Social Psychologist Explains How Good Intentions & Bad Ideas Are Leading Us To Failure

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with Jonathan Height. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me, man. Um, as I was mentioning before we got started, the thing that draws me to you is you seem truly committed to understanding the way the human mind works. And that is my like core mission in life largely for my own benefit if I'm completely honest. But um, super excited to get into that stuff with you. Well, thank you, Tom. It's a a pleasure to be here. Um, yeah, I'm a psychologist. I'm a social psychologist. And, you know, when I learn stuff professionally, I learn about, you know, how how the mind works, I'm I I think like, oh, now I understand that other thing or that other person. Um, so yeah, if you want to talk about the mind for for an hour, I'm I'm there with you. Yeah. So the reason that I'm so focused on the mind in my own life is so the the movie The Matrix has become the dominant metaphor in my life, not because I necessarily think we are actually living in a simulation. I actually don't. Um partly I guess because I don't find that a very interesting framework with which to approach the world. So even if we are, I don't know how useful that is. Um, but your brain is definitely creating a um a detached sort of virtual reality that isn't about measuring the number of photons that are reflecting off of an object and landing on your eye, which would be like true objective reality, at least visually. Um, it's trying to keep you alive. And so that can be at times really advantageous and create a beautiful experience, but it can also be very problematic at times. And one of the ideas that I found super intriguing um from you is the idea that we're 90% chimps and 10% bees. Um I'd love to know more about like what does that mean to you and how how do we use that as we think about um constructing our own mindset or or even thinking about our minds. Okay. All right. Let's just let's jump into it. Um so um so so human beings are this really bizarre species. Um, we so I'm really interested in sociality. Why are we so sociable and there are there are a lot of species that are social in this world that you know deer are social. They they run in herds, but it's not much sociality. You know, a herd is really just, you know, if you're the slowest, if you're the slowest one, you'll get eaten, but if you're not the slowest, you won't get eaten by the the lion chasing you. Um, there are other animals that are really sociable like wolves and other dolphins that go in packs uh and they cooperate. Um, and then there are these animals like bees and ants and wasps and termites that are ultra social. They live in these gigantic collections and they can build big things. They can build hives that are vastly bigger than they are. Uh, and so so uh, biologists call this ultraocciality. And humans are actually ultraocial. We're able to live together in gigantic groups. We're able to cooperate. I never met you before. We can cooperate to do this. And so a lot of lot of social scientists are interested in this ultraasocciality. How do we do it? What's our trick? Um in all the other species that are ultraocial, the trick is they're all descended from a single female. They all, you know, there's a queen who lays all the eggs and she's not the ruler. She's just the ovary. So they're all siblings. We do it with people who are not related to us. They don't have to be siblings. One thing I wanted to ask you because I've I've heard you talk about that before. Is the logic behind them being siblings meaningful because of the um the selfish gene hypothesis of we're more likely to Okay. Exactly. Yeah. Kin selection. If you can't reproduce on your own because almost all of those other species are sterile. So they can only get into the next generation. The genes can only get into the next generation if they keep the queen alive, if they, you know, if they if they work for the good of the group. Um so humans have this weird sociality which is kind of like bees and ants, but also we're really selfish. We're really selfish a lot of the time. It depends on the context. And so I've been really fascinated because I study morality. That's what I've always done since since graduate school. I study morality. And this weird corner of morality is making things sacred. So can you define morality? That's actually something I've never stopped to to think about like what definition would you put to that? Well, morality is a feature of human [clears throat and cough] human thinking and judgment. Just like we all have language and then we create languages. We live in a linguistic environment. We all have norms. We perceive norms. We co-create norms. And then we enforce them on each other. And if you look at a group of kids getting together to play a game, they'll quickly make up the rules. And it's really fun. You can watch them negotiating it like, "No, you're not allowed to go over that line." Yes, I am. That's the kitchen. Or whatever. You know, they just their brains are sort of unfolding. They're playing with with norms. Um, and so as they play, as they make norms, well, in a sense, that's the Matrix. So, if you remember from the movie The Matrix, The Matrix is a consensual hallucination. And what's so cool about human beings is that we're great at creating. We co-create a consensual hallucination and then we live inside it and we enforce it on each other. But in a big complex society like ours, there are different groups making lots of matrices that are not really fully compatible. So, there's constant misunderstanding, constant conflict. And I think that can help us illuminate this moment. Well, any moment in human history, but my goodness, our current moment. There's a lot of conflict, a lot of incoherence, um a lot of misunderstanding. So, I would like to just bring it all back to this amazing ability humans have um to uh to cocreate norms, um judge each other, hate each other, love each other because of this. Uh and that's the excitement and the tragedy of our lives. It's it's interesting um when you start talking about the use of temples and how religion has really played a powerful role in this. So I'm not religious. I was actually growing up. So growing up I was raised Lutheran. I would say very lightly. It was a very light touch. Um, but I went through sort of a deeply Christian period in my life for a couple of years and then I went through a deeply the the most sort of profound pseudo religious because it was probably more philosophical if I'm completely honest for me was Dowoism and I I just went hard on Dowoism selfidentified as a Dowist almost got a tattoo like the the whole thing. It just it meant so much to me and it really um began to to color the way that I thought about the world. And then as I got older, a lot of that started to um fall by the wayside. And and I'm thinking through this in real time, it it began to fall by the wayside to what I'll call maybe the religion of function. So if I were I I think that the the human mind has a a need for something that's sacred. Literally, I'm stealing this from you. You are the person that made that very clear to me. Um and the thing that that is sacred in my life, I won't even say that it was. It still is. This is sort of the driving thing in my soul that's sacred is the ability to turn potential into usable skills. And that like transition is what I'll say is my life's mission. Um, and when you think about, okay, we have something that's sacred. We can all agree on what that thing is and it allows us to cooperate in ever bigger groups. Um, you talk about the hive switch. Like what exactly is that? How do things become sacred? And then when you look at a moment like now where what is sacred is becoming I would say potentially problematic. How do we navigate that? Okay. So let me back up and ask you a question. Um so you know you say you got it from me. I got a lot of it from Emil Durkheim the famous French sociologist. And Durkheim analyzed religion not about what you believe. It's not about you know reincarnation or you know or or you know um immaculate conception. He said it's about the community that religion its power and it and its function is to bind a group together into into a church or into a into a congregation or community. So your dowoism period was that just you reading books or were you part of a group or a temple? Was it just an intellectual thing for you by yourself? That that is an amazingly good question that I have never thought of until this very moment. it was my best friend um introduced me to it first and so we became sort of a a a tribe of two if you will. Um but no other than that there there was nothing but it was a very it created a deep sort of intellectual intimacy between he and I that I really cherished. Okay. So two is not quite enough for a community or a group. I'm gonna guess that what it gave you was more um a sort of a an intellectual opening that there's a so I'm really interested in awe experiences and I wrote a a review paper in 2003 with my friend Decker Kelner where we reviewed all these different kinds of experiences people have near-death experiences psychedelic drug experiences spontaneous peak experiences all kinds of religious experiences that William James used to write about a lot of them have the sense of of of a kind of a shattering of old constructs um a loss of boundaries of the self and an almost ecstatic sense of opening. Uh mystics talk about it as merger with God or merger with all. Durkheim talked about it as actually merger with with with everyone else that he said society is actually God. Um so I'm going to guess that you had feelings of just of like your concepts cracking open and like wow. So that was more of a cerebral thing. A group of two probably is not enough to have like a lifelong religion. That's just a guess. Am I totally off base? No, I mean that's super accurate and that's probably part of why it became it was either um just a transitional thing for me to get into deep functionality because that was um or and let me finish that thought. So, it was either a gateway to deep functionality or it was that um not being around him anymore, it began to sort of lose its hold on me because I didn't have anybody to reinforce it. Um but