https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MPVMcBPlKeY
I say, mind, body, these are just words. Imagine we could have had mind, body, and elbows. You know, that would lead us to a different conception of people. The problem is, for people who separate mind and body, is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? So I said, you know, I don’t want to pay attention to any of that. It’s all interesting philosophy, but it’s not useful. So put the mind and body back together, then wherever you’re putting the mind, you’re necessarily putting the body. I’m extremely pleased to announce that Daily Wire Plus has decided to make the 16-part Exodus Seminar fully and freely available to everyone over the next four months on YouTube. We are, therefore, truly beyond pleased to invite you all most hospitably to partake in this great moral banquet. The Hello, everyone watching and listening. Today, I’m speaking with the mother of mindfulness, Dr. Alan Langer. Dr. Langer was a colleague of mine when I worked at Harvard in the early 90s and so it’s a particular pleasure for me to be talking to her today. We discuss her latest book, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We explore how intentional awareness paired with humility allows for a healthier mindset and body, how the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age, the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we might conquer them through faith and hope, and the immense benefits to be found in carefully considering to what, where, and who you direct your attention. So I was reading your new book today, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And, you know, we were colleagues back in the 1990s. I suppose we still are colleagues in some ways. That’s right. And I was thinking about mindfulness again. And I have a proposition for you, and you tell me what you think about this. I was thinking that mindfulness is something approximating paying attention to what you’re paying attention to. But I’m open for definitions. No, no, no, I like that. But the way I’ve defined it is actively noticing. You know, that if you… People give people instructions and say, pay attention, be present, and that’s sweet, but it really falls on deaf ears because when people are not there, they don’t know they’re not there. And all of the research we’ve done over 40 years says most of us, most of the time, are mindless. So to be mindful, you can do one of two things. The one most… The easiest for people is probably just to notice new things about the things you thought you knew. And then you come to see you didn’t know them as well as you thought you did, and then your attention naturally goes to them. The other is to adopt a mindset, the only mindset we should have, for uncertainty. People don’t realise that everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, so we can never know. And if you know you don’t know, then you naturally stay tuned in. If you thought you knew what I was going to say next, why listen to me? So, Jordan, it’s fun when I lecture, I often begin a lecture and I ask people, so I’ll ask you, how much is one plus one? And people are annoyed with me because they think it’s ridiculous, and then they dutifully say two. But it’s not always two. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. Add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one. Add one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. So in the real world, one plus one probably doesn’t equal two as more often as it does. And the problem is that we’re all taught absolutes, we’re taught facts that we think are unchanging, and again, when you think you know, you don’t pay any attention. So that’s why I like the one plus one, because that’s the most basic, where people think surely they have the right answer. I must tell you, so I was at this horse event many years ago. It changed my life. This man came over and asked me if I’d watch his horse for him because he was going to go buy his, get his horse a hot dog. You know, you know I’m Harvard Yale all the way through. Nobody knows better. People know as well that horses don’t eat meat. They’re herbivorous, right? He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that everything I thought I knew, I realized could be wrong. Which for me was very exciting because I’d opened up a world of possibility. When was that? Oh God, that was about a long time ago, I’d say maybe even 30 years ago. You know, so I have been in this state of openness for at least, if not for my lifetime, for at least the last 30 some odd years. So this, you mentioned art, for example, and you mentioned, you mentioned actually that people should pay more attention to what they take for granted. And one of the things that I’ve come to realize, I think… But they can’t, no, but Jordan, they can pay attention to what they take for granted because it doesn’t occur to them. They’re in a robotic state of mind. I’m starting to interrupt. Well, no, no, that’s fine. I have written a little bit about the role of art in remediating that because one of the things that happens, as far as I can tell, you can see this, for example, I think it’s exemplified well by Van Gogh’s painting, Irises in particular, because it’s easy in some ways to take what you’ve looked at many times for granted. But what an artist will do, and this is really their function, is to put a twist on the perception and then snap you out of that habitual frame of mind so that you see the object that you have taken for granted outside of the strictures of your preconceptions. And the object always transcends your preconceptions because there’s much more to it than you think. So what seems to happen neurologically is that we build up these little modules that specify our perceptions and then we default to them. But it’s possible to stop those modules and to re-novelize the phenomena and then to see it again in its glory. And that is one of the things that, what would you say, keeps us falling in love with life? Yeah, I mean, I think that’s perfect. The only thing is that once somebody sees it anew, if they think now they know what it is, then they’re going to be mindless again, you know, with just that brief interval of being mindful. And it’s interesting, and I don’t know if you know, I started to paint about, well, after I turned 50. And I’m not one of those kids when I was younger who knew how to draw. But nevertheless, I took to the whole thing. It was very exciting. And prior to my painting, I had just assumed leaves, for example, on trees were green, you know, except in the fall when they turn brown. But then I started looking at the leaves and there are hundreds of shades of green. And so the taking to painting opened my eyes and made me see that again, things I thought I knew, I didn’t know at all. So whether you’re creating the art or observing the art, in both cases, it can have that effect as long, and it can be an important effect, as long as people don’t think, oh, now I know. So on this theme of paying attention to what you pay attention to, I want to tell you a bit of a story and get your comments on it. So for years, I was trying to sell tests that help people by aiding them in specifying better employees. And I talked to hundreds of middle managers about the tests. I developed them actually when I was working at Harvard in our department there. And what I found was that people didn’t want those tests. But what they did want to know was how to deal with people, their employees that they already hired who weren’t doing well. And I thought, well, there isn’t anything you can do with them because you’re just a manager and you don’t have the time or resources to deal with people’s serious problems. But no one really liked that answer. So I went into the literature and I tried to see if there were any interventions that were scalable and inexpensive and harmless that actually produced a remedial effect. And there was a couple of sources of literature that specified exactly that. One was derived, one stream was established by people studying goal setting in the industrial realm. And the other stream was established by James Pennebaker at the University of Austin, the University of Texas at Austin. And what Pennebaker showed was that if you got people to write about their past traumas, that made them physically healthier. And people varied his research to show that if you got people to write about their future, that that also made them healthier. And the goal setting literature showed that if you got people to write about their future, that they became more productive. So we developed this program that was a vision program, essentially, called Future Authoring. And you can do it in 90 minutes. It asks people to develop a vision for their life. And so that means to pay attention to what they’re paying attention to, to decide what they want, if they were going to optimize their life, to do it consciously, to decide what they didn’t want and to aim away from that, and then to do that in seven different dimensions of their life. If you have students do that, this is so fascinating. Well, I hope you find it fascinating too. If you have students do that for 90 minutes, when they come into college for their orientation, they are 50 percent less likely to drop out and their grade point averages go up 35 percent. 