Mindset, Health, And Life | Dr. Ellen Langer | EP 381

I say Mind Body. These are just words. Imagine we could have had mind, body, and elbows. You know, that would lead us to a different conception of people. The problem is, for people who separate mind and body, is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? So I said, you know, I don't want to pay attention to any of that. It's all interesting philosophy, but it's not useful. Say put the mind and body back together; then, wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body.

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Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with the mother of mindfulness, Dr. Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer was a colleague of mine when I worked at Harvard in the early '90s, and so it's a particular pleasure for me to be talking to her today. We discuss her latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We explore how intentional awareness, paired with humility, allows for a healthier mindset and body; how the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age; the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we might conquer them through faith and hope; and the immense benefits to be found in carefully considering to what, where, and who you direct your attention.

So I was reading your new book today, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, and you know, we were colleagues back in the 1990s. I suppose we still are colleagues in some ways. That's right. And I was thinking about mindfulness again, and I have a proposition for you. And you tell me what you think about this: I was thinking that mindfulness is something approximating paying attention to what you're paying attention to. But I'm open for definitions.

You don't know? I like that. But the way I have defined it is actively noticing. You know that if you people give people instructions and say pay attention, be present, and that's sweet, but it really falls on deaf ears because when people are not there they don't know they're not there. And all of the research we've done over 40 years says most of us, most of the time, are mindless. So to be mindful you can do one of two things. The one most, uh, the easiest for people is probably just to notice new things about the things you thought you knew, and then you come to see you didn't know them as well as you thought you did, and then your attention naturally goes to them.

The other is to adopt a mindset. The only mindset we should have for uncertainty. People don't realize that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So we can never know, and um, and if you know you don't know, then you naturally stay tuned in. If you were going to, if you thought you knew what I was going to say next, why listen to me?

So Jordan, it's fun when I lecture. I often begin a lecture, and I ask people—so I'll ask you—how much is one plus one? And people are annoyed with me because they think it's ridiculous, and then they dutifully say two. But it's not always two. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. Add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry; one plus one and one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one.

So in the real world one plus one probably doesn't equal two more often than it does, and the problem is that we're all taught absolutes. We're taught facts that we think are unchanging, and when you get, again, when you think you know, you don't pay any attention. So that's why I like the one plus one, because that's the most basic where people think surely they have the right answer. Now I must tell you, so I was at this horse event many years ago that changed my life. This man came over and asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get his horse a hot dog. You know, you know, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through, nobody knows better; people know as well that horses don't eat meat. They're herbivorous, right? He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it.

It was at that moment that everything I thought I knew I realized could be wrong, which for me was very exciting because I'd opened up a world of possibility. When was that? Oh God, that was about, um, a long time ago. I'd say maybe even 30 years ago. So I have been in this state of openness for at least, if not for my lifetime, for at least the last 30 some odd years.

So this, you ancient art, and you mentioned actually that people should pay more attention to what they take for granted, and one of the things that I've come to realize, I think I can't now, but Jordan, and they can pay attention to what they take for granted because it doesn't occur to them. They're in a robotic state of mind. I'm sorry to interrupt.

Well, no, no, that's fine. It's I had I have written a little bit about the role of art in remediating that. Because one of the things that happens, as far as I can tell, you can see this, for example, I think it's exemplified well by Van Gogh's painting Irises, in particular, because it's easy in some ways to take what you've looked at many times for granted. But what an artist will do, and this is really their function, is to put a twist on the perception and then snap you out of that habitual frame of mind so that you see the object that you have taken for granted outside of the strictures of your preconceptions.

And the object always transcends your preconceptions because there's much more to it than you think. We have, so what seems to happen neurologically is that we build up these little modules that specify our perceptions, and then we default to them. But it's possible to stop those modules and to re-novelize the phenomena and then to see it again in its glory, and that is one of the things that would you say keeps us falling in love with life?

Yeah, I mean I think that's perfect. The only thing is that once somebody sees it anew, if they think now they know what it is, then they're going to be mindless again. You know, with just that breeze interval of being mindful. And it's interesting, and I don't know if you know, I started to paint about, well, after I turned 50. And I'm, you know, I'm not one of those kids when I was younger who knew how to draw, but nevertheless, I took to the whole thing; it was very exciting.

And prior to my painting, I had just assumed leaves, for example, on trees were green, you know, except in the fall when they turn brown. But you know, then I started looking at the leaves, and there are hundreds of shades of green. And so they've, um, taking to painting opened my eyes and made me say that again. Things I thought I knew I didn't know at all. So whether you're creating the art or observing the art, in both cases, it can have that effect as long—and it can be an important effect as long as people don't think ah, now I know.

So I on this theme of paying attention to what you pay attention to, I want to tell you a bit of a story and get your comments on it. So for years I was trying to sell tests that help people buy, by aiding them and specifying better employees. And I talked to hundreds of middle managers about the tests. I developed them actually when I was working at Harvard in our department there. And what I found was that people didn't want those tests, but what they did want to know was how to deal with people, their employees that they already hired who weren't doing well.

And I thought, well, there isn't anything you can do with them because you're just a manager, and you don't have the time or resources to deal with people's serious problems. But no one really liked that answer. So I went into the literature, and I tried to see if there were any interventions that were scalable and inexpensive and harmless that actually produced a remedial effect. And there was a couple of sources of literature that specified exactly that. One was derived—one stream was established by people studying goal setting in the industrial realm, and the other stream was established by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin.

And what Pennebaker showed was that if you got people to write about their past traumas, that made them physically healthier. And people varied his research to show that if you got people to write about their future, that that also made them healthier. And the goal-setting literature showed that if you got people to write about their future, that they became more productive.

So we developed this program that was a vision program, essentially called Future Authoring, and you can do it in 90 minutes. It asks people to develop a vision for their life, and so that means to pay attention to what they're paying attention to, to decide what they want if they were going to optimize their life, to do it consciously, to decide what they didn't want, and to aim away from that, and then to do that in seven different dimensions of their life.

If you have students do that—this is so fascinating—I said, well, I hope you find it fascinating too—if you have students do that for 90 minutes when they come into college for their orientation, they are 50 percent less likely to drop out and their grade point averages go up 35 percent. 90 minutes of...

