of crucial importance, and it is really complicated. So and
Speaker 1: Maslow always felt to me, look, I learned a lot
Speaker 1: from the humanists, and I would say they were an
Speaker 1: entry point to me into the domain of practical philosophical
Speaker 1: slash religious thinking. The humanists offered within the field of
Speaker 1: psychology spirituality for people, for atheists. That's what it looked
Speaker 1: like to me. And I'm not denigrating that, I say
Speaker 1: that with all due respect. And they did introduce spirituality,
Speaker 1: let's say, back into the scientific community among psychologists. So
Speaker 1: that was extremely attractive to me. And well, let me
Speaker 1: tell you how I tested my model and cairically because
Speaker 1: I published a paper where I attempted to integrate this
Speaker 1: theory into modern day personality psychology. And this is where
Speaker 1: you come in, quite frankly, and your own ideas and work.
Speaker 1: So I had a hypothesis, which Colin thought was a
Speaker 1: good hypothesis that I should run with it, that the
Speaker 1: deprivation and growth and being realm that Maso talked about
Speaker 1: would map onto stability and plasticity in the Big Five,
Speaker 1: that these two higher order factors of the Big and
Speaker 1: I found that to be the case. I actually developed
Speaker 1: and validated a psychometric scale of all the self factorization
Speaker 1: characteristics at Maswell wrote about, and I found that I
Speaker 1: could validate ten out of the seventeen that he mentioned,
Speaker 1: and that the ten were just really strongly positively correlated
Speaker 1: with plasticity. And okay, so let's take that apart for
Speaker 1: sex for everyone. So work done in my lab, again
Speaker 1: by Colin Deyung and other people had looked at two
Speaker 1: factor solutions too, but we showed that agreeableness neuroticism and
Speaker 1: conscientiousness neuroticism reversed and conscientiousness together seemed to make a
Speaker 1: super factor. So they were somewhat correlated, and so did
Speaker 1: extraversion and openness, and Colin in particular has gone off
Speaker 1: and developed all of that into a theory with neuroscientific underpinnings,
Speaker 1: and he started doing that at the University of Toronto,
Speaker 1: was considered continued for the last it's got to be
Speaker 1: near twenty years. And so we found stability. We called
Speaker 1: the super factor stability and plasticity for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1: But and so you just said that you mapped stability
Speaker 1: onto the deprivation realm and and and plasticity into the
Speaker 1: being realm being realm. And I think that that's how
Speaker 1: that's my modern day flavor on this, like integrating it
Speaker 1: with personality psychology, because at the at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I'm really an individual difference and that's my
Speaker 1: focus is individual difference, is cognitive science and personality. And
Speaker 1: I think that the optimal and what I argued in
Speaker 1: this paper is that the optimal cybernetic system is one
Speaker 1: that has a deep integration of both stability and plasticity.
Speaker 1: So it really it really isn't an either or question.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of do you have the skills that
Speaker 1: allow you to resist distractions against your higher r goals
Speaker 1: and do you have the flexibility to change course when
Speaker 1: it's no longer serving those higher or goals, and and
Speaker 1: that that's how I try to integrate Maso's theory with
Speaker 1: modern day cybernetic and personality theory. So I've been you
Speaker 1: tell me what you think about this. I've been working
Speaker 1: on the pre position that that balance is it manifests
Speaker 1: itself as something that's analogous to chicksent Mahailey's flow, although
Speaker 1: I think it's more like it's act if it's active
Speaker 1: engagement and immerse immersement. You experience that when well, when
Speaker 1: you're having a good conversation, let's say, and you're not
Speaker 1: attending to anything but the ideas that are being bandied
Speaker 1: back and forth. You're not aware of the broader context,
Speaker 1: you're not aware of the flow of time. You're focused
Speaker 1: and engaged and interested in what's happening. And that happens,
Speaker 1: as far as I'm concerned, when maximal, when optimal information
Speaker 1: flow has been established. So you want to maintain the
Speaker 1: integrity of your current perceptual frameworks, essentially, your current interpretive frameworks.
Speaker 1: You don't want them to fall apart. But because they're limited,
Speaker 1: because you're limited, they have to continually transform at some
Speaker 1: rate and expand so as you become more competent and
Speaker 1: as the world changes around you. So it seems to
Speaker 1: me that the instinct of meaning is the manifestation of
Speaker 1: an internal signal that you've optimized information flow for your
Speaker 1: particular nervous system. So you're not getting more information than
Speaker 1: you can stand. So it's not knocking you into uncertainty
Speaker 1: related anxiety, but you are incorporating information at a rate
Speaker 1: that's optimal with regards to your continued adaptation and growth. Well,
Speaker 1: I love that. I think that manifests itself as the
Speaker 1: sense of meaning, and I think that's what music produces.
Speaker 1: It's an analogy. When you listen to music and you're
Speaker 1: deeply engaged, you get an analog of that, and it's
Speaker 1: like a model. It's like, this is what your life
Speaker 1: could be like, this musical beauty if you were in
Speaker 1: the right place at the right time all the time,
Speaker 1: which is what you should should, should could strive to attain.
Speaker 1: And there's something that there's something that never runs out
Speaker 1: about that idea. I would love that, And just add
Speaker 1: is it worth distinguishing between the kind of meaning that
Speaker 1: is pre wired, you know, programmed through the course of
Speaker 1: human evolution, that our universal forms of meaning that all
Speaker 1: of us would agree give us meaning versus individualistic forms
Speaker 1: of meaning that maybe touch more of our unique traits.
Speaker 1: And well, I would say that's probably a matter of
Speaker 1: level of integration, which is that the more universal the trait,
Speaker 1: the the meaning experience is, the more it's related to
Speaker 1: an emergent integration. So so you know, I like as
Speaker 1: you as you already pointed out, we all differ in
Speaker 1: our temperaments and quite substantively, and so there are going
Speaker 1: to be things that we find particularly interesting that other
Speaker 1: people won't find interesting that might determine something like the
Speaker 1: choice of our careers. It's not trivial these differences there,
Speaker 1: but as you integrate, it makes sense that as you integrate,
Speaker 1: the thing that's integrated becomes more similar across diverse places.
Speaker 1: I mean, how could it be otherwise. And that's where
Speaker 1: I think you get into the realm of universal human values,
Speaker 1: and I think they are they're emergent properties of reciprocal
Speaker 1: game something like that. So let me tell you something interesting.
Speaker 1: You tell me what you think about this. So you know,
Speaker 1: I've been very what would you say opposed to the
Speaker 1: idea that the typical hierarchical social structure is based on power.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a political argument going on everywhere now
Speaker 1: and at the extremes the claim is something like, well, hierarchical,
Speaker 1: the hierarchical structures that characterize the West, that characterize capitalism,
Speaker 1: or maybe that just characterize the West in general, are
Speaker 1: based on power. Okay. So first I talked to Richard
Speaker 1: Trombley this week, who's one of the world's leading authority
Speaker 1: on the development of aggression in human beings. Okay, So
Speaker 1: what he showed quite clearly is that aggression is there
Speaker 1: right at the beginning. So it's one of these built
Speaker 1: in motivational systems that you already talked about. The most
Speaker 1: aggressive age is two. If you group two year olds together,
Speaker 1: the probability of kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing is higher
Speaker 1: than it is if you group any other age together,
Speaker 1: and that declines precipitously with socialization. Okay, So the general
Speaker 1: trend is from aggression to less aggression. And then you
Speaker 1: can differentiate the aggressive kids into three groups, the kit
Speaker 1: to two year olds into three groups. Those who are
Speaker 1: never aggressive even at two thirty percent of the human population,
Speaker 1: those who are aggressive sporadically fifty percent and seventeen percent
Speaker 1: who are chronically aggressive. It's from that category. If those
Speaker 1: kids aren't socialized into peace over the course of their
Speaker 1: developmental history, most particularly by the age of four, they're
Speaker 1: the long term permanent offenders. Okay, so, but what's interesting
Speaker 1: about this and crucial I believe, is that the developmental
Speaker 1: trend across aggression categories is for less aggression. Aggression isn't
Speaker 1: and therefore power is not a stable strategy for negotiating
Speaker 1: success in human hierarchies. And it's more like it's more
Speaker 1: something like reciprocity. And we need to recognize that because
Speaker 1: it really is the case that you're much more likely
Speaker 1: to be successful if you're productive and reciprocal. And I
Speaker 1: think that's an emergent that emerges out of hierarchical organization.