90 minutes of… I’m… yeah. No, I think that’s great, Jordan. I’m not surprised because everything that you just mentioned, Penny Baker’s work, for instance, is an instance of making people mindful. If you are writing about traumas that you’ve already discussed with people, it doesn’t have the ameliorative effect. And the thing about coming up with a scale, it’s very interesting because people don’t realize that what we’re always doing is trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. And so when you’re taking a scale, you’re assuming everything is staying still. And those people may have, if they did well on those scales, possibly do well at the job as it was defined in the past. But it’s going to change. So I have a different approach to all of it, which is essentially the same thing that you’re suggesting with this 90-minute interaction for students, which I think is wonderful. What you’re doing is waking them up. And when you’re writing about the past where you have to write about something you never explored before, obviously you’re being mindful, because the idea of being mindful is noticing new things. When you’re writing about the future, because you haven’t experienced the future, again, you’re being mindful. And so, you know, they should be taught just to be mindful from the start, either in your way or added to it or in place of it, and just an understanding that is very unusual, especially in schools, for people to be taught to exploit the power and uncertainty. Again, all of the schools, schools, parents, the army, you know, industry in general, teaches people absolutes. This is the way you do it. This is what it is. Horses don’t eat meat. One in one is two, you know, and so on. And by teaching people that everything looks different from different perspectives, everything is always changing, uncertainty is the rule, not the exception, and you don’t have to feel bad about not knowing. You should make a universal rather than a personal attribution for not knowing, because nobody knows. And not knowing is good, because then it makes everything potentially new and exciting. I’m thrilled that you found this in 90 minutes. Oh, it’s stunning. Well, it actually shocked me half to death, because I started thinking about it. I had been using the same program in my classes, because I had people outline a vision for their future. And then I started thinking about the fact that we don’t do this in the education system. So I was teaching kids who had 15 years of education already, and no one had ever sat them down once, once in their entire educational history, and said, why don’t you think about what you really want and who you could be and how you might lay that out? And so then I did some research to try and figure out, into trying to figure out why in the world this was, because it was as if we have a society that’s predicated on literacy and forgot entirely to teach people to read. There’s nothing more important than helping people establish vision. So I looked at the history of the development of the education system, and it turns out that it was developed as a consequence of bringing in Prussian militaristic models of blind obedience in the late 1800s, right? To produce mindless workers who would not be creative and who would not question authority. And so that’s actually that rule following, that mindless rule following that you’re describing is built right into the system. Yeah, that’s great. You know, that I’ve been studying mindful learning where essentially all you do when you’re teaching is make it conditional. You know, rather than saying, here are three reasons for the civil war or whatever, it would be, here are three reasons that could explain the civil war from this perspective or that. So you change things, horses don’t eat meat, it seems that most horses don’t eat meat, possibly horses don’t eat meat, it could be that horses don’t eat meat, you know, all of the words that suggest it’s not always so. And then you get an enormous difference because people don’t learn the lesson and then think now I’ve got it and then close their mind to all the ways it’s changing. It’s interesting because somebody asked me the other day when I was doing the podcast, because I said we should be mindful all the time and I’ll explain what I mean by that to you in a moment. And they said, you know, isn’t it exhausting? And I’ll talk about that. But the important thing was they said, you know, why is everybody so mindless? Doesn’t it serve a purpose? And my answer to that, and I’m curious about your reaction to this because I think you’re better read in this regard than I, that I don’t have any data, but my armchair reasoning leads me to believe that teaching everybody all this mindlessness instantiates the status quo. You know, there’s no reason why you and I should have these lofty positions and so many others who would have something else to bring to the table that’s no less valuable. Don’t get a chance to offer it. You know, so, and so we’ll speak to that and then I’ll tell you what I mean by why we should be mindful all the time. As central banks in countries like China, India, and Australia begin transitioning to a digital currency, the Federal Reserve has been contemplating the same for the US. With the digital currency, the government can track every single purchase you make. 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Well, I think that you can make a case that, and this is a common case made by, say, social critics, particularly on the left, is that anything that biases behavior in favor of maintenance of the status quo obviously benefits people who are highly positioned in that status quo. Right, now, but there’s another psychological reason for that too, which is that if you introduce anomaly into a conceptual scheme, you increase entropy by increasing choice. And increased entropy, if you increase entropy and that happens involuntarily, you catalyze a stress response. Now, if you increase entropy voluntarily, you don’t catalyze a stress response. You catalyze a challenge response, and the challenge response looks like it’s associated with positive emotion, exploration, and play. And so that’s another issue where attitude makes all the difference. You see this in clinical work too, because if people are exposed accidentally to a stressor and they’re phobic, that tends to make them more phobic. But if they’re introduced voluntarily to a stressor of the same magnitude, then the introduction of the stressor is curative. And then on your final point, you said that it’s also easier, let’s say, to default to mindlessness. The thing is, that’s true. No, I don’t think it’s really easier, in fact. I think people don’t fully understand what I mean by being mindful. Because they think, when I say should be mindful all the time, people get crazy. How could that be? Because they confuse mindfulness with just thinking. And thinking has gotten a bad rep. Thinking is fun. What’s not good about thinking and stressful about thinking is worrying about whether you’re going to get the problem solved, whether you’re going to look stupid when you come up with your answers and so on. Which is the stress that you’re talking about, and that’s debilitating, but all stress is mindless. So my view is that if you’re going to do it, you should be there for it. And that mindfulness, it turns out, is energy begetting, not consuming. And that, if you came here to visit me, Jordan, since you’ve never been at my house here, everything would be new. You’d be looking around, you’d see what books is she reading, oh, there are all those Fritos that your men who helped set this up left around. You would notice, and it wouldn’t be hard for you. You’d go on a trip to Europe, you don’t have to practice being mindful. Your expectation is it will all be new, and so you are mindful. And mindfulness is the essence of engagement. It’s what you do when you’re having fun. So is there a limit to how much fun and how happy you can be? I don’t think so. So we should be mindful all the time. And people say, well, aren’t there circumstances where it’s your advantage to be mindless? My answer is emphatically no. And I say, let’s say you’re at the park and you took a two-year-old with you. And this is the person trying to challenge me and says, and the two-year-old wanders into the street. Wouldn’t