The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 328. Jordan Peterson's Psychological Tools ｜ Dr. Daniel Higgins & Dr. Robert O. Pihl

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone.

00:01:09.640 I recently had the wherewithal and the honor and the privilege to discuss the business and research and personal arrangements that I've had with a couple of my closest compatriots.

00:01:23.120 Dr. Robert O. Peel, my former graduate advisor at McGill University, and my former student, Dr. Daniel M. Higgins, who graduated from MIT and under my supervision from Harvard.

00:01:37.060 We walked through our business, professional, and personal relationships as they've unfolded through many ups and downs over the last 30 years.

00:01:47.940 And I wanted to bring them into the picture because I have worked with them so closely.

00:01:54.700 I've worked with them particularly on two projects that I wanted to also draw attention to as they form the basis for much of the discussion that's to follow this clip.

00:02:06.420 One is self-authoring.com, self-authoring as in writing, self-authoring.com, and it contains a number of programs, past, present, and future authoring, that help people write out the narrative of their life, their biography, their virtues and faults in the present, and then a vision for the future.

00:02:33.120 And that's a very useful program, as you do live out a story, and it's a good idea to know what story you've been living out and know where you want to go in the future.

00:02:43.140 And that's self-authoring.com.

00:02:45.280 And the other project that we developed on the commercial front, so that's publicly accessible, is understandmyself.com.

00:02:55.080 And understandmyself provides a very thorough description of the fundamental elements of human personality, the five major traits, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, differentiated into 10 different aspects.

00:03:11.360 So it gives you a relatively simple shorthand for your personality, but also a differentiated view of who you are.

00:03:19.940 And so if you take that test, which doesn't take very long, about 20 minutes or so, then you get a detailed description of your basic temperament.

00:03:31.860 But also, if you have a partner and then your partner takes the test, then you can join the test together and get a separate printout, a separate report, that details your comparative similarities and differences.

00:03:49.100 And this is extremely useful.

00:03:50.460 When you establish an intimate relationship with someone, there is some utility in your differences and some utility in your similarities.

00:04:00.720 And there's some additional utility in understanding what those are.

00:04:03.760 Because you need to understand who your partner is and you need to understand when they're different from you, that they're actually different and that there can be value in that.

00:04:15.200 And so understandmyself.com can help you understand who you are.

00:04:19.180 It can help you understand who your partner is and it can understand how you differ and what you might do about that.

00:04:26.260 And so, well, with that, we'll move onward to the discussion itself.

00:04:30.360 So that's selfauthoring.com, past, present, and future, biographical writing and the development of a vision, and understandmyself.com, which helps you understand your personality and maybe understand your personality and relationship to the person who's closest to you.

00:04:45.820 So thank you all for your time and attention and onward to the discussion.

00:04:51.660 So today I have two people to talk to who I've known for many, many years.

00:04:59.480 First, Dr. Robert Peel, who was my graduate supervisor at McGill from 1985 to 1992, and with whom I've had a friendship and business relationship ever since.

00:05:14.820 Very intense and multidimensional relationship, both on the intellectual, well, on the intellectual front, the personal front, and the business front.

00:05:23.560 And so we're going to talk a little bit about that today, and also Dr. Daniel Higgins, who was a student of mine at Harvard after getting his engineering training at Trinity and at MIT,

00:05:37.900 and who also got involved with Bob on the business front and helped me develop some of the measurement devices that we've been attempting to use in the corporate world and more successfully using in the private sphere.

00:05:57.940 And so I thought it would be, well, fun for me, but also hopefully for my two guests and for everyone listening to just walk through what we learned as we've worked together over the last 30 years on the scientific front and the business front.

00:06:16.640 I started working with Bob in 1985.

00:06:19.180 I wrote him a weird letter when I was applying for my graduate training.

00:06:26.040 I'd finished my PhD or my bachelor's degree in psychology, my second update, really, to my first bachelor's degree concentrating on psychology, and decided I wanted to go to clinical work.

00:06:36.280 And I wrote him a, everyone, I applied to a letter that actually told people what I was like, which I'm sure scared off a hell of a lot more people than it attracted.

00:06:44.560 But for some reason, it seemed to twig Bob's interest, and he called me one day.

00:06:50.060 I really wanted to go to Montreal to study and asked me if I wanted to come down and study alcoholism.

00:06:56.000 We actually had a compatriot in common, a man I had met in Fairview years ago, the town I grew up in, happened to be a student of Bob's.

00:07:08.020 And when the letter showed up on his desk, he asked this person, Dave Ross, if he knew who I was.

00:07:16.960 And luckily, I got a positive review, which was quite the surprise.

00:07:20.560 So I really enjoyed working with Bob.

00:07:23.240 What do you remember from the beginning of those days, Bob?

00:07:25.980 Well, first of all, I remember the letter, and I remember that colleagues advised me that I should not select you as a graduate student.

00:07:38.940 But it was exactly the nontraditional nature of what you wrote, and the deep thought that was implicit in your statements that drew me to it.

00:07:48.980 And that, along with a basic instinct to be a risk taker, was the reason why I accepted you as a student.

00:08:02.720 Yeah, well, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about that letter, A, because it was a calculated risk.

00:08:08.940 I think I wrote, if I remember, and I can actually remember some of this,

00:08:11.720 I think I wrote that I liked to drink copious amounts of red wine and could type like a mad dog.

00:08:16.460 And I knew that wasn't exactly standard graduate school application letter language.

00:08:23.820 But, you know, I thought, first of all, I also indicated in the letter that there were some deep things that I wanted to pursue,

00:08:31.220 you know, that I was interested in assessing the nature of human malevolence,

00:08:35.000 and that I had broad philosophical and psychological interests.

00:08:38.580 So there was a real serious part, and there was a real, I would say, well, comedic part in some sense, and provocative.

00:08:46.620 And I thought, look, I'm going to be working with someone for a long time,

00:08:51.000 and I want to find someone who actually wants to work with me.

00:08:54.520 And so it was a calculated risk, like the one you took, I guess, when you accepted me.

00:09:01.560 And it's funny, you know, because people have had that kind of reaction to me, I would say, ever since,

00:09:07.700 which is that some people, like you, are quite happy with the opportunity to work with me,

00:09:12.360 and other people think, you know, that they should keep me at a distance with a stick.

00:09:16.520 And I think maybe, it's not obvious that the people in the latter camp are wrong.

00:09:22.280 Anyways, yeah, so you called me up and asked me if I wanted to do some work on alcoholism,

00:09:27.760 which wasn't really the specific field that I had evinced a tremendous amount of interest in,

00:09:34.240 although I was interested in motivation.

00:09:35.660 But we started to work on motivation for drug and alcohol abuse and on antisocial behavior pretty much right away.

00:09:44.900 Why do you think our collaboration was so successful?

00:09:50.260 Oh, well, it comes down to who you are and how many degrees of freedom you're allowed

00:09:58.160 and the nature of the challenge.

00:10:01.540 And challenges in front of you, Jordan, produce great rewards.

00:10:09.280 So I think it's as simple as that.

00:10:11.860 Yeah, well, for me, you know, I was really thrilled that I had the opportunity to come to McGill.

00:10:17.440 I really wanted to come to Montreal.

00:10:20.960 And then you were an ideal supervisor for me because you were very practically oriented, right?

00:10:28.900 You had a great administrative hand.

00:10:31.640 You had a thriving and unbelievably productive lab.

00:10:34.720 How many papers have you published, Bob?

00:10:36.520 I honestly don't know, Jordan.

00:10:41.780 A hundred and a half, two hundred, something like that.

00:10:45.140 Yeah, I think it's more than that, Bob.

00:10:49.260 So, yeah.

00:10:51.480 So Bob's lab was famous for its productivity, I would say,

00:10:56.300 and also for the morale of its graduate students.

00:10:59.900 I mean, one of the things that was really remarkable about you and often in distinction to other graduate supervisors

00:11:06.860 is that you were very generous with credit, you know,

00:11:11.100 and you gave your students a tremendous amount of freedom.

00:11:15.860 And you really helped all of us through the various administrative hurdles, you know,

00:11:23.340 clearing the ethics hurdles for our research and then encouraging us both simultaneously on the career development

00:11:32.080 and the intellectual development front, which is a very thin line ethically, right?

00:11:38.360 Because obviously, to be a successful academic, there is kind of a marketing element.

00:11:43.340 You have to publish.

00:11:45.120 You have to meet people.

00:11:46.940 You have to communicate.

00:11:48.900 But at the same time, you're supposed to be assiduously pursuing mathematically grounded truth

00:11:56.860 insofar, say, as you're a good statistician.

00:11:59.260 And those often come into conflict.

00:12:01.520 And you are very, very good at letting all of us know.

00:12:05.240 I mean, you've produced a lot of very successful graduate students,

00:12:09.220 Sherry Stewart and Patricia Conrad and Jean Sagan and Peter Finn,

00:12:13.920 a lot of very successful academics.

00:12:16.720 And you did an extremely good job of helping us know that it was our moral obligation

00:12:24.460 to stick with the data no matter what, but at the same time to develop our careers.

00:12:31.340 And for me, also, the fact that you had an unbelievably encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant psychiatric

00:12:37.940 and psychological research was, that was extremely useful.

00:12:41.960 It made our discussions extremely fruitful because I could talk about more philosophically oriented

00:12:46.800 issues.

00:12:48.360 And you could immediately bring that down.

00:12:51.540 Well, bring it down.

00:12:52.500 Move laterally into the scientific realm and help introduce me into the appropriate biological

00:12:59.780 and psychiatric literature.

00:13:03.100 Two rules of thumb.

00:13:05.760 First was, accept good students and get out of their way.

00:13:10.020 That is, just provide them with what they need to do what they're interested in.

00:13:13.580 And secondly, if they have really good ideas, don't ask the bureaucrats.

00:13:22.460 Just do it.

00:13:25.500 Yeah, well, you know, as we worked together, that got more and more difficulty.

00:13:29.700 And we could tell even back then that the university was starting to close in on its researchers.

00:13:34.920 Because when I first started working with you, the ethics committees, the so-called ethics

00:13:40.520 committees, were kind of an encumbrance whose dictates you had to please, but could in some

00:13:48.700 real sense dispense with quite rapidly while attempting to stay in the proper ethical domain.

00:13:56.120 But as we continued to work together, the constraints that were placed on our research became more

00:14:02.260 and more onerous, and that's a process that's just continued and accelerated since then.

00:14:07.220 But you could really see it coming back even in the late 80s.

00:14:12.360 Yeah.

00:14:13.360 No, it's true.

00:14:17.260 I'm somewhat happy that I'm not there now, given the kinds of constraints that researchers have to go through.

00:14:25.560 Yeah, well, it's so odd, eh?

00:14:27.080 Because as we got more and more efficient at running studies,

00:14:31.680 and this happened a lot when I was working with Daniel, too, we got more and more efficient

00:14:35.920 at running studies and designing them, partly as a consequence of being able to use computational

00:14:41.020 power, and so we could do studies much faster.

00:14:45.100 The bureaucratic impediments to doing studies multiplied to such a degree that it became more

00:14:50.160 and more difficult to do them because there were so many hurdles that had to be leapt over

00:14:57.880 before you could even begin the process of an investigation.

00:15:01.000 And so it's really hard on people who are quick-minded and sharp because their orientation

00:15:06.320 is to do interesting things as rapidly as possible, and then to be confronted continually

00:15:11.840 with a bureaucracy that works at counterpurposes to that certainly ensures, at least to some

00:15:17.620 degree, that anybody who's fast and sharp just wants to get the hell out of there.

00:15:22.040 Yeah.

00:15:22.240 Because, you know, you said, this is so cool.

00:15:24.000 One of your management principles, and this is a good thing to pursue on the front of the

00:15:30.240 joint relationship between scientific endeavor and entrepreneurial endeavor, you said your

00:15:36.720 management principle was to hire really good people, students, let's say, and then get

00:15:40.920 the hell out of their way.

00:15:41.740 One of the things I really admired about you and never stopped admiring you for, and you

00:15:46.900 were a great model in this regard, was that you were, you know, your students had areas

00:15:53.940 of expertise always that you didn't share.

00:15:56.380 Like Segar, for example, was a near professional musician.

00:16:00.340 You tended to take in a lot of students who had non-traditional backgrounds in some sense

00:16:06.580 in relationship to psychology, and I never ever saw you, what would you say, engaging in

00:16:14.700 a turf war for intellectual preeminence with any of your students if they were operating

00:16:21.200 in an area of expertise that wasn't your area of expertise.

00:16:24.640 You know, you were always able to maintain like a calm authority and never be threatened by

00:16:33.520 the fact that you were willing and capable of bringing around people, bringing people

00:16:39.180 around you who knew some things you didn't know.

00:16:41.600 That was a relief, and that is a great management principle.

00:16:45.260 Well, less a principle and more a realization that they were all brighter than me.

00:16:49.360 Yeah, well, that remains to be determined.

00:16:52.900 So we started working on alcoholism.

00:16:55.260 That was really useful for me because alcohol, unlike most other drugs, doesn't really target

00:17:02.620 a specific brain area or set of neurological receptors.

00:17:06.700 It flows through the brain like water.

00:17:08.840 And one of the consequences for me was that that meant that I really had to delve deeply

00:17:13.320 into biological neuroscience because alcohol essentially affected every physiological and

00:17:20.700 neurophysiological system in the body.

00:17:23.280 And so part of what I learned to do at McGill, apart from developing a certain degree of statistical

00:17:28.260 expertise, not my forte, by the way, was to delve deeply into the biological literature.

00:17:34.340 And you were very interested in biological psychiatry.

00:17:37.160 So that was extremely helpful.

00:17:40.260 Yeah.

00:17:41.760 Remember that paper we did on genetics for the U.S. Congress?

00:17:48.040 Yeah.

00:17:48.520 Yeah.

00:17:48.600 I was amazed at how quickly you were able to grasp that literature.

00:17:57.340 And that was a very nice piece of work.

00:18:01.800 Yeah.

00:18:02.340 Well, it was one of the things that was great for me at McGill.

00:18:07.360 You know, there's this idea in psychology of construct validation.

00:18:12.280 And the idea is, you know, how do you determine if something that's abstract, a psychological

00:18:16.940 concept, let's say, like neuroticism or self-esteem, how do you know if that's real rather than just

00:18:24.040 sort of a metaphor or a linguistic placeholder?

00:18:26.700 And one of the answers to that is, well, it's real if it's a pattern that makes itself manifest

00:18:32.900 across a variety of different modes of measurement.

00:18:36.380 And I had been reading a lot of psychoanalytic material and mythology when I came to McGill,

00:18:43.640 which definitely put me in a minority.

00:18:46.300 And then as a consequence of having the biological frontier opened up, especially with people 0.92

00:18:51.320 like Jeffrey Gray, I started to see parallels between the deep biological literature, hard

00:18:59.460 neuroscience work and animal experimental work that was done on rat brain functioning and

00:19:05.260 and on the neurochemical front, I could start to see real deep parallels between that and

00:19:10.080 the mythological material that I had been reading.

00:19:13.400 And that was really what I started writing my first book when I was at McGill, Maps of

00:19:17.280 Meaning and pursued that a lot while I was working with you sort of as a side project.

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00:21:02.080 It was an attempt to integrate all the biology I was learning about with the mythology.

00:21:07.900 We were also studying antisocial behavior at that point.

00:21:10.940 And this sort of segues into my relationship with Daniel.

00:21:13.620 And we'll get to that or our interrelationship.

00:21:16.140 So Bob and I were working with the sons of male alcoholics who also had an extensive family

00:21:23.400 history of alcoholism, a very specific population.

00:21:27.000 That eventually became essentially impossible as the dictates came down from above that half 1.00

00:21:31.940 our research subjects had to be female, which was a real problem for our research enterprise 1.00

00:21:37.600 because we were actually researching a particular kind of primarily male psychopathology.

00:21:43.060 And our subjects had to be young men who weren't alcoholic, who did drink, who had alcoholic

00:21:50.520 fathers, alcoholic grandfathers.

00:21:53.540 So they had to have an alcoholic father, another close, and at least another close alcoholic

00:21:58.000 relative male and not an alcoholic mother because that would have exposed them in principle

00:22:04.480 to fetal alcohol syndrome.

00:22:06.920 And we were looking at the biological basis of the proclivity to alcoholism.

00:22:12.720 And we're interested in the role of disinhibition in that, right?

00:22:17.140 So you might say, well, one of the reasons people might drink is because they're biochemically

00:22:21.560 responsive to alcohol in some manner that's either directly rewarding like cocaine or anxiety

00:22:28.540 reducing like valium and barbiturates.

00:22:31.340 But another possible hypothesis is they're just not very good at impulse control.

00:22:36.580 And so an impulse would be a biological impetus that wants short-term gratification like lust

00:22:43.400 or hunger or thirst or the desire to breathe for that matter.

00:22:46.620 And obviously you have to abide by those dictates or you die.

00:22:50.880 But if you only fall prey to them, then you're impulsive and that dysregulates your medium to

00:22:57.140 long-term survival.

00:22:58.080 So we're interested in impulsivity.

00:22:59.380 And Bob and I started to investigate the neuropsychological literature.

00:23:04.820 A lot of people at McGill were working on the assessment of so-called prefrontal cognitive

00:23:09.240 ability and had developed a lot of practical tests for brain damaged people to see what focal

00:23:16.960 cognitive deficits they had as a consequence of their neurological condition or their brain

00:23:21.280 surgery.

00:23:21.720 And we started to apply that to the analysis of antisocial behavior, right?

00:23:27.140 And Jean Seguin was very much involved in that.

00:23:30.820 So what got you interested, Bob, in the realm of antisocial behavior?

00:23:37.360 Well, alcohol and aggression, the relationship.

00:23:45.220 If you want to really understand aggression, understand the relationship between alcohol

00:23:52.660 and aggression, because alcohol is involved in half of murders, rapes, and general assaults,

00:24:00.580 most situations of violence.

00:24:05.020 And so it was a question of what is alcohol doing to the brain that, in fact, is increasing

00:24:11.380 that propensity.

00:24:12.440 So as we were turning to sons of alcoholics and the problem of alcoholism, it became the

00:24:23.380 same kind of question of was there a difficulty in producing inhibitory behavior, as these individuals

00:24:31.780 also tended to have a series of cognitive deficits as measured in terms of scholastic performance

00:24:41.320 and psychological tests.

00:24:44.420 And so that's where you started looking at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the

00:24:53.420 measures that they were using to measure, for example, frontal lobe functioning as its

00:24:59.240 importance in generally controlling social behavior.