Yeah, now I think that's great, Jordan. I'm not surprised because everything that you just mentioned, you know, Penny Baker's work, for instance, is an instance of making people mindful. If you are writing about traumas that you've already discussed with people, it doesn't have the, um, ameliorative effect. And the thing about, about coming up with a scale, it's very interesting because people don't realize that what we're always doing is trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions.

And um, so when you're taking a scale, you're assuming everything is staying still, and those people may have—if they did well on those scales, possibly do well at the job as it was defined in the past, but it's going to change. So I have a different approach to all of it which is essentially the same thing that you're suggesting with this 90-minute interaction for students which I think is, you know, is wonderful.

What you're doing is waking them up, and you know, when you're writing about the past where you have to write about something you never explored before, obviously you're being mindful because the idea of being mindful is noticing new things. When you're writing about the future, because you haven't experienced a future, again, you're being mindful.

And so, um, you know, they should be taught just to be mindful from this art either in your way or added to it or in place of it and just an understanding that is very unusual, especially in schools for people to be taught to exploit the power of uncertainty. Again, all of the schools, parents, the army, you know, industry in general teaches people absolutes.

This is the way you do it. This is what it is. Horses don't eat meat. One and one is two, you know, and so on. And by teaching people that everything looks different from different perspectives, everything is always changing, uncertainty is the rule, not the exception, and you don't have to feel bad about not knowing. You should make a universal rather than a personal attribution for not knowing because nobody knows, and not knowing is good because then it makes everything potentially new and exciting.

I'm thrilled that you found this in 90 minutes. Oh, it's just stunning. Well, it actually shocked me half to death because I started thinking about it. I had been using the same program in my classes because I had people outline a vision for their future, and then I started thinking about the fact that we don't do this in the education system.

So I was teaching kids who had 15 years of education already, and no one had ever sat them down once in their entire educational history and said, why don't you think about what you really want and who you could be and how you might lay that out? And so then I did some research trying to figure out why in the world this was because it was as if we have a society that's predicated on literacy and forgot entirely to teach people to read.

There's nothing more important than helping people establish vision. So I looked at the history of the development of the education system, and it turns out that it was developed as a consequence of bringing in Prussian militaristic models of blind obedience in the late 1800s, right, to produce mindless workers who would not be creative and who would not question authority.

And so that's actually—that rule-following, that mindless rule-following that you're describing is built right into the system. Yeah, that's great. You know that I've been studying mindful learning where essentially all you do when you're teaching is make it conditional. You know, rather than saying, here are three reasons for the Civil War or whatever, it would be here are three reasons that could explain the Civil War from this perspective or that.

So you change things: horses don't eat meat to it seems that most horses don't eat meat; possibly horses don't eat meat. It could be that horses don't eat meat. You know, all of the words that suggest it's not always so, and then you get an enormous difference because people don't learn the lesson and then think now I've got it, and then close their mind to all the ways.

It's interesting because if somebody asked me the other day when I was doing the podcast because I said we should be mindful all the time, and I'll explain what I mean by that to you in a moment, and they said, you know, isn't it exhausting? And I'll talk about that, but the important thing was they said, you know, why is everybody so mindless? Doesn't it serve a purpose?

And my answer to that, and I'm curious about your reaction to this because I think you're better read in this regard than I, that I don't have any data, but my armchair reasoning leaves me to believe that teaching everybody all this mindlessness instantiates the status quo. You know, there's no reason why you and I should have these lofty positions and so many others who would have something else to bring to the table that's no less valuable don't get a chance to offer it.

And so it will speak to that, and then I'll tell you what I mean by why we should be mindful all the time. As central banks and countries like China, India, and Australia begin transitioning to a digital currency, the Federal Reserve has been contemplating the same for the U.S. With a digital currency, the government can track every single purchase you make. Officials could even prohibit you from purchasing certain products or easily freeze or seize part of or all of your money.

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Well, I think that you can make a case that—and this is a common case made by, say, social critics particularly on the left—is that anything that biases behavior in favor of maintenance of the status quo obviously benefits people who are highly positioned in that status quo right now. But there's another psychological reason for that too, which is that if you introduce anomaly into a conceptual scheme, you increase entropy by increasing choice, and increased entropy, if you increase entropy and that happens involuntarily, you catalyze the stress response.

Now, if you increase entropy voluntarily, you don't catalyze the stress response; you catalyze a challenge response, and the challenge response looks like it's associated with positive emotion, exploration, and play. And so that's another issue where attitude makes all the difference. You see this in clinical work too because if people are exposed accidentally to a stressor and they're phobic, that tends to make them more phobic. But if they're introduced voluntarily to a stressor of the same magnitude, then the introduction of the stressor is curative.

And then to your final point, you said that it's also easier, let's say, to default to mindlessness. And the thing is, you know, that's true. No, I don't think it—as I don't think it's really easier. In fact, I think people don't fully understand what I mean by being mindful because they think, you know, when I say should be mindful all the time, people get crazy. How could that be? Because they confuse mindfulness with just thinking, and thinking has gotten a bad rap.

Yeah, thinking is fun. What's not good about thinking, and stressful about thinking is worrying about whether you're going to get the problem solved, whether you're going to look stupid when you come up with your answers and so on, which, you know, which is the stress that you're talking about, and that's debilitating.

But all stress is mindless, you know? So my view is that if you're gonna do it, you should be there for it. And that mindfulness, it turns out, is energy begetting, not consuming and that, you know, if you came here to visit me, Jordan, since you've never been at my house here, everything would be new. You'd be looking around, you'd see what books is she reading? Oh, you know, there are all those Fritos that your men who helped set this up left around. You know, you would notice, and it wouldn't be hard for you. You'd go on a trip to Europe.

You don't have to practice being mindful. Your expectation is it will all be new, and so you are mindful, and mindfulness is the essence of engagement. It's what you do when you're having fun. So, you know, is there a limit to how much fun and how happy you can be? I don't think so. So we should be mindful all the time. If people say, well, aren't there circumstances where it's your advantage to be mindless? My answer is emphatically no.

And I say, let's say you're at the park, and you took a two-year-old with you, and this is a person trying to challenge me and says, now—and the two-year-old wanders into the street; wouldn't it be best to mindlessly just grab the child so that the child doesn't hit by the oncoming car? And my response to that is twofold. The first is that if you were mindful, the child wouldn't have ended up in the street in the first place.

And secondly that, probably in grabbing the child, you'd want to notice the posture of the driver to figure out whether they're going to turn right or left to know if you should take the child out of harm's way going to the right or left and so on. That the only time one should be mindless, I believe, is when you found the very best way of doing something and nothing changes. And so clearly I don't think those conditions can be met.