Speaker 1: And I think it's the same across cultures, you know,
Speaker 1: with variation. But that's a universal human truth and I
Speaker 1: think we're adapted to it and we recognize that in
Speaker 1: others when we see it, and that produces awe. When
Speaker 1: we really see it, that person's hyper productive, they're hyper generous.
Speaker 1: I want to be like that person, so competent and relational.
Speaker 1: Will those be synonyms for those two words? Yeah, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: It's competent and generous. What a combination. And you know
Speaker 1: the thing about generosity is that it allows competent people
Speaker 1: to store the fruits of their labor, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you and I collaborate and I'm generous in our collaboration,
Speaker 1: then you're going to collaborate with me again, maybe sometime
Speaker 1: down the road when I really need it, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: You know, when I was struck, I talked to Jocko
Speaker 1: Willing two weeks ago, and Jocko's this like hyper masculine
Speaker 1: warrior type of character. You know, he's Navy seal and
Speaker 1: very intimidating physically and psychologically. And he told me in
Speaker 1: the naval seal training, for example, the primary dictum is
Speaker 1: you have your buddy's back. It isn't biggest, meanest ape wins.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't even work for chimpanzees as friends d
Speaker 1: wall is shown. So there is an ethic man. And
Speaker 1: one of the things I liked about the Humanists and
Speaker 1: about your book is that you know, you're pointing out
Speaker 1: that there is this integrative tendency that is associated with
Speaker 1: values and that there's something universal about it. It's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely absolutely And if I may go to a territory
Speaker 1: that may seem completely unrelated, but I don't think it is.
Speaker 1: I wrote a book called Mating Intelligence Unleashed that co
Speaker 1: authored with an evolutionary psychologist, Glenn Gear But we found
Speaker 1: that the male, the male that was most attractive to
Speaker 1: women was the tender defender. And I feel like you're
Speaker 1: kind of describing a tender defender. I really want to
Speaker 1: talk to you about that. So okay, So I've I've
Speaker 1: been involved in an email exchange with Richard Dawkott's and
Speaker 1: I asked him to come on my podcast, and he
Speaker 1: wrote back very politely and in a detailed letter pointing
Speaker 1: out why I wanted to talk to him, which was
Speaker 1: very surprising to me. I said I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to him sex selection, particularly, and then he identified a
Speaker 1: paragraph from a talk I did with Sam Harris that
Speaker 1: nailed exactly why I wanted to talk with Dawkins. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Dawkins is the blind Watchmaker guy, right, and he's
Speaker 1: anti teleological to the core and also anti religious, etc.
Speaker 1: And people know about Dawkins and Dawkins is an admirable
Speaker 1: person intellectually, but they're the evolutionary psychologic biologists are not
Speaker 1: taking the issue of sexual selection seriously enough in relationship
Speaker 1: to value. So let's take what you just said. All right,
Speaker 1: So imagine this. You tell me if you think this
Speaker 1: is wrong, because I really want to know if it's wrong.
Speaker 1: Men women do this too, but we're going to sex
Speaker 1: differentiate for the time being. Men organize hierarchies around tasks.
Speaker 1: They want to get something done, okay, and it's something
Speaker 1: that everyone in the group wants to get done, and
Speaker 1: so as soon as they aggregate themselves towards the task,
Speaker 1: a hierarchy of competency emerges because there's individual differences, and
Speaker 1: if the group's functional, they let the guys who are
Speaker 1: better at the task rise to the top. Okay, Now
Speaker 1: imagine that across tasks there's a proclivity for some men
Speaker 1: to rise and others not to. And those would be
Speaker 1: men who are competent and generous across tasks, and so
Speaker 1: they're more likely to emerge as successful in the domain
Speaker 1: of task related hierarchies. All right, Now we know that
Speaker 1: women are what's the word, they mate across and up hierarchies.
Speaker 1: It's one of their real Yes. There, men mate across
Speaker 1: and down hierarchies, women mate across and up, and that's
Speaker 1: obvious cross culturally. It's ameliorated to some degree in countries
Speaker 1: like the Scandinavian countries, but it's there. Cross culturally. They
Speaker 1: like men who are a bit older, and they like
Speaker 1: men who are a bit above them. In the hierarchical game,
Speaker 1: Let's say men vote on who the most valid man
Speaker 1: is and women peel from the top, and that value
Speaker 1: game drives evolution. It's not random, it's not random at all.
Speaker 1: And so that's you said, tender defender, and I do
Speaker 1: think that's generous productivity and so not all. We're selected
Speaker 1: for that, and sexual selection specifies that even more completely
Speaker 1: and intensely, intensely. So men can men can gain that
Speaker 1: by by displaying trappings of wealth, and like the pickup
Speaker 1: artist types, they mimic tender defender and they can fool
Speaker 1: women that way. But women, you know, by and large,
Speaker 1: are looking for cues for for exactly that competence and
Speaker 1: the capacity to protect, the ability to protect. Why out,
Speaker 1: what else would you want for your children? You know? You? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean what you're saying link so much does these
Speaker 1: handicapped principle and evolutionary psychology, you know that you need honest,
Speaker 1: reliable signals, uh do Uh? Like women are pretty smart
Speaker 1: at seeing bullshit, you know, Like, well they're they're the
Speaker 1: survival of their children depends on it. That's why there
Speaker 1: So they're extremely smart at it, as they should be.
Speaker 1: And like, I don't, I don't believe that it's a
Speaker 1: misreading of the evolutionary literature to point out that one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that we have diverged so rapidly from
Speaker 1: our con from our common ancestor with chimps, chimps seem
Speaker 1: much more similar to that common ancestor than we are
Speaker 1: is because chimp females are non selective maters, whereas human
Speaker 1: females are highly selective maters. And you know this manifests itself.
Speaker 1: And if you look at these charts, they're quite comical
Speaker 1: in some sense. If you look at how men rate
Speaker 1: women on a typical dating site, it's pretty much a
Speaker 1: normal distribution. The average woman gets an Outridge rating, and
Speaker 1: you know, the nine out of ten gets a nine
Speaker 1: and so forth. It's distributed as you would expect, but
Speaker 1: it's skewed way to the left. For men, like sixty
Speaker 1: percent of men are like a four or lower. And
Speaker 1: so even in just instantaneous ratings of attractiveness, there's exactly
Speaker 1: sex differences. So you put it what you put it
Speaker 1: very well though, when you said our survival or species
Speaker 1: literally depends on it. I love it. That's what it is.
Speaker 1: A double click on that. Okay. So then the question is,
Speaker 1: and this ties into this humanist idea, what is it
Speaker 1: that we're aiming at? Well, what part of that is? Well,
Speaker 1: what are the elements that make up competence and generosity? Well,
Speaker 1: we know what competence is made out of IQ and conscientiousness.
