#158 — Understanding Humans in the Wild
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Summary
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton Business School, where he has been the top-ranked professor for seven straight years. He is a leading expert on bringing social science into the workplace, and he is the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. He also hosts the Work Life Podcast in association with TED and is a repeated TED speaker. In this episode, we talk about how teams work effectively, the nature of power, personality types, and what Adam has described as the fundamental styles of interaction: giving, taking, and matching. We talk about the critical skill of saying no, creativity, resilience, and resilience. And we cover the strange case of Jonas Salk, which is surprising. And then I browbeat Adam for a good long time about mindfulness. And he proves to be a very good sport, and I found it a very useful conversation. Thanks for having me, Adam Grant. Sam Harris The Making Sense Podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, and therefore, therefore, we re making possible all of the things we're doing here. Please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here, by becoming a member of the M&A Club. We don t run ads on the podcast, and thus, you won t miss out on the benefits of becoming a M&C Club member! . Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy what we do here! - Sam Harris, too! If you like what you're doing, please consider becoming one. - thank you, become a supporter, and spread the word to your friends and share the word about what we're listening to this podcast by spreading the word of this podcast everywhere you do it. And I hope you like it! Thank you, and keep spreading the good vibes everywhere you listen to it. - Sam and I really do - Cheers, Cheers! Cheers. Cheers - Yours Truly, Yours truly, Sarah and Cheers - Sarah, Sarah, Kristy, Amy, Sarah, Emily, Megan, Natalie, - Amy, Rachel, Adam, Evan, and Kevin, -- - Rachel, Jon, <3 - - Caitlyn, ~ and Jon, Rachel & so on and so on & so much so much more.
Transcript
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Adam is an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton Business School, where
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he has been the top-ranked professor for seven straight years.
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He is a leading expert on bringing social science into the workplace, and he's the author of four
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New York Times bestselling books, including Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power
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He also hosts the Work Life Podcast in association with TED, and he's a repeated TED speaker.
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Anyway, the list of his academic distinctions is long, and we get into some of his core interests.
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In this episode, we talk about how teams work effectively.
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We talk about the nature of power, personality types, and what Adam has described as the fundamental
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styles of interaction, giving, taking, and matching.
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We talk about the critical skill of saying no, creativity, resilience.
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We cover the strange case of Jonas Salk, which is surprising.
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And then I browbeat Adam for, I don't know, a good long time about mindfulness, and he proves
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Anyway, I found it a very useful conversation, and I hope you do as well.
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Before we talk about any of your books and other areas of interest, how do you summarize
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And I guess the one setup point I would make is that you are a much celebrated academic,
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but you actually have a more obviously entrepreneurial and sort of breaking of the mold approach to
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You're visible in a way that many academics aren't.
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And so I'm just wondering how you think about your career and how you got into your pile
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So I fell in love with psychology when I was an undergrad and was just fascinated by the
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idea that you could take the tools of science and apply them to human behavior.
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And my freshman year of college, I was in the middle of a bunch of psych classes and
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I had, I think, a group of clients who had a 95% renewal rate.
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And I called up a bunch of them my first week and I had zero contracts.
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And three people demanding their money back from the previous year.
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And I'd read Robert Chaldini's book on persuasion for one of my psych classes.
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And I immediately started applying some of the principles and I got better at the job.
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And I started to see all the ways that psychology was useful at work.
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And then the next year I got promoted into this manager role where I had to hire a team
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And I had a seven-figure budget as a 19-year-old.
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And I just, I found myself using everything I was learning in psychology to try to get better
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And I think eventually what clicked for me is that there's so much good insight in the social
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And I feel like most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work.
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And yet so many people don't find what they do in their jobs meaningful or motivating.
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And so I guess I deliberately chose an applied field where, you know, instead of being discouraged
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from doing work that was useful to people, I would actually be encouraged to do that.
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And so your PhD is in organizational psychology?
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Does that overlap at all with operations research or these different...
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There are a few people who bridge the two, but I did, so I did my PhD in a psych department
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and a bunch of my classes were in a business school sort of studying management.
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But most of my training was kind of like, think about it as social and personality psychology
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applied to work where we take your job and the organizational culture that surrounds you
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So what do we know about work and career and power and influence?
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I mean, obviously this is a very big question, but I want to go into this area.
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What do we know based on the social science that is most actionable, most important to
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know, and is therefore most useful in people's lives?
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So let's start with a noun like a person's career or work.
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What do you think you know as a result of being a specialist in this area that the average
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That's the question my students ask all the time, and I never know how to answer it.
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But I think I have something based on years of trial and error on that.
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So I think when most people choose jobs, they choose based on the nature of the work and
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they choose based on the status of the organization, you know, holding constant factors like pay,
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And I think there's a big misfactor there, which is culture.
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We know, we have decades of evidence that the culture of the organization that you join
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has as much impact on your happiness, your success, and even your career trajectory as the
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actual work itself or, you know, as, you know, characteristics of the job that you take.
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And yet we don't know how to consider that because culture is messy, right?
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And so I guess what I would suggest is for anybody who's looking for practical advice on
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how to, basically what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to interview a company.
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Once they give you the job, right, you have to say, is this a place where I can be successful
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And if you ask about what the culture is like, you get a bunch of platitudes back.
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People will say things like, oh, we value integrity and excellence.
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Well, every other company claims that too, right?
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I think where you really learn about a culture is you ask people to tell a story about something
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that happened in their workplace that would not happen anywhere else.
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And if you ask a bunch of people in the same organization that question, you can start
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So there's a classic study on this where, you know, everybody thinks their own organization
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is unique, but then you hear the same roughly seven stories over and over again.
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So people will tell stories about how the little person can get to the top or not, right?
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Or about how the big boss is human or about, will I get fired if I make a mistake?
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And if you break down all these stories, what you see is that fundamentally they're about,
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And those are the things people really care about in a culture.
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And so I think that anybody who's choosing a job ought to be asking those questions,
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gathering the stories, and trying to get to the bottom of, okay, what does this place
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mean in terms of safety, justice, and control and impact?
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Now, what would you say to someone who's running a distributed team?
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Because in tech, there are many companies, I mean, like, so I now have a team for the first
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time in my life, and they're virtually all long distance.
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And so there's not the same kind of cohesive culture, because no one's showing up to an
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I remember talking to Matt Mullenweg, who started WordPress.
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I mean, he's got something like 11 people in an office and, you know, a thousand times
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What's, is that just a filter that we'll select for people who don't need all of the
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I think that, though, a lot of people find substitutes for culture.
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So, you know, if your organization is distributed, and you don't feel like, you know, you have
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clear values or norms or a sense of community, because you don't interact with those people
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very often, you tend to find it then instead in your profession, right?
