Intimations of Creativity ｜ Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman ｜ EP 177 (I4xZUQmmMuI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=I4xZUQmmMuI

dollars max . Scott Barry Kaufman, my guest today, is a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human potential. He received his PhD in cognitive science from Yale University and has taught courses on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He hosts a very popular podcast, the Psychology Podcast, and is author or editor or co-editor of nine books, including his newest, Transcend, the new science of self-actualization, published in 2020 and just out in paperback as of April of 2021. He wrote Wired to Create, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind with Carolyn Gregoire in 2016 and Ungifted, Intelligence Redefined in 2013. He’s written major academic works as well. With Robert Sternberg, he co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence in 2011, which is a major academic text. He also edited The Complexity of Greatness in 2013, which brought together leading scholars to discuss and debate the relative contributions of biology and society in determining creativity. In 2015, he was named one of 50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world by business insider. Dr. Kaufman, thank you for coming on my podcast. Dr. Peterson, it’s great to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this chat. It’s good to see you. We actually have a couple of publications together from a few years back, but we’ve, enough never sat down and had a lengthy discussion. So hopefully today we’ll have an opportunity to rectify that. So first of all, maybe you could tell everyone just exactly what a cognitive scientist is. Well, I think the important thing to recognize about cognitive science is it’s an interdisciplinary field. So it doesn’t just involve psychology, but it brings in philosophers and it brings in neuroscientists. It brings in computer scientists to all kind of sit down at the table and figure out what is the mind and what are the functions of the human mind? What are the limits of the human mind? How does the nervous system represent mind? So basically everything having to do with mind, but it’s very interdisciplinary. And that’s what really was exciting to me about it when I got into it. I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon and I did a computer science degree and I did a cognitive science degree. And it was really exciting to me to kind of figure out how all these different things can be integrated with each other. And how did a cognitive scientist, who’s at least technically more interested, let’s say in the mechanics of thought and abstract cognition, how did you come to be interested in the humanist tradition, which is the focus of this book, which we’re going to talk about in fair detail today. It isn’t obvious that those things have any necessary interrelationships. So what happened? Not at all obvious. Well, so as a kid, I grew up with a real deep fascination for understanding individual differences. I remember just being a very young kid looking on the playground and wondering why someone could so effortlessly go in the jungle gym and why I was so awkward. And I also had some early learning difficulties that made me try to understand what the only limits of my own potential were. So the interest that got me to the field was human intelligence. And I realized after enough years in the field, once my interest brought into creativity, which is the work we did together was on creativity when I was in grad school. And then now self-actualization and humanism, I realized that what I was really interested in was human potential, not intelligence. Intelligence I thought was the be-all and end-all of human potential. And then what I’ve learned, come to realize throughout my career is that that was just the beginning. Well, Galton, Francis Galton, who in some sense pioneered the psychometric study of IQ is also interested in human potential, I would say. So in some sense, that’s a return to the source. And it is easy to confuse intelligence with, well, the whole range of human talent and ability and differentiating all those different concepts and placing them in the proper relationship to one another and identifying them for study is no trivial thing. So you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se. My junior year in college, I was so curious about intelligence that I cold emailed Nicholas McIntosh, who was the head of the department at the University of Cambridge. And I said, can I just take a year off my undergraduate studies and just will you teach me everything about IQ? Will you teach me everything there is to know about everything we’ve known in the last 100 years about intelligence? And so to my excitement, he responded to my email and he said, sure, come over. And so I packed my bags and went to England. And this didn’t count as a study abroad program. There was no study abroad program. So I just notified Carnegie Mellon, I’m going off to England to study intelligence. And it was just so exciting to me to be able to learn. How old were you when you did that? Twenty years old, probably. And he responded to a cold letter and invited you over. Yeah, I must have. Well, I think that he might have been impressed with some of it. Like I was Herb Simon’s last research assistant at that time as well. And but I felt like there were limits to what I was understanding about intelligence through the expertise approach that I was learning from Herb Simon. I felt as though I wasn’t learning about intelligence. I was learning about expertise acquisition and I didn’t think they were exactly the same thing. So anyway, yes, he must have been impressed with my email. I mean, I was a real I was I was really I’m trying to think of the word and enterprising young man. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of the right word. You know, I was like really excited to learn this stuff. Curious and enthusiastic. Yeah, I like that. And obviously able to communicate that. So you went over to England and you worked with a psychometrician. And so you worked with someone who was very interested in the formalities of measurement and careful definition of intelligence. And what and and what did you learn as a consequence of doing that about intelligence? Well, I learned a bunch of things. One one important thing I learned is that intelligence has multiple general cognitive mechanisms which contribute or give rise to a general intelligence kind of function. Some you know, there’s this debate in the field about whether or not G or general intelligence is the thing that is causal of things in the world or if it’s an emergent property of things. And I learned a little bit about this view that it’s an emergent property of these domain general mechanisms and the biggest one which captivated my attention was working memory at that time. And then that quickly led to me doing and being interested in differences in sex, different sex differences in working memory. And I came up with a hypothesis when I was working with him in college about that, which then led me to getting studying with him for a master’s degree to actually test that hypothesis. So let’s walk over the psychometric view a bit and I’ll say some of the things that I think I know. And you can tell me if if they’re out of date or if you’re convinced that they’re erroneous in some way. So essentially what the psychometricians have discovered is an established and I think more credibly than any psychologists have established any other phenomenon within the field of psychology is that there’s a common mechanism or an emergent property that appears to characterize activity in relationship to virtually any set of abstractions. So if you if you put together a random set of questions that require abstraction to solve so they could be mathematical questions or general knowledge or vocabulary, the sort of thing even that you might encounter while playing Trivial Pursuit, if you put together a reasonable set of those and then you add up the correct scores and you rank order them across all the people who’ve taken that particular test, you get something that is a pretty accurate estimate of IQ. That’s central tendency. It’s that powerful. And that’s related to long term life success in in in attainment, let’s say, economic attainment and career attainment. That accounts for about 25 percent of the variation between people in the differences in attainment. Is that that that seem roughly anything I would I would I would do like a yes and if this was in proctor, I would yes and and say a central concept in this is the idea of the positive manifold, because it’s really interesting. And this was Charles Spearman’s discovery in 1904. It’s interesting that people who tend to do well on one of these kinds of tests tend to do well on other of these kinds of tests. And the thing, which is why I thought the expertise acquisition approach I was learning in college didn’t fully explain is that we’re talking even with lacking expertise in like these IQ tests, items, abstraction, like you mentioned, there are a lack of expertise and yet they’re positively correlated with each other. And it didn’t have to be that way. Right. Right. Jordan, because one could have proposed, well, the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you’ll be in other things because you’re devoting all your time and attention to one thing. But instead, we find that actually there is there are some general cognitive mechanisms that apply to any task and even novel, especially actually, I would say especially the novel. Yeah, right. Because it’s it’s it actually predicts learning new abstractions better than it predicts real world performance. And we should also note that the level of predictive accuracy is stunning compared to the predictive accuracy of virtually anything any social scientists have discovered apart from IQ. Yeah, I tweeted that out the other day. I said, it’s astounding to me when people say so matter of fact, like IQ tests are invalid when it is probably the most valid test we have in psychology. And that, of course, got a lot of comments like, well, that therefore that just shows your whole field of shit. And that’s completely wrong because the effect sizes in psychology, the valid effect sizes are are what would you call them impressive when you compare psychology to other disciplines of its category of generalization, say. So the idea that the whole field is nonsense is is only put forth by people who don’t have differentiated understanding of the field or of the social sciences that it might be compared with. Psychologists are the most sophisticated methodologists by far in all the social scientists sciences, as far as I’m concerned. So, yeah, there seems to be this misunderstanding or this expectation of psychology that we’re supposed to be perfectly reliable, that we’re supposed to have perfect reliability of humans. And I don’t think any psychologist has ever claimed to have that sort of level of precision. I mean, of course, a lot of people are going to fall between the cracks with these IQ tests. And I’m interested in those people, too. I mean, of course, I’m also interested in the statistical generalizations and the implications for society. I mean, you can hold both things in your mind at one time. Yes. Well, and you can also point out that accounting for 25 percent of the variation in something as complex as life attainment is unbelievably impressive, especially given how much effect random factors have on determining those outcomes like, well, like health, for example, like physical and mental health. And while in situational variables like the state of the economy, et cetera, et cetera, the availability of educational resources across all that variability, you still get this incredibly impressive prediction of this single factor. And we could also point out for everyone that, you know, you might think that people have good personalities and bad personalities. In some sense, that’s unidimensional. But if you do the same statistical analysis with a set of personality questions that you would conduct on a set of abstract questions, you get five factors, not one. So it isn’t it isn’t necessarily the case at all that something will simplify down to a single factor. But that’s profoundly the case with IQ. The other thing that is worth pointing out is that bad as IQ tests might be, given that there’s much they don’t explain, they’re far better than any other method we have of assessing potential for, let’s say, cognitive growth and acquisition. So if you want to predict how well someone’s going to do in academic environment, then there isn’t anything that even comes close to the accuracy of an IQ test and also to the unbiased. It’s also unbiased compared to all other forms of measurement. So, so, OK, so you learned this in in in England, but you weren’t you weren’t satisfied with the expertise approach. And you so you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn’t satisfy you. Why not? Yeah. So I really and I felt this in my bones just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading I wrote I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. And I felt as though creativity wasn’t the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I, you know, I didn’t know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay and and got to the chapter on intelligence and Sternberg’s textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity. And that really excited me. And I and I felt like there was there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He he unfortunately he passed away a couple of years ago. But, you know, if he were alive, he would definitely agree completely with that. And he has in our conversations. It’s almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said, you know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know have ever known has said like that IQ is a perfect predictor of everything. Right. You know, yeah, quite the contrary. They tend to be conservative in their estimates of IQ potential for prediction. Well, you’re also in a strange position intellectually, a unique