00:25:03.880 Right, well, that was the first paper I published with Jennifer Rothfleisch and Phil Zalazo, right?

00:25:11.600 We put together a neuropsychological battery, and then we had people who were drunk at two

00:25:18.060 doses of alcohol, and we used high doses of alcohol in our lab, which was one of the things

00:25:22.880 that made it rather unique.

00:25:24.420 We looked at the specific patterns of neuropsychological deficits that alcohol produced.

00:25:31.300 And alcohol doesn't interfere with things like vocabulary understanding or color perception,

00:25:36.620 but it has a walloping effect on the ability to move information from short-term storage

00:25:41.920 into long-term storage, even at relatively moderate doses.

00:25:45.720 And it really interferes with complex motor coordination, although it doesn't suppress, let's

00:25:53.660 say, it doesn't shorten, it doesn't lengthen reaction time per se, simple reaction time and

00:25:59.300 had no effect on it at all.

00:26:00.660 That's right, so we started building a neuropsychological battery, first of all, to see what the nature of

00:26:08.280 the overlap between criminal and aggressive behavior and the proclivity to alcoholism was,

00:26:13.320 but also trying to investigate why alcohol made people aggressive, because it is one of

00:26:17.400 the few drugs, and your research was part of what it demonstrated this, that alcohol actually

00:26:23.640 does make people more aggressive.

00:26:25.780 I remember a study we discussed that you devised where people were put into a bus aggression

00:26:33.820 task, I think, where they were asked to administer shocks, electrical shocks, of a certain duration

00:26:40.440 and intensity to their competitors in a game-like scenario, low levels of shock, and they weren't

00:26:46.160 actually shocking a real person.

00:26:47.700 That was a sham, but one of the hypotheses was that people who were drunk just didn't

00:26:54.380 know what they were doing.

00:26:55.440 So if I remember correctly, you had the drunks, the people who were alcohol intoxicated, write

00:27:01.760 down or otherwise record the level of shocks that they were administering and the duration

00:27:06.860 to make that conscious.

00:27:08.940 And what happened was that actually made the drunk people more aggressive rather than less. 1.00

00:27:13.460 So it wasn't merely a matter of alcohol-induced stupidity. 0.99

00:27:17.300 It was, there was real facilitation of aggression that seemed to be associated with something 1.00

00:27:22.180 like disinhibition.

00:27:24.160 Mm-hmm.

00:27:26.120 Indeed.

00:27:27.960 And we even tried to pay them not to be aggressive and found out that that works very well with people

00:27:36.440 who generally have higher IQs, but not with individuals with lower IQs.

00:27:42.960 Yeah, yeah, well, you know, the thing is people in their real life, in some sense, are paid

00:27:47.680 not to be aggressive when they're drunk.

00:27:50.200 And the way you get paid to not be aggressive while you're drunk is by not getting in trouble.

00:27:56.060 And that certainly doesn't stop people.

00:27:58.580 It's worth just dwelling for a moment on the statistic that Bob cited.

00:28:03.260 You know, we did a lot of reviews of the relationship between alcohol and aggression.

00:28:07.440 And it's, I think you could make a pretty strong case that almost all sexual assault

00:28:11.820 and almost all, and a tremendous amount of general interpersonal violence would just vanish

00:28:18.660 if people weren't overly alcohol-intoxicated.

00:28:23.880 There's a massive relationship between drunkenness.

00:28:26.380 Half the people who commit murders are severely intoxicated, and half of the victims of violent

00:28:32.880 crimes are severely alcohol-intoxicated, right?

00:28:36.480 It's...

00:28:37.040 Indeed.

00:28:37.600 It's always been amazing to me that when we talk about sexual assault on campus, you know,

00:28:42.320 we talk a lot about sexism and toxic masculinity, and not very much about the fact that it's

00:28:48.860 almost all alcohol-fueled.

00:28:52.320 At least half of it is, George.

00:28:54.760 Yes, right, right.

00:28:55.880 At least half of it is.

00:28:56.880 So we were also, you and I were also talking at that point about entrepreneurial ideas, you

00:29:03.560 know, because I guess we both had a bit of an entrepreneurial bent, and one of the things

00:29:08.100 that was always noodling away at us was whether there was anything that we could do that might

00:29:13.200 constitute the grounds for the construction of a business.

00:29:18.080 And I remember we talked about the possibility of investigating treatment for hangovers on the

00:29:23.820 pharmaceutical front and went down that rabbit hole for a while, but we never really, at

00:29:29.260 McGill, we never really settled on an entrepreneurial idea.

00:29:34.840 I think one of the ideas that we had discussed, too, was to start a consulting business to help

00:29:40.020 people who had health problems do an objective review of the scientific literature bearing on

00:29:46.360 their particular health problem, and that's still a good idea, although we never did do it.

00:29:50.540 Well, anyways, after I was at McGill, and I think Bob and I wrote 15 papers together, which

00:29:57.960 was something of a record at that point for a graduate student and advisor collaborator,

00:30:05.620 I was thrilled to receive an appointment to Harvard, which was quite, yeah, that was quite

00:30:12.220 the event.

00:30:12.860 And I went down and started pursuing the same line of research in some sense that I was pursuing

00:30:19.460 with you, but it had become increasingly difficult.

00:30:22.000 The National Institute for Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, which in principle was designed

00:30:27.140 to facilitate research, kept making it impossible to bring people into the lab and actually give

00:30:32.900 them reasonable doses of alcohol.

00:30:34.940 I mean, I remember by the time you and I were done our research, we were having to keep our 0.97

00:30:39.120 damn subjects in the lab for like six or seven hours after we got them drunk. 0.93

00:30:44.340 The NIAAA required that we bring their alcohol, blood alcohol level down. 0.99

00:30:51.680 I think their eventual recommendation was either 0.04 or 0.02, half of legal intoxication.

00:30:58.820 They wouldn't allow us, for example, to send them home in a cab and nobody wanted to sit 0.78

00:31:03.320 in our damn lab and sober up miserably for six hours, you know, while staring at a wall. 0.88

00:31:09.000 And it made it pretty much impossible to bring people in repeated times because the experience 0.99

00:31:15.360 became too onerous.

00:31:16.700 And there was all sorts of other restrictions that were emerging that made it impossible

00:31:22.100 for us to do what we had been doing.

00:31:24.220 And we got a long way on analyzing the effects of alcohol, associating it with opiate reinforcement

00:31:31.040 and starting to investigate potential biochemical treatments like naltruxone for alcoholism.

00:31:37.480 And we did it on a shoestring budget too, which was also an interesting thing to do.

00:31:43.920 Now, so I went to Harvard and I wasn't making a lot of money.

00:31:49.280 I had to teach a lot of extra classes.

00:31:51.580 My wife couldn't work because she didn't have a green card and I was just kind of existing 0.85

00:31:55.300 on the threshold of survivability, you know, in a comfortable sense.

00:31:59.140 But I didn't even have magazine subscriptions when I was a junior professor at Harvard.

00:32:04.860 And I drove this old rust bucket of a car that was barely holding together.

00:32:10.440 And I remember I phoned up the dean at one day and I said, you know, I don't know what

00:32:16.700 your policy here is at Harvard, but you guys hired me to do research.

00:32:20.580 But I have to do a lot of overload teaching just to be able to survive here because it's

00:32:25.600 relatively expensive.

00:32:26.560 Like, what the hell is the rationale for this?

00:32:29.600 I was probably slightly more polite than that.

00:32:32.120 And he said, well, most of our people consult.

00:32:36.180 And I thought, well, that's not true because junior professors don't have time to consult.

00:32:40.620 So that's just not true. 0.97

00:32:41.980 But OK, if that's the damn game, then what the hell do I know that might have some economic 0.98

00:32:49.060 value? 0.99

00:32:50.160 And I thought we had talked at that point about starting to use our neuropsych battery, which

00:32:56.540 we'd started to computerize on broader fronts, right?

00:33:00.980 We used it to investigate alcohol and then antisocial personality.

00:33:04.300 And then I thought, you know, maybe we could see if this battery of neuropsychological tests

00:33:13.340 would predict corporate and academic performance.

00:33:17.760 And so I called you and that's when, and we had a talk about, you know, potentially putting

00:33:23.760 together a company that would be designed to do exactly that.

00:33:28.860 And we did, the late 1990s.

00:33:34.300 Yeah, and that's when Daniel showed up.

00:33:36.420 And so, Daniel, you had done a, you had done your engineering training at Trinity and then

00:33:43.980 at MIT.

00:33:44.460 So walk us through a little bit about your academic and intellectual background.

00:33:51.500 I was, I did civil engineering at Trinity College in Dublin.

00:33:57.020 And then I came over to the U.S. and I found it was incredibly difficult to find a job just

00:34:05.780 to go through the mechanics of it.

00:34:08.020 So I thought, well, maybe I'll just go to graduate school instead, which sadly was as

00:34:12.400 shallow as that.

00:34:14.640 No, it probably wasn't.

00:34:15.560 But I went to MIT and I did a degree, a master's degree in civil engineering.

00:34:24.680 But at the time, it would have been around 1991, 92, 93, the use of computers, computer technology

00:34:33.620 was getting cheaper.

00:34:34.780 And so it was more pervasive.

00:34:36.680 And so obviously, while I'm there, I'm not going to be busting concrete beams or cubes.

00:34:45.020 I'm going to be looking at what the current computer technology is, AI and so on and so

00:34:53.280 forth.

00:34:53.620 People were much more optimistic about AI in the early 90s than they were in the late 90s.

00:34:59.800 And so I had been doing computer programming.

00:35:06.040 And then I went over to take some classes at Harvard with you.

00:35:11.200 I think it would have been 1995.

00:35:16.140 I may have been in your first personality psychology class or your second.

00:35:21.960 I'm not quite sure.

00:35:23.620 And we started programming the neuropsych stuff.

00:35:29.800 The work that you guys had done and that Jean Sagan had done in Montreal had used a paper

00:35:37.520 and pencil version of the psych tests.

00:35:40.460 And those psych tests were, they were kind of modified from use with people from with clinical

00:35:48.600 issues and with experimental animals.

00:35:51.400 So it was an interesting kind of a transformation of using something to detect clinical differences,

00:35:59.320 to detect individual differences.

00:36:02.980 And at the time, the idea of a prefrontal cognitive ability really didn't, as far as I know,

00:36:09.060 it didn't really exist.

00:36:09.940 People spoke about executive function, but they didn't speak about it in individual differences

00:36:15.260 terms.

00:36:16.420 They spoke about it more in a sort of a global, like what would happen if executive function

00:36:21.700 did or didn't exist.

00:36:22.680 And so we were using, we computerized the types of tests that you'd been using with the

00:36:35.140 sons of male alcoholics and that Jean Sagan had been using with, I believe, impulsive children,

00:36:40.880 if I remember correctly.

00:36:42.000 And then we did the, I think it was 1997, we, you were teaching the personality class and

00:36:53.120 we did the online computerized personality lab.

00:36:57.540 Right, right.

00:36:58.780 Which was, and that was early web days.

00:37:01.940 And so we, we, we did that.

00:37:04.640 We had, I guess.

00:37:05.920 We did like a hundred experiments at once.

00:37:08.320 We did.

00:37:08.720 It was really something, eh?

00:37:09.600 That was right when Net, that's right when, was it Netscape?

00:37:12.780 What was the first browser?

00:37:14.420 It would, it was pretty much right after, right after Netscape came out.

00:37:18.780 It was, it was fairly early.

00:37:20.640 In computer days, it was when Perl was the way that you would do, Perl CGI programming was

00:37:25.640 the way you were doing, you do web stuff.

00:37:28.740 And, and so we essentially set up a bunch of experiments.

00:37:33.580 My wife, Alice Lee, and I programmed them.

00:37:36.660 And, and all the kids in the class took them, it was like, I think probably about 140, and

00:37:43.440 they divided up into groups of five to do the analysis.

00:37:46.100 So we did a soup, a soup to nuts set of, as you said, maybe 15, 20 different experimental

00:37:53.980 questions.

00:37:54.520 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:55.440 Well, it was, and it was, it was this, this battery of tests that I had developed with

00:38:01.680 Sagan and Bob, it took like, a lot of it required gadgets and lights and boxes, and

00:38:09.140 it was very mechanical.

00:38:10.340 It also took about nine to 11 hours for a trained neuropsychologist to administer the

00:38:14.920 test battery.

00:38:15.620 But when we computerized, we got, when we computerized it, we got the whole damn thing down to 90 minutes.

00:38:21.160 And so then, then we were interested in, we thought, well, we could use this test battery

00:38:28.700 to assess psychopathology impulsivity, but then could we use it to assess normative or

00:38:35.180 even excellent performance?

00:38:37.680 And Daniel and I and Bob started to investigate the possibility of using prefrontal cognitive

00:38:43.160 ability tests to assess academic prowess at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, as

00:38:49.860 it eventually turned out.

00:38:51.220 And we also started to move into the corporate world.

00:38:54.280 And so that was part of an entrepreneurial vision at that point as well, because we thought,

00:38:58.340 well, I had started studying papers that were produced by, God, now I'm not going to be

00:39:04.400 able to remember, unfortunately, the names of the people who produced the initial equations

00:39:12.860 relating increased accuracy of selection to economic outcomes.

00:39:19.840 Hunter and Schmitt.

00:39:21.680 Hunter and Schmitt.

00:39:22.680 Yeah.

00:39:23.520 Absolutely crucial papers showing that.

00:39:26.300 So one of the things we learned, for everyone watching and listening, is that a tiny minority 1.00

00:39:32.260 of extremely high performers produce almost all the economic outcome of a given endeavor.

00:39:38.500 So it's actually the square root of the number of people involved in a given endeavor do half

00:39:42.780 the work.

00:39:43.780 It's like the 80-20 rule.

00:39:45.300 It's almost a very small minority of your customers produce all your profits.

00:39:50.160 A small minority of your workers produce all your productive outcome.

00:39:53.960 A small minority of creative people produce almost all the creative output.

00:39:57.380 A small number of criminals commit almost all the crimes.

00:40:01.400 And so what that means is that if you can tilt your selection methods, your hiring methods,

00:40:06.100 towards the upper end, even a small amount, and thereby increase the number of extremely

00:40:12.280 top performers that you have in your organization, the economic payoff to that is unbelievably dramatic.

00:40:20.140 So I think Schmitt and Hunter estimated at that point that if the U.S. bureaucracy, the

00:40:26.040 government bureaucracy, switched to accurate assessment for hiring, which they're actually bound

00:40:32.280 to do by law, they would save an amount each year equivalent to total American corporate

00:40:37.760 profits.

00:40:39.260 And I read that and I thought, oh my God, if we can develop a new way of assessing ability

00:40:45.900 that's accurate, we should be able to go to corporations and say, look, you know, for a

00:40:51.760 relatively small amount of money, we can radically increase the productivity of your employees.

00:40:56.200 And I thought we could just make a statistical case that the payoff for that would be so great

00:41:02.820 that, you know, people would literally beat a path to our door.

00:41:06.260 And so that was a very naive presumption.

00:41:09.000 Now, you were put right in the center of this because in order to pursue this for your PhD,

00:41:17.120 you decided to come and do a PhD in psychology.

00:41:19.680 You had to master the neuropsychological literature.

00:41:23.660 You had to master the literature on IQ testing because one question that came up was, well,

00:41:31.020 was there a difference between prefrontal cortical ability, let's say, the ability, cognitive abilities

00:41:36.940 that are dependent on the forward part of the brain, the part that abstracts action before

00:41:44.240 it's implemented?

00:41:45.340 What was the relationship between that and IQ?

00:41:47.400 And most of the neuropsychologists regarded IQ tests as these dusty, you know, ancient technologies

00:41:55.240 that had been superseded and just assumed that what they were measuring was something separate.

00:42:00.580 But that had never really been rigorously tested.

00:42:03.920 And then you also had to become a master of the relevant literature on personality

00:42:08.840 because personality traits like conscientiousness are also useful at predicting performance.

00:42:15.200 And so why don't you talk a little bit about the development of your thesis and also the fact

00:42:21.320 that you wrote your thesis at the same time that the bell curve came out.

00:42:26.120 And that was quite the political nightmare, all things considered.

00:42:29.300 So why don't you walk through what you did for your PhD research and your thesis?

00:42:33.540 Well, we sort of hit a perfect storm in a way because Hernstein and Murray's bell curve had just been published,

00:42:42.920 which was the most vilified book of the 90s, if you like.

00:42:48.220 And Hernstein and Murray were both at Harvard, although Hernstein had just passed away.

00:42:52.820 And we had been, the neuropsych guys had been speculating on.

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00:44:09.720 The way the brain works under normal circumstances,

00:44:13.300 based on research that they had done with clinical populations,

00:44:17.960 and they essentially completely ignored the statistical methods that are required

00:44:23.860 to talk about individual differences in cognitive ability

00:44:28.800 and individual differences in outcomes, differences across situations.

00:44:33.920 And so, in some ways, we caught a certain amount of flack from the neuropsych guys

00:44:41.140 because we weren't cutting up monkeys, which seems okay to me,

00:44:45.460 and they weren't interested in the IQ stuff

00:44:50.940 because the intelligence research was tainted in psychology,

00:44:58.900 which was very strange because it was the most well-developed

00:45:04.040 from a scientific perspective and has been area of psychology.

00:45:08.500 And the tools that people used throughout psychology,

00:45:13.140 personality psychology, for example,

00:45:15.340 were developed by the early intelligence researchers.

00:45:20.360 Charles Spearman developed a factor analysis,

00:45:24.640 and it was later enhanced by a gentleman from the UK.

00:45:29.880 I've forgotten his name.

00:45:31.580 But in Thurston, is it?

00:45:34.060 Thurston, yeah.

00:45:34.780 And so, it was very weird for somebody coming into psychology from engineering

00:45:44.540 to look at the situation and see,

00:45:46.540 well, the most rigorous research programs that I can see in this,

00:45:51.820 this is probably going to irritate experimental psychologists a bit,

00:45:55.260 but I don't know how else to put it,

00:45:57.940 were despised.

00:45:59.420 The area that those things, that was essentially despised.

00:46:04.220 And a lot of academics in psychology were trying to figure out

00:46:12.060 how to essentially throw stones at intelligence research,

00:46:18.820 even though it would be like that meme where it's like nobody, nothing,

00:46:23.040 and then Jerome Kagan, IQ tests are biased.

00:46:28.160 It was just, it was that opportunistic,

00:46:30.940 just to come out and make a statement against that.

