The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to season four, episode 31 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this

00:01:00.740 episode, my dad is joined by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human

00:01:07.560 potential. He hosts a very popular podcast called The Psychology Podcast and is an author, editor,

00:01:13.980 and co-editor of nine books, including his newest, Transcend, the new science of self-actualization.

00:01:21.060 Dr. Scott Kaufman and Jordan spoke about cognitive science, behavioral studies, humanism. They also

00:01:28.440 discussed IQ tests, personality tests, aggression in hierarchies, dating intelligence, self-actualization,

00:01:35.820 long-form media, of course, and more. I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:51.060 Hello, everyone. Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, my guest today, is a cognitive scientist exploring the limits

00:02:06.360 of human potential. He received his PhD in cognitive science from Yale University and has taught courses

00:02:13.840 on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania,

00:02:21.360 and elsewhere. He hosts a very popular podcast, The Psychology Podcast, and is author or editor or co-editor

00:02:30.240 of nine books, including his newest, Transcend, The New Science of Self-Actualization, published in 2020 and

00:02:39.520 just out in paperback as of April of 2021. He wrote Wired Create, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind

00:02:49.000 with Carolyn Gregoire in 2016 and Ungifted Intelligence Redefined in 2013. He's written major academic works as well.

00:02:59.560 With Robert Sternberg, he co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence in 2011, which is a major academic text.

00:03:07.140 He also edited The Complexity of Greatness in 2013, which brought together leading scholars to discuss and debate

00:03:15.460 the relative contributions of biology and society in determining creativity. In 2015, he was named one of 50

00:03:24.020 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world by business insider. Dr. Kaufman, thank you

00:03:33.540 for coming on my podcast. Dr. Peterson, it's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this chat.

00:03:40.020 It's good to see you. We actually have a couple of publications together from a few years back,

00:03:45.060 and so, but we've, strangely enough, never sat down and had a lengthy discussion, so hopefully

00:03:51.220 today we'll have an opportunity to rectify that. So, first of all, maybe you could tell everyone just

00:03:56.020 exactly what a cognitive scientist is. Well, I think the important thing to recognize about cognitive

00:04:02.420 science is it's an interdisciplinary field. So, it doesn't just involve psychology, but it brings

00:04:06.980 in philosophers and it brings in neuroscientists. It brings in computer scientists to all kind of

00:04:13.940 sit down at the table and figure out what is the mind and what are the functions of the of the human

00:04:18.500 mind? What are the limits of the human mind? How does the nervous system represent mind? So, basically,

00:04:25.860 everything having to do with mind, but it's very interdisciplinary, and that's what really was

00:04:29.940 exciting to me about it when I got into it. I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and I did a

00:04:34.420 computer science degree, and I did a cognitive science degree, and it was really exciting to me

00:04:38.340 to kind of figure out how all these different things can be integrated with each other.

00:04:43.220 And how did a cognitive scientist, who's at least technically more interested, let's say,

00:04:48.020 in the mechanics of thought and abstract cognition, how did you come to be interested in the humanist

00:04:53.620 tradition, which is the focus of this book, which we're going to talk about in fair detail today?

00:04:58.500 It isn't obvious that those things have any necessary interrelationship. So, what happened?

00:05:04.260 Not at all obvious. Well, so, as a kid, I grew up with a real deep fascination for

00:05:09.620 understanding individual differences. I mean, I remember just being a very young

00:05:13.700 kid looking on the playground and wondering why someone could so effortlessly go in the jungle gym

00:05:18.820 and why I was so awkward. And I also had some early learning difficulties that made me try to

00:05:24.660 understand what the only limits of my own potential were. So, the interest that got me to the field

00:05:29.380 was human intelligence. And I realized after enough years in the field, and once my interest

00:05:36.420 brought into creativity, which is the work we did together was on creativity when I was in grad school,

00:05:41.460 and then now self-actualization humanism, I realized that what I was really interested in was

00:05:45.860 human potential, not intelligence. You know, intelligence, I thought, was the be-all and end-all

00:05:51.140 of human potential. And then what I've learned, come to realize, you know, throughout my career is

00:05:55.460 that that wasn't, that was just the beginning. Well, Galton, Francis Galton, who in some sense

00:06:02.420 pioneered the psychometric study of IQ was also interested in human potential, I would say. So,

00:06:08.420 in some sense, that's a return to the source. And it is easy to confuse intelligence with,

00:06:14.100 well, the whole range of human talent and ability and differentiating all those different concepts and

00:06:19.860 and placing them in the proper relationship to one another and identifying them for study is no

00:06:25.300 trivial thing. So, you worked, you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se.

00:06:33.540 So, my junior year in college, I was so curious about intelligence that I cold emailed Nicholas

00:06:40.980 McIntosh, who was the head of the department at University of Cambridge, and I said, can I just take

00:06:44.420 a year off my undergraduate studies and just, will you teach me everything about IQ? Will you teach me

00:06:49.060 everything there is to know about, like, everything we've known in the last hundred years about

00:06:52.820 intelligence? And so, he, to my excitement, he responded to my email, and he said, sure,

00:06:57.380 come over. So, I packed my bags and went to England. Well, and this didn't count as a study

00:07:02.340 abroad program. There was no study abroad program. So, I just notified Carnegie Mellon, I'm going off

00:07:06.500 to England to study intelligence. And, and it was just so exciting to me to be able to learn.

00:07:11.540 How old were you when you did that?

00:07:13.860 20 years old, probably.

00:07:15.620 And he responded to a cold letter and invited you over.

00:07:19.060 Yeah, I, I must have, uh, well, there, I think that he might, might have been impressed with some,

00:07:23.300 like, I was, um, Herb Simon's last research assistant at that time as well. And, um, but I,

00:07:28.900 I felt like there were limits to what I was understanding about intelligence through the

00:07:32.020 expertise approach that I was learning from Herb Simon. I felt as though, um, I wasn't learning

00:07:36.340 about intelligence. I was learning about expertise acquisition, and I didn't think they were

00:07:40.020 exactly the same thing. So anyway, um, yeah, so he must've, he must've been impressed with

00:07:44.500 my email. I mean, I was a real, I was a, I was really, uh, uh, I'm trying to think of

00:07:50.180 the word and enterprising young man. I don't know. I'm trying to think of the right word.

00:07:53.540 You know, I was like really excited to, to learn this stuff.

00:07:56.260 Curious and enthusiastic.

00:07:57.700 Yeah. I like that better.

00:07:59.060 Yeah. And, and obviously able to communicate that. So you went over to England and you worked

00:08:02.740 with a psychometrician. And so you worked with someone who was very interested in the formalities

00:08:08.420 of measurement and careful definition of intelligence. And what, and, and what did you

00:08:13.220 learn as a consequence of doing that about intelligence?

00:08:17.140 Well, I learned a bunch of things. One, one important thing I learned is that

00:08:19.860 intelligence, uh, has, uh, multiple general cognitive mechanisms, which contribute or give

00:08:26.900 rise to a general intelligence kind of, uh, function. Um, some, you know, there's this debate

00:08:32.020 in the field about whether or not G or general intelligence is the thing that is causal of things

00:08:36.900 in the world, or if it's an emergent property of things. And I learned a little bit about this view

00:08:41.860 that it's an emergent property of these domain general mechanisms. And the biggest one which captivated

00:08:47.220 my attention was working memory at that time. And then that quickly led to me doing, uh,

00:08:52.180 and being interested in differences in sex difference, uh, sex differences in working memory.

00:08:56.820 Um, and I came up with a hypothesis when I was working with him in college about that,

00:09:01.300 which then led me to getting, uh, studying with him for a master's degree to actually test that

00:09:05.540 hypothesis.

00:09:06.100 So let's walk over the psychometric view a bit, and I'll say some of the things that I think I know.

00:09:12.740 And you can tell me if, if they're out of date or if you're convinced that they're erroneous in some

00:09:17.860 way. So essentially what the psychometricians have discovered is an established, and I think

00:09:24.100 more credibly than any psychologists have established any other phenomenon within the

00:09:28.820 field of psychology is that there's a common mechanism or an emergent property that appears

00:09:35.540 to characterize activity in relationship to virtually any set of abstractions.

00:09:40.420 So if you, if you put together a random set of questions that require abstraction to solve,

00:09:47.540 so they could be mathematical questions or general knowledge or vocabulary,

00:09:51.300 um, the sort of thing that even that you might encounter while playing trivial pursuit,

00:09:56.260 if you put together a reasonable set of those, and then you add up the correct scores and you rank

00:10:04.900 order them across all the people who've taken that particular test, you get something that

00:10:09.380 is a pretty accurate estimate of IQ. That's central tendency, it's that powerful. And that's

00:10:15.620 related to long-term life success in attainment, let's say, economic attainment and career attainment,

00:10:24.660 that accounts for about 25% of the variation between people in the differences in attainment.

00:10:31.380 Is that, that, that seem roughly anything?

00:10:35.620 I would, I would, I would do like a yes end if this was improv, I would, I would yes end and say a

00:10:41.220 central concept in this is the, the idea of the positive manifold, because it's really interesting.

00:10:46.580 And this was Charles Spearman's, you know, discovery in 1904. It's interesting that people who tend to do

00:10:52.500 well on one of these kinds of tests tend to do well on other of these kinds of tests. And the thing,

00:10:56.900 which is why I thought the expertise acquisition approach I was learning in college didn't fully explain

00:11:00.900 is that we're talking even with, um, lacking expertise in, in like these IQ test items, abstraction,

00:11:07.300 like you mentioned, they're, they're a lack of expertise and yet they're positively correlated with each

00:11:11.620 other. And it didn't have to be that way. Right. Right. Uh, Jordan, because one could have proposed,

00:11:16.420 well, the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you'll be in other things because, um,

00:11:21.300 you're devoting all your time and attention to one thing. But instead we find that actually there is,

00:11:26.660 there are some general cognitive mechanisms that apply to any task and even novel, especially,

00:11:32.260 actually, I would say, especially the novel. Yeah. Right. Because it's an, it's, it,

00:11:35.860 it actually predicts learning new abstractions better than it predicts world, real world performance.

00:11:41.220 And we should also note that the level of predictive accuracy is stunning compared to

00:11:46.980 the predictive accuracy of virtually anything, any social scientists have discovered apart from IQ.

00:11:53.780 Yeah. I tweeted that out the other day. I said, it's astounding to me when people say,

00:11:57.460 uh, so matter of factly, like IQ tests are invalid when it is probably the most valid test we have in

00:12:03.140 psychology. And that of course got a lot of comments like, well, that, that therefore that just shows

00:12:07.460 your whole field of shit. And that's completely wrong because the effect sizes in psychology,

00:12:13.700 the, the valid effect sizes are, uh, are, uh, what would you call them impressive when you compare

00:12:20.180 psychology to other disciplines of its category of generalization, say. So the idea that the whole

00:12:25.700 field is nonsense is, is only put forth by people who don't have differentiated understanding of the

00:12:31.540 field or of the social sciences that it might be compared with. The psychologists are the most,

00:12:35.780 um, sophisticated methodologists by far in all the social scientists, sciences, as far as I'm

00:12:41.140 concerned. So, yeah, there seems to be this misunderstanding or this, uh, expectation of

00:12:46.100 psychology that we're supposed to be perfectly reliable, that we're supposed to have perfect

00:12:50.100 reliability of humans. And I don't think any psychologist has ever claimed to, to have that

00:12:55.700 sort of level of precision. I mean, of course, a lot of people are going to fall between the cracks,

00:12:59.940 um, with these IQ tests. Um, and, and, and I'm interested in those people too. I mean,

00:13:04.260 of course, I'm also interested in the, in the statistical generalizations and the implications

00:13:08.420 for society. I mean, you can hold both things in your mind at one time. Yes. Well, and you can also

00:13:13.060 point out that accounting for 25% of the variation in something as complex as life attainment is

00:13:18.980 unbelievably impressive, especially given how much effect random factors have on determining those

00:13:25.220 outcomes, like, well, like health, for example, like physical and mental health. And while in situational

00:13:30.900 variables, like the state of the economy, et cetera, et cetera, the availability of educational

00:13:35.220 resources across all that variability, you still get this incredibly impressive prediction

00:13:39.860 of this single factor. And we could also point out for everyone that, you know, you might think that

00:13:45.780 people have good personalities and bad personalities in some sense, that's unidimensional. But if you do

00:13:51.220 the same statistical analysis with a set of personality questions that you would conduct on a set of

00:13:57.460 abstract questions, you get five factors, not one. So it isn't, it isn't necessarily the case at all,

00:14:04.340 that something will simplify down to a single factor, but that's profoundly the case with IQ.

00:14:10.580 The other thing that is worth pointing out is that bad as IQ tests might be, given that there's much

00:14:16.580 they don't explain, they're far better than any other method we have of assessing potential for,

00:14:22.980 uh, let's say cognitive growth and acquisition. So if you want to predict how well someone's going to

00:14:27.940 do in academic environment, then there isn't anything that even comes close to the accuracy

00:14:33.860 of an IQ test. And also to the unbiased, it's also unbiased compared to all other forms of measurement.

00:14:40.580 So, so, okay, so you learned this in, in, in England, but you weren't, you weren't satisfied with the

00:14:48.340 expertise approach. And you, so you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that

00:14:55.060 literature, but that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

00:14:58.660 Yeah. So I really, and I felt this in my bones, uh, just intuitively when I was in college,

00:15:05.940 even sophomore year in college, I was reading, uh, wrote the, I read the book successful intelligence

00:15:10.100 by Robert Sternberg. And I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like

00:15:15.460 that was this thing that I felt to be true that I, um, you know, I didn't know there was a whole field

00:15:20.580 until I started reading, um, cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my

00:15:25.620 sophomore year with Ann Fay and, and got to, uh, the, the chapter on intelligence and Sternberg's

00:15:30.420 textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity. And that really excited me.