taking a um the first approach and saying it was a bridge to something else. When I first started reading um the Dao De Jing, it was this sense the like I'll encapsulate it by be like water, right? So I was obsessed with Bruce Lee. I was obsessed with Daoism. I'm reading the Dao of Jet Kundo like all of this stuff about um in fact Bruce Lee maybe um sums it up in in the most interesting way where he says be like water my friend. And then if you read his book the Dao of Jet Kundo, Jet Kundo translates roughly as defend by attacking. And so there was there was this transition from here's this abstract philosophy that's telling you to be like water, but then it's explaining why it's useful. And so when you think about water being able to erode rock over millennia, it it begins to plant all these ideas in my head that I think, wow, there's like a a realworld application of this and that was very intoxicating. And by bringing that into my thought process and my behavior, I felt I wouldn't have used the words that you're using, the sense of awe, but I definitely would have said a sense of opening up that there was a world which I had known nothing about that I had a reaction to or a potential for reaction to laying dormant in my mind and someone need only give me the text. And in reading the daing for myself, I had this emotion of like, whoa, there's there are possibilities that I had not yet understood. Yes. And so that notion of, you know, the the doors of perception or whatever opening was very profound. Beautiful. That's right. And that's what I think a lot of people you think back on your college experience, if you had a great college or high school experience, it's that rare class or that rare professor that made you suddenly see possibilities that you did not see before. And so when I first began reading anthropology in graduate school and reading ethnographies of other cultures and and learning to think of culture in this way, it was like, wow. Um and when I first read Emil Durkheim when I first took a sociology course again in graduate school um again it was like these you know new ways of thinking they're so powerful. Okay so now we're ready to talk about the hive switch. So um when I was a professor at the University of Virginia uh from 1995 to 2011 I was interested in all these all these self-trcendent experiences and I would collect you know stories about near-death experiences and how what how people described how it affected them all that sort of stuff and there were so many similarities like there's all these different ways to get to this self-trcended experience that I began to think it's almost there's like a button on the on front of your forehead where if you press it you like you you sort of lose yourself and then you have this whole suite this whole package of experiences part of which is moral it's always moral improvement that is people who you know you're up on a mountain top you have this amazing experience you don't come down the mountain saying I'm so psyched to make as much money as I can like no that doesn't happen it's like I want to be useful to everybody I I want to you know spread be I mean you have a there's always kind of a moral uplift so when you press the button you lose self petty selfishness declines and there's there's sort of a spiritual growth or a or a moral elevation and so that's why I was interested in all these weird one thing one thing I want to know about that so earlier you what I took away from your words on the defining morality is that it is a a shared um belief system and that it feel it felt as you were talking about it and it feels in experience quite frankly to be highly malleable. So when you say that you have this moral elevation, what what is going on psychologically? And so that's a terrible question. So I'll step back and say I have a hypothesis that there are what I call the physics of being human that the brain the brain is wired for certain things. Yes. Uh is one of them. You've talked about the fact that we have the high hive switch is another. So, are you talking about tapping into something that's sort of innate to the human brain that gives you a sense of connectedness which you're calling elevation? Absolutely. That's exactly it. Um, the key book for me, there were a couple of them, but the one I recommend to a general audience is by Barbara Erin Reich. You know, she wrote Nickel and Dime. She has a lot of great books. Um, she has a book called Dancing in the Streets, a history of collective joy. And she shows how the normal default way that human groups are, religion is danced. It's ecstatic. It's it's it's these really active rituals. And she shows how Christianity used to be like that too. But gradually and I think it was in the Protestant world much more than Catholic. In Protestant it becomes more sedate, more intellectual, less Durkheimian. And uh she says group love like the love that you feel for your group is this powerful common emotion around the world. and religious rituals often instill it and somehow we in the sort of the modern secular west have much staler you know now obviously there's many different forms of protestantism some are more ecstatic and those are generally the ones that are growing um so yes this is a default normal healthy capability of the human mind and modern western society doesn't satisfy it as much as traditional many traditional societies and therefore her point is people do all these things to seek out that pleasure. And that helps you understand. She goes through raves like you know when you know in the 1980s when uh you know um you know really powerful speakers and laser lights and then also the drug ecstasy which had been around for 80 years or more but they all came together. people found a way to create this group experience that like pressed all the buttons and a lot of people would have these transformative uh experiences not you know and and again it's always this like a moral growth as well so the idea is um we have this ability it's like like a switch in the head you can push it and all these amazing things happen they're deeply pleasurable so I began calling that the hive switch because even though humans are primates we're a lot like other you know chimpanzees bonobos where those our closest uh you know other species. We're a lot like them in our social life. But we have this ability they have they know nothing of which is to briefly become like bees in a hive. We forget ourselves. It we have this ecstatic merging. That's what I mean by the hive switch. And that's what what I find is when I lecture about this and I ask people how many have had an experience the majority not not 90% but you know more than 50% have had something like this. I have you tell tell me about one that you've had that involves a group. Um that involves a group. So the I think your group size is probably I'm going to run into a problem with that. The the group experience that I do that I have the biggest reaction to. Guys, you're going to think this is uh silly, but um my wife, my sister and I play a game called Destiny on the PlayStation and we play as a team. So I'm I am to your point, I am only interested in cooperative games. So um I I play where I can play as a part of a team and we I mean essentially simulate war, right, without the real world violence and the real consequences. And as you've talked very eloquently about like people that go to war and survive and come back in one piece often talk about it as sort of the peak experience of their life. And so in a really really really small way I get that from playing that game. Now, of course, having gone to USC and going to football games or quite frankly, and hey, this will I'm going to grab the [ __ ] third rail right now. Um, growing up as a kid in the 80s in America felt awesome to be American. Like, it felt [ __ ] awesome. And I used to say all the time like to so I have a lot of younger employees and I would say, "Man, I wish you guys had that same kind of experience of like, man, we were just like it felt so good. the movies coming out in the 80s which of course wildly influenced me, you know, um Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where it was just like being an American, being a badass, like standing up for what you believed in, like all of that [ __ ] was just so rad and that really intoxicated me. Um that obviously has fallen out of fashion in a hard way, but I still have that. So I still like when I think about sort of what's my highest level group identity, being a person is rad. And the moment the moments where I have felt the best are moments where you just feel connected. So when I was at Quest, in fact, so I am thinking out loud right now, which is why I'm sort of all over the place. So thank you for allowing me to think through something I hadn't thought about. Um, but being at Quest was a great example of that. I was suddenly in the mix of people who grew up so differently than I did. But we had this common mission, a common drive of self-improvement. And that was so awesome to making protein bars is hard. like f it's physically demanding especially in the beginning when we didn't have industrial-grade equipment and so it's really really hard and being with people fighting side by side for this common mission and it is physically difficult um you've talked about muscular bonding so I'll say that was a a tremendous example of muscular bonding I don't know if that answered your question no that that really does that's beautiful because the other book that I was going to recommend is by the historian William McNeel called Keeping together in time and he talks about how it's movement in synchrony. He begins with his story of being uh when World War II broke out, I don't know if he was drafted or he volunteers, but they're in basic training marching around a field with fake wooden guns seems stupid, but by the end of the first or second day when his unit gets it and they actually are moving in sync, he describes this ecstatic experience. So physically moving with a group especially if you have a higher noble mission you're pursuing together which you know he did and which you did um uh that is a good way to unlock that. So it was physically hard you were doing things at the same time um uh and you had a noble purpose in mind. This is also why say playing in in a