it be best to mindlessly just grab the child so that the child isn’t hit by the oncoming car? And my response to that is twofold. The first is that if you were mindful, the child wouldn’t have ended up in the street in the first place. And secondly, that probably in grabbing the child, you wanna notice the posture of the driver to figure out whether they’re going to turn right or left to know if you should take the child out of harm’s way going to the right or left and so on. That the only time one should be mindless, I believe, is when you found the very best way of doing something and nothing changes. And so clearly I don’t think those conditions can be met. So mindlessness feels good. I have over 45 years of research showing that it’s good for your health, it’s good for your relationships, people see it as authentic, charismatic, and it even leaves its imprint on the things that we do. And given that it’s so easy, I can find no reason why people wouldn’t begin immediately after understanding us today to become more mindful. So a variety of things there. The first is the behaviorists, the neuroscience-oriented behaviorists, distinguish two forms of reward. There’s satiation reward, consumatory reward, technically an incentive reward, and consumatory reward tends to bring about quiescence and sleep. And so I might say, well, you should be mindless when it’s time to go to sleep because it’s time to go to sleep. If you’re satiated, there are times for rest. With regard to optimized engagement, that seems to be an incentive reward phenomenon that’s mediated by dopamine. And it’s associated, as you already pointed out, with exploration and play. And I would say that is, is it exhausting? I mean, it depends on the level of intensity, but it’s definitely engaging. And it’s also engaging in an interesting manner because what play does is engage you in a manner that expands your realm of adaptive competence, right? So you’re doing the task, but you’re simultaneously getting better at doing the task. That’s an optimized place to stand. That’s Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development because you’re continually expanding your domain of adaptive competence by playing. And the emotions that are associated with that are associated with engagement and meaning and depth. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s interesting, you mentioned fatigue. So in the mindful body, I have, I present some research on fatigue. Let me give you the simplest of these. Let’s imagine, we have, let’s do one after imagine and I’ll report it. So we have a group of people, we have them do 100 jumping jacks, very simple, and tell us when you get tired. So they get tired around two thirds of the way through the activity, around 67. Then we have another group of people, they’re going to do 200 jumping jacks. And we ask them, tell us when you’re tired. And they also are tired two thirds of the way through, which is twice as many jumping jacks as the former group. And we do this across all, you know, the ballerinas in all different spheres. So there’s a degree to which fatigue itself is a mindset and limits us. But I think that, you know, if you go back to, you made me think about something, if somebody you get into bed and you want to go to sleep, and you were suggesting that maybe at that point, they should be mindless. I think that what happens too often is that the stress of the day keeps people awake, you know, and that if they weren’t stressed, and stress is mindless, you know, when you’re stressed, two things are happening. First, you believe something awful, something’s going to happen. And second, that when it happens, it’s going to be awful. And prediction is an illusion. So if you said to yourself simply, what are three, five reasons why this thing won’t happen? You won’t fail the test, you won’t be fired, your spouse won’t leave you, whatever it is that’s keeping you awake at night. And you give yourself three to five reasons why it won’t happen. Well, you immediately feel better. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, rather than it’s definitely going to happen. And then turn it around, let’s assume it does happen. What are three or five reasons, ways, that that’s actually a good thing? And if people don’t realize that events themselves don’t come pre-packaged, there aren’t good things, bad things, that whatever happens needs to be interpreted by us. And the more mindful you are, the more available are multiple interpretations, good, bad, and whatever. And I don’t know why I keep using this as an example, maybe help me come up with a better one. But if you and I went out to lunch and the food was delicious, wonderful, the food’s delicious. If you and I go out for lunch and the food is awful, wonderful, the food is awful, presumably I’ll eat less, I’ll get more from my waistline. And with this attitude, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make this clear, but I hope people will think about it. There’s a way, I live my life and I fall up. I don’t fall down. My car gets a ding on it, I get it repaired, and I fix something else about the car. So afterwards, it’s better than it was before. So when you realize that events don’t determine how you feel, it’s the view you take of the event that determines how you feel, then it’s hard to understand why we would come up with explanations that are frightening and stressful. People say everybody has to experience stress. They just take it as a given. I tell you, Jordan, that there are things, I’m 76 years old, so certainly in my life, there are things that have happened that have been big. But in the normal course of a day, a week, a month, a year, I don’t experience stress. And I have this one liner that I think people will find useful. Ask yourself when something happens, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Rarely is it ever a tragedy. The dog ate my homework, I missed the bus, I burnt the meal, whatever it is that causes us stress. And it turns out that almost everything that we’re stressed about, virtually all of it, never happens. So you take the attitude, no worry, take the attitude, no worry before it’s time. The reframing that you talked about with regards to people’s worry at night, that’s something that’s very much part and parcel of cognitive behavioral therapy, is that one of the things that you do with people- Yes, which I was involved in the beginning. Right, right. You take people who are locked into say a depressive or an anxiety inducing pattern of repetitive thought, and you have them open up a wider realm of possibility, and then you have them practice instantiating that, so that becomes more part of their, well, part of their nature, let’s say. You also mentioned the jumping jack study, and it reminded me of studies done by Peter Herman showing that if you, imagine you bring people into the lab and you have them watch a movie, and you give them a bag of popcorn, if you give them a small bag of popcorn, and you ask, they’ll eat the whole bag of popcorn, and then if you ask them if they want another, they’ll say no, but if you give them a bag of popcorn that’s five times that big, they will also eat that- They’ll eat the whole thing. Yes, exactly, exactly. It’s like, and what seems to happen is that we set up a target, and the target is somewhat arbitrary, right? So it could be portion size, and then the goal is to hit the target, and the emotions that are experienced in relationship to that target are target dependent, and so, and this is also, it’s also part of the trick of setting optimal goals, right? Is that you wanna set a goal that challenges you and that pushes you beyond your limits, but you don’t wanna set a goal that’s absolutely impossible to attain. If you set a high goal, the amount of positive emotion that you experience as you move towards the goal increases, but if the goal’s too high and it’s impossible, well then that can be frustrating and disappointing, but it’s very interesting to see how malleable that is. Well, it’s interesting because one of the ways I define mindlessness is to be goal driven, rule and routine driven, that it’s fine to have a goal, but you have to realize we’re setting that goal at time one, and oftentimes moving towards something several years in the future. Lots change, and there’s no reason for us not to take advantage of the changes and perhaps change the goal. You know, when we form these goals, where do they come from? You know, somebody said it’s important to be a doctor, for example, and so you’re on your way to be a doctor, but you really don’t wanna be a doctor. Change it. Essentially at the end of the game, you want to feel good about yourself, you want to feel good about your relationships and feel perhaps that you’ve made some contribution in some way to somebody or to the world at large, and you