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So in tech, you find that, you know, groups of engineers tend to spend a lot of time together,
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even if they work at different organizations, even if they're not in a co-working space, right?
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What they're trying to do often is say, hey, we want to build a culture around our profession,
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where we have, you know, a set of beliefs that are important to us and a set of practices
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that we try to stick to and then maybe improve over time.
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And I think if that's the world you live in, I think most people want to feel like they're
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part of an organization where they can make a bigger contribution than if they were just
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And I see culture as mostly a force that reduces friction in doing that, right?
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Because so much of the collaboration and coordination we do causes us when we work with other people
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And I feel like part of what we're trying to do in building an organizational culture is
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to say, okay, how do we get people on the same page in terms of what their mission, their
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And hopefully we can do that in such a way that then when we work together, we actually
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accomplish things together that we couldn't solo.
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And so I guess I'd say concretely, if you're working in a distributed team, one of my favorite
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new practices is to write a user manual for how to work with you effectively.
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Well, this is actually one of the key insights, right?
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Is you want people who know you well to write the manual for you.
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But it's stunning to me that when you buy a computer or a car, there's a manual for how
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But the other people you work with who are way more complex than any piece of technology
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or machinery, there's no user manual for how to work with them.
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So there's a group of managers at Bain, the consulting firm who did this really well.
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They said, all right, I'm going to go to all my teams that I've worked with for a long
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time, and I'm going to have them write the one pager for what brings out the best in me,
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What would you want to know if today were day one of working with me?
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And then I'm just going to share it with anybody who works with me in the future.
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And I think it's such an easy way to try to make sort of, I guess, a collaboration a
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little bit more predictable and also not push each other's buttons.
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Is there more that we know about the variables that conspire to make collaboration more than
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the sum of the parts rather than less than the sum of the parts?
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I think the first, I mean, the starting point for me is that a lot of collaboration shouldn't
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So one of my first mentors was Richard Hackman, who spent a half century studying teams.
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And he did it because he hated working with other people.
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And he chose this career where he wanted to figure out how does anybody ever work together
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and actually, you know, not only do it well, but sort of enjoy it.
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And he had a fun philosophy for what an organizational psychologist does, which is you take all the
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jobs that you wish you had pursued and you get to live them vicariously by studying them.
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And so he went and studied U.S. intelligence agencies and how to improve their effectiveness.
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He was interested in being a musician at one point.
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So he studied symphony orchestras and how to increase the quality of music they played.
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And so he was constantly looking across these different worlds to figure out what made a team
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And one of his most basic findings was that for the most part, teams fail when you give them
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Like, for example, writing a book, really bad idea to have multiple people write a book
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Especially more than two, especially if they don't share a voice and there's not kind of
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And I think that the first question to ask is, is this a task that really requires interdependent
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collaboration or is it a task that's better done by individual people working separately?
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Well, I guess, you know, what I was taught growing up is that power corrupts.
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I remember in middle school looking at the, you know, the poster on the wall and it was
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the Lord Acton quote that said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.
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And I don't know if I was skeptical of it then, but there was something about it that
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I think what I found really bothersome about it was that it gave individuals no agency.
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You know, it was like, okay, if a good person becomes powerful, you know, all hope is lost.
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And that just didn't ring true to me, I guess, intuitively.
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And, you know, fast forward a couple decades, we now have a growing body of evidence in psychology
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that yes, power can corrupt, but I think more often it reveals.
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So, you know, one of the things we see pretty consistently is that the way people use power
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And, you know, I think there are lots of good examples of this.
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You know, we've controlled experiments that show it, but the pattern looks a lot like
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I think of two lawyers who got into public office.
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And one of them was threatened to be disbarred in the first case he ever tried.
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And the judge said, I doubt that you have the ethical qualifications to practice law.
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And then he ended up using power in a corrupt way once he gained the highest office in America.
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There's another lawyer who was so ethical that he ended up refusing a client because
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And therefore, I cannot defend someone that, you know, that I don't believe is innocent.
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And I think that, you know, to me, the arc of what we've learned in psychology is very
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often, you know, it's not that power necessarily corrupts people, although it can be a powerful
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It can be hard to resist some of the temptations of power.
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The intoxication, as Nietzsche described it, right?
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But I think that more often, people end up morphing power to serve their own ends.
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And that it's not so much that power corrupts people, it's that people corrupt power.
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Yeah, you sort of find out what people really want when they have more tools with which to
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And also, one of the consistent findings in psychology is that when you give people power,
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they become disinhibited because they think, look, I've, you know, I've gained now the freedom
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And so, you know, Caro, after doing his deep biography of Lyndon Johnson...
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But one of his observations was that the power never corrupts.
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And I think that is one of the things that, you know, I don't think one is true and the
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But I think that's, for me, a fundamental shift about power.
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Let's give people a little bit of credit, right?
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Let's say, look, you know, it's possible that if you are a person of decent character
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and integrity, that, you know, power could bring out the better angels of near nature,
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Yeah, one thing that, again, this could be a bit of a caricature, but I feel like I've
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discovered this in my wanderings among powerful people, that it's not just power.
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I guess fame might be a more relevant variable.
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But at a certain point in a person's career, as they get more powerful and more famous, they
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seem to surround themselves with people who insulate them from the normal tests of truth.
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And I mean, there's less reality testing going on.
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And so you can meet people who, you get the sense, have never heard a strong argument against
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They're just surrounded by, yes, men and women.
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And they have been told they're geniuses so often that, I'm thinking of one case in particular,
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I won't name him, but it's just, you get, there is a kind of delusion where you've been
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drinking your own publicity for long enough that you're out of touch with reality.
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I've seen that happen more times than I'd like to admit.
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And, you know, I think to me, it suggests poor judgment on the part of a leader, right?
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That you ought to know that one of the dangers of gaining power is that, yeah, I'm sure you've
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heard leaders remark at some point in their career, like, huh, it's so interesting.
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You know that your judgment of other people's character actually gets worse as you become more
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powerful because they are more motivated to impress you and to flatter you.
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And if you recognize that, then you set up systems to counteract that.
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So, yeah, I think the mistake that a lot of leaders make is they gain power and they say,
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I need a support network because I know my success depends on being able to multiply all
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And so I need a whole group of people around me who are going to extend my work, who are
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going to strengthen it, who are going to reinforce it.
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And I think what they overlook is they also need a challenge network, right?
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A group of people who believe in their potential enough that they want to tear their work
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And, you know, it's definitely scary when I've seen a couple of leaders who, you know,
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occasionally would walk into their office and they say, good morning.