Speaker 1: That's a huge chunk of it. So in general problem
Speaker 1: solving capability that's IQ. Consciousness is diligent application of that. Okay.
Speaker 1: So then you pair that with generosity and hel and
Speaker 1: openness to experience there, yes, well there'd be a niche
Speaker 1: there because that's where you get creative types, and they
Speaker 1: can be radically I think of creativity as a high risk,
Speaker 1: high return game. You're highly likely to fail. But I'm
Speaker 1: just looking that to Jeffrey Miller's hypots about creativity being
Speaker 1: a reliable indicator of genetic mutation load, which is why
Speaker 1: it would be so sexy, you know, from from the
Speaker 1: selector point of view. Oh, you'd have to elaborate out
Speaker 1: that a bit because this this is also the case
Speaker 1: for like all sorts of other species, right, bower birds
Speaker 1: for example, and even fish, for God's sake, there's have
Speaker 1: you ever seen those sculptures that puffer fish make at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the motion. It's incredible and they're beautiful,
Speaker 1: and they're codificated, and they take a lot of work.
Speaker 1: It's like birds select highly for creativity in many cases,
Speaker 1: and so you see this, You see this emerge out
Speaker 1: of evolutionary process in species that are quite distant from ours.
Speaker 1: It points to something underneath that's common. You know, even
Speaker 1: it's common across creative fish and creative people. It's quite
Speaker 1: the damn gap. Well, this goes back to like a
Speaker 1: lot of things we're saying, because like human human intelligence,
Speaker 1: human creativity is so complex it's very hard to fake.
Speaker 1: It goes back to like the what I said earlier,
Speaker 1: You can't just accidentally get like a one seventy IQ,
Speaker 1: even though there's lots of reasons why maybe a missed
Speaker 1: lower IQ is misrepresenting your IQ but you know, this
Speaker 1: does relate to the fact that you know, reliable indicators
Speaker 1: of these things are important from a sexual selection point
Speaker 1: of view as well as other points. Well, that's crucial,
Speaker 1: you know, because the blind watchmaker types they say, well,
Speaker 1: evolution is just a random process, and there's unfortunate political
Speaker 1: and philosophical implications that instantly emerge from that. Everything's bloody pointless,
Speaker 1: there's no direction, there's no such thing as real value.
Speaker 1: It's like, wait a sec, Wait a sec. There's random
Speaker 1: mutation on the creativity production side. So the life capitalizes
Speaker 1: on chance an extra domain of creative production. Just and
Speaker 1: you see that in creative thought in people too, because
Speaker 1: there's a kind of a randomness about creative thinking. You
Speaker 1: open up the gates and let ideas mate, you know, promiscuously,
Speaker 1: let's say, and so there. But there's no reason to
Speaker 1: assume whatsoever that the selection mechanism is random, especially when
Speaker 1: you add in sexual selection. And as soon as you
Speaker 1: introduce consciousness, I think, you introduce a sexual selection. And
Speaker 1: as soon as you introduce sexual selection, you introduce directionality,
Speaker 1: and so much for randomness you can't derive. So the
Speaker 1: people that processes that make the watch might be random,
Speaker 1: although you know, what's happening down at the genetic level
Speaker 1: is pretty damn complex, and even bacteria exchange DNA with
Speaker 1: each other, so there's a plenty of play down at
Speaker 1: the genetic level, as well as room for mutation. But
Speaker 1: once you get up to the selection level, like to me,
Speaker 1: conscious voice is the fundamental determinant of evolutionary progress. And
Speaker 1: I can't and look even Darwin, because Darwin was a genius,
Speaker 1: he stressed sexual selection much as natural selection, but biologists
Speaker 1: for one hundred years never paid any attention to that. No,
Speaker 1: wonder like it's revolutionary. To be fair, I do think
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Miller, to be fair, Jeffrey Miller, I think he
Speaker 1: did a good job in his book The Mating Mind
Speaker 1: kind of bringing to consciousness of the fact that creativity
Speaker 1: of may have evolved due to sexual selection processes you
Speaker 1: know itself, and as well as human consciousness itself may
Speaker 1: have evolved due to sexual Look. I mean, look, plenty
Speaker 1: of biologists have been assessing sexual selection in the last
Speaker 1: thirty years, but it was it was under stressed to
Speaker 1: a huge degree for a long long time. And it
Speaker 1: is a game changer because sexual selection among human beings.
Speaker 1: I think is more important determinant of successful reproduction than
Speaker 1: natural selection. I mean they're the same at some level.
Speaker 1: Women are acting as the gatekeepers, and so they are
Speaker 1: natural selection in some sense. But how can you deny
Speaker 1: the role of conscious directionality in that? And I don't
Speaker 1: see flaws in my reasoning. I mean, it is the
Speaker 1: case that men arrange hierarchies around competence and generosity. Fundamentally,
Speaker 1: it's not power. Even bloody chimps don't use power, you know,
Speaker 1: they baboons. They're a bit of a different story. But
Speaker 1: power is too unstable and so and I think it's
Speaker 1: of advantage to men to elect men, even though that
Speaker 1: gives some men a wider range of mating opportunities, because
Speaker 1: the net benefit of enhanced productivity, especially when coupled with generosity,
Speaker 1: is so high that the downside, you know, of the
Speaker 1: hierarchical ranking is trivial in comparison. You want the best
Speaker 1: warrior leading your rating party, obviously, I mean, we want
Speaker 1: the best person in power, whether it's a man or woman, right,
Speaker 1: I mean we obviously want we want, you know, a
Speaker 1: really competent woman in power as well. Of course, we
Speaker 1: and we and men select competence in women too, But
Speaker 1: there's differential selection to some degree because men will mate
Speaker 1: across and down, whereas women mate across and up. So
Speaker 1: the men aren't putting the same selection pressure on those
Speaker 1: attributes of femininity that women are putting on men. Men
Speaker 1: put their own attributes on I'm not saying youth, for example,
Speaker 1: is a tremendous determinant. I think you're saying a lot
Speaker 1: of really stimulating things. I'm trying to wonder is there
Speaker 1: a sex fiel do that? Do you think? I mean,
Speaker 1: you're stimulating my head in a million directions, but do
Speaker 1: you think that there's a sex difference in that? Do
Speaker 1: you think men are more likely to abuse positions of
Speaker 1: power when they're in power as opposed to women? Has
Speaker 1: it ever been doing? I think there's actually data showing
Speaker 1: the reverse. Very interesting. I'm curious to see data on that. Yeah. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: and I don't have this at hand. There isn't research
Speaker 1: going on into machiavelianism among status achieving women, and some
Speaker 1: of that's done at UBC, and I can't give you
Speaker 1: the details because I just came across it. I'm just
Speaker 1: running it, you know, I'm just starting to process it.