00:15:35.540 And I, um, and I felt like there was, uh, there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the

00:15:40.980 way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He, he, unfortunately he passed away a couple years

00:15:44.980 ago, but, um, you know, if he were alive right now, I mean, he would definitely, uh, agree completely

00:15:49.140 with that. And he has in our conversations. Um, it's almost like, um, people, uh, import ideas on

00:15:55.700 IQ researchers that they never said, you know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know, uh, have ever known

00:16:00.660 has said like that IQ is a perfect predictor of everything. Right. You know? Yeah. Quite the

00:16:06.100 contrary. They tend to be conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction. Well,

00:16:11.300 you're also in a strange position intellectually, unique position in some sense, because you worked

00:16:16.180 with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single

00:16:21.700 factor of intelligence IQ essentially. But you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the

00:16:26.820 the people in the nineties in particular, and in the eighties as well, who mounted a challenge to

00:16:32.580 the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and, and, uh, uh, Howard Gardner at the

00:16:39.060 Harvard school of, of education, faculty of education that started to develop theories of multiple

00:16:45.380 intelligence essentially. And so, um, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed

00:16:51.140 to both of those sets of ideas? This episode is sponsored by Blinkist. Blinkist is a

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00:18:06.100 At the Harvard School of, of education, faculty of education that started to develop theories of

00:18:12.660 multiple intelligence essentially. And so, um, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence

00:18:18.020 of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas? Yeah. And you're quite right. It's a really astute

00:18:22.660 point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we, we invited Bob,

00:18:27.060 uh, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge. Once I remember,

00:18:32.740 all of us walking in the garden, me, Nick and Bob, and, uh, and Bob was criticizing. I remember this

00:18:38.980 vividly. Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing

00:18:43.620 us nothing about intelligence. And, and Nick was, we were pushing back, but I feel like there was a

00:18:47.720 great affection at the core among all of us. Um, I think that what I really learned from all these

00:18:53.560 perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either or terms and do a lot

00:18:59.280 more integration, um, in our thinking about these topics, which, and I'm sure we're going to talk

00:19:03.760 about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because believe it or not, this is related,

00:19:06.640 is that we need to be, we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than

00:19:11.160 in terms of, um, binaries or, um, or, or disparate constructs that, uh, are completely

00:19:17.680 a contextual of each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting

00:19:22.800 questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, you know, when you combine and when you

00:19:27.400 start looking at the world. Um, so for instance, I, I, um, I published a paper, um, with Roger Beattie,

00:19:33.440 who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention

00:19:37.900 network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination,

00:19:42.860 when they are coupled together, you see the greatest, uh, sources of creativity. So it doesn't

00:19:48.580 make any sense to kind of view these things as separate, but each one do make their unique

00:19:51.960 contributions, if that makes sense. Okay. So let's, let's go back momentarily to the

00:19:56.600 Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in

00:20:02.680 measurement. Um, when, when I encountered all those ideas, I was trying to predict, uh, success

00:20:09.080 in complex environments, academic environments, like the university of Toronto and Harvard, and also

00:20:13.880 in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so

00:20:20.680 I was scouring the literature, looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that

00:20:26.920 would predict achievement, and then also reliable measures of achievement, which, which is a separate

00:20:31.960 problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive

00:20:38.040 anything of, of practical measurable utility from their work. And, and I couldn't find anything in it that

00:20:45.480 would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also, at that time was studying the big five

00:20:51.640 personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually

00:20:56.200 measurable. So to even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially, and the

00:21:04.520 SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite

00:21:10.040 frequently they do, conscientiousness is a good additional predictor. And we looked at prediction

00:21:15.640 of performance in graduate school and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we'll talk

00:21:19.960 about, didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduates, graduate

00:21:24.360 school performance, publications, and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological

00:21:30.600 tests basically assessing executive function could add something to IQ, maybe, depending on how you did

00:21:38.280 the analysis, but conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the

00:21:43.480 multiple intelligence literature. And so, and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually,

00:21:48.520 of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable,

00:21:55.800 critical, intellectual perspective, if you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the

00:22:04.200 evidence, what's the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual?

00:22:08.520 And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ.

00:22:12.440 I did. And I'll be, I'll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of

00:22:19.240 multiple intelligences. And once I started studying this stuff scientifically, I became seduced by the

00:22:26.600 truth. I don't know, I don't know how else to say it.

00:22:29.160 Well, how about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like,

00:22:35.320 oh my god, this will go away no matter what you do. And it is solitary, and it's been well measured,

00:22:40.920 and it's really hard to add to it. And everything else looks bad in comparison. It's, it was quite a

00:22:47.160 shock to me. That's the thing. So once I started studying this stuff with, with, with Nick, you know,

00:22:52.760 you'd, for instance, you would look at like people's attempts to measure Garner's multiple

00:22:56.720 intelligences. And in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor.

00:23:01.440 And there, there's no, and I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating

00:23:06.880 consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going, it's going to be G loaded. The task you're

00:23:12.680 doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other,

00:23:16.620 like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has

00:23:22.120 studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those

00:23:26.700 measures that have been used in the behavioral literature, because Nicholas is most well known

00:23:31.340 for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associative learning measures to

00:23:35.340 predict G very, just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found that there's the,

00:23:40.060 there are these general cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever,

00:23:43.660 whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognitive mechanisms,

00:23:48.300 you can't sweep them under the rug. Right. So if you laid out a number of hypothetical

00:23:52.700 general or multiple intelligence measures, and they measured anything that had to do with

00:23:58.380 abstraction and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ,

00:24:04.620 if you got anything at all. And what really, what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything

00:24:10.620 additional to that. Even we added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych

00:24:16.860 literature, not from the psychometric literature. It was all clinical tests, mostly developed at the

00:24:22.060 Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to

00:24:27.180 the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation,

00:24:34.300 they would both contribute. But if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor,

00:24:39.020 which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find

00:24:45.260 out from my own research, whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly,

00:24:51.260 in terms of its predictive validity, or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it

00:24:55.340 was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't

00:25:02.220 influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it, still ended up measuring

00:25:06.940 exactly the same thing. I always told my students, and you tell me what you think about this, that it was

00:25:11.340 forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure.

00:25:15.980 As a covariate, at least.

00:25:18.140 As a covariate. And I also think the same thing about big five personality, for whatever that's

00:25:23.500 worth. It's like, we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social

00:25:29.500 scientists have ever discovered exists. So if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you

00:25:35.020 should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more

00:25:40.300 difficult, because we get results from some measure, and then that would be hypothetically

00:25:45.340 be publishable. But then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures,

00:25:49.660 it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic

00:25:54.300 achievement. And there's well-developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly

00:25:59.900 with IQ and personality. And I can't get, I don't understand why the field won't accept that.

00:26:06.380 Well, I'll give you an analogy. It's almost, it's, I think it's analogous to the fact that all these

00:26:11.660 environmental determinants of X papers don't never use genes as a covariate. You know, it's like,

00:26:18.380 well, things change. Once you start to include genes as a covariate, then you find some of these

00:26:23.500 effects drop away. And that's interesting to me. It's like, we don't even want to know the truth,

00:26:28.460 you know, in certain circumstances. Well, you know, I've thought about that too. It's not

00:26:33.740 surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ, because it's quite nasty. I mean,

00:26:38.860 there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn. And that has

00:26:44.700 walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's, there's a bitterness in that. That's,

00:26:51.900 I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but you know, so for me, it's like

00:26:57.020 IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives, incredible damage because the

00:27:03.500 conservatives are likely to say, well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and, and,

00:27:08.360 you know, get at it. And the liberals like to say, well, everybody can be trained to do everything.

00:27:13.640 And both of those are wrong, because there's an, there's a large number of people who are not,

00:27:20.280 who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has

00:27:26.600 become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem. And, and we have no idea what to do with

00:27:32.760 it. We won't even look at it. Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that's

00:27:37.640 okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some

00:27:42.680 of my own research, I studied something called twice exceptionality. Actually, I edited a book

00:27:46.280 called twice exceptionality, supporting bright and creative students with learning disabilities.

00:27:51.640 Sometimes they're intelligent. They're like, they're, they're very intelligent, but sometimes

00:27:55.040 because of their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn't show up in

00:28:00.200 an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to what's missed.

00:28:05.040 Absolutely fair enough. Look, there's as and as we already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25%

00:28:11.040 of the relative relevant territory. And the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people who

00:28:16.560 are measured, whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So and

00:28:23.680 other factors play an important role like conscientiousness, but it's only about at least as far as we can

00:28:28.640 measure it. And we can only really measure it still with self report or other report personality tests.

00:28:34.160 It adds about, it's only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ.

00:28:38.880 This is how I put it. I say, look, it's really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident.

00:28:44.240 But there's many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with

00:28:49.800 error variance and other factors. But it's very hard. Like if you get 160 IQ, genuinely and honestly,

00:28:55.260 if you didn't cheat, it's hard to like just accidentally stumble into those right answers.

00:28:59.280 Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. That yeah, that that it's the low scores that

00:29:04.000 contain the errors. Yeah, and fair enough. And that should be attended to, not least because we don't

00:29:09.120 ever want to deny anybody with potential, the possibility of developing that and sharing it with

00:29:15.120 everyone else. But you know, it's so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let's say,

00:29:21.600 and, and, and because they because of their perceived and actual shortcomings. But my problem with that is

00:29:29.520 that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension.

00:29:36.400 So we'll see how that all plays out. So okay, so go ahead.

00:29:42.880 Well, another reason why the topic is radioactive, of course, is because every time you talk about

00:29:46.880 IQ differences, people, their head immediately goes to group differences. And we're, I just want to

00:29:53.540 clarify, we're talking about individual differences. That's well, that's what we've talked about so far.

00:29:57.420 Do you know what I mean? And you can't automatically extrapolate, you know, even when I use the word genes,

00:30:01.800 people are scared of the word genes, you know, like, like it, that should be the most uncontroversial

00:30:05.680 thing in the world, the fact that individual to individual, our genes play some influence. We

00:30:10.920 don't want an environmentally deterministic world, that would be horrible. We don't want to, you know

00:30:15.080 what I mean? People don't really think that through, you know? So I just wanted to clarify,

00:30:18.680 we're talking about this, you know, individual to individual level, we're not talking,

00:30:21.880 we're not extrapolating this to group differences.

00:30:24.200 Well, we're also talking about it at a comparative level. It's like, well, the IQ testing process is

00:30:31.400 imperfect. Right? Well, compared to what, like, you have to come up with a better alternative,

00:30:37.640 you can't just say this isn't good enough. It's like, compared to what we can't, we could assign

00:30:42.280 people to universities randomly. And like, so, and you could do this, imagine that your, your first

00:30:49.160 year students, anybody could attend first year classes. And then you use first year grades to decide

00:30:55.000 who got to continue. You could see that you could make a coherent social policy based on that,

00:30:59.640 that would give everyone a shot. And then it would allow those who succeeded in the actual

00:31:04.920 enterprise to progress. Now it'd be very expensive in the first year, but that might be beneficial

00:31:09.400 anyways, to expose everyone to that kind of education. But you can't do that and continue

00:31:15.480 up to the higher stratospheres of intellectual endeavor, because the people who pursue that have

00:31:21.400 to be able to do it. So, well, so we're stuck with it, but we won't have a serious discussion

00:31:27.560 of it. And it's really, it's really unfortunate. I would say, well, on caveat, you know, we found

00:31:32.120 in our own paper that IQ was, was entirely uncorrelated with artistic creative achievement.

00:31:36.760 And I've always been kind of interested in what to do with that, because it just seems like openness

00:31:42.040 to experience and some of these other cognitions. Like I studied implicit learning and I found

00:31:46.840 that was correlated with artistic achievement and late and reduced latent inhibition. The great work

00:31:52.600 you did with Shelly Carson, I replicated some of that. So I think there's more of the story if we,

00:31:57.960 you know, if we look at what, what field are we trying to predict?

00:32:00.760 Yeah. Well, the openness dimension is of extreme interest and, and, and because there is something

00:32:06.280 to the personality trait openness that seems to be related, as you pointed out to creative

00:32:11.960 achievement, but also to, to not so, not even so necessarily so much artistic achievement,

00:32:17.480 but even to enterprise achievement, like entrepreneurial ability, we've found a stuff

00:32:22.280 that I never published. I used it privately. Um, we found a pretty pronounced relationship

00:32:27.320 between openness to experience and entrepreneurial ability, practical entrepreneurial ability. And

00:32:32.360 as, as you well know, uh, that seems to have that openness seems to have something to do with

00:32:37.800 perceptual differences. Um, so open people are, they have, they seem to have a broader perceptual

00:32:46.360 range, something like that. And they're, they're more emotionally impacted by their perceptions too.

00:32:50.040 They're more likely to experience awe. They're more likely to be compelled and gripped by ideas.

00:32:55.880 They're more likely to be curious. They're more likely to engage in associative thinking.

00:33:00.440 So one concept will remind them of a range of distantly related concepts,

00:33:06.440 more than someone who's a more constrained thinker. They're more likely to have insight experiences.

00:33:10.920 And, and there is something to that. That's not purely reducible to IQ because you can be,

00:33:16.600 you can have a high IQ and be non-creative. It's less likely, but not only that, but like,

00:33:23.080 and this, this starting to get into the transcend stuff, when you said the word all AWE,

00:33:27.240 then it starts to get into my newer research because, you know, I can look, I can, I could pop up a

00:33:31.720 data set right now and show you that IQ is correlated to zero with the extent to which you're going

00:33:35.080 to experience all in your daily life. But openness to experience is very strongly correlated with that.

00:33:40.440 Right. And so what do you make of that? What, what do you think? What do you think about

00:33:45.240 open? We've had professional exchanges on this topic, but I haven't talked to you for years. So

00:33:50.600 where's your thinking gone with real in relationship to openness to experience?

00:33:55.240 And you know, it can be transformed by psilocybin mushroom experiences, right?

00:33:58.760 Griffiths showed that one standard deviation increase in openness one year later, after one

00:34:05.000 mystical experience, stunning, some profound neurological transformation.

00:34:10.920 And Catherine McLean as well has, has showed that, uh, very large effects. Um, I'm, I'm very,

00:34:16.760 very interested in the linkage between openness to experience and, uh, self-transcendent experiences.