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And you can almost hear the people wanting to say in response, great point.
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And yeah, I mean, I think that's how most group think starts.
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So let's get into give and take because we've almost landed on it already.
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I summarize your thesis there and the different personality types or would you call them personality
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types or they're just it's it's and I'll let you explain it.
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But the differences in people and their styles here are orthogonal to like the big five personality
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So there's actually there's really interesting.
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So, you know, we think about the big five as the major dimensions of personality.
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So, you know, how extroverted versus introverted are you?
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Where do you stand on emotional stability versus how reactive are you to stressful events?
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And then how open versus traditional are you in your thinking?
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And there's been we see these traits exist in most cultures around the world.
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That leads us to think they're pretty fundamental.
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And there's even pretty good biogenetic evidence that, you know, we can trace to, hey, there's
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a there's a heritability coefficient that's attached to each of these.
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And, you know, these these traits, they exist in us.
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But we thought for a long time there were just kind of five.
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And then most of the additional traits that were discovered, we could kind of fit under
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And recently there's there's growing evidence that there may be a sixth factor of personality,
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And I found this really exciting because for the past 15 years, I've been studying individual
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differences in your motivation to help others versus advance your own interests.
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And so, you know, not surprising to me that that's emerging.
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But I don't think about these as personality types, in part because what I'm really interested
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When you interact with another person, what are your goals and intentions?
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And I was struck by evidence from around the world.
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This has been shown in North America, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, but also in some pretty
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remote places like the African Maasai, that there are three fundamental styles of interaction
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And so on the extremes, I've come to call them givers and takers.
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So the givers are the people who are always asking, you know, what could I do for you?
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And most of us, we don't want to be too selfish or too generous.
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And so when we meet somebody new, we choose a third style as our default, which is called
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If I'm a matcher, I say, hey, I'll do something for you if you do something for me.
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And I think of these as styles rather than personality traits, because I think these are
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So, you know, I might be a giver when I'm mentoring a junior person.
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I might be more of a taker when I'm negotiating my salary with my employer, where, you know,
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my goal is definitely not to make sure that they win that negotiation, right?
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And then I might be a matcher if somebody who's maybe a rival of mine or a competitor
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asks me to share some information and say, hey, wait a minute, quid pro quo.
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And yet, I think we also all have a dominant style.
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And that's what I've been finding in my studies over the years is that there's a way that we
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prefer to treat most of the people most of the time.
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Yeah, so in reading the book, I'm sure this is the universal experience of people who
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read it, but the first thing the reader does is try to figure out which style he or she
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And I'm sure there's some self-deception at play in the conclusions people draw there.
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But honestly, I think I tend to be a giver in most respects, but I'm a kind of battered
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So I noticed that a few things are happening now.
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One is there are some salient cases where I feel like I've been taken advantage of and
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So now I'm more on guard in certain situations.
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And I have to some degree outsourced my disagreeableness and my disposition not to give reflexively to
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I mean, there's a layer between me and reality.
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And that, to some degree, I'm sure many people experience this.
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It can be a kind of good cop, bad cop relationship where you get to kind of maintain your dominant
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style because you have an asshole who's working for you, right?
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I hope they're just a matcher who believes deeply in justice and is trying to punish all
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Well, that is, I think that is the right recipe.
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And I guess as one of the pieces here, I noticed this, I noticed the liability of being a giver.
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At least this is what I imagined had happened here.
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I met a guy who kind of was offering his services to collaborate with me on the meditation app that
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And he was clearly somebody who, at least to hear him describe himself, was a huge giver,
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had been a huge giver, but felt just mightily burned by his previous encounters with people
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where he had essentially been instrumental in building a billion-dollar company and was
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So he's giving good ideas to people and was just unremunerated, apparently.
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And so now his style of approach to me was like out of an SNL sketch in terms of its
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I mean, he basically blackboxed every piece of advice he could have given me.
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Like there was nothing, he deliberately wouldn't add value to anything in a conversation because
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The thing was so transactional that it was like a comedy sketch.
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And, you know, I got off the phone with this guy and there was just, it would have been
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so exhausting to figure out how to work with him.
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And yet I can see, having had a few collisions of this sort, I can see how people could get
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there where you just feel like you're sort of open to the point where you're a really
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bad match for the people you happen to be around because they just, they take everything.
00:23:45.680
They take all the credit or they take all the opportunities.
00:23:47.560
And then some bear trap shuts within you and you have a different style there.
00:23:53.420
And then in that mode, it seems clearly toxic and unpragmatic.
00:23:58.660
I think, you know, it's, it's really interesting to ask the question of how do people become
00:24:04.460
And, you know, I think some of that, obviously there are sociopaths out there who just don't
00:24:10.280
But I think more commonly, at least when I've, when I've studied this, you, you do see that
00:24:15.640
there's a whole subset of takers who have just been taken advantage of one too many times,
00:24:21.540
And, you know, they kind of got burned and said, all right, I got to put myself first
00:24:27.040
And I think there's actually a name for, for, for that kind of almost overcorrection, right?
00:24:32.860
From, you know, somebody who was too self-sacrificing, too selfless to now being maybe too selfish
00:24:37.660
and transactional, there's a psychologist, George Kelly, who called it slot rattling.
00:24:42.240
And it's the, it's the idea of, okay, there's a, there's a particular trait and I'm on, you
00:24:46.940
know, I think I'm on a bad spot along that spectrum.
00:24:51.320
And then all of a sudden I go to the opposite extreme, but then I find out that's not good
00:24:56.060
And I spend all this time trying to figure out, okay, how do I get in the optimal zone?
00:25:00.020
And Kelly's observation was there is no optimal zone.
00:25:02.920
What you need to do is add other traits to your, your field of vision.
00:25:08.200
And so, you know, one would be flexibility, right?
00:25:11.340
To say, okay, it's not inherently good to be a taker.
00:25:16.400
There are situations where each might be appropriate and I need to be more, you know, more judicious
00:25:22.340
In this world, I would say one of the mistakes that we make that, that I made in the early days
00:25:26.340
of my research is I thought we were dealing with one continuum where takers on one end were
00:25:30.420
selfish, givers on the other end were generous.
00:25:33.180
But when I measured independently, I surveyed thousands and thousands of people and, and
00:25:37.780
gave them a series of questions about how motivated they were to help others and then
00:25:41.500
how motivated they were to achieve their own goals and also then got their, their colleagues
00:25:48.900
I found that, that self-concern and other concern were completely orthogonal.
00:25:53.220
So how much you care about other people and how, how much you care about your, yourself
00:26:00.820
How is that possible given that in so many situations, there's a zero sum contest between
00:26:07.780
So I think the, the key is that in a given situation, right?