Speaker 1: But no, I don't think men are more likely to
Speaker 1: abuse power. I also think it's also mostly as a
Speaker 1: general rule, it's really counterproductive. I want to ask you
Speaker 1: something to you tell me what you think about this. So,
Speaker 1: in terms of deep pleasure that's associated with higher order values,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I've noticed about extremely competent
Speaker 1: people in positions of authority and productivity is the delight
Speaker 1: that they take in mentoring. And I don't know what
Speaker 1: it's like in your personal experience, but my experience has
Speaker 1: been that there isn't anything that's more rewarding than that,
Speaker 1: all things considered. Do you think that's right, Well, think
Speaker 1: about what there's Think about what that means for the
Speaker 1: emergence of value, you know, as a biological idea. If
Speaker 1: there's something unbelievably pleasurable about finding someone competent and of
Speaker 1: high moral caliber, let's say, and opening doors to them
Speaker 1: and then watching them progress, you know, Jordan, that gets
Speaker 1: to the heart of the whole my whole project of
Speaker 1: this book of TRANSRT. Well, that's why I'm bringing it up.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's it is. I want people to you know,
Speaker 1: I want to be able to spot the potential in
Speaker 1: people that they don't even see in themselves. To me,
Speaker 1: that's special, right, you know, I agree, I agree. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's anything more. Look, I was talking to
Speaker 1: this kid. It was twenty seven. He interviewed me a
Speaker 1: couple of days ago, and he was this He worked
Speaker 1: in nightclubs for years. He's attractive guy, a charismatic guy,
Speaker 1: and so you know, from the perspective of young men
Speaker 1: who aren't successful in their life, he was doing just
Speaker 1: fine because he was charismatic and attractive and he had
Speaker 1: a whole nightclub life thing going, and so he'd kind
Speaker 1: of mastered that. But he started a podcast and started
Speaker 1: to pay very careful attention to what he was saying,
Speaker 1: and it's a human development podcast. And now he's getting
Speaker 1: letters from people who are saying, man, you know, you're
Speaker 1: really helping me out. It's really making a difference to
Speaker 1: my life. And he told me that successful as he
Speaker 1: was in his sort of man about town persona and
Speaker 1: everything that that granted him, it was nothing at all
Speaker 1: compared to the intrinsic pleasure that he experiences when someone
Speaker 1: tells him that. And I think that's right, and that's
Speaker 1: you think there's almost nothing more antithetical to a power
Speaker 1: philosophy than that. It's like, no, the pleasure in domination,
Speaker 1: which is resentful and bitter and cruel and short lived
Speaker 1: and counterproductive, that's nothing compared to the pleasure that you
Speaker 1: take if you have any sense in finding someone with
Speaker 1: some possibility and opening doors for them. They're not even
Speaker 1: in the same universe. I'm gonna go further and say,
Speaker 1: not just pleasure, but what greater source of meaning in
Speaker 1: one's life? Yes, could could someone have a meaning? The
Speaker 1: pleasure secondary, but the meaning is so deep that it
Speaker 1: is Pleasure is every phenomenon. So yes, I mean I
Speaker 1: see that in your book. I know what you're up to,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, you're trying to like the humanists
Speaker 1: in general, and I found them extremely helpful. Rogers was reading.
Speaker 1: Rogers was very useful to me and Maslow as well.
Speaker 1: It's like, there's something within you that needs to be
Speaker 1: developed that's a great benefit to you and to everyone
Speaker 1: else simultaneously. I liked Yung in the final analysis. I
Speaker 1: thought I put him at the top of the panoply
Speaker 1: of psychologists of this type because he took the study
Speaker 1: of transcendence into the religious domain and that seemed to me, well,
Speaker 1: I found much much deeper comprehension of its limits as
Speaker 1: a consequence of reading you. I try to get there.
Speaker 1: I try to get there in this book, to the
Speaker 1: spiritual level of transcendence. But I felt like I could
Speaker 1: only get there after very carefully, in an integration way,
Speaker 1: put all the other pieces in place, because I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of pseudo spirituality that you see these days,
Speaker 1: a lot of spiritual transcendence where it's transcendence built on
Speaker 1: a faulty foundation of basic needs and actually being driven
Speaker 1: by deprivation needs like the need for a steam for instance.
Speaker 1: You'll see a lot of these gurus who really it's there.
Speaker 1: See that with ideology too, you know, yes, it's driven
Speaker 1: by unrecognized deprivation. I see a lot of unresolved Freudian
Speaker 1: familial psychopathology driving ideologically. I mean the idea, for example,
Speaker 1: that the patriarchy is authoritarian and fundamentally based on power.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, how is your relationship with your father
Speaker 1: just out of curiosity or have you ever had a
Speaker 1: positive relationship with any man in your entire life, whether
Speaker 1: you're a man or a woman, It doesn't really You're
Speaker 1: asked that question. Have you asked question, Well, it's not
Speaker 1: a good way to make friends. Jordan. Well, I generally
Speaker 1: don't hit people with questions like that. If I see it,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's it's it's it's instantaneous surgery. If
Speaker 1: you're accurate, and it's not, so you don't. I don't
Speaker 1: do that. But I see it. I don't recommend it.
Speaker 1: I don't recommend it. No, no, but it's definitely worth,
Speaker 1: you know, true consideration, because you've got to ask yourself, well,
Speaker 1: why would you reduce your political theorizing to that particular
Speaker 1: unidimensional proposition? And but but and for me that well,
Speaker 1: and this is again partly why I like your book
Speaker 1: is and this line of work in general. It's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't understand, is that functional human organizations are actually
Speaker 1: predicated on they work way better for everyone and if
Speaker 1: they encourage the manifestation of the highest possible human values.
Speaker 1: And my experience in the both in the academic world
Speaker 1: and in the corporate world is that companies that abide
Speaker 1: by those universal principles do much much better in every
Speaker 1: possible way. And that doesn't mean that, you know, I
Speaker 1: think when when structures deteriorate, they become dominated by people
Speaker 1: who play power games. That happens all the time. We
Speaker 1: have to be awake to that. It happens all the time.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that functional hierarchies have that structure.
Speaker 1: And I agree, and I'm really deeply concerned about that.
Speaker 1: That's another topic. I mean, I feel like we were
Speaker 1: trying to we're actually in real time integrating about forty
Speaker 1: different threads. But I think that that is the power
Speaker 1: games going on in society right now is something deeply
Speaker 1: deeply concerns me. I feel like even I think I
Speaker 1: feel like I've learned in the past couple of years
Speaker 1: that I'm too naive and as a human and I've
Speaker 1: been trying to actually improve that because I tend to
Speaker 1: treat everyone I meet in good faith. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't care who you are, like, like, let's talk. That
Speaker 1: can be courage, you know, like, because say it's naive
Speaker 1: to begin with, and then you get walloped and you're
Speaker 1: no longer naive, But then you get cynical and bitter,
Speaker 1: and that's actually improvement. But then you think, no, no cynicism,
Speaker 1: no bitterness. I'm going to open myself up again and
Speaker 1: take the goddamn hits, and that's courage. I feel like
Speaker 1: that's where I'm at right now. Actually, I feel like
Speaker 1: that's where I'm at right now. It's been a real
Speaker 1: transformation for me, a real Uh yeah, it's been a
Speaker 1: growth journey. What did you see? Okay, you said naivety,
Speaker 1: so what have you why? I didn't know that that
Speaker 1: Sometimes because I'm a caring person and I'm empathetic, so
Speaker 1: some people I've started noticing that I would say things
Speaker 1: like I would say research findings or things that I
Speaker 1: just am curious, just purely curious about, and people would say,
Speaker 1: you know that that hurts, like you shouldn't talk about
Speaker 1: that stuff, or or you know that I that some
Speaker 1: of this can call cause damage to to to minority populations,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And I'm a caring person, so that really
Speaker 1: kiss me in the gut because the last thing I
Speaker 1: want to do is hurt a minority. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't want to hurt a minority anyone. But then I
Speaker 1: started to realize in some instances definitely not all obviously,
Speaker 1: but in some instances, there was a power game being
Speaker 1: played that was outside of my level of comprehension or
Speaker 1: outside my level of like of understanding that wasn't personal
Speaker 1: against me, but actually there's just something being played out
Speaker 1: where if you have a certain ideology, there are certain terms,
Speaker 1: buzzwords and things that you just you just that they're
Speaker 1: just off limits from even bringing into a discussion. And
Speaker 1: I may have inadvertently sometimes like it's like I inadvertently
Speaker 1: trip wire things sometimes that are outside of my level.