band I'm not a good musician at all but for a year or two I played with some other people and like the first time we really got in sync it it was like nothing I'd ever experienced. So there's all these ways, there's all these potentials we have to to, I would say, realize our our our deep social nature that modern western society often leaves frustrated. Yeah. The when when I first started encountering the idea that religion was um on the Wayne, I was actually excited about that if I'm honest. That that just felt right to me like going to reason instead of like hardcore emotions. Um, and I I read The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell from a filmmaker's perspective is why I picked up the book. Um, but then I stayed for the transformation like it really ended up impacting my life. And he started talking about how when the core meaning behind a ritual falls away or the ritual itself dies away, there is some sort of vacuum left. And when I think about what you're talking about things needing to be sacred or there will be something sacred like people will put some elements and elevate them to the status of sacred it's like all of a sudden we had things that were functioning you know have friction against them or whatever fine but like religion really societies are here they're doing pretty good um so when you remove that it becomes a huge question of what's it replaced with and I started to get really unnerved and and I would say this moment in time is sort of the peak of my fear over what happens if it gets replaced with something less useful. That's right. That's right. So that's a good lead in I think to what's going on going on nowadays. Um so the other piece the other piece that we have to put on the table here is social media. We have to understand what social media is doing to us before we can understand the incoherence and conflicts of our time. So um uh I teamed up. I've always had I had a sense that things began getting just really weird in our country and our democracy around maybe 2015. This is before Trump. Um it it was like there was a glitch in the program. It was like like the fundamental you know parameters of the universe had changed [clears throat] and um and and the weirdness of the weirdness I think allowed allowed Donald Trump to have a campaign that never could have worked previously but with his the way he used social media it it did somehow work. Let's understand what social media has done has done uh to us. Um uh let's go back to the origins of it. Around 2003 2004 you get Friendster, MySpace, the Facebook. These were sites where you put up you know links to your friends or other things about you or you know here are the bands I like. [clears throat] Totally not toxic. Okay. It's just a way to connect with people. Um [clears throat and cough] pardon me. And um uh so I teamed up with with a guy named Tobias Rose Stockwell uh who who really knows the tech industry and social media very well. I'm a social psychologist. I'm on Twitter a little bit, but I I don't really understand the the space very well. But Tobias and I together sort of traced out exactly how social media changed between 2009 and 2012. That's the period when the whole universe changes. Facebook adds the like button in 2009 and now it's much more engaging and people are rating each other. your reinforce little bits of reinforcement so it's much more engaging. Twitter adds the retweet button which makes things much more explosive. Things go viral very quickly. Um [clears throat] a Twitter engineer was involved in it. I think he said when he saw what was happening he said something like I think we just put a loaded gun in the hands of a three-year-old. It was something he had a quote something like that. Um so you get these two innovations and each platform copies the innovations of the other and they become features of social media. Um, and so now the platforms have a huge amount of information about what you like, what you're engaged with. And so now they algor they even they've done it before, but they really algorithmicize the feeds so that you're not getting a chronological you're getting what other people or what they think you will be more likely to engage with. So social media really changes between 2009, 2011, 2012. And then the mainstream media, the newspapers and the television stations, they now have to adapt because that's where the action is. things are going so fast. So you get so our our information ecosystem that used to was always fast but it now it goes to warp speed, lightning speed, no time to check things. Um it it go it's head spinningly fast. Uh lots more untruth, lots more manipulation. Uh I think we kind of lose touch with reality around this time around 2012 2013 is when the um uh things begin to get particularly uh that the the tech platforms have now set things up. I want to I I want to um have you go deeper on that. though because I think this is going to end up being important that the the fact that you're saying we've lost touch with reality tells me that you think and I certainly do so correct me if if you don't think this but that there is an important part of defining what reality is is the reflection you get back from other people and that's the part that ends up getting wildly deranged by social media. Um yes I would say it a little differently. I would agree with what you said but let me say it a little bit differently. So um so if we return to the the metaphor of the matrix it's a consensual hallucination um and there's a great line from the sociologist Max Vber um the gist of it is man is an animal actually it's from Clifford Gears quoting Max Ver man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun and I take culture to be those webs and so we're always spinning these webs but what happens when social media comes in and now any you somebody can spin a new web in you know in a matter of a day or you know hours in a sense like so so we have the technological environment hyperactivating our ability to spin new webs of meaning now let me just add one last element then we'll put it all together sorry if it seems too didactic but no no at all I'm really interested nowadays in the biblical story of the tower of babel so after humans you know humans all had one language and they're very powerful they're what you know they're ultra social creatures they can build towers they can build giant hives and nests. So they build this tower and God says, "Look, they're become like they become like gods." He says, "Let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another." And I think that's what happened between 2009 and 2012. We built this enormous new well outrage platform is Tobias's word for it. We built this enormous new way of communicating that allows people to spin and manipulate and and express outrage and draw people in. Uh we built it and what did it do to us? It shattered any ability to have a common language, a common understanding of what happened. So any big event happens um like with the pandemic, just look at the pandemic. Um um and what you you have is there can be a common understanding for a few days, maybe even a week or two, but pretty soon different political elements, foreign actors are putting in conspiracy theories or just twisting it and before you know it, you know, the basic science questions become questions of which side you're on. Um now I don't want to do you know both sidesism here like each side is equal you know because obviously the president tweeting you know you know against his own team and tweeting liberate Virginia you know liberate Minnesota um obviously the president politicized it greatly but almost anything nowadays uh uh um it's hard to find the truth and so I think an implication of this is we have to be a lot more intellectually humble because it's just really hard to know what the truth is but man we get plugged into some reading some narrative and we are certain we know what the truth is and that tells us who's good and who's evil. So it's a mess. It is just a mess out there. And and you know I was began thinking this way around 2015 like something is weird with the universe. Yeah. I I am I'm almost pathologically optimistic to the point I've cultivated that in myself to be sure because I think that is far more useful. And when I think about entrepreneurs that succeed, you really are trying to do something that other people think is impossible, which is largely why they haven't tried it. Um, and certainly Quest was sort of the biggest experiment and optimism in my life where everybody told us what what are you doing? This doesn't make any sense. There's a reason that this bar doesn't exist. The number of people that told us that it physically could not be made. Um, and they were right except for the fact if you're willing to build your own equipment, then you can produce it. But like people just don't even think to do that, right? So it was this huge gamble that we took ends up paying off. And so it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, this idea of being pathologically optimistic is actually really powerful. This is the first time in my life where I've been like, whoa, I'm actually I don't know that I see the mechanisms by which we unwind this. And so it becomes a question of you talk about these webs of meaning. I think that's so powerful. That's such a smart way to think of this. And but my question becomes, what the hell makes one web of meaning so viral and so sticky that it spreads so fast? And then the people that are creating these webs like are they really smart? Have they just happened upon something? Um like what is it about the human mind? Like what elements of the human mind make a certain narrative sticky? And I I am intentionally taking you to um the the like moral foundation theory. So if you don't think that's the right answer, let me know. But that never, hey, there's six and once you understand these, like you can really begin to predict people's behavior. I was like, oh my god. Yeah. So yeah. So great. So so yeah, this is the the the problem that I've worked on, especially the first half of my career, um is um you know what, you know, what is morality? Where does it come from? And as I said before, I was just blown away when I began studying anthropology about how different we are. But at the same time, you have