So good to be here.

We’re only ten days in, and it always seems that it’s the exact right time for a book on insubordination to come out. We’re in the midst of a Ukrainian invasion and we’re in the midst of a bunch of culture wars. I don’t think anyone’s ever said at any point in history, we’re chilled, we’re good and we don’t need anyone to dissent and rebel.

It might be the concentration of intolerance, negative emotionality and problems. There’s a question in terms of historical wise, whether now is more chaotic than other times? I think the speed and transmission of information has made at least the perception of it, as if we live in the most polarized times possible. But I always, as a student of history, like to refer back to it, as polarized as politics are now, if you go back to the 1800s, the 1700s, the way you resolved the conflict was you whipped out two pistols and you had a duel and someone was going to die.

Well, you captured something really important, which is you need to be able to hold more than one view at the same time. For example, Harvard scientists coined the phrase prevalence-induced concept change. What that means is, we accomplish more progressive aims over the course of time. If we were to look at a chart right now, you would see that it’s one of the lowest rates of murders in the history of humanity. It’s the same for kidnapping, robbery and for sexual assaults. And yet, it feels as if it’s no better than it ever was and it’s only getting worse over the course of time.

As we get successive changes and as we improve society little by little, our lens becomes more molecular at discovering smaller and smaller problems that we have issues with. Once it was very simple in terms of you would have a water fountain for colored people and a water fountain for people that were white. Well, you can solve that crisis. Then now you are at point, the ratio of the number of college students who are black versus the number of people who are in entry level jobs in Fortune 500 companies, the prevalence is off. So, it may feel as if there’s no problem considering what it was like in the past. But, what you are is, you’re more fine grained and precise in detecting where the difficulties lie. That’s a good thing. We can also be grateful simultaneously for just how much societal changes has occurred when it comes to sex, gender, race and sexual orientation.

There’s no clear answer. But, if you look at the data, which I’m trained as a scientist to do, it’s very clear that it comes to social norms as one of the big factors in society. You only have to go back about five generations of United States presidents and the notion was you can be in the military if you’re gay, but you have to disacknowledge publicly that you’re not heterosexual, will allow you to give up your life, but you can’t acknowledge your actual central identity. And only in the course of a 10 to 15-year period, you move from gay unions to having allowing anyone of any sexual orientation to get married to each other and what we forget is very small people. Small people in terms of, they’re not known names, they’re not known entities. But they did something. They changed people’s minds.

Over the course of time, when a concentrated number of minorities influences public opinion in a concentrated area, it starts to permeate, it starts to expand itself. As you’re saying, in terms of the collective consciousness of society, what you found is that as it spread from San Francisco and New York City and Chicago, some of the core central areas where people felt comfortable being publicly, not heterosexual, because they could find their set of peers. Over time, people get to actually interact with a neighbor who’s gay and they actually have dinner. Suddenly, after talking to a physicist, they realize, “Oh! I didn’t know you were gay.” You realize it’s an inconsequential, tangential variable that has no relevance to their area of expertise, their strengths, their talents, their contribution to society. So the small, singular face to face interactions start to pay dividends over the course of time. It’s hard to trace the origins because it really is singular people altering their viewpoint.

I’ll give you an example from my 9-year-old daughter’s elementary school. A good friend of mine, his daughter had Down syndrome and she passed away tragically from the flu about 8 years ago. In honor of her, they put a bench in the schoolyard. It’s called Jillian’s bench. One of the strategies for dealing with the cultural norm of the epidemic of loneliness in society is, there’s a single purple bench, which was Jillian’s favorite color. And if you can’t find someone to play with on the playground, if you sit on that bench, you are basically waiting for someone to be socially heroic enough to say, I can go to someone outside of my social group, bring someone in and be virtuous, kind, compassionate and generous, and find potentially a new friend. That happens there.

We shouldn’t step away from how much of a social norm shift that is. Because even for me, in the 1980s, growing up, bullying was so prevalent. The idea that you would actually approach the kid that was sitting by themselves reading a book on the side and ask them to play with you was an anathema. And now, you have an actual bench, a formal mechanism that allows loneliness to subside in children. Here comes the very interesting question. Over time, how has that changed the trajectory of children’s identities about themselves and viewing the world as a potentially benevolent place with a simple act of being pulled from the bench into a social circle? The reason that I bring this up is, not just as an example of principled rebellion, but as an example of very small behaviors that can have these powerful compounding changes in the course of individual lives, much less groups and society.