Speaker 1: So many trip wires that you, Yeah, the game that
Speaker 1: people who are playing that game is playing are playing
Speaker 1: is the laying of unavoidable trip wires because it's a
Speaker 1: dominance game. And all I have to do is put
Speaker 1: enough trip wires around you and you will definitely stumble across.
Speaker 1: How is a caring, compassionate human being possibly supposed to
Speaker 1: navigate trip wires? I should say a compassionate person who
Speaker 1: also has committed to the truth. That's what I should say.
Speaker 1: How in the world do we navigate the trip wires?
Speaker 1: You try to say things that you believe are true,
Speaker 1: and you take the consequences, you know when you do
Speaker 1: it carefully and you pay attention. You pay attention. But
Speaker 1: I would say more importantly, look, you have this podcast,
Speaker 1: and I have a podcast, and we're both educators and
Speaker 1: in a broad sense, and I believe that that's our
Speaker 1: ethical responsibility given our training and now our reach. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: the way I navigate that landscape is I have conversations
Speaker 1: like this. They're better. That's what we've got. When you're
Speaker 1: trying to diminish malevolence, let's say, and ignorance, misunderstanding, willful
Speaker 1: or otherwise, your best bet is to do something better
Speaker 1: and use that as a model. And that works. And
Speaker 1: I'm so hardened by this. I can give you an example.
Speaker 1: So I've been working with this musician. His name is
Speaker 1: Akira the Dawn, and he has taken quotes from my
Speaker 1: lectures which I hope are meaningful and positive and also
Speaker 1: not naive, I hope, and he's been putting them to music.
Speaker 1: And so he has this genre that he calls meaning
Speaker 1: wave and it's not like it's a huge subculture, but
Speaker 1: it numbers in the tens of thousands. And he's had
Speaker 1: his success completely underground because no popular media ever touches this.
Speaker 1: And you go on the website. I was just interviewed
Speaker 1: by him, and he played some of the music and
Speaker 1: so on. On On YouTube, every single comment is unbelievably positive
Speaker 1: and uplifting in a non naive way. It's like these
Speaker 1: people they've caughtened onto this music. It's all positively oriented
Speaker 1: and Akira is trying very hard to make it that
Speaker 1: way without being naive. And all these people are doing
Speaker 1: something positive and they're all supporting each other in the comments.
Speaker 1: It's like, you think, wow, that's a YouTube comment list
Speaker 1: and there's hundreds of them or thousands of them. It's
Speaker 1: so wonderful to see that. And so we have these
Speaker 1: podcasts available to us now, so we can have these
Speaker 1: long form discussions, right, So you and I we have
Speaker 1: some shared expertise. We can talk about it as high
Speaker 1: level as we can possibly manage, as honestly as we
Speaker 1: possibly can, and is engaging as possible a manner, and
Speaker 1: we can share it with hundreds of thousands of people.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, that's a great deal, man, it's great.
Speaker 1: And there's something about this long form communication that just
Speaker 1: opens itself up to that. And I've watched the comments
Speaker 1: and people are happy about two things. They're happy about
Speaker 1: the content, happy about watching the process, right, and the
Speaker 1: process is more important than the content, So we can
Speaker 1: model that balance that you already talked about between plus
Speaker 1: just the instability we can model that in real time,
Speaker 1: and that's completely an ethical issue. Right As long as
Speaker 1: the more you and I can listen to each other
Speaker 1: and attend and say what we believe to be true
Speaker 1: and dance, the better the bloody podcast is going to be. Well,
Speaker 1: this is obviously what I live. I live for these
Speaker 1: kinds of conversations like we had today, and I don't
Speaker 1: feel one. I don't feel like everyone that I meet
Speaker 1: is coming at me with the same sort of Hey,
Speaker 1: let's have a shared understanding of the truth here, let's
Speaker 1: get let's try it, Let's let's talk about this and
Speaker 1: get to some sort of generalizable principle. I just feel
Speaker 1: like a lot of conversations it's there's kind of different
Speaker 1: different energy in the conversation where it's a lot of
Speaker 1: people are lecturing at each other but not having conversations
Speaker 1: with each other. And I don't know what to do
Speaker 1: with that. I don't know how I get when I
Speaker 1: find myself in a lecturing at situation. It takes me
Speaker 1: out of my comfort zone so much that I don't
Speaker 1: it's almost like someone speaking Russian to me. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I don't understand Russian. You know, well, I
Speaker 1: can tell you what I advise people to do under
Speaker 1: those circumstances. The first is to realize that you are
Speaker 1: not where you think you are. You're somewhere else. That's
Speaker 1: that feeling of being taken out. Now you're somewhere else.
Speaker 1: You don't know where you are. Okay, that's fine. You
Speaker 1: don't know where you are. What should you do? Shut up?
Speaker 1: That's the first thing. The person you are talking to
Speaker 1: is not interested in your opinion. They're interested in something else.
Speaker 1: You don't know what it is. But it's not your
Speaker 1: opinion or your thoughts or your ideas. It's something else.
Speaker 1: Then you watch attend. It's like this is a mystery unfolding.
Speaker 1: If you attend, you'll see what's happening, and you'll be
Speaker 1: able to react carefully. But the cruise issue is to
Speaker 1: recognize that you're not where you because what you'll try
Speaker 1: to do is impose your desire on the situation. You
Speaker 1: want this to be the kind of conversation you just describe.
Speaker 1: As long as you keep doing that, you actually lose.
Speaker 1: That's something I learned, at least in part from reading
Speaker 1: you in depth, because he talked about how to handle
Speaker 1: yourself in conversations where something had possessed the conversation. Essentially,
Speaker 1: something you didn't understand it possessed the conversation. Sometimes you're
Speaker 1: the person you're talking to is possessed by something that wins.
Speaker 1: If you argue, doesn't matter if you what you argue about,
Speaker 1: or what you say, or what the fact is. If
Speaker 1: you engage in the argument, you lose. So But having
Speaker 1: said that, I still think the better alternative, all things considered,
Speaker 1: is just to do a better thing, not to have
Speaker 1: converse model like, model something better. You know, I try
Speaker 1: and explore while you're doing it. Yeah, I try so
Speaker 1: hard to model Carl Rogers notion of unconditional positive regard,
Speaker 1: and I really try, and I can honestly say I
Speaker 1: try my best to model that in my life and
Speaker 1: it does often get good results. Well, I can tell
Speaker 1: you what what I made of that as a clinician,
Speaker 1: because I was never I was never comfortable with that idea.
Speaker 1: I didn't like it exactly. I knew there was something
Speaker 1: to it. I would I didn't casually discard it. But
Speaker 1: it lacks differentiation. So if you're a clinician and someone
Speaker 1: comes to you there's a bunch of things in their
Speaker 1: life that aren't right and aren't good, and there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of things that could be promoted. And partly what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're you're on the you're on the
Speaker 1: side of the part of the person that wants to
Speaker 1: grow and develop, and you're not on the side of
Speaker 1: the part that doesn't. And you can make that explicit
Speaker 1: and people are actually relieved by it, and you can say, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna I'm gonna make mistakes and in my judgment,
Speaker 1: and please correct me. But so the caract, the therapeutic contract,
Speaker 1: is you're going to come And I learned some of
Speaker 1: this from Rogers too, so so it came along with
Speaker 1: the unconditional positive regard. It's like, Okay, you and I
Speaker 1: are going to aim for what's better. We're going to
Speaker 1: mutually discuss what's better so that we agree that that's better,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to strategize about how to go
Speaker 1: about doing it, and we're going to test the strategies.