So mindlessness feels good. I have over 45 years of research showing that it's good for your health, people. It's good for your relationships; people see you as authentic, charismatic, and it even leaves its imprint on the things that we do. And given that it's so easy, I can find no reason why people wouldn't begin immediately after understanding us today to become more mindful.

So a variety of things there. The first is the behaviorist, the neuroscience-oriented behaviorists distinguish two forms of reward. There is satiation reward—consummatory reward technically, an incentive reward—and consummatory reward tends to bring about quiescence and sleep. And so I might say, well, you should be mindless when it's time to go to sleep, because it's time to go to sleep.

If you're satiated, there are times for rest. With regard to optimized engagement, that seems to be an incentive reward phenomenon that's mediated by dopamine. And it's associated, as you already pointed out, with exploration and play. And I would say that is exhausting, I mean it depends on the level of intensity, but it's definitely engaging. And it's also engaging in an interesting manner, because what play does is engage you in a manner that expands your realm of adaptive competence.

Right, so you're doing the task, but you're simultaneously getting better at doing the task, and that's a very— that's an optimized place to stand. That's Vygotsky's zone of proximal development because you're continually expanding your domain of adaptive competence by playing, and the emotions that are associated with that are associated with engagement and meaning and depth.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting you mentioned fatigue. So in the Mindful Body, I present some research on fatigue. Let me give you, um, the simplest of these lists. Let's imagine, uh, we have—what do I have to imagine? And I'll report it. So we have a group of people; we have them do 100 jumping jacks—very simple—and tell us when you get tired. So they get tired around two-thirds of the way through the activity, around 67.

So then we have another group of people; they're going to do 200 jumping jacks, and we ask them, tell us when you're tired. And they also are tired two-thirds of the way through, which is twice as many jumping jacks as the former group. And we do this across all— you know, ballerinas, uh, in all different spheres. So there's a degree to which fatigue itself is a mindset and limits us.

But I think that, you know, if you go back to—I you made me think about something—of somebody, you get into bed and you want to go to sleep, and you are suggesting that maybe at that point they should be mindless. I think that what happens too often is that the stress of the day keeps people awake, you know? And that if they weren't stressed—and stress is mindless. You know, when you're stressed, two things are happening. First, you believe something awful is—something's going to happen, and second, that when it happens, it's going to be awful, and prediction is an illusion.

So if you said to yourself simply, what are three, five reasons why this thing won't happen? You won't fail the test. You won't be fired. Your spouse won't leave you, whatever it is that's keeping you awake at night. And you give yourself three to five reasons why it won't happen? Well, you immediately feel better. Maybe it'll happen; maybe it won't. Rather than it's definitely going to happen.

And then turn it around. Let's assume it does happen. What are three or five reasons, ways that that's actually a good thing? And if people don't realize that events themselves don't come pre-packaged, there aren't good things, bad things, that whatever happens needs to be interpreted by us, and the more mindful you are, the more available are multiple interpretations, good, bad, and whatever.

And I don't know why I keep using this as an example; maybe help me come up with a better one. But if you and I went out to lunch and the food was delicious, wonderful, the food's delicious. If you and I go out for lunch and the food is awful, wonderful, the food is awful. Presumably I'll eat less, and that'll be better for my waistline. You know that when you know—and with this attitude, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this clear, but I hope people will think about it.

There's a way I live my life, and I fall up—I don't fall down. You know, my car gets a ding on it, I get it repaired, and I fix something that, uh, something else about the car. So afterwards, it's better than it was before. You know, so when you realize that events don't determine how you feel, it's the view you take of the event that determines how you feel.

Um, then, you know, it's hard to understand why we would come up with explanations that are frightening and stressful. And people say, you know, everybody has to experience stress. They just take it as a given. And I tell you, Jordan, there are things—you know, I'm 76 years old, so certainly in my life, there are things that have happened that have been big.

But in the normal course of a day, a week, a month, a year, I don't experience stress. And I have this one-liner that I think people will find useful. You know, ask yourself when something happens, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Rarely is it ever a tragedy—the dog ate my homework, I missed the bus, I burnt the meal, you know, whatever it is that causes us stress. And it turns out that almost everything that we're stressed about, virtually all of it, never happens.

So you talk, take the attitude, no worry, take the attitude, no worry before it's time. Okay, you're the reframing that you talked about with regards to people's, um, worry at night. That's something that's very much part and parcel of cognitive behavioral therapy. Is that one of the things that you do is involved in the beginning? Right, right.

Well, you take people who are locked into, say, a depressive or an anxiety-inducing pattern of repetitive thought, and you have them open up a wider realm of possibility, and then you have them practice instantiating that so that it becomes more part of their—well, part of their nature, let's say. You also mentioned the jumping jack study, and it reminded me of studies done by Peter Herman showing that if you imagine you bring people into the lab and you have them watch a movie and you give them a bag of popcorn, if you give them a small bag of popcorn and you ask, they'll eat the whole bag of popcorn and then if you ask them if they want another, they'll say no.

But if you give them a bag of popcorn that's five times that big, they will also eat that. Yes, exactly, exactly. It's like, it's—and it—what seems to happen is that we set up a target, and the target is somewhat arbitrary, right? So it could be portion size, and then the goal is to hit the target, and the emotions that are experienced in relationship to that target are target-dependent.

And so—and this is also part of the trick of setting optimal goals, right, is that you want to set a goal that challenges you and that pushes you beyond your limits, but you don't want to set a goal that's absolutely impossible to attain. If you set a high goal, the amount of positive emotion that you experience as you move towards the goal increases, but if the goal is too high and it's impossible, well then it's, you know, then that can be frustrating and disappointing.

But it's very interesting. Let me see how malleable that is. Well, it's interesting because one of the ways I define mindlessness is to be goal-driven, rule-driven, and routine-driven. You know, that it's fine to have a goal, but you have to realize we're setting that goal at time one, and oftentimes, moving towards something several years in the future, lots change.

And there's no reason for us not to take advantage of the changes and perhaps change the goal. You know, when we form these goals, where do they come from? You know, somebody said it's important to be a doctor, for example, and so you're on your way to be a doctor, but you really don't want to be a doctor. You know, change it.