position in some sense, because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence IQ, essentially. But you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the 90s in particular and in the 80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education, Faculty of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence, essentially. And so well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas? Yeah. And you’re quite right. It’s a really astute point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge. Once I remember us all, all of us walking in the garden, me, Nick and Bob, and Bob was criticizing, I remember this vividly, Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying, it’s so reductionistic, like it’s showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was, we’re pushing back. But I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because believe it or not, this is related. Is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely acontextual of each other. The more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, when you combine and when you start looking at the world. For instance, I published a paper with Roger Beattie, who’s a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn’t make any sense to kind of view these things as separate, but each one do make their unique contributions, if that makes sense. OK, so let’s go back momentarily to the Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement. When I encountered all those ideas, I was trying to predict success in complex environments, academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard, and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring the literature, looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement and then also reliable measures of achievement, which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive anything of practical, measurable utility from their work. And I couldn’t find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the big five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ, essentially, and the SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently, they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor. And we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we’ll talk about, didn’t predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduates, graduate school performance publications and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests, basically assessing executive function, could add something to IQ, maybe depending on how you did the analysis. But conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn’t extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually, of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable, critical intellectual perspective, if you can’t extract out anything of measurable value, then what’s the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual? And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to… Expand out from IQ. I did. And I’ll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences. And once I started studying this stuff scientifically, I became seduced by the truth. I don’t know how else to say it. How about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, oh my God, this will go away no matter what you do. It is solitary and it’s been well measured and it’s really hard to add to it. And everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me. That’s the thing. So once I started studying this stuff with Nick, for instance, you would look at people’s attempts to measure Gartner’s multiple intelligences and in every single instance, you’d be able to still extract a G factor. And there’s no… I’ve come to the conclusion that as long as you’re activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, it’s going to be G-loaded. The task you’re doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It’s going to bring in some other… Like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behaviorist literature, because Nicholas is most well known for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associative learning measures to predict G just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found there are these general cognomechanisms that won’t go away. You could have whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognomechanisms, you can’t sweep them under the rug. Right. So if you laid out a number of hypothetical multiple intelligence measures, and they measured to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them what you’d essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn’t add anything additional to that. We added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature, not from the psychometric literature. It was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute. But if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity or whether the neuropsychologists were on to something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn’t influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it, still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students, and you tell me what you think about this, that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure. As a covariate at least. As a covariate. Because it seemed, and I also think the same thing about Big Five personality for whatever that’s worth, is like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists. So if you’re studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we’d get results from some measure and then that would hypothetically be publishable. But then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement. And there’s well-developed values literature. But we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can’t get, I don’t understand why the field won’t accept that. Well I’ll give you an analogy. I think it’s analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers never use genes as a covariate. It’s like, well, things change. Once you start to include genes as a covariate, then you find some of these effects drop away. That’s interesting to me. It’s like we don’t even want to know the truth in certain circumstances. You know, I’ve thought about that too. It’s not surprising that people don’t want to know the truth about IQ because it’s quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn. And that has walloping economic and social consequences. And so there’s a bitterness in that. I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously. But you know, so for me, it’s like IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, well, there’s a job for everyone if they just get up and, you know, get at it. And the liberals like to say, well, everybody can be trained to do everything. Both of those are wrong because there’s a large number of people who are not, who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that’s a huge problem. And we have no idea what to do with it. We won’t even look at it. Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that’s okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research, I study something called twice exceptionality. Actually, I edited a book called Twice Exceptionality, supporting bright and creative students with learning disabilities. Sometimes they’re intelligent. They’re very intelligent, but sometimes because of their executive dysfunction, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn’t show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to what’s missed. Absolutely fair enough. Look, there’s, as we already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory. And the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people who are measured, whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So and other factors play an important role, like conscientiousness. But it’s only about at least as far as we can measure it. And we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests. It adds about, it’s only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ. This is how I put it. I say, look, it’s really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But there’s many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with error variance and other factors. But it’s very hard. Like if you get 160 IQ, generally and honestly, if you didn’t cheat, it’s hard to like just accidentally stumble into those right answers. Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. That yeah, that it’s the low scores that contain the errors. Yeah, and fair enough. And that should be attended to, not least because we don’t ever want to deny anybody with potential the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let’s say, and because of their perceived and actual shortcomings. But my problem with that is that whatever they’re replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we’ll see how that all plays out. So OK, so go ahead. Well another reason why the topic is radioactive, of course, is because every time you talk about IQ differences, people, their head immediately goes to group differences. And I just want to clarify, we’re talking about individual differences. That’s what we’ve talked about so far. Do you know what I mean? And you can’t automatically extrapolate. Even when I use the word genes, people are scared of the word genes. That should be the most uncontroversial thing in the world, the fact that individual to individual, our genes play some influence. We don’t want an environmentally deterministic world. That would be horrible. We don’t want to, you know what I mean? People don’t really think that through. So I just wanted to clarify, we’re talking about this individual to individual level. We’re not extrapolating this to group differences. Well, we’re also talking about it at a comparative level. It’s like, well, the IQ testing process is imperfect. Right. Well, compared to what? You have to come up with a better alternative. You can’t just say this isn’t good enough. It’s like, compared to what? We could assign people to universities randomly. And you could do this. Imagine that your first year students, anybody could attend first year classes. And then you used first year grades to decide who got to continue. You could see that you could make a coherent social policy based on that. That would give everyone a shot. And then it would allow those who succeeded in the actual enterprise to progress. Now, it’d be very expensive in the first year, but that might be beneficial anyways to expose everyone to that kind of education. But you can’t do that and continue up to the higher stratospheres of intellectual endeavor because the people who pursue that have to be able to do it. So well, so we’re stuck with it. We won’t have a serious discussion of it. And it’s really unfortunate. I would say, well, in caveat, we found in our own paper that IQ was entirely uncorrelated with artistic creative achievement. And I’ve always been kind of interested in what to do with that because it just seems like openness to experience in some of these other cognitions. I studied implicit learning and I found that was correlated with artistic achievement and reduced late inhibition. The great work you did with Shelly Carson, I replicated some of that. So I think there’s more to the story if we look at what field are we trying to predict? Yeah, well, the openness dimension is of extreme interest because there is something to the personality trait openness that seems to be related, as you pointed out, to creative achievement, but also to not even so necessarily so much artistic achievement, but even to enterprise achievement like entrepreneurial ability. We found that I never published. I used it privately. We found a pretty pronounced relationship between openness to experience and entrepreneurial ability, practical entrepreneurial ability. And as you well know, that openness seems to have something to do with perceptual differences. So open people, they seem to have a broader perceptual range, something like that. And they’re more emotionally impacted by their perceptions too. They’re more likely to experience awe. They’re more likely to be compelled and gripped by ideas. They’re more likely to be curious. They’re more likely to engage in associative thinking. So one concept will remind them of a range of distantly related concepts more than someone who’s more constrained. They’re more likely to have insight experiences. And there is something to that that’s not purely reducible to IQ because you can be, you can have a high IQ and be non-creative. It’s less likely. Not only that, but like, and this is starting to get into the transcend stuff. When you said the word awe, then it starts to get into my newer research because I can look, I can pop up a data set right now and show you that IQ is correlated to zero with the extent to which you’re going to experience all in your daily life. But openness to experience is very strongly correlated with that. Right. And so what do you make of that? What do you think about open? We’ve had professional exchanges on this topic, but I haven’t talked to you for years. So where’s your thinking gone with in relationship to openness to experience? And you know it can be transformed by psilocybin mushroom experiences, right? Griffiths showed that one standard deviation increase in openness one year later after one mystical experience. Stunning, some profound neurological transformation. And Catherine McLean as well has showed that very large effects. I’m very, very interested in the linkage between openness to experience and self-transcendent experiences. It does seem like certain personality structures are more likely to experience absorption. So I think the major link there, and probably our bridge here, is the under-discussed topic in the public of, because people talk about flow, but telegen’s absorption construct is not the same thing as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow construct. And I think that when we talk about openness to experience, I think it is quite linked to these altered states of consciousness and susceptibility to even hypnotizability, you know? This kind of willingness to dip your toe into the sea of madness, I would say. So do you suppose that the capacity