00:26:10.880
You often will face a trade-off, but if you aggregate all the situations across your life,
00:26:17.400
you can often find ways that, that it's not zero sum, right?
00:26:20.720
So this is one of the reasons people love relationships as opposed to transactions is, oh, I can, you
00:26:25.880
And it feels like maybe it costs me something in this moment, but over time, there's a chance
00:26:32.800
So, yeah, I was taking a narrow view of that because as I've often said, there's a place
00:26:36.880
where selflessness and selfishness, wise selfishness coincide because you, because you realize
00:26:41.760
that you want to be surrounded by happy people.
00:26:50.220
And, you know, it's, it's interesting because it's been studied a lot in negotiations.
00:26:53.440
So there's a meta-analysis that Karsten DeDru led of every study that's ever been done of
00:26:59.120
going into a negotiation, what are your motivations?
00:27:02.000
And then how well do you do relative to your counterpart?
00:27:05.120
And the overall finding is that the best negotiators are high in concern for their themselves
00:27:11.960
And what that allows them to do is, is immediately figure out, okay, what does the person across the
00:27:15.900
table from you need and how do I help them get that?
00:27:18.560
But then also make sure I get what I needed out of this interaction too.
00:27:22.300
It's very different if you're negotiating with someone and you get what you want clearly
00:27:30.860
You're sabotaging any future relationship there.
00:27:36.040
And there was a, there was one of my favorite studies of negotiators actually measured their
00:27:45.020
And then the question was, does smarter negotiators do better?
00:27:48.840
And the answer was no, that the smarter you were, the better your counterpart did in the
00:27:54.000
And some of that might be because more intelligent people are more likely to take the long view
00:27:57.620
and say, look, you know, yeah, I might quote unquote lose this negotiating negotiation
00:28:02.260
today, but that's not ultimately the only test of, of, you know, whether we built a good
00:28:07.820
relationship or whether there's a way we could help each other in the future.
00:28:10.420
But also the smarter you were, the more able you were to identify ways of benefiting the
00:28:19.580
And I think this is one of the kind of basic mistakes people make is they think, oh, well,
00:28:23.620
every act of generosity has to be at a personal expense.
00:28:28.700
I don't think anyone should be altruistic because it's not sustainable.
00:28:31.900
I think what we should do is say, look, let's look for ways of helping others that don't require
00:28:38.940
Well, yeah, you can sacrifice one thing, let's say time, but to your mutual advantage.
00:28:45.240
So although there's one case, did you write an op-ed about not responding to emails?
00:28:51.000
I wrote an op-ed about why people should be responsive to reasonable emails.
00:29:00.900
So, so this is where I think I disagree because so now I'm in a position, so I once woke up
00:29:11.240
So I had to declare email bankruptcy, obviously.
00:29:14.900
And, but I still get a lot of cold emails and I actually don't feel I, so your argument,
00:29:23.800
What, what, what point did you make in that op-ed?
00:29:25.600
I don't think you have to answer cold emails, by the way.
00:29:28.400
And I think that's how I read your op-ed that, that if someone is, if someone is writing you
00:29:32.720
in a reasonable cold email, it is of necessity rude to not respond to it.
00:29:41.140
I think, and I, by the way, I think this is a, this is a whole different animal for public
00:29:45.580
Or people who are visible to the point that you could even get 50,000 emails.
00:29:49.980
I think, but my, my general case is that email has evolved to be as essential to communication
00:29:58.280
And if somebody walked by you in the hallway and said, hello, you wouldn't just snub them,
00:30:04.120
And if somebody left you a voicemail, you, most people call them back.
00:30:07.540
And I think some people have evolved this idea that, well, email is different.
00:30:11.280
And if somebody writes me a message, I don't have to respond to it.
00:30:14.220
And if that's the norm in your workplace, fine.
00:30:16.580
If that's the norm in your field, totally okay.
00:30:18.580
The problem is that because so much communication is being done on email today, it's mostly
00:30:23.100
taken as a sign either that you're not conscientious, which of all the personality traits in the
00:30:28.120
big five is the best predictor of job performance.
00:30:30.660
And so if you're judged as somebody who's disorganized and unreliable, that's generally
00:30:35.580
And then also it's, it sends a signal that you don't care, right?
00:30:38.460
That the, the person who took the time to write you just doesn't matter to you.
00:30:42.060
And neither of those signals, you wouldn't want to send either of them, right?
00:30:53.680
But I think, you know, I think that it's fine to, to exercise judgment on any individual
00:30:58.900
I think if, if somebody has a habit of just not responding, they're taking a risk in,
00:31:04.500
And I think that, you know, that what I mean is you should have a hierarchy, right?
00:31:10.100
So in my world, I'm responsive to family first, students second, colleagues third, everyone
00:31:16.080
And, you know, that, that makes, that makes it really easy, right?
00:31:18.440
The everyone else category is going to fall by the wayside.
00:31:21.980
If I don't, you know, if I haven't gotten through responding to the other groups.
00:31:26.620
Well, this opens the larger topic of, of saying no.
00:31:30.920
And the more, the more things are going well, the more you actually need to say no to triage
00:31:37.980
And what I experienced with emails that it just, it takes, there's enough of it that if
00:31:43.740
I were going to be scrupulous about saying no in the most conscientious way, that there'd
00:31:50.500
I mean, it just takes too long to say no to some of these emails.
00:31:52.460
So that's, so if you, if you sent me an email and you did not get a reply that this explains
00:31:57.840
So, but how do you think about saying no and triaging with respect to all the demands on
00:32:04.220
I think when I first got into this field, I thought, I confused being a giver with saying
00:32:09.860
And the whole point of, you know, choosing a set of values where you say, look, I want
00:32:16.260
to be someone who contributes to the lives of others and I enjoy being helpful and I'm happy
00:32:20.640
to do it without strings attached is you get to choose where you want to have your impact.
00:32:25.200
And so you shouldn't be a slave to other people's priorities, right?
00:32:28.220
At the same time, I'm not of the belief that when you, when you get an email or a request,
00:32:32.820
that's always somebody else's priorities being dumped on you, right?
00:32:36.780
I don't know about you, but my inbox is also the place where I get really helpful advice
00:32:40.720
And I can immediately find the answer to some esoteric question where I'm looking for a data
00:32:45.960
And so I feel like, you know, in a, in a cosmic matching sense, right?
00:32:49.860
If I ignore email, then, uh, then probably I'm not going to end up getting very helpful
00:32:54.380
But I think that the saying no is a critical skill for anybody who wants to be generous
00:33:01.760
And the way I've come to think about it is you ought to have a set of priorities around
00:33:12.100
I give you my list of, of students coming before colleagues.