Essentially, at the end of the game, you want to feel good about yourself. You want to feel good about your relationships and feel perhaps that you've made some contribution in some way to somebody or to the world at large, and you can do that almost in any occupation.

And I think that, you know, there are people who are given goals—they want to be a billionaire. Used to be when I was younger, a millionaire. That's not enough. I want to be a billionaire. But I think that if we surveyed most of the billionaires and they were honest, you'd see most of them are not very happy. So if you sit back at square one, do you want to be an unhappy billionaire or a happy bike store owner?

I think people might choose differently. So as you're gaining information, pursuing the goal, you want to, in fact, be open to possibility. I mean, so I say to my class that, you know, let's say that on your way to school today, you run into, I don't know, who's famous these days that they might like? Yeah, that you are just so cool or whatever word they use.

Please, you know, let's go have a cup of coffee. But you say, no, I can't. I have Professor Langer's class meeting now. That's ridiculous. You know, that here's an opportunity that you're probably not going to get again, something you would really want to do. You should deviate from the plan. You know, you should be in the state of mind so that whatever you're doing is in a sense what you would choose to do now, not doing it because of what you decided to do in a prior life, you know, years ago.

It goes against lots of what people think. I mean, I'm sure you're going to say to me after this, well, what about delay of gratification? And here I have a lot to say that is probably going to be met with, um, I don't know, disagreement, rage, outrage, who knows? I don't think we should delay gratification.

I think that, first of all, since everything is changing, you know, if I decide I'm not going to do this now, I'll do it next week, this good thing, because next week will be better for me—well, the world may change, and often changes in such a way, two ways: one, that I may not have the opportunity to do it in the future, as in the going for the coffee with Taylor Swift; or second, that my desires very well may change now.

So you say, well, what about studying and, um, you know, things of this sort where we have to do the work so tomorrow we prosper? And it's very simple, Jordan. You know that no matter what you're doing, there's a way of doing it so that it's fun and enjoyable almost no matter what. If you put away the stress of failure, of not being able to complete it successfully and so on, then all the little challenges that present themselves motivate us and feel good.

And, um, you know, so there's—I don't know if you've ever seen it, but you should. It's wonderful. There's a YouTube called Piano Stairs, and so what these people did in Scandinavia, they go to, uh, subway stations all over the place, and in all of these subway stations, you have an escalator and stairs. And so the film is very clear—everybody takes the escalator. Everybody random, young person who wants to take the stairs—then they laid down piano keyboards on the stairs.

So it actually makes noise. So now, as you're going up, because it's such fun, in a very short amount of time, nobody virtually takes the escalator; everybody is taking the stairs. Anything can be made to be fun. And so I tell my students, why wait for somebody to put down the keyboard? You know, one can do it. I can't say or else I would make it more compelling for you.

As they go up the stairs, there's a way to make everything, if not fun, interesting and potentially exciting once we take off that layer of evaluation apprehension. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. The Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible's profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life.

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Hello.com/jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all ten thousand plus prayers and meditations. One of the things you do lines of questioning to explore in relationship to that, one of the things you do as a clinical therapist is help people find a manner in which they can extract enjoyment from, at least in potential, necessary tasks, right?

To help them recraft the way that they're looking at the world. So for example, one way of approaching that is that if someone lives in a very messy and disordered environment, and they want to put that into something approximating order, you experiment with them to find out how much they could work on that every day until they find an optimized balance so that they're compelled and interested in doing it.

And it might be that they can only do it to begin with for two minutes or three minutes, but they can joust with themselves to find out what's interesting and engaging. And it is certainly the case that you can ask yourself, regardless of the task that you're engaged in, how you could orient your attention so that that task would be as engaging and meaningful as possible.

And that's a constantly worthwhile thing to do. Now I want to decorate that with something, so this you might find this interesting. I hope you find it interesting. So, you know, this issue of attention has been an obsession of deep thinkers for thousands of years. I spent a fair bit of time studying ancient Egyptian theology, so there's a set of stories that derive out of ancient Egypt that were, well, they're extremely influential.

In fact, some of the symbols we still know—so one of the symbols is the famous eye, you know, the Egyptian eye with the curved eyebrow. So here's what the Egyptians figured out: They figured out there were four deities. So one deity was the king; that was Osiris. One day, and he was the king's evil brother; that was Seth. That word eventually becomes Satan. One deity was Horus, who was a falcon, and the other deity was Isis, who was Queen of the underworld.

So Osiris is habit, and Osiris is represented by the Egyptians as a great king who's now anachronistic, archaic, and somewhat senile. Senile and willfully blind. Okay, now he has an evil uncle, he has an evil brother, and that's Seth, the evil brother of the king, and he's the proclivity of ordered systems to become malevolent with time.

The antithesis of that is Horus, and Horus is the open eye and the falcon, and he's the falcon because falcons can see better than any other animals, including human beings. And so the Egyptians determined that Horus, who was the god of attention, was the force that kept the evil king at bay, destroyed the negative consequences of habit, and revitalized the social order.

And they prioritized attention as the highest God. And so did the Mesopotamians. So they had a god, Marduk, who was their pinnacle god. So, Jordan, they all beat me to the punch, so this is good to know. And the question is: why has it taken so long for cultures around the world to see the wisdom in all of this? You think it's partly because if you start to become mindful, there's also the possibility that you'll bring your shortcomings to mind? Like imagine that you do start a practice of attending; as you attend, you're going to learn things about yourself that are interfering with your ability to openly attend, right?

And that can be challenging and off-putting because you can see—because you're wondering, well, if this is so obvious, why don't people notice it? Why don't people just automatically do it? And I do think that part of it is that when you start to pay careful attention, you find things that need to be fixed, and that calls you that.

Okay, so well let me speak to that because something that's very important to me is the idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. And so if one were mindful, they'd be aware of why they're doing what they're doing. And it turns out that every description we have of people, ourselves or others, has an equally potent but oppositely valenced alternative.

So you want to diminish me because I'm so gullible, which I am. From my perspective, I'm trusting you drive me crazy because you're so inconsistent. From your perspective, you're flexible. You can't stand me because I'm so impulsive. That's because I value being spontaneous.

So it's interesting. I like this as a clinician. Years ago, we did this study where we gave people about 200 of these behavior descriptions, and we said, circle those things about yourself that you want to change, but you have trouble changing. Okay? So for me, it would be gullible, impulsive, for example.