I think it’s important. We have the president of Ukraine and if you listen to his speeches, most people would say they have never heard such bravery in their lifetimes of a leader who actually puts on military garb and actually fights on the front lines who was a standup comedian previously to being a president. He is humorous, somber, dedicated and committed. That’s one form of thinking about how we can improve society? But it’s almost, he’s so impressive, he just reminds you of the Martin Luther Kings and the Malcolm X’s and the Harriet Tubmans’ where that’s not attainable. So it’s important to also pay attention to the very small little things that we can do in terms of inviting people into our world who maybe are having mental health difficulties and having less stigma about mental health problems, where you can actually ask people about their depression because you don’t view that they’re dysfunctional. You view is that it’s a normal part of the human condition and it’s normal to seek help and it’s normal to ask for help. When we balance the big changes and the small changes, we can have a greater sense of urgency that we can actually do something when we wake up in the morning.

It’s really about distinguishing. Everybody thinks they’re principled in their rebellions against the status quo. This is really about distinguishing between those dysfunctional approaches versus those constructive approaches. If you transform things into a mathematical formula, you can see where are the points where we can intervene to alter cultures and alter individuals so that they are more inclined to do good for the world as to be complacent.

Principled insubordination, the equation from 60 years of science. The first part is deviance. There are essentially norms, rules or authority figures that you view as barriers to your well-being or the well-being of other people and you have a different perspective on things. That’s like a fundamental part.

Deviance + authenticity + contribution.

The authenticity part is, this has to be something that you’re pursuing because it is fundamental to your identity, it’s fundamental to your values. It’s not something that you’re doing just to win likes on social media or just to win social approval and status within a group. That’s not authenticity. Part of being human is that you care about the groups that you identify with? But, authenticity is about fundamental central values and from those values you derive goals that you want to work towards. So, is it about justice? Is it about fairness? Is it about reducing harm? Is it about being a steward of a healthy environment? Is it about being a kind, compassionate person that is even, considers forgiveness and reconciliation for people who do wrongdoings? We all have a different structure of values. When you act in accordance with those deep, cherished interests and values, you’re on the path to a principled rebel status.

The final part in that numerator of this equation is contribution. It’s very easy to point out the problems in society, but the question is, are you working to reduce the gap, the chasm between how the world is now and this utopian vision of how you see the world could be? That constructive view is a fundamental part of being principled as opposed to an unprincipled rebel.

Just to add more to the equation, what makes it difficult is, the denominator is social pressure. There is pressure to be part of the herd. There’s this great body of work that says one of the reasons that we can form is because, if you ask a question and I answer with this outlandish response where I just start talking about my favorite music and my favorite movies, I make the social interaction more difficult for you. It requires you to have more effort. It’s awkward, it’s cringeworthy and then whatever you respond to me is going to be difficult for me. So we will both be expending a ton of energy if we don’t conform to a little bit of semi structure in our conversation. Conformity has its benefits and people push you to be conformist because you make the world less effortful.

If you follow between the lines, say what you’re supposed to say that’s socially acceptable and don’t dissent with what’s the typical belief system of the people around you, what I would argue is, you must have the courage to resist that social pressure to make life easy for people, because that friction is that early harbinger of social evolution.

A lot of innovators make this misstep. They go for a high level of novelty, high level of complexity and high level of switching costs where it’s going to be hard to switch gears. Just think about how the lexicon has changed about talking about people of color over the course of time. We talk about colored people and we talk about African-Americans, and then we’re talking about blacks. Then we’re talking about blacks is not acceptable because it’s separate. It makes the person their skin color. So you use it only as a qualifier, you say black people. These are small, moderate novel changes.

But, if you asked for everything in one shot and I know this is a little bit controversial, if the switching cost is too difficult and too challenging and effortful, you’re going to get unnecessary resistance. This is the part that people have a lot of problems with. It is that slow, inexorable, gradual changes that are actually sticky and lasts as opposed to having unnecessary detractors that are barriers to progress.

We like to think that we recognize dysfunction in society. We discover something that’s going to be useful. We often are so excited to share those ideas that we forget that society’s not ready for it.