00:33:14.540
And that means that if I have a choice in a given day between a fellow professor who
00:33:18.920
wants my feedback on a paper and a student who's looking for some career advice, I'm
00:33:24.180
And that means I'm comfortable with the student feeling I'm more generous than, than my
00:33:28.180
Because I didn't become a professor to try to be helpful to other professors.
00:33:31.620
Also, if somebody, you know, if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior and,
00:33:35.740
you know, they've kind of proven themselves to be more of a taker, I'd want you to
00:33:39.840
And say, look, I'm not going to reward that behavior.
00:33:43.700
I'm going to either not help them or I'm going to make sure that they're paying it back
00:33:49.360
And then the when is basically about saying, look, I've got to block out time to get my
00:33:53.940
And too often there's a, there's a temptation, I think, for a lot of people who like to be
00:33:58.420
helpful to prioritize other people's needs ahead of their own.
00:34:01.420
And then they're constantly falling behind on finishing their own work.
00:34:04.600
And then the how to me is the most fun is just to be clear and proactive about saying, look,
00:34:08.680
there are certain ways of helping others that I enjoy and that I'm uniquely good at.
00:34:14.240
And, you know, for me, that's I love sharing knowledge about work in psychology.
00:34:17.780
My favorite cold emails to get are, have you ever seen a study fill in the blanks?
00:34:21.780
I'm like, oh, all these hours that I waste reading these completely trivial and tiny studies
00:34:28.560
And I really enjoy connecting people when it's mutually beneficial, if there's, there's a
00:34:33.760
And I feel like I live in this world where I bridge between lots of different fields.
00:34:37.520
And so that's, that's a fun and easy thing to do.
00:34:41.400
Do you, do you send a cold email connecting them as a fait accompli or do you ask whether
00:34:48.520
So I just, I just sent one yesterday, actually.
00:34:50.720
I hope I'm not telegraphing too much, but you know what style I would prefer.
00:34:54.660
But so yes, I would say I generally prefer the double opt-in every once in a while.
00:35:00.820
There's a person where I know, look, like they would be insane not to want to make this
00:35:07.640
So I always default to the double opt-in, but on a few occasions where I haven't, where
00:35:13.620
I've just thrown two people together, I have literally said that you would be insane not
00:35:21.240
I was going to, uh, to tape a live podcast episode with Malcolm Gladwell and we're sitting
00:35:28.120
And he's like, I'm doing this episode, uh, my podcast on, um, why you should pull your
00:35:33.160
And I really want to talk to Sam Harris, but I can't find anyone who knows him.
00:35:37.240
I'm like, wait, I, I'm sure, you know, lots of people who know him, but I just met Sam
00:35:40.740
last, like, I think it was a week after we met.
00:35:43.540
And, uh, I, I didn't ask you if you wanted to meet him, but I assume like in general, you're
00:35:50.300
Although I landed, that connection landed me in the weirdest episode of a podcast because
00:35:55.660
it was, I don't know if you heard that stuff in one interview, but it was just, he was
00:35:58.560
interviewing me about home invasions and, uh, my wife and I probably had a two hour debate
00:36:06.180
But, uh, anyway, but yeah, I think that it's, it's reasonable to, to assume that if, if there's
00:36:12.500
one person who can help the other, the receiver would be happy to receive that connection.
00:36:19.280
What do we know about creativity at this point?
00:36:24.280
I think we know how to undermine it as parents and teachers.
00:36:29.620
And I think most of what I know about how to unleash it is basically getting the obstacles
00:36:38.760
And, and well, well, let's focus on creativity, but I actually would like to know how your
00:36:43.500
understanding of psychology may or may not have affected your parenting because I'm amazed
00:36:50.420
at how little science seeps through into one's daily life in, I mean, I, this is not, you
00:36:56.240
know, I haven't focused on developmental psychology or, um, any of the, the relevant
00:37:00.580
fields narrowly, but I just know from talking to people like Paul Bloom or people who are
00:37:04.160
closer to those data, it's amazing how little it, it constrains or, uh, inspires our, our
00:37:11.380
I think it's one of the most irresponsible things we do as a society is, I mean, we, we don't
00:37:15.860
educate parents in the most basic knowledge about developmental psychology.
00:37:20.700
And I'm, I'm kind of torn on that because on the one hand I've, you know, just as a casual
00:37:24.400
consumer of, of that literature, not somebody who's ever really contributed to it.
00:37:29.340
On the other hand, I never wanted to be one of those psychologists who screwed up our kids,
00:37:33.680
which I feel like is, you know, it was kind of the norm, but also I've, I've been pretty
00:37:37.900
persuaded by the, the wealth of evidence on behavioral genetics that says a lot of what we think
00:37:42.760
are parenting effects are actually shared genes.
00:37:45.860
And so, you know, and that's why I say, I think it's, it's easy to, to undermine a kid.
00:37:50.020
So, you know, not, not being supportive, not, you know, not showing unconditional love,
00:37:56.640
We, we have decades of evidence on the, you would know this as a neuroscientist, right.
00:38:00.560
On, on how much harm you can do by depriving children, by exposing them to chronic stress,
00:38:06.560
But I think if you take out all the bad things that happen to kids, I'm not sure how much upside
00:38:10.580
there is around trying to be the world's best parent, right.
00:38:14.040
Or trying to get it perfect as opposed to just saying,
00:38:15.600
look, we're all going to make mistakes no matter how hard we try at it.
00:38:18.520
But I guess there are a few things that I think we ought to be aware of as parents.
00:38:22.360
I think the biggest thing I've learned as a parent actually is that a big part of being
00:38:29.700
Because I think, you know, part of having ideas that are novel is it requires you to face rejection.
00:38:36.880
As a, as a nonconformist who's maybe not fitting in.
00:38:40.200
And there's some evidence that the most creative kid in a classroom is the least likely to be the
00:38:45.840
Because, you know, creative kids are annoying in class, right.
00:38:48.380
I know even as a teacher of, of, of, you know, college students and MBA students that,
00:38:53.260
you know, the ones who are wildly creative, like they're not quite sticking with the lesson
00:38:57.520
And they often want to take the conversation and, you know, onto a tangent.
00:39:00.320
And then I worry that the rest of the class is going to miss out on, you know, the, the,
00:39:05.760
So when I, when I think about all of that, I think that if you are going to be creative,
00:39:09.860
one of the skills that you need early on is you need to be comfortable with disapproval
00:39:15.320
And I think that one of the ways you, you foster that comfort is you encourage kids to think
00:39:21.600
for themselves and recognize that they don't always need the approval of a parental figure
00:39:28.300
And there are, there are some interesting ways to do this, but one, one that I've applied with
00:39:32.480
our kids is I read all this research showing that one of the beliefs that kids need in
00:39:36.740
order to be resilient is they need to feel that they matter and mattering in, in sociology
00:39:41.620
One is that other people notice me two is they care about me.