00:34:21.720 Um, it does seem like certain personality, uh, structures are more likely to, uh, experience

00:34:28.840 absorption. So I think the major link there and probably our bridge here is, is the, is the,

00:34:33.160 the under-discussed topic, uh, uh, in, in, in the public of, because people talk about flow,

00:34:38.280 but intelligence absorption construct is not the same thing as, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's

00:34:43.640 flow construct. And I think that when we talk about openness to experience, I think it is quite linked to

00:34:49.240 these altered states of consciousness and susceptibility, um, to even hypnotizability,

00:34:54.360 you know, um, this kind of willingness to, um, take a, take a, uh, um, to dip your toe into the

00:35:02.280 sea of madness, I would say.

00:35:03.560 So, do you, do you suppose, so, so do you suppose that the capacity to embody multiple

00:35:11.960 personalities in some sense is the key aspect to, to openness, you know, because we're incredible

00:35:18.520 mimics. And I want to talk to you about the relationship between mimicry and awe, because

00:35:22.360 I think awe is the manifestation of the instinct to mimic, but I've watched creative people play

00:35:27.880 music. For example, I remember one guitarist I was watching and he was jamming and he was very

00:35:33.640 expert at it. And it was unbelievably interesting to watch and listen to him at the same time,

00:35:37.880 because you could see one second, he'd be like a black female gospel singer from the 1930s.

00:35:43.240 And the next second he'd be like, uh, Morrison from the doors. And you could see all these

00:35:48.200 musical influences that, that had inhabited him and he was playing with them constantly.

00:35:53.560 And it was like watching a shape shifter and, and you know, our capacity for abstract into

00:36:00.040 abstraction means that we can think up abstractions, which are representations of ourselves in some

00:36:05.720 sense, and then assess their perceptions and their actions before we implement them. And I,

00:36:11.080 I wonder if open people are, are able to be more people in some sense, because I've also known,

00:36:19.240 I think so. You think, you think there's something, I think there's something, I think there's some,

00:36:22.680 I actually tested this hypothesis. Um, in the sense, I look to see whether or not people who were

00:36:27.880 scored higher in opens to experience were more likely to have unreliability in their big five

00:36:32.680 character structure over time. Oh, that's yeah. And I found that they did, they did, you found that.

00:36:37.320 Yeah. Okay. So that means from, from moment to moment, their personality and over what span of

00:36:42.360 time? Well, over from month to month, I didn't, I didn't do like sample, like experience sampling,

00:36:46.440 which would be, that'd be really cool, but just over a period of couple months, for instance.

00:36:50.280 Okay. So just to clarify that personality, like IQ, personality is quite stable across

00:36:55.480 time. What you see across time is that people maintain their personality structures, but they become

00:37:01.000 more agreeable, less neurotic. So less characterized by negative emotion and more conscientious as they age.

00:37:07.000 So those all seem like good things, uh, hypothetically. Um, but your point is that

00:37:12.200 if you take people who are high in openness to experience, which is this creativity dimension,

00:37:16.440 their personalities are less stable across time. I also wonder if that accounts to some degree for

00:37:22.040 the oft remarked upon hypothetical association between creativity and instability, because imagine

00:37:28.200 you're high in openness and you're high in neuroticism. I mean, that's a problem because

00:37:34.200 you have that personality variability, that's an intrinsic part of you, but in some ways,

00:37:38.440 that's going to be harder on you because that variability is going to make things more

00:37:42.440 unpredictable. I've had, I've seen open people have a hard time catalyzing a single identity.

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00:41:44.360 I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. And I think that there's some really cool

00:41:51.240 things when you actually look at the interaction effects. That's what's really cool. Especially

00:41:56.600 what I guess I would call paradoxical traits. Because you look at the general correlational

00:42:02.200 structure, but then what if a person really bucks those general correlational structure trends? What's

00:42:07.880 the word for that? I've been trying to come up with a term for that. Most people who are

00:42:13.320 conscientious, I guess, tend to be what? Less what? In the general population. Well,

00:42:20.760 probably less neurotic. But what if you're high neurotic and you're high conscientious? That's

00:42:24.120 just one example. Right, right. But there are lots of these other kinds of paradoxical

00:42:27.480 traits that I think are worth studying in more depth. Mm-hmm. So those would be singular people

00:42:32.920 in some sense. So, right, right. So high orderly, high openness would be an example of that too.

00:42:38.920 What is that? Yeah. Right. For instance, me. I think that's Hitler.

00:42:43.720 Oh, no. I was going to say. Very orderly and very open.

00:42:46.600 I wasn't going to say I'm not those traits, but here's something I am that's paradoxical. And

00:42:51.560 maybe you are too. I don't know. I'd like to hear that. I score very high in autistic-like

00:42:56.360 trait scales, but I also score very high in schizotypy-like scales. So that's something

00:43:00.760 that in the general population, those are very strongly negatively correlated with each other. But

00:43:04.280 how in the world am I high in both those things? I think you might be high in both those things too.

00:43:08.760 Do you think that's mediated by openness?

00:43:11.560 Maybe that's what it all comes down to.

00:43:13.960 That'd be my guess. So I wonder, like I used to see my kid come home, my son,

00:43:19.000 when he was young, he'd come home after playing with kids, and he would be inhabited by one of

00:43:23.400 the kids' personalities. And often it was a bratty child. And so he'd come home with this whole bag of

00:43:28.600 tricks. And it wasn't just one thing that he would experiment with. It was like he'd picked up the

00:43:33.560 whole pattern of behavior from that play experience. And then he'd come home and try

00:43:37.960 out his new tricks. And I wonder, has anybody ever assessed to see if open people are better

00:43:45.160 or faster mimics? Because absorption, imagine two things, okay? So imagine, first of all, that

00:43:52.280 you have this capacity for awe. And so what that does, you meet someone who's very impressive.

00:43:57.480 And so there's an experience of awe that goes along with that. Now, you should mimic someone

00:44:03.160 who's impressive. Because if your judgment of their impressiveness is accurate, then you could

00:44:08.680 be more impressive if you were more like them. So imagine that there's an instinct towards awe-inspired

00:44:14.760 imitation. Okay, now if you were also very high in absorption, you would get into that. And I think

00:44:20.680 that's probably what's happening to open people in movies, because they sink really deeply into the

00:44:25.240 movies. They are entranced by them, or the fictional universe. And so they can become

00:44:29.240 possessed by alternative personalities. Yes.

00:44:31.800 And then, and that, and of course, that's what we want in actors, obviously, right? We want people

00:44:38.200 who are possessed by alternative personalities to act them out for us. And there's no reason, because,

00:44:43.320 you see, one of the things psychologists don't study enough, as far as I'm concerned, is imitation.

00:44:49.000 It's so fundamental.

00:44:51.960 Well, here's a, here's a, maybe a far out link. Do you think people who are higher in openness are

00:44:56.440 more likely to be ideologically possessed? Have you ever made that linkage? I mean, I don't know if

00:45:02.120 there is something interesting there, but there might be. To the extent to which people who are higher

00:45:07.000 in openness tend to be more likely to have contagion of other people's emotions and ideas, and maybe

00:45:13.640 we have, I mean, could that be possible?

00:45:16.040 Well, I guess I'd think two things about that. The, the, the, if you're open, you're more easily

00:45:21.880 possessed line of reasoning would suggest that. But the, if you're open, you're likely to blow

00:45:28.040 through arbitrary cognitive barriers would act negatively towards that. So maybe, maybe what you

00:45:33.880 might see is that, who the hell knows, that high openness, teenagers are likely to be ideologically

00:45:40.200 possessed, but to, to not be later. Hmm. Right. So maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the mechanism

00:45:47.400 would lead them to that in the, in the early development, but it would lead them out of that

00:45:51.160 as they matured. And moderator, and maybe IQ is a moderator of all of this. Maybe it's going,

00:45:56.280 going full circle. Yeah. Well, that's a tough one too. Cause you, you know, it, it, I suspect that

00:46:02.600 I would suspect again, that in adolescence, higher IQ would, would be a predictor of more

00:46:09.320 ideological possession because, because, well, imagine that you, you have to be relatively

00:46:15.080 smart to be interested in political issues, political abstraction. So there's, it's a

00:46:19.800 precondition. And then when you first start being interested, well, you're not going to be very

00:46:23.880 sophisticated. So an ideology is likely what you're going to adopt. Well, maybe it's the intellect

00:46:31.880 facet, you know, cause the openness to experience, uh, your pine, you pioneer this work, which I carried

00:46:37.640 forward in my graduate work. Um, there's an important distinction, uh, at the aspect level

00:46:42.520 between intellectual curiosity and, um, openness to experience more having to do with the actual

00:46:47.960 experiential aspect of it. And so maybe the intellectual curiosity part is a modifier there

00:46:53.480 even more so than IQ. Right. Who knows? Right. Well, I, I, I mean, all we've found so far in our

00:46:58.440 investigations of openness and political view is that it's a definitely, and it isn't only our lab,

00:47:05.560 obviously, and we didn't originate this idea for that matter. Um, openness is definitely a predictor

00:47:11.400 of liberal and left leaning political proclivity. That's, that's clear. And, and that goes along with

00:47:19.400 a comparative interest in fiction, say versus nonfiction. And it's definitely temperamental.

00:47:24.120 And I've been thinking, tell me what you think about this. So, you know, that openness and

00:47:29.800 conscientiousness are the best two predictors of political belief. Okay. So then you might ask,

00:47:34.600 and this goes along with your interest in interactions is why the hell is it openness

00:47:39.000 and conscientiousness, relatively uncorrelated traits? You know, why isn't it openness and

00:47:43.480 neuroticism or, or, or, or, or, or extroversion and agreeableness? Why those two? Why political?

00:47:50.040 And so I've been thinking, um, I think it has to do with borders and I've been influenced in my

00:47:57.160 thinking by all the new literature on the relationship between contagious disease and political

00:48:03.080 belief. So there's a huge literature. This is the only literature I've ever seen that has effect

00:48:07.960 sizes approximating those of IQ. So if you measure the prevalence of infectious disease at the city,

00:48:15.160 state, provincial, or country level, you find that there's a walloping correlation with

00:48:21.160 authoritarian attitudes like 0.7. It's ridiculous. It's massive. And there's some association there with

00:48:28.200 disgust sensitivity, although that hasn't been completely pulled out yet. So, so imagine this is

00:48:33.400 imagine that the open types. So the liberal types, they want the free flow of information.

00:48:39.720 So they don't like barriers. They don't like borders between anything. They don't like borders between

00:48:44.120 concepts. They don't like borders between genders. They don't like borders because it interferes with the

00:48:49.320 free flow of information. But the cost of the free flow, borderless free flow is contamination.

00:48:57.080 And so, and they're both right. You open the borders, well, look what happened last year.

00:49:01.880 International, we're an international society, so we have an international pandemic.

00:49:06.760 So you open up the doors to information flow. You also open up the doors to contamination. And I would say

00:49:12.600 that's true biologically and ideationally as well. So the, the analogy holds. So that's why those two

00:49:20.360 things combine to determine political belief, because political belief is about borders, fundamentally.

00:49:25.800 The one thing I don't understand about that is that neuroticism is pretty strongly correlated with

00:49:29.960 disgust sensitivity or even the kind of thing you're referring to. So why is, why is neuroticism not,

00:49:36.280 what, you know, because you said openness and consciousness.

00:49:38.200 We kind of thought, we kind of thought, and some of my theoretical work led me to presume that

00:49:44.200 more conservative types or more ideologically possessed types, it wasn't clear which, would be

00:49:49.400 more neurotic, but they're not. Like, if anything, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals at a

00:49:55.080 trait level. And it's a complex literature because there is some literature showing that conservatives are

00:50:00.840 more sensitive under some conditions to some kinds of negative emotion. You know, and then you can generate

00:50:07.160 up a, a defense theory of conservative ideology, but it doesn't look to me like it's fear-related

00:50:13.320 because it doesn't manifest itself in neuroticism at all. And it should, if that theory was correct.

00:50:18.600 There's something about disgust that's crucial that, that has been understudied so far, but that's changing.

00:50:25.160 I think that's super interesting. And I've also been interested in the, at the aspect level analysis of these things.

00:50:31.080 So, um, the overall agreeableness to me is, is not a player, but once you look at the aspect level,

00:50:37.240 you find that they diverge. Politeness is higher among, uh, conservatives and, um, and compassion is

00:50:44.520 higher among, um, liberals.

00:50:46.520 I should just point out for everyone that's listening is that work done in my lab by Colin de Young,

00:50:51.240 um, particularly we showed that you could break the big five down into 10 sub aspects, we call them.

00:50:58.280 So you get some additional predictive utility sometimes if you use the more differentiated

00:51:02.680 scales. And we did investigate as, as Dr. Kaufman just mentioned, we did investigate the effects

00:51:08.360 of that on political belief. And we did find, as you said, that conservatives are more polite

00:51:13.640 and that liberals are more, um, uh, empathetic or more agreeable. And, and we don't know what to make

00:51:19.640 of that partly because we don't really understand politeness. Exactly. It, it has something to do

00:51:24.920 with, it's something related to deference to authority, politeness. Um, but it, man, if like

00:51:31.960 one of the best, just respect, respect for authority, it seems a little bit different than deference.

00:51:37.560 It could, could be respect. Sure. Sure. And, but, but then you, it's complicated because

00:51:43.800 conscientiousness is also associated, I would say to some degree with respect for authority. Right. And so,

00:51:49.880 what's the difference? What is politeness adding that conscientiousness doesn't already cover?

00:51:55.800 So certainly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it, it, it, it, well, I was really excited by the political

00:52:01.800 research, uh, partly that was done in my lab, but also elsewhere, because it's really, it's quite

00:52:07.240 revolutionary, I think, to think through the implications of the fact that your political

00:52:12.840 viewpoints are determined by your, by your temperament. And because what it means is that

00:52:21.000 your biology in large part has provided you with a filter for the facts, right? So we like to think,

00:52:28.600 well, you derive your rational conclusions from the set of facts that you're exposed to, but

00:52:33.160 unfortunately you have to choose the facts because there's just too many of them. And so

00:52:39.400 temperament is playing a major role in determining what you expose yourself to. We found that with

00:52:44.200 fiction preference, for example, is like open people are much more likely to read fiction and

00:52:48.920 fiction of certain sorts. And so the differences start with the information gathering process itself.

00:52:55.240 Is that what the work with Marr? Yeah. Was that? Yeah. I love that. I love that work so much, by the way.