Even a better example than Darwin is Galileo. For Galileo to challenge the church, to say, the Earth is revolving around the sun and not the other way around. We’re not the center of the universe. Not only was that unaccepted, not only was he basically imprisoned, not only were all of his books destroyed, but one of the things that’s forgotten about Galileo is, it was 200 years afterwards that the church finally said, “Hey, let’s actually decide whether or not we should have some reconciliation and say that Galileo was right.” It was only in the 1980s, only 40 plus years ago where the church finally said, “We forgive Galileo for his sins. We were wrong. He was right. Let’s move forward.” Just think about that concept. The world was not ready for science and religion to collide. In some ways, it’s still not ready to say that you can actually hold multiple beliefs at the same time. You could believe in a higher power and still recognize the objective fact that the world does not revolve around the Earth. It’s a little bit the other way around in terms of the revolutions that happened there.

We can extend that to other parts of society and ask the question. Is it the right time to reveal these ideas? And if it’s not the right time, what is the way to craft that message? But what we can’t do effectively is, know the truth and assume other people have had the background and the expertise with our deep, comprehensive investigation of separating in a centrifuge falsehood from facts that they’re up to speed with us to catch people up and not overwhelm them. We have to be pithy and very succinctly say, “This is why it makes sense that you would treat someone that’s gay that’s similar to someone’s heterosexual.” This is why there’s a question of how social media in some ways is hijacking children’s minds because they’re unable to escape from social pressures when they get home because it’s still waiting for them after the school day. What is that doing to children’s minds and what is that doing to their identities when they’re constantly worried about their public persona? And there’s no green room for them to return to where they can let their hair down, take off their makeup and just be effortlessly themselves. We don’t know what that’s going to do to people’s identities, but we have to start asking the questions so that we can actually try to start making slow modifications where we can have at least semi permeable boundaries between the public self and the private self for young adults.

I hadn’t heard that story, but there’s another one that I really enjoy, which is controversial, but history is history. In that era, how do you get Southern people to get on board with the emancipation of slaves? One of the things that Lincoln did was, he engaged in a lot of what they called at the time, black humor. He would collect humor about black people at the time and about slaves, he would engage in humor with people in the South. It wasn’t because he believed in those jokes, it wasn’t because he didn’t believe that they were offensive and they were in some ways demoralizing and dehumanizing of people that were black at the time. He did it strategically. He was trying to say, I’m one of you guys. These are guys at the time in terms of voting and I understand your cause and I’m going to show that I’m one of you. Because of that, you’re going to be more likely to lower your defenses, have a conversation, and we can talk about what concessions I’ll make as we work towards the emancipation of slaves that happens there.

There’s an interesting counterfactual you can ask about history. As we look back and bemoan the fact that he was engaging in racist humor, what if he didn’t engage in those racist jokes with people that were racist at the time in order to win their votes? Is it worthwhile to make these small sacrifice of engaging in behavior that is counter to the values that you have, because you’re focusing on the larger war and you’re willing to lose a battle in terms of a few conversations where you act in slow, small moral transgressions in your language and your acts, because you’re focusing on a much more moral and a much more important and a much more difficult cause?

I’m so glad you brought up Frederick Douglass. Black History Month just passed and I’ve been trying to really talk about them as much as possible. These are purveyors of history. These agents are actually ignored in most of the history books. But I love that you’re getting to some of the dark parts. There’s another part of Frederick Douglass’ story. I feel like we’re just adding Lego blocks to each other with this huge, massive space that’s here. When Frederick Douglass was emancipated as a slave or just left the plantation to move to the North, the abolitionists brought him everywhere saying, here is this learned man who taught himself how to read and how to write, and they would bring him almost as if he was a circus stage performer. They would bring him from city to city, and there would be a bunch of white men that would introduce him and say, “Here is Frederick Douglass, he is like us in terms of his intellect.” And eventually, Frederick Douglass realizes, I’m a free man and when I’m with you, the abolitionists, in terms of a cause that you feel a sense of meaning about, but you don’t understand what it’s like to actually experience enslavement. I don’t want to be your character to play with. So, he abandoned it. It was completely unheard of as a black man to have solo public speaking tours around the North in small cities and small environments. He was always his own man.