00:39:46.900
I think most parents are pretty good at the first two, but we miss out on the third, which
00:39:51.000
is I matter when I feel that other people are counting on me.
00:39:54.820
And I think too many parents let kids be helpless, right?
00:39:57.320
There's all this discussion now about snowplow parenting, where we clear the path for kids as
00:40:04.720
And so I thought, okay, we've, we're supposed to show our kids that, that we are willing
00:40:10.420
So one of the things I'll do is when I'm nervous before a big speech, let's say, I'll actually
00:40:15.680
go to our kids and ask them for advice on how to handle that.
00:40:24.580
So very young to, to imagine they could actually contribute to your wellbeing in that way.
00:40:30.080
I mean, I don't have high hopes for our five-year-old's advice on that all the time, but
00:40:33.660
But just the fact that you would kind of model that, that reciprocity is interesting.
00:40:40.080
I mean, I think, you know, I don't want them to feel like I'm, you know, I'm needing it.
00:40:45.620
But I want to show them that I value their input.
00:40:50.340
And so the great thing about that is one, I've signaled that I have confidence in their ability
00:40:54.920
to think through, you know, how do I, how would I handle a stressful situation to, I then
00:40:59.900
get to watch them practice their own problem solving.
00:41:02.820
And so instead of, so a couple, the first time I did this actually was before I gave my
00:41:07.600
first talk at Ted and, you know, I talked to our oldest and she gave me a bunch of like
00:41:12.460
pretty good tips and, you know, said, Hey, you know, you should, you should think about
00:41:17.020
what, you know, why you're excited to give this speech and who, you know, in the audience
00:41:21.920
that could help. And then a few weeks later, of course, she's in a school play and she's
00:41:25.360
nervous. And instead of me giving her advice, she gets to think for herself and know that
00:41:30.360
she already has some ideas about how to handle that situation. And I think, I think we could,
00:41:34.520
we could give kids those opportunities more often, right. To, instead of telling them how
00:41:38.280
to solve a problem, we ought to give them opportunities to think through the problem
00:41:41.420
themselves and even show them that we're willing to consider their advice.
00:41:45.560
Yeah, that's great. So how does unconditional love mesh with this
00:41:51.800
concept of grit that we have been hearing more about?
00:41:54.840
Well, it's interesting because Angela Duckworth is a close colleague of mine who put grit on
00:41:58.540
the map in her research. And she has found the exact same thing for parenting that I've
00:42:02.780
found for work, which is there's another, there's a two by two in the, in the work world. I've
00:42:08.520
talked about this in terms of, you know, giving and taking and then how agreeable and disagreeable
00:42:12.540
people are, which just as a quick aside, I used to assume that being agreeable meant you
00:42:16.780
were going to be a giver because, you know, if you're nice and friendly and warm, you're going to be
00:42:21.120
helpful. But the data I've gathered suggests that those are independent and that agreeableness
00:42:25.100
is about on the surface, you know, how pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and
00:42:29.020
taking are, are, what are the, what are those real intentions deep down? And so when you draw
00:42:32.800
the two by two, I've found that often the best leaders are the disagreeable givers who dole out
00:42:37.740
more tough love, who challenge you because they care about you. And Angela has a two by two of
00:42:42.780
parenting that's almost identical, which is how supportive are you? That's your unconditional love
00:42:46.840
factor. And then the other axis is how demanding are you? And the goal is to be in the high high
00:42:52.180
cell and say, I am both supportive and demanding. Now, to your point earlier about situations,
00:42:57.980
it's really hard to be both in one sentence, right? Yeah. But I think over time, grit comes from
00:43:03.640
your kids feeling like you believe in their potential, you care about them and their wellbeing
00:43:07.920
and success, but also you have really high expectations and standards for them. And I don't
00:43:12.280
think those things have to be at odds. I think I would like another axis there,
00:43:16.460
which is honesty. Which is honesty. Maybe it collapses down to one of the other two, but people
00:43:25.780
often think that in order to truly be supportive, there are some circumstances where you have to lie
00:43:31.340
to people and you have to tell a white lie in order to not give them a truth, which they might find
00:43:39.740
disappointing or dispiriting. But I've been on this hobby horse for more than a decade now. And I find
00:43:46.300
that, and I find this as a parent as well, it's an immense reservoir of confidence interpersonally for
00:43:54.280
the other person to know that you will never lie to them, right? Because then when you're praising
00:43:59.840
them, they know you're not bullshitting them. And I don't know, I think it's not something that is
00:44:05.700
explicit in many people's thinking here. It's just like, if you're just trying to be supportive
00:44:10.920
and demanding by turns to say, to take those two variables, it's easy to see how the level of
00:44:17.640
honesty may just accidentally fall wherever it falls. That's one of the reasons that I like
00:44:22.740
the disagreeable giver idea, the language at least, better than demanding and supportive.
00:44:28.320
Right. Because I think part of the heart of being disagreeable is saying, look, I'm going to tell you
00:44:32.700
the truth that you need to hear, even if you don't want to hear it. Right. And as somebody who, by
00:44:37.120
personality, you can probably tell, I skew much more in the agreeable direction. And I think one
00:44:42.580
of my Achilles heels in my career has been wanting to be liked. One of the things I've tried to learn
00:44:48.240
over time is to say, look, yes, in the short run, it is more painful to tell people a hard truth than
00:44:54.400
it is to tell them what seems like a kind lie. But in the long run, that's not creating a foundation
00:44:59.180
where people trust me and where I have integrity. And so I have an aspiration to be more disagreeable
00:45:05.640
and sometimes have overcorrected on that. But I think that, yeah, I mean, there are, this goes back
00:45:11.800
to the idea that you want to challenge network, not just a support network, right? People who are
00:45:15.480
willing to pick your arguments apart because they think it's important for you to get it right.
00:45:20.220
Yeah. Actually, there's one more point on creativity that I think you made in one of your books.
00:45:26.500
I think it's been made elsewhere too, but one of the false assumptions about creativity is that
00:45:32.140
there's just a higher quality of work coming out of creative people, whereas it seems like it's,
00:45:38.980
and correct me if the research hasn't backed this up, but it seems like there's just a,
00:45:43.760
in most cases, it's just a higher volume of work and then it's just more at the far end of the
00:45:48.940
distribution to choose from. Yeah. The dominant finding in the creativity literature is the more
00:45:55.200
creative you are, the more bad ideas you have. And that's just because you generate more ideas.