00:46:35.040 So, suddenly, I found myself, and you did also,

00:46:39.000 being with the pariahs when we didn't even know that there was such a situation.

00:46:45.840 Yeah, yeah, it was really weird, eh?

00:46:47.940 Because we were driven to 100%,

00:46:53.440 no, we were driven by two things.

00:46:55.180 Like, first of all, we had an entrepreneurial curiosity about this,

00:47:00.640 but Bob and you and I were driven,

00:47:04.120 I would say, apart from that,

00:47:05.540 100% by nothing but the desire to try to find accurate predictors

00:47:10.980 of measurable performance, academically and industrially.

00:47:15.700 There was no, not only was there no political agenda,

00:47:18.900 as you said, we didn't even know a political agenda existed,

00:47:22.780 in some real sense,

00:47:23.960 till you started writing your thesis and the bell curve issue blew up.

00:47:27.840 And we were also interesting,

00:47:29.880 people might find this interesting.

00:47:31.960 So, the neuropsychologist had really claimed

00:47:34.300 that what they were measuring with their specific tests

00:47:37.220 was something completely independent of IQ,

00:47:40.200 or, at least importantly, independent of IQ.

00:47:42.940 And then, as we delved into the IQ research,

00:47:45.880 and you took the forefront on this endeavor, Daniel,

00:47:49.880 we realized that

00:47:51.580 all cognitive measures converge to a single factor.

00:47:57.840 And that really means all.

00:48:00.760 Right.

00:48:01.120 It means you can't come up with a...

00:48:02.660 Go ahead, Daniel.

00:48:03.560 If you're speculating about the higher cognitive functions,

00:48:07.460 like Alexandre Luria's The Higher Cognitive Functions of Man,

00:48:11.460 and if you're working in that tradition,

00:48:13.380 and you want to speculate about that in intact humans,

00:48:17.260 you're like two questions away from G, essentially.

00:48:20.100 Right, right.

00:48:20.800 You're like, well, how does this manifest itself in the real world?

00:48:24.680 Well, it manifests itself in individual differences between performance.

00:48:28.620 Okay, and what do those things have in common?

00:48:33.100 A lot.

00:48:34.000 They're all positively correlated with each other.

00:48:37.940 Right.

00:48:38.400 You're at G.

00:48:39.200 You bake, congratulations.

00:48:40.840 It's 1904.

00:48:42.160 You've just rediscovered the G factor.

00:48:44.500 Yeah.

00:48:44.660 But no, we're not going to ask that second question.

00:48:48.340 We're not even going to ask the first question.

00:48:50.260 We're just going to speculate about how important things like executive function are

00:48:55.700 without saying, well, can it be formalized, measured,

00:49:01.100 and does it spread?

00:49:04.040 Are there individual differences?

00:49:05.600 And then once you ask those questions,

00:49:07.440 it is incumbent upon you to explain why it is different than the G factor.

00:49:13.120 Right, right.

00:49:13.720 Well, that was hard on us, too,

00:49:15.380 because we had already put years into working out the proposition

00:49:21.620 that these prefrontal cognitive tests were, in fact,

00:49:25.140 assessing something interestingly different.

00:49:27.720 Right.

00:49:28.300 And then when we did, go ahead.

00:49:30.560 I pushed the prefrontal cognitive ability as a construct,

00:49:34.680 measured by the neuropsych test that we had essentially stolen

00:49:39.480 from the neuropsych guys and the animal research guys.

00:49:43.800 And developed into an individual difference construct.

00:49:46.740 And I pushed that as far as I could as an independent construct from G. 0.89

00:49:50.700 And when I wrote up my dissertation and the paper,

00:49:56.200 the one that we published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

00:49:59.960 essentially I didn't collapse it and I pushed it as hard as I could.

00:50:03.760 But after coming away from that, I would not sit down with anyone

00:50:08.380 and tell them that prefrontal cognitive ability was independent of G

00:50:12.160 because it had a different heritage.

00:50:13.780 Yeah, well, this is a good indication of the kind of price you can pay

00:50:18.780 for scientific rigor.

00:50:21.400 I mean, Bob and I have put six years into the development

00:50:25.000 of this prefrontal cognitive battery.

00:50:27.120 And there was some utility in it predicting disinhibition.

00:50:30.560 And then you and I put in years developing the battery itself.

00:50:33.500 And then our discovery was we didn't know enough

00:50:36.640 about the psychometrics of intelligence to be doing what we were doing.

00:50:39.780 And that there was no escaping from the black hole of fluid intelligence

00:50:44.360 in some real sense.

00:50:46.320 I mean, we did get evidence that the battery had incremental predictive validity

00:50:50.980 in relationship to predicting grades at Harvard and the University of Toronto

00:50:55.780 and also on the corporate front.

00:50:57.980 But what that meant at best in all likelihood was that perhaps we had expanded

00:51:03.780 the domain of cognitive measurement to some degree into areas

00:51:08.500 that hadn't been precisely evaluated,

00:51:11.680 although it might have just been that it was just a secondary consequence

00:51:15.460 of additional testing.

00:51:18.860 Well, for our measure of G, we only use the Raven's progressive matrix.

00:51:25.120 Right, exactly.

00:51:25.660 The block, the fluid intelligence components, like three of them, of the waste.

00:51:31.640 So a real intelligence researcher like Ian Drury, for example,

00:51:40.560 that's his name, isn't it, Ian Drury?

00:51:43.240 He would say, you haven't tapped G at all.

00:51:46.640 You've only taken two or three subtests.

00:51:49.740 And he would basically want to define the whole thing.

00:51:53.680 But anyways, one of the things that you said at the time was

00:51:56.580 every psych experiment should use IQ tests.

00:52:01.540 And that would have been, if that sort of maxim had been used from the start,

00:52:09.240 we probably wouldn't have been as naive as we were about getting away from it.

00:52:15.920 That's not to say that executive function and prefrontal cognitive ability

00:52:20.320 are reducible to some magical construct in the sky, G.

00:52:24.740 It's just to say that in psychological research,

00:52:29.340 things just don't fall along the nice little neat theoretical lines

00:52:33.520 that you build your career around, that they're messy.

00:52:37.420 Right.

00:52:37.960 Yeah, well, what I concluded at that time was that

00:52:40.600 every psychological experiment run that involves analysis of the differences

00:52:46.280 between people should, by what would you call universal fiat,

00:52:54.560 be required to use both IQ tests and likely personality tests.

00:52:59.260 Because we have these basic constructs,

00:53:02.320 general cognitive ability, which is a walloping measure,

00:53:06.000 and also pretty decent measures of temperamental proclivity.

00:53:10.300 And they're really basic the same way the elements in the table of the elements

00:53:16.340 are basic physically.

00:53:19.080 And we shouldn't be talking about any other constructs in psychology

00:53:22.380 until we can be absolutely sure that we're not just

00:53:25.340 re-measuring constructs that have already been discovered.

00:53:29.000 And that is kind of disheartening on the psychological front,

00:53:31.720 because both IQ and the Big Five,

00:53:36.600 I mean, you can argue exactly about the parameters of the Big Five still,

00:53:40.000 but fundamentally, they're such black holes

00:53:42.020 that they tend to suck in every other bit of research 0.62

00:53:44.660 and invalidate it in some sense.

00:53:47.700 Like, I mean, I remember we looked at the self-esteem literature, for example,

00:53:51.060 and concluded pretty rapidly that self-esteem was nothing but

00:53:54.060 low neuroticism with a bit of extroversion thrown in.

00:53:59.180 And there was no need for the self-esteem construct at all.

00:54:03.320 And I mean, that just obliterates the careers in some real sense

00:54:06.400 of the people who are proposing these alternative constructs as real.

00:54:12.140 The other thing that happened, Daniel, when we were working together

00:54:15.680 was that the multiple intelligence and practical intelligence people,

00:54:19.940 especially at the Harvard School of Education under Gardner,

00:54:22.400 were beating their drum extremely loudly.

00:54:24.480 And Gardner was proclaiming that

00:54:26.520 what had always been regarded as talents,

00:54:29.740 there's multiple talents, let's say,

00:54:31.700 although they might be united to some degree by G,

00:54:34.460 that he proposed renaming talents intelligence

00:54:37.840 and then pursuing this multiple intelligence idea,

00:54:41.220 which was really just a political scheme right from the beginning,

00:54:45.420 because he never developed a single instrument of measurement.

00:54:49.140 And that was scandalous from our perspective, too.

00:54:51.480 It's like, what the hell are you doing?

00:54:53.060 You're talking about multiple intelligences

00:54:55.980 in the face of all this documentation

00:54:58.640 that intelligence is actually a unitary construct,

00:55:02.020 and you can't measure it at all.

00:55:04.800 And now you're putting this forward as the basis

00:55:06.580 for some kind of educational doctrine.

00:55:08.680 That was also politically shocking.

00:55:11.700 Well, Gardner had written a book

00:55:14.280 on the emergence of cognitive neuroscience.

00:55:18.480 And in that book, I don't recall the title of the book,

00:55:22.760 he identified faculties in the mind

00:55:25.760 that the neuropsychologist had,

00:55:28.180 that cognitive neuroscience had uncovered.

00:55:31.360 And then his next, that was a successful book,

00:55:33.640 his next book after that was Frames of Mind,

00:55:36.760 which is his multiple intelligences book.

00:55:38.960 And I think that what he essentially did was,

00:55:42.240 there's a very weird thing amongst academic psychologists.

00:55:46.520 I've always found this striking.

00:55:48.960 The people that they value the most

00:55:51.160 are the people who are the most intelligent.

00:55:53.840 You can see this in the way they interact

00:55:56.260 with their students.

00:55:57.960 They're unaware of it many times,

00:56:00.280 but it's quite noticeable.

00:56:02.760 But then, as I said, they don't like the whole idea.

00:56:06.240 There's a presumption that,

00:56:08.260 I think it might be, if I may be a bit Freudian about it,

00:56:12.000 there might be an unconscious recognition

00:56:14.020 that they are conflating intelligence with value as a human.

00:56:17.380 Right, with moral virtue.

00:56:18.680 With moral virtue, just with value.

00:56:22.100 And that leads them to see this conflation everywhere,

00:56:28.060 even though other people aren't doing it.

00:56:30.580 I personally don't consider people to be more valuable

00:56:33.900 if they have a higher IQ score.

00:56:36.220 But I think that there may be some sort of guilt

00:56:39.680 at the bottom behind that.

00:56:41.420 I never really understood it.

00:56:43.780 So, what Gardner did was,

00:56:45.660 he plucked the construct intelligence

00:56:49.780 out of the psychometric realm.

00:56:53.160 And in the psychometric realm,

00:56:55.640 intelligence and IQ are very clearly understood.

00:56:58.820 There are very clear procedures

00:57:01.080 for having these phenomena appear as construct

00:57:08.020 in your statistical analysis tool set.

00:57:11.420 to put it as precisely as I can.

00:57:14.780 But he just took that and said,

00:57:17.540 reducing, if I remember correctly,

00:57:20.100 it was something along the lines of,

00:57:21.820 reducing the sort of prospect of a young person

00:57:26.920 down to one number an IQ score

00:57:28.780 is unreasonably cruel, he offered.

00:57:35.660 Well, Stephen Jay Gould was making the same kind

00:57:38.300 of arguments, right?

00:57:39.200 The mismeasurement of man.

00:57:40.940 What Gardner didn't do,

00:57:42.440 and he should have done,

00:57:43.600 and I would criticize him ethically on this one,

00:57:46.840 is he didn't explain that he was using

00:57:50.080 a well-defined individual difference

00:57:52.300 psychometric construct.

00:57:53.720 And he was tearing that from that domain

00:57:56.840 and essentially appropriating the term

00:57:59.600 for his own rebranding of the faculties.

00:58:03.240 Yeah.

00:58:03.840 Without carrying through

00:58:06.740 with the required research that would be necessary.

00:58:10.860 You want to call your frames of mind intelligences?

00:58:13.700 You've got to show me the tools

00:58:15.940 that will produce the spread of variance

00:58:20.060 so that you can use it

00:58:23.340 as an individual differences construct

00:58:25.640 in your statistical analysis

00:58:28.020 for your research project.

00:58:30.200 He never did that.

00:58:31.200 He just skipped that.

00:58:31.980 No, and he just hand-waved it away.

00:58:33.640 He said, well, I'm not interested in measurement. 0.95

00:58:35.860 It's like, well, then you should shut the hell up 0.96

00:58:37.520 about intelligence,

00:58:38.740 and you should not pollute

00:58:39.860 the entire educational psychology literature

00:58:42.580 with your preposterous propositions,

00:58:45.280 multiplying a construct

00:58:46.620 that's already extremely well understood technically

00:58:49.200 and muddying up the waters

00:58:51.140 unforgivably in some real sense.

00:58:54.460 And Stephen Jay Gould did the same thing,

00:58:56.340 you know, when he talked about

00:58:57.200 the mismeasure of man.

00:58:58.440 And I'd started to understand

00:58:59.880 with my limited statistical

00:59:01.400 and mathematical ability,

00:59:02.700 he started to understand factor analysis

00:59:04.440 and the sorts of things

00:59:05.740 that we were pursuing

00:59:06.620 more and more mathematically deeply.

00:59:08.820 And I thought, well, Stephen Jay Gould

00:59:10.780 is criticizing the hypothetically abstract construct

00:59:14.460 of intelligence.

00:59:16.420 It's like, well, what's the abstract construct here?

00:59:19.700 Well, it's a single factor.

00:59:21.160 Oh, he's criticizing the idea

00:59:23.620 that the average of a group of numbers is real.

00:59:28.800 Because really, what it boils down to,

00:59:31.560 just so everybody who's listening knows,

00:59:33.240 if you take a hundred questions,

00:59:34.780 questions, any questions

00:59:36.840 that require abstraction to answer,

00:59:41.000 and so that could be formulated verbally, say,

00:59:43.580 or pictorially in some kind of abstraction,

00:59:46.400 if you ask a hundred people,

00:59:49.000 a hundred questions,

00:59:50.000 and you sum up their answers,

00:59:52.860 and you rank order the people

00:59:54.540 in terms of their accuracy,

00:59:56.180 you've already produced

00:59:57.380 what's essentially a test

00:59:58.580 of general cognitive ability.

01:00:00.560 It's that robust.

01:00:01.680 And so IQ, in some sense,

01:00:04.060 is the rank ordering of people

01:00:05.940 in relationship to their ability

01:00:08.100 to answer abstract questions

01:00:11.420 or to learn abstract concepts

01:00:13.000 corrected for age.

01:00:14.340 That's all it is.

01:00:15.140 And it's a unitary factor.

01:00:16.780 And so the idea that this is some sort of

01:00:18.840 statistical abstraction

01:00:20.460 that doesn't really exist

01:00:22.020 is the same claim

01:00:23.460 that the average or the sum

01:00:25.260 of a group of numbers isn't real.

01:00:27.740 And that's preposterous scientifically.

01:00:31.680 I thought Gould's book

01:00:33.060 was pretty dishonest.

01:00:35.360 He used the maxim

01:00:38.040 that correlation does not imply causation,

01:00:44.060 which, you know,

01:00:46.480 of course, correlation implies causation.

01:00:50.460 What it doesn't do

01:00:51.200 is it doesn't elucidate

01:00:52.400 the causal mechanism.

01:00:54.360 Right.

01:00:55.000 It doesn't prove causation.

01:00:56.480 And so, essentially,

01:00:58.600 he jumped from there

01:00:59.480 to the idea

01:01:00.300 that because this statistical regularity

01:01:05.080 you couldn't point to a brain area

01:01:08.500 that people had illegitimately reified it.

01:01:12.240 So, all right.

01:01:12.960 So, on the entrepreneurial front,

01:01:14.720 this is where things got,

01:01:16.360 well, interesting

01:01:17.080 and more complicated for all of us.

01:01:19.280 At the same time, Daniel,

01:01:21.640 that we were working together

01:01:22.860 on the scientific front,

01:01:23.860 we started talking about

01:01:25.200 the possibility of doing this commercially.

01:01:27.760 And so, we built a battery

01:01:29.160 that assessed people

01:01:32.000 on the neuropsychological front

01:01:33.440 and had a personality test built into it.

01:01:35.700 And you tested it at Harvard

01:01:37.300 and the University of Toronto.

01:01:38.620 And Bob and I went on the road

01:01:40.120 to find companies

01:01:41.160 that would allow us

01:01:42.700 to test it in the real world.

01:01:45.240 And that was very tricky.

01:01:46.260 Now, Bob had a brother-in-law

01:01:48.580 who ran a factory in Milwaukee,

01:01:52.200 Hatco.

01:01:52.820 And we went to Hatco

01:01:54.340 and we talked to the people there

01:01:56.740 and said,

01:01:57.140 look, we're interested in

01:01:58.600 predicting industrial performance.

01:02:01.100 Will you allow us to conduct a study

01:02:03.180 in your institution?

01:02:05.800 Bob, do you want to pick up the story there?

01:02:08.440 Sure.

01:02:09.100 Well, on numerous occasions,

01:02:10.480 we went and we applied

01:02:13.320 the battery of tests

01:02:14.420 to all the managers,

01:02:18.240 basically the entire staff.

01:02:20.740 And it's a mid-size corporation.

01:02:24.940 And we went back.

01:02:28.120 What we did is to validate it

01:02:30.320 is we wanted to look at our test results

01:02:33.120 relative to the ratings that,

01:02:36.720 the internal ratings of the corporation,

01:02:38.480 which are done twice a year,

01:02:41.860 I believe.

01:02:44.280 And so we,

01:02:45.980 over a two-year period,

01:02:48.100 it was that

01:02:49.120 Jordan and I went

01:02:50.920 and tested individuals,

01:02:54.260 went through all the data,

01:02:56.400 collected the data,

01:02:57.580 and passed it on to Daniel.

01:03:00.100 Right, right.

01:03:00.860 And so, and then Daniel published this,

01:03:03.120 well, I think it was brilliant thesis,

01:03:05.120 bringing together

01:03:06.440 the neuropsychological literature

01:03:07.960 the IQ literature,

01:03:10.280 the personality literature,

01:03:11.260 and then laying out these three

01:03:12.820 extremely difficult studies, right?

01:03:14.500 It was hard to do the studies at Harvard.

01:03:16.580 These were practical,

01:03:17.600 real-world studies.

01:03:18.520 It was difficult to do them

01:03:19.580 at the University of Toronto.

01:03:21.320 It was difficult to do them

01:03:22.460 on the industrial front.

01:03:23.700 And you published that paper,

01:03:26.160 as you said,

01:03:26.700 in the Journal of Personality

01:03:27.560 and Social Psychology.