Just as you said, part of being your own man, truly free, is that as your views evolve, you are willing to publicly acknowledge with the sense of intellectual humility that what I said about Lincoln three weeks ago, I’ve thought more about it. I’ve talked to people, I’ve changed my mind, and I’m going to acknowledge that. There’s a question about in society now, for as much as we lionize icons like as Frederick Douglass, do we allow the same level of freedom for individuals to change their mind, or do we hold them in prison to the views that we hate the most that they’ve held in the past and don’t allow them the space and autonomy to grow as a person? Then, what are the consequences when we don’t allow our public figures and leaders to grow and evolve in their positions?

I’m curious because I’m not as well versed in Mandela’s life other than the parts that most people learn in school. What were the mistakes he made as a leader? How did the public respond at the time?

You gave me the chills from that story, which I have never heard before. The reason that I’m glad we’re having this conversation is, I think when you dissect the iconic characters, the iconic failures and iconic successes in history, then we can realize these are all possible avenues for young adults and older adults as well in terms of reaching these. If we don’t show the votes and the flaws and we don’t show the friction that they experienced and you only see just the highlights in terms of their successes, then they become unreachable, unattainable positions to happen there.

I’ve always had this dream of creating a curriculum on principled rebellion for grade school. The idea is, we would talk about Martin Luther King’s transgressions and his romantic life. We would talk about how Gandhi basically abandoned his children and spent almost no time with them focusing on the country in large. We would talk about all the problems and their jagged personality profile of psychological strengths and weaknesses. And when kids would take personality tests, they could say, your profile with all of your flaws is very similar to a young Mandela. It’s very similar to Condoleezza Rice. It’s very similar to George Bush Senior. It’s not as if you should focus just on your flaws, it’s this combination, this holistic nature of who you are, where you will fall into the same pitfalls that they did and have the same potential for success as they had.

When we whitewash it and just focus on it as if it was a linear path, unlike what you wrote about Mandela, that it seems as if there’s a qualitative difference between them and the rest of us and I think that’s a mistaken way to take away agencing a potential in humans around us.

Oh my God, Hitendra! This is like a dream conversation. My head is going in 7000 different directions right now. I want to bring it to an area where it’s less intense than politics. Just think about creators in general. Just think about your writers and your poets and everyone out there who’s listening, who’s working on a blog post or a book that happens there. You could ask yourself what the counterfactuals of what you’re saying, of people like Jim Morrison. I grew up loving the Doors as a kid, even though it was a little bit before my time. His origin story was his first live concert at the Whisky a Go Go in L.A. He was so nervous in terms of his public speaking and felt so unqualified to be the lead man for a band that he didn’t face the audience. He faced his drummer over the course of the entire concert. Here’s the counterfactual. What if at that moment people were booing him and throwing beer cans at Jim Morrison’s back as he was on stage and was pushed off? He created the same level of music, but it didn’t have the worldwide appeal where kids like me who grew up in the 80s who had a poster of him on his wall. Would he still be an amazing creator? I would argue that the social approval and the sheer number of followers, is not the indication of the quality of your work. The work speaks for itself, and it’s worthwhile to think about how many of our metrics as an individual are focusing on the acclaim that we achieve, as opposed to the quality of the work itself, where that’s the only thing that we really have control over.

No.

Wait. Searching for Sugarman. Is that what you are talking about?

I think I wrote an article that’s one of my favorite documentaries of all time.

It doesn’t give it way to say that, luck found him later in life, where it completely changed the reception to his music. The only difference was that it just got into the right number of hands. I have all these college students that I teach every single year. Hundreds of students have passed through my science of well-being class over the past 23 years. We talk about the science of love, meaning, purpose, friendships, positive emotions, the benefits of negative emotions and so many of them are so afraid to pursue really large aspirational goals because they say nobody gave me the podium and nobody’s giving me the opportunity. What I regularly try to impart on them is, it’s very few people that are told by a record label or by Penguin or Random House that, we’ve now anointed you as you are officially an author. We’ve anointed you as you are officially a musician. Just do the work and do your best to get it in as many hands as possible and don’t allow the random luck factor be the determinant of how you decide what you’re going to do with your life, but really try to figure out, what is it that you’re good at? What is your unique background? History of positive and negative life events? People that you have interacted with? books that you’ve read. Everyone on the history of the Earth, has created an original perspective by amalgamating all this information and experiences. If you don’t unleash that originality and novelty, you only allow social pressure to decide what you’re doing, you have basically eviscerated your original human potential.