00:45:59.600
And I think the Dean Simonson, who's a very prolific psychologist who studied this pretty
00:46:04.580
extensively throughout history is, Dean would say that you want to think about creativity as
00:46:09.880
fundamentally Darwinian, that you have what's essentially blind variation, that as a creator,
00:46:15.640
you are too close to the idea and have too little access to, you know, the taste of your audience or
00:46:21.280
the needs of your field to really judge whether your ideas are any good. And so you have to generate
00:46:26.280
enough blind variation that some of those ideas will be selectively retained. So you look at
00:46:31.320
classical composers, for example, and there's good evidence that one of the distinguishing factors
00:46:36.180
that made Beethoven and Bach and Mozart better than their peers is they generated often not just
00:46:41.720
twice as much work, but 10 times as much work as most other composers. And what that means is
00:46:46.420
their mean composition is not considered greater than, you know, lesser musicians, but their peak
00:46:52.700
is higher because they had more shots on goal, essentially. You can also see this within people's
00:46:56.980
careers, though. So Simonson did an analysis of Thomas Edison's innovations over time, and he found
00:47:02.840
that the periods in which he generated the most patents were also the periods in which he had the best
00:47:07.380
shot at a truly influential patent. And that, you know, during the same window where he kind of did the
00:47:14.140
work sort of pioneering the light bulb, whether or not he actually invented it at all. He was also
00:47:19.080
trying to create a fruit preservation technique that totally backfired, maybe even caused fruit to
00:47:24.720
rot faster. Not sure. He created a technique for mining iron ore that didn't work, invented a doll
00:47:30.700
so creepy that it scared adults and kids. So you look at that and it's like, okay, how is that the same
00:47:36.320
inventor? But Shakespeare, same thing. You know, same period, he was working on some of his greatest hits,
00:47:41.640
like, because Macbeth was also the time when he wrote Timon of Athens, which nobody thought was
00:47:47.840
any good. So I think, yeah, I think there's a rule that says you have to generate a sufficient
00:47:52.820
quantity to stumble onto some quality. There was an anecdote you tell in Give and Take that I
00:47:58.680
hadn't heard. I was amazed that I hadn't heard it upon reading it, but this goes to the consequences
00:48:05.300
of being a taker or an apparent taker, even in great success. Just the story of Jonas Salk and his
00:48:14.280
press conference, maybe you can tell that because I genuinely hadn't heard it. And I'm amazed given
00:48:18.800
how famous he was and how much he appears to have contributed to our well-being. It's just an amazing
00:48:25.500
story. I was shocked when I stumbled onto the story. I had no idea because Jonas Salk's a hero,
00:48:31.400
right? When you think about givers, he's, when I think societally, right, great people throughout
00:48:36.620
the past century, he was pretty close to the top of my list. And I actually started looking into him
00:48:42.860
because I was interested in writing a chapter about sharing credit. And I thought, oh, a great
00:48:47.620
scientist who did so much good is probably an exemplar. And when I look for stories, when I write,
00:48:52.660
I always start with the science and then say, let me find a good example to illustrate it.
00:48:55.960
And so, you know, I had a bunch of studies about credit that I wanted to bring to life. And I went
00:49:01.420
to Salk. And I read this really surprising article by a historian that said, you know, Salk was asked
00:49:07.740
why he didn't patent his vaccine when he, you know, when he first generated it. And he said, well,
00:49:13.880
you can't patent the sun. You wouldn't patent the sun. Like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a public
00:49:18.840
good. It turns out it's a lie. It turns out his vaccine wasn't patentable. And so he was trying
00:49:26.260
to paint himself as this very altruistic guy when in fact, the due diligence had been done and a
00:49:31.560
patent was not obtainable because I think the work was not sufficiently novel. Right. So, so that was
00:49:36.280
the first layer. And then I thought, okay, I've got to learn more about this guy. He's obviously a
00:49:39.940
more complicated figure than he seems to be. And I read a whole book. It was a biography of,
00:49:44.960
it was a biography of polio really, but it was sort of a biography of Salk in a way.
00:49:49.320
And I learned a couple of things. One was that he, he would always refuse press interviews
00:49:54.260
because, you know, he was too busy. And then he would allow himself to be cajoled into saying yes.
00:49:59.800
And then, you know, I'm doing all this important work, but I would, you know, okay, this is,
00:50:04.480
if you really need me, I can talk to you. Again, trying to paint this picture of himself as,
00:50:08.660
as somebody who had these very noble ideals. And then the kicker was he had a core lab
00:50:14.740
of people who really did essential work. Without them, there would be, I think, no Salk vaccine.
00:50:22.600
And he snubbed them. He refused to give them credit for the work that they did. When they
00:50:27.600
made the big announcement, they finally had the vaccine available. He didn't mention any of their
00:50:32.560
names and basically fractured his relationship with all these people.
00:50:37.360
Yeah. The left in tears from that press conference.
00:50:39.700
Yeah. Actually crying. And these were people who toiled away trying to work on a problem that
00:50:44.040
was so critical to humanity and just wanted their boss to say their name and he wouldn't do it. And
00:50:50.400
it was apparently really important to him that he was the sole inventor. And, you know, again,
00:50:55.000
not even an invention per se, but there's this whole debate about whether he then was blackballed
00:51:00.860
from the National Academy of Sciences because of that, or because his work was too applied and people
00:51:05.220
didn't see it as making a basic contribution to knowledge. But I think that we see this a lot.
00:51:09.900
I think there are a lot of people who work very hard to craft images as givers. And if you look at
00:51:15.440
the way that they dole out blame and take credit, it doesn't really follow the value system that you
00:51:22.560
All right. Well, another lateral move to the topic of meditation, which I warned you about. So you wrote
00:51:28.880
an op-ed in the New York Times, which was widely considered a broadside against the scientific
00:51:34.100
consensus or the rumors thereof about the utility of mindfulness.
00:51:43.460
So why do you think it was perceived that way? Because it wasn't my intent.
00:51:46.960
I don't think we have to get into the weeds of that. It's just, it's more,
00:51:51.360
I think what would inform this conversation more is that I heard you do a podcast with my friend,
00:51:54.360
Dan Harris, who's got the 10% Happier podcast and meditation app by that name. And Dan is a,
00:52:01.640
is just a, you know, hardcore evangelist for meditation now because he's, he's found it so
00:52:06.400
useful in his life. So you had a conversation there where your, your basic skepticism about
00:52:11.400
just the whole project, whether there's a there, there came out, but it was in your op-ed as well.