can do that almost in any occupation. And I think that there are people who are given goals, I want to be a billionaire. Used to be when I was younger, a millionaire. That’s not enough, I wanna be a billionaire. But I think that if we surveyed most of the billionaires and they were honest, you’d see most of them are not very happy. So if you sit back at square one, do you wanna be an unhappy billionaire or a happy bike store owner? I think people might choose differently. So as you’re gaining information, pursuing the goal, you want to in fact be open to possibility. I mean, so I say to my class that, let’s say that on your way to school today, you run into, I don’t know, who’s famous these days that they might like? Sean Penn. Taylor Swift. Okay, Taylor Swift. I’m gonna go with Taylor Swift. Sure, that’s better. And Taylor Swift says, oh, yeah, that you are just so cool or whatever word they use. Please, let’s go have a cup of coffee. But you say, no, I can’t. I have Professor Langer’s class meeting now. That’s ridiculous. That here’s an opportunity that you’re probably not gonna get again, something you would really want to do. You should deviate from the plan. You should be in the state of mind so that whatever you’re doing is in a sense what you would choose to do now, not doing it because what you decided to do in a, for you, a prior life years ago. It goes against lots of what people think. I mean, I’m sure you’re gonna say to me after this, well, what about delay of gratification? And here I have a lot to say that is probably going to be met with, I don’t know, disagreement, rage, outrage, who knows? I don’t think we should delay gratification. I think that first of all, since everything is changing, if I decide I’m not gonna do this now, I’ll do it next week, that’s a good thing because next week will be better for me. The world may change and often changes in such a way, two ways, one, that I may not have the opportunity to do it in the future, as in the going for the coffee with Taylor Swift, or second, that my desires very well may change. Now, so you say, well, what about studying and things of this sort where we have to do the work so tomorrow we prosper? And it’s very simple, Jordan, that no matter what you’re doing, there’s a way of doing so that it’s fun and enjoyable, almost no matter what. If you put away the stress of failure, of not being able to complete it successfully and so on, then all the little challenges that present themselves motivate us and feel good. And so there’s, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but you should, it’s wonderful, there’s a YouTube called Piano Stairs. And so what these people did in Scandinavia, they go to subway stations all over the place, and in all of these subway stations, you have an escalator and stairs. And so the film is very clear, everybody takes the escalator, everybody. Random young person who wants to take the stairs. Then they laid down piano keyboards on the stairs, so it actually makes noise. So now you go, do, do, do, as you’re going up. Because it’s such fun, in a very short amount of time, nobody virtually takes the escalator, everybody is taking the stairs. Anything can be made to be fun. And so I tell my students, why wait for somebody to put down the keyboard? One can do, do, do, I can’t sing or else I would make it more compelling for you as they go up the stairs. There’s a way to make everything, if not fun, interesting and potentially exciting. Once we take off that layer of evaluation apprehension. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration and spiritual nourishment. The Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible’s profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life. A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow app for brief daily readings and reflections. Here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans, accompanied by insightful reflections and audio guided meditations. Whether you’re a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey, Hallow provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before. 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One of the things you do as a clinical therapist is help people find the manner in which they can extract enjoyment from, at least in potential necessary tasks, right? To help them recraft the way that they’re looking at the world. So for example, one way of approaching that is that if someone lives in a very messy and disordered environment and they want to put that into something approximating order, you experiment with them to find out how much they could work on that every day until they find an optimized balance so that they’re compelled and interested in doing it. And it might be that they can only do it to begin with for two minutes or three minutes, but they can joust with themselves to find out what’s interesting and engaging. And it is certainly the case that you can ask yourself, regardless of the task that you’re engaged in, how you could orient your attention so that that task would be as engaging and meaningful as possible. And that’s a constantly worthwhile thing to do. Now I want to decorate that with something. So this, you might find this interesting. I hope you find it interesting. So you know, this issue of attention has been an obsession of deep thinkers for thousands of years. I spent a fair bit of time studying ancient Egyptian theology. So there’s a set of stories that derive out of ancient Egypt while they’re extremely influential. In fact, some of the symbols we still know. So one of the symbols is the famous eye, you know, the Egyptian eye with the curved eyebrow. So here’s what the Egyptians figured out. They figured out there were four deities. So one deity was the king, that was Osiris. One deity was the king’s evil brother, that was Seth. That word eventually becomes Satan. One deity was Horus, who was a falcon, and the other deity was Isis, who was queen of the underworld. So Osiris is habit. And Osiris is represented by the Egyptians as a great king, who’s now anachronistic, archaic, and somewhat senile. Senile and willfully blind. Okay, now he has an evil uncle, he has an evil brother, and that’s Seth, the evil brother of the king. And he’s the proclivity of ordered systems to become malevolent with time. The antithesis of that is Horus. And Horus is the open eye and the falcon. And he’s the falcon because falcons can see better than any other animals, including human beings. And so the Egyptians determined that Horus, who was the god of attention, was the force that kept the evil king at bay, so destroyed the negative consequences of habit, and revitalized the social order. And they prioritized attention as the highest god. And so did the Mesopotamians. So they had a god, Marduk, who was their pinnacle god. So Jordan, they all beat me to the punch. So this is good to know. And the question is, why has it taken so long for cultures around the world to see the wisdom in all of this? Well, Alan, do you think it’s partly because if you start to become mindful, there’s also the possibility that you’ll bring your shortcomings to mind. Like imagine that you do start a practice of attending. As you attend, you’re going to learn things about yourself that are interfering with your ability to openly attend. And that can be challenging and off-putting because you can see, because you’re wondering, well, if this is so obvious, why don’t people notice it? Why don’t people just automatically do it? And I do think that part of it is that when you start to pay careful attention, you find things that need to be fixed. And that calls you, so well, that’s one possibility anyways. Well, so let me speak to that because something that’s very important to me is the idea that behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective or else he or she wouldn’t do it. And so if one were mindful, they’d be aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing. And it turns out that every description we have of people, ourselves or others, has an equally potent but oppositely balanced alternative. So you want to diminish me because I’m so gullible, which I am. From my perspective, I’m trusting. You drive me crazy because you’re so inconsistent. From your perspective, you’re flexible. You can’t stand me because I’m so impulsive. That’s because I value being spontaneous. So it’s interesting, you’ll like this as a clinician, years ago, we did this study where we gave people about 200 of these behavior descriptions. And we said, circle those things about yourself that you want to change, but you have trouble changing. Okay, so for me, it would be gullible, impulsive, for example. Now you turn the sheet of paper over and in a mixed up order, are the positive versions of each of these. And now we ask people, circle those things about