weird stuff in the anthropological record like, you know, Puritan pollution taboss. You know, you find them in the in the Hebrew Bible around menstruation. You find similar things in many other societies that never met. And so that told me like wow it's like you know for those of those of you who know Carl Jung and his idea of archetypes it's not a very scientific concept but it gets the idea that some very specific patterns will occur around the world in societies that you know were separated 50,000 years ago. So there's something about the human mind that seems to generate or or be receptive to certain narratives certain pieces of content. And so this led me and and some some colleagues of mine to develop a theory we call moral foundations theory. And it draws heavily on the the work of Richard Schweder, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. Um, and the analogy we used was our, you know, our tongues have five different kinds of taste receptor on them because we evolved to eat fruit and meat. And so sweet and sour guides a primate to ripe fruit and, you know, salt and bitter and umami, a kind of a meat flavor. So we, you know, we evolved to have these tongues with specific receptors, but that doesn't tell us, you know, how you get Mexican cuisine versus Indian cuisine. That's culture. It's based on what's available. It's based on history. So moral foundations theory is an attempt to put it all together and say what are the evolved taste receptors of the moral sense. Uh and then given that every person on earth has the same receptors, why do we end up with different moralities in different countries originally, but now even you know in the same neighborhood you can. So briefly the the six are uh care. So, you know, care and harm and, you know, compassion because we're we're mammals and we evolved to care for our young. Um, fairness, fairness, reciprocity, cheating because we're very good at exchange and we have to keep track of who's trustworthy. Um, uh, loyalty, um, because we're groupish creatures and we take keep track of who's who's with us, who's not. Uh, like your story about the the the kid in prison. um authority because we're hierarchical creatures like most primates and we we we recognize signs of of authority which can be abusive. Um uh and then uh purity or sanctity. We do this stuff about investing objects with this sacred essence and then you know if you touch it you don't want to touch you wash your hand. So we have all this stuff about purity and pollution. Um and those are the main five that that we worked on originally. There's a bunch more. The the other one that we're we're working on that I think is extremely important for our politics is is liberty uh liberty versus versus oppression. Um and but there are several others. I I don't believe we have to have a small set. Evolution didn't care about parsimony. Didn't care about making everything have one foundation. But once you understand this that we have all these different moral taste receptors. Now you can see how do you persuade someone? If I want to persuade you of some political issue, if I want to pull you to the left or the right or change your thinking about race or the environment, you know, I I could just give you data, I could say, we'd all be better off if we did X, that tends not to persuade people very much. But if I can tell you a story about how those greedy bastards who are doing this to us and they took this and they're doing that and we have to unite to fight them. Okay, now I'm hooking deep into your narrative process or your story thinking and I'm grounding it in moral foundations. Uh so so that's um yeah that's like the psychology I would put on the table here for us to now have a conversation about why does some why does some story constructions take off and others sort of die on the vine. Yeah, it's interesting. This is where it gets really important to understand that we're not blank slates that there are people that are going to have receptors that are um really optimized for one thing or another. Um, you talked about twin studies where it's like the thing that predicts your sort of right or left leaning has far more to do with your genetics than even where you grew up, which I found interesting. I was actually really surprised by that. Um, well, I'm not I'm not sure I would say it has more total, just that almost everything about us, you know. Didn't you say in the book that it was actually more predictive? Uh well the correlations are well the you know if you look at the map of voting um you know the red zones and the blue zones you know where you grow up uh does it does have a lot to do with certainly what party you'll support. Um but uh but whe how religious you are how conservative or liberal um yes you're your genes do influence that quite a lot. And what would you say is more influential? Is it more influenced by genes or more influenced by your surroundings? Uh, I can't I can't, you know, that's an empirical question. I don't have the data handy. I don't remember to the extent that it's been I'm not sure I've seen it quantified in any one study. Um, how where you are on the left right, put it this way, where you're on the left right is what is heritable. whether you're a Republican, Democrat is not the heritable thing because the parties have changed over time and you might be a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat. So party um and certain specific beliefs would be more influenced by where you grow up and and your community. This is interesting. This gets into your Tower of Babel thing where it's like it it begins to get hard to pin them down because until you started speaking 30 seconds ago, I considered the left Democrat and the right Republican. So the idea that those actually need to be um parsed out is interesting and and I think for a lot of people those are sort of one and the same. It it's just you know well for Americans now they've become one and the same but before the 90s they weren't. So uh parties have always been um you know a whole assemblage of interest groups and regions and industries. Uh and you might say that one party is more to the left or right than than another in American history. But um uh you know the the the Republican party grew out of Lincoln and and you know the party of Lincoln in the civil war. So the South was therefore Democrat and uh it would you know so um that's back when there were liberal Republicans in the northeast and the Northwest there were conservative Democrats in the south. Um so if you had to define then the difference between liber liberal and conservative what words would you put to that? Well, I prefer to think in terms of left right because the word liberal has a particular meaning um in in the western world in Europe and America the liberal tradition is like John Stewart Mill individual rights freedom of conscience freedom of speech. Um and the word liberal in Europe means more like what we mean but nowadays as a political party as I understand it is more like what we mean by like libertarian. So um America has taken the word liberal I think this started in the early 20th century and we've said the word liberal means left. So in America if you say liberal to conservative um but I think it uh but then if you talk to Europeans they understand the way that we use the word I think it's better to talk about progressive versus conservative. Some people are just constitutionally disposed to let's change things. Let's progress. Let's change change and others like whoa not so fast like there's a wisdom to traditions you know. So that's the normal tension that you find I think in every society. Um progressive versus conservative and that generally is what we mean by left versus right. Uh and so so using those words that's really interesting. Um when you start thinking though about the names you give things progress versus anything seems like the other thing is going to be the bad thing. Um, and it's funny, I actually now at a subconscious level, like obviously I I don't believe this is actually true, but in terms of my own emotional response, I respond to um progressive, conservative, Republican, Democrat, as if they were slurs. Like, I wouldn't want anybody putting any of those labels on me, they become so divisive. Um, and it's become so formulaic, right? that if you say that you're a conservative, then you're going to line up um on issues that way just to be a part of the team, right? So, going back to that hive mind, I feel like I agree. We have this switch, this hive mind switch. Somebody's [ __ ] got their boot on it and people just cannot get back to the the 90% um I I'll even stray away from chimp and just say 90% mammal, like just, you know, nurturing and and caring about other people and wanting to understand and like to listen. It just seems super weird. So anyway, you you've got one word being used for progressive, which seems to set up sort of an an inherent conflict uh when you say conservative, at least in my own mind. And I meant to ask you this when we were talking about the Tower of Babel. How much of this do you think is the actual words are what are being manipulated? The definitions of the words are changing versus just making it impossible for people to to tell the same narrative. Hm. Um, you know, I think part of part of attempts at political change is to control the language, redefine words, um, put out images. So, it's hard to it's hard to say. We'd have to talk about a specific specific case. Um, the one [snorts] thing I'll I'll add is just that the data from the Pew surveys shows that if you go back to the 90s, if you were on the left, let's say, you would believe certain kinds of issues, but you wouldn't be orthodox. Like, you wouldn't have all 10. And same thing on the right. Like there used to be people would sort of have a mismatch. They'd have a a bunch of different issues on on both sides. And gradually since then, if you know that someone is on the left or the right, you actually you're more likely to know their position on all 10 of the issues that Pew surveys. So there has been and I think this is related to in possibly in part to to the the new media environment just the the policing we do of each other now the policing we can do of people's views and the penalties for for thinking for yourself or for stepping off