00:53:00.760 We had a hell of a time getting that stuff published, although it's, it's crazy.

00:53:05.240 You never know when you publish what's going to be published and what's going to have an impact. You

00:53:09.000 certainly can't predict it, but yes, that, that all worked out quite well. So, okay. So back to,

00:53:15.240 let's go back to the, if you don't mind, unless you want to take this somewhere else,

00:53:19.160 let's go back to the humanism issue. Okay.

00:53:21.800 Which is central to your new book. So you got it, you got interested in what,

00:53:26.040 what was it about the humanist define it? And then tell me what it was that captured your attention.

00:53:32.040 So it was in particular, it was humanistic psychology. And I actually distinguish that

00:53:36.200 from the humanism movement that maybe you, you know, like that that's more a philosophical movement,

00:53:41.480 you know, um, the humanistic psychology movement was in the fifties and sixties, um, a cadet of

00:53:47.720 psychologists who were unconvinced that we were telling the full story about, uh, humanity and

00:53:54.040 humans through the Freud approach or the behaviorism approach. They felt like we were neglecting higher

00:53:59.560 principles. Um, they felt like we were neglecting, um, the investigation of the whole person as a

00:54:05.320 system. Right. Freud focused, Freud focused a lot as an MD on psychopathology, on mental illness.

00:54:12.200 Exactly. And the behaviorists took everything that was related to consciousness and, and

00:54:16.920 subjective experience completely off the table. And, and we should point out that that had utility,

00:54:21.880 both those movements had tremendous utility, but there was this lacunae, let's say that the

00:54:26.600 existentialists addressed in the fifties, the existential psychologists, and then the humanists in the

00:54:31.960 sixties. By the way, I loved your lecture, uh, about Carl Rogers and the phenomenology approach.

00:54:37.320 So that was, that was really cool. I liked that. Um, yeah. So in a big way, you know,

00:54:42.840 there was still a respect for those prior approaches. They weren't saying they were,

00:54:46.120 they were complete shit, you know, like Abraham Maslow did really rigorous, great work in grad school

00:54:52.280 and rats, you know, you, you're looking at reaction time tasks, but he got bored with it and he felt that

00:54:57.560 there was more to the story of humanity. So I guess what really captured my interest is this notion

00:55:03.400 of studying the whole system, um, the whole person and how all the parts work together. Um, I think

00:55:09.560 that we both agree in our philosophy that nothing is actually objective or absolutely good or bad. No,

00:55:16.760 no, no psychological trait. It's, it depends how it's integrated into the system. You know,

00:55:21.800 this is why I don't, I I'm critical of the distinction between positive and negative emotions.

00:55:25.880 Like we can absolutely classify which emotions are positive and absolutely classify which ones are

00:55:30.680 negative as opposed to just, we have comfortable emotions. You have uncomfortable emotions. I mean,

00:55:35.240 it's, you can have the experience, but then we put the label on top of the experience. Um, you,

00:55:39.560 you've, you've said, uh, you've had some good lectures about the potential benefits of integrating your

00:55:44.360 anger or, um, or integrating. I mean, anything you integrate in a healthy way into the whole system,

00:55:50.200 um, can be beneficial. You know, that's the crucial issue there, right? Yeah.

00:55:54.280 It's the crucial issue that the existentialists and the human humanists and Jung as well,

00:55:58.520 as far as I'm concerned, and you concentrated on, which is, well, when you're talking about

00:56:04.360 integration, let's say, and, and so the psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic approach,

00:56:09.960 even Freudian approach would be to uncover something repressed and to bring it into the

00:56:14.200 whole personality. Well, what exactly do you mean by the whole personality and what do you mean by

00:56:19.960 integrated? And so the humanists for me, the humanists were the entry point to the answer

00:56:25.640 to that question. Absolutely. So, so, okay. So, so you, you're, you're updating Maslow with your,

00:56:32.200 with this new book. And, and so walk us through what you were thinking.

00:56:36.680 In one way I'm updating Maslow, but in another way, I'm actually setting the record straight about

00:56:41.480 Maslow because there's so many misconceptions and things he never even said. So, first of all,

00:56:46.760 he never drew a pyramid there. There's none of his papers. Did he ever draw a pyramid, um,

00:56:53.320 to represent his hierarchy of needs? Um, he didn't even really think of it in that way.

00:56:57.800 In fact, I was talking to someone who knew him personally, and there's a story where he was

00:57:01.240 having lunch with him and he saw on the dollar bill or I think it's the dollar bill where there's

00:57:05.640 a pyramid. Uh, he looked at me and he said, I hate that fucking pyramid. So, so look, he didn't,

00:57:11.720 he didn't like, that's not how he thought about it. He actually says in his writings, he said,

00:57:15.160 I would like to present my integrated hierarchy of, uh, human needs. And he, he was very clear

00:57:21.880 to call it integrated. Um, he, he said it's, it's every single need rests very carefully upon

00:57:28.520 the lower need. But just because life is not like a video game where you reach one level of needs and

00:57:34.280 then like some voice from above is like, congrats, you've unlocked the next level. And then you never

00:57:38.360 go back to the prior level. Um, integration fundamentally means that every single higher

00:57:44.280 need depends on the lower need that came before. It depends on it in a very important way that gets

00:57:52.280 missed by the way it's often represented in, um, moderns, even psychology textbooks. Like we,

00:57:57.640 I really think we need to update the psychology textbooks about this.

00:58:00.440 Yeah. Well, lots of great thinkers are poorly represented, um, by their low order,

00:58:07.320 their low resolution representation. I mean, Piaget, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist,

00:58:12.920 who's basically taught as a stage theorist, which was a tiny fraction of what he did.

00:58:18.280 And certainly not the most important thing. He was fundamentally interested in reconciling the

00:58:23.720 distinction between religion and science. And I never heard hide nor hair of that till I started

00:58:29.240 reading Piaget while the translations, I couldn't read it in the French original.

00:58:33.240 So, you know, the ideas of creative geniuses are filtered through the, through lesser minds when

00:58:40.120 they're taught and, and much of what's complex and interesting disappears. And what's simplified

00:58:47.080 is what remains. C'est la vie. Um, so do you want to walk us through a bit, the theory and then

00:58:53.320 what you've done with it and what, what it's done for you and what you think it can do for other people?

00:58:58.040 Absolutely. And, um, I'll also bring in how some of your own work influenced it. So, okay. So the

00:59:05.080 hierarchy of needs, um, as, as Maslow originally proposes that we have a hierarchy of prepotency,

00:59:10.120 and that's the word he used, prepotency, um, various motivations that given certain, um,

00:59:16.280 deprivations, um, cause our entire consciousness to be, um, very narrowed down to those, to fit to,

00:59:22.840 to paying attention to those things. So if we, if we severely lack food, our consciousness,

00:59:27.160 um, sees everything as, as a potential source of food. If we severely, um, are deficient with our,

00:59:33.960 um, with our connections and belonging, um, he says we had, we show a very kind of needing love.

00:59:39.800 So everyone looks like, um, everyone's utility value is, is to satisfy this hole in ourselves of,

00:59:46.120 of connection, of our loneliness. Um, same with self-esteem needs. If we're severely deprived of any

00:59:51.880 opportunities for mastery or esteem from others, we become very needy and demand respect. But he

00:59:58.920 argued that the deprivation realm of human existence can be distinguished from the being

01:00:03.560 realm of human existence. He said, once we can, it's like putting on a clear, clear, uh,

01:00:08.920 set of glasses for the first time when you've, when you've only been seeing very, um, very, uh,

01:00:14.120 unclear, uh, glasses. Um, and when you put on the clear glasses and you enter the being realm or the

01:00:19.720 growth realm of human existence, you no longer, um, demand for the world to conform to your

01:00:27.080 deprivations. You start to see the world on its own terms. You start to see the world, um, and you,

01:00:32.840 and even dare I say, admire, and this is where transcendence starts to come into play, um, admire

01:00:38.360 and love people for who they are independently of you, independently of, of their utility value for

01:00:44.440 your own deprivations. So to me, I thought that was the most important distinction in Maslow's

01:00:49.800 theory that had been lost. Okay. So let, let me ask you a question there. So there's two distinctions

01:00:55.640 that are being made and they seem to be conflated to some degree in Maslow, but maybe that's a

01:01:01.400 misunderstanding on my part. There's an implication at least that the, the higher, uh, the more transcendent

01:01:09.880 values or perceptions make themselves manifest once the deprivation states have been taken care of.

01:01:17.240 That's sort of the, but then, but there's a conceptual distinction that's equally important,

01:01:22.360 which is that there are deprivation motivated, uh, perceptions, motivations, and actions, but there's

01:01:29.160 another class as well, and those should be separated. And I have more trouble with the first presumption

01:01:34.200 than the second, because, well, when, when I was think, thinking through Maslow, for example, in,

01:01:41.400 in the courses I've taught on existentialism and humanism, um, Solzhenitsyn talk, who's a great

01:01:50.120 existential psychologist, as far as I'm concerned, talked about people who were in the prison camps in

01:01:55.960 Russia who were starving and deprived in multiple different ways. And Frankel did the same thing with

01:02:02.120 regards to the concentration camps in, in Nazi Germany. And he describes in painful story after

01:02:07.800 story, people turning to what Maslow would consider being needs in the midst of severe deprivation and

01:02:15.800 finding sustenance and profound sustenance there. So he talked, for example, about a group of

01:02:21.480 intellectuals who were starving to death in a work camp, who had a weekly seminar where they discussed

01:02:28.200 their specific academic, um, specializations. And, you know, it shrunk over time as each of them died

01:02:35.080 of malnutrition. But, and, and Solzhenitsyn produces a very powerful critique of the idea that

01:02:44.040 the being realm, let's say, in Maslow's terms, can only be accessed once the deprivation realm has been

01:02:51.240 taken care of. And, well, well, I found that an interesting argument, to say the least.

01:03:01.000 It's, it's very interesting, but I would modify and say, um, at least, you know, and this, this is

01:03:06.120 where maybe what Maslow said and what Scott Barry Kaufman is saying might start to diverge. Because, um,

01:03:12.200 what I tried to argue in this book is that it's all about the, um, how, how those deprivations are

01:03:18.120 integrated, not the fact that they're gone. Um, so for instance, in, in my chapter on purpose,

01:03:23.240 I cover what I call the Hitler problem. And that's the, the, you know, the, the very, I think,

01:03:27.800 a reasonable question, did Hitler have a higher purpose, you know, and, you know, and what would

01:03:31.420 that even mean in the, in the whole hierarchy of needs model, considering that I put purpose as a

01:03:35.820 higher need in the growth realm, you know, or am I saying that Hitler entered the being a growth

01:03:40.420 realm? And the way I resolved that is that I argued that, you know, some of the most, um,

01:03:46.440 pro social or, um, or most, uh, uh, positive aspects of, uh, manifestations of the higher

01:03:52.420 need of purpose occur when one's sufferings, um, are integrated into, uh, one's higher order

01:03:59.160 structure, but it's, it's not the only thing that's driving their whole system. So I just

01:04:04.080 really do like viewing this from a whole system perspective, because, um, once you can integrate

01:04:08.720 kind of this, um, this suffering you had in this, the anger you have for the suffering, but

01:04:13.600 you integrate that with this need for exploration, as I talk about as a growth need, as well as,

01:04:19.560 um, be love, which is, uh, Maslow called it be love, love for the, just like humanitarian

01:04:24.180 sort of concern, or as, um, Alfred Adler called it, uh, get shoot on the Freud. I can never pronounce

01:04:29.480 the word, but you know, social interest. If once we have a higher level integration of all these

01:04:34.280 things, I think you get something much better as, um, the sum of the parts than any of the parts

01:04:39.200 themselves. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, and, well, let's, we can, we, we can also walk,

01:04:44.960 walk through this argument in some more detail. I mean, it, it's obviously the case that deprivation

01:04:50.460 can reach a point where nothing but the deprivation is salient. I mean, if you're in enough pain,

01:04:56.640 for example, if you're hungry enough, et cetera, et cetera. So there's limit conditions that, that,

01:05:01.720 that make up these deprivation states that skew everything. Um, if you're dying of thirst,

01:05:08.620 for example, you're not going to in all likelihood engage in a philosophical conversation,

01:05:13.340 right? So at some point deprivation takes the reins completely, but then there's that one of the

01:05:19.600 dangers in, in Maslow's approach, as far as I was concerned, and this is partly why the writings of

01:05:25.100 Theodore Delrimple have been so interesting to me because Delrimple talks, he worked a lot in

01:05:30.420 really in the, what would you say, the dispossessed, he worked a lot among the dispossessed class in

01:05:37.220 inner city, uh, British cities, in the, in the innermost confines of, of British cities, and he described

01:05:45.180 a culture of, of poverty that characterized the, the dispossessed, and they weren't poor so much

01:05:52.800 if you thought about poverty in terms of absolute deprivation. So he had worked in Africa as well among

01:05:59.440 people who were by any reasonable standard, much more materially deprived than the members of the

01:06:04.920 population he was addressing in the psychiatric practice. But he, his fundamental diagnosis was that

01:06:11.220 the multi-generational poverty cycle, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, antisocial behavior that

01:06:18.260 he saw was a consequence of a profound philosophical disequilibrium that was the primary agent that was

01:06:28.340 driving all this rather than something that could be addressed, for example, by attending, by social

01:06:34.880 attention being paid, say to, um, you know, like a guaranteed basic income or something like that. And so

01:06:41.660 there are, I mean, getting this straight is really of crucial importance and it is really complicated.

01:06:47.740 So, and Maslow always felt to me, look, I learned a lot from the humanists and I would say they were

01:06:54.420 an entry point to me into the domain of practical philosophical slash religious thinking. The humanists

01:07:03.000 offered within the field of psychology, spirituality for people, for atheists. That's what it looked like

01:07:09.020 to me. And, and I'm not denigrating that. I, I say that with all due respect and they, they did

01:07:15.600 introduce spirituality, let's say back into this, into the scientific community among psychologists.

01:07:22.320 So that was extremely attractive to me. And.