yourself you really value, trusting and spontaneous. And so as long as I value being trusting, I’m going to necessarily be gullible. As long as I value being spontaneous, people on occasion are going to see me as impulsive. And when you realize that behavior makes sense, then we don’t want to change ourselves or other people in the same way. You might be tired of me because I’m so whatever. And then when you see the positive version of it, you welcome it and our relationship flourishes and we become less judgmental. Because before you were talking about what do we do with people in industry who don’t do well at whatever the task is. And it occurred to me that everybody doesn’t know something. I wrote a little song about this that I sang for my and taught my grandkids. I’m not going to sing it because I can’t carry a tune, although I should Jordan, because that’s what it’s about. I do a lot very, very well. So why should I hesitate? So here we go, you’re ready? I’m ready, I’m ready. Everybody doesn’t know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can’t do something, but everyone can do something else. So my long-term goal is to take the horizontal where we comfortably sit on top, the vertical rather, and make it horizontal where everybody is valued. And so the person who seems not to be able to do whatever it is will be able to do it differently somehow else. It goes back to you have your teaching and you ask your students how much is one in one, and one person in the class says one. And what we do now is we belittle that person, we teach the students around to have no respect for that person, where in my world, what we do is say, Johnny, Susie, whatever, how did you come up with that? And then they tell us, they added one cloud plus one cloud, or however they came up with it. And that we’d learn that much more. You know, I was lecturing on South Africa many years ago, and I was staying at this fancy hotel, and I was down at the pool resting one afternoon, and I noticed that there was this enormous amount of real estate in the hotel, part of the hotel, that nobody was using. And the only person who knew that was the lowly cabana boy. You know, that of course, if we assumed that he had something really to offer, we would think to get that information from him, and then make more money, which seems to be the goal of most of these entrepreneurs or hotel owners or what have you. You know, so we’re brought up thinking there’s a single way of doing things, there’s a single answer to questions, and all of that fosters our mindlessness. And you know, sometimes when I’m lecturing, I’ll look in the audience to see if there’s some guy who seems really big. And I’ll say, you know, ask him if he’ll come to the stage. So let’s assume I’m lucky that day and he’s 6’5”. Well, I’m 5’3”, almost, all right. And so we look ridiculous next to each other. And then I asked him to put his hand up, and his hand is 3 inches bigger than mine. And then I raised the question, should we do anything physically the same way? Should we hold a tennis racket, a baseball bat, a golf club? And the answer is clearly no. And that the more similar you are to the person who wrote the rules, perhaps the better it is for you to follow, but the more important part of that is the more different you are, the more important it is for you to find your own way of doing it. And you know, and that when people are taught conditionally, you know, you sort of hold the racket like this, or you could hold the racket like this, they’re more likely to come up with their own way than somebody who’s told this is the way. Okay, so I wanna sort what appear to be two competing claims out in my imagination. So on the one hand, as far as I can tell, you’re making the case that all things considered, an attitude towards the world that’s more attentive and mindful is better. So that’s a definite up. With that. Okay, okay. Yes. But now, but you added to that a different conception, which was that every negative trait, let’s say, has a positive element, which by the way, is something that seems to me to be an appropriate statement, but there’s somewhat of a contradiction there, as far as I can tell, because on the one hand, you’re flattening out the moral hierarchy and saying, well, there’s a multitude of ways of looking at things, and just because you think something is bad, it isn’t necessarily bad, it could be good in another way, but at the same time, there is a sort of ultimate- Exactly, it’s better. Which is, okay, yeah, yeah. So how do you reconcile those? That’s right. I don’t, I don’t. I think that in today’s world, we all aspire to certain things, and given the values that are currently operative, to meet those values, to live the kind of life that most people seem to want, which is not answering the question about whether they’d be better off living a very different kind of life. Mindfulness sets the stage for it. And that if it’s a contradiction, so be it. That I think that we can live with contradictions until we accumulate enough wisdom to resolve them. But at this point, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Nothing is good or bad, except it’s better to be mindful. But I think one of the things that I’d like to talk about, if you’re willing, is some of the health work in the mindful body. Because here, one of the values that we seem to have is to be healthy, to live a long, happy, healthy life. And one could argue that also, that if one is going to live multiple lives, which some people believe, in a reincarnation and whatever, maybe that goal is misplaced. But if we take that goal as real, a great deal of the information we’ve been given is simply wrong. And I go back to the horse that ate the hot dog. And what people need to realize is that studies, research can only give us probabilities. You do a study, and the study shows you that if you were to do it again the exact same way, which we could never do, we’re likely to get the same findings. These probabilities are then taught to us as absolutes. Horses don’t eat meat, one in one is two, and so on. Now, when you’re given a diagnosis and you’re told, research shows that you have six months to live or whatever it is, I mean, that’s insane. Nobody can know that. And when you realize that everything we’re taught are maybes, it allows us to go forward and find new ways of doing things, new ways of meeting our needs, and so on. So I talk a lot in the mindful body about mind-body unity. And tell me what you think of this. I say, mind-body, these are just words. Imagine, we could have had mind-body and elbows. That would lead us to a different conception of people. And right now, people think that mind and body, being separate, and they know, well, they’re sort of connected, they don’t know how, that the problem is for people who separate mind and body, is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? So I said, I don’t want to pay attention to any of that. It’s all interesting philosophy, but it’s not useful. Say, put the mind and body back together, then wherever you’re putting the mind, you’re necessarily putting the body. And we’ve done so many studies on this. The first one you might know about, because I’ve reported it earlier on in work, is the counterclockwise study. Do you know this, Jordan? We retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they’re speaking about the past in the present tense. Everything is designed to make them think that now was 20 years earlier. As a result of this, without medical intervention, in a period of time as short as a week, I think it was only five days, actually, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they look significantly younger just by putting the mind in a different place. So you want me to tell you about a couple of the newer ones that are in the new book? Yeah, please do, please do, and then I’ll respond. Okay, so I’ll go in some chronological order. The next one we did was a study with chambermaids. And we asked the chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? They thought exercise is what you do after work because that’s what the surgeon general leaves people to believe in. They’re just too tired. So they don’t think they get any exercise. So all we did was take half of them and teach them that their work was exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on. So I think we have two groups. One who sees their work as exercise, the other who doesn’t realize their work as exercise. Just changing that mindset. Eating the same, working the same way, they’re not working harder, they’re not eating less, they’re not eating more. Just changing their mind to now their work is exercise. They lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Okay, so now let’s go fast forward. Let me just give you one of the newest studies. So we inflict a wound. Well, you know