Speaker 1: But that's the deal. Another deal is part of that
Speaker 1: deal is you're going to tell me what you actually think,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to tell you what I actually think.
Speaker 1: That's that what did he call that? Congruence? And it
Speaker 1: was congruence and honesty. And so you know, if a
Speaker 1: client says something that upsets me, I'll say, I just
Speaker 1: had this emotional reaction to what you said. Negative emotional reaction.
Speaker 1: We should take that apart or if I observe that
Speaker 1: in them. But it's not unconditional positive regard because there's judgment.
Speaker 1: There has to be. You want to keep the wat
Speaker 1: and throw away the chaff, and you want to participate
Speaker 1: in that with with the people that now you could
Speaker 1: say over arching that is a benevolent motivation, and that
Speaker 1: motivation is I want you to be better, and I
Speaker 1: want you to be better so that everyone else is better.
Speaker 1: That's fine, but Young pointed out that every ideal is
Speaker 1: a judge by necessity, and so you have to wrestle
Speaker 1: with that in relationship unconditional positive regards. You know, you
Speaker 1: just made me realize that I don't think I practice
Speaker 1: unconditional positive regard. I think I practice unconditional regard. Let's
Speaker 1: just take the word positive out of there for a second, okay,
Speaker 1: Because there's something I try to do with with any
Speaker 1: human who's in front of me, and it's it's unconditional.
Speaker 1: They're past, they're all the things that you know. It's like,
Speaker 1: I don't even want to know all the things that
Speaker 1: came before this conversation. You know, I want to see
Speaker 1: someone on my with my own eyes freshly. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be influenced by you know, people
Speaker 1: will say, don't talk to this person, don't talk to
Speaker 1: that person. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you mean. Yep, yep. That's why I
Speaker 1: was so fascinated by the ancient Egyptian worship of the eye,
Speaker 1: and the Mesopotamians had it too. Their greatest god, Marduks
Speaker 1: had eyes all the way around his head and he
Speaker 1: spoke magic words. It's like, yes, that's exactly right. But
Speaker 1: what you're you're saying is that's attention. It's attention. I
Speaker 1: want to watch and see what's right in front of me,
Speaker 1: and it's not thinking. It's something completely different than that.
Speaker 1: It's it's akin to what you just described. And then
Speaker 1: you say it's almost like it's almost like a scientific perspective.
Speaker 1: I want to see what is I I want to
Speaker 1: see what is I don't want to be colored buy
Speaker 1: so the Egyptians regarded Horace as the revitalizing agent. Oh,
Speaker 1: Cyrus was the dead king, right, the worn out state,
Speaker 1: the the no longer functional ideology, and Horace was the eye.
Speaker 1: And it was the eye that was the reviizing source,
Speaker 1: because it saw what was and replaced presumption with what was.
Speaker 1: And it's sort of it's it's it's there watching to
Speaker 1: see and being willing to see, and certainly that's an
Speaker 1: integral part of any real scientific process. Absolutely, okay, so
Speaker 1: let's let's cut off the unconditional word. Then as well,
Speaker 1: I tried to practice regard. Well, then there's two things
Speaker 1: you've got. You've got this regard, which is focused attention,
Speaker 1: but then the differentiation element is also crucially important. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: let's figure out what's right here and what isn't, and
Speaker 1: we'll let's have a bunch more of what's right and
Speaker 1: not so much of what isn't, and that should never
Speaker 1: be imposed. And that's something else I learned from Rogers,
Speaker 1: is like, you can't you can't really give advice to well,
Speaker 1: to anyone for that matter, but certainly not to clinical clients.
Speaker 1: They have to be fully bought in for it to work.
Speaker 1: So imposing. It isn't a hell. You can't. You can't
Speaker 1: rip off the defense mechanisms. You can't rip them off people.
Speaker 1: It's a terrifying thing. Yeah, well that's yes, there's plenty
Speaker 1: for us to be defended against. So I mean that
Speaker 1: fear you had, let's say, about being in conversations where
Speaker 1: you don't know what the rules are. I mean, what
Speaker 1: I observed among undergraduates was that continually, was that that
Speaker 1: would be there at a surface level now and then.
Speaker 1: But I could trust the undergraduates by and large that
Speaker 1: if I gave them something that was substantive, they'd be
Speaker 1: so excited and so interested that it was just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And so even that ideological cynicism or resentment is often
Speaker 1: relatively shallow, and you can entice people away from that
Speaker 1: with something better. I agree. I'd just like to tell
Speaker 1: you a little bit of my personal experience. At Columbia University,
Speaker 1: I teach the course called the Science of Living Well.
Speaker 1: And you know, I just on the first day of class,
Speaker 1: I just let leave at the door any kind of
Speaker 1: ideology or just all that. Basically, you're all welcome here,
Speaker 1: Like let's just start there, like you're all welcome to
Speaker 1: this class, and I care about finding the greatest potentiality
Speaker 1: within each and every one of you in this class,
Speaker 1: and and the way in the style that works best
Speaker 1: for you, and how you want to own your decide
Speaker 1: how you want to live your life, and then take
Speaker 1: responsibility for that life. And students love it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't. There's no controversies, there's no I mean, it's
Speaker 1: what I love. My students, you know, they they when
Speaker 1: you kind of frame it in that way, I mean, students,
Speaker 1: they're all on board. There's no reason to divide, there's
Speaker 1: no reason to kind of lead with division in my
Speaker 1: point of view. You know, I agree. And I've always
Speaker 1: had faith in my undergraduate students, and they've always delivered
Speaker 1: on that faith, like all every year, it was always
Speaker 1: the same. And so if I was interested in what
Speaker 1: I was doing and I found it meaningful, and if
Speaker 1: I was trying to get at the heart of things,
Speaker 1: they were like completely along for the ride. But I've
Speaker 1: also found exactly the same thing in the podcast. And
Speaker 1: when I went on public lectures is like, you know,
Speaker 1: I had discussions of this sort, I would say, of
Speaker 1: this intensity with Sam Harris, for example, about religious matters
Speaker 1: and you know, there were ten thousand people watching that
Speaker 1: and they were captivated by it. Well that was how
Speaker 1: it appeared, So you can trust that in people. And
Speaker 1: and well, what's been your experience with your podcast and
Speaker 1: what tasting funny? Yeah? Yeah, regarding to the taste thing funny.
Speaker 1: I had four hour debate with Sam Harris on my
Speaker 1: podcast about the nature of free will, and he actually
Speaker 1: said to me in an email, I think I'm allowed
Speaker 1: to say what he said to me. He said, what
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a compatibilist. He said, what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: do with my compatibilist version of free will is what
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson's trying to do with trying to redefine God.