01:03:28.620 It's a very highly ranked journal.

01:03:29.840 And I remember the reviewers

01:03:32.040 of your thesis,

01:03:33.620 even though they weren't

01:03:34.760 necessarily politically aligned

01:03:36.300 with this research protocol,

01:03:38.960 let's say,

01:03:39.760 were uniformly,

01:03:41.900 extremely positive

01:03:43.380 with regard to their comments

01:03:45.180 on the quality of the thesis.

01:03:46.480 I remember that

01:03:47.200 a couple of them

01:03:48.840 had told me afterwards

01:03:49.640 that that was one of the

01:03:50.700 best theses

01:03:51.540 they had ever read.

01:03:53.260 And it was something

01:03:54.240 we had very much thought about

01:03:55.760 and still do talk about

01:03:56.760 from time to time,

01:03:57.400 making into a book.

01:03:58.460 One of the things

01:03:58.960 that was so lovely

01:03:59.540 about working with you, Daniel,

01:04:00.880 and something I like

01:04:01.580 about engineers,

01:04:02.360 is that you virtually

01:04:04.360 never said anything

01:04:06.120 you hadn't researched 0.99

01:04:07.120 right to the damn bottom. 0.99

01:04:08.520 And, you know, 0.99

01:04:09.280 if you're a computer engineer,

01:04:10.480 you have to build something

01:04:11.760 from the code level up

01:04:13.260 and it has to work.

01:04:14.220 And one of the things

01:04:15.200 I really liked about you

01:04:16.940 as a graduate student

01:04:18.020 was that I knew

01:04:19.360 if you...

01:04:20.020 You didn't say a lot.

01:04:21.520 I had a lot...

01:04:22.120 I had students

01:04:22.640 who were a lot noisier than you.

01:04:24.680 And...

01:04:25.140 But if you ever said something,

01:04:26.600 I knew perfectly well

01:04:27.740 that you had bloody well

01:04:29.300 investigated it

01:04:30.200 right down to its atoms

01:04:31.380 and you knew

01:04:32.600 the entire logical sequence

01:04:35.400 of ideation

01:04:36.620 that produced that conclusion.

01:04:38.140 Remember, for example,

01:04:39.140 you referred to John Galton

01:04:40.680 a fair bit in your thesis

01:04:41.860 and you actually went back

01:04:43.540 into the original writings

01:04:44.780 and familiarized yourself

01:04:46.540 with Galton

01:04:47.160 in a manner that was...

01:04:49.060 Well, that distinguished you...

01:04:50.340 Distinguished you completely

01:04:51.560 from anybody I'd ever met

01:04:52.900 who'd talked about Galton at all.

01:04:54.800 Your thesis was really

01:04:55.680 a masterpiece of depth

01:04:58.040 and courage

01:04:58.900 and clear thinking.

01:05:00.740 And so, anyways,

01:05:02.000 we started...

01:05:03.720 Oh, I had a side question for you.

01:05:05.440 Why the hell did you switch

01:05:06.920 from engineering to psychology?

01:05:08.460 Like, you came over to Harvard

01:05:10.480 and took my class

01:05:11.540 and I don't remember exactly...

01:05:13.460 Did you start working with me

01:05:14.920 when you were still an undergraduate

01:05:17.120 as an undergraduate project?

01:05:18.800 How did...

01:05:19.500 Why did you come over

01:05:20.640 and start working with me?

01:05:22.140 I mean, you were

01:05:22.560 a perfectly qualified engineer

01:05:23.960 and on the computational front,

01:05:25.840 you had a, you know,

01:05:27.000 an immense potential career

01:05:28.420 set out in front of you.

01:05:30.440 Well, I had been reading...

01:05:32.120 I had been reading

01:05:33.760 Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud

01:05:36.240 and Alfred Adler

01:05:38.500 and stuff like that.

01:05:39.580 and I had taken...

01:05:43.140 I audited a psych course

01:05:44.920 at MIT.

01:05:46.980 So I went over there

01:05:48.420 to take your personality psychology class

01:05:52.380 and then I went up

01:05:54.500 and talked to you afterwards

01:05:55.320 and said,

01:05:56.040 this is interesting.

01:05:57.520 What do you do?

01:05:58.100 You know,

01:05:58.500 shall we do something together?

01:05:59.860 And you said,

01:06:00.500 yeah, sure.

01:06:01.080 Why don't you...

01:06:02.260 Why don't you construct this instrument

01:06:04.900 to help us,

01:06:05.960 I believe,

01:06:07.700 cook, you know,

01:06:09.640 code reactions

01:06:11.500 of people

01:06:12.500 who are

01:06:13.480 in an alcohol

01:06:14.860 experiment

01:06:16.880 with the computer.

01:06:18.680 And then it just went on

01:06:19.540 from there.

01:06:19.960 Then we did the first version

01:06:21.020 of the neurocognitive battery.

01:06:23.580 Then before we went

01:06:25.020 to HATCO, etc.,

01:06:27.020 we redid it

01:06:28.600 to make it more intuitive

01:06:29.740 and easier to use.

01:06:32.100 You remember the summer

01:06:32.940 in, I think it was 1998,

01:06:34.840 you and Alice and I

01:06:36.220 were in Porter Square

01:06:37.360 working on that,

01:06:38.740 stuffing ourselves

01:06:39.860 with pastries

01:06:40.720 in the mid-morning.

01:06:42.280 Good times.

01:06:44.220 Yeah, great.

01:06:44.740 That was just at the dawn

01:06:46.080 of the point

01:06:46.640 where all this stuff

01:06:47.380 became possible

01:06:48.580 on the computational front.

01:06:50.080 So that was exciting too

01:06:51.100 to learn how to do all that.

01:06:52.980 Right.

01:06:53.520 Oh, just to clarify something,

01:06:55.300 it wasn't the...

01:06:56.020 The people at the JPSP

01:06:57.660 said that the paper,

01:06:59.780 that the submission

01:07:00.440 was well-written.

01:07:01.360 It was the people

01:07:01.860 at Harvard

01:07:02.380 that gave the positive feedback.

01:07:05.640 I don't think you should

01:07:06.340 be smirching the people

01:07:07.800 at JPSP

01:07:08.760 by suggesting

01:07:09.740 that they thought

01:07:10.280 there was anything

01:07:10.760 particularly special

01:07:11.700 about my paper.

01:07:12.600 Right, right.

01:07:13.180 No, no.

01:07:13.500 It was the reviewers

01:07:14.460 of the thesis at Harvard.

01:07:15.780 No, that's right.

01:07:16.860 All right, so we started.

01:07:18.660 Then Bob and I,

01:07:20.120 once your paper came out,

01:07:21.580 we could calculate

01:07:22.560 the economic return

01:07:23.980 that would be available

01:07:25.520 to companies

01:07:26.180 if they used

01:07:26.800 our test battery.

01:07:27.700 So basically,

01:07:28.440 what we showed

01:07:29.080 was that on the managerial front,

01:07:31.280 if you were scored highly

01:07:34.260 on the neuropsychological assessment,

01:07:37.000 so which is something

01:07:37.740 like an elaborated assessment

01:07:39.400 or, no,

01:07:40.260 something like a variant assessment

01:07:41.740 of fluid intelligence,

01:07:42.960 and you were high

01:07:44.040 in conscientiousness,

01:07:45.340 that you were

01:07:45.960 much more likely

01:07:47.560 to be a successful manager,

01:07:49.280 and that what predicted

01:07:50.940 on the line worker front

01:07:52.260 was more purely

01:07:53.360 just conscientiousness.

01:07:55.040 And that was

01:07:55.700 in accordance

01:07:56.780 with the relevant

01:07:57.700 industrial organizational literature,

01:07:59.560 which we also had to master

01:08:01.120 at the same time, right,

01:08:02.580 because we were trying

01:08:03.320 to find out

01:08:04.160 what were valid predictors

01:08:07.120 of industrial performance

01:08:08.480 and calculate

01:08:09.560 the economic returns

01:08:10.680 on that.

01:08:11.560 And we armed ourselves

01:08:14.020 with a set

01:08:14.600 of scientific facts.

01:08:15.760 So what Bob and I

01:08:17.460 and you decided to do

01:08:18.860 was to go out

01:08:19.520 into the corporate world

01:08:20.760 and try to sell

01:08:21.940 these tests.

01:08:22.740 And the pitch was,

01:08:24.680 we can assess

01:08:25.520 your new employees

01:08:26.540 within about

01:08:27.800 an hour and a half.

01:08:29.360 We can tell you

01:08:30.120 who's going to be

01:08:30.660 a good manager,

01:08:32.220 statistically more likely.

01:08:33.780 We can identify

01:08:34.440 a pool of people

01:08:35.260 who are statistically

01:08:36.020 more likely

01:08:36.760 to be high performers

01:08:37.880 as managers

01:08:39.040 and as line workers

01:08:40.020 using slightly different

01:08:41.060 measurement techniques.

01:08:42.260 And the economic payoff

01:08:43.680 of that is going

01:08:45.080 to be like 500 times

01:08:46.480 as much as it costs

01:08:47.620 you to do the testing

01:08:48.700 per year

01:08:49.920 over the hypothetical

01:08:51.380 five-year period

01:08:52.400 of their career.

01:08:53.400 And we use that

01:08:54.400 five-year period

01:08:55.180 because people

01:08:55.700 tend to switch jobs.

01:08:56.780 And so in our naivety,

01:08:58.600 we presume that

01:08:59.300 if we could go out

01:08:59.980 into the corporate world

01:09:00.860 and say,

01:09:01.300 look, here's something

01:09:02.740 that you could do

01:09:03.620 that is really inexpensive

01:09:05.280 that will generate

01:09:06.520 a lot of money

01:09:07.260 that people would just

01:09:08.420 fall all over themselves

01:09:09.640 to do it.

01:09:10.980 And so Bob,

01:09:11.600 you and I

01:09:12.140 went on the corporate road

01:09:13.940 for, God,

01:09:15.940 five years,

01:09:17.280 do you think?

01:09:18.500 Trying to sell 1.00

01:09:19.440 these damn tests. 1.00

01:09:21.340 And what was 1.00

01:09:22.440 the consequence?

01:09:24.960 Zero.

01:09:26.780 Experience

01:09:28.660 and

01:09:29.500 traveler points

01:09:32.160 pretty much.

01:09:34.040 Right.

01:09:36.400 I recall

01:09:39.000 our trips

01:09:40.040 to Chicago,

01:09:42.600 Phoenix.

01:09:44.800 We even

01:09:45.960 went to a

01:09:47.420 National Football League

01:09:48.980 team

01:09:49.380 and tried

01:09:50.840 to sell

01:09:51.720 them the test.

01:09:53.380 And they were

01:09:53.740 very interested.

01:09:54.480 they were

01:09:56.680 using IQ tests,

01:09:58.020 eh?

01:09:58.560 Yeah,

01:09:59.080 but the big

01:10:00.140 problem with them

01:10:01.100 was they

01:10:01.760 figured

01:10:02.600 they would have

01:10:03.660 difficulty

01:10:04.140 getting the players

01:10:05.020 to sit down

01:10:05.720 and actually

01:10:06.260 invest an hour

01:10:08.160 and a half

01:10:08.660 at any one time.

01:10:10.960 Right,

01:10:11.460 right,

01:10:12.200 right.

01:10:12.680 Yeah,

01:10:12.900 well,

01:10:13.020 it turns out

01:10:13.560 that the better

01:10:14.020 quarterbacks

01:10:14.600 tend to have

01:10:15.160 better general

01:10:16.000 cognitive ability,

01:10:16.920 tend to have

01:10:17.320 higher IQs.

01:10:18.400 Yeah,

01:10:18.660 so that was

01:10:19.880 also our first

01:10:20.620 encounter,

01:10:21.220 Bob,

01:10:21.540 with the

01:10:22.500 realities of

01:10:23.340 human resources

01:10:24.240 and we used

01:10:24.820 to joke,

01:10:26.180 Bob and I

01:10:26.720 met a

01:10:27.720 tremendous number

01:10:28.640 of women

01:10:29.940 employed in

01:10:30.660 HR

01:10:31.200 named Debbie

01:10:32.160 and they

01:10:33.480 always got in

01:10:34.160 our way,

01:10:34.800 like we would

01:10:35.480 attempt to lay

01:10:36.880 out the case

01:10:37.460 that we could

01:10:37.980 evaluate people

01:10:39.120 on the basis

01:10:39.700 of their capacity

01:10:40.460 to learn

01:10:40.980 and that that

01:10:42.220 was an element

01:10:43.820 of merit

01:10:44.400 and the Debbies 0.86

01:10:45.740 weren't very happy

01:10:46.540 with that idea

01:10:47.260 because they liked

01:10:48.020 to presume

01:10:48.540 that you could

01:10:49.160 train anybody

01:10:49.840 to do anything

01:10:50.660 at all

01:10:51.180 and there was

01:10:51.880 no such thing

01:10:52.560 as individual

01:10:53.220 differences

01:10:53.780 and,

01:10:54.660 well,

01:10:55.140 we probably

01:10:56.400 talked to

01:10:57.260 300 companies,

01:11:00.060 something like that,

01:11:00.980 mostly at the

01:11:01.620 middle management

01:11:02.220 level and what

01:11:03.340 did we learn?

01:11:04.220 We learned

01:11:04.680 talking to middle

01:11:06.060 managers is

01:11:06.760 absolutely pointless

01:11:07.680 if you're trying

01:11:08.240 to do anything

01:11:08.820 entrepreneurial.

01:11:10.160 We learned that

01:11:10.900 if you're a

01:11:11.400 middle manager,

01:11:12.380 go ahead,

01:11:12.820 Bob.

01:11:13.200 We were

01:11:13.680 Debbified.

01:11:14.900 Yes,

01:11:15.180 exactly,

01:11:15.780 exactly and I

01:11:16.500 think that's

01:11:17.140 been replaced

01:11:17.780 by the epithet

01:11:18.820 Karen now

01:11:19.740 and so other

01:11:20.640 people obviously

01:11:21.380 encountered more

01:11:22.120 Karens but we 0.95

01:11:22.840 encountered a lot

01:11:23.520 of Debbies

01:11:24.060 and so,

01:11:26.260 well,

01:11:26.460 we learned that

01:11:27.000 talking to

01:11:27.720 middle managers

01:11:28.300 about anything

01:11:29.040 entrepreneurial

01:11:29.640 wasn't going

01:11:30.220 to fly

01:11:30.620 and the reason

01:11:31.760 for that was

01:11:32.400 that most

01:11:33.320 people in

01:11:33.840 middle management

01:11:34.540 are not

01:11:35.780 risk takers

01:11:36.640 at all

01:11:37.520 and so if

01:11:38.460 you go to

01:11:39.000 them and you

01:11:39.400 say,

01:11:39.700 look,

01:11:39.880 we've got

01:11:40.200 this new

01:11:40.860 thing that

01:11:42.220 could have

01:11:42.580 a spectacular

01:11:43.340 outcome,

01:11:44.760 all they hear

01:11:45.920 is,

01:11:46.260 I could

01:11:47.340 get in a lot

01:11:48.320 of trouble

01:11:48.660 if that

01:11:49.040 goes wrong

01:11:49.820 and the only

01:11:50.800 question they

01:11:51.460 really want to

01:11:52.020 have answered

01:11:52.620 is,

01:11:53.420 who else

01:11:53.920 is using

01:11:54.440 this?

01:11:55.480 And that

01:11:56.080 was so

01:11:56.420 interesting

01:11:56.920 sociologically

01:11:57.800 because I

01:11:58.660 didn't realize

01:11:59.260 at that point

01:11:59.940 how much

01:12:01.420 people relied

01:12:02.480 on consensus

01:12:03.700 to make their

01:12:04.460 judgments

01:12:04.920 instead of

01:12:05.900 logic.

01:12:06.280 Like,

01:12:06.960 as naive

01:12:07.580 scientists,

01:12:08.120 we assumed

01:12:08.880 that if we

01:12:09.300 just went

01:12:09.720 out of the

01:12:10.120 business world

01:12:10.720 armed with

01:12:11.280 our statistical

01:12:11.920 arguments,

01:12:12.560 we could

01:12:13.300 demonstrate

01:12:13.920 incontrovertibly

01:12:14.960 the economic

01:12:16.020 utility of

01:12:16.800 this approach

01:12:17.520 but then we

01:12:18.580 assumed that

01:12:19.120 people were

01:12:19.600 motivated by

01:12:20.420 economic utility,

01:12:21.640 that they would

01:12:22.280 be rewarded

01:12:23.100 for taking a

01:12:23.960 risk,

01:12:24.720 that they would

01:12:25.300 understand the

01:12:26.480 technical arguments

01:12:27.320 and that that

01:12:28.080 would guide their

01:12:28.660 decision making

01:12:29.440 and every single

01:12:30.820 one of those

01:12:31.440 presumptions was

01:12:32.340 wrong.

01:12:33.900 Yeah.

01:12:34.320 So we didn't

01:12:35.080 sell any of

01:12:35.760 those tests,

01:12:36.700 not really,

01:12:38.020 not until we

01:12:38.540 started working

01:12:39.100 with the

01:12:39.460 Founder Institute

01:12:40.220 and that was

01:12:41.080 like 10 years

01:12:41.860 later.

01:12:43.440 Well,

01:12:44.040 and the

01:12:44.380 experience I

01:12:45.080 had trying

01:12:46.080 to demonstrate

01:12:47.540 to pharmacists

01:12:48.880 and to

01:12:49.820 pharmacies,

01:12:50.880 we did

01:12:51.880 studies with

01:12:52.740 pharmacies who

01:12:54.300 made medication

01:12:55.080 errors,

01:12:55.980 serious errors,

01:12:57.020 and were able

01:12:58.420 to demonstrate

01:12:59.660 that on this

01:13:00.540 battery of tests,

01:13:01.920 those individuals

01:13:02.720 who made the

01:13:03.440 errors compared

01:13:04.120 to a control

01:13:04.840 group of

01:13:05.280 pharmacists scored

01:13:06.800 significantly poorly,

01:13:08.420 particularly in

01:13:09.080 something like

01:13:09.700 working memory

01:13:10.440 because they

01:13:11.520 just weren't

01:13:12.200 able to

01:13:12.720 keep a lot

01:13:13.380 of things

01:13:13.760 in their

01:13:14.040 head at

01:13:14.380 the one

01:13:14.680 time.