or saying well you know I I I hold this view on that but this view on that. Um so I think it is making it harder for us to think straight because you have to kind of buy into a whole package and there can be penalties for stepping off the you know stepping off the little zone of agreement. Yeah for sure. The one word that I'll say if we were going to pick one to be an example of how changing the definition seems to have created problems and and this is where I was saying this to you before we started filming. I don't consider myself to have deep wisdom here. I have a way of thinking um that has certainly served me well and so I use it to process through this stuff. But racism to me is a word that seems to have changed definitions to our detriment and where um change is maybe a better word for progressive than progressive because you're not always changing in the right direction. So to me like I always say that everything is an echo of your goal. What's your goal? So my goal at least as it pertains to race would be to get to the point where race is about as interesting as hair color. It's like you can see it, sure, like nobody's obviously not going to be able to tell, but you just don't factor it in terms of thinking about whether somebody's worth um worthy of love or promotion or that their ideas are good or you know, you just I mean to be judged by the content of your character, but that's actually become like an eye rolly thing to quote um that notion of, you know, judge somebody by the content of their character and to make the term racism to be more about sort of intrinsic qualities um that have to do with power dynamics seems like it it is a web of meaning that has become extraordinarily sticky but seems to be like where we almost can't even have the conversation because it's like well I don't agree with the definition and when you get into it's what I call a base assumption if you're having an argument so I my poor audience has heard me explain this so many times but this will help you understand how I'm thinking the biggest argument I ever got into with my wife was over a cup of tea and so we we're just in this huge fight over this cup of tea and finally About 2 hours in, I was like, "This is not about the tea. What is this actually about?" Like, "What? There's no way I could get this heated about a cup of tea. So, what are we really talking about?" And then when you get to base assumptions, that's where it's like, yo, getting people to change their base assumption can be really [ __ ] difficult and speaks to those the flavor receptors and who has more of one and, you know, is leaning in a certain direction. So, are you still pessimistic about how we move forward? Are you optimistic about how we move forward specifically in at that sort of base assumption like religious fervor level? Right. Okay. So let's let's okay this is this is tricky. Let's try to talk about this about about the changing definition of of of racism. So you and I me more I was born in 1963. I was born uh you know two months after Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech. And you know the the late 20th century in the United States was a time of extraordinary progress on uh you know uh civil rights, women's rights, uh gay rights, now LGBTQ um animal rights, you know, the environ. So um it was an extraordinary period, the late 20th century, and our our ideal then was, as you said, you know, the the the king quote about the content of their character and a raceblind society. And so that, you know, that's very appealing to, you know, people like you and me, you know, 20th century white guys. Um um and and you know, when I first heard the changing definitions of racism, I was very skeptical of it. And and you know, systemic racism is a is a difficult concept. And um and so I was I was skeptical at first, but what I've been trying to do, especially since the since the George Floyd killing, um is is listen um expose myself to different webs of meaning. Um because, okay, so here's here's one of the other basic principles of moral psychology. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. And you have to actually open your heart first before you can think new thoughts. And I think the George Floyd video and the many other videos have affected white Americans and opened their hearts in ways that you know could have happened in previous waves but but didn't. And I just want to add that for my own transformation, the the big experience, the big thing that happened to me was um I was invited on this so Congressman John Lewis leads this civil rights pilgrimage every uh every March or April um to uh to Selma Montgomery uh to the site sites in Alabama and uh with it takes a bunch of Congress people from both parties and I was invited along. You know, I study moral psychology. I know some of the people on the trip. Um, and we went to the museums uh um in in Montgomery um and the you know the you learn all you really see the these powerful exhibits about about slavery and family separation and uh and um and the the the monument this incredibly powerful monument that you walk through about lynching. And so you have this incredibly um emotionally powerful experience where it it opens your heart and it's done in a way it's not demonizing. It's not shaming and blaming. It's inviting you to understand what happened, what America did to to to to black people over all these centuries and that it wasn't just long ago. Um that it went up well into the 20th century. And and we heard a talk from Brian Stevenson who helped us understand, you know, it's not that it's not that slavery ended, it changed form. It's not the Jim Crow ended. It changes form. And yes, there's progress, of course, but but to but to have this experience, you know, it it opened my heart to at least now, okay, now I can let me let me let me hear the arguments. Let me hear what you're saying. And so, um, and so I think the idea the the ideal that we were talking about before, just, oh, you know, colorblind, let's just treat everybody the same. Um, you know, I'm now much more open to the idea that that might be a fine, you know, go endgame that we might get to someday. Um, but but that for now we do have to pay attention to to race. Uh, we do have to um we do have to change things about our society um that lead to different outcomes. Now, as to whether it's wise to call it racism, structural racism, because that word then makes people, you know, especially white people say, "No, no." Um, you know, that's a separate question. Um, but I just want to say that I think that, you know, one of the big changes of this month of June is that we saw we saw a big change in America in in in its in the hearts of many many people, many white people in particular. So I think yeah we have to be careful talking about these concepts. We have to start with empathy. It's so hard to find the truth. It's so hard to understand each other. So I think we have to seek out opportunities to open our hearts first and then we can talk about these difficult complicated ideas. And how do you think about finding the path forward? Because hearing you talk it is very obviously measured. It's very reasonable. I think it's very in line with the truth of the human condition. You talk about the writer and the elephant. You know, the elephant being the emotion, the writer being sort of the intellect and the intellect will make all kinds of justifications to explain why you're feeling what you're feeling. When in truth, you're just being driven by what you feel. And I think that having leading with empathy is so self-evidently the right way to march forward. Um, but when I think about, okay, well, how do we begin to make that the sticky web of meaning that's shared by everybody, because what I see, what I see being born out of really beautiful ideas is something that will metastasize or probably already has metastasized. And so it's like, how do we keep an idea that has really beautiful sentiment, like let's really understand where somebody's at, where they're coming from, the historical context, all of that makes all the sense in the world to me. But then how do we make sure that it doesn't metastasize and become shaming and blaming and us versus them like the the sort of scary way that people have a reputational gun put to their head to to not I mean you you started the heterodox [clears throat] academy to get people to have these varying opinions and come together. there is, at least from a very vocal minority, an excruciatingly um aggressive stance that either get in line or be ostracized. That's right. So, that's right. This is my my big fear is that we are set up for to make major moral progress, but there's a good chance that it's that we're going to have such backfire effects. And um the you know one of the messages that that we got on the trip to Alabama was the power of uh the power of love as opposed to hate. Obviously this was very much King's message. Um but it was that if you want to win people over, you have to appeal to them as as human beings. You you shouldn't uh uh you shouldn't be you know attacking people tends to not win them over. And um so this is I think we're at very high risk of this. There's research in social psychology on on diversity training and um there's not really any form of diversity training that's been shown to work well to actually change people to improve relationships to to create an inclusive environment. But there is evidence of what backfires and when you take the shaming blaming approach um there's a there's a a review paper in science I think it's called like scientific diversity interventions but it says very clearly that when you when you do shaming blaming it tends to affect the especially the white men it tends to actually produce a backfire effect and so um I think there's a lot of of goodwill towards change but there's a lot of fear and I fear that and I'm I what I see I think I think is what you're getting at is that in a lot of companies they're going to be doing things where everyone's going to be saying like yes yes yes but but privately they have different feelings and a lot of what um a lot of the change we're going to be wrestling with might backfire. So I don't know what's going to happen. I do know that um right now our country and our media ecosystem is very well set up for us