Speaker 1: So he put me and you in the same camp
Speaker 1: there in a way. So I think, you know, we're
Speaker 1: on a similar frequency and in some in some sense
Speaker 1: that I don't want to have such narrow conceptualizations of
Speaker 1: something that no longer has practical utility, you know, construct
Speaker 1: value anymore. So tell me what's happening with your podcast
Speaker 1: and why you're doing it, because I'm sure you're an
Speaker 1: educator like me, and now you have the means, this
Speaker 1: technological means and so what what episode, what have you experienced,
Speaker 1: and what do you want from it? You know, my
Speaker 1: podcast has become one of the greatest sources of meeting
Speaker 1: in my life. It started seven years ago as just
Speaker 1: me turning on the microphone I wanted to have nerdy
Speaker 1: conversations with my colleagues about psychology. But it's really turned
Speaker 1: into a different beast. It's really something's really emerged, which
Speaker 1: is which I'm really pleased about, and and that's that
Speaker 1: I have a guest on my show who I treat
Speaker 1: with unconditional regard, and I don't I don't, I don't
Speaker 1: care who they are, Like, I want to engage them
Speaker 1: in the moment on ideas and and try to come
Speaker 1: to some mutual understanding of the truth. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: had controversial guests, I've had non controversial guests on. I
Speaker 1: don't even like to think of it in that way,
Speaker 1: because none of the episodes have been controversial. So it's
Speaker 1: almost like people say, like, oh, you're going to have
Speaker 1: a controversial guest on, as though they're expecting that the
Speaker 1: episode need be controversial, And what I want to show
Speaker 1: is that doesn't need to be the case, you know, Like,
Speaker 1: why does that need to be like, is there some
Speaker 1: role from like Moses ten commands. Well, I think it's
Speaker 1: it's it's cheap and fast, yeah, you know, and and
Speaker 1: and I think some of that was actually imposed previously
Speaker 1: by our technological limitations. Like you know, if you're if
Speaker 1: you're trying to attract attention in a limited bandwidth world,
Speaker 1: you need something flashy and quick because the attentional space
Speaker 1: is unbelievably expensive and you have to wave a red flag.
Speaker 1: But now we've got time, right, we can let things unfold.
Speaker 1: And so you know, I'm inviting political figures onto my podcast,
Speaker 1: and I hope I can get people from across the
Speaker 1: ideological spectrum and offer them the opportunity to unfold their
Speaker 1: ideas over two hours without sound bites and without the
Speaker 1: intermediation of the journalists, so to speak. I'm going to
Speaker 1: ask questions, obviously, but and that's all become possible because
Speaker 1: of this technological transformation, and I think it's going to
Speaker 1: I had Mike Lee, the Senator from Utah, who's I
Speaker 1: think the most conservative senator in the House according to
Speaker 1: his voting record, and he laid out his thoughts over
Speaker 1: two hours. And what's been so gratifying is that the
Speaker 1: comments in the main aren't foolish and knee jerk on
Speaker 1: either side of the political spectrum. They're more like, oh,
Speaker 1: when he laid out his arguments, I found them interesting,
Speaker 1: and I learned a lot from listening. And that's left
Speaker 1: wingers are saying that, and right wingers are saying that,
Speaker 1: and hooray, and so it would be so nice, as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned, if that was how we conducted
Speaker 1: our political discourse. It's like, what's your ideas? Can you
Speaker 1: lay them out over two hours and still be there
Speaker 1: and still have something to say? And I've also found
Speaker 1: I don't know what your experience is, but my experience
Speaker 1: with these long forms is that they brutally punish any
Speaker 1: facade or dishonesty of any sort, any editing, misbehavior, anything
Speaker 1: like that. It just doesn't fly, man, It doesn't What
Speaker 1: do you mean? What do you mean? Just can you
Speaker 1: unpack that a little more well? For example, if I
Speaker 1: put up a YouTube video and I've cut some of it,
Speaker 1: people are immediately saptical about what I got. Yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely, I cut out. I cut out a bathroom
Speaker 1: break the other day, and I actually got YouTube comment saying,
Speaker 1: what are you trying to hide? I'll like, well, you
Speaker 1: don't want you don't want to hear me peeing exactly.
Speaker 1: But have you found and I found this to be
Speaker 1: the case that if you, if I treat people as human,
Speaker 1: they tend to act human. I don't care who they are.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't care. Very rarely have I encountered
Speaker 1: any anyone in my life, and I've encountered so called
Speaker 1: controversial figures that I'm that I'm I'm supposed to even hate,
Speaker 1: you know, even before talking to them, that if I,
Speaker 1: if I treat them with humanity, they at least engage
Speaker 1: they me with humanity. That's been in the main, that's
Speaker 1: been in the mawhelming my experience. However, I have, yeah
Speaker 1: and pronounced exceptions. I mean, I've had interviews with journalists
Speaker 1: that were where I did the things that you just described,
Speaker 1: and the consequence was that they wrote something that was
Speaker 1: absolutely deceitful and reprehensible and they knew it. And that's
Speaker 1: been a continual shock to me, even though it's happened
Speaker 1: many many times. So I would say almost all the time,
Speaker 1: when you invite someone to play, they play nicely, but
Speaker 1: not always not always, and so it's unfortunate. Right, it
Speaker 1: is unfortunate. It's trying a lot of damage. No, well, right,
Speaker 1: I don't want to become like an ultra cynic. I
Speaker 1: guess is what I'm trying to say about humanity. I
Speaker 1: want to keep my humanistic. There's no reason for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no reason for that. It's it's the data don't
Speaker 1: support the conclusion. I mean, I've looked very neatly into
Speaker 1: the problem of malevolence, and I've taken it very seriously,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that I'm particularly naive, but it's
Speaker 1: still definitely the case that your best bet is like
Speaker 1: arms open and welcoming. And even though you know that
Speaker 1: that invites in catastrophe now and then, it's still it's
Speaker 1: it is the most appropriate ethical stance. So, so what
Speaker 1: do you think? What do you think is going to
Speaker 1: happen to the universities in light of all this new
Speaker 1: technological possibility? I mean, have you thought do your thoughts
Speaker 1: go in that direction? Mean, you're an educator at an
Speaker 1: elite univer but now you have all this technological power.
Speaker 1: It's like, what what is what are the consequence is
Speaker 1: that going to be? Yeah? I tweeted out something along
Speaker 1: the lines of my I predict that in twenty years
Speaker 1: or so. I think I may have said twenty years,
Speaker 1: universities will be considered very archaic and uh and pointless
Speaker 1: to a large degree. Now I got a lot of
Speaker 1: comments because that's obviously a pretty uh uh superlative statement.
Speaker 1: But I do think, I am I am. I do
Speaker 1: think that we're going to look back at some point
Speaker 1: in the future and and think that, you know, the
Speaker 1: the sort of elitism of the of the educational structure
Speaker 1: that we have at universities is going to be a
Speaker 1: bit silly, considering there's so much high quality information coming
Speaker 1: out that's going to be accessible to so many people,
Speaker 1: and that so many people are going to be learning
Speaker 1: things that that they in which they do with their lives,
Speaker 1: not through university. And once that starts happening and kind
Speaker 1: of the tables get turned in a way where the
Speaker 1: people in power in society to a large degree are
Speaker 1: if not, if not self taught, but taught through channels
Speaker 1: other than the most elite universities. I think that things
Speaker 1: are going to look a bit silly about the current structure.
Speaker 1: What do you think of how did that land with you. Well,
Speaker 1: it seems to me that the landscape is going to
Speaker 1: transform itself so that people will turn to further education,
Speaker 1: to discussions like the one that we just had, because
Speaker 1: why not, right, I mean, I see, we just conducted
Speaker 1: something that approximates a high level graduate seminar spontaneously. I mean,
Speaker 1: you've worked for decades on these sorts of things, and
Speaker 1: so have I. I mean, even as a professional in
Speaker 1: an elite institution, I would say, the opportunity to sit
Speaker 1: down for two hours with another respected figure in the
Speaker 1: field and have a conversation like this are relatively few
Speaker 1: and far between. But now you can do that whenever
Speaker 1: you want, assuming people will accept your invitation, and then
Speaker 1: you can invite like five hundred thousand people to take part.