That’s why it’s in the denominator as the barrier to principled rebels and innovators and norm shifters and norm breakers. Social pressure prevents you from seeing the chasm between how you see the world differently and potentially better, and what everyone else is suggesting you should say and do.

I appreciate that. Just think of this. You and I have never spoken one word to each other, even by email, phone, or any contact. While we are reading and learning about the same characters in history, there is a slight difference because, if we went through our mental arsenal of what we read, how we talked about it, how people asked us questions, how we responded to those questions, we collected a different arsenal of information. When the two of us collide, as we’re doing live right now, what happens is, two people are learning not just necessarily information, but that’s a different vantage point and an angle for looking at this topic. That’s what I think people are often missing in societal conversations where speed takes precedence over knowledge and wisdom. It is that you cling prematurely to a singular vantage point of a topic, an issue or most problematically a person in terms of whether there’s a thumbs up or thumbs down to an individual. We don’t spend the time thinking about and asking questions. Asking questions, even our own mental chatter about, do I think I have sufficient evidence to decide on this issue? What evidence would change my mind? What questions should I be asking? What questions have I ignored? to reach a comfortable sense of certainty about an issue that is very complicated and uncertain by nature?

First of all, I love your turn of language. Most importantly, congratulations, because having written a few of these and this was when I was 6 years in monk mode. Congratulations for completing the book, and also reaching that state of equanimity, which not every author has. There are too many authors and if they’re listening now, I wish them to have your state of mind at the end of finishing the book as opposed to, “Okay, now I must move to the next stage of trying to go for the arbitrary bestseller list.” Which we know is the algorithm that some people already know how to break. It’s not always ethical for how people do it that way.

I mean, you always wish it can get to more hands, but it’s really of when you get the individual messages from people where they say, I adopted these principles and practices that has changed my relationship with my child and it has changed my relationship with my organization, or I’ve decided I am going to be a whistleblower and I must speak something about this police precinct that I work at. I’ve been getting those messages.

The idea of people that are going to be whistleblowers and going to take the step forward as opposed to avoiding and hovering in the dark because of something I wrote and speak their piece about dysfunction, I mean, that’s why I wrote the book. The stories are fun. They’re fun to read. It’s great to share them. But, for someone to have to feel they have a plan of action from reading this, that’s when esthetic chills start to kick in.

Yeah sure. As we’re speaking right now, we have the invasion of Russia and Ukraine. This is very relevant to that. A lot of people are putting the Ukraine flag in their social media and a lot of people are posting messages of support for them. One of the things that to gain traction on a mission or a missive that you’re focusing on is, we know that from 97 studies of minority influence, the greatest predictor that a message can actually influence other people is the consistency of that message. But there’s a really important piece that people get wrong. Most people replicate the same message over and over, the Ukrainian president is incredible. Ukraine is a victim and they are actually being invaded. There’s lots of language about not saying it’s a war, it’s an invasion and repeating this over and over. What happens with that and we know this from science, which makes it difficult to learn sometimes is, we habituate and we no longer have an emotional reaction and we don’t feel a compulsion that motivates us to want to engage in behavior whether that’s giving money or donating goods or in some case, veterans are now traveling from other countries to go to Ukraine.

One of the things that we know from the research is consistency is important, but repetition interferes with consistency. You want consistency, but slightly novel modifications of how that message is displayed. In terms of practicality, making sure that you’re talking about different stories in detail, making sure you’re switching between video footage and words, making sure that you’re talking about your personal impact because of your ancestral linkage to Ukraine versus more objectively about what’s going on in the world itself. So, going from the personal to the more global for talking about these things and when you do that, you prevent people from habituating the message, but you’re still staying on task.

I would argue that one of the problems that the Black Lives Matter Movement, for example, had is that they kept beating people over with the singular message without the precise details of what you do with this phrase, what you do with this symbol. Because of that, people habituated and they were very engaged in the beginning. Then very slowly and then very quickly, people abandoned the cause and moved on to something else that happened there because there wasn’t that very clear, consistent definition of the singular, easy ways to take action and it just became a slogan that people turned out towards.