to embody multiple personalities in some sense is the key aspect to openness? You know, because we’re incredible mimics, and I want to talk to you about the relationship between mimicry and awe, because I think awe is the manifestation of the instinct to mimic. But I’ve watched creative people play music, for example. I remember one guitarist I was watching, and he was jamming, and he was very expert at it. And it was unbelievably interesting to watch and listen to him at the same time, because you could see one second he’d be like a black female gospel singer from the 1930s, and the next second he’d be like Morrison from the Doors. And you could see all these musical influences that had inhabited him, and he was playing with them constantly. And it was like watching a shapeshifter. And you know, our capacity for abstraction means that we can think up abstractions, which are representations of ourselves in some sense, and then assess their perceptions and their actions before we implement them. And I wonder if open people are are able to be more people in some sense, because I’ve also known. I think so. You think you think there’s something? I think there’s something I think there’s I actually tested this hypothesis in the sense I look to see whether or not people who are scored higher in open experience were more likely to have unreliability in their big five character structure over time. Oh, that’s yeah. And I found they did. You did. You did. You found that. Yeah. OK. Yeah. That means from moment to moment, their personality and over what span of time? Well, over from month to month. I didn’t do like Sam, like experience sampling, which would be that’d be really cool. But just over a period of a couple of months. OK, so just to clarify that personality like IQ, personality is quite stable across time. What you see across time is that people maintain their personality structures, but they become more agreeable, less neurotic, so less characterized by negative emotion and more conscientious as they age. So those all seem like good things, hypothetically. But your point is that if you take people who are high in openness to experience, which is this creativity dimension, their personalities are less stable across time. I also wonder if that accounts to some degree for the oft remarked upon hypothetical association between creativity and instability, because imagine you’re high in openness and you’re high in neuroticism. I mean, that’s a problem because you have that personality variability that’s an intrinsic part of you. But in some ways, that’s going to be harder on you because that variability is going to make things more unpredictable. I’ve had I’ve seen open people have a hard time catalyzing a single identity. And so that can be hard on them. I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. And I think there’s some really cool things when you actually look at the interaction effects. That’s what’s really cool, especially what I guess I would call paradoxical traits. Because you look at the general correlational structure, but then what if a person really bucks those general correlational structure trends? What’s the word for that? I’ve been trying to come up with a term for that. You know, like, you know, most people who are conscientiousness or conscientious, I guess, tend to be what less what in the general population? Well, probably less neurotic. But what if you’re high neurotic and you’re high conscientious? That’s just one example. Right. Right. But there are lots of these other kinds of paradoxical traits that I think are worth studying in more depth. So those would be singular people in some sense. So right. Right. So high orderly, high openness would be an example of that, too. What is that? Yeah. Right. For instance, me, me, me. I think that’s Hitler. Oh, no, I was very orderly and very open. I wasn’t going to say I’m not those traits. But but here’s something I am that’s paradoxical. And maybe you are, too. I don’t know. I’d like to hear that. I score very high in autistic like trait scales, but I also score very high in schizotypy like scales. So that’s something that in the general population, those are very strongly negatively correlated with each other. But how in the world am I high in both those things? I think you might be high in both those things, too. Do you think that’s mediated by openness? Maybe that’s what it all comes down to is that. That’d be my guess. So I wonder, like I used to see my kid come home, my son, when he was young, he’d come home after playing with kids and he would be inhabited by one of the kids personalities. And often it was a bratty child. And so he’d come home with this whole bag of tricks. And it wasn’t just one thing that he would experiment with. It was like he’d picked up the whole pattern of behavior from that play experience. And then he’d come home and try out his new tricks. And I wonder, has anybody ever assessed to see if open people are better or faster mimics? Because absorption. Imagine, imagine two things. OK, so imagine, first of all, that you have this capacity for awe. And so what that does, you meet someone who’s very impressive. And so there’s an experience of awe that goes along with that. Now, you should mimic someone who’s impressive, because if your judgment of their impressiveness is accurate, then you could be more impressive if you were more like them. So imagine that there’s an instinct towards awe inspired imitation. OK, now, if you were also very high in absorption, you would get into that. And I think that’s probably what’s happening to open people in movies because they sink really deeply into the movies. They are entranced by them or the fictional universe. And so they can become possessed by alternative personalities. And then and that and of course, that’s what we want in actors, obviously. Right. We want people who are possessed by alternative personalities to act them out for us. And there’s no reason because you see, one of the things psychologists don’t study enough. As far as I’m concerned, is imitation. It’s so fundamental. Well, here’s a here’s maybe a far out link. Do you think people who are high in openness are more likely to be ideologically possessed? Have you ever made that linkage? I mean, I don’t know if there is something interesting there, but there might be to the extent to which people who are high on openness tend to be more likely to have contagion of other people’s emotions and ideas and maybe have. I mean, could that be possible? Well, I guess I’d think two things about that. The the the if you’re open, you’re more easily possessed line of reasoning would suggest that. But the if you’re open, you’re likely to blow through arbitrary cognitive barriers would act negatively towards that. So maybe maybe what you might see is that who the hell knows that high openness teenagers are likely to be ideologically possessed, but to to not be later. Right. So maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the mechanism would lead them to that in the in the early development, but it would lead them out of that as they matured. And moderator and maybe IQ is a moderator of all this. Maybe it’s going full circle. Yeah. Well, that’s a tough one, too, because, you know, it I suspect that I would suspect again that in adolescence, higher IQ would would be a predictor of more ideological possession because because well, imagine that you you have to be relatively smart to be interested in political issues, political abstractions. So it’s a precondition. And then when you first start being interested, well, you’re not going to be very sophisticated. So an ideology is likely what you’re going to adopt. Well, maybe it’s the intellect facet, you know, because openness to experience your pie and you pioneered this work, which I carried forward in my graduate work. There’s an important distinction at the aspect level between intellectual curiosity and openness to experience more having to do with the actual experience of the intellectual experiential aspect of it. And so maybe the intellectual curiosity part is a modifier there, even more so than IQ. Right. Right. Well, I mean, all we’ve found so far in our investigations of openness and political view is that it’s a definitely and it isn’t only our lab, obviously, and we didn’t originate this idea for that matter. Openness is definitely a predictor of liberal and left leaning political proclivity. That’s that’s clear. And and that goes along with a comparative interest in fiction, say, versus nonfiction. And it’s definitely temperamental. And I’ve been thinking, tell me what you think about this. So, you know, that openness and conscientiousness are the best two predictors of political belief. OK, so then you might ask and this goes along with your interest in interactions is why the hell is it openness and conscientiousness? Relatively uncorrelated traits. You know, why isn’t it openness and neuroticism or or or or extroversion and agreeableness? Why those two? Why political? And so I’ve been thinking, I think it has to do with borders. And I’ve been influenced in my thinking by all the new literature on the relationship between contagious disease and political belief. So there’s a huge literature. This is the only literature I’ve ever seen that has effect size is approximating those of IQ. So if you measure the prevalence of the infectious disease at the city, state, provincial or country level, you find that there’s a walloping correlation with authoritarian attitudes like point seven. It’s ridiculous. It’s massive. And there’s some association there with disgust sensitivity, although that hasn’t been completely pulled out yet. So imagine this is imagine that the open type, so the liberal types, they want the free flow of information. So they don’t like barriers. They don’t like borders between anything. They don’t like borders between concepts. They don’t like borders between genders. They don’t like borders because it interferes with the free flow of information. But the cost of the free flow, borderless free flow, is contamination. And so and they’re both right. You open the borders. Well, look what happened last year. International or international society. So we have an international pandemic. So you open up the doors to information flow. You also open up the doors to contamination. And I would say that’s true biologically and ideationally as well. So the analogy holds. So that’s why those two things combine to determine political belief, because political belief is about borders fundamentally. But the one thing I don’t understand about that is that neuroticism is pretty strongly correlated with disgust sensitivity or even the kind of thing you’re referring to. So why is why is neuroticism not what you know, because you said openness. We thought we kind of thought we kind of thought and some of my theoretical work led me to presume that more conservative types or more ideologically possessed types, it wasn’t clear which would be more neurotic, but they’re not like, if anything, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals at a trade level. And it’s a complex literature because there is some literature showing that conservatives are more sensitive under some conditions to some kinds of negative emotion. You know, and then you can generate up a defense theory of conservative ideology. But it doesn’t look to me like it’s fear related because it doesn’t manifest itself in neuroticism at all. And it should. If that theory was correct, there’s something about disgust that’s crucial that has been understudied so far. But that’s changing. I think that’s super interesting. And I’ve also been interested in the at the aspect level analysis of these things. So the overall agreeableness to me is not a player. But once you look at the aspect level, you find that they diverge. Politeness is higher among conservatives and compassion is higher among liberals. I should just point out for everyone that’s listening is that work done in my lab by Colin DeYoung, particularly, we showed that you could break the big five down into ten sub aspects, we call them. So you get some additional predictive utility sometimes if you use the more differentiated scales. And we did investigate, as as Dr. Kaufman just mentioned, we did investigate the effects of that on political belief. And we did find, as you said, that conservatives are more polite and that liberals are more empathetic or more agreeable. And we don’t know what to make of that, partly because we don’t really understand politeness exactly. It has something to do with it’s something related to deference to authority, politeness. But it may not be just respect, respect for authority. It seems a little bit different than deference. It could could be respect. Sure, sure. And but but then it’s complicated because conscientiousness is also associated, I would say, to some degree with respect for authority. Right. And so what’s the difference? What is politeness adding that conscientiousness doesn’t already cover? So certainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it it it it. Well, I was really excited by the political research partly that was done in my lab, but also elsewhere, because it’s really it’s quite revolutionary, I think, to think through the implications of the fact that your political viewpoints are determined by your by your temperament. And because what it means is that your biology in large part has provided you with a filter for the facts. Right. So we like to think, well, you derive your rational conclusions from the set of facts that you’re exposed to. But unfortunately, you have to choose the facts because there’s just too many of them. And so temperament is playing a major role in determining what you expose yourself to. We found that with fiction preference, for example, is like open people are more much more likely to read fiction and fiction of certain sorts. And so the differences start with the information gathering process itself. Is that what the work with Mar? Yeah. Was that? Yeah, I love that. I love that work so much, by the way. We had a hell of a time getting that stuff published, although it’s it’s crazy. No way. When you publish what’s going to be published and what’s going