01:07:26.180 Well, let me tell you how I tested my model empirically, because I published a paper, um,

01:07:31.200 where I attempted to integrate, um, this theory into modern day personality psychology. And this is where you,

01:07:36.580 you come in quite frankly, and your own ideas and work. So I had a, um, hypothesis, um, which Colin

01:07:43.160 thought was a good hypothesis and that I should run with it, that, um, the deprivation and, and, uh,

01:07:48.140 grow and being realm that Maslow talked about would map on to stability and plasticity in the big five,

01:07:53.860 that, that these two higher order factors of the big. And, and I, and I found that to be the case. I

01:08:00.280 actually developed and validated a psychometric scale of all the self-actualization

01:08:05.580 characteristics that Maslow wrote about. And I, I, I found that I could validate 10 out of the 17

01:08:10.540 that he mentioned, and that the 10 were just, um, really strongly positively correlated with, uh,

01:08:16.960 with plasticity. And.

01:08:18.300 Okay. So let's take that apart for a sec for everyone. So work done in my lab, again,

01:08:23.020 by Colin de Young and other people had looked at two factor solutions too, but, um, we showed that

01:08:29.680 agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness, neuroticism reversed and conscientiousness

01:08:36.900 together seemed to make a super factor. So they were somewhat correlated and so did extroversion

01:08:43.760 and openness. And Colin in particular has gone off and developed all of that into a theory with

01:08:48.480 neuroscientific, uh, underpinnings. And, um, he started doing that in, at the university of Toronto

01:08:54.080 has considered continued for the last, it's gotta be near 20 years. And so we found stability. We

01:09:00.200 called the super factor stability and plasticity for a variety of reasons, but, and so you just said

01:09:05.860 that you mapped stability onto the deprivation realm and, and, and, and, and plasticity into the

01:09:14.180 being realm.

01:09:14.860 Being realm. And I think that, um, that's how, that's my modern day flavor on this, like integrating

01:09:20.780 it with personality psychology. Cause at the, at the end of the day, I'm, I'm really an individual

01:09:24.440 difference. That's my focus is individual differences, cognitive science and personality.

01:09:28.960 And I think that the, um, optimal and what I argued in this paper is that the optimal cybernetic

01:09:34.700 system is one that has a deep integration of both stability and plasticity. So it really,

01:09:39.200 it really isn't an either or question. It's a matter of, do you have the skills that allow you to

01:09:45.200 resist distractions against your higher order goals? And do you have the flexibility to change

01:09:50.400 course when it's no longer, um, serving those higher order goals? And, and that, that's how

01:09:54.920 I tried to integrate Maslow's theory with modern day, uh, cybernetic and personality theory.

01:09:59.780 So I've been, you tell me what you think about this. I've been working on the presupposition that

01:10:05.720 that balance is, it manifests itself as something that's analogous to Csikszentmihalyi's flow.

01:10:14.080 Although I think it's more like it's, it's act, if it's active engagement and immerse,

01:10:19.160 you experience that when, well, when you're having a good conversation, let's say, and

01:10:24.640 you're not attending to anything, but the ideas that are being bandied back and forth,

01:10:28.900 you're not aware of the broader context. You're not aware of the flow of time.

01:10:32.780 You're focused and engaged and interested in what's happening. And that happens as far as I'm concerned,

01:10:40.260 when maximal, when optimal information flow has been established. So you, you want to maintain

01:10:47.460 the integrity of your current, um, perceptual frameworks, essentially your current interpretive

01:10:53.940 frameworks, you don't want them to fall apart, but because they're limited, because you're limited,

01:10:59.920 they have to continually transform at some rate and expand. So as you become more competent and as

01:11:07.300 the world changes around you. So it seems to me that the instinct of meaning is the manifestation

01:11:12.960 of an internal signal that you've optimized information flow for your particular nervous

01:11:19.000 system. So you're not getting more information than you can stand. So it's not knocking you into

01:11:25.100 uncertainty related anxiety, but you are incorporating information at a rate that's optimal with regards to

01:11:34.540 your continued adaptation and growth.

01:11:36.440 Well, I love that. I absolutely love that.

01:11:38.960 Well, I think that manifests itself as the sense of meaning. And I think that's what music produces.

01:11:44.660 It's an analogy. When you, when you listen to music and you're deeply engaged, you get an analog of that.

01:11:51.640 And, and, and it's like a model. It's like, this is what your life could be like this musical

01:11:56.440 beauty. If you were in the right place at the right time all the time,

01:12:02.160 which is what you should, should, should, could strive to attain. And there's something that,

01:12:09.820 there's something that never runs out about that idea.

01:12:14.300 I would love that. And just add, um, is it worth distinguishing between the kind of meaning that is

01:12:20.200 pre-wired, uh, you know, programmed through the course of human evolution that are universal,

01:12:25.340 universal, uh, forms of meaning that all of us would agree, give us meaning versus, um, individualistic,

01:12:32.000 uh, forms of meaning that maybe touch more of our unique traits and motivations.

01:12:35.840 Well, I would say that's probably a matter of level of integration, which is that the more universal

01:12:41.480 the trait, the, the meaning experience is, the more it's related to an emergent integration.

01:12:48.040 Hmm. So, so, you know, as you, as you already pointed out, we all differ in our temperaments

01:12:55.040 and quite substantively. And so there are going to be things that we find particularly interesting

01:13:01.180 that other people won't find interesting. Um, that might determine something like the choice

01:13:06.240 of our careers. It's not trivial, these differences there, but, but as you integrate,

01:13:11.260 it makes sense that as you integrate, the thing that's integrated becomes more similar across diverse

01:13:17.160 places. I mean, how could it be otherwise? And that's where I think you get into the realm of

01:13:21.680 universal human values. And I think they are, they're emergent properties of reciprocal games,

01:13:27.820 something like that. And so let me, let me tell you something interesting. You tell me what you think

01:13:32.040 about this. So, you know, I've been very, uh, what would you say, opposed to the idea that

01:13:39.160 the typical hierarchical social structure is based on power. You know, there's an, there's a

01:13:45.860 political argument going on everywhere now. And at the extremes, the claim is something

01:13:50.780 like, well, hierarchical, the hierarchical structures that characterize the West, that

01:13:56.540 characterize capitalism, or maybe that just characterize the West in general are, um, based

01:14:03.160 on power. Okay. So first I talked to the, uh, Richard Trombley this week, who's one of the

01:14:11.360 world's leading authority on the development of aggression in human beings. Okay. So what he

01:14:14.820 showed quite clearly is that aggression is there right at the beginning. So it's one of these built

01:14:18.900 in motivational systems that you already talked about. The most aggressive age is two. If you group

01:14:27.460 two-year-olds together, the, the probability of kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing is higher than

01:14:33.800 it is if you group any other age together. And that declines precipitously with socialization.

01:14:41.660 Okay. So the general trend is from aggression to, to less aggression. And then you can differentiate

01:14:48.200 the aggressive kids into three groups, the kid, the two-year-olds into three groups, those who are

01:14:53.840 never aggressive, even at two, 30% of the human population, those who are aggressive sporadically,

01:14:59.840 50%, and 17% who are chronically aggressive. It's from that category. If those kids aren't

01:15:08.260 socialized into peace over the course of their developmental history, most particularly by the

01:15:13.920 age of four, they're the long-term permanent offenders. Okay. So, but what's interesting about

01:15:19.640 this and crucial, I believe is that the developmental trend across aggression categories is for less

01:15:26.220 aggression. Aggression isn't a, and therefore power, is not a stable strategy for negotiating success in

01:15:34.500 human hierarchies. And it's more like, it's more something like reciprocity. It's, and we need to

01:15:41.000 recognize that because it really is the case that you're much more likely to be successful if you're

01:15:46.440 productive and reciprocal. And I think that's an emergent, that emerges out of hierarchical organization.

01:15:52.880 And I think it's the same across cultures, you know, with variation, but that's a universal

01:15:57.440 human truth. And I think we're adapted to it. And we recognize that in others when we see it.

01:16:03.780 And that produces awe when we really see it. That person's hyperproductive. They're hypergenerous.

01:16:10.400 I want to be like that person. So competent and relational. Would those be synonyms for those two

01:16:16.660 words? Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's competent and generous. What a combination. And you know,

01:16:22.440 the thing about generosity is that it allows competent people to store the fruits of their

01:16:27.560 labor. Right? I mean, if you and I collaborate, and I'm generous in our collaboration, then you're

01:16:34.000 going to collaborate with me again, maybe sometime down the road when I really need it, and vice versa.

01:16:39.940 You know, when I was struck, I talked to Jocko Willink two weeks ago, and Jocko's this like

01:16:43.980 hypermasculine warrior type of character. You know, he's Navy SEAL, and very intimidating physically

01:16:49.980 and psychologically. And he told me in the naval SEAL training, for example, that the primary dictum

01:16:56.040 is you have your buddy's back. It isn't biggest, meanest ape wins. And that doesn't even work for

01:17:02.940 chimpanzees, as Franz DeWall has shown. So there is an ethic, man. And one of the things I liked about

01:17:10.120 The Humanist and about your book is that, you know, you're pointing out that there is this integrative

01:17:13.960 tendency that is associated with values, and that there's something universal about it. It's like,

01:17:20.200 yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. And if I may go into a territory that may seem

01:17:25.220 completely unrelated, but I don't think it is. I wrote a book called Mating Intelligence Unleashed

01:17:30.240 that I co-authored with an evolutionary psychologist, Glenn Gere. But we found that the male that was most

01:17:36.200 attractive to women was the tender defender. And I feel like you're kind of describing a tender defender.

01:17:41.580 I really want to talk to you about that. So okay, so I've been involved in an email exchange with

01:17:50.060 Richard Dawkins. And I asked him to come on my podcast. And he wrote back very politely and in

01:17:57.000 a detailed letter, pointing out why I wanted to talk to him, which was very surprising to me. I said I

01:18:03.020 wanted to talk to him about sex selection, particularly. And then he identified a paragraph

01:18:08.280 from a talk I did with Sam Harris that nailed exactly why I wanted to talk with Dawkins. Okay,

01:18:14.000 so Dawkins is the blind watchmaker guy, right? And he's anti-teleological to the core, and also

01:18:20.760 anti-religious, etc. And people know about Dawkins, and Dawkins is an admirable person intellectually.

01:18:27.800 But the evolutionary psychologists are not taking the issue of sexual selection seriously enough in

01:18:34.680 relationship to value. So let's take what you just said. All right, so imagine this, you tell me if

01:18:40.960 you think this is wrong, because I really want to know if it's wrong. Men, women do this too. But

01:18:46.060 we're going to sex differentiate for for the time being. Men organize hierarchies around tasks.

01:18:53.700 They want to get something done. Okay, and it's something that everyone in the group wants to get

01:18:58.220 done. And so as soon as they aggregate themselves towards the task, a hierarchy of competence emerges,

01:19:03.780 because there's individual differences. And if the group's functional, they let the guys who are

01:19:08.680 better at the task rise to the top. Okay, now imagine that across tasks, there's a proclivity for some men

01:19:18.760 to rise and others not to. And those would be men who are competent and generous across tasks. And so

01:19:27.060 they're more likely to emerge as successful in the domain of task-related hierarchies.

01:19:32.460 All right. Now we know that women are, what's the word? They mate across and up hierarchies.

01:19:41.680 It's one of the... Relational?

01:19:44.080 Yes, they're men mate across and down hierarchies. Women mate across and up. And that's obvious

01:19:51.240 cross-culturally. It's ameliorated to some degree in countries like the Scandinavian countries,

01:19:58.000 but it's there cross-culturally. They like men who are a bit older, and they like men who are a bit

01:20:02.520 above them in the hierarchical game, let's say. Men vote on who the most valid man is, and women

01:20:12.080 peel from the top. And that value game drives evolution. It's not random. It's not random at all.

01:20:20.440 And so that's, you said tender defender. And I do think that's generous productivity. And so

01:20:28.760 not only... We're selected for that, and sexual selection specifies that even more completely,

01:20:34.560 and intensely, intensely. So men can game that by displaying trappings of wealth. And like the

01:20:43.220 pickup artist types, they mimic tender defender. And they can fool women that way. But women,

01:20:49.440 you know, by and large, are looking for cues for exactly that. Competence and the capacity to

01:20:54.880 protect. The ability to protect. What else would you want for your children? You know, you...

01:21:01.300 Yeah, I mean, what you're saying links so much to Zahavi's handicap principle in evolutionary

01:21:06.120 psychology. You know, that you need honest, reliable signals. Do... Like, women are pretty

01:21:14.960 smart at seeing bullshit. You know, like... Well, they're... The survival of their children depends

01:21:23.200 on it. That's why. So they're extremely smart at it, as they should be. And like, I don't believe

01:21:29.060 that it's a misreading of the evolutionary literature to point out that one of the reasons that we have

01:21:35.060 diverged so rapidly from our common ancestor with chimps, chimps seem much more similar to that

01:21:42.380 common ancestor than we are, is because chimp females are non-selective maters, whereas human

01:21:48.340 females are highly selective maters. And, you know, this manifests itself in... If you look at these

01:21:54.040 charts, they're quite comical in some sense. If you look at how men rate women on a typical dating site,

01:22:01.020 it's pretty much a normal distribution. The average woman gets an average rating and,

01:22:04.560 you know, the 9 out of 10 gets a 9 and so forth. It's distributed as you would expect,

01:22:10.520 but it's skewed way to the left for men. Like, 60% of men are like a 4 or lower. And so even in just

01:22:18.560 instantaneous ratings of attractiveness, there's... Exactly. Sex differences.

01:22:24.160 You put it very well, though, when you said our survival or species literally depends on it.

01:22:31.080 I love it. I just want to double click on that. Okay. So then the question is, and this ties into

01:22:35.580 this humanist idea, what is it that we're aiming at? Well, part of that is, well, what are the elements

01:22:43.120 that make up competence and generosity? Well, we know what competence is made out of? IQ and conscientiousness.

01:22:49.260 That's a huge chunk of it. So in general problem-solving capability, that's IQ.

01:22:54.220 Consciousness is diligent application of that. Okay. So then you pair that with generosity.

01:23:00.980 And openness, dare I say. And openness to experience, dare I say.