01:13:15.340 And a

01:13:15.660 pharmacist's

01:13:16.240 job is

01:13:16.860 one which

01:13:17.360 is very

01:13:17.760 dependent on

01:13:19.020 being able

01:13:19.680 to keep

01:13:22.500 in mind that

01:13:23.360 they're filling

01:13:23.820 a prescription

01:13:24.420 at the same

01:13:25.100 time that they

01:13:25.640 have to deal

01:13:26.180 with a customer

01:13:26.920 at the same

01:13:27.860 time that there's

01:13:28.540 a phone call.

01:13:29.180 There's all

01:13:29.660 of these

01:13:30.160 situations that

01:13:32.660 are occurring.

01:13:34.020 Anyway,

01:13:34.640 our tests

01:13:35.420 were really

01:13:36.760 appropriate in

01:13:38.140 being able to

01:13:39.280 raise red

01:13:40.300 flags about

01:13:41.060 individuals who

01:13:41.900 were going

01:13:42.200 to have

01:13:42.460 trouble.

01:13:43.700 And so

01:13:45.260 we even

01:13:45.960 talked to

01:13:46.720 large

01:13:47.440 pharmaceutical

01:13:48.220 chains

01:13:48.960 at the

01:13:51.140 directors of

01:13:51.940 personnel level.

01:13:53.920 And the

01:13:55.500 issue is

01:13:56.320 they didn't

01:13:57.020 like our

01:13:57.600 tests,

01:13:58.260 A, because

01:13:58.680 of the

01:13:59.000 time,

01:13:59.860 and B,

01:14:00.520 because there

01:14:01.020 was no

01:14:01.380 face validity.

01:14:02.940 Right,

01:14:03.260 right.

01:14:03.480 They didn't

01:14:03.760 look like,

01:14:04.460 yeah,

01:14:04.760 yeah.

01:14:05.240 They didn't

01:14:05.800 look like

01:14:06.380 what a

01:14:07.380 pharmacist

01:14:08.120 was doing.

01:14:10.020 Right,

01:14:10.320 right,

01:14:10.620 right.

01:14:11.180 Yeah,

01:14:11.420 and so

01:14:11.720 that,

01:14:12.080 as Bob

01:14:12.380 pointed out,

01:14:12.920 that's known

01:14:13.320 as face

01:14:13.740 validity.

01:14:14.300 The test

01:14:14.720 looks like

01:14:15.280 it's doing

01:14:15.720 what it

01:14:16.080 says to

01:14:16.500 be doing,

01:14:16.960 and lots

01:14:17.660 of accurate

01:14:18.080 psychological

01:14:18.640 tests don't

01:14:19.440 have that

01:14:19.860 quality.

01:14:20.780 So we

01:14:21.640 also started

01:14:22.260 to understand

01:14:22.760 more about

01:14:23.340 the political

01:14:23.840 landscape on

01:14:25.340 the corporate

01:14:25.860 front in

01:14:26.900 America,

01:14:27.560 and also

01:14:28.680 why innovative

01:14:29.840 technologies are

01:14:30.720 difficult to

01:14:31.280 get adopted.

01:14:32.040 I mean,

01:14:32.260 first of all,

01:14:32.700 if you're

01:14:32.900 going to go

01:14:33.140 out and sell

01:14:33.580 something to

01:14:34.340 a corporation,

01:14:35.580 you have

01:14:36.460 to actually

01:14:36.900 talk to the

01:14:37.460 people who

01:14:37.820 can make

01:14:38.140 decisions,

01:14:38.600 and that is

01:14:39.400 not an easy

01:14:40.000 thing to do,

01:14:40.580 and that's

01:14:40.960 almost never

01:14:41.640 middle management.

01:14:42.600 And before

01:14:43.400 people think

01:14:43.980 that I'm

01:14:44.320 down on

01:14:44.780 middle managers,

01:14:46.140 I should

01:14:46.800 also point

01:14:47.380 out that

01:14:47.920 they have

01:14:49.480 every reason

01:14:50.060 to be leery

01:14:50.680 of risk.

01:14:51.320 So I remember

01:14:51.860 one company

01:14:52.500 that we

01:14:52.860 dealt with,

01:14:53.640 they were

01:14:54.060 growing by

01:14:54.800 like 100

01:14:55.300 employees a

01:14:55.980 month,

01:14:56.180 they couldn't

01:14:56.540 keep up,

01:14:57.340 and they

01:14:57.800 really needed

01:14:58.580 a technology

01:15:00.260 to screen

01:15:01.240 their applicants

01:15:03.360 before interviews,

01:15:04.360 and our

01:15:04.620 technology was

01:15:05.360 perfectly

01:15:05.840 situated to

01:15:06.640 manage this,

01:15:07.920 but we

01:15:09.440 wanted to

01:15:09.900 charge them,

01:15:10.400 I think it

01:15:10.760 was $30 a

01:15:11.680 test or

01:15:12.060 something,

01:15:12.420 I think they

01:15:12.840 had a budget

01:15:13.300 of $5,

01:15:14.380 and we

01:15:14.940 said,

01:15:15.240 look,

01:15:15.400 we just

01:15:15.680 can't do

01:15:16.100 it for

01:15:16.340 $5,

01:15:16.960 there's

01:15:17.180 just no

01:15:17.780 utility in

01:15:18.520 this whatsoever

01:15:19.040 for us,

01:15:19.680 and we

01:15:20.100 already

01:15:20.320 demonstrated

01:15:20.840 that you'll

01:15:21.320 get like a

01:15:21.760 500 to

01:15:22.420 1 return

01:15:23.020 on investment

01:15:23.680 at the

01:15:24.360 price we're

01:15:25.140 charging,

01:15:26.060 why the

01:15:26.620 hell wouldn't

01:15:27.120 you do

01:15:27.540 it?

01:15:28.020 And they

01:15:28.420 said,

01:15:28.740 well,

01:15:28.940 look,

01:15:30.060 we get

01:15:30.500 evaluated on

01:15:31.320 how much

01:15:31.640 we spend

01:15:32.140 per test,

01:15:33.200 and some

01:15:33.640 other part

01:15:34.500 of the

01:15:34.740 company will

01:15:35.240 be rewarded

01:15:35.900 if there's

01:15:36.380 more productive

01:15:36.960 people.

01:15:37.920 So we

01:15:38.280 bear all the

01:15:38.920 responsibility for

01:15:39.880 the risk and

01:15:40.440 get none of

01:15:40.860 the reward for

01:15:41.540 the outcome.

01:15:42.420 And I

01:15:42.720 thought,

01:15:43.200 well,

01:15:43.460 oh my

01:15:43.740 God,

01:15:44.040 that's fatal.

01:15:45.240 And so

01:15:45.600 many companies

01:15:46.220 are set up

01:15:46.840 like that,

01:15:47.400 like,

01:15:47.700 you're not

01:15:48.220 going to get

01:15:48.720 your HR

01:15:49.800 people to be

01:15:50.680 incentivized to

01:15:52.100 hire better

01:15:52.640 employees if they

01:15:53.480 get punished for

01:15:54.420 taking risks when

01:15:55.360 they're assessing

01:15:55.940 them.

01:15:56.240 And so,

01:15:57.640 well,

01:15:57.940 we learned a

01:15:58.460 lot about how

01:15:59.060 the corporate

01:15:59.460 world functioned.

01:16:00.500 And also,

01:16:01.760 I learned,

01:16:02.540 for example,

01:16:03.100 why people,

01:16:05.740 when they're

01:16:05.940 making business

01:16:06.460 deals,

01:16:06.820 go play golf,

01:16:08.340 for example.

01:16:09.100 And the reason

01:16:09.640 for that is a

01:16:10.620 lot of the way

01:16:11.220 that people in

01:16:11.860 business evaluate

01:16:12.700 one another for

01:16:13.700 the possibility of

01:16:14.960 working together

01:16:15.640 is on the basis

01:16:16.800 of personal

01:16:18.040 trust and

01:16:18.680 compatibility.

01:16:19.940 Like,

01:16:20.100 they're not

01:16:20.340 doing a

01:16:20.720 technical analysis

01:16:21.760 of the utility

01:16:22.700 of their

01:16:23.180 processes.

01:16:24.240 Hardly anyone

01:16:24.920 thinks like that,

01:16:25.880 right?

01:16:26.480 Some scientists

01:16:27.640 think like that

01:16:28.700 some of the

01:16:29.440 time.

01:16:30.200 But other

01:16:30.640 people use all

01:16:31.960 sorts of

01:16:32.380 interpersonal

01:16:32.880 heuristics that

01:16:33.860 we were in

01:16:35.240 some ways unaware

01:16:36.060 of when we

01:16:37.440 were overestimating

01:16:38.480 the degree to

01:16:39.100 which pure logic

01:16:40.700 could be used as

01:16:41.500 a sales technique.

01:16:43.200 In any case,

01:16:43.920 Bob and I went

01:16:44.620 all over the

01:16:46.340 U.S. and

01:16:46.840 Canada for a

01:16:47.680 long time,

01:16:49.300 a long,

01:16:49.980 long time,

01:16:50.980 learning about

01:16:51.880 the culture of

01:16:53.080 business,

01:16:53.560 feeling like

01:16:54.040 complete bumbling 1.00

01:16:54.800 fools because, 1.00

01:16:55.560 of course, 1.00

01:16:55.740 we didn't

01:16:56.800 really have

01:16:57.200 any business

01:16:57.680 experience at

01:16:58.380 that point.

01:16:59.640 And then,

01:17:01.080 well,

01:17:01.420 then two

01:17:02.220 things happened.

01:17:03.760 I made

01:17:04.200 contact with

01:17:04.860 Adele Ressi

01:17:05.580 at the

01:17:06.300 Founder Institute

01:17:07.060 in California,

01:17:08.080 and Adele was

01:17:08.840 trying to set up

01:17:10.120 business schools

01:17:11.240 for budding

01:17:12.000 entrepreneurs all

01:17:12.900 over the world,

01:17:13.520 and he really

01:17:14.500 wanted to

01:17:15.120 predict

01:17:15.520 entrepreneurial

01:17:16.560 ability.

01:17:17.920 And so we

01:17:18.320 ran a study

01:17:18.900 with him that

01:17:19.440 we never

01:17:19.780 published.

01:17:20.260 It was a

01:17:20.560 private study

01:17:21.140 for us,

01:17:21.980 showing that

01:17:22.420 we could

01:17:22.700 actually

01:17:23.040 predict

01:17:23.440 entrepreneurial

01:17:24.020 performance

01:17:24.700 with quite a

01:17:25.620 high degree

01:17:26.060 of accuracy.

01:17:27.340 And then we

01:17:27.740 started testing

01:17:28.520 people all

01:17:29.740 over the

01:17:30.100 world with

01:17:31.060 a modified

01:17:31.720 version of

01:17:32.480 our

01:17:32.660 neuropsychological

01:17:33.600 battery,

01:17:34.080 a much

01:17:34.360 simplified version

01:17:35.280 that concentrated

01:17:36.000 more on

01:17:36.540 fluid intelligence

01:17:37.440 than on

01:17:38.340 hypothetical

01:17:39.000 prefrontal

01:17:40.100 ability.

01:17:40.520 And we

01:17:40.720 tested tens

01:17:41.380 of thousands

01:17:41.920 of people

01:17:42.420 for Adele

01:17:43.100 quite successfully,

01:17:44.360 and that

01:17:44.740 kept

01:17:45.040 ExamCorp going.

01:17:46.120 Now that

01:17:48.100 was hard

01:17:49.100 on the

01:17:49.420 business

01:17:49.740 front,

01:17:50.120 because we

01:17:50.520 pulled Daniel

01:17:51.160 into the

01:17:51.640 business,

01:17:52.620 and we

01:17:53.200 tried to

01:17:54.200 fund his

01:17:54.660 research

01:17:55.240 through grants,

01:17:56.080 and we

01:17:56.440 threw some

01:17:57.240 private funding

01:17:57.960 at him,

01:17:58.340 although we

01:17:58.740 didn't have

01:17:59.220 a lot of

01:17:59.640 money,

01:18:00.540 and weren't

01:18:01.080 generating

01:18:01.520 any capital.

01:18:02.360 And that,

01:18:03.700 you know,

01:18:03.980 at that time,

01:18:05.360 the universities

01:18:06.100 were really

01:18:06.620 pushing on

01:18:07.220 professors to

01:18:08.480 commodify their

01:18:12.000 research.

01:18:12.600 Why can't the

01:18:13.380 universities produce

01:18:14.320 more businesses?

01:18:15.140 And we

01:18:16.600 went out and

01:18:17.120 tried to

01:18:17.460 produce a

01:18:17.920 business,

01:18:18.500 and what we

01:18:19.260 learned was

01:18:19.800 that's a

01:18:20.220 hell of a

01:18:20.520 lot harder

01:18:20.940 than you

01:18:21.340 think,

01:18:21.860 because the

01:18:22.340 product is

01:18:23.020 only about

01:18:23.500 5% of

01:18:24.620 the problem.

01:18:26.120 Sales and

01:18:26.660 marketing are

01:18:27.280 more like

01:18:27.640 95% of

01:18:28.780 the problem.

01:18:29.680 And we

01:18:30.080 also learned

01:18:30.780 that the

01:18:31.160 people who

01:18:32.360 were pushing

01:18:33.020 this idea

01:18:33.800 that scientists

01:18:35.480 should produce

01:18:36.440 more businesses

01:18:37.180 were people

01:18:38.340 who'd never

01:18:38.940 discovered

01:18:40.340 anything

01:18:40.780 scientifically,

01:18:41.600 and had no

01:18:42.020 idea how

01:18:42.480 difficult that

01:18:43.200 was,

01:18:43.860 and who

01:18:44.160 had never

01:18:44.560 produced

01:18:45.000 a business,

01:18:46.020 and who

01:18:46.320 had no

01:18:46.640 idea how

01:18:47.200 difficult that

01:18:47.900 was,

01:18:48.660 and then had

01:18:49.200 absolutely no

01:18:50.180 idea whatsoever

01:18:51.200 about how

01:18:52.040 difficult it

01:18:52.740 was to jointly

01:18:53.760 do something

01:18:54.660 scientific and

01:18:56.000 entrepreneurial.

01:18:57.260 And the

01:18:57.700 reason for that

01:18:58.340 in part is

01:18:58.920 those are very

01:18:59.580 different domains.

01:19:01.020 Like marketing

01:19:01.600 and sales is

01:19:02.280 such a big

01:19:02.880 part of the

01:19:03.600 industrial

01:19:04.800 domain of

01:19:07.700 activities compared

01:19:08.760 to the scientific.

01:19:10.000 You have to

01:19:10.580 understand marketing

01:19:11.380 and sales deeply

01:19:12.240 to be successful

01:19:13.060 as an

01:19:13.480 entrepreneur.

01:19:15.140 And also,

01:19:17.580 we also ran

01:19:18.660 into a fair

01:19:19.940 bit of

01:19:20.360 friction.

01:19:21.440 It was often

01:19:22.460 very emotionally

01:19:23.460 demanding because

01:19:24.540 we had in some

01:19:26.060 sense a conflict

01:19:26.940 of interest,

01:19:27.700 especially in

01:19:28.220 relationship to

01:19:29.000 Daniel,

01:19:29.520 because we were

01:19:30.440 trying to move

01:19:30.980 ahead to your

01:19:31.500 scientific career

01:19:32.340 and we were

01:19:32.700 trying to produce

01:19:33.360 a business

01:19:34.160 enterprise at the

01:19:35.060 same time,

01:19:35.800 and it

01:19:36.480 wasn't easy

01:19:37.080 at all to

01:19:38.500 keep the

01:19:39.180 ethical line

01:19:40.980 straight.

01:19:42.380 You know,

01:19:42.700 how much to

01:19:43.320 pay you,

01:19:43.840 how much we

01:19:44.680 should be

01:19:45.100 concentrating on

01:19:45.900 your scientific

01:19:46.940 career.

01:19:47.600 Now,

01:19:47.840 you had got

01:19:48.260 somewhat

01:19:48.620 disenchanted

01:19:49.360 with the idea

01:19:50.000 of a scientific

01:19:50.620 career,

01:19:51.800 but we're very

01:19:52.480 interested in

01:19:53.180 pursuing the

01:19:53.800 development of

01:19:54.440 this battery.

01:19:55.980 And at the

01:19:56.380 same time,

01:19:57.480 just to make

01:19:58.000 the story a

01:19:58.480 bit more

01:19:58.760 complex,

01:19:59.600 a lot of

01:20:00.000 the managers

01:20:02.760 we were

01:20:03.220 talking to,

01:20:03.880 they would

01:20:05.220 dispense with

01:20:06.020 any interest

01:20:06.660 in the

01:20:07.020 predictive tests

01:20:07.940 for the

01:20:09.720 reasons we

01:20:10.220 already described.

01:20:11.300 But they

01:20:11.700 kept asking us

01:20:12.500 the same

01:20:12.900 question,

01:20:13.500 which was,

01:20:14.000 well,

01:20:15.000 you say we

01:20:15.680 should hire

01:20:16.020 better people,

01:20:16.640 but we have

01:20:17.020 a lot of

01:20:17.380 troublesome

01:20:17.680 people that

01:20:18.240 we've already

01:20:18.700 hired and we

01:20:19.240 need to know

01:20:19.720 what to do

01:20:20.200 with them.

01:20:21.480 And our

01:20:22.100 answer always

01:20:22.700 was,

01:20:23.040 well,

01:20:23.160 we don't

01:20:23.540 know what

01:20:24.720 to do with

01:20:25.180 your troublesome

01:20:25.680 people,

01:20:26.140 and the

01:20:26.460 managerial

01:20:27.080 literature says

01:20:27.780 you should

01:20:28.140 spend all

01:20:28.640 the time

01:20:29.000 with your

01:20:29.320 best performers,

01:20:30.420 not your

01:20:30.800 worst.

01:20:31.780 And so,

01:20:32.460 we don't

01:20:33.680 know what

01:20:34.000 to do

01:20:34.240 about that,

01:20:34.740 maybe there's

01:20:35.140 nothing that

01:20:35.560 can be done,

01:20:36.160 but we got

01:20:36.560 asked that

01:20:36.980 like 200

01:20:37.540 times.

01:20:38.980 And so,

01:20:39.280 we went

01:20:39.580 into the

01:20:39.980 literature to

01:20:40.580 see if we

01:20:41.720 could find

01:20:42.400 any evidence

01:20:44.360 that there

01:20:44.840 were broad-scale

01:20:45.740 psychological

01:20:46.440 interventions that

01:20:47.480 might help

01:20:48.060 poorer performers,

01:20:49.740 and we

01:20:50.820 settled on

01:20:51.620 the development

01:20:53.260 of what became

01:20:54.020 the self-authoring

01:20:54.900 battery.