that it would be wonderful if I could do something dramatic and really hurt people. I have no desire to do that. And even if I did, luckily the review board is not gonna let me. So we inflict a minor wound. Now we have people sitting, it’s a little more complicated than I’m saying, but just so it becomes clear. They’re sitting in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is real time. And the question is, how long does it take the wound to heal? Well, it turns out the wound heals based on clock time, perceived time. And we have studies with diabetics, the same thing we find that insulin increases or decreases based on perceived time rather than real time. We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got, two hours fewer or the amount that they got, biological and cognitive functioning seems to follow perceived sleep. And all of this, this might be a fun story for you. Somebody had asked me, where did this come from? I mean, how did I get into this? And I was married when I was very young. And I went to Paris on my honeymoon. And it was very important that I was very sophisticated because now I was a married woman, even though I was a baby. And I ordered mixed grill and this restaurant we were eating in and on the plate was pancreas. And I said to my then husband, which one is the pancreas? He says, that one. Okay, so now I don’t know if I can do it, but I feel like now I’m so sophisticated, I have to be able to eat the pancreas. I eat everything on the plate with gusto. Now the moment of truth, can I eat it? Well, I start eating it and I’m literally getting sick. I can’t swallow it. And my then husband starts laughing. And I say, what’s so funny? He said, that’s chicken. You ate the pancreas 20 minutes ago. Okay, so I said, wow, what’s going on here? It’s like you’re walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and you get all startled until you realize it’s just a leaf. That our thoughts have enormous control over our health. And we need to pay more attention to that. My mother had breast cancer, last story. My mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to have pancreas. And that’s the end game, right? Pancreatic cancer. And then magically it was just gone. And the medical world couldn’t explain it then and they still can’t explain it now. And this mind body unity idea does explain it. And I think spontaneous remissions are much greater in frequency than people realize. You have people who never get to the medical world in the first place, who have tumors that they don’t know they have, or even you and I, tumors that are there that are magically gone. We’ve all heard stories of people who are told they only have a year to live and they’re telling us a story 10, 15 years later. And when we believe again that we can beat whatever this thing is, we organize ourselves differently. And even in a very mundane way, if I think that I’m going to live, I start living, I start doing things. The neurons are firing. 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Well, when you’re suffering, I’ve also been looking at the book of Job, you know, and Job is a book that exemplifies human suffering. And one of the morals in the story- Is that Steve Job? Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, it’s the older Job from way back when. Yeah, and so everything possibly bad that could happen to someone virtually happens to him. And one of the morals that’s embedded in the story is that regardless of that, and also regardless of the relative unfairness or perceived unfairness of the fate, your best and most appropriate attitude psychologically is to keep faith and hope alive. And that story in particular is very dramatic in that regard because the reason that Job suffers is because God himself has a bet with Satan, that Satan can torture Job enough to make him lose faith. You know, and that’s pretty rough, right? If you’re gonna have forces arrayed against you, God and Satan is a pretty rough battle. And what happens in the story of Job is that he determines to abide by his faith and hope regardless of circumstances. And so maybe you can say to people who are suffering, say from a terminal cancer diagnosis, that obviously a large degree of compassion on the part of themselves and observers is in order, but that they will make the best of a terrible situation by reorganizing their attentional structures so that the maximum amount of faith and hope can be present at every moment. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll win, so to speak, in the final analysis, but it might mean that the course of the cancer is going to be less like hell than it could have been. And that’s also not nothing. No, that’s terrific. You know, I think I speak to many people who are given these dread diagnosis and they’re stressed, they’re angry. And I simply ask them, and not in an aggressive way, let’s assume for a moment that that’s correct. Is this the way you want to live for the last years you have, the last days or a month? And when you realize that, no. I mean, first thing I wanna do is go have a half-bunch Sunday. Whatever it is one thinks that they shouldn’t do that, now why not do it? So yeah, I’m in agreement with that, but the interesting part of that, I think, is that when you then make the decision to make the moment matter, and that’s all we have. When you’re talking about people who are depressed, one of the best things I think, as far as therapy goes, is just deal with the moment. And then the next moment, and a moment is easy to deal with. And if they are mindful in the moment, they will probably end up beating the cancer. They stand a good chance of beating the cancer. Let me give you an example of something, and I don’t need to remember in the book, I talk about what we call the borderline effect. Now, so let me explain this. Let’s say you and I both take an IQ test, and you get 70, which means you’re normal, and I score 69, which means I’m not normal, that I’m cognitively challenged. Nobody in their right mind, they don’t need to know anything about statistics to know there’s no meaningful difference between 69 and 70. I could have sneezed, so I read the question wrong, and so on. But my life and your life will diverge from that moment in dramatic, quick, and extraordinary ways. And you will be growing, and I will be coming less and less because now I’m cognitively challenged, what we used to call retarded. Okay, so it starts out there’s no difference, but in some sense, that diagnosis causes the difference. All right, that’s the same thing for all different diseases. So we did some work with diabetes and cancer. There is some point on some tests where one of us falls right above that borderline, and so we’re told we have it, whatever the it is, one of us right below it. And so we find that those who are given that diagnosis fare terribly. The people who are just like them right before they’re given the diagnosis do fine, which suggests, again, the control we have over our health, in this case, not using that control. And- That issue of the edge case is very interesting. I mean, it’s, so you can tie a bunch of things that you just discussed together. So the first is you said you should pay attention to the moment, and there’s a gospel injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to do exactly that, right, is to focus to make the concerns of the day sufficient thereof, essentially. And what that means is that you want to occupy a time frame that optimizes the challenge within that time frame without it being too stressful. So one of the things you do, for example, with people who are depressed or anxious is you narrow the time frame over which they’re apprehending their behavior. And if you’re really suffering, if you’re really in pain, you might narrow your time frame to the next minute. Like you might not be able to handle the next day, right? And so you want to never bite off more than you can chew. And you can do that partly by minimizing the time frame you’re computing over and attending more particularly to that narrow time frame, and also by narrowing the scope of your activity, which we discussed a little earlier, too. If you can’t take on a major task, you can’t put your family in order, you might be able to say something kind to the sister you haven’t seen for five years, right? You can take that incremental, tiny step forward. And there’s real power in that minimal transformation. Now, you also talked about attention to variability in the edge cases. I mean, how do you reconcile that with the apparent necessity for categorization? You know, at the edge of every category is an indeterminate margin, right? And you said, well, if you’re in category A versus B, that can have a massive effect, even though there’s no real distinction at that border. Now, that’s a very important question, that am I saying