01:23:05.820 Yes. Well, there'd be a niche there because that's where you get creative types and they

01:23:11.720 can be radically... I think of creativity as a high-risk, high-return game. You're highly likely

01:23:16.540 to fail, but... I'm just linking that to Jeffrey Miller's hypothesis about creativity being a

01:23:22.800 reliable indicator of genetic mutation load, which is why it would be so sexy from the selector

01:23:30.100 point of view. Oh, you'd have to elaborate out that a bit because this was also the case

01:23:34.600 for all sorts of other species, right? Bowerbirds, for example. Exactly. And even fish, for God's

01:23:40.720 sake. Have you ever seen those sculptures that pufferfish make at the bottom of the ocean floor?

01:23:44.880 It's incredible. It's very aesthetic. Mind-boggling. And they're beautiful.

01:23:48.220 Beautiful. And they're complicated. And they take a lot of work. It's like birds select

01:23:52.860 highly for creativity in many cases. And so you see this emerge out of an evolutionary process

01:23:59.360 in species that are quite distant from ours. It points to something underneath that's common,

01:24:05.320 you know, even... It's common across creative fish and creative people. It's quite the damn gap.

01:24:12.140 Well, this goes back to like a lot of things we're saying because like human

01:24:14.860 human intelligence, human creativity is so complex, it's very hard to fake. It goes back

01:24:19.780 to like what I said earlier, you can't just accidentally get like a 170 IQ, even though

01:24:23.680 there's lots of reasons why maybe a lower IQ is misrepresenting your IQ. But, you know,

01:24:29.420 this does relate to the fact that, you know, reliable indicators of these things are important

01:24:34.540 from a sexual selection point of view, as well as other points of view.

01:24:37.360 Well, that's crucial, you know, because the blind watchmaker types, they say, well,

01:24:40.860 evolution is just a random process. And there's unfortunate political and philosophical implications

01:24:47.580 that instantly emerge from that. Everything's bloody pointless. There's no direction. There's

01:24:51.900 no such thing as real value. It's like, wait a sec, wait a sec. There's random mutation on the

01:24:58.020 creativity production side. So that life capitalizes on chance as an extra domain of creative production.

01:25:06.320 Just, and you see that in creative thought in people too, because there's a kind of a randomness

01:25:11.320 about creative thinking. You open up the gates and let ideas mate, you know, promiscuously, let's say.

01:25:18.420 And so there, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that the selection mechanism is random,

01:25:24.120 especially when you add in sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce consciousness,

01:25:28.640 randomness, I think you introduce sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce sexual selection,

01:25:35.300 you introduce directionality and so much for randomness. You can't derive.

01:25:42.040 So the, the people that, the processes that make the watch might be random. Although, you know,

01:25:48.300 what's happening down at the genetic level is pretty damn complex. And even bacteria exchange DNA with

01:25:53.760 each other. So there's a plenty of play down at the genetic level, as well as room for mutation.

01:25:59.820 But once you get up to the selection level, like to me, conscious choice is the fundamental

01:26:05.020 determinant of evolutionary progress. And I can't, and look, even Darwin, because Darwin was a genius,

01:26:12.940 he stressed sexual selection much as natural selection, but biologists for a hundred years never

01:26:19.300 paid any attention to that. And no wonder he like, it's revolutionary.

01:26:24.140 To be fair, I do think Jeffrey Miller, to be fair, Jeffrey Miller, I think he did a good job in his

01:26:27.760 book, The Mating Mind, kind of bringing to consciousness of the fact that creativity of may

01:26:35.980 have evolved due to sexual selection processes, you know, itself, and as well as human consciousness

01:26:41.900 itself may have evolved due to sexual selection.

01:26:44.080 Look, I mean, look, plenty of biologists have been assessing sexual selection in the last 30 years,

01:26:49.820 but it was, it was under stress to a huge degree for a long, long time. And it is a game changer,

01:26:56.080 because sexual selection among human beings, I think, is more important determinant of,

01:27:02.040 of successful reproduction than natural selection. I mean, they're the same at some level,

01:27:07.420 women are acting as the gatekeepers, and so they are natural selection in some sense.

01:27:13.040 But, but how can you deny the role of conscious directionality in that? And, and I don't see

01:27:20.240 flaws in my reasoning. I mean, it is the case that men arrange hierarchies around competence

01:27:26.900 and generosity. Fundamentally, it's not power. Even bloody chimps don't use power. You know,

01:27:33.720 they, baboons, they're a bit of a different story, but power is too unstable. And so,

01:27:39.240 and I think it's of advantage to men to elect men, even though that gives some men a wider range of

01:27:47.640 mating opportunities, because the net benefit of enhanced productivity, especially when coupled

01:27:53.400 with generosity is so high that the downside, you know, of the hierarchical ranking is trivial in

01:27:59.420 comparison. You want the best warrior leading your raiding party, obviously.

01:28:03.660 I mean, we want the best person in power, whether it's a man or woman, right? I mean,

01:28:09.040 we obviously want, we want, you know, a really competent woman in power as well.

01:28:13.020 Of course we, and we, and men select competence in women too, but there's differential selection

01:28:19.060 to some degree, because men will mate across and down, whereas women mate across and up.

01:28:24.400 Yeah. So, the men aren't putting the same selection pressure on those attributes of femininity that

01:28:30.920 women are putting on men. Men put their own attributes on. I'm not saying, like, youth,

01:28:37.120 for example, is a tremendous determinant. I think you're saying a lot of really

01:28:40.820 stimulating things. I'm trying to wonder, is there a sex difference? I'm known for that.

01:28:44.940 Do you think, no, I mean, you're stimulating my head in a million directions, but do you think that

01:28:48.540 there's a sex difference in that, do you think men are more likely to abuse positions of power

01:28:54.000 when they're in power, as opposed to women? Has that ever been studied?

01:28:57.260 No, I think there's actually data showing the reverse.

01:29:00.360 Very interesting. I'm curious to see data on that.

01:29:02.900 Yeah. Unfortunately, and I don't have this at hand, there isn't research going on into

01:29:08.840 Machiavellianism among status-achieving women, and some of that's done at UBC. And I can't give

01:29:15.540 you the details because I just came across it. I'm just running it. You know, I'm just starting

01:29:19.920 to process it. But no, I don't think men are more likely to abuse power. I also think it's also

01:29:25.280 mostly, as a general rule, it's really counterproductive. I want to ask you something

01:29:31.000 too. Tell me what you think about this. So, in terms of deep pleasure that's associated with

01:29:37.720 higher order values, one of the things that I've noticed about extremely competent people

01:29:45.040 in positions of authority and productivity is the delight that they take in mentoring.

01:29:54.520 And I don't know what it's like in your personal experience, but my experience has been that

01:29:59.580 there isn't anything that's more rewarding than that.

01:30:03.620 Absolutely.

01:30:04.060 All things considered. Do you think that's right? Well, think about what that means for the emergence

01:30:08.860 of value, you know, as a biological idea. If there's something unbelievably pleasurable about

01:30:15.220 finding someone competent and of high moral caliber, let's say, and opening doors to them

01:30:22.300 and then watching them progress.

01:30:24.440 You know, Jordan, that gets to the heart of my whole project of this book of Transcend.

01:30:29.840 Right. Well, that's why I'm bringing it up.

01:30:31.440 That's it. That's it. Is I want people to, you know, I want to be able to spot the potential

01:30:38.240 in people that they don't even see in themselves. To me, that's special.

01:30:42.260 Right. You know, I agree. I agree. I don't think there's anything more. Look, I was talking

01:30:47.140 to this kid. He was 27. He interviewed me a couple of days ago. And he was this, he worked

01:30:53.420 in nightclubs for years. He's an attractive guy, charismatic guy. And so, you know, from the

01:30:58.800 perspective of young men who aren't successful in their life, he was doing just fine because

01:31:04.760 he was charismatic and attractive and he had a whole nightclub life thing going. And so

01:31:08.560 he'd kind of mastered that. But he started a podcast and started to pay very careful attention

01:31:14.240 to what he was saying. And it's a human development podcast. And now he's getting letters from people

01:31:19.280 who are saying, man, you know, you're really helping me out. It's really making a difference

01:31:23.380 to my life. And he told me that successful as he was in his sort of man about town persona

01:31:30.020 and everything that granted him, it was nothing at all compared to the intrinsic pleasure that

01:31:35.420 he experiences when someone tells him that. And I think that's right. And that's, you think

01:31:44.120 there's almost nothing more antithetical to a power philosophy than that. It's like, no,

01:31:49.440 the pleasure in domination, which is resentful and bitter and cruel and short-lived and

01:31:58.000 counterproductive. That's nothing compared to the pleasure that you take, if you have any sense

01:32:05.880 in finding someone with some possibility and opening doors for them. They're not even in the

01:32:11.540 same universe. I'm going to go further and say, not just pleasure, but what greater source of meaning

01:32:16.040 in one's life? Yes. Could someone have meaning? The pleasure is secondary, but the meaning is so

01:32:22.680 deep that it... Pleasure is an epiphenomenon. Yeah. So yes, I mean, I see that in your book. I know

01:32:28.280 what you're up to, you know, I mean, you're trying to, like the humanists in general, and I found them

01:32:35.340 extremely helpful. Rogers was, reading Rogers was very useful to me and Maslow as well. It's like,

01:32:40.820 there's something within you that needs to be developed that's of great benefit to you and to

01:32:45.280 everyone else simultaneously. I liked Jung in the final analysis. I thought I put him at the top

01:32:52.000 of the panoply of psychologists of this type, because he took the study of transcendence into

01:32:58.320 the religious domain. And that seemed to me, well, I found much, much, much deeper comprehension of

01:33:08.800 its limits as a consequence of reading Jung. I tried to get there. I tried to get there in this

01:33:15.140 book to the spiritual level of transcendence. But I felt like I could only get there after

01:33:20.980 very carefully, in an integration way, put all the other pieces in place, because I think there's a lot

01:33:27.140 of pseudo-spirituality that you see these days. A lot of spiritual transcendence, where it's

01:33:32.960 transcendence built on a faulty foundation of basic needs, and actually being driven by

01:33:39.080 deprivation needs, like the need for esteem, for instance. You'll see a lot of these gurus

01:33:43.140 who really, it's their... You probably see that with ideology, too.

01:33:48.760 You know, it's driven by unrecognized deprivation. I see a lot of unresolved Freudian familial

01:33:55.640 psychopathology driving ideologically. I mean, the idea, for example, that the patriarchy is

01:34:02.180 authoritarian and fundamentally based on power. It's like, well, how was your relationship with

01:34:08.560 your father, just out of curiosity? Or have you ever had a positive relationship with any man in

01:34:14.280 your entire life, whether you're a man or a woman? It doesn't really matter.

01:34:17.180 Have you ever asked that question? Have you ever asked someone that question?

01:34:19.820 It's not a good way to make friends, Jordan.

01:34:21.720 Well, I generally don't hit people with questions like that if I see it. Because it's instantaneous

01:34:29.700 surgery, if you're accurate. And it's not... So I don't do that, but I see it.

01:34:34.920 I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it.

01:34:36.820 No, no. But it's definitely worth true consideration, because you've got to ask yourself,

01:34:41.720 well, why would you reduce your political theorizing to that particular unidimensional

01:34:47.400 proposition? And for me, well, and this is, again, partly why I like your book, and this line of work

01:34:54.540 in general, is like, no, no, what you don't understand is that functional human organizations

01:34:59.780 are actually predicated on they work way better for everyone if they encourage the manifestation of

01:35:07.180 the highest possible human values. And my experience, both in the academic world and in

01:35:13.560 the corporate world, is that companies that abide by those universal principles do much,

01:35:19.240 much better in every possible way. And that doesn't mean that, you know, I think when structures

01:35:25.940 deteriorate, they become dominated by people who play power games. That happens all the time. We have

01:35:30.800 to be awake to that. It happens all the time. But that doesn't mean that functional hierarchies have

01:35:36.480 that structure.

01:35:38.300 I agree. And I'm really deeply concerned about that. That's another topic. I mean, I feel like we're

01:35:42.540 trying, we're actually in real time integrating about 40 different threads. But I think that that

01:35:47.860 is the power games going on in society right now is something that deeply, deeply concerns me. I feel

01:35:53.560 like even, I think, I feel like I've learned in the past couple of years that I'm too naive

01:35:58.120 as a human. And I've been trying to actually improve that because I tend to treat everyone I

01:36:05.040 meet in good faith. I mean, I don't care who you are. Like, let's talk.

01:36:08.500 That can be courage, you know, like, because say it's naive to begin with. And then you get

01:36:14.200 walloped and you're no longer naive, but then you get cynical and bitter. And that's actually

01:36:17.860 improvement. But then you think, no, no cynicism, no bitterness. I'm going to open myself up again

01:36:24.500 and take the goddamn hits. And that's courage.

01:36:28.380 I feel like that's where I'm at right now, actually. I feel like that's where I'm at right

01:36:31.480 now. It's been a real transformation for me. A real, a real, uh, yeah, it's been a growth

01:36:36.000 journey. So what did you see? Okay. You said naivety. So what have you, why did you come

01:36:41.340 to that conclusion? I didn't know that, that sometimes, cause I'm a caring person and I'm

01:36:46.560 empathetic. So, um, some people I've started noticing that I would, uh, say things like

01:36:52.400 I would say research findings or things that I just am curious, just purely curious about.

01:36:56.920 And people would say, you know, that, that hurts. Like you shouldn't talk about that stuff

01:37:01.740 or, um, uh, or do you know that if, that some of this can cause damage to, uh, to, to minority

01:37:08.840 populations, et cetera. And I'm a caring person. So that really hits me in the gut because the last

01:37:14.580 thing I want to do is hurt a minority. I mean, I don't want to hurt a minority, anyone. Um, but

01:37:19.520 then I started to realize in some instances, um, definitely not all obviously, but in some

01:37:25.580 instances there was a power game being played that was outside of my level of comprehension

01:37:30.180 or outside my level of like, uh, of understanding that wasn't personal against me, but actually

01:37:37.060 there's just something being played out where, um, if you have a certain ideology, there are

01:37:42.560 certain word terms, buzzwords and things that you just, you just, that they're just off limits

01:37:47.580 from even bringing into a discussion. And I may have inadvertently sometimes like, it's

01:37:53.540 like I inadvertently tripwire things sometimes that are outside of my level.