Now you turn the sheet of paper over and in a mixed-up order of the positive versions of each of these, and now we ask people to circle those things about yourself you really value—trusting and spontaneous. And so as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to necessarily be gullible; as long as I value being spontaneous, people on occasion are going to see me as impulsive.

And when you realize that behavior makes sense, then we don't want to change ourselves or other people in the same way. You know that you might be tired of me because I'm so, whatever, and then when you see the positive version of it, you welcome it, and our relationship flourishes, and we become less judgmental. Because before you were talking about what do we do with people in industry who don't do well at whatever the task is, and it occurred to me that everybody doesn't know something.

Every—I met, wrote a little song about this that I, uh, sang for my grandkids. I'm not going to sing it because I can't carry it too, and although I should Jordan, because that's what it's about. I do a lot very, very well, so why should I hesitate?

So here we go. You ready? I'm ready. Everybody doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else. So my long-term goal is to take the horizontal where we comfortably sit on top and the vertical rather and make it horizontal where everybody is valued, and so the person who seems not to be able to do whatever it is will be able to do it differently somehow else.

You know, it goes back to you have your teaching and you ask your students how much is one and one. And one person in the class says one, and what we do now is belittle that person. We teach these students around to have no respect for that person, where in my world what we do is say, “Johnny, Susie, whatever, how did you come up with that?”

And then they tell us I added one cloud plus one cloud or however they came up with it, and that we learn that much more. You know, I was lecturing on South Africa many years ago, and I was staying at this fancy hotel, and I note I was down at the pool resting one afternoon, and I notice that there was this enormous amount of real estate in the hotel, you know, part of the hotel that nobody was using, and the only person who knew that was the lowly cabana boy.

You know, that of course, if we assumed that he had something really to offer, we could get that information from him and then make more money, which seems to be the goal of most of these entrepreneurs or hotel owners or what have you.

You know, so we’re brought up thinking there's a single way of doing things, there's a single answer to questions, and all of that fosters our mindlessness. And you know, sometimes when I'm lecturing I'll look in the audience to see if there's some guy who seems really big, and I'll say you know, ask him if he'll come to the stage.

So let's assume I'm lucky that day, and he's six-five. Well, I'm five-three, almost, and so we look ridiculous next to each other. And then I ask him to put his hand up, and his hand is three inches bigger than mine. And then I raise the question: should we do anything physically the same way? Should we hold a tennis racket, a baseball bat, a golf club?

And the answer is clearly no, and the more similar you are to the person who wrote the rules, perhaps the better it is for you to follow. But the more important part of that is the more different you are, the more important it is for you to find your own way of doing it.

And you know, when people are taught conditionally, you know, you sort of hold the racket like this or you could hold the racket like this, they're more likely to come up with their own way than somebody who's told this is the way.

So I want to sort—I want to sort what appeared to be two competing claims out in my imagination. So on the one hand, as far as I can tell, you're making the case that all things considered, an attitude towards the world that's more attentive and mindful is better. So that's a definite okay, okay.

But now, but you added to that a different conception, which was that every negative trait, let's say, has a positive element, which by the way is something that seems to me to be an appropriate statement, but there's a sort of ultimate, exactly—yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do you reconcile those? That's right; I don't, I don't think that, you know, that in today's world, we all aspire to certain things, and given the values that are currently operative, to meet those values, to live the kind of life that most people seem to want, which is not answering the question about whether they'd be better off living a very different kind of life.

Mindfulness sets the stage for it. And there, you know, if it's a contradiction, so be it, you know that I think that we can live with contradictions until we accumulate enough wisdom to resolve them. But at this point, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Nothing is good or bad except it's better to be mindful.

So, but, you know, I think one of the things that I'd like to talk about, if you're willing, is some of the health work and the mindful body. Because here, one of the values that we seem to have is to be healthy—to live a long, happy, healthy life. And one could argue that also that if one is going to live multiple lives, which some people believe in a reincarnation and whatever, maybe that goal is misplaced.

But if we take that goal as real, a great deal of the information we've been given is simply wrong. And I go back to the horse that ate the hot dog. And what people need to realize is that studies, research can only give us probabilities. Do you do a study, and the study shows you that if you were to do it again the exact same way, which we could never do, we're likely to get the same findings.

These probabilities are then taught to us as absolutes—horses don't eat meat; one and one is two; and so on. Now, when you're given a diagnosis and you're told research shows that you have six months to live, or whatever it is, I mean that's insane. You know, nobody can know that.

And when you realize that everything we're taught or maybe is—it allows us to go forward and find new ways of doing things, new ways of meeting our needs and so on. So I talk a lot in The Mindful Body about mind-body unity. And tell me what you think of this: I say mind-body, these are just words. Imagine we could have had mind, body, and elbows.

You know, that would lead us to a different conception of people. And right now, people think, um, you know, that mind and body being separate, and they know, well, they're sort of connected; they don't know how. That the problem is for people who separate mind and body is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body?

So I said, you know, I don't want to pay attention to any of that. It's all, uh, interesting philosophy, but it's not useful. Say put the mind and body back together; then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body.

And we've done so many studies on this. The first one you might know about because I reported it earlier on in work is the counterclockwise study. Do you know this, Jordan? We retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there as if they were their younger selves.

So they're speaking about the past in the present tense. Everything is designed to make them think that now was 20 years earlier. As a result of this, without medical intervention, in a period of time as short as a week—I think it was only five days actually—their vision improved, the hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked significantly younger just by putting the mind in a different place.

So you want me to tell you about a couple of the newer ones? Please do, and then I'll respond. Okay, so I'm going in some chronological order. The next one we did was a study with chamber maids, and we asked the chamber maids how much exercise do you get? They thought exercise is what you do after work because that's what the surgeon general leaves people to believe, and they're just too tired, so they don't think they get any exercise.

So all we did was take half of them and teach them that their work was exercise. You know, making the bed is like working on this machine at the gym, and so on. So I think we have two groups: one who sees their work as exercise; the other who doesn't realize their work is exercise. Just changing that mindset, eating the same, working in the same way. They're not working harder, they're not eating less, they're not eating more, just changing their mind.

So now their work is exercise; they lost weight, there was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Okay, so now let's go to fast forward. Let me just give you one of the newest studies. So we inflicted wounds, well, you know that it would be wonderful if I could do something dramatic and really hurt people. I have no desire to do that, and even if I did, luckily the review board is not going to let me.