to have an impact, you certainly can’t predict it. But yes, that that all worked out quite well. So, OK, so back to let’s go back to the if you don’t mind, unless you want to take this somewhere else, let’s go back to the humanism issue. OK, let’s just central to your new book. So you got it. You got interested in what what was it about the humanist? Define it and then tell me what it was that captured your attention. So it was in particular was humanistic psychology. And I actually distinguish that from the humanism movement that maybe, you know, like that that’s more a philosophical movement. The humanistic psychology movement was in the 50s and 60s, a cadet of psychologists who were unconvinced that we were telling the full story about humanity and humans through the Freud approach or the behaviorism approach. They felt like we were neglecting higher principles. They felt like we were neglecting the investigation of the whole person as a system. Right. Freud focused. Freud focused a lot as an M.D. on psychopathology, on mental illness. And the behaviorists took everything that was related to consciousness and subjective experience completely off the table. And we should point out that that had utility. Both those movements had tremendous utility. But there was this lacunae, let’s say, that the existentialists addressed in the 50s, the existentialists, just and then the humanists in the 60s. By the way, I loved your lecture about Carl Rogers and the phenomenology approach. So that was really cool. I liked that. Yeah. So in a big way, there was still a respect for those prior approaches. They weren’t saying they were complete shit. Abraham Maslow did really rigorous, great work in grad school on rats. You’re looking at reaction time tasks. But he got bored with it and he felt that there was more to the story of humanity. So I guess what really captured my interest is this notion of studying the whole system, the whole person and how all the parts work together. I think that we both agree in our philosophy that nothing is actually objective or absolutely good or bad. No, no, no psychological trait. It depends how it’s integrated into the system. You know, this is why I don’t I’m critical of the distinction between positive and negative emotions. Like we can absolutely classify which emotions are positive and absolutely classify which ones are negative as opposed to just we have comfortable emotions, you’ve uncomfortable emotions. I mean, you can have the experience, but then we put the label on top of the experience. You’ve you’ve said you’ve had some good lectures about the potential benefits of integrating your anger or are integrating. I mean, anything you integrate in a healthy way into the whole system can be beneficial. You know, that’s the crucial issue there. Right. It’s the crucial issue that the existentialists and the human humanists and Jung as well, as far as I’m concerned, and you concentrated on, which is, well, when you’re talking about integration, let’s say. And and so the psychoanalyst psychoanalytic approach, even Freudian approach would be to uncover something repressed and to bring it into the whole personality. Well, what exactly do you mean by the whole personality? And what do you mean by integrated? And so the humanists, for me, the humanists were the entry point to the answer to that question. Absolutely. So so OK, so so you’re you’re updating Maslow with your with this new book. And so walk us in one what you were thinking. In one way, I’m updating Maslow, but in another way, I’m actually setting the record straight about Maslow because there’s so many misconceptions and things he never even said. So first of all, he never drew a pyramid. There there is none of his papers. Did he ever draw a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs? He didn’t even really think of it in that way. In fact, I was talking to someone who knew him personally. And there’s a story where he was having lunch with him and he saw on the dollar bill. So I think it’s the dollar bill where there’s a pyramid. He looked at me, he said, I hate that pyramid. So look, he didn’t he didn’t like that’s not how he thought about it. He actually says in his writings, he said, I would like to present my integrated hierarchy of human needs. And he he was very clear to call it into integrated. He said it’s it’s every single need rests very carefully upon the lower need. But just because life is not like a video game where you reach one level of needs and then like some voice from above is like, congrats, you’ve unlocked the next level and then you never go back to the prior level. Integration fundamentally means that every single higher need depends on the lower need that came before. It depends on it in a very important way that gets missed by the way it’s often represented in moderns, even psychology textbooks. Like we I really think we need to update the psychology textbooks about this. Yeah, well, lots of great thinkers are poorly represented by their low order, their low resolution representation. I mean, Piaget, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, who’s basically taught as a stage theorist, which was a tiny fraction of what he did and certainly not the most important thing. He was fundamentally interested in reconciling the distinction between religion and science, and I never heard hide nor hear of that till I started reading Piaget while the translations, I couldn’t read it in the French original. So, you know, the ideas of creative geniuses are filtered through the through lesser minds when they’re taught and much of what’s complex and interesting disappears and what’s simplified is what remains. C’est la vie. So do you want to walk us through a bit the theory and then what you’ve done with it and what what it’s done for you and what you think it can do for other people? Absolutely. And I’ll also bring in how some of your own work influenced it. So, OK, so the hierarchy of needs as as Mazzo originally proposes that we have a hierarchy of prepotency, and that’s the word he used. Pre potency, various motivations that given certain deprivations cause our entire consciousness to be very narrowed down to those to to to pay attention to this thing. So if we if we severely lack food, our consciousness sees everything as a potential source of food. If we severely are deficient with our with our connections and belonging, he says we have we show a very kind of needing love. So everyone looks like everyone’s utility value is to satisfy this whole in ourselves of of connection of our loneliness. Same with self-esteem needs. If we’re severely deprived of any opportunities for mastery or esteem from others, we become very needy and demand respect. But he argued that the deprivation realm of human existence can be distinguished from the being realm of human existence. He said once we can it’s like putting on a clear, clear set of glasses for the first time when you’ve when you’ve only been seeing very, very unclear glasses. And when you put on the clear glasses and you enter the being realm or the growth realm of human existence, you no longer demand for the world to conform to your deprivations. You start to see the world on its own terms. You start to see the world and even dare I say, admire. And this is where transcendence starts to come into play. Admire and love people for who they are independently of you, independently of their utility value for your own deprivations. So to me, I thought that was the most important distinction in Maslow’s theory that had been lost. OK, so let me ask you a question there. So there’s two distinctions that are being made. And they seem to be conflated to some degree in Maslow, but maybe that’s a misunderstanding on my part. There’s an implication, at least, that the higher the more transcendent values or perceptions make themselves manifest once the deprivation states have been taken care of. That’s sort of the but then but there’s a conceptual distinction that’s equally important, which is that there are deprivation motivated perceptions, motivations and actions. But there’s another class as well, and those should be separated. And I have more trouble with the first presumption than the second, because, well, when I was thinking, thinking through Maslow, for example, in the courses I’ve taught on existentialism and humanism, Solzhenitsyn talk, who’s a great existential psychologist, as far as I’m concerned, talked about people who were in the prison camps in Russia who were starving and deprived in multiple different ways. And Frankl did the same thing with regards to the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. And he describes in painful story after story, people turning to what Maslow would consider being needs in the midst of severe deprivation and finding sustenance and profound sustenance there. So he talked, for example, about a group of intellectuals who were starving to death in a work camp, who had a weekly seminar where they discussed their specific academic specializations. And, you know, it shrunk over time as each of them died of malnutrition. But and Solzhenitsyn produces a very powerful critique of the idea that the being realm, let’s say, in Maslow’s terms, can only be accessed once the deprivation realm has been taken care of. And, well, well, that I found that an interesting argument, to say the least. And it’s very interesting. But I would modify and say, at least, you know, and this is where maybe what Maslow said and what Scott Barry Kaufman is saying might start to diverge, because what I try to argue in this book is that it’s all about the how how those deprivations are integrated, not the fact that they’re gone. So, for instance, in my chapter on purpose, I cover what I call the Hitler problem. And that’s the very, I think, a reasonable question. Did Hitler have a higher purpose? You know, and, you know, and what would that even mean in the in the whole hierarchy of needs model, considering that I put purpose as a higher need in the growth realm? You know, or am I saying that Hitler entered the being a growth realm? And the way I resolved that is that I argued that, you know, some of the most pro-social or or most positive aspects of manifestations of the higher need of purpose occur when one’s sufferings are integrated into one’s higher order structure. But it’s not the only thing that’s driving their whole system. So I just really do like viewing this from a whole system perspective, because once you can integrate kind of this this suffering you had and the anger you have for the suffering, but you integrate that with this need for exploration, as I talk about, as a growth need, as well as be love, which is Maslow called it be love, love for the just like humanitarian sort of concern or as Alfred Adler called it, I can never pronounce the word, but, you know, social interest. Once we have a higher level integration of all these things, I think you get something much better as the sum of the parts than any of the parts themselves. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, and well, let’s we can we we can also walk walk through this argument in some more detail. I mean, it it’s obviously the case that deprivation can reach a point where nothing but the deprivation is salient. I mean, if you’re in enough pain, for example, if you’re hungry enough, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s limit conditions that that that make up these deprivation states that skew everything. If you’re dying of thirst, for example, you’re not going to in all likelihood engage in a philosophical conversation. Right. So at some point, deprivation takes the reins completely. But then there’s that one of the dangers in in Maslow’s approach, as far as I was concerned. And this is partly why the writings of Theodore Del Ripple have been so interesting to me, because Del Ripple talks. He worked a lot in really in the what would you say the disparate? He worked a lot along among the dispossessed class in inner city British cities in the in the inner most confines of British cities. And he described a culture of of poverty that characterized the dispossessed. And they weren’t poor so much. If you thought about poverty in terms of absolute deprivation. So he had worked in Africa as well among people who were by any reasonable standard, much more materially deprived than the members of the population he was addressing in the psychiatric practice. But he his fundamental diagnosis was that the multi generational poverty cycle, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, antisocial behavior that he saw was a consequence of a profound philosophical disequilibrium that was the primary agent that was driving all this rather than something that could be addressed, for example, by attending by social attention being paid, say, to you know, like a guaranteed basic income or something like that. And so there are I mean, getting this straight is really of crucial importance. And it is really complicated. So and Maslow always felt to me, look, I learned a lot from the humanists. And I would say they were an entry point to me into the domain of practical, philosophical, religious thinking. The humanists offered within the field of psychology, spirituality for people, for atheists. That’s what it looked like to me. And I’m not denigrating that. I say that with all due respect. And they they did introduce spirituality, let’s say, back into this into the scientific community among psychologists. So that was extremely attractive to me. And well, let me tell you how I tested my model empirically, because I published a paper where I attempted to integrate this theory into modern day personality psychology. And this is where you come in, quite frankly, and your own ideas and work. So I had a hypothesis, which Colin thought was a good hypothesis and that I should run with it, that the deprivation and and growth and being realm that Maslow talked about would map on to stability and plasticity in the big five, that that these two higher order factors of the big. And and I and I found that to be the case. I actually developed and validated a psychometric scale of all the self-actualization characteristics that Maslow wrote about. And I found that