to polarize everything, misunderstand everything and hate each other more. Yeah, that that's really my concern is I come at everything again like this is not something I think that I have deep wisdom on. I but the way that I think goes like this. Everything starts with your goal. So what are you trying to achieve? And then basically from there it's what I call the physics of progress which definitely rhymes with the scientific method. So you've got and and I just got this from business but it I think applies to every area of your life. But if you want to move forward in business you have to say okay what's my goal? What am I trying to achieve? like really specifically and then what is my informed hypothesis to overcome whatever problem is between where I'm at now and actually achieving that goal and then you have to have some set of data that you're going to say this is what we're going to look at to see whether or not that we've made progress and if you're making progress awesome keep doing it but if you're not making progress like you need to acknowledge that and adjust course and where I feel like and this is why I feel like the right goal to have like you said like there there are there are problems between where we are and how we get there 100%. But we have to decide where are we actually trying to get to and the the thing that I am I don't yet see the wisdom and like you I'm open man I am open I just want what works where everybody has the opportunity to have the rad life possible. So if if we agree that our goal is to make race like hair color and that it's essentially irrelevant, that seems like it would bypass some of the backfire problems that you're talking about, some of the more um the the problems of um homogeneity when you start talking about thinking and how that creates a weakness in and of itself and that you need these competing ideas um versus what I'll say is sort of the competing goal which I feel is right now far stickier which is that race is so important that every moment that we're interacting with somebody, we need to hold Selma in our mind. We need to be thinking about um slavery and like that just needs to be how we approach the world and that's the only way to get beyond that. And I'm actually open like if that really is the truth and that really is the thing that takes us to a more beautiful society on the other side of it, then I'm open to that. I just don't see any evidence how it's being deployed now. like that's actually what's going to happen. And I'm worried that we're not clear about what's on the other side of that. Like what's our end state that we want to get to? Because if everybody was like, "Look, the end state is races like hair color." Okay, cool. I'm down for that. Um I haven't yet heard a strict articulation of that. And so I I do worry that we don't share a goal as a society that there's more division being born of the current tactics that are being deployed. So even if everybody has a beautiful end state in mind, if we don't articulate what it is, agree on what it is, and then have some sort of metric that we'll judge progress against, we could be in a spiral, a negative spiral. Yeah, I'm not sure that the the universally desired end state would be that race is no more meaningful than hair color. U I I think a better approximation would be um equal opportunity, which we all agree on, but then equal dignity, which is what where I think we're really well, we're falling short on both, but especially equal dignity. I'm not sure that it's to make race, you know, irrelevant to everything. It's it's um uh it's to erase the the the barriers to well, equal participation, opportunity, and dignity. Um businesses, you know, business is pragmatic in a way that the academy often is not. And so I'm at least hopeful that in the coming year there'll be a lot of different approaches tried. Uh and some might backfire and some might work. So I don't know what's what's coming. Um there will be a lot of attention to these issues in in organizations of all sorts. I'm hopeful that there will be an experimental method tried that people will collect data that people will gradually innovate and figure out what actually works. Uh but it's possible that we won't. Yeah. It's interesting when you start thinking about conversations taking on a religious tenor and you talk about the difference in the moral foundations, how can we begin to facilitate a more constructive dialogue and you said uh a while ago you were like you know when you go to try to convince somebody of something. Yeah. What is what is that process like? How do we do that in a way that is uniting and not divisive? So the uh the first principle of moral psychology I think I said before was intuitions come first strategic reasoning second and that goes along with the metaphor that I that I developed in the happiness hypothesis that the mind is divided like a small rider which is our conscious reasoning on a very large elephant which is all the automatic intuitive and emotional processes in our minds. And so you might think that the rider is in control and tells the elephant what to do. But in fact, most of our lives the elephant is sort of running the show and the rider is just up there like making excuses, you know, coming up with justifications. In many ways, the the the rider serves the elephant. And so if you want to persuade someone, the basic rule is talk to the elephant first. You you have to um you have to appeal to the elephant. Appeal to the automatic processes. This is why story is important. narrative, making appeals that that are well grounded in that person's moral foundations. Um, uh, and the most powerful technique of all is acknowledge something that they're right about in any argument. So, just think about think about an argument you have with your spouse or with a good friend or family member. Um, uh, you know, if you start it right in with you're wrong and here's why. Well, I guarantee you you're not going to win that argument. Like, you're not going to persuade them of why they're wrong. But if you start off with, why is that? I'm super curious. What is it psychologically that causes people to just be so I agree that it happens, but what makes people so resistant to facing being wrong? Oh, well, you know, our our our minds have certain sort of like functional patterns and we can be in a mindset for combat. We're very good at that. Um, we can be in a mindset for exploration, you know, exploration and learning. Um, we can be in a mindset for ritual. So, we have all these different mindsets that we can get into. And you you know in the academic world what we want is our students to spend all their time in the exploration and learning mindset not in the you know team versus team combat mindset. Uh and that's why I think you know politics can often have a corrupting effect on on learning and you know ide you know ideology and orthodoxy you know they narrow your mind and they make you see intellectual life as a battle you know battle between teams rather than you know a kid in a candy shop like oh what's that? Oh wow what's that? let me try that. Um, so, uh, so if you think about people being in different mindsets and then you approach your spouse with, you know, you're wrong and here's why or, you know, I'm so upset about that thing you said to me. Well, that, you know, right away they're using all their, you know, all their mental power to to to show why you're wrong and why they're right. Um, the the writer is very good at conscious, you know, writer does conscious reasoning. And if the writer is told, find a defense, you know, here comes the attack, get, you know, batten down the hatches, prepare a counterattack, then it's going to go in a very predictable way. Um, but one thing I learned from one of my favorite books, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it um went around my first year of grad school at Penn um was um start with acknowledgement. Say something. You know, you know, honey, um, you know, we had that argument yesterday and I've been thinking and, you know, I think you're right about X. You know, I think, you know, about this one thing that you criticized me for, I've got to admit you were right about that. Now, if the thing that you most care about is why, it's a really good strategy to search for something that you really were wrong about because there almost certainly is something. And if you can start by saying, you know, you were right about X, that right away takes the other person out of, you know, conflict, resistance, battle mode, and puts them more into sort of, you know, reciprocity. Oh, you know, now you acknowledge, you know, you acknowledge something that I was saying. You've heard me. I feel heard. I feel validated. Now I'm much more willing to say, yeah, and you know, on why I, you know, I can see your side or or maybe I was overreacting on what. So, so this is the technique. This is the basic technique to make progress in human relationships is really try to understand the other person, how they see it, and find something that they're right about. There usually is. Yeah, that that's a very good piece of advice, especially for marriages. Um, my wife and I have been together, we've been together now for almost 20 years. We've been married um 18 years. And one thing that I always tell people is when you have something hard to say, you want to make sure that you wait for a moment where their guard is down. Cuz when man, when people put up their defenses, it like you said, we're we're we have evolved to be very good at coalescing into groups, groups around something that's sacred, an idea or whatever, and being able to mount that defense. and groups that were able to mount that defense and overcome the quote unquote enemy were more uh they thrived. And so we're going to be the descendants of the people who were very good at warding off whatever a physical attack, a mental attack. And so understanding how people throw up their defenses um and how to bring them down is really important. And when I think about, you know, some of the leaders of old that I I wish that we had right now during this time to help us through, you know, this crisis and to get us to the other side in in a way that's beautiful and I love the use of the word dignity to, you know, really help everybody have a degree of