Speaker 1: So how is that not just going to win? I agrees,
Speaker 1: And it's much more interesting than the typical lecture, because
Speaker 1: the typical lecture is dull and horrible. I mean, you
Speaker 1: get exceptions to that, but generally that's the case. And
Speaker 1: I mean you go to an academic conference and my god,
Speaker 1: it's it's so no one would watch any of that
Speaker 1: almost unless they had to. And so yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: I can't compete it. I think, yeah, I can't go
Speaker 1: back to Colombia in the fall after going a year
Speaker 1: of you know, there's virtual classes. I didn't even partake
Speaker 1: in the virtual but when I come back in the
Speaker 1: fall to in person classes, there's no way I'm going
Speaker 1: to go back to business as usual. It feels so
Speaker 1: weird to stand up there and lecture the students after
Speaker 1: I've experienced Clubhouse and the potential for that. For I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've discovered club house, but that's going
Speaker 1: to be a big wave of the future. I experienced
Speaker 1: in the podcast format, I experienced all these other formats
Speaker 1: of discussions. There's no way I can go back to
Speaker 1: the typical lecture style. So I'm actually trying to reformulate
Speaker 1: exactly what a classroom, what a Science of Living well
Speaker 1: classroom even looks like. Well, I think that what will
Speaker 1: emerge too, the accreditation institutions will emerge, you know, increasingly
Speaker 1: the cost of education will be driven down to something
Speaker 1: approximating zero. And I think that's what That's how it
Speaker 1: looks to me, and I think will get the people
Speaker 1: who really want to teach and who are teaching something
Speaker 1: that people want to listen to will be radically successful
Speaker 1: at it at an individual level primarily, and then there's
Speaker 1: the problem of accreditation, and perhaps universities will solve that,
Speaker 1: but I suspect not, I suspect upstart private companies will well,
Speaker 1: we'll solve that problem, you know, because you can imagine
Speaker 1: a situation where all the lectures are free, but the
Speaker 1: exams are very expensive and almost no one passes them.
Speaker 1: So it's breadth of education, but strenuous evaluation, strenuous, accurate evaluation,
Speaker 1: and then accreditation, and the accreditation would have some value.
Speaker 1: It's already the case that you know, if you hire
Speaker 1: someone from Harvard, part of what you're getting is the
Speaker 1: initial entry process. Right, it's really hard to get into Harvard.
Speaker 1: You have to be you have to have a very
Speaker 1: high IQ in so far as the SATs are you
Speaker 1: unless they're one of these celebrities and you pay for
Speaker 1: your DC that. Yes, there's there's exceptions, but you're going
Speaker 1: to have a bitch of a time if you go
Speaker 1: to the university and you're you're not intellectually qualified, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a horrific experience. Now your point self punishing.
Speaker 1: So you have to be very, very smart, and you
Speaker 1: have to have accomplished generally three or four other things.
Speaker 1: So when you hire someone from an Ivy League institute,
Speaker 1: because of the stringent selection process, which is made possible
Speaker 1: at least in part by the plethora of applicants, you
Speaker 1: know that, regardless of the educational quality, you're getting a
Speaker 1: person who had those attributes to begin with. So it's
Speaker 1: a proxy for it's a proxy for competent generosity, all
Speaker 1: things considered, and then the education adds something to that.
Speaker 1: But you can imagine that accreditation institutions will pop up
Speaker 1: that are capable of assessing that, and there's real value
Speaker 1: in that. I'd like to do that, but I don't
Speaker 1: have the wherewithal to manage it. It's too complex. What
Speaker 1: I love about the competent that you brought in the
Speaker 1: competent relational aspect there is I mean, that's the highest
Speaker 1: level of integration of my whole book. Like, that's where i'm.
Speaker 1: That's where i'm. I mean, I feel like we just
Speaker 1: like a ride with that, like independently, but I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's all we've thought along the same track too.
Speaker 1: That's true. Fertilization, that's very true. That's very true. But
Speaker 1: you know, if you ask me, what is what is
Speaker 1: trans sentence? I don't define transcendence as as some sort
Speaker 1: of thing where you're above other humans, you know, in
Speaker 1: some sort of I'm superior to other humans sort of way.
Speaker 1: But a very doesn't work. I define it as a
Speaker 1: as I call it a synergy between self and world
Speaker 1: where you're and you could you could frame in terms
Speaker 1: of competence. Your competence is so influential and powerful in
Speaker 1: making the world a better place that there's such a
Speaker 1: little separation between you and the world, so that what's
Speaker 1: good for you is good for the world. And that's
Speaker 1: what I that's what my book's trying to get to.
Speaker 1: So I love that you. I believe that's true. I
Speaker 1: believe that's true. Is that you can you can have
Speaker 1: your cake and eat it too. And I think the
Speaker 1: pleasure of mentorship is really an example of that. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: what would make you more happy than anything else? Well,
Speaker 1: who knows. Let's take a look just out of curiosity. Well,
Speaker 1: is it a like is it a fast Mercedes? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it like sexual gratification on demand? Is it wealth?
Speaker 1: Is it power? Is its status? Et cetera, et cetera?
Speaker 1: And you can get more sophisticated than that as well.
Speaker 1: But my experience has been that there isn't anything more
Speaker 1: pleasurable than seeing unrewarded talent and possibility and facilitating its development.
Speaker 1: It's like that's in its own universe, and so that's
Speaker 1: deeply meaningful to me. But then it's also something that's
Speaker 1: clearly of high level social benefit. And so I think
Speaker 1: as you do integrate in your sense, you integrate internally,
Speaker 1: which is what I recommend people do and concentrate, but
Speaker 1: at the same time you're integrating things externally. There's no
Speaker 1: separation there, not fundamentally, which is also why cleaning up
Speaker 1: your room turns out to be a very difficult act.
Speaker 1: You know, there's impediments there that you just don't realize
Speaker 1: and to get. You can't get your room in perfect
Speaker 1: order without simultaneously getting the world in perfect order. So'sly
Speaker 1: in Einstein's desk, then there can be pers of creative disorder, right,
Speaker 1: but it's not a consequence of avoidance. Okay, fair enough,
Speaker 1: Fair because I always see that picture of Einstein, you know,
Speaker 1: like there's a famous picture of him with his his
Speaker 1: office was out of control. Sure, well, he probably knew
Speaker 1: where everything in it was right. So there's that too.
Speaker 1: It's like order is not necessarily evident on the surface.
Speaker 1: That's true. So that's true. So all right, well, look
Speaker 1: that was that was wonderful. I appreciate the factory. It
Speaker 1: took the time to talk to me, and it's good.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we finally had a chance to have a
Speaker 1: prolonged discussion. I wish you good luck with your book Transcend,
Speaker 1: and it's true. I hope that it has the effect
Speaker 1: that you wanted to have, and that your podcast does
Speaker 1: as well, and that onward and all of that. Thank you,
Speaker 1: and I hope this conversation modeled what a conversation could
Speaker 1: be in the world. Oh we'll see, because people will
Speaker 1: tell us. I guess they will. I guess that I
Speaker 1: was interested in it. So I got in the absorption.
Speaker 1: I got in the the you know, the absorption aspect
Speaker 1: to put. Yeah, well thanks, thanks. That's a killer marker,
Speaker 1: isn't it. You know what really is you're not assuming
Speaker 1: you're not too corrupt. What you're absorbed in is perhaps
Speaker 1: what's most important, because why else would you be absorbed
Speaker 1: in it? So why can't we assume that's a reliable
Speaker 1: marker or the most reliable marker even I think it is.
Speaker 1: So yeah, all right, great, thanks, thanks very much, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast
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Speaker 1: Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show,
Speaker 1: and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.