So we inflicted a minor wound. Now we have people sitting. It's a little more complicated than I'm saying, but just so it becomes clear: they're sitting in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time; for a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time; for a third of the people, the clock is real time. And the question is how long does it take the wound to heal? Well, it turns out the wound heals based on clock time perceived time, and we have studies with diabetics, you know, the same thing.

We find that insulin increases or decreases based on perceived time rather than real time. We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got, two hours fewer, or the amount that they got. Biological and cognitive functioning seems to follow perceived sleep.

And all of this—this might be a fun story for you—you know, somebody had asked me where did this come from? I mean how did I get into this? And I was married when I was very young, and I went to Paris on my honeymoon, and it was very important that I was very sophisticated because now I was a married woman, even though I was a baby. And I ordered mixed grill in this restaurant we were eating in, and on the plate was pancreas.

And I said to my then husband, “Which one is the pancreas?” And he said, “That's that one.” Okay, so now I don't know if I can do it, but I feel like now I'm so sophisticated, I have to be able to eat the pancreas. I eat everything on the plate with gusto. Now, the moment of truth, can I eat it? Well, I start eating it, and I'm literally getting sick. I can't swallow it; my stuff—okay. And my then husband starts laughing, and I say, “What's so funny?” He said, “That's chicken. You ate the pancreas 20 minutes ago.”

Yeah, what's going on here? You know? Um, it's like you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and you get all startled until you realize it's just a leaf. You know that, um, our thoughts have enormous control over our health, and we need to pay more attention to that.

So, you know, my mother had breast cancer. The last story, my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to have pancreas, and that's the end game, right? Pancreatic cancer. And then magically, it was just gone, and the medical world couldn't explain it then, and they still can't explain it now. And this mind-body unity idea does explain it.

And I think spontaneous remissions are much greater in frequency than people realize. You know, you have people who never get to the medical world in the first place who have tumors that they don't know they have or even you and I, tumors that are there that, you know, are magically gone.

You know, we've all heard stories of people who are told they only have a year to live, and they're telling us a story 10, 15 years later. You know, and when we believe again that we can beat whatever this thing is, we organize ourselves differently, and even in a very mundane way. You know, if I think that I'm going to live, like I start living and I start doing things.

Um, the, you know, the neurons are firing, where if I believe my demise is only moments away, I shut down, you know? And, um, help in some sense. According to a recent study of hundreds of post-abortive women, sixty percent of women reported that they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more support from others or had more financial security, and that’s where Preborn steps in.

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[Music] Okay, so I've got a variety of comments about what you just said. My wife was diagnosed with cancer, first of all in principle, a trivial form, and then that was a misdiagnosis, and then she was diagnosed with the cancer that only 200 people in the world have been reported to have that killed every single one of them in 10 months.

And she told me about six months into the treatment that she would be better on our wedding anniversary, which was August 19th. This was three months ahead. She got better on our wedding anniversary, and it's been five years. Yes, it's—so I'm telling you that, so you're a believer. Well, I'm telling you that because I've seen strange things happen.

Now, I've also seen in my clients, for example, you see this with people who are retiring—and retiring is generally a very stupid plan for people, because last thing—yeah, well, they have a very narrowed image of what retirement means. So they imagine themselves, you know, surfing, sipping margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean, which is a real good plan for the first night but a really long, really bad—well, right?

You just turn into like a fat, sunburned alcoholic in no time flat, and like, I've seen people around 55 start to decide that they're old, you know? They've sort of decided that they've had the adventure of their life and that they're done, and that makes—that does facilitate their aging very rapidly now.

But by the same token, this is—and this is where all this is going. You know, I understand that the structure of reality is malleable in relationship to interpretation, and to a degree that is unspecifiable, right? However, I'm curious about your notion of where the limits to that are. I mean, you took these elderly people and you put them in a situation where they were acting out the proposition they were 20 years younger and they were getting all sorts of feedback from their environment that that was valid.

But the painful truth of the matter does seem to be that we all age and that we all die, and so you know, there are intrinsic limits too. So tell me how you make of that. Yeah, yeah, I don't know what the limit is. I think that it's to our, um, advantage as individuals and as a culture to assume that we can exceed wherever we are.

You know, I think that, um, people used to die—you probably know, just when they were 20 years old, and then people were dying mostly at 40 years old. And this, you'll find this funny. Do you know who Willard Scott was? I've never—I never said this publicly anyway. Willard Scott was the—weatherman for a news program.

And what Willard Scott would do is every day, every morning, he'd say, "And happy birthday Rosie from Michigan, who just turned 100. And happy birthday Peter, who I just turned 100." And so the idea of turning a hundred became, to my mind, for many people, much more likely.

And I think that oddly, you know, despite all the work I've done in the aging area, all the medical work, I think he had a very significant role in extending our lifespan. You know, again, if you think you're going to live a long life, you organize yourself differently.

And it's that organization, those thoughts of how to continue growing. No, it's very funny. The other day, I was helping this person, an old woman, with something, and my spouse said to me, you know, she's probably a lot younger than you—but I didn't even realize.

So, um, I just don't have a sense of—I don't use age as a measure of do it, don't do it. And I think that that's healthy. I think that you asked about limits. Interestingly, years ago, I think it might have even been when you were at Harvard, I was on the Division of Aging at the medical school, and Jack Rowe was the chair of the committee.

And I called Jack one day. He was my doctor of choice at the moment, and I said, "Jack, how long does it take for a broken finger to heal?" And he says, "I don't know. Let's say a week." I said, "What would you say if I said I could heal it psychologically in five days?" She said, "Okay." I said, "What about four days?" Okay, what about three days?

"No, okay, what about three days and 23 hours?" You know, where is where is the breaking point? And so that's the way things progress is in these small steps. But if you follow that logic, you know, if you know that if you can do it in three days and 23 hours, so why not three days and 22 hours?

And why not, you know? And then you slowly get yourself to the point where you can do it in three days. And if you do it in three days, why not two days and 23 and a half hours? And so on. And I don't know what the limit is. I just think we're so far from what these limits to what we can do in any parts of our lives—not just our health—that we can far exceed whatever goals we set for ourselves.

I've been writing about—there's a notion that's deeply embedded in the Genesis text that human suffering is a consequence of sin and not built into the structure of the universe, right? And it's a strange doctrine in many ways because, as I pointed out earlier, the normal course of human events is that everybody ages and dies.