I could validate 10 out of the 17 that he mentioned and that the 10 were just really strongly, positively correlated with with plasticity. And so let’s take that apart for a sec for everyone. So work done in my lab, again, by Colin DeYoung and other people had looked at two factor solutions, too. But we showed that agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness, neuroticism reversed and conscientiousness together. Seemed to make a super factor, so they were somewhat correlated. And so did extroversion and openness. And Colin, in particular, has gone off and developed all of that into a theory with neuroscientific underpinnings. And he started doing that in at the University of Toronto is considered continued for the last it’s got to be near 20 years. And so we found stability. We called the super factor stability and plasticity for a variety of reasons. But and so you just said that you mapped stability onto. The deprivation realm and yeah, and and plasticity into the being realm. Being realm. And I think that that’s how that’s my modern day flavor on this, like integrating with personality psychology, because at the end of the day, I’m really an individual difference. That’s my focus is individual differences, cognitive science and personality. And I think that the optimal and what I argued in this paper is that the optimal cybernetic system is one that has a deep integration of both stability and plasticity. So really, it really isn’t an either or question. It’s a matter of do you have the skills that allow you to resist distractions against your higher order goals? And do you have the flexibility to change course when it’s no longer serving those higher order goals? And that’s how I try to integrate Maslow’s theory with modern day cybernetic and personality theory. So I’ve been you tell me what you think about this. I’ve been working on the presupposition that that balance is it manifests itself as something that’s analogous to Chicksent Mahaly’s flow, although I think it’s more like it’s it’s it’s active engagement and immerse. You experience that when? Well, when you’re having a good conversation, let’s say, and you’re not attending to anything but the ideas that are being bandied back and forth, you’re not aware of the broader context. You’re not aware of the flow of time. You’re focused and engaged and interested in what’s happening. And that happens as far as I’m concerned, when maximal when optimal information flow has been established. So you you want to maintain the integrity of your current perceptual frameworks, essentially your current interpretive frameworks. You don’t want them to fall apart. But because they’re limited, because you’re limited, they have to continually transform at some rate and expand. So as you become more competent and as the world changes around you. So it seems to me that the instinct of meaning is the manifestation of an internal signal that you’ve optimized information flow for your particular nervous system. So you’re not getting more information than you can stand. So it’s not knocking you into uncertainty related anxiety. But you are incorporating information at a rate that’s optimal with regards to your continued adaptation and growth. Well, I love that. I absolutely love that. I think that manifests itself as the sense of meaning. And I think that’s what music produces. It’s an analogy when you when you listen to music and you’re deeply engaged, you get an analog of that. And it’s like a model. It’s like this is what your life could be like. This musical beauty. If you were in the right place at the right time all the time, which is what you should, should, should, could strive to attain. And there’s something that there’s something that never runs out about that idea. I would love that and just add, is it worth distinguishing between the kind of meaning that is pre-wired, you know, programmed through the course of human evolution, that are universal forms of meaning that all of us would agree, give us meaning versus individualistic forms of meaning that maybe touch more of our unique traits and. Well, I would say that’s probably a matter of level of integration, which is that the more universal the trait, the meaning experience is, the more it’s related to an emergent integration. So, so, you know, I like as you as you already pointed out, we all differ in our temperaments and quite substantively. And so there are going to be things that we find particularly interesting that other people won’t find interesting. That might determine something like the choice of our careers. It’s not trivial, these differences there. But but as you integrate. It makes sense that as you integrate, the thing that’s integrated becomes more similar across diverse places. I mean, how could it be otherwise? And that’s where I think you get into the realm of universal human values. And I think they are their emergent properties of reciprocal game, something like that. And so let me let me tell you something interesting. You tell me what you think about this. So, you know, I’ve been very, what would you say, opposed to the idea that the typical hierarchical social structure is based on power. You know, there’s an there’s a political argument going on everywhere now. And at the extremes, the claim is something like, well, hierarchical, the hierarchical structures that characterize the West, that characterize capitalism, or maybe that just characterize the West in general, are based on power. OK, so first, I talked to Richard Trombley this week, who’s one of the world’s leading authority on the development of aggression in human beings. OK, so what he showed quite clearly is that aggression is there right at the beginning. So it’s one of these built in motivational systems that you already talked about. The most aggressive age is two. If you group two year olds together, the the probability of kicking, hitting, biting and stealing is higher than it is if you group any other age together. And that declines precipitously with socialization. OK, so the general trend is from aggression to less aggression. And then you can differentiate the aggressive kids into three groups, the kid, the two year olds into three groups, those who are never aggressive, even at two, 30 percent of the human population, those who are aggressive sporadically, 50 percent and 17 percent who are chronically aggressive. It’s from that category. If those kids aren’t socialized into peace over the course of their developmental history, most particularly by the age of four, they’re the long term permanent offenders. OK, so but what’s interesting about this and crucial, I believe, is that the developmental trend across aggression categories is for less aggression. Aggression isn’t and therefore power. Is not a stable strategy for negotiating success in human hierarchies. And it’s more like it’s more something like reciprocity. And we need to recognize that because it really is the case that you’re much more likely to be successful if you’re productive and reciprocal. And I think that’s an emergent that emerges out of hierarchical organization. And I think it’s the same across cultures, you know, with variation. But that’s a universal human truth. And I think we’re adapted to it. And we recognize that in others when we see it. And that produces all when we really see it. That person’s hyper productive, they’re hyper generous. I want to be like that person. So competent and relational, will those be synonyms for those two words? Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s competent and generous. What a combination. And, you know, the thing about generosity is that it allows competent people to store the fruits of their labor. I mean, if you and I collaborate and I’m generous in our collaboration, then you’re going to collaborate with me against maybe sometime down the road when I really need it and vice versa. You know, when I was struck, I talked to Jocko Willink two weeks ago and Jocko’s this like hyper masculine warrior type of character. You know, he’s Navy SEAL and very intimidating physically and psychologically. And he told me in the naval SEAL training, for example, that the primary dictum is you have your buddies back. It isn’t biggest, meanest ape wins. And that doesn’t even work for chimpanzees, as friends to wall is shown. So there is an ethic, man. And one of the things I liked about the humanists and about your book is that, you know, you’re pointing out that there is this integrative tendency that that is associated with values and that there’s something universal about it. It’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. And if I may go to a territory that may seem seem completely unrelated, but I don’t think it is. I wrote a book called Mating Intelligence Unleashed that I coauthored with an evolutionary psychologist, Glenn Gere. But we found that the the male the male that was most attractive to women was the tender defender. And I feel like you’re kind of describing a tender defender. I really want to talk to you about that. OK, so I’ve. I’ve been involved in an email exchange with Richard Dawkins. And I asked him to come on my podcast, and he wrote back very politely and in a detailed letter pointing out why I wanted to talk to him, which was very surprising to me. I said I wanted to talk to him about sex selection, particularly. And then he identified a paragraph from a talk I did with Sam Harris that nailed exactly why I wanted to talk with Dawkins. OK, so Dawkins is the blind watchmaker guy, right? And and he’s anti-teleological to the core and also also anti-religious, et cetera. And people know about Dawkins and Dawkins is an admirable person intellectually. But this there, the evolutionary psychologist biologists are not taking the issue of sexual selection seriously enough in relationship to value. So let’s take what you just said. All right. So imagine this. You tell me if you think this is wrong, because I really want to know if it’s wrong. Men, women do this too. But what are you going to sex differentiate for for the time being? Men organize hierarchies around tasks. They want to get something done. OK, and it’s something that everyone in the group wants to get done. And so as soon as they aggregate themselves towards the task, a hierarchy of competence emerges because there’s individual differences. And if the group is functional, they let the guys who are better at the task rise to the top. OK, now imagine that across tasks, there’s a proclivity for some men to rise and others not to. And those would be men who are competent and generous across tasks. And so they’re more likely to emerge as successful in the domain of of task related hierarchies. All right. Now, we know that women are what’s the word? They mate across and up hierarchies. It’s one of the relational. Yes, there there men mate across and down hierarchies. Women mate across and up. And that’s obvious. Cross culturally, it’s ameliorated to some degree in countries like the Scandinavian countries, but it’s their cross culturally. They like men who are a bit older and they like men who are a bit above them in the. Hierarchical game, let’s say. Men vote on who the most valid man is, and women peel from the top. And that value game drives evolution. It’s not random. It’s not random at all. And so that’s you said tender defender. And I do think that’s generous productivity. And so not all were selected for that. And sexual selection specifies that even more completely and intensely, intensely. So men can men can gain that by by displaying trappings of wealth and like the pickup artist types, they mimic tender defender. And they can fool women that way. But women, you know, by and large, are looking for cues for for exactly that competence and the capacity to protect the ability to protect. Why? What else would you want for your children? You know, you. Yeah, I mean, what you’re saying links so much to Zahavi’s handicap principle in evolutionary psychology, you know, that you need honest, reliable signals. Do like women are pretty smart at at seeing bullshit, you know, like, you know. Well, they’re the survival of their children depends on it. That’s why they’re extremely smart at it as they should be. And I don’t I don’t believe that it’s a misreading of the evolutionary literature to point out that one of the reasons that we have diverged so rapidly from our con from our common ancestor with chimps, chimps seem much more similar to that common ancestor than we are, is because chimp females are non selective maters, whereas human females are highly selective maters. And, you know, this manifests itself in if you look at these charts, they’re quite comical in in some sense. If you look at how men rate women on a typical dating site, it’s pretty much a normal distribution. The average woman gets an average rating and, you know, the nine out of ten gets a nine and and and so forth. It’s distributed as you would expect, but it’s skewed way to the left for men like 60 percent of men are like a four or lower. And so even in just instantaneous ratings of attractiveness, there’s sex differences. So you put it what you put it very well, though, when you said it, our survival or species literally depends on it. I love it. I just want to double click on that. OK, so then the question is, and this ties into this humanist idea, what is it that we’re aiming at? Well, what part of that is, well, what are the elements that make up competence and generosity? Well, we know what competence is made out of IQ and conscientiousness. That’s a huge chunk of it. So in general problem solving capability, that’s IQ. Consciousness is diligent application of that. OK, so then you pair that with generosity and open. And openness to experience. Yes. Well, there’d be there’d be a niche there because that’s where you get creative types and they can be radically. I think of creativity as a high risk, high return game. You’re highly likely to fail. But I’m just linking that to Jeffrey Miller’s the hypothesis about creativity being a reliable indicator of genetic mutation load, which is why it would be so sexy, you know, from from the selector point of view. Oh, you’d have to elaborate out that a bit, because this this is also the case for like all sorts of other species. Right. Bowerbirds, for example, exactly. And even fish, for God’s sake. Have you ever seen those sculptures that pufferfish make at the bottom of the ocean? Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s very aesthetic. Mind boggling. And they’re beautiful and they’re complicated. And they take a lot of work. It’s like birds select highly for creativity in many cases. And so you see this you see this emerge out of an evolutionary process and species that are quite distant from ours. It’s it points to something underneath that’s common, you know, even that’s common across creative fish and creative people. It’s quite the damn gap. Well, this this goes back to like a lot of things we’re saying, because like human human intelligence, human creativity is so complex. It’s very hard to fake. It goes back to like the voice that earlier you can’t just accidentally get like a 170 IQ, even though there’s lots of reasons why. Maybe it missed lower IQ is misrepresenting your IQ. But, you know, this does relate to the fact that, you know, reliable indicators of these things are important from a sexual selection point of view, as well as other points. Well, that’s crucial, you know, because the blind watchmaker types, they say, well, evolution is just a random process. And there’s unfortunate political and philosophical implications that instantly emerge from that. Everything’s bloody pointless. There’s no direction. There’s no such thing as real value. It’s like, wait a sec, wait a sec. There’s random mutation on the creativity production side. So that life capitalizes on chance as an extra domain of creative production. Just and you see that in creative thought in people, too, because there’s a kind of a randomness about creative thinking. You open up the gates and let ideas mate, you know, promiscuously, let’s say. And so there but there’s no reason to assume whatsoever that the selection mechanism is random, especially when you add in sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce consciousness. I think you introduce the sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce sexual selection, you introduce directionality and so much for randomness. You can’t derive. So the the people that the processes that make the watch might be random, although, you know, what’s happening down at the genetic level is pretty damn complex. And even bacteria exchange DNA with each other. So there’s a plenty of play down at the genetic level, as well as room for mutation. But once you get up to the selection level, like to me, conscious choice is the fundamental determinant of evolutionary progress. And I can’t. And look, even Darwin, because Darwin was a genius, he stressed sexual selection much as natural selection. But biologists for 100 years never paid any attention to that. And no wonder like it’s revolutionary. To be fair, I do think Jeffrey Miller, to be fair, Jeffrey Miller, I think he did a good job in his book, The Mating Mind, kind of bringing to consciousness of the fact that creativity may have evolved due to sexual selection processes, you know, itself. And as well as human consciousness itself may have evolved due to sexual. Look, look, look, plenty of biologists have been assessing sexual selection in the last 30 years, but it was it was under stress to a huge degree for a long, long time. And it is a game changer because. Sexual selection among human beings, I think, is more important determinant of of successful reproduction than natural selection. I mean, they’re the same at some level. Women are acting as the gatekeepers, and so they are natural selection in some sense. But but how can you deny the role of conscious directionality in that? And I don’t see flaws in my reasoning. I mean, it is the case that men arrange hierarchies around competence and generosity. Fundamentally, it’s not power. Even bloody chimps don’t use power. You know, they baboons. They’re a bit of a different story, but power is too unstable. And so and I think it’s of advantage to men to elect men, even though that gives some men a wider range of mating opportunities, because the net benefit of enhanced productivity, especially when coupled with generosity, is so high that the downside, you know, of the hierarchical ranking is trivial in comparison. You want the best warrior leading your rating party, obviously. I mean, we want the best person in power, whether it’s a man or woman, right? I mean, we obviously want we want, you know, a really competent woman in power as well. Of course. And we and men select competence in women, too. But there’s differential selection to some degree, because men will mate across and down, whereas women mate across and up. So the men aren’t putting the same selection pressure on those attributes of femininity that women are putting on men. Men put their own attributes on. I’m not saying youth, for example, is a tremendous determinant. I think you’re saying a lot of really stimulating things. I’m trying to wonder, is there a sex? I’m known for that. Do you think? No, I mean, you’re stimulating my head in a million directions. But do you think that there’s a sex difference in that? Do you think men are more likely to abuse positions of power when they’re in power as opposed to women? Has that ever been? No, I think there’s actually data showing the reverse. Very interesting. I’m curious to see data on that. Yeah, unfortunately, and I don’t have this at hand. There isn’t research going on into Machiavellianism among status achieving women, and some of that’s done at UBC. And I can’t give you the details because I just came across it. I’m just running it. You know, I’m just starting to process it. But no, I don’t think men are more likely to abuse power. I also think it’s also mostly. As a general rule, it’s really counterproductive. I want to ask you something to you. Tell me what you think about this. So in terms of deep pleasure, that’s associated with higher order values. One of the things that I’ve noticed about extremely competent people in positions of authority and and productivity is the delight that they take in mentoring. And I don’t know what it’s like in your personal experience, but my my experience is being that there isn’t anything that’s more rewarding than that. All things considered, you think that’s right. Well, think about what there is. Think about what that means for the emergence of value, you know, as a biological idea. If there’s something unbelievably pleasurable about finding someone competent and of high moral caliber, let’s say, and opening doors to them and then watching them progress. You know, Jordan, that gets to the heart of my whole my whole project of this book of Transcendence. That’s why I’m bringing it up. That’s it. That’s it. Is I want people to, you know, I want to be able to spot the potential in people that they don’t even see in themselves. To me, that’s special. Right. I agree. I agree. I don’t think there’s anything more. Look, I was talking to this kid. It was twenty seven. He interviewed me a couple of days ago, and he was this. He worked in nightclubs for years. He’s an attractive guy, charismatic guy. And so, you know, from the perspective of young men who aren’t successful in their life, he was doing just fine because he was charismatic and attractive and he had a whole nightclub life thing going. And so he had kind of mastered that. But he started a podcast and started to pay very careful attention to what he was saying. And it’s a human development podcast. And now he’s getting letters from people who are saying, man, you know, you’re really helping me out. It’s really making a difference to my life. And he told me that successful as he was in his sort of man about town persona and everything that that granted him, it was nothing at all compared to the intrinsic pleasure that he experiences when someone tells him that. And I think that’s right. And that’s you think there’s almost nothing more antithetical to a power philosophy than that. It’s like, no, Dom, the pleasure and domination, which is resentful and bitter and cruel and short lived and counterproductive. That’s nothing compared to the pleasure that you take if you have any sense in finding someone with some possibility and opening doors for them. They’re not even in the same universe. I’m going to go further and say not just pleasure, but what greater source of meaning in one’s life could someone have meaning? The pleasure secondary, but the meaning is so deep that it Pleasure is an epiphenomenon. Yeah. So, yes, I mean, I see that in your book. I know what you’re up to. You know, I mean, you’re trying to like the humanists in general. And I found them extremely helpful. Rogers was reading. Rogers was very useful to me and Maslow as well. It’s like there’s something within you that needs to be developed that’s of great benefit to you and to everyone else simultaneously. I liked the young in the final analysis. I thought I put him at the top of the panoply of of of psychologists of this type because he took the study of transcendence into the religious domain. And and that seemed to me, well, I found a much, much, much deeper comprehension of of its limits as a consequence of reading young. I tried to get there. I tried to get there in this book to the spiritual level of transcendence. But I felt like I could only get there after very carefully in an integration way put all the other pieces in place, because I think there’s a lot of pseudo spirituality that you see these days, a lot of spiritual transcendence where it’s transcendence built on a faulty foundation of basic needs and actually being driven by deprivation needs like the need for esteem. For instance, you’ll see a lot of these gurus who really it’s there. That with ideology, too. You know, it’s driven by unrecognized deprivation. I see a lot of unresolved Freudian familial psychopathology driving it. Ideologically, I mean, the idea, for example, that the patriarchy is authoritarian and fundamentally based on power. It’s like, well, how was your relationship with your father? Just out of curiosity. Oh, my God. Have you ever had a positive relationship with any man in your entire life, whether you’re a man or a woman? It doesn’t really matter. Ask that question. Have you ever asked that question? Well, it’s not a good way to make friends, Jordan. Well, I generally don’t hit people with questions like that if I see it. You know, because it’s it’s it’s it’s instantaneous surgery if you’re accurate. And it’s not so you don’t I don’t do that. But I see it. I don’t recommend it. I don’t recommend it. No, no. But it’s definitely worth, you know, true consideration because you’ve got to ask yourself, well, why would you reduce your political theorizing to that particular unidimensional proposition? And but but and for me, that well, and this is again, partly why I like your book is and this line of work in general is like. No, no, you don’t understand is that functional human organizations are actually predicated on they work way better for everyone if they encourage the manifestation of the highest possible human values. And my experience in the both in the academic world and in the corporate world is that companies that abide by those universal principles do much, much better in every possible way. And that doesn’t mean that, you know, I think when structures deteriorate, they become dominated by people who play power games. That happens all the time. We have to be awake to that. It happens all the time. But that doesn’t mean that functional hierarchies have that structure. And I agree. And I’m really deeply concerned about that. That’s another topic. I mean, I feel like we were trying. We’re actually in real time integrating about 40 different threads. But I think that that is the power games. Going on in society right now is something deeply, deeply concerns me. I feel like even I think I feel like I’ve learned in the past couple of years that I’m too naive as and as a human. And I’ve been trying to actually improve that because I tend to treat everyone I meet in good faith. I mean, I don’t care who you are. Like, like, let’s talk. That can be courage, you know, like because say it’s naivety to begin with. And then you get walloped and you’re no longer naive, but then you get cynical and bitter and that’s actually improvement. But then you think, no, no cynicism, no bitterness. I’m going to open myself up again and take the goddamn hits. And that’s courage. I feel like that’s where I’m at right now, actually. I feel like that’s where I’m at right now. It’s been a real transformation for me. A real a real. Yeah, it’s been a growth journey. So what did you see? OK, you said naivety. So what have you why did you come to that conclusion? I didn’t know that that sometimes because I’m a caring person and I’m empathetic. So some people I’ve started noticing that I would say things like I would say research findings or things that I just am curious, just purely curious about. And people would say, you know, that that hurts like you shouldn’t talk about that stuff. Or or do you know that if that some of this can cause damage to to to minority populations, et cetera, and I’m a caring person. So that really gets me in the gut because the last thing I want to do is hurt a minority. I mean, I don’t want to hurt them and anyone. But then I started to realize in some instances, definitely not all, obviously. But in some instances, there was a power game being played that was outside of my level of comprehension or outside my level of like of understanding that wasn’t personal against me. But actually, there’s just something being played out where if you have a certain ideology, there are certain word terms, buzzwords and things that you just you just that they’re just off limits from even bringing into a discussion. And I may have inadvertently sometimes like it’s like I inadvertently tripwire things sometimes that are outside of my level. So many tripwires that you. Yeah. This the game that people who are playing that game is playing are playing is the laying of unavoidable tripwires, because it’s a dominance game. And all I have to do is put enough tripwires around you and you will definitely stumble across one of