00:52:16.220
I mean, basically the, you and I are going to agree here that the science in support of the
00:52:21.020
benefits of meditation is thinner than many people would acknowledge who are relying on it,
00:52:29.760
Yeah. And I think any, any serious scientists will tell you that.
00:52:32.540
I guess the better way to put that is that there's a range of kind of quality of science
00:52:36.100
attesting to the benefits of meditation. And some of it is obviously thin. Some of it's
00:52:41.020
obviously interesting, but all of it's preliminary, right? And so it's not, I mean,
00:52:45.840
I would put Richie Davidson in the, on the side of obviously interesting, but still preliminary.
00:52:52.580
But so to come in at the ground floor here, I think you were talking about with Dan having met so many
00:52:59.700
people who were, whose lives they, you know, they imagined had been changed by the practice of
00:53:04.720
meditation and the, the evangelism was starting to rub you the wrong way such that you, you, you know,
00:53:11.340
your, your look at the, at the data coupled to the personal enthusiasms of annoying people
00:53:15.880
cause you to say, all right, enough is enough. Well, you know, I'm not interested in this. So
00:53:20.160
how would, I don't know when you recorded this, this conversation with Dan, it must have been
00:53:25.540
So, uh, yeah, give me your, give me your hot take on meditation and then, and then, uh, I will try
00:53:31.400
Oh, well, I, apparently I'm, uh, I didn't know I was possessed. This is interesting.
00:53:37.340
I think we should all be possessed by doubt more often. Isn't, isn't that a preceptive science?
00:53:41.480
Up to a point, even without having an experience in it, I think there are things that you could
00:53:45.760
understand conceptually that would make it seem obviously of greater interest that whether or not
00:53:53.420
it was, it was something that you wanted to act on. Well, anyway, we'll, we'll get there. I just
00:53:57.580
want to get your up to the minute take, and then I'll say a few things that Dan didn't say in his,
00:54:03.520
I believe that. I think, I think it could be more interesting to me than I let on.
00:54:07.280
I think I just, I have, I have a natural skepticism of anything that has evangelism behind
00:54:12.940
it. And I think my responsibility as a social scientist is to look at the evidence and, you
00:54:17.920
know, ask in a, in a balanced way, what do we really know? And I actually started reading
00:54:22.800
mindfulness research in 1999 before the, you know, the make mindfulness movement took
00:54:28.140
off. And one of the first observations that I thought was interesting is you can become
00:54:32.040
mindful without meditating. You can at least create a state of mindfulness by teaching people
00:54:37.200
to think in conditionals rather than, rather than absolutes. And you could also get there
00:54:42.300
by, by teaching people to, to just notice the things in their environment. Right. So I felt
00:54:47.660
like my, my early assumption was we ought to decouple meditation from mindfulness because
00:54:51.880
there are many ways of cultivating and focusing attention on the present. There are many ways
00:54:55.920
of learning to be nonjudgmental and meditation might be one path there, but like any complex
00:55:00.700
system that's governed by equifinality, right? That there are multiple routes to the same
00:55:04.160
end. Maybe there are other ways you could get there too. So that's kind of where I came
00:55:07.440
in. And then it's all these people started saying, well, I mean, I felt like I was, I
00:55:11.840
was getting judged. Like, so what kind of meditation do you do? I don't. Well, wait, I'm sorry.
00:55:16.880
What are you, how could you not? What's wrong with you? And you know, that, that only happens
00:55:21.320
so many times where you think like, huh, I didn't even know that that was a virtue to
00:55:25.220
meditate. I just thought it was a practice that some people like in the same way that, you
00:55:29.020
know, some people prefer to go running and others prefer to play basketball, right?
00:55:32.940
I guess, well, you, I think what's starting to happen for people is there's this expectation
00:55:36.920
that its benefits have been so obviously demonstrated that it's, it is analogous to physical
00:55:42.900
exercise where it's like, wait a minute, you don't exercise at all. You don't run, you don't
00:55:46.940
bike, you don't lift weights. That begins to seem pathological. And, and I would imagine
00:55:52.920
the circles in which you run, you know, if you're going to, you know, conferences like Ted
00:55:56.840
or wherever you're surrounded by people who would assume that it's the benefits are so
00:56:03.360
clear cut that you're taking some kind of stand for not being interested.
00:56:07.260
Yeah. No, which, which obviously was not my intent. I just, I think it's never, I mean,
00:56:12.600
I've, I've tried it. It's never, I probably had not been taught a way to do it that worked
00:56:16.680
for me. It had never, it never just felt like something that was, that I wanted to make time
00:56:20.580
for. And all the, my, my big beef was that aside from the fact that I think, you know,
00:56:25.500
the claims far outstrip the science, you know, how many randomized controlled trials
00:56:29.300
do we really have looking at isolating meditation from all of the different components of activity
00:56:35.220
that you might be able to get without meditating? And then how objective are the outcomes and
00:56:39.880
how, how consistently do they work? Is it effective for most of the people in most of
00:56:44.020
the situations? I feel like there are a lot of open questions there, you know, but I don't,
00:56:47.820
I don't disbelieve that I think it's probably helpful for most people in most situations
00:56:52.020
if the goal is to reduce stress or to cultivate mindfulness. I just, I looked at that and I said,
00:56:57.320
okay, but we see the same effects on stress reduction of exercise. We see very similar
00:57:02.560
effects on mindfulness of some of these other activities that I mentioned. And so my feeling
00:57:06.460
had been, I like to use my time productively. I'm not someone who's good at quote unquote
00:57:10.880
doing nothing. And I realized that meditation is not doing nothing, but when I compare it to
00:57:14.780
reading where I feel like I get some of the same benefits, I'd rather read. When I compare it to
00:57:19.500
exercise, I'd rather spend, you know, an extra 10 minutes or one hour a day doing more exercise than
00:57:24.700
I would meditating. And by the way, I can, you know, I can think and reflect while I do that.
00:57:29.060
And so I was just reacting to the force, the feeling of being forced to do this one activity that
00:57:34.440
I think the science suggests is probably helpful, but I don't, I don't feel like I need it. And the
00:57:37.920
funny part to me was when I would ask people, well, why, why are you so, why are you so evangelistic
00:57:44.460
about it? And the, the common answer was, well, you know, I, it helps me quiet my monkey mind
00:57:50.220
and all the chatter. I've never heard voices in my head. I don't, I don't know what a monkey mind
00:57:55.820
is and I don't think I have one. Right. Well, this is the interesting part. This is the part that
00:57:59.880
made me think we had to talk about this. Good. Tell me. So I guess one more question. Have you ever
00:58:05.940
done psychedelics? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need
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