And so the notion that suffering and limitation is built in seems self-evident. But then there's another part of me that thinks, you know, we all waste an awful lot of our own time in futile pursuits and self-defeating pursuits, and we impose limitations on ourselves that are arbitrary and often lazy, and we hurt ourselves by doing that.

And then collectively, we deceive each other and we lie, and we don't cooperate well together, and we manipulate, and that interferes with our ability to apprehend things properly and to structure our existence properly. And you know, the wildly optimistic side of me thinks—and I do think there is reason for believing this—that if we got our act together completely, insofar as that's possible, and that might partly be by paying more attention, that there aren't any intrinsic limits that would necessarily stop us.

We'd still have to figure out, for example, like—it's an open question to me, and I'm kind of curious about your attitude towards this. You know, if you could choose how long you would live, do you have any idea how long you would choose? I mean, an indefinite existence, you know, of hundreds of thousands of years, that seems to me to be like incomprehensibly dramatic.

It is and awesome, right? I mean, it's a long time. Yeah, but—but 80 years seems kind of short. So I think that, um, you know, it depends what people should strive for. Rather than adding more years to their life, they should be adding more life to their years. And by doing that, then you'll want to extend—you know, if today is really exciting, you look forward to tomorrow.

If you're miserably depressed today, you're scared about tomorrow. And so that if we were able to create a world where people were more mindful, where people had more respect for each other by noticing people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it, um, that, um, I think that there'd be no reason to fear.

You know, you can't imagine what life is going—I can't even imagine what life is going to be like in 50 years, and I'm a survey which is separate from whether I'm going to be alive or not. Most people would say no, but you know, who knows? You know, AI is changing things. The iPhone changed things. The railroad changed things.

And all of these, so we don't know what the big change is going to be. It could be—I which planet was it? Was it Venus where they just found ice, um, making space travel to whatever, wherever it was, um, seemingly more possible? I don't know. I don't claim to have any special knowledge about what the deep future holds, so I wouldn't know how to think about it.

So you—I do know how to think of you. You think that if you concentrated on maximizing the quality of your life, the issue of how long that should extend would more or less solve itself as a consequence of that exact orientation. Yeah, that seems reasonable, Ellen. Can I change the topic, please?

When we were college—well, no, when we were discussing the possibility of this podcast, one of the things we had talked about a little bit is the state of the university, and I do want to approach that with you too. When I worked with you, if you don't mind, when I worked with you in the 1990s, I was at Harvard between '92 and '98, and I really thought—I thought it was a great privilege to be there. I really enjoyed my time.

In terms of attitude, there was something interesting that happened then too that you might find, um, worthy of contemplation, given your attitude towards attitude. You know that the junior professors at Harvard were always destined to leave in 99.9 percent of the cases. You know, and when I first came there, I observed that some of the junior faculty who were at the outer limits of their brief tenure there were unhappy that they weren't likely to be considered for permanent status and that they'd have to move on.

And I thought, but I don't want to be in that position in six years. I think I'll go there and think if the turnover of junior staff wasn't high, I wouldn't have got this job to begin with, and that I'm pretty damn lucky to go to Harvard and meet all these people and be paid for it because most people who go to Harvard have to pay to go, and I got paid for going, so that was a good deal, and that I should be happy with the outcome regardless of what it was and then move on to wherever I was going.

And that was an attitudinal shift that was very helpful to me and made the transition out of there much smoother than it might have been, even though it was accompanied by a certain amount of grief. Anyway, when I was there, I also felt that it was a very admirable institution and that I was there in a kind of golden age. I thought the university had prioritized the research requirements of the senior faculty as their number one goal, and then they treated undergraduates exceptionally well, and then they were pretty good to junior faculty and graduate students, kind of in that order.

And the administrative apparatus was essentially there to facilitate all of that, so it was structured in a lovely way. And I also found that my colleagues, junior and senior alike, were fundamentally focused on their intellectual interests and their research, and they did what was necessary to keep things moving forward on the administrative front effectively, but that was not anyone's primary concern.

So I was thrilled to be there. I can't say that the University of Toronto operated with that degree of professionalism, let's say, and I also saw a decline in the quality of the university enterprise that was quite precipitous over about a 20-year period. And so I'm wondering, well, I'm wondering your reactions to that.

And I'm not happy with what's happened in the university community in general. Um, what's your take on the educational front? Yeah, well, the first thing is that we have to be aware that anything I say may just be the difference of being, you know, 30 years old versus as old as I am. You know, rather than a change in the university itself might change, rather than the university's change.

Um, the idea that most people are not going to get tenure was the rule. I was actually—I tenured when you were there. Yes, you were. Yes, I was. No, no, no. And then it's much later, because I was the first tenured woman in the psychology department, and there were years where there was, you know, nobody else, right?

Right. That was by far, though, I—yeah. But I remember, you know, I was hot stuff then, I'm allowed to say it because it's the past, right? You know, and I suffered, you know, with am I going to get tenure? Am I not going to get tenure? I was the hottest thing out there, I shouldn't have had to suffer.

And I said to myself, you know, having gone through this, nobody should have to go through this, and it turned out to be positive, and that was wonderful. Well, the university changed over time, so now if you were to come as a junior person, you're very likely to get tenure.

It's now just like all the other universities in the world, so that's a good thing. As far as—and then the students are still spectacular, and my colleagues are doing very interesting work, and the university supports all of that, so those things haven't changed.

My feeling is that there are more rules and regulations than there were in the past, which interferes at a time with certain intellectual activities. You know, if I wanted to—and this has happened over and over again—I want to do research. The research I'm doing is not like in the medical school where you can take one person's head and put it on another person and then see if it works, you know? Most of the things we're asking people to do are innocuous, and it takes forever.

So we have the idea, then it takes, um, a good over a year to get approval to do it, and then we actually do it, and it's just—it's too many steps. And um, so I find for whatever reason, I don't know what the reason is actually, but that when I was younger, it was easier to get these things done.

And not because I'm an older person now, I mean, I think in this way I'm wiser, you know, but, um, things have just become more complicated. You know, I used to have somebody from Europe or then the states or even somebody in Boston right next door want to volunteer to be in my lab.

Well, it turns out, and that was great because, you know, I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, I need an army of people to help me do it. It turns out you can't take volunteers unless they're Harvard students. Why can't you take volunteers? Well, because unions and whatever has changed, so that in one person's lab, somebody found out that they weren't getting paid; they were volunteering, and they were doing the exact same thing as somebody else volunteering, excuse me, as somebody else.