them. But how is a caring person supposed to navigate tripwires? Like you’ve advised for that. How is a caring, compassionate human being possibly supposed to navigate tripwires? I should say a compassionate person who also is committed to the truth. That’s what I should say. How in the world do we navigate the tripwires? You try to say things that you believe are true. And you take the consequences, you know, and you do it carefully and you pay attention, you pay attention. But I would say more importantly, look, you have this podcast and I have a podcast. And we’re both educators and in a broad sense. And I believe that that’s our ethical responsibility, given our training and now our reach. It’s like, well, the way I navigate that landscape is I have conversations like this. They’re better. And that’s what we’ve got. When you’re when you’re trying to. Diminish malevolence, let’s say, an ignorance, misunderstanding, willful or otherwise. Your best bet is to do something better and use that as a model. And that works. And I’m so heartened by this. I can give you an example. So I’ve been working with this musician. His name is Akira the Don and he has taken quotes from my lectures, which I hope are meaningful and positive and also not naive, I hope. And he’s been putting them to music. And so he has this genre that he calls Meaning Wave. And it’s it’s not like it’s a huge subculture, but it’s it numbers in the tens of thousands. And he’s had his success completely underground because no popular media ever touches this. And you go on the websites. I was just interviewed by him and he said, well, I’m going to do this. I was interviewed by him and he played some of the music and so on. On YouTube. Every single comment is unbelievably positive and uplifting in a non naive way. It’s like these people, they’ve caught on to this music. It’s all positively oriented. And Akira is trying very hard to make it that way without being naive. And all these people are doing something positive and they’re all supporting each other in the comments. It’s like you think, wow, that’s a YouTube comment list. And there’s hundreds of them or thousands of them. It’s so wonderful to see that. And so you we have these podcasts available to us now so we can have these long form discussions. Right. So you and I, we have some shared expertise. We can talk about it as high level as we can possibly manage, as honestly as we possibly can and is engaging as possible a manner. And we can share it with hundreds of thousands of people. It’s like, well, that’s a great deal, man. It’s great. And there’s something about this long form communication that just opens itself up to that. And I’ve watched the comments and people are happy about two things. They’re happy about the content, but they’re happy about watching the process. Right. And the process is more important than the content. So we can model that balance that you already talked about between plasticity and stability. We can model that in real time. And that’s completely an ethical issue. Right. As long as the more you and I can listen to each other and attend and say what we believe to be true and dance, the better the bloody podcast is going to be. Well, this is obviously what I live. I live for these kinds of conversations like we had today. And I don’t feel like I don’t feel like everyone that I meet is coming at me with the same sort of, hey, let’s have a shared understanding of the truth here. Let’s try to let’s talk about this and get to some sort of generalizable principle. I just feel like a lot of conversations, there’s a different energy in the conversation where a lot of people are lecturing at each other, but not having conversations with each other. And I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how. When I find myself in a lecturing at situation, it takes me out of my comfort zone so much that I don’t. It’s almost like someone speaking Russian to me all of a sudden, and I don’t understand Russian, you know? Well, I can tell you what I advise people to do under those circumstances. The first is to realize that you are not where you think you are. You’re somewhere else. That’s that feeling of being taken out. Now you’re somewhere else. You don’t know where you are. OK, that’s fine. You don’t know where you are. What should you do? Shut up. That’s the first thing. The person you’re talking to is not interested in your opinion. They’re interested in something else. You don’t know what it is, but it’s not your opinion or your thoughts or your ideas. It’s something else. Then you watch. Attend. It’s like this is a mystery unfolding. If you attend, you’ll see what’s happening and you’ll be able to react carefully. And but the crucial issue is to recognize that you’re not where you because what you’ll try to do is impose your desire on the situation. You want this to be the kind of conversation you just described. As long as you keep doing that, you actually lose. That’s something I learned, at least in part from reading Jung in depth, because he talked about how to handle yourself in conversations where. Something had possessed the conversation, essentially something you didn’t understand and possessed the conversation. Sometimes you’re the person you’re talking to is possessed by something that wins if you argue. Doesn’t matter if you what you argue about or what you say or what the fact is, if you engage in the argument, you lose. So. But having said that, I still think the better alternative, all things considered, is just to do a better thing, not to have a model model, something better. You know, I try so hard while you’re doing it. Yeah, I try so hard to model Carl Rogers’ notion of unconditional positive regard. And I really try my I can honestly say I try my best to model that in my life. And it does often get good results. Well, I can tell you what I made of that as a clinician, because I was never I was never comfortable with that idea. I didn’t like it exactly. I knew there was something to it. I didn’t casually discard it, but it lacks differentiation. So if you’re a clinician and someone comes to you, there’s a bunch of things in their life that aren’t right and aren’t good. And there’s a bunch of things that could be promoted. And partly what you’re doing is you’re you’re on the you’re on the side of the part of the person that wants to grow and develop. And you’re not on the side of the part that doesn’t. And you can make that explicit and people are actually relieved by it. And you can say, well, we’re going to I’m going to make mistakes and in my judgment and please correct me. But so the contract, the therapeutic contract is you’re going to come and I learned some of this from Rogers, too. So so it came along with the unconditional positive regard. It’s like, OK, you and I are going to aim for what’s better. We’re going to mutually discuss what’s better so that so that we agree that that’s better. And then we’re going to strategize about how to go about doing it. And we’re going to test the strategies. But that’s the deal. Another deal is part of that deal is you’re going to tell me what you actually think and I’m going to tell you what I actually think. That’s that. What did he call that congruence and was congruence and honesty. And so, you know, if a client says something that upsets me. I’ll say. I just had this emotional reaction to what you said, negative emotional reaction. We should take that apart. Or if I observe that in them. But it’s not unconditional positive regard because there’s judgment. There has to be. You want to keep the wheat and throw away the chaff. And you want to participate in that with with the people that. Now, you could say overarching that is a benevolent motivation. And that motivation is I want you to be better and I want you to be better so that everyone else is better. That’s fine. But. Jung pointed out that every ideal is a judge by necessity. And so you have to wrestle with that in relationship to unconditional positive regard. You know, you just maybe realize that I don’t think I practice unconditional positive regard. I think I practice unconditional regard. Let’s just take the word positive out of there for a second. OK, because there’s something I try to do with with any human who’s in front of me. And it’s it’s unconditional. They’re past. They’re past. They’re all the things that, you know, it’s like I don’t even want to know all the things that came before this conversation. You know, I want to see someone on my with my own eyes freshly. You know, I don’t want to be influenced by, you know, people will say, like, don’t talk to this person, don’t talk to that person. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yep. Yep. Oh, that’s why I was so fascinated by the ancient Egyptian worship of the eye. And the Mesopotamians had it, too. Their greatest god, Marduk, was had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words. It’s like, yes, that’s exactly right. But what you’re you’re saying is that that’s attention. It’s attention. I want to watch and see what’s right in front of me. And it’s not thinking. It’s something completely different than that. It’s akin to what you just described. I want to see what is. Say again. It’s almost like it’s almost like a scientific perspective. I want to see what is. I want to see what is. I don’t want to be colored by. So the Egyptians regarded Horus as the revitalizing agent. Osiris was the dead king, right? The worn out state, the the no longer functional ideology. And Horus was the eye. And it was the eye that was the revitalizing source because it saw what was and replaced presumption with what was. And it’s sort of it’s it’s it’s there watching to see and being willing to see. And certainly that’s an integral part of any real scientific process. Absolutely. OK, so let’s let’s cut off the unconditional word then as well. I try to practice regard. Well, then there’s two things. You’ve got this regard, which is focused attention. But then the differentiation element is also crucially important. It’s like, well, let’s figure out what’s right here and what isn’t. And let’s have a bunch more of what’s right and not so much of what isn’t. And that should never be imposed. And that’s something else I learned from Rogers is like, you can’t you can’t really give advice to well, to anyone for that matter, but certainly not to therapy to clinical clients. They have to be fully bought in for it to work. So imposing it isn’t going to help. You can’t and you can’t rip off the defense mechanisms. You can’t rip them off people. It’s a terrifying thing. Yeah, well, that’s yes. There’s plenty for us to be defended against. So I mean. Though that that that fear you had, let’s say, about being in conversations where you don’t know what the rules are, I mean, what I observed among undergraduates was that continually was that that would be there at a surface level now and then. But I could trust the undergraduates by and large that if I gave them something that was substantive, they’d be so excited and so interested that it was just ridiculous. And so even that. Ideological cynicism or resentment is often relatively shallow, and you can entice people away from that with something better. I agree. I just like to tell you a little bit about my personal experience. I at Columbia University, I teach the course called the Science of Living Well. And, you know, I just on the first day of class, I just let I leave at the door any kind of ideology or just all that crap. Basically, you’re all welcome here. Like, let’s just start there. Like, you’re all welcome in this class. And I care about finding the greatest potentiality within each and every one of you in this class and in the way and the style that works best for you and how you want to own your decide how you want to live your life and then take responsibility for that life. And students love it. I mean, I don’t there’s no controversies. There’s no I mean, it’s what I love my students. You know, they they when you kind of frame it in that way, I mean, students, they’re all on board. There’s no reason to divide. There’s no reason to kind of lead with division in my in my point of view. You know, I agree. And I’ve always had faith in my undergraduate students, and they’ve always delivered on that faith like all every year. It was always the same. And so if I was interested in what I was doing and I found it meaningful and if I was trying to get at the heart of things, they were like completely along for the ride. But I’ve also found exactly the same thing in the podcast. And when I went on public lectures, it’s like, you know, I had discussions of this sort, I would say of this intensity with Sam Harris, for example, about religious matters. And, you know, there were 10,000 people watching that and they were captivated by it. Well, that was how it appeared. And so you can trust that in people. And and well, what do you think? What’s been your experience with your podcast and what are you doing? Funny. Yeah. Yeah. Regarding the God Tasting Funny, I had a four hour debate with Sam Harris on my podcast about the nature of free will. And he actually said to me in an email, I think I’m allowed to say what he said to me. He said, what I’m I’m a compatible list. He said, what I’m trying to do with my compatible list version of free will is what Jordan Peterson is trying to do with trying to redefine God. So he put me and you in the same camp there. In a way. So I think, you know, we’re on a similar frequency in some sense that I don’t want to have such narrow conceptualizations of something that no longer has practical utility, you know, construct value anymore. So tell me what’s happening with your podcast and why you’re doing it, because you’re an educator like me and now you have the means this technological means. And so what what have you experienced and what do you want from it? You know, my podcast has become one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life. It started seven years ago as just me turning on the microphone. I wanted to have nerdy conversations with my colleagues about psychology. But it’s really turned into a different beast. It’s really something’s really emerged, which is which I’m really pleased about. And and