01:20:56.560 And we

01:20:57.260 learned that

01:20:57.900 from two

01:20:58.340 different

01:20:58.720 literatures,

01:20:59.800 James Pennebaker

01:21:00.680 spearheaded one

01:21:01.560 of them, 0.95

01:21:01.960 and then

01:21:02.320 Latham and

01:21:03.460 Locke,

01:21:08.360 Gary Latham

01:21:09.900 did that in

01:21:11.840 the goal-setting

01:21:12.580 domain in the

01:21:13.340 industrial

01:21:13.700 organizational

01:21:14.340 psychology,

01:21:15.120 we found out

01:21:16.000 that if you

01:21:16.400 had people

01:21:17.060 write about

01:21:17.960 complex,

01:21:20.300 about the

01:21:20.900 complexities of

01:21:21.740 their life

01:21:22.320 autobiographically

01:21:23.880 or in

01:21:24.340 relationship to

01:21:25.220 their future,

01:21:26.500 that they would

01:21:27.700 perform better

01:21:28.760 industrially and

01:21:30.220 their mental

01:21:30.680 and physical

01:21:31.220 health would

01:21:31.760 improve.

01:21:32.940 So we

01:21:34.460 started working

01:21:35.100 with the

01:21:35.460 DALE to

01:21:35.940 predict creative

01:21:38.320 competence,

01:21:39.140 and that gave

01:21:39.760 us a bit of

01:21:40.260 capital, and

01:21:41.240 then we

01:21:41.560 started to

01:21:42.120 develop the,

01:21:43.000 I think that

01:21:43.840 was the right

01:21:44.320 order, we

01:21:44.760 started to

01:21:45.260 develop the

01:21:45.800 self-authoring

01:21:46.580 tests, and

01:21:48.080 our goal was

01:21:50.200 to produce

01:21:50.760 tests that

01:21:51.420 were scientifically

01:21:52.200 validatable,

01:21:53.700 that were

01:21:54.060 inexpensive,

01:21:55.340 that were

01:21:55.740 scalable, that

01:21:56.640 would do no

01:21:57.220 harm, and

01:21:57.700 that had

01:21:58.960 demonstrated

01:21:59.660 validity in

01:22:01.260 terms of

01:22:01.780 improving

01:22:02.200 performance in

01:22:02.980 mental health.

01:22:04.540 And so,

01:22:05.060 Daniel, you

01:22:05.480 want to walk

01:22:05.940 through the

01:22:06.380 self-authoring

01:22:07.180 suite a little

01:22:08.240 bit?

01:22:09.400 Yeah, the

01:22:10.380 self-authoring

01:22:11.680 suite is

01:22:12.640 essentially a

01:22:13.680 series of

01:22:14.160 writing exercises,

01:22:16.000 future authoring,

01:22:18.140 past authoring,

01:22:19.180 and present

01:22:20.080 authoring.

01:22:21.240 And starting

01:22:22.580 with, I like to

01:22:23.520 start with the

01:22:23.880 future authoring

01:22:24.620 because it

01:22:25.540 gives you the

01:22:26.740 most bang for

01:22:27.420 your buck.

01:22:28.380 And essentially,

01:22:29.360 it's a series

01:22:30.580 of writing

01:22:33.040 exercises where

01:22:34.580 you're asked to

01:22:35.980 think about what

01:22:37.660 you want out

01:22:38.960 of life in

01:22:42.220 concrete, in

01:22:42.980 more concrete

01:22:43.560 detail than you

01:22:44.440 do typically,

01:22:45.540 and to work out

01:22:46.840 some processes

01:22:47.720 to elaborate on

01:22:50.120 that vision of

01:22:52.100 an ideal future,

01:22:52.980 and then to

01:22:54.180 actually break

01:22:55.720 up the

01:22:56.740 steps that

01:22:58.920 would be

01:22:59.260 required in

01:22:59.940 order for you

01:23:00.360 to start

01:23:00.700 making motion

01:23:02.480 towards that,

01:23:03.720 and then to

01:23:04.400 look at the

01:23:05.320 impediments and

01:23:06.680 things that can

01:23:07.500 help you to 0.85

01:23:08.640 execute those

01:23:09.500 plans.

01:23:11.600 And so, the

01:23:12.100 future authoring

01:23:12.960 is a good

01:23:15.880 way to get

01:23:16.820 people motivated,

01:23:18.020 and I think

01:23:18.620 maybe you

01:23:20.960 might talk

01:23:22.960 in some

01:23:23.460 detail about

01:23:24.720 the study that

01:23:25.320 we did at

01:23:26.160 the college,

01:23:27.620 because you're a

01:23:28.600 little bit more

01:23:29.040 familiar with the

01:23:29.720 details of that

01:23:30.440 than I am.

01:23:31.020 Yeah, well, we

01:23:31.860 did three

01:23:32.420 studies.

01:23:33.740 You and I

01:23:34.220 and Bob

01:23:35.060 did all these

01:23:36.300 studies, and so

01:23:37.180 Bob had a

01:23:38.000 student who was

01:23:38.580 working at

01:23:39.060 McGill who was

01:23:40.500 interested in

01:23:41.340 potentially in the

01:23:42.920 prediction of

01:23:43.380 performance, and

01:23:44.040 so we set out

01:23:45.500 to see if we

01:23:47.460 allowed students

01:23:48.560 or encouraged

01:23:49.360 students to

01:23:50.220 write about

01:23:51.360 their future,

01:23:52.660 to make a

01:23:53.220 plan, to

01:23:53.840 develop a

01:23:54.280 vision for

01:23:54.860 six dimensions

01:23:56.140 of their

01:23:56.620 future, intimate

01:23:57.820 relationships, job,

01:23:59.160 career, education,

01:24:00.160 care of mental

01:24:01.780 and physical

01:24:02.240 health, use of

01:24:03.160 time outside of

01:24:04.060 work, regulation

01:24:05.880 of response to

01:24:07.660 temptations,

01:24:10.180 friendship networks,

01:24:11.420 development of

01:24:11.860 friendship networks,

01:24:12.720 to develop a

01:24:13.420 coherent plan for

01:24:14.780 those domains

01:24:15.620 in relatively

01:24:17.500 constrained

01:24:18.140 circumstances, right?

01:24:19.160 I think we had

01:24:19.700 people write for

01:24:20.420 90 minutes or

01:24:21.980 write about what

01:24:22.740 they had done the

01:24:23.720 previous two weeks

01:24:24.460 for 90 minutes, and

01:24:25.640 then we evaluated

01:24:26.500 first at McGill, we

01:24:27.740 evaluated the impact

01:24:29.220 of a goal-setting

01:24:30.220 program on

01:24:31.480 academic performance,

01:24:32.500 and we found that

01:24:33.380 we decreased the

01:24:35.500 dropout rate, and

01:24:37.440 these are fairly

01:24:37.940 highly selected

01:24:38.640 students at McGill

01:24:39.580 because it's a

01:24:40.280 selective university,

01:24:41.400 we dropped their

01:24:42.240 dropout rate

01:24:42.940 substantially, and we

01:24:44.000 increased their

01:24:44.840 academic performance

01:24:46.340 by 35%, and you

01:24:48.940 know, you'd expect

01:24:49.600 that universities

01:24:50.320 would just jump all

01:24:51.280 over that, it's

01:24:52.000 like that's a

01:24:52.580 walloping improvement

01:24:54.020 in performance, and

01:24:55.120 although they didn't,

01:24:56.780 that's for sure, and

01:24:57.780 then we did some

01:24:59.220 work with Michaela

01:25:00.000 Shippers in the 0.69

01:25:01.500 Netherlands at the

01:25:02.900 business school there

01:25:04.160 and ran another

01:25:05.500 series of studies

01:25:06.660 over a couple of

01:25:08.540 years showing that

01:25:09.960 we got exactly the

01:25:10.980 same results for

01:25:12.380 undergraduate business

01:25:13.360 schools, but that

01:25:14.160 the results were

01:25:14.900 even more pronounced

01:25:16.140 for men who were

01:25:18.120 underperforming, men 0.76

01:25:19.340 in general were

01:25:20.180 underperforming, and

01:25:21.240 even more specifically

01:25:22.360 for minority men, so

01:25:24.260 it was this weird

01:25:25.140 intervention, most

01:25:26.940 interventions, psychological

01:25:29.300 interventions, help

01:25:30.280 people who aren't

01:25:31.000 doing well do

01:25:31.740 somewhat better, but

01:25:32.680 at the same time they

01:25:33.540 help people who are

01:25:34.280 doing well do even

01:25:35.280 better, but this

01:25:36.640 intervention had this

01:25:38.840 paradoxical effect

01:25:40.600 where it really raised

01:25:42.220 the bottom part of

01:25:43.940 the performance

01:25:44.540 distribution, and

01:25:45.880 the culminating

01:25:47.860 study in that

01:25:49.320 sequence of studies

01:25:50.180 we did at Mohawk

01:25:51.280 College, and we had

01:25:53.000 kids come in for

01:25:53.840 their orientation day

01:25:55.180 and write for 90

01:25:56.620 minutes about their

01:25:57.360 future, or write

01:25:58.300 about what they did

01:25:58.980 for the past two

01:25:59.720 weeks, and we

01:26:01.400 dropped their dropout

01:26:02.660 rate 50% the first

01:26:04.820 year, which was, and

01:26:06.440 that was mostly, and

01:26:07.420 it worked best for the

01:26:08.860 men who had the lowest

01:26:09.800 grades in high school,

01:26:11.160 and for minority men

01:26:12.480 again, and so we

01:26:13.700 thought, well this is

01:26:14.480 just a no-brainer,

01:26:15.520 people are going to

01:26:16.040 eat this up like mad

01:26:17.180 because, well why

01:26:18.380 wouldn't you want a

01:26:19.160 intervention that's

01:26:20.880 dirt cheap, that

01:26:21.760 reduces dropout by

01:26:22.940 50%, and

01:26:24.220 particularly targets

01:26:25.400 minority men, like 1.00

01:26:26.880 what a deal for

01:26:27.700 everyone, regardless

01:26:28.880 of your politics, and

01:26:30.680 we worked with

01:26:31.280 Mohawk for what, 10

01:26:32.540 months afterwards, 0.99

01:26:34.260 retooling our damn 0.99

01:26:35.600 software to fit their 1.00

01:26:37.100 bureaucratic idiocy, and 0.99

01:26:39.220 at the end of that, 0.99

01:26:40.140 which was a lot of

01:26:40.820 trouble for us, they

01:26:41.600 just dropped it.

01:26:43.160 Yeah, that was

01:26:43.720 hilarious, I really

01:26:45.240 thought that was very

01:26:46.160 funny.

01:26:47.200 Yeah, yeah, well

01:26:48.100 and also very telling,

01:26:49.600 man, it's like, we

01:26:51.300 gave you a tool, it

01:26:54.300 was dirt cheap, that

01:26:55.380 took no time, that

01:26:56.940 had no negative side

01:26:58.100 effects, that

01:26:59.360 doubled the

01:27:00.880 performance of your

01:27:01.740 incoming students, and

01:27:03.500 then, and we

01:27:04.500 offered it to you

01:27:05.360 with almost no

01:27:06.380 difficulty, and

01:27:07.300 retooled it for your

01:27:08.320 bureaucracy, and we

01:27:10.080 did the study in your

01:27:11.140 institution, and we

01:27:12.160 published it, and

01:27:13.440 yet, at the end of

01:27:14.740 this whole process, you

01:27:15.700 basically told us that

01:27:16.700 you weren't interested.

01:27:18.180 It's like, yeah, you're

01:27:19.420 bloody well not

01:27:20.220 interested, that's why

01:27:21.380 you have such a high

01:27:22.200 dropout rate among

01:27:23.100 young men, because you 0.93

01:27:24.360 don't give a damn, and 0.93

01:27:25.660 that's pretty much the

01:27:26.620 situation in universities

01:27:27.960 writ large.

01:27:29.480 So, so what we

01:27:30.300 decided to do, Bob, what

01:27:31.580 we decided to do

01:27:32.480 instead was just to

01:27:33.560 sell this program to

01:27:35.740 individuals, eh, and

01:27:37.520 we just stopped, we

01:27:38.820 just stopped talking to

01:27:39.860 corporations and large

01:27:41.060 institutions all

01:27:41.900 together, and that was

01:27:43.420 way better, like we

01:27:44.440 have a pretty steady

01:27:46.060 sales record now, we

01:27:50.080 also produced a

01:27:50.900 personality test called

01:27:52.560 understand myself.com

01:27:54.420 that enables people to

01:27:56.400 go and do a big five

01:27:58.120 personality analysis, gives

01:27:59.540 them a detailed report on

01:28:01.420 their personality, and

01:28:03.020 also they can pair up

01:28:05.020 with a partner, an

01:28:06.680 intimate partner, say, and

01:28:07.860 they can go do the test

01:28:09.300 and get their own

01:28:10.200 report, and then they

01:28:10.920 can get a joint report

01:28:12.100 detailing out their

01:28:13.040 similarities and their

01:28:13.960 differences, and what,

01:28:15.260 Daniel, how many, how

01:28:17.580 many self-authoring

01:28:18.760 programs are we selling

01:28:20.820 a day, and how many

01:28:22.320 understand myself programs

01:28:24.040 are we selling a day on

01:28:25.120 average now, about?

01:28:27.800 I'm not sure.

01:28:29.000 I can tell you that in

01:28:30.080 aggregate, we've probably

01:28:30.980 done about 600,000, five

01:28:32.960 to 600,000 understand

01:28:34.220 myself users, and

01:28:36.860 possibly maybe 400,000

01:28:40.300 self-authoring, but I

01:28:41.940 could be wrong on that

01:28:43.080 one.

01:28:43.320 Well, no, it's a couple

01:28:44.440 hundred a day, anyways,

01:28:45.860 on a regular basis,

01:28:47.200 say, and the feedback

01:28:48.680 we've been getting from

01:28:49.660 people with regards to

01:28:51.720 understand myself is very

01:28:52.920 positive.

01:28:53.640 People find the

01:28:55.140 provision of accurate

01:28:56.440 personality information

01:28:57.580 about themselves extremely

01:28:58.860 useful, and also on the

01:29:00.420 partner front, because we

01:29:02.500 only launched that, what

01:29:03.440 about, how long ago did

01:29:05.300 we put the couple's

01:29:07.500 version of the

01:29:08.220 personality test up?

01:29:10.000 I think it was 2020,

01:29:11.160 2021, maybe.

01:29:13.160 Right, right, so that

01:29:14.020 hasn't been going that

01:29:15.000 long, and people, Tammy

01:29:16.740 and I did that, and did a

01:29:17.840 podcast about it, and we,

01:29:19.280 even though we know each

01:29:20.120 other well, and we

01:29:20.880 designed, you know, I

01:29:22.480 designed at least part of 0.98

01:29:23.680 the damn test, I still 0.99

01:29:25.520 found doing it with her 0.99

01:29:26.760 quite revealing, and it

01:29:28.940 helped us understand each

01:29:30.000 other better.

01:29:31.140 The wonderful thing...

01:29:31.940 Because people really do

01:29:32.000 our different...

01:29:32.600 Go ahead, Daniel.

01:29:33.700 The wonderful thing about

01:29:34.860 the understand myself

01:29:36.040 process is that it gives

01:29:38.060 our users what you

01:29:40.980 could call immediately

01:29:42.460 actionable, like, insight

01:29:45.500 into what they're like

01:29:49.900 and how they respond to

01:29:51.280 various situations, and

01:29:54.000 it doesn't require the

01:29:56.500 same amount of time

01:29:57.860 commitment as the

01:29:58.620 self-authoring.

01:30:00.120 So it's very...

01:30:02.060 It's actually quite a

01:30:03.340 pleasant experience, and I

01:30:05.840 won't say that for, let's

01:30:07.060 say, the past authoring.

01:30:08.920 Right, right.

01:30:09.400 The people who get the

01:30:10.500 most value from the past

01:30:11.820 authoring don't enjoy

01:30:13.380 doing it.

01:30:14.480 They...

01:30:15.040 And sometimes they even

01:30:16.540 get angry at us for

01:30:17.500 asking them to do it.

01:30:19.040 But the understand myself

01:30:20.240 is immediately...

01:30:21.440 Is immediately helpful,

01:30:23.220 and I think it's

01:30:23.920 immediately rewarding as

01:30:25.240 well.

01:30:26.520 Right.

01:30:26.880 Well, the past authoring,

01:30:28.560 you know, there's a good

01:30:29.300 dictum from clinical

01:30:30.320 psychology that it's

01:30:32.040 better to voluntarily face

01:30:33.700 your demons, let's say,

01:30:35.140 or the dragons, right?

01:30:36.360 It's...

01:30:37.360 You put yourself in the

01:30:38.700 zone of proximal

01:30:39.560 development by adopting a

01:30:41.580 voluntary stance of

01:30:42.760 confrontation with

01:30:43.760 complexity and threat, and

01:30:45.140 one of the things we ask

01:30:46.580 people in the past

01:30:47.440 authoring exercise to do

01:30:49.220 is to divide their life

01:30:51.260 into sections, epochs,

01:30:53.000 and then to write about

01:30:54.720 the more emotionally

01:30:55.760 compelling experiences,

01:30:58.120 right, both negative and

01:30:59.300 positive, and yeah, that's

01:31:00.800 quite difficult, and it

01:31:01.840 does upset people.