01:37:56.860 There's so many tripwires that you, the game that people who are playing that game is playing

01:38:02.640 are playing is the laying of unavoidable tripwires. Cause it's a dominance game. And all I have

01:38:09.780 to do is put enough tripwires around you and you will definitely stumble across one of them.

01:38:13.880 But how's a caring person supposed to navigate tripwires? Like do you have advice for that?

01:38:18.740 How's a caring, compassionate human being possibly supposed to navigate tripwires? I should

01:38:24.080 say a compassionate person who also is committed to the truth. That's what I should say. How in the

01:38:28.500 world do we navigate the tripwires? You try to say things that you believe are true and you take

01:38:35.460 the consequences, you know, and you do it carefully and you pay attention, you pay attention. But I

01:38:41.080 would say more importantly, look, you, you have this podcast and I have a podcast and we're both

01:38:46.100 educators and in a, in a broad sense. And, and I believe that that's our ethical responsibility,

01:38:51.220 given our training and our, now our reach. It's like, well, the way I navigate that landscape is

01:38:56.740 I have conversations like this. They're better. And that's what we've got. When you're, when you're

01:39:03.660 trying to diminish malevolence, let's say, and ignorance, misunderstanding, willful or otherwise,

01:39:13.500 your best bet is to do something better and use that as a model. And that works. And I'm so

01:39:22.840 heartened by this. I can give you an example. So I've been working with this musician. His name is

01:39:28.260 Akira the Dawn. And he has taken quotes from my lectures, which I hope are meaningful and positive

01:39:36.620 and also not naive, I hope. And he's been putting them to music. And so he has this genre that he calls

01:39:44.020 meaning wave. And it's, it's not like it's a huge subculture, but it's, it numbers in the tens of

01:39:48.700 thousands. And he's had his success completely underground because no popular media ever touches

01:39:54.480 this. And you go on the websites, I was just interviewed by him, and he played some of the music and so

01:40:02.680 on. On YouTube, every single comment is unbelievably positive and uplifting in a non naive way. It's like

01:40:12.960 these people, they've cottoned on to this music, it's all positively oriented. And Akira is trying

01:40:17.480 very hard to make it that way without being naive. And all these people are doing something positive,

01:40:23.000 and they're all supporting each other in the comments. It's like you think, wow, that's a YouTube

01:40:26.740 comment list. And there's hundreds of them or 1000s of them. It's so wonderful to see that. And

01:40:32.340 so you we have these podcasts available to us now. So we can have these long form discussions,

01:40:38.940 right? So you and I, we have some shared expertise, we can talk about it as high level as we can possibly

01:40:45.960 manage, as honestly as we possibly can, and is engaging as possible a manner. And we can share

01:40:52.220 it with hundreds of 1000s of people. It's like, well, that's a great deal, man, it's great. And there's

01:40:58.360 something about this long form communication that just opens itself up to that.

01:41:02.340 And I've watched the comments, and people are happy about two things. They're happy about the

01:41:07.260 content. But they're happy about watching the process. Right? And the process is more important

01:41:14.860 than the content. So we can model that balance that you already talked about between plasticity

01:41:22.560 and stability, we can model that in real time. And that's completely an ethical issue, right? As long as

01:41:28.300 the more you and I can listen to each other and attend, and say what we believe to be true,

01:41:33.760 and dance, the better the bloody podcast is going to be.

01:41:38.420 Well, this is obviously what I live, I live for these kinds of conversations like we had today.

01:41:43.320 But I don't feel like everyone that I meet is coming at me with the same sort of, hey, let's have a

01:41:51.600 shared understanding of the truth here. Let's get let's try to let's let's talk about this and get

01:41:56.120 to some sort of generalizable principle. I just feel like a lot of conversations, it's there's a

01:42:04.100 different different energy in the conversation where it's a lot of people lecturing at each other,

01:42:09.280 but not having conversations with each other. And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how

01:42:13.600 when I get when I find myself in a lecturing at situation, it takes me out of my comfort zone so much

01:42:19.480 that I don't, it's almost like someone speaking Russian to me all of a sudden, and I don't

01:42:22.800 understand Russian, you know, well, I can tell you what I advise people to do under those circumstances.

01:42:29.180 The first is to realize that you are not where you think you are. You're somewhere else. That's

01:42:34.420 that feeling of being taken out. You're now you're somewhere else. You don't know where you are.

01:42:39.340 Okay, that's fine. You don't know where you are. What should you do? Shut up. That's the first thing.

01:42:45.680 Hmm. The person you're talking to is not interested in your opinion. They're interested in something

01:42:51.020 else. You don't know what it is, but it's not your opinion or your thoughts or your ideas. It's

01:42:55.180 something else. Then you watch, attend. It's like this is a mystery unfolding. If you attend, you'll see

01:43:02.900 what's happening, and you'll be able to react carefully. And but the crucial issue is to recognize

01:43:10.480 that you're not where you because what you'll try to do is impose your desire on the situation. You

01:43:16.940 want this to be the kind of conversation you just described. As long as you keep doing that, you

01:43:21.880 actually lose. That's something I learned at least in part from reading Jung in depth, because he talked

01:43:27.440 about how to handle yourself in conversations, where something had possessed the conversation,

01:43:36.060 essentially, something you didn't understand it possessed the conversation. Sometimes you're the

01:43:41.560 person you're talking to is possessed by something that wins if you argue, doesn't matter if you what

01:43:47.720 you argue about or what you say or what the fact is, if you engage in the argument, you lose. So

01:43:53.340 but having said that, I still think the better alternative, all things considered is just to do a better

01:44:00.400 thing. Not to have conversations like model something better. You know, I try so hard while

01:44:05.900 you're doing it. Yeah, I try so hard to model Carl Rogers notion of unconditional positive regard.

01:44:12.860 And I really try my I can honestly say I try my best to model that in my life. And it does often get

01:44:20.260 good results. Well, I can tell you what what I made of that as a clinician, because I was never I was

01:44:26.480 never comfortable with that idea. I didn't like it exactly. I knew there was something to it. I went I

01:44:32.060 didn't casually discard it. But it lacks differentiation. So if you're a clinician, and

01:44:39.880 someone comes to you, there's a bunch of things in their life that aren't right and aren't good. And

01:44:45.860 there's a bunch of things that could be promoted. And partly what you're doing is you're you're on the

01:44:50.860 side of the part of the person that wants to grow and develop. And you're not on the side of the

01:44:58.240 part that doesn't. And you can make that explicit and people are actually relieved by it. And you can

01:45:03.380 say, well, we're gonna I'm going to make mistakes and in my judgment, and please correct me. But so

01:45:08.480 the the contract, the therapeutic contract is, you're going to come and I learned some of this from

01:45:14.980 Rogers too. So so it came along with the unconditional positive regard. It's like, okay, you and I

01:45:20.820 are going to aim for what's better. We're going to mutually discuss what's better so that so that we

01:45:27.880 agree that that's better. And then we're going to strategize about how to go about doing it. And we're

01:45:33.500 going to test the strategies. But that's the deal. Another deal is part of that deal is you're going

01:45:38.640 to tell me what you actually think. And I'm going to tell you what I actually think that's that what

01:45:43.420 did he call that congruence and was congruence and honesty. And so, you know, if a client says

01:45:50.520 something that upsets me, I'll say, I just had this emotional reaction to what you said,

01:45:57.400 negative emotional reaction, we should take that apart. Or if I observe that in them, but

01:46:02.980 it's not unconditional positive regard, because there's judgment, there has to be you want to

01:46:09.980 keep the wheat and throw away the chaff. And you want to participate in that with with the people that

01:46:15.760 now you could say overarching that is a benevolent motivation. And that motivation is I want you to

01:46:23.600 be better. And I want you to be better so that everyone else is better. That's fine. But

01:46:28.120 Jung pointed out that every ideal is a judge by necessity. And so you have to wrestle with that

01:46:37.380 in relationship to unconditional positive regard.

01:46:39.760 You know, you just made me realize that I don't think I practice unconditional positive regard. I

01:46:43.920 think I practice unconditional regard. Let's just take the word positive out of there for a second.

01:46:48.820 Okay, because there's something I try to do with with any human who's in front of me. And it's,

01:46:53.480 it's unconditional, their past, their all the things that, you know, it's like, I don't even want to

01:46:59.960 know all the things that came before this conversation. You know, I want to see someone on my with my own

01:47:05.080 eyes freshly, you know, I don't want to be influenced by, you know, people will say, like, don't talk to

01:47:09.980 this person. Don't talk to that person. Do you know what I mean?

01:47:12.520 Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yep. Yep. Oh, that's why I was so fascinated by the ancient

01:47:17.680 Egyptian worship of the eye. And the Mesopotamians had it to their greatest god, Marduk, was had eyes all

01:47:24.980 the way around his head, and he spoke magic words. It's like, yes, that's exactly right. But what you're

01:47:30.700 you're saying is, that's attention. It's attention. I want to watch and see what's right in front of

01:47:37.940 me. And it's not thinking. It's something completely different than that. It's akin to what you just

01:47:43.280 described. I want to see what is. Say again? It's almost like, it's almost like a scientific

01:47:49.060 perspective. I want to see what is. I want to see what is. I don't want to be colored by...

01:47:55.000 So the Egyptians regarded Horus as the revitalizing agent. Osiris was the dead king, right? The worn

01:48:01.920 out state, the no longer functional ideology. And Horus was the eye. And it was the eye that was

01:48:09.000 the revitalizing source, because it saw what was, and replaced presumption with what was.

01:48:15.340 And it's sort of, it's there watching to see and being willing to see. And certainly that's an

01:48:20.700 integral part of any real scientific process. Absolutely.

01:48:25.000 Okay, so let's, let's cut off the unconditional word then as well. I try to practice regard.

01:48:30.180 Well, then there's two things. You've got, you've got this regard, which is focused attention. But

01:48:35.320 then the differentiation element is also crucially important. It's like, well, let's figure out what's

01:48:39.860 right here and what isn't. And let's have a bunch more of what's right, and not so much of what isn't.

01:48:45.960 And that should never be imposed. And that's something else I learned from Rogers is like,

01:48:49.600 you can't, you can't really give advice to, well, to anyone for that matter, but certainly not to

01:48:55.460 therapy, to clinical clients. They have to be fully bought in for it to work. So imposing it isn't

01:49:01.760 going to help. Absolutely. You can't, and you can't rip off the defense mechanisms. You can't rip them

01:49:05.460 off people. It's a terrifying thing. Yeah, well, that's, yes, but there's plenty for us to be defended

01:49:13.760 against. So, I mean, though that, that, that fear you had, let's say about being in conversations

01:49:22.580 where you don't know what the rules are. I mean, what I observed among undergraduates was that

01:49:28.040 continually was that that would be there at a surface level now and then, but I could trust

01:49:33.800 the undergraduates by and large, that if I gave them something that was substantive, they'd be so

01:49:38.720 excited and so interested that it was just ridiculous. And so even that ideological cynicism

01:49:46.540 or resentment is often relatively shallow and, and you can entice people away from that with something

01:49:52.580 better. I agree. I, I just like to tell you a little bit of my personal experience. I, at Columbia

01:49:57.200 University, I teach the course called The Science of Living Well. And, you know, I, I just, on the first

01:50:03.500 day of class, I just let, uh, I leave at the door any kind of ideology or just all that crap.

01:50:09.540 Basically, you're all welcome here. Like, let's just start there. Like, you're all welcome in this

01:50:13.240 class. And I care about finding the greatest potentiality within each and every one of you

01:50:18.420 in this class and, and the way and the style that works best for you and how you want to own your,

01:50:23.700 decide how you want to live your life and then take responsibility for that life. And students love

01:50:28.660 it. I mean, I, I don't, there's no controversies. There's no, I mean, it's what I love my students,

01:50:33.940 you know, they, they, when you kind of frame it in that way, I mean, um, students, they're all on

01:50:39.660 board. There's no reason to divide. There's no reason to kind of lead with division in my, in my

01:50:44.020 point of view, you know? I, I agree. And I've always had faith in my undergraduate students and

01:50:51.420 they've always delivered on that faith. Like all every year, it was always the same. And so, um,

01:50:59.140 if I was interested in what I was doing and I found it meaningful, and if I was trying to get at the

01:51:02.920 heart of things, they were like completely along for the ride, but I've also found exactly the same

01:51:07.460 thing in the podcast. And when I went on public lectures, it's like, you know, you know, I had

01:51:12.940 discussions of this sort, I would say of this intensity with Sam Harris, for example, about

01:51:17.900 religious matters. And, you know, there were 10,000 people watching that and they were captivated

01:51:22.060 by it. Well, that was how it appeared. And so you can trust that in people. And, and well,

01:51:27.780 what's been your experience with your podcast? And why are you doing it?

01:51:32.360 Yeah. Yeah. Regarding the, I had a four hour debate with Sam Harris on my podcast about the nature of

01:51:39.720 free will. And he actually, uh, said to me in, in, in an email, I think I'm allowed to say what he

01:51:46.660 said to me, he said, what I'm doing, I'm a compatibilist. He said, what I'm trying to do with

01:51:50.240 my compatibilist version of free will is what Jordan Peterson is trying to do with trying to

01:51:54.000 redefine God. So he put me and you in the same camp there in a way. So, um, I think, uh, you know,

01:52:01.460 we're on a similar frequency in, in some, in some sense that, uh, I don't want to, uh, have such

01:52:06.420 narrow conceptualizations of something that no longer has practical utility, uh, you know,

01:52:11.440 construct value anymore. So tell me what's happening with your podcast and why you're doing

01:52:16.800 it. Cause I mean, you're an educator like me, and now you have the means, this technological

01:52:21.180 means. And so what, what, what have you experienced and what do you want from it?

01:52:25.740 You know, my podcast has become, uh, uh, one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life.