that’s that I have guests on my show who I treat with unconditional regard. And I don’t I don’t I don’t care who they are. Like, I want to engage them in the moment on ideas and and try to come to some mutual understanding of the truth. I mean, I’ve had controversial guests on. I’ve had non-controversial guests on. I don’t even like to think of it in that way because none of the episodes have been controversial. So it’s almost like people say, like, oh, you’re going to have a controversial guest on as though they’re expecting that that the episode need be controversial. And what I want to show is that doesn’t need to be the case, you know, like it. Why does that need to be like, is there some role from like Moses Ten Command? Well, I think it’s it’s it’s cheap and fast. Yeah. You know, and and and I think some of that was actually imposed previously by our technological limitations. Like, you know, if you’re if you’re trying to attract attention in a limited bandwidth world, you need something flashy and quick because. The attentional space is unbelievably expensive and you have to wave a red flag. But now we’ve got time, right? We can let things unfold. And so, you know, I’m inviting political figures onto my podcast and I hope I can get people from across the ideological spectrum and and offer them the opportunity to unfold their ideas over two hours without sound bites and without the intermediation of the journalist, so to speak, I’m going to ask questions, obviously. But and that’s all become possible because of this technological transformation. And I think it’s going to I had Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, who’s I think the most conservative senator in the House, according to his voting record. And he laid out his his thoughts over two hours. And what’s been so gratifying is that the comments in the main aren’t foolish and knee jerk on either side of the political spectrum. They’re more like, oh, when when he laid out his arguments, I found them interesting and I learned a lot from listening. And that’s left wingers are saying that and right wingers are saying that. And hooray. And so it would be so nice as far as I’m concerned, if that was how we conducted our political discourse. It’s like, what’s your ideas? Can you lay them out over two hours and still be there and still have something to say? And I’ve also found I don’t know what your experience is, but my experience with these long forms is that they brutally punish any facade or dishonesty of any sort, any editing misbehavior or anything like that. It just doesn’t fly, man. It doesn’t happen. What do you mean? What do you mean? Just can you unpack that a little more? Well, for example, if I put up a YouTube video and I’ve cut some of it, people are immediately skeptical about what I’ve got. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I cut out I cut out a bathroom break the other day. And I actually got YouTube comments saying, what are you trying to hide? I was like, well, you don’t want you don’t want to hear me peeing. But but have you found and I found this to be the case that if you if I treat people as human, they tend to act human. I don’t care who they are. I mean, I don’t care. I very rarely have I encountered any anyone in my life. And I’ve encountered so-called controversial figures that I’m that I’m I’m supposed to even hate, you know, even before talking to them, that if I if I treat them with humanity, they at least engage me with humanity. That that’s been in the main that’s been overwhelming my experience. However, there are exceptions. I have I. Yeah. And pronounced exceptions. I mean, I’ve had interviews with journalists that were where I did the things that you just described. And the consequence was that they wrote something that was absolutely deceitful and reprehensible, and they knew it. And that’s been a continual shock to me, even though it’s happened many, many times. So I would say almost all the time when you invite someone to play, they play nicely. But not always, not always. And so it’s unfortunate, right? It is unfortunate. Hmm. It doesn’t mean that we don’t stop trying. A lot of damage. No. Well, right. I don’t want to become like an ultra cynic, I guess is what I’m trying to say about humanity. I want to keep my humanistic. There’s no reason for that. Yeah. There’s no reason for that. It’s the data don’t support the conclusion. I mean, I’ve looked very deeply into the problem of malevolence, and I’ve taken it very seriously. And I don’t think that I’m particularly naive, but it’s still definitely the case that your best bet is like arms open and welcoming. And even though you know that that invites in catastrophe now and then, it’s still it’s it is the most appropriate ethical stance. So. So what do you think? What do you think is going to happen to the universities in light of all this new technological possibility? I mean, you know, have you thought or do your thoughts go in that direction? You’re an educator at an elite university, but now you have all this technological power. It’s like what? What is what are the consequences that going to be? Yeah, I tweeted out something along the lines of my I predict that in 20 years or so, I think I may have said 20 years, universities will be considered very archaic and pointless to a large degree. Now, it got a lot of comments because that’s obviously a pretty superlative statement. But I do think I am I am I do think that we’re going to look back at some point in the future and think that, you know, the the sort of elitism of the of the educational structure that we have at universities is going to be a bit silly, considering there’s so much high quality information coming out that’s going to be accessible to so many people and that so many people are going to be learning things that in which they do with their lives, not through a university. And once that starts happening and kind of the tables get turned in a way where the people in power in society to a large degree are, if not if not self-taught, but taught through channels other than the most elite universities, I think that it’s that that things are going to look a bit silly about the current structure. What do you think? How did that land with you? Well, it seems to me that. The landscape is going to transform itself so that. People will turn to further education, to discussions like the one that we just had, because why not? Right. I mean, I see we just conducted something that approximates a high level graduate seminar spontaneously, and you’ve worked for decades on these sorts of things, and so have I. I mean, even as a professional in an elite institution, I would say the opportunity to sit down for two hours with another respected figure in the field and have a conversation like this are relatively few and far between. But now you can do that whenever you want, assuming people will accept your invitation, and then you can invite like 500000 people to take part. So how is that not just going to win? I agree. And it’s much more interesting than the typical lecture, because the typical lecture is dull and horrible. I mean, you get exceptions to that, but generally that’s the case. And I mean, you go to an academic conference and my God, it’s it’s it’s so. No one would watch any of that almost unless they had to. And so, yeah, that’s just I can’t compete. I can’t go. Yeah, I can’t go back to Colombia in the fall. After going a year of, you know, there’s virtual classes. I didn’t even partake in the virtual. But when I come back in the fall to in-person classes, there’s no way I’m going to go back to business as usual. It feels so weird to to stand up there and lecture the students after I’ve experienced Clubhouse and the potential for that. I don’t know if you’ve discovered Clubhouse, but I think that’s going to be a big wave of the future. I experienced the podcast format, I experienced all these other formats of discussions. There’s no way I can go back to the typical lecture style. So I’m actually trying to reformulate exactly what a classroom, what a science of living while classroom even looks like. Well, I think that what will emerge to the accreditation institutions will emerge. You know, increasingly, the cost of education will be driven down to something approximating zero. And I think that’s what that’s how it looks to me. And I think we’ll get. The people who really want to teach and who are teaching something that people want to listen to will be radically successful at it at an individual level, primarily. And then there’s the problem of accreditation and and perhaps universities will solve that, but I suspect not. I suspect upstart private companies will will will solve that problem. You know, because you can imagine a situation where all the lectures are free. But the exams are very expensive and almost no one passes them. So it’s breadth of education, but strenuous evaluation, strenuous, accurate evaluation and then accreditation. And the accreditation would have some value. It’s already the case that, you know, if you hire someone from Harvard, part of what you’re getting is the initial entry process. Right. It’s really hard to get into Harvard. You have to. You have to have a very high IQ insofar as the SATs are. Unless you’re one of these celebrities and you pay for your. Do you see that? Yes, there’s there’s there’s exceptions. But you’re going to have a bitch of a time if you go to the university and you’re you’re not intellectually qualified. It’s going to be a horrific experience. No, your point is well taken. Your point self punishing. So you have to be very, very smart. And you have to have accomplished generally three or four other things. So when you hire someone from an Ivy League agency, so when you hire someone from an Ivy League institute because of the stringent selection process, which is made possible, at least in part by the plethora of applicants, you know that regardless of the educational quality, you’re getting a person who had those attributes to begin with. So it’s a proxy for it’s a proxy for competent generosity, all things considered. And then the education adds something to that. But but you can imagine that accreditation institutions will pop up that that are capable of assessing that. And there’s real value in that. I’d like to do that. But I I don’t have the wherewithal to manage it. It’s too complex. What I love about the competent that you brought in the competent relational aspect there is, I mean, that’s the highest level of integration of my whole book. Like, that’s where I’m that’s where I’m I mean, I feel like we just like a ride to that, like independently. But I mean, that’s that’s now we’ve thought along the same track to that. That’s true. And there’s been cross fertilization. Yeah, that’s very true. That’s very true. But, you know, if you ask me, what is what is transcendence? I don’t define transcendence as as some sort of thing where you’re above other humans, you know, in some sort of I’m superior to other human sort of way. But a very doesn’t work. I define it as a it’s as a called it a synergy between self and world where you’re and you could you could frame in terms of competence. Your competence is so influential and powerful in making the world a better place that there’s such a little separation between you and the world so that what’s good for you is good for the world. And that’s what I that’s what my book’s trying to get to. So I love that. I believe that’s true. I believe that’s true is that you can you can have your cake and eat it too. And I think the pleasure of mentorship is really an example of that. It’s like, well, what would make you more happy than anything else? Well, who knows? Let’s take a look just out of curiosity. Well, is it like is it a fast Mercedes? Is it is it like sexual gratification on demand? Is it wealth? Is it power? Is it status, et cetera, et cetera? And you can get more sophisticated than that as well. But my experience has been that there isn’t anything more pleasurable than seeing unrewarded talent and possibility and facilitating its development. It’s like that’s in its own universe. And so that’s deeply meaningful to me. But then it’s also something that’s clearly of high level social benefit. And so I think as you do integrate in your sense, you integrate internally, which is what I recommend people do and concentrate. But at the same time, you’re integrating things externally. There’s no separation there, not fundamentally, which is also why cleaning up your room turns out to be a very difficult act. You know, there’s impediments there that you just don’t realize. And to get you can’t get your room in perfect order without simultaneously getting the world in perfect order. So so it’s like an Einstein’s desk, then there can be periods of creative disorder. But it’s not a consequence of avoidance. OK, fair enough. Because I always see that picture of Einstein, you know, like there’s a famous picture of him with his his office was out of control. Sure. Well, he probably knew where everything in it was. Right. So there’s that, too. It’s like order is not necessarily evident on the surface. That’s true. So that’s true. So all right. Well, look, that was that was wonderful. I appreciate the fact that you took the time to talk to me and it’s good. I’m glad we finally had a chance to have a prolonged discussion. I wish you good luck with your book, Transcend. And I hope that it has the effect that you want it to have and that your podcast does as well in that. Onward and upward and all of that. Thank you. And I hope this conversation modeled what a conversation could be in the world. We’ll see, because people will tell us. I guess they will. I guess I was interested in it. So I got an absorption. I got into the, you know, the absorption aspect. But, yeah, well, that’s it. Thanks for that. That’s a killer marker, isn’t it? You know, it really is. You’re not assuming you’re not too corrupt. What you’re absorbed in is perhaps what’s possible. Perhaps what’s most important, because why else would you be absorbed in it? So why can’t we assume that’s a reliable marker or the most reliable marker even? I think it is. So. Yeah. All right. Great. Thanks, Jordan. Thanks very much. Thank you.