01:31:03.000 I mean, the research

01:31:04.020 literature indicated most

01:31:05.300 of this generated by

01:31:06.220 Pennebaker and his, and

01:31:07.820 the people who followed in

01:31:08.760 his footsteps, basically

01:31:10.320 showed that if you do an

01:31:11.540 autobiographical exercise

01:31:12.820 like that, which is akin in

01:31:14.200 some sense to both

01:31:15.660 confession and to

01:31:16.720 psychotherapy, is that the

01:31:18.460 immediate consequences are

01:31:19.900 negative, because reliving

01:31:22.260 those upsetting experiences is

01:31:25.400 upsetting and can put you

01:31:26.920 into a bit of a spin, but the

01:31:28.780 medium to long-term

01:31:30.180 consequences are very

01:31:32.060 positive, both on the

01:31:33.400 performance and on the

01:31:34.600 mental and physical health

01:31:35.620 front, and so you can think

01:31:37.840 of self-author, all of those

01:31:39.640 of you who are watching and

01:31:40.640 listening, you can think of

01:31:41.500 this self-authoring.com set of

01:31:43.340 exercises, the self-authoring

01:31:45.460 suite as, what would you say,

01:31:47.840 as it's in some sense do-it-yourself,

01:31:51.280 well, redemption, but certainly

01:31:53.480 do-it-yourself psychotherapy,

01:31:55.020 psychotherapy, and, you know,

01:31:56.740 maybe it couldn't substitute

01:31:57.980 for extremely high-quality

01:32:00.800 psychotherapy conducted by

01:32:03.180 someone who really knows what

01:32:04.880 he or she is doing, but it's a

01:32:07.340 pretty damn good home activity

01:32:12.040 if you want to set your life

01:32:13.420 straight, and, I mean, I think

01:32:16.200 the response we've had from the

01:32:18.840 individuals who've been using it,

01:32:20.960 well, you deal with that more

01:32:22.200 because you've handled customer

01:32:23.580 complaints and comments for

01:32:24.960 years, like, what's, I have

01:32:26.820 lots of people in my lectures

01:32:28.020 who come up to me and tell me,

01:32:29.400 you know, how helpful the

01:32:30.920 Understand Myself program was,

01:32:32.760 but also the self-authoring

01:32:34.140 program, fewer people because

01:32:35.320 it's more difficult, but people

01:32:37.080 often respond to the self-authoring

01:32:39.760 program in a manner that

01:32:41.420 indicates, you know, that it's

01:32:42.880 changed their life, and I used

01:32:44.560 the programs, we developed the

01:32:45.860 programs for my Maps of Meaning

01:32:47.280 course at the U of T, right, when

01:32:49.440 we were first walking through the

01:32:50.880 paper and pencil versions,

01:32:52.200 I had students write

01:32:53.260 autobiographies, and then also

01:32:55.500 write out a plan for the future,

01:32:57.320 and I could watch the impact

01:32:59.380 that it had on them.

01:33:00.860 It's really something to be able

01:33:02.440 to develop a vision for the

01:33:03.720 future, and it's really, go ahead.

01:33:06.800 If any users are watching this,

01:33:09.400 and, you know, I would say with

01:33:11.980 the self-authoring suite, because

01:33:14.420 we all have a limited amount of

01:33:15.880 time and a limited amount of

01:33:17.140 energy, and so if you're not

01:33:20.180 sure that you can do the full

01:33:23.180 thing, do the future authoring

01:33:25.380 and do it badly, and push

01:33:28.280 through it to the very end.

01:33:29.800 If you're doing the past

01:33:30.780 authoring, and you think you can

01:33:33.260 only do a little bit at a time,

01:33:34.560 do a little bit at a time, and

01:33:36.300 then walk away from it, come back

01:33:37.840 to it, reread it, take your time

01:33:39.360 over that one. 0.68

01:33:39.880 They're really quite different.

01:33:40.900 I don't think people should

01:33:41.620 approach them the same way.

01:33:43.840 Push the future authoring through

01:33:45.220 to the end, and then you can redo

01:33:46.880 it again later if you want to.

01:33:49.200 But with the past authoring, if

01:33:50.820 it's difficult, just do a little

01:33:52.180 bit, set it aside, come back to it

01:33:53.900 again later.

01:33:54.460 It'll be waiting for you when

01:33:55.620 you're ready.

01:33:56.640 Yeah, right.

01:33:57.180 Don't bite off more than you can

01:33:58.520 chew.

01:33:59.300 There's no need to.

01:34:00.460 There's no need to.

01:34:02.600 Yeah.

01:34:02.980 And so, yeah, so, so, well, we

01:34:05.900 were pretty happy with the way the

01:34:07.380 self-authoring and the

01:34:09.280 understand myself tests have rolled

01:34:10.960 out because we were able to

01:34:12.460 fulfill our vision.

01:34:13.880 We should talk a little bit,

01:34:15.100 guys, about some of the problems

01:34:16.980 that we've encountered trying to

01:34:19.400 keep our relationship intact over

01:34:21.560 this 30-year period.

01:34:23.100 I mean, we hit a lot of situations.

01:34:26.260 I mean, it's been a pleasure

01:34:27.200 overall and a real intellectual

01:34:28.960 adventure and a personal adventure

01:34:30.740 and rewarding in 15 different

01:34:32.820 ways.

01:34:33.220 But, man, we hit some pretty brutal

01:34:35.340 points of conflict over the years

01:34:37.380 too, especially when we were trying

01:34:39.240 to bring new people into the

01:34:41.900 endeavor and also to retool our

01:34:44.800 financial agreements, eh?

01:34:46.340 Because, Daniel, you sort of

01:34:48.260 started out as a junior partner

01:34:50.760 in some sense and then, well, as

01:34:54.340 our enterprise developed and you

01:34:57.540 developed the technology of the

01:34:59.740 platform and plenty of the

01:35:01.360 underlying ideas, your role grew

01:35:04.020 and then we had to retool our

01:35:07.260 financial arrangements to take that

01:35:09.040 into account and that was every

01:35:11.580 time we've had to address our

01:35:15.080 constitutional agreement and, let's

01:35:17.480 say, that's caused really weeks

01:35:20.980 and even months of a fair bit of

01:35:22.960 emotional turmoil for all of us.

01:35:25.460 It's not an easy thing to figure out

01:35:27.700 exactly what's fair and to be able

01:35:29.840 to maintain that across time.

01:35:31.400 What are your memories of those

01:35:32.720 processes, Daniel?

01:35:34.480 The process of me insidiously

01:35:36.360 taking over the whole company?

01:35:38.380 Yeah.

01:35:39.200 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:39.800 Exactly that.

01:35:44.780 Generally speaking, we had to go

01:35:48.300 through these, we had to go through

01:35:50.780 these, all right.

01:35:51.940 So, one of the things that I didn't

01:35:55.140 want to happen was I didn't want to

01:35:57.440 be involved in a failed company.

01:35:59.520 And my intuition was that if we took

01:36:06.500 on funding from outside and we

01:36:10.440 tried to grow the way companies

01:36:13.080 tend to do, that we would be dead

01:36:15.900 in six months if we didn't have

01:36:17.680 something happening, something

01:36:18.920 significant happening on sales.

01:36:20.400 And I was always attracted to the

01:36:21.820 small business model rather than the

01:36:24.100 big shot venture capital sort of,

01:36:26.480 you know, story.

01:36:27.220 And so, that basically required us

01:36:30.760 to do the work ourselves.

01:36:32.500 And I guess what happened was

01:36:35.920 when we first started, there was a,

01:36:38.460 I think there was kind of like a

01:36:39.660 basic presumption was that we would

01:36:41.100 be sort of doing this the way most

01:36:43.360 businesses do it.

01:36:44.140 They get funding, they hire people,

01:36:45.780 they pay them, and so on.

01:36:48.080 But approaching it as a small

01:36:51.440 business thing where all of the

01:36:54.000 partners are doing the work,

01:36:57.880 the partners that are doing the

01:37:00.380 most work exclusively on it are the

01:37:03.220 ones that are taking on the most

01:37:04.680 risk if you think of the

01:37:06.260 opportunity cost.

01:37:08.040 And so, that basically required,

01:37:09.840 you know,

01:37:12.140 over time recognizing that and then

01:37:16.340 deciding that it would,

01:37:18.560 A, the first thing was,

01:37:20.260 is it right for us to try this

01:37:23.760 small business approach where we do

01:37:25.440 things ourselves or should we do the

01:37:27.360 funding route?

01:37:29.080 And then B, what's required in order

01:37:31.400 to make it so that everybody involved

01:37:34.420 is going to be sufficiently

01:37:35.980 represented as a player, if you like,

01:37:39.340 based on their risk?

01:37:41.020 And I think it took,

01:37:43.380 it was difficult, I think,

01:37:44.720 because a good deal of the stuff

01:37:47.120 that happens,

01:37:48.500 neither you nor Bob would see it

01:37:50.840 happening.

01:37:51.980 You would be giving a lecture and I

01:37:55.080 would be pounding my head against

01:37:56.720 the keyboard because I can't find out 0.66

01:37:58.780 what this ridiculous bug is or

01:38:00.660 whatever the case may be.

01:38:02.320 And so, it wasn't easy for everyone

01:38:05.640 to see exactly what was going on.

01:38:08.200 I had a pretty good idea what was

01:38:09.480 happening because just about a lot of

01:38:12.840 stuff outside of the business, outside

01:38:14.620 of the sales things, which I wasn't

01:38:16.680 part of, was happening through me.

01:38:19.140 And a lot of the renegotiations

01:38:22.500 happened after we had decided that

01:38:24.480 the rubber chicken route of going

01:38:28.180 to conferences and so on wasn't going

01:38:29.780 to work.

01:38:31.620 So, and so that was it.

01:38:33.900 And I think that it was, a lot of

01:38:36.940 that was basically, I suppose you

01:38:39.740 could say it was driven by a certain

01:38:41.340 aggressiveness on my part.

01:38:42.840 I thought it was, I thought it was

01:38:44.740 necessary and I tried not to be too

01:38:46.520 aggressive about it.

01:38:47.580 And essentially, you guys graciously

01:38:49.740 kind of acquiescing to my request.

01:38:52.160 I think it was more like honesty on

01:38:53.580 your part in two ways, eh?

01:38:56.220 So, the first honesty, and this was

01:38:58.500 really interesting, you know, I'm

01:39:00.060 probably more market and sales

01:39:03.180 oriented, Bob probably is too, than

01:39:05.180 you.

01:39:05.560 And I mean, that's kind of how it's

01:39:06.680 laid itself out in the company.

01:39:08.460 And so, we would be more expansive.

01:39:11.540 We had a more expansive proclivity on

01:39:13.400 the sales and growth front.

01:39:14.980 And Bob and I learned this too, because

01:39:16.820 we did concept, we did consider going

01:39:20.020 down the venture capital route.

01:39:21.560 And so, that route is something like,

01:39:23.240 well, you have an idea and you test it

01:39:24.960 and you get initial funding from family

01:39:26.700 and friends and so forth.

01:39:27.820 And then, you're ready to launch your

01:39:29.900 idea broadly into the world.

01:39:31.420 And so, you bring in venture capital,

01:39:33.440 you hire a whole bunch of people,

01:39:35.460 you try to build your company into

01:39:36.980 something that has a very staggering

01:39:39.100 sort of valuation and then maybe you

01:39:40.880 go public and you cash out and you

01:39:42.860 have your margaritas and you sit on

01:39:44.280 the beach in Guadalupe, if there's a

01:39:46.760 beach there, for the rest of your

01:39:48.380 life.

01:39:49.100 And that's your vision.

01:39:50.820 And you were very much opposed to

01:39:53.120 that practically, but I think there

01:39:55.300 was an ethical element too.

01:39:56.760 And Bob and I got quite deeply into

01:39:59.120 the whole venture capitalist and tech

01:40:01.560 incubator scene, both in the US and

01:40:04.540 Canada.

01:40:04.940 And what I realized eventually was that

01:40:07.280 it was almost all scam, that mostly

01:40:10.520 what these so-called tech incubator

01:40:13.000 companies were doing was hype.

01:40:15.900 Now, I'm ambivalent about that because

01:40:18.500 I have some real respect for marketing

01:40:20.520 and salespeople where you have to

01:40:23.240 communicate about your product and

01:40:24.620 push it forward.

01:40:25.420 But the degenerate element of that is

01:40:27.960 a kind of narcissism, right?

01:40:30.320 And we got tangled up a couple of times

01:40:32.480 with tech incubators who were working

01:40:34.040 with some of the junior people that we

01:40:35.660 tried to work with who filled their

01:40:37.640 heads with visions of a $400 million

01:40:39.800 initial public offering and this

01:40:42.280 immense amount of wealth and failed

01:40:44.200 entirely to educate them about the

01:40:46.140 fact that if you really wanted to start

01:40:47.560 a business, you should go out and find 0.99

01:40:49.880 some damn customers because that's the 1.00

01:40:52.560 hardest part of a business. 1.00

01:40:54.300 And you were very good at continually

01:40:56.980 insisting that we didn't do that, that

01:41:00.660 we kept our vision, I wouldn't say small,

01:41:04.340 but not grandiose.

01:41:06.040 And you were also extremely good at letting

01:41:08.200 us know when the financial arrangement we

01:41:11.420 had worked out was no longer sufficiently

01:41:14.580 motivating for you to be wholeheartedly

01:41:18.420 committed to this project.

01:41:19.840 And I would say of the three of us, I mean,

01:41:21.460 you've staked your life on our business

01:41:25.420 enterprise to a larger degree than either Bob

01:41:27.980 or I have by a substantial margin.

01:41:29.920 And, you know, we needed to know when you

01:41:33.260 needed to be properly compensated for that.

01:41:36.040 So I don't think that was aggressive

01:41:37.620 aggression.

01:41:38.600 Bob, what do you think about like, what

01:41:40.760 did you see as the major challenges in

01:41:42.700 keeping our enterprise going and our

01:41:45.440 relationship over the last 30 years?

01:41:47.480 And why do you think we're able to do it

01:41:49.600 successfully?

01:41:50.180 Well, I think we basically listened to

01:41:55.120 Daniel and understood what the issue was.

01:42:02.100 And we need to be anchored to reality.

01:42:06.440 And Daniel was that anchor and the anchor

01:42:09.640 wasn't being sufficiently rewarded.

01:42:12.400 Yeah, well, you were the one in some sense

01:42:15.060 that paid the most price for that technically

01:42:17.820 because as Daniel's role in the company grew

01:42:21.100 proportionately, your ownership of the

01:42:25.040 company shrank proportionately.

01:42:27.240 Mine did to some degree, but not as much as

01:42:29.520 yours did.

01:42:30.260 And so, you know, I mentioned at the beginning

01:42:32.660 of the conversation that one of the reasons

01:42:35.720 I really enjoyed working with you and thought

01:42:38.040 it was such a privilege at McGill was that

01:42:42.420 you were very, very fair and judicious in

01:42:45.760 your distribution of rewards and credits.

01:42:49.840 And, you know, you showed that same

01:42:52.840 rather largeness of spirit, let's say, when

01:42:56.300 we had to undergo these renegotiations.

01:42:58.820 And, well, that's obviously worked out very

01:43:02.500 well for everybody that we've been able to

01:43:04.460 serve with these programs, but also for the

01:43:06.280 three of us, because this is, especially over

01:43:09.260 the last four or five years, this has turned

01:43:11.020 into a very robust and reliable business.

01:43:13.300 And so, Daniel, I don't think it was aggression.

01:43:16.260 That's not how I look at it.

01:43:17.660 Like, I really think it was a form of the same

01:43:19.980 kind of rigorous honesty that you've brought to

01:43:22.620 the programming enterprise because you've produced

01:43:25.220 an unbelievably reliable system.

01:43:27.320 Like, I don't think we haven't lost any data,

01:43:30.380 and I don't think we've ever been offline except

01:43:33.860 when the Microsoft servers crashed.

01:43:35.980 And so you brought that integrity of purpose to

01:43:40.300 your intellectual endeavor on the academic front

01:43:44.100 and then to your engineering, but also to your,

01:43:47.300 you had an unerring eye for what the difficult

01:43:49.800 but appropriate path forward was on the business

01:43:52.320 front.

01:43:52.800 And so that's been extremely useful.

01:43:55.220 And luckily, as Bob pointed out, we had enough sense

01:43:57.920 to pay attention to that and to adjust when that was

01:44:01.200 necessary.

01:44:01.820 And it got very challenging again when things kind

01:44:05.060 of blew up around me and I got sick because you ended

01:44:07.800 up, both of you ended up dealing not with me so much

01:44:10.960 as with my proxies.

01:44:12.800 And while that put another, and we also didn't really

01:44:16.560 know what to do with the fact that I had come to such

01:44:19.180 broad public attention at that point too, and how to

01:44:21.820 reconfigure our business.

01:44:22.920 Bob and I just decided, Bob and I just decided that we

01:44:25.800 were going to take advantage of it.

01:44:27.220 Just, we have meetings where we talk, hey, Bob, have you

01:44:31.740 contacted Jordan lately?

01:44:33.880 Because, you know, we want to make sure that he still

01:44:36.080 thinks we're his friend.

01:44:38.480 We want to be able to ride this guy's coattails.

01:44:42.100 Well, you know, when you were talking about the VC thing,

01:44:46.880 you know, occasionally, very large window, birds will often

01:44:51.520 try to fly through the window and they hit the window and

01:44:55.060 fall.

01:44:55.380 Well, watching you and Bob trying to sell ExamCorp was a

01:44:58.560 little bit like that.

01:45:00.100 And so, whenever somebody said, oh, hey, this is a big, let's

01:45:07.000 do a business plan, let's do this, let's do that.

01:45:11.720 And you take a look at the sales situation, it wasn't very

01:45:15.840 difficult to see, like, what would be different about these

01:45:18.600 people?

01:45:19.540 Why wouldn't these also be birds bouncing off a glass

01:45:22.700 window?

01:45:23.240 And I didn't see it.

01:45:24.220 It wasn't easy to, it wasn't difficult.

01:45:27.760 All I had to do was say, well, all I had to do was basically

01:45:32.060 trust that you guys gave it a good go.

01:45:34.820 And then, just looking at these other situations, it was a very

01:45:38.340 easy calculation to make.

01:45:40.780 You know, we're going to be dead in six months because they're

01:45:44.240 not going to have any more success making sales.

01:45:46.280 And then we have to figure out a very low cost way of keeping this

01:45:50.340 alive until we figure out what the formula is.

01:45:53.720 And then we did figure out what the formula is.

01:45:56.280 Largely, you did an experiment.

01:45:59.900 I don't remember exactly when it was, but you just basically put the

01:46:05.340 self-authoring suite online.

01:46:07.640 You put together a website with a very simple PayPal button, and that gave

01:46:12.440 us a proof of concept.

01:46:13.520 And from that point forward, it was just like, oh, we'll just deal with

01:46:19.180 end users.

01:46:19.840 They're great.

01:46:21.380 They come to us.

01:46:22.640 They want to use it.

01:46:23.620 They love it.

01:46:24.680 Sometimes they complain to us about the self-authoring suite being a little bit

01:46:28.440 more painful than they were expecting.

01:46:33.200 But there was no more of this, you know, trying to deal with a corporate

01:46:40.960 structure and being bounced back down to HR and then booted out the door.

01:46:45.240 But we were able to do that because a lot of the businesses, they have no issue at

01:46:49.580 all.

01:46:50.060 And this is also, this is more of a function of the size of the business.

01:46:53.960 They will waste your time without giving it a second thought.

01:46:59.760 And so once we started going to end users, it was better.