01:52:31.780 Um, it started seven years ago as just me turning on the microphone. I wanted to have

01:52:36.920 nerdy conversations with my colleagues about psychology. Um, but it's really turned into

01:52:42.640 a different beast. It's really, something's really emerged, uh, which is, which I'm really

01:52:47.260 pleased about. And, and that's that I have a guest on my show who I treat with unconditional

01:52:53.940 regard. And I don't, I don't, I don't care who they are. Like I want to engage them, um, in the

01:53:00.880 moment on ideas and, um, and try to come to some mutual understanding of the truth. I mean,

01:53:07.960 I've had controversial guests on, I've had non-controversial guests on, I don't even like

01:53:12.400 to think of it in that way because none of the episodes have been controversial. So it's almost

01:53:18.040 like people say like, Oh, you're going to have a controversial guest on as though they're expecting

01:53:21.700 that, that the episode need be controversial. And what I want to show is that doesn't need to be

01:53:27.920 the case, you know, like it, why does that need to be like, is there some rule from like

01:53:33.200 Moses 10 commands? Well, I think it's, it's, it's cheap and fast, you know, and, and, and I think

01:53:40.220 some of that was actually imposed previously by our technological limitations. Like, you know, if

01:53:48.000 you're, if you're trying to attract attention in a limited bandwidth world, you need something

01:53:55.280 flashy and quick because the attentional space is unbelievably expensive and, and you have to wave

01:54:01.660 a red flag, but now we've got time, right? We can let things unfold. And so, you know, I'm, I'm

01:54:08.860 inviting political figures onto my podcast and I hope I can get people from across the ideological

01:54:14.940 spectrum and, and offer them the opportunity to unfold their ideas over two hours without soundbites

01:54:23.400 and without the intermediation of the journalists, so to speak, I'm going to ask questions, obviously,

01:54:29.220 but, and that's all become possible because of this technological transformation. And I think it's

01:54:35.460 going to, I had Mike Lee, the Senator from Utah, who's I think the most conservative Senator in the

01:54:41.060 House, according to his voting record. Um, and he, you know, laid out his, his thoughts over two hours.

01:54:48.520 And what's been so gratifying is that the comments in the main aren't foolish and knee jerk on either

01:54:57.680 side of the political spectrum. They're more like, oh, would, when he laid out his arguments,

01:55:02.660 I found them interesting and I learned a lot from listening and that's left wingers are saying that

01:55:07.780 and right wingers are saying that and hooray. And so it would be so nice as far as I'm concerned,

01:55:13.100 if that was how we conducted our political discourse. It's like, what's your ideas? Can you

01:55:19.540 lay them out over two hours and still be there and still have something to say? And I've also found,

01:55:25.660 I don't know what your experience is, but my experience with these long forms is that they

01:55:30.540 brutally punish any facade or dishonesty of any sort, any editing misbehavior, anything like that.

01:55:39.860 Uh, it just doesn't fly, man. It doesn't have, what do you mean? What do you mean? Just,

01:55:45.780 can you unpack that a little more? Well, for example, if I put up a, uh, a YouTube video and

01:55:50.960 I've cut some of it, people are immediately skeptical about what I've got. Oh, yeah. Oh,

01:55:55.100 absolutely. Absolutely. I cut out, I cut out a bathroom break the other day and I actually got

01:55:59.400 YouTube comments saying, what are you trying to hide? I was like, well, you don't want, you don't

01:56:02.540 want to hear me peeing. But, um, but have you found, and I found this to be the case that

01:56:08.200 if you, if, if I treat people as human, they tend to act human. I don't care who they are. I mean,

01:56:13.700 I don't care. I, I very rarely have I encountered any, anyone in my life and I've encountered so-called

01:56:19.780 controversial figures that I'm, that I'm, I'm supposed to even hate, you know, even before

01:56:24.680 talking to them that if I, if I treat them with humanity, they at least engage me with humanity.

01:56:31.940 I found that, that's been in the main, that's been overwhelming my experience. However,

01:56:37.920 There are exceptions. I have, I, yeah. And pronounced exceptions. I mean, I've had

01:56:41.780 interviews with journalists that were, where, um, I did the things that you just described. And

01:56:48.280 the consequence was that they wrote something that was absolutely deceitful and reprehensible,

01:56:54.960 and they knew it. And that's been a continual shock to me, even though it's happened many,

01:57:00.880 many times. So I would say almost all the time when you invite someone to play, they play nicely, but

01:57:09.760 not always, not always. And so it's unfortunate, right?

01:57:15.340 Um, it is unfortunate. It doesn't mean that we don't stop trying a lot of damage. No.

01:57:21.360 Well, right. I don't want to become like an ultra cynic, I guess is what I'm trying to say

01:57:25.520 about humanity. I want to keep my humanistic. There's no reason for that. Yeah, there's no

01:57:30.960 reason for that. It's, it's the data don't support the conclusion. I mean, I've looked very deeply into

01:57:35.700 the problem of malevolence and I've taken it very seriously. And I don't think that I'm particularly

01:57:40.500 naive, but it's still definitely the case that your best bet is like arms open and welcoming.

01:57:46.660 And even though you know that that invites in catastrophe now and then it's still, it's,

01:57:52.020 it is the most appropriate ethical stance. So, so what do you think, what do you think's going to

01:57:58.740 happen to the universities in light of all this new technological possibility? I mean,

01:58:03.780 have you thought, or do your thoughts go in that direction? I mean, you're an educator at an elite

01:58:09.000 university, but now you have all this technological power. It's like, what, what is, what are the

01:58:14.740 consequences of that going to be? Yeah. I tweeted out something along the lines of my, I predict that

01:58:20.260 in 20 years or so, I think I may have said 20 years, um, universities will be considered very archaic,

01:58:26.040 um, and, uh, and pointless to a large degree. Now it got a lot of comments because that's obviously a

01:58:32.020 pretty, uh, uh, uh, superlative statement, but I do think I am, I am, I do think that we're going

01:58:38.140 to look back at some point in the future and, and, and think that, um, you know, the, the sort of

01:58:43.660 elitism of the, uh, of the educational structure that we have at universities is going to be a bit

01:58:49.020 silly considering there's so much high quality information coming out that's going to be accessible

01:58:54.020 to so many people and that so many people are going to be learning things that, that they,

01:58:58.420 in which they do with their lives, not through a university. And once that starts happening and

01:59:03.200 kind of the tables get turned in a way where the people in power in society to a large degree are,

01:59:08.280 um, if not, if not self-taught, but taught through channels other than the most elite universities,

01:59:13.880 I think that it's, that, that things are going to look a bit silly about the current structure.

01:59:18.540 What do you think? How did that land with you? Well, it seems to me that

01:59:23.700 the landscape is going to transform itself so that people will turn to further education,

01:59:34.980 to discussions like the one that we just had, because why not? Right. I mean,

01:59:40.320 I see. We, we just conducted something that approximates a high level graduate seminar

01:59:47.640 spontaneously. I mean, you've worked for decades on these sorts of things and so have I,

01:59:53.080 I mean, even as a professional in an elite institution, I would say the opportunity to

01:59:59.200 sit down for two hours with another respected figure in the field and have a conversation like

02:00:04.420 this are relatively few and far between, but now you can do that whenever you want, assuming people

02:00:10.700 will accept your invitation and then you can invite like 500,000 people to take part. So how is that

02:00:17.340 not just going to win? I agree. And, and it's much more interesting than the typical lecture because

02:00:24.360 the typical lecture is dull and horrible. I mean, you get exceptions to that, but generally that's the

02:00:30.780 case. And I mean, you go to an academic conference and my God, it's, it's, it's so no one would watch

02:00:39.460 any of that almost unless they had to. And so. Yeah. That's just, I can't compete. I can't go.

02:00:47.200 Yeah. I can't go back to Columbia in the fall after going a year of, um, you know, there's virtual

02:00:52.540 classes. I didn't even partake in the virtual, but, um, when I come back in the fall to in-person

02:00:57.000 classes, there's no way I'm going to go back to business as usual. It feels so weird to, to stand up

02:01:03.760 there and lecture at the students after I've experienced clubhouse and the potential for that for,

02:01:07.900 and I don't know if you've discovered clubhouse, but I think that's going to be a, a big wave of

02:01:11.000 the future. Um, I experienced, you know, the podcast format, I experienced all these other

02:01:15.100 formats of discussions. There's no way I can go back to the typical lecture style. So I'm actually

02:01:18.960 trying to reformulate exactly what a classroom, what a science of living while classroom even looks

02:01:23.560 like. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Well, I think that what will emerge too, though, accreditation institutions will

02:01:30.340 emerge, you know, increasingly the cost of education will be driven down to something approximating

02:01:35.740 zero. And I think that's what, that's how it looks to me. And I think we'll get

02:01:40.380 the people who really want to teach and who are teaching something that people want to listen to

02:01:49.560 will be radically successful at it at an individual level primarily. And then there's the problem of

02:01:56.320 accreditation and, and perhaps universities will solve that, but I suspect not. I suspect upstart

02:02:02.960 private companies will, will, will solve that problem. You know, cause you could imagine a

02:02:08.820 situation where all the lectures are free, but the exams are very expensive and almost no one passes

02:02:16.040 them. Hmm. So it's breadth of education, but strenuous evaluation, strenuous, accurate evaluation,

02:02:24.500 and then accreditation and the accreditation would have some value. It's already the case that,

02:02:28.860 you know, if you hire someone from Harvard, part of what you're getting is the initial entry process,

02:02:36.400 right? It's really hard to get into Harvard. You have to be, you have to have a very high IQ

02:02:42.200 insofar as the SATs are used. Unless you're one of these celebrities and you pay for your,

02:02:46.780 do you see that whole scandal? Yeah, there's, there's exceptions, but you're going to have a

02:02:50.960 bitch of a time if you go to the university and you're, you're not intellectually qualified. It's

02:02:55.560 going to be a horrific experience. No, your point is well taken. Your point is self punishing. So

02:02:59.960 you have to be very, very smart and you have to have accomplished generally three or four other

02:03:05.460 things. So when you hire someone from an Ivy league Institute, because of the stringent selection

02:03:10.880 process, which is made possible, at least in part by the plethora of applicants, you know,

02:03:16.040 that regardless of the educational quality, you're getting a person who had those attributes to begin

02:03:20.120 with. So it's a proxy for, it's a proxy for competent generosity, all things considered.

02:03:27.080 And then the education adds something to that. But, but you can imagine that accreditation institutions

02:03:33.700 will pop up that, that are capable of assessing that. And there's real value in that. I'd like to

02:03:40.020 do that, but I, I, I don't have the wherewithal to manage it. It's too complex.

02:03:43.960 What I love about the competent, that you brought in the competent, uh, uh, relational aspect there

02:03:50.340 is, I mean, that's the highest level of integration of my whole book. Like that's where I'm, that's

02:03:54.460 where I'm, I mean, I feel like we just like arrived at that like independently, but, um, I mean,

02:03:58.600 that's, that's, well, we've thought along the same track too. That's true. That's very true.

02:04:06.700 That's very true. But you know, if you ask me, what is, what is transcendence? I don't define

02:04:11.360 transcendence, um, as, uh, uh, as some sort of thing where you're above other humans, you

02:04:17.120 know, in some sort of, um, I'm superior to other humans sort of way, but a very, um, doesn't

02:04:22.840 work. I, I define it as a, as Maslow called it a synergy between self and world where you're,

02:04:28.640 and you could, you could frame in terms of competence. Your competence is so, um, uh, influential

02:04:35.160 and powerful in, in making the world a better place that there's such little separation between

02:04:39.300 you and the world so that what's good for you is good for the world. And that's what I,

02:04:43.980 that's what my book's trying to get to. So I love that. Yeah. I believe that's true. I believe that's

02:04:48.880 true is that you can, you can have your cake and eat it too. And I think that the pleasure of

02:04:54.440 mentorship is really an example of that. It's like, well, what would make you more happy than anything

02:04:59.520 else? Well, who knows? Let's take a look just out of curiosity. Well, is it a, like, is it a fast

02:05:04.600 Mercedes? Is it, is it like sexual gratification on demand? Is it wealth? Is it power? Is it status?

02:05:11.520 Et cetera, et cetera. And you can get more sophisticated than that as well. But my experience

02:05:17.220 has been that there isn't anything more pleasurable than seeing unrewarded talent and possibility and

02:05:23.360 facilitating its development. It's like that's in its own universe. And so that's deeply meaningful to

02:05:29.200 me. But then it's also something that's clearly of high level social benefit. And so I think as you

02:05:35.920 do integrate in, in, in your sense, you integrate internally, which is what I recommend people do

02:05:42.580 and concentrate. But at the same time, you're integrating things externally. There's no separation

02:05:47.300 there, not fundamentally, which is also why cleaning up your room turns out to be a very difficult act.

02:05:54.020 You know, there's impediments there that you just don't realize. And to get, you can't get your

02:05:58.800 room in perfect order without simultaneously getting the world in perfect order. So, so it's

02:06:04.780 explain Einstein's desk then. There can be periods of creative disorder, right? But it's not a

02:06:12.500 consequence of avoidance. Okay, fair enough. Because I always see that picture of Einstein,

02:06:17.060 you know, like there's a famous picture of him when his, his office was out of control.

02:06:21.700 Sure. Well, yeah, he probably knew where everything in it was. Right. So there's that too. It's

02:06:27.260 like order is not necessarily evident on the surface. That's true. So that's true. So all

02:06:32.880 right. Well, look, that was that was wonderful. I appreciate the fact that you took the time to

02:06:37.460 talk to me. And it's good. I'm glad we finally had a chance to have a prolonged discussion. I wish

02:06:41.320 you good luck with your book transcend. And I hope that it has the effect that you want it to have

02:06:49.700 and that your podcast does as well. And that onward and upward and all of that.

02:06:55.320 Thank you. And I hope this conversation modeled what a conversation could be in the world.

02:07:00.540 Well, we'll see because people will tell us.

02:07:02.960 I guess they will. I guess they will.

02:07:04.720 I was interested in it.

02:07:06.660 I got in the absorption. I got in the, you know, the absorption aspect.

02:07:11.040 But yeah, well, that's it. That's a killer marker, isn't it?

02:07:15.220 You know, it really is.

02:07:17.000 You're not assuming you're not too corrupt. What you're absorbed in is perhaps what's most

02:07:22.240 important, because why else would you be absorbed in it? So why can't we assume that's a reliable

02:07:27.300 marker? Or the most reliable marker even? I think it is. So yeah. All right. Great.

02:07:35.520 Thanks, Jordan.

02:07:36.060 Thanks very much.

02:07:36.880 Thank you.

02:07:41.040 Thank you.

177. Intimations of Creativity ｜ Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman

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