dignity. Um, when I read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and understood his policies coming out of um such just un Yeah. unimaginable. Obviously, racism, oppression, like just just it's crazy. And the fact that he was saying unity at this point is is all that matters. And really really understood some deep things about human psychology about bringing groups together. And I think the probably the right I'm so curious to hear what you think about this. The you quoted in the uh in one of your talks anyway, when when somebody draws a circle to exclude me, I draw a larger circle to include them. And that was very much Nelson Mandela's philosophy of like how do we find the things that are in common? In fact, one of the things you said that I really resonated with was we've got to get people to focus on similarities. Like, and I have a um a thing I think about when building one's own mind, which is you're whatever you look at, you're going to see more of. Um you know, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And if you're focused on the things that divide us, you're going to see them everywhere. But if you focus on the things that unite us, um that can be a powerful way forward. Does that still ring true to you? Well, yes. Yes. I mean what um you know I I think the technique the technique that works over and over again uh whether it be you know Mandela or or King or Gandhi um is you know to bring about social change you you do need to apply pressure and they all were masters at applying economic pressure political pressure you're not going to win just by persuasion and beautiful words. Um but um if ultimately you do need to persuade large numbers of people then humanizing them rather than demonizing them is likely to be more effective. Unfortunately our instinct is often to demonize. And I think it's much worse nowadays because uh people raised in a social media environment are not necessarily trying to persuade the person that they're interacting with. They're doing things to signal out sideways to all the people in their community, all the people who are going to like or follow, not whatever, who are going to, that's what matters to them. And I've heard this from a couple of of uh of leaders in nonprofit spaces recently, the pressures that they felt um to make statements, the pressures that they felt from their young employees. It's it seemed not driven by a desire to actually you know um um do something constructive for real but by the urgent pressure to satisfy the demands on social media um to do something now. So um you know this is what so so once again the the the media envir the social media environment makes it harder for us to have authentic communication and it plays up the importance of sort of a more defensive signaling you know what have I liked what have I said I'll be judged oh my god I better say something now um so yeah I am I am alarmed the quote by the way the quote that you gave before uh was from Paulie Murray a civil rights uh activist just a a woman um um African-American woman um minister and lawyer um at at Yale. At any rate, yeah, when my brothers uh draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. That's the common humanity approach. Uh and that's what lowers people's guards and that's what invites them in. And I I hope that we'll find ways to do that going forward. Yeah. One thing that and admittedly I have not done this but I'm always so intrigued by people who have is psychedelics and the ability to expand your mind to lower the sense of ego to connect to other people. Um I'd love to talk about that specifically and then I'd also love to talk about just how do you invite like disisconfirming evidence into your world. Oh boy. Let's see how much more time do we have? We're uh uh you know that's those are two very big topics. Um I guess we'll just do okay just you know very briefly on on the psychedelics. Um that is one of the categories when I when I started studying the hive switch um that is one of the category you know psychedelic experience is one of the categories that I was thinking of um and uh you know in the last year I've begun to to speak as with Michael Pollen's book um about psych about psychedelics um coming out you know a lot more people are beginning to speak out about their own experiences and and it I I first tried psychedelics in um was it 1993 when I was a posttock at the University of Chicago uh and had a lot of the classic experience that people talk about loss of ego, a sense that everything is one, resolution of contradictions. Um uh and I and I began to read everything I could about the experience and try to understand how is this potential possible and how is it that I just had this experience that is so similar to what many people have described as religious experiences um all these other um self-trcended experiences. Um, and I I you know, I do think that um that psychedelic experiences can be very very helpful in helping people turn down the moralism, the binary thinking. And I wonder I suspect that it was in part those experiences uh because I then had a bunch of them in 1993. I got so interested. Um, you know, I do wonder whether that prepared me later to be better at understanding, you know, left and right and and multiple moral perspectives. I I think, you know, it's what I study and so I can't know whether it's because I study it and read it or whether it's because I had the these incredibly powerful experiences when I was about 30. Um, I don't know. But I yeah, I do think it they're they're very valuable. I'm thrilled that they're being studied again with careful experiments. are being studied for their use in in psychotherapy. They're showing very good promise as they did in the 60s before the research was stopped. Um so that's where I'm coming from. Tell me why you ask. Um I am very passionate about the idea of that your your mind is incredibly malleable. So call it 50% hardwired, 50% malleable. And the amount that you can change your life based on changing the part that's malleable. um that you need to be very thoughtful about how you uh change the part that you can change to make sure that it's moving in a productive direction. But the things that can give you quick access to something I find very interesting. And the number of reports that I've heard from people where they talk about the disillusion of the ego, they talk about connection, awe, a sense of touching the divine, Sam Harris's um thing of, you know, imagine reaching into your uh right pocket with your left hand or whatever it was and pulling out the Andromeda galaxy. Like there's something so so cool. And there's there is something every truly transformative moment in my life has felt like I was punching through a veil and you realize oh my god like these walls that I thought were caging me you rip through and on and a it was like paper thin and so now when you're on the other side you're like Jesus I'm reorienting myself to something entirely different and this is that so that's the core mission of my life right is I want people to understand that no matter where you are no matter matter what situation you're in, you can improve your skill set, which is my obsession. You can improve your skill set and get a different outcome. And that to me was so liberating because I didn't start there. I started in a place where I felt like I was born with a certain level of intelligence, a certain skill set, and that was that. And that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits, and that I could never go any further. And then I began to encounter ideas through reading and meeting people where it was like, that's so [ __ ] Like, you can change. And my favorite quote on the topic is you can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig. And so even if all you can do is like 10x or 100x your life, you're never going to be the greatest of all time at whatever you're pursuing, but that you can get so much better that it has this marketked impact on your life. And then also, I think that real progress is a foundational pillar to happiness, to fulfillment, maybe is a better way to think of it. And so that was one of the veils that I've punched through in my own life. Come through to the other side. And I'm like, "Oh my god, I'm in control. I can do the things that I want to do. I can get better. I have limitations, sure, but I don't even think about those." It's like my limitations are so far away that to engage with the world as if I had none is far more instructive, far more liberating, far more interesting. And so I went from sliding towards depression to punching through that very thin membrane into this whole new world which has changed every aspect of my life, how I feel about myself. Right. So in the happiness hypothesis you talk about there are three inbetweens as you call them that you need to get right between you and others between you and your work and between you and something bigger than yourself. And I'll add another one which you may hate or may say is already encompassed but between you and yourself. And when I changed my relationship to my narrative and what I told myself about myself and I stopped telling myself that I was smart which is very fragile and I started telling myself that I'm the learner which is antifragile that the more I [ __ ] up and fail and people attack it and tell me I'm dumb the better I get because I go okay cool I'm blind in that way now I can improve upon that. So when I hear people talk about psychedelics and they talk about punching through some veil and that they get to bring that back with them and the only reason I haven't done it is fear legalities, fear of um [ __ ] up my brain, fear of a bad trip. Like those are the the threeear um but I'm I am committed to doing MDMA with my wife. I think that would be [ __ ] amazing. Uh, I really I'm I'm actively excited to do that and if it were legal, I would have already done it. Um, so that's why a lot of words, but Tom, that was that was a kind of a a meta narrative about narrative. That was like your life story told with a structure that had a real low point and then a sort of a triumphant up from the low point. You had all kinds of metaphors in there. That was great. I mean, you could organize that into your autobiography right there. But that was that was a beautiful story. Well, thank