So same job; one is paid, one isn't. That caused a lot of difficulty with the result that I can't take these people, you know? It's things like that that make it hard. At any rate, but it's still a wonderful place to be.

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The proliferation of bureaucratic impediments, it's well, it’s hard on the research side because if you're an entrepreneurial and creative person, which is what you need to be if you're going to generate a lot of research ideas, there's a certain quickness of mind and approach and striking while the iron is hot that goes along with that, right? Because you have to follow that thread of interest, and for me, to have to delay a study for a year means that by the time the study is possible—well, not in the least, it's like, I—what, I haven't learned anything in the intervening year, right?

You know, what kind of useless bastard would I be in that situation? Yeah, so let me tell you something. So I think that this was actually—I don't remember the year, but it was a long time ago. So it might have even been before things were bureaucratic.

You still had people on these review committees who, um, I disagree with vehemently. So I want to do this study; I actually talk about this in The Mindful Body, which we ended up doing. But the study is we want to see the difference between seeing your cancer as in remission versus seeing it as cured, all right? Now, when the cancer is not there, it's—you know, this happened to a friend of mine who had a very bad case of cancer.

One day she comes back from Mass General and she said, I said, “How are you, Eva?” She said, “Great! My cancer is in remission.” And at that moment, the light bulb went off. Why is it if I had the exact same test, they'd tell me I don't have cancer and she has cancer in remission?

And you know, once a person is told that cancer is in remission, the indica— you know, the implication is it may still be there and that you're stressed and that stress, I think, stress, by the way, is the major killer—over and above genetics, over and above nutrition.

And so a woman with the silly five-year rule where there's no data for it, you know, the cancer is gone, they're not going to declare her cancer free in any permanent sense until five years have passed. Five years of stress is awful. And what people need to understand is that if you're in remission, and I'll tell you about the study in a moment, but if you're in remission, you're worried about the cancer.

If you're cured, you go about living. And if cancer comes back, in some ways it'll be the same cancer; that's why we call it cancer. But in just as many ways, it's brand new. And so there's reason to see it as something different. It never comes back exactly the same.

And so when you have a cold and then you're—the cold is gone, you don't see yourself as in remission; you know, when you get another cold, you don't see it as the same cold as before; it's a brand new cold, even though they both bear similarities, which is why we call them both colds. And so each time you beat a cold, you become in some sense less and less frightened of getting a cold.

Um, I can beat this, I've beaten it many times in the past, which is not the case oftentimes with cancer. So what we did—and here's where the review board comes into play—the first attempt at this was to ask people, women on a cancer awareness walk, about whether they see their cancer as in remission or cured.

And then we'd check back a while later, six months later, to see how their health has progressed. The review board wouldn't let us do this because asking somebody about their cancer they thought was stressful. These are women on a breast cancer awareness walk. I mean, you know, and so it required lots of fighting with them.

The best one years and years ago, this student comes in; she's gay, and she believes, and I think it's a very reasonable assumption that if a child is brought up by two women, since mothers are so important to the upbringing of kids, this child is going to be better off.

And that would have been worth noting. So what she wanted to do was to go into gay bars, and if there were women in gay bars, she wanted to ask them if they had children, and if they had children, she wanted to ask them to be in the study. And the review board said, asking—remember, any gay bar asking people if they're gay is insulting.

You know, well, when I heard this, I went crazy. How homophobic and whatever! Now, the point—the larger point, I guess, is that the people who are on these boards are ordinary people with ordinary biases. Things change over time. I couldn't imagine that that study wouldn't get—be allowed to be run immediately now, for better or worse.

And, um, you know, so for me, these review boards, while I appreciate their need, maybe, it's always been the bane of my existence because if they do a cost-benefit analysis, you know, should we be able to run the study? Well, let's see what the aggravation and potential harm is going to do to people and what we're going to—for my work.

They almost never think it's going to work, which is why I want to do the study in the first place. And so, if you don't—you know, if you're on the board and you're going to do a cost-benefit analysis and you don't believe it's going to work, even if I just ask you to fill out three questions, the costs exceed the benefits.

So it's always been hard for me, and the—you know, I know that the original nursing home study that we did, where we gave people a plan to take care of, encouraged them to make decisions for themselves, um, and they lived longer. This was a very important study, not just from the mind-body unity idea, but for medicine in general.

And, um, I don't think they'd let me do it now. And I think that's a shame. Well, we don't exactly understand the invisible preconditions for the scientific enterprise, right?

I mean, we tend to think of science as a robust enterprise and in some ways a self-evident enterprise, and that's stupid, because it's only about 450 years old and it only emerged once, as far as we know, in human history, and God only knows why we ever allowed it. I mean, a lot of the great early scientists were independently wealthy, or they had a patron, like an artist, and they were left the hell alone.

Thinking of people like Darwin—I would love that. Right? Right? If you know anybody, I'm available. Yeah, well, you know, well, it's really how—it's really what scientists should be looking for, I would say, instead of government funding, because along with that government funding comes exactly the sort of problems that we're discussing right now, which is, well, you know, is this going to be of broad public benefit?

And the answer is, well, if I knew that, I wouldn't—well, I would turn it into a company in a second, right? If you knew for certain that your new discovery was going to be of broad significant economic benefit, you'd raise money, and you'd have entrepreneurs on board in two seconds. And so that problem would take care of itself.

And as you pointed out too, is that the probability that a given study will work is inversely proportionate to its daringness and its creative nature, and so those are exactly the studies that are going to be scuttled by anything even approximating a cost-benefit analysis, which no one on an ethics committee ever does anyways, because they don't have the technical qualifications for doing so.

No, I think they do far more harm than good. You know, people point out on the same page, well, look, the overall evidence for malfeasance on the scientific side of things in relationship to the treatment of research participants is very, very sparse. There are some egregious counter-examples, right?

Experiments in the concentration camps in Germany. Um, experimentation by the Chinese, the Tuskegee experiment, like you can point to exceptions, but all things considered—well, most scientists who run a research lab would just assume, for example, that their participants might come back again or that, you know, bad word doesn't get out about exactly what's going on in the lab.

And most scientists who are genuine scientists also have a very high regard for ethical conduct and the truth, because if you don't, you never discover anything, right? I mean, you cannot be a crooked scientist and discover something; it's just not possible.

So I also wanted to