01:47:04.540 Well, we were, we were on the threshold of large business deals several times.

01:47:09.860 Like we had a contract pending with a very large organization in New York for the

01:47:16.420 self-authoring suite.

01:47:17.700 And it was literally on the CEO's desk for signature.

01:47:21.740 And thank God it didn't go through because we would have ended up as employees of this

01:47:25.800 company.

01:47:26.760 And we didn't charge nearly enough money for what we wanted to do in our ignorance.

01:47:31.440 And the CEO resigned that day.

01:47:33.800 And that had taken us like a year of work to organize that deal.

01:47:36.920 And it just evaporated.

01:47:38.140 And that happened to us.

01:47:39.660 Like we did have some sales successes in nine out of 10 of the initial stages, you know,

01:47:45.940 but that was another thing about, about the complexity of dealing with corporations is

01:47:53.800 that, you know, you think you want to land a big fish and there's a lot of money in that,

01:47:57.360 but it takes a lot of time.

01:47:59.340 And there's such churn and turnover in corporations that you can end up talking to someone for like

01:48:04.820 a year and then all of a sudden they're not there anymore.

01:48:07.880 And that happened a lot.

01:48:09.540 And, and that, that was certainly a reason why selling to individuals was better.

01:48:13.420 I think our new market is great.

01:48:16.320 You encounter these people all the time.

01:48:18.520 They're, it's so rewarding to provide these services for them.

01:48:24.020 I get this through the, through the emails that we get, but you also meet people at your

01:48:29.500 events.

01:48:30.560 And that's not, that, I don't think that we would have done, I don't think we would have

01:48:36.060 done better if we were working in the corporate world and working with end users.

01:48:40.420 No, and it would have been way more annoying.

01:48:42.040 Like the thing, one of the things everybody listening should understand is that if you

01:48:47.080 make a deal ever with anyone who has more money than you, don't be so sure that you're

01:48:53.420 not now an employee, you know, cause you think, well, I'd like to land a big company and they'd

01:48:58.680 be my client.

01:48:59.520 It's like, yeah, if the company is a lot bigger than you, they're not your client.

01:49:03.720 You are now their minion.

01:49:04.840 And so, and maybe you want that, right?

01:49:07.540 Because you have to have a job, but don't, don't, don't ever be convinced that there

01:49:12.260 aren't major strings that come along with that.

01:49:14.160 One of the things I really liked about you and also about working with you, Bob, too,

01:49:17.460 on the entrepreneurial front was that I think all three of us were free enough of delusion

01:49:23.520 to understand pretty immediately on the industrial and corporate front that the only thing that

01:49:33.320 really mattered, the only thing that was truly real was the in-hand existence of paying customers.

01:49:42.380 That's the fundamental metric is like, I don't care about how your idea sounds.

01:49:47.960 I don't care about the background of your team, et cetera.

01:49:51.380 I don't care about your vision of the future.

01:49:54.000 Those things are all relevant to some degree.

01:49:56.040 But what I do care about is, have you even been able to find one person who will give you money

01:50:02.480 for what you're producing?

01:50:04.140 And, and we did keep that in mind.

01:50:06.000 And that is why we eventually turned to private users.

01:50:08.720 Yeah, people who want to improve themselves or help themselves versus companies when we

01:50:16.500 were asking someone to help other people who may not have particularly wanted to be helped,

01:50:23.800 you know, have everybody in the department do the future authoring program.

01:50:27.620 I remember being in school well enough to know that I wouldn't have liked that very much.

01:50:35.080 Right, right, right.

01:50:36.080 Yeah, well, that's the advantage to dealing with these individuals.

01:50:38.720 Like you said, that's a voluntary, it's a voluntary association.

01:50:42.600 Yes, and they like it.

01:50:44.020 And they, they, they, they want to do it and they want to do it for themselves as well.

01:50:48.060 Each one of them is a, is a mini victory.

01:50:52.180 Right, right.

01:50:53.000 Yeah, well, and it's a lovely thing.

01:50:54.280 I mean, one of the things that Bob and I talked about a long time ago, and then obviously

01:50:58.180 with you too, is, you know, we were interested right from the beginning in working on the

01:51:03.540 entrepreneurial front, partly just because of the challenge of learning how to do

01:51:07.180 it. And God knows we learn plenty by going through the difficulties of banging ourselves

01:51:14.280 against multiple sheets of glass window and breaking our necks over and over and over.

01:51:20.660 I mean, our vision was to produce widely distributable psychological interventions at low cost with low

01:51:28.240 overhead that would not hurt anyone and that would do people good.

01:51:32.240 And I think that we, we have managed that to a large degree.

01:51:35.140 Like the research we've done on these interventions and measures has been very solid.

01:51:39.540 And it's certainly the case that the hundreds of thousands of people who've used our technologies

01:51:45.440 now have, many of them have set their lives on much more productive pathways.

01:51:50.320 And that's pretty damn good thing to be able to, to be, to have participated in and also

01:51:56.140 to have profited from.

01:51:57.800 And, you know, one thing people who are a bit skeptical about capitalism might be asking

01:52:02.800 is, well, why the hell didn't you just give away this all for free?

01:52:05.600 How do we know this isn't greed?

01:52:07.380 And we spent a lot of time talking about the right price, say, and it took us a long time

01:52:14.560 to figure out what our self-authoring program was worth.

01:52:18.500 It's like, well, if this is going to change your life, how much is it worth?

01:52:22.080 And the answer to that was, well, it's worth about what people will pay for it because that's

01:52:27.320 the actual accurate number.

01:52:28.860 And we, we, we sell it at quite a low cost.

01:52:31.960 I mean, it, it's not the sort of thing that anybody in the developed world is going to

01:52:36.000 have to strain themselves particularly to afford, but we decided not to distribute it

01:52:41.420 for free and we've never produced anything for free.

01:52:44.780 We've always worked within a for-profit model.

01:52:46.800 And for me, the advantage of that was twofold is like we had to produce the kind of products

01:52:53.700 that people would actually pay for.

01:52:55.980 So that was one way of demonstrating their attractiveness and value.

01:53:01.740 And then the other thing, of course, is because we've been able to generate some capital as

01:53:05.500 a consequence of doing this on a for-profit basis, we're not beholden to any outside stakeholders,

01:53:11.780 governmental or private.

01:53:13.720 And we have enough capital so that we can produce additional ventures.

01:53:18.160 And Daniel, you're working on some, on a refitting, for example, of our predictive battery.

01:53:23.520 Do you want to, maybe we'll just wrap up with that.

01:53:25.440 Do you want to just end with a brief description of where you're headed, where we're headed

01:53:29.380 in the future?

01:53:30.660 Sure.

01:53:31.080 But let me just add to what you're saying.

01:53:33.320 The people who are users, when they come and they pay for the assessments, I wouldn't

01:53:38.820 ask them to do it for free because I think that robs them of their agency.

01:53:43.680 When they pay for it, they can accept it or reject it.

01:53:47.560 And if they don't like it, they can ask for their money back.

01:53:49.820 And in my experience, I don't think people want free.

01:53:55.500 I think that's a delusion of the computer age, the internet age.

01:54:01.300 But I could be wrong about that.

01:54:02.820 No, I think that's right.

01:54:04.580 I mean, it's the case often that if I do offer content for free, say, that people clamor

01:54:12.000 to be involved in some manner that allows them to reciprocate.

01:54:15.960 That's the thing is people have a powerful drive for reciprocity.

01:54:20.040 And so if you offer something to someone for free, well, first of all, it begs the question,

01:54:25.060 who the hell's the product here?

01:54:27.440 Like, is it really free?

01:54:28.900 And second, it doesn't allow people to discharge their moral burden, you know, because people

01:54:34.800 don't have to be beholden to us for having done them a favor.

01:54:39.480 And the reason for that is because they paid us.

01:54:41.500 And as far as we're concerned, that's a perfectly equal and desirable trade.

01:54:45.880 Yeah, it's respectful.

01:54:47.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:54:49.720 So basically what I'm working on now, and I suppose it'll probably be something like,

01:54:57.260 hopefully over the next 12 months, 12 years is a classic Freudian slip there.

01:55:04.020 That's definitely Freudian.

01:55:05.560 But it's to make it so that my target audience for this is small businesses.

01:55:15.820 If large corporations want to use it, it's fine, as long as they don't expect to call

01:55:19.780 me on the phone, because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole again.

01:55:23.480 My target is small businesses, because we have a lot of small business users that use

01:55:27.440 Understand Myself and Self-Authoring, and they use it informally.

01:55:30.700 They just go there on their own.

01:55:32.920 They purchase it.

01:55:33.720 They distribute it to their people.

01:55:35.780 It's all voluntary.

01:55:36.840 There's no hard sale or anything like that.

01:55:40.560 And so what I want to do is I want to streamline it to make it easier for small businesses and

01:55:45.940 organizations like churches and so on and so forth to be able to purchase the Understand Myself

01:55:52.700 and self-Authoring for their members or their employees, whatever the case may be.

01:56:03.680 But also, I'm going to use that platform to essentially bring the harder edged.

01:56:10.760 We didn't talk about selection that much.

01:56:13.000 We alluded to it.

01:56:13.900 The fastest and easiest way to improve, let's say, your workforce is to use brutal selection

01:56:24.020 practices.

01:56:25.360 And everybody understood that until about five minutes ago.

01:56:29.120 That's why Harvard and Yale used to have brutal selection processes. 0.96

01:56:35.660 Most people wouldn't, their application is in red.

01:56:41.300 And so these ones, so the assessment things, I'd like to be able to bring those back to general use

01:56:49.780 to make them easier to use so that people can use a little bit of selection when they're hiring

01:56:57.260 people so that, you know, to avoid the situation.

01:57:03.760 Okay, so we never discussed this, but one of the least effective ways of determining the, let's say,

01:57:13.420 cognitive ability is important for jobs that are highly complex.

01:57:16.660 And so it becomes more, this becomes more of an issue if you're talking about highly complex jobs.

01:57:22.840 But one of the tools that a lot of people use to determine whether or not someone's a suitable fit

01:57:27.440 is an interview.

01:57:28.960 And the Hunter and Schmidt research was quite plain that interviews are not very useful unless they're

01:57:34.000 highly structured interviews or even if they include some work sample.

01:57:38.340 And so this is to provide people with an auxiliary of the, to their whole hiring process,

01:57:45.760 which may or may not include cognitive ability, but will include the big five personality assessment,

01:57:52.680 you know, also.

01:57:55.040 And so the idea then is to make these tools available for people to use at low cost with low commitment.

01:58:03.760 And hopefully the advice that we'll have for them will be use these tools to bias your decision processes.

01:58:13.720 Don't use them to make your decisions.

01:58:16.020 Just have this, just have these in the back of your head while you're talking to people.

01:58:19.780 There's a lot you can derive from it.

01:58:21.640 For example, if you, if you have a big five personality assessment on somebody before you interview them,

01:58:28.180 it's very, it would be very useful if you're about to interview somebody who's high in extroversion.

01:58:34.460 You need to know that during that interview, you're going to have an inflated view of their competence

01:58:39.480 because you will automatically conflate confidence with competence.

01:58:44.480 So it's good to know before you go in there, whether or not you're dealing with somebody who's highly extroverted.

01:58:49.880 If they're highly extroverted, they're going to present better compared to others.

01:58:53.720 And in the, in the opposite direction, if somebody is high in neuroticism, it's good to know that in advance.

01:59:01.040 They might not appear very confident.

01:59:04.560 They might require a certain amount of coats, coats, coaxing to, to come out of their shell.

01:59:10.980 They might be nervous.

01:59:12.280 It would be useful to have a tool to know that in advance.

01:59:15.580 So you can essentially counteract the hard wiring that you have as an interviewer to be bamboozled by the brilliant

01:59:25.120 and to, to, to discard people who don't present themselves in a forceful way.

01:59:33.300 Right.

01:59:33.960 Well, and you, you talked about brutal selection methods and people might react to that.

01:59:38.240 And I would say, well, here's something for people to think about.

01:59:40.440 Here's something brutal. 0.99

01:59:42.800 Hire stupidly and put people in positions where not only do they fail painfully over a long period of time, 0.99

01:59:49.360 but they compromise the performance of everyone around them while doing so. 1.00

01:59:54.160 Now that's brutal.

01:59:55.500 And it's a lot more brutal than making an appropriate hiring decision to begin with.

02:00:00.940 And so it isn't whether it's brutal or not.

02:00:03.660 It's like, which form of brutality do you prefer?

02:00:06.160 And I would prefer the preventive brutality approach rather than the consequential brutality approach.

02:00:13.140 Well, I think the, I think what I, brutal is probably a, too bad, wasn't a, wasn't a good choice of words.

02:00:20.880 But I think that it's essentially, if you're using, the opposite would be to have a therapeutic view.

02:00:28.700 That you can essentially change people and you can convert them into something that they're not.

02:00:34.640 For example, and let's just keep it in the personality realm.

02:00:38.200 You might have a highly agreeable person, somebody who's very high in compassion.

02:00:42.820 And that person has been hired by a law firm, let's say.

02:00:47.380 And all of a sudden, this person has to go into situations where they have to act in a very disagreeable way.

02:00:53.320 And, you know, the therapeutic way would be to presume that that person will change over time.

02:01:02.520 And they can over time.

02:01:04.800 But it might be better to, depending on your perspective, to look for people who are low in agreeableness if you want to hire lawyers.

02:01:14.940 Particularly if they're going to be doing, yeah, aggressive, aggressive legal action.

02:01:20.000 So, putting, but putting the wrong person in the wrong place, particularly in a complex environment where things are interconnected.

02:01:29.320 Like, for example, in software, they compare the most productive workers to the least productive workers.

02:01:34.720 And they try to work out, you know, you can speculate on what would be a factor of productivity.

02:01:38.860 And as one person said, the factor is infinite because not only will an unproductive worker not produce,

02:01:49.180 they can actually introduce bugs and errors into the system that takes more capable people time to undo

02:01:58.620 so they can have a negative impact on the overall situation.

02:02:01.940 Yeah, well, the management literature that I reviewed, and that was back in the 90s,

02:02:09.120 indicated that 60% of managers add negative net value to a given corporate enterprise.

02:02:14.860 60%, right?

02:02:15.900 So, it's not just zero.

02:02:17.180 It's worse than zero.

02:02:18.720 And so, okay, anyway.

02:02:20.440 So, you also do less, let me just add this.

02:02:23.180 You do much less damage to somebody by not hiring them if they're not appropriate

02:02:30.260 than you do by letting them in and then terminating them after six months or 12 months or whatever.

02:02:36.980 Right, right, right, right, right.

02:02:37.940 So, you pay the eventual price for inaccuracy in your determinations,

02:02:41.420 no matter how compassionate that motivation might be.

02:02:44.860 Everybody has to pay the price at the end.

02:02:47.380 Even you, boss man.

02:02:49.000 Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, no doubt.

02:02:53.100 Bob, you're going to come down to Miami and lecture for Peterson Academy.

02:02:57.940 And so, that's at least part of what's on your horizon.

02:03:00.880 When are you doing that?

02:03:02.740 Mid-February.

02:03:04.780 Oh, good.

02:03:05.520 And you're going to do a series of lectures on abnormal psychology?

02:03:09.480 Is that the plan?

02:03:11.000 Yep, it is.

02:03:12.260 Excellent, excellent.

02:03:13.840 Yeah, and so, for everyone watching and listening,

02:03:15.620 this is part of this Peterson Academy initiative,

02:03:17.840 which is an attempt to produce something approximating an online university,

02:03:21.760 at least at the Bachelor of Arts level.

02:03:23.700 And Bob is one of our stellar lecturers lined up to work for this academy.

02:03:30.800 Bob was an excellent graduate student advisor,

02:03:33.520 but I should also point out that he's an extremely popular undergraduate lecturer.

02:03:37.680 He lectured about abnormal psychology, which, of course, is a very interesting field,

02:03:42.740 although any bad lecturer can make any field dull and uninteresting, even abnormal psychology.

02:03:49.140 But Bob was a stellar lecturer at McGill,

02:03:51.640 and witty and urbane and challenging and provocative.

02:03:57.740 And we're very happy to have him have the opportunity to bring those lectures to a much broader audience,

02:04:04.240 we hope, with the Peterson Academy.

02:04:06.080 And so, it's a great pleasure talking to both of you guys today.

02:04:09.480 We covered a lot of the ground that we've covered in the last three decades,

02:04:14.880 and so that was very entertaining.

02:04:17.240 It's been a privilege to work with both of you,

02:04:19.400 and quite the honour to have been able to produce a thriving enterprise,

02:04:24.260 despite the difficulties that has, in fact, resulted in helping perhaps tens of thousands

02:04:31.460 and maybe hundreds of thousands of people.

02:04:33.560 I mean, that really was a fulfilment of our initial vision, right?

02:04:36.340 Because I remember we established these principles at the beginning of our collaboration, right?

02:04:40.940 Is that we were going to produce valid psychological interventions and assessment methods,

02:04:45.840 low cost, widely distributed, scalable, inexpensive, and do no harm.

02:04:50.540 And that we were also going to stay relatively minimal on the employee front,

02:04:55.980 which we have, because there's basically us three,

02:04:59.040 and the person that you've hired part-time to do customer service.

02:05:02.980 And so, it really looks like, although it took a long time for it to unfold and to work,

02:05:07.800 it looks like we did hit the target that we had eventually set and continue to do that.

02:05:13.540 And so, I'm going to talk to Daniel and Bob a little bit more on the Daily Wire Plus platform

02:05:18.180 about how their interest in their respective fields developed.

02:05:22.620 And so, for those of you who are watching and listening that might be interested in that,

02:05:26.600 you'll have to refer to the Daily Wire Plus platform for that.

02:05:29.140 I'd like to thank them for facilitating this conversation,

02:05:31.980 and to everyone watching and listening for your time and attention.

02:05:36.040 Wish everybody Happy New Year.

02:05:37.460 And to say once again, thank you, you two, for the conversation.

02:05:41.960 Thanks, thanks, Jordan.

02:05:43.440 Great ride.

02:05:44.800 All right, so, ciao, everybody.

02:05:46.260 Yeah, yeah, it's so nice to be able to sit and talk to you guys.

02:05:49.180 And, well, we'll finish this up on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

02:05:52.980 Bye to everybody watching and listening.

02:05:54.420 Hello, everyone.

02:05:57.500 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

02:06:04.020 Bye to everybody watching and listening to my guest on the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 02, 2023

328. Jordan Peterson's Psychological Tools ｜ Dr. Daniel Higgins & Dr. Robert O. Pihl

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