people should never be given diagnoses? Because there has to be, you know, these have it, and these people don’t have it. I’m not saying that. First, I use the borderline studies as a way of showing if there’s no meaningful difference between two people when they start and they’re given the diagnosis, and then the two groups come apart, that means that this group that’s given that diagnosis could do whatever they were doing that was similar to the other group and diminish the negative consequences. So it was a way, again, of showing the mind-body unity, and we have control over our health. Whether we should or shouldn’t be given diagnoses, I don’t know. But I do know that if you or anyone you love is given a diagnosis, you make them aware that it’s a best guess, that these diagnoses are based on research, they’re based on probabilities, not absolute facts. And when you are told that you may have it, that is very different from you do have it, when you’re told it may run its course in the following way, is very different from being told it will unfold in this way. And I think that’s crucial for us. Behavioral psychologists aren’t very positively inclined to psychiatric diagnosis. And the reason for that is that they’re very pragmatic. And so the orientation of a behavior psychologist is, well, let’s differentiate your problems to the point we can envision potential solutions to them. And the meta-construct isn’t all that valid. I think there’s an exception, possibly, and you tell me what you think about this. I found diagnosis useful and salutary in my clinical practice when it helped people bind their otherwise catastrophic anxiety and when it pointed to a direction forward. So someone might come in and say, look, man, I haven’t been able to get out of my house for the last five years. I’m completely out of my mind. I’m the only person in the world like this, and there’s no hope. And you say to them, look, you’re agoraphobic. Lots of people have this problem. Here’s the associated symptoms. So you’re not the only one. You’re not uniquely insane. And we know how to treat it. Well, then diagnosis has a binding capacity, right? It boxes in the issue, and it has a direction. Yeah. Now, you go to the doctor, and your stomach is hurting. And you leave, and he tells you you have gastroenteritis, which just means a stomach ache, and you feel better. I think, for sure. But I want to ask you something before I forget about depression. So I’ve often thought that if we were able to give people a placebo or convince them in whatever way that their depression will only last another three weeks, that they would instantly become better, that the most depressing thing about depression is that you assume that’s all you’re going to see going forward. Well, I think there is evidence for that on the treatment front, because one of the things you do in cognitive therapy with depression is challenge the assumption of eternal permanence. So depressed people tend to think, OK, I feel awful right now. I have always felt awful. Every single day is unending awfulness, and that will extend indefinitely into the future. And so what you do, one of the things you do, is you have people track their moods over a week, hourly. And you show them that there’s substantive variability in their mood, even though they were blind to that. And then you also often have them. So first of all, that shows that it’s not permanent and unchanging. And then you often do a very detailed history that helps them understand that they haven’t experienced this before, and almost invariably, it has receded. Like, it’s almost invariably cyclical. It doesn’t feel like that when you’re depressed. Jordan, that’s perfect, because that’s what we were doing with major diseases, teaching people attention to symptom variability. So when you have a major disease, you assume your symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. All right, so what we did was we would call people, and we’d ask them, how do you feel now? And is it better or worse than before? And why? And three things happen. The first is, wow, I thought I felt this, whatever the pain is, all the time. Now I see there are moments I don’t feel it, so you feel a little better. Second, by asking why the search is mindful, and as we’ve said now enough times, that that mindfulness feels good and is good for your health. The neurons are firing, and it’s good for you. And third, I think that you’re more likely to find a solution if you’re looking for it. So we’ve done this with biggies, with stroke, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, even depression. And in each case, we have very, very positive results. And so when I first proposed this, I was seeing it as an antidote. You can’t give yourself a placebo. When you’re given a placebo, somebody is fooling you into thinking that it’s real medication, and then you take it, and it’s not the medication, clearly. It’s a sugar pill, so you are helping yourself. So I was trying to think, well, how can we have people give themselves placebos? And this was a way. So imagine that you have chronic pain, and you set your smartphone to ring in an hour. And then you ask yourself, is it better or worse than before, and why? And then at that moment, set it to ring in two hours and 10 minutes. You keep doing this over the day, over the week, if you need more time. And the results have been phenomenal. And I think all of this work, again, supports the idea that I keep coming back to that virtually everything in the world is mutable. We can make it fit for us better than it does at the moment, and that our own health is largely under our own control. So, Ellen, with depressed people, one of the things you do, and this is true for psychological misery in general, is you ask them to adopt an attitude of open-eyed ignorance about their own nature. So you think you know who you are, but it’s possible that you don’t really know more about yourself than you know about anybody else. Like you think you have privileged access, but you’re pretty damn complicated, and you’re not an open book. And so one of the things we could do let’s say track the variation in your well-being across time. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on those times when you feel better. And we’re going to try to figure out what the hell you were doing during those times. So with depressed people, for example, you find that they want to isolate themselves. But if they go see family and friends, they almost invariably feel better. And if they track that, yeah, right. So while you can see that the same thing might in a situation that’s characterized by illness. And you could also imagine that that would have a profound physiological effect. Because imagine that you’re in a situation now and you’re suffering from cancer and you’re having a relatively good day. Now, because you’re having a good day, you’re not stressed out. You have more positive emotion and hope. And there are situational determinants of that. Now it could easily be if you could maximize the probability that you would stay there and then look for improvement even in that, that you would tilt your physiology in a direction of having a better probability of combating the illness itself. It could easily be the case. I think for sure. Another area that lends itself to this attention to variability is stress. There are some people who think they’re stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. So if we call them periodically how stressed are you now? And is it more or less than before? And why and so on. Then what happens is, Jordan, you might find out that you know you’re really stressed when you’re speaking to Ellen Langer, but not when you’re not. Then the solution is simple. Don’t speak to me. There’s something else that I wanna get your view on, which is, I was very active in the beginning, the creation of say cognitive behavior therapy. And people have asked me, well, what’s the difference between, I wanna say, a mindful therapy and cognitive behavior therapy? And so I’m gonna tell you what I think, and then the question to you is, is it a difference that makes a difference? So you go to the therapist with some problem and you tell him you see the world in this particular way, and the cognitive behaviorist says, well, perhaps it’s this other way. Okay, now because the therapist is an authority figure, what I think people too often do is then take the therapist frame of reference as real. And mindful therapy would be to come up with many explanations. And the more, it’s just like what I was saying about stress, that if you think of five reasons why it might not happen, the situation changes. How else might we understand this? And you come to see, gee, you don’t know. And when you know you don’t know, then you tune in. And that’s the bottom line to how to be