you. Yeah. So, that's why I'm interested in that. The other part of it, which is just heterodox thinking in general, um I I am so there there's a quote that governs a huge portion of my life, which is genius is a young man's game. Jonathan, when I heard that, it really upset me. It was one of those where it was like I lost sleep that night. Like it really [ __ ] with me because I was I I have always been a late bloomer. I wanted to get into film in in my early 20s and ended up on a 15-year sort of sojourn to learning how to control my life and build wealth and was just like, have I am I now too old? And one of the the saving graces was this guy who said um I think he's won two Nobel prizes. I I could be conflating stories. I fully admit that. But here's how I I replay it in my head. a guy who won two Nobel prizes in different disciplines said that the the places that he's won these Nobel prizes were in areas that overlapped it. So, chemistry and biology or I don't remember what the real ones were, but you know, economics and chemistry, whatever. And he said every 10 years he had just forced himself to reinvent himself. And that gave me this rope of like when you the reason that people calcify is they're young. They don't know any better. They're sort of born of that moment. They have wonderful amounts of naive, of arrogance, and just enough knowledge and skill set to really be brash and do something. And when it pays off, it's [ __ ] amazing. And we call it genius. Now, the problem is you begin to trap yourself. And there are just assumptions that you've made that you think are truth and you don't realize they're assumptions. And because you can never clear them from your field of view because you're not even necessarily aware of them, you you don't make that progress. And so my thing was always um and and the person who gave words to it um was Ray Dallio. Oh yeah. And Ray Dallio, who's just a brilliant thinker, said how do I know I'm right? And you don't want to live in a state of paralysis where you think everything you think is wrong. But at the same time, you want to constantly check yourself and say, "How do I know that I'm right?" So I seek disisconfirming evidence in my life. And so I and I do that to stay psych psychologically nimble so that I recognize the assumptions I made that maybe are wrong that don't take me where I want them to take me. So when I meet somebody like you that I know like I mean you you literally started an organization around heterodox thinking um I'm just always intrigued if there's a better way that I could be doing it. So I wonder how you you know is it just seeking authors? Is it YouTube? You know what's the method? Yeah. Uh well, given that our minds are so good at confirming what we want to believe, um you have to find someone to critique you, you have to find someone who can do for what you can't do for yourself, which is challenge your confirmation biases. Um and so the you know, one of the most brilliant writers on this is is John Stewart Mill. Um we have a version of his is his his his book on liberty chapter 2. We have a version of it at heterodoxacademy.org/mill. Um uh and you know one of the famous lines from it is he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. Um an amazing thing happens when you ask people to make you smarter. When you say to people what am I doing wrong? What have I missed? Um it's amazing. They'll do it for you. They'll tell you. Uh I watched uh preparing to talk with you. I watched your recent interview with Adam Grant who really exemplifies this. You know Adam see you know seeks out criticism like what am I doing wrong? So um if you you know you can you can be defensive and try to guard your reputation and and you know always you know show that you're right then you don't grow you don't learn you don't become more competent um or you can have a lifelong habit of seeking out of asking people to make you better asking people to um to critique you now you know a place like Twitter can be an awful place there there's no relationship there's anonymity so I don't want to say just put yourself out there and let people you know be savage towards But but in the right context and that's part of what we're after with Herodox Academy is universities are the right context. The university is like the ideal place where people come together um to discuss ideas to learn and if as long as you have a range of viewpoints and people don't all start with the same starting assumptions then people will come out of that class smarter they'll come out better able to think about complicated complicated difficult questions and um you [clears throat] know and what what we what we've seen is that the university environment has lost a lot of its intellectual diversity over the last 20 or 30 and more places now you know there are many different universities there are many parts of university I don't want to overgeneralize but um but in general uh you know there is data showing that there's been a decline in the viewpoint uh the diversity of professors certainly um and some increase in students saying that they're afraid to speak up they're afraid to challenge opinions uh and so you get bad thinking you get fear you get people in this defensive mindset the key phrase we hear a lot is walking on eggshells um one student um Deb Mashik is the woman who who runs Heterodox Academy. She she had been a professor at Harvey Mud College. Um and she said one of her students said to her, "My motto is silence is safer. Think about that. Think about going through college with the motto just keep quiet. You won't get in any trouble." Like wow, that's really sad. So, uh, yes, that's one of the things that we're we're working on is how do you create a vibrant open environment in which people with diverse viewpoints do each other the favor of arguing civily and constructively. Yeah. Do each other the favor. That's so important. And this goes back to man, what you said is is one of the sort of key pillars of my life. Open your heart. Right. So I always tell people when when you're and I'm usually talking in context of a marriage, but I say you you have to want the other person to win. Like you you've got to like fill you have to fill your heart with love, which is what I always say. And even to me that sounds dumb because I just don't have the better words um about, you know, tapping into uh compassion or something in your mind. I'm not sure what's actually going on neurologically, but what it feels like is that you fill your heart with love and from that position, which changes the the very frame of reference from which you're approaching the world in that moment like and getting people to understand frame of reference is everything. And how quickly you can sort of step in and out of different frames of reference. They are Jordan Peterson called them micro personalities. I thought that's so astute. It it it carries like all this weight with it in terms of when you step into that personality. filling your heart with love and then engaging from that perspective. And when you get somebody who's reciprocating that and you're both like really sharing something um to be generous to uh you know be be open like, "Hey, I'm I I think you're wrong about this. Let me lay out why I think that. Let me hear how you think I'm wrong." Like, and when you get people that are doing that, it's so rad. Um and I love that the most. And part of what bums me out now is is there's so much bludgeoning, right? Like when you see people screaming at each other and it's like the the only thing I can tell you is I I'm not even sure who's right. Just no one's going to listen. Like you're you're forcing people to put their defenses up. Even just yelling at somebody makes them feel like, "Oh [ __ ] this is like fight or flight. This is you you can feel that that anxiety bubbling up in you, which is going to have weird [ __ ] consequences. It's pulling the blood literally pulling the blood out of your prefrontal cortex." And you know, and when you you approach something like that, it's like this is bound to lose. But what you're dealing with is like everybody has good intentions. I'll even grant them that. I I may be wrong, but I think I'm probably wrong only a little bit of the time. Like most of the time, people are really coming at something with that level of intensity because they believe like, yo, I have the way forward. I know what we need to be doing. You're going to [ __ ] it up. And now it just like keeps ratcheting it up. which is why I'm so worried about how the [ __ ] do you unwind all this stuff where there's so much agitation, so much us versus them. It's right. That's that's where we are now. So, um you know, I I think maybe some parting words I do I do have to move on in in a minute. Um but I think some parting words are that because that is the where we are. Um I think it's incumbent on all of us to go easier on each other. Um, we we are, you know, it's as though we're caught in a in a game in which, you know, fighting and and and really cruelty are sometimes incentivized. And we've got to figure this out together. We've got to heal our country. Our democracy is in big big trouble. Um, I'm very hopeful that things will change after the next election and we'll have a chance to to really um to reconcile um across political lines, across racial lines. But it's it's it's going to require us all, I think, to to go easier on each other. Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Assume good intent until you see evidence otherwise. Um, and recognize just how hard it is to find the truth. So, we have to all tone down our certainty. Um, that I think is the way we live in the postbabel age. Those are some brilliant final words. Jonathan, thank [snorts] you so much for joining me, man. Guys, if you haven't followed this guy, read his books. You will love them the most. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. [music] When you're you're trying to innovate in an industry, you can't be completely clueless about what everybody else is doing. Otherwise, you might miss something really important. Um, and yes, Blockbuster, Sears, Blackberry, I'm talking to you, Kodak. But uh on the other hand, if if you're too obsessed with what your competitors are up to, then you you get entrenched and it's harder to see with fresh eyes.