healthy, I guess. So two things on that. The psychoanalysts observed first that if you impose a solution on a client or a patient, even if it’s an intelligent solution, there’s a high probability that you’ll produce resistance. And part of the reason for that is that you’re stealing the person’s destiny. It’s like, look, if you come to me with a problem and I give you a solution and you implement it, it’s not your victory, it’s my victory. And so I’ve stolen it. And if you fail, it’s your failure, not mine, because you’re gonna suffer for it. And so people are naturally inclined to tell an authority figure to go to hell if they impose a solution. A good cognitive behavioral therapist won’t say, here’s another way of looking at it, although there may be situations where that’s necessary because of an emergency, say. What they will do instead is say, look, could we collaborate on imagining alternative conceptualizations about situations? And what you really want, you want the person to come up with the alternatives. And I think that actually does the rewiring. If you deliver the alternative, people don’t act it out and they don’t remember it. And I think it’s because they haven’t undergone the cognitive reorganization necessary to actually expand their horizon. You want the client to lead, always. That’s why Freud used free association, for example. Yeah, no, and I think that’s beautiful. What I’m adding to it is that one should seek multiple potential understandings. Yes. When we have the client now come up with a different understanding, it doesn’t make that right. No, no. And it doesn’t make the original one wrong. And by recognizing that this thing you were sure was an X could be a Y or a Z, leads you to think of most, when I said to you before, when the horse ate that hot dog, it didn’t just change my mind about whether horses are herbivorous or not. It changed everything for me, one event. And so if the person in therapy is dealing with, you’re sure it’s this, and then the therapist helps you to come to, could be this, could be that, could be the other. There are many people who can walk away from that one instance now with an entirely new life before them. Okay, okay. So you do that, that’s actually been technically termed collaborative empiricism. So the notion would be the person’s in a fixed mindset. You help them develop a proliferation of alternatives, and then you say, well, look, go home for a week and try this attitude and watch, attend, be mindful. Come back and tell me how it went. And we’re either gonna find out that it’s better or the same or worse, and you’ll be able to tell me, if it’s the same or worse, we’ll try another attitude. Don’t do it. Right, exactly, exactly. And then, and that does two things, as you pointed out. It may lead to a proximal solution to the proximal problem, but it also teaches the person that they’re the sort of creature that can generate alternative hypotheses and then test them and evaluate. And that’s kind of a meta-learning, right? That would be more learning, not to be attentive to the situation, but to be attentive, period, to make that a habit of mine. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a good cognitive behavior therapist would do that. They won’t impose top-down solutions. They’ll generate, with the client, a multitude of possible solutions and then test them. Do you know the early study I did with therapists and labels? This was good. We had an interview between, it was actually a professor at Yale when I did this, when I was a graduate student. And so we take this interview and we call the person being interviewed either a job applicant or a patient. And then we showed them to therapists of all different stripes. And almost always, when we called them a patient, they saw him as sick, potentially having this and that disorder. And when we called them a job applicant, they saw him as well-adjusted, the same person on the same tape. It was interesting because, excuse me, behavior therapists, since they were more attuned to the specific behaviors, were a little less likely to do this. But I think that, you know, I think a lot of therapy needs to be reconfigured because whatever lens you put on what you’re going to see. And it doesn’t make sense to go pay a therapist top dollar for telling you how wonderful, you’re telling them how wonderful you are, them telling you how wonderful you are. And so the focus on problems, in some instances at least, I’m sure itself is a problem. So the therapist, I think, has to always say that in this small realm, this is what’s going on. And not, you know, because as soon as you walk into a therapist’s office, you’re declaring yourself a patient. Well, that’s why behavior- Even though the therapist now says client. Well, behavior therapists have said clients forever for exactly that reason. And I don’t know, there might be an underground, that might be an underground consequence of your early influence on the field. I mean, it’s always, and I always referred to my clients in that manner because I’m not the authority. If I’m the authority in the session, they’re paying to boost my ego, right? Yeah, that’s all. They have to be the authority. I can listen and we can exchange ideas and we can investigate, but in the final analysis, the decision to attend and to change, and Carl Rogers knew this too and laid it out beautifully in his work on humanism, humanistic psychology, the impetus has to come from the client, him or herself. Otherwise it doesn’t work. It has to be voluntary and attention-focused. And on the same note, humorously, that if you charge 5,000 for the hour, in the second case, the person would get better faster. Not because it’s costing so much money, but because they value it so much more. That’s very interesting in regard to pricing, period. We’ve developed a variety of psychological interventions and tried to determine how to price them. And you might think that the compassionate thing to do and the generous thing to do would be to make them free. But it’s not. Well, it’s not, no, it’s not at all. And it’s partly because the act of paying, first of all, is fair exchange and that keeps the interaction like neutral and morally untrammeled. There’s no charity in it. And second, it is the case that part of how you determine whether something is valuable is whether or not you’ve had to exchange something of value for it. You bet, you bet, you bet. So those things are very tricky. Yeah. Well, now we’re- So there’s research. Oh, well, we’re coming to the end here. So what I should do is allow you the opportunity. If you have another thing, if you have something else you wanna bring up. I have so much to talk to you about, Jordan, because it’s such fun talking to you that, you know, we should end here. We can go on for another three hours. So it’s your show, you decide. Well, we are going to talk for everybody watching and listening, many of you know this. We’re going to continue for another half an hour on the Daily Warrior Plus side. And if you found this conversation interesting and compelling, which was the point, then please do join us there. Otherwise, I’ll just let everyone know again, the name of Ellen’s new book, Dr. Langer’s new book, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And that, when is that coming out? It’s interesting that it seems to be already out in Canada. I don’t know how that happened. Well, we’re so quick. But the publication date is September 5th. September 5th. But it can be pre-ordered now. Okay, okay, so you can pre-order The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health now. And well, thank you very much for talking to me today and for sharing what you know with everybody who’s watching and listening. I presume that people ill and healthy alike will find what we talked about interesting and perplexing and thought-provoking. That’s the idea. It’s a very complicated topic. That’s the way I found it. Yeah, yeah, well, the relationship between attitude and brute reality is unbelievably complex. And you know that it’s a constant source of mystery and need for investigation. And so attitude makes a lot of things. There’s no doubt about that. And we don’t know the limits to that. Your work has certainly been at the forefront of making that idea what’s scientifically investigatable and widely publicly known. So thank you very much for that and for talking to us today. For everybody watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention. And to the Daily Wire Plus folks and the film crew here in Northern Ontario, the film crew in, are you in Cambridge? No, I’m in Dartmouth, Mass. You’re in Dartmouth. To the film crew in Dartmouth, thank you for facilitating this as well. And Alan, we’ll rejoin each other on the Daily Wire Plus platform momentarily. Bye bye, everybody. Take care now. [“The Daily Wire Plus Theme”]