Yeah, I didn’t know that about Gandhi. I’m going to read up more on that because that’s actually very interesting. One of the things that you’re describing, which is really powerful and it’s not something you’re seeing often in modern social advocacy is, they did not dehumanize the opponents and they recognize that there is a public version of them that’s engaging in wrongful language, wrongful acts, or they actually haven’t done anything explicitly wrong, but they are part of the group that’s problematic. Gandhi kind of acknowledged like, “Listen, I’m giving you moral license to change, because I can see that there’s moral virtue and goodness inside you and I feel like you can understand that this isn’t the only way of doing things.” And that’s not what we hear now. It’s to make it into zero sum games and probably even more precisely, is to start to label and categorize people as good or bad as opposed to use your phrasing from before. They’re on a complicated spiritual journey in terms of figuring out what is their value system and what are they doing now that could be pointed out is less advantageous, not just through the group that they’re being. problematic towards, but also just to honor themselves and honor their ancestors and honor their society at large.

We really like to dehumanize our opponents and it feels good. It makes your group a tighter, cohesive, harmonious and feel as if you’re stronger. But, what it does is you’ve now lost out on potential allies, and you’ve increased unnecessary detractors by having that view. We just should acknowledge a tradeoff. Do you want to choose this? The group solidarity and pleasure of having really strong nemeses, or do you want to open up the possibility that some of those so-called detractors might end up being allies if you produced a different message that actually invites them in for their humanity, not necessarily for their recent behaviors.

Hitendra, this is a great teaser for your book. So glad everyone knows that they have to pick up your book. It’s a fantastic thesis. It’s exactly what the world needs and I’ll be one of the first people picking it up. Is there a tentative title of your book?

It’s great. I think the concise answer is, there is a downloading of cultural scripts information, and there is we can’t ignore a few million years of evolution how it’s affected our brain, where we have a £3 prediction machine and the main goal of a £3 brain and not too large of a body is trying to manage uncertainty. One of the quick ways that our brain tries to manage uncertainty is to quickly categorize people into threats and opportunities and friends and foes. We know for example from research that, in a mere 5 seconds of observing another human being, people tend to be 65 to 75% accurate in depicting what someone’s sexual orientation is. We someone of a particular race, when they look at a crowd of individuals and they see only a small number of people in that crowd that resembles their race, that they quickly find those people and they don’t see the very heterogeneous faces and images of everyone else that surround the people that look like our race. So we have this own race effect where everyone else is a sea of just a color and those people that resemble your race, you see their distinctive qualities like, “Oh, that person is muscular. Oh, that person looks like they’re intelligent. Oh, that person, I could see by their posture that they look very confident in their skin.” And the other race, the large number in the crowd, we just see them as a blob of others. Our brain does this automatically.

This is our biological machinery. We download the software from the culture. While both those things are true, we can train ourselves to hold more loosely this cultural information. Not that it’s easy to do, and we can be more cognizant of how our brain operates. And from that we can reduce our biases, our prejudices and have this greater sense of common humanity, where we are less inclined to categorize people quickly and we’re more likely to update our beliefs as we acquire information showing that the person that I initially depicted as a bad person, actually, they had a tough background. I can actually appreciate that and I can give them a little bit of the benefit of the doubt and offer them opportunities to alter their behavior and have this opportunity for second chances and third chances because they had the misfortune of having an abusive or neglected child rearing. That’s a blemish on society and this is the consequences of an impoverished environment and the early years.

I appreciate that. I debated starting the book by talking about my background and my demographics. There are lots of arguments that occur right now of, as someone who looks like me, which is, white, middle aged and heterosexual and middle income, then who am I to be speaking to tell people that are minorities in the world of how to be influential? And I would offer the thought experiment, which was what if I spent 25 years of research, 6 years focused directly on this book, collecting information about how minorities can be influential and the pathway of doing that and I held back, because I wasn’t the right sex, gender or race for doing that. Wouldn’t that be equally, if not more problematic to do that? One of the things that you can see in this conversation is, I think we have to ask more questions, have provocations of thinking of, what if we banned all of the people that are matches between audiences and people that have some level of expertise at a topic and look for people that are only matches, what will that do to the reservoir of knowledge and wisdom that you could tap into? For me, I want to have as few barriers of entry as possible for people to reach their full potential.

I love the examples you give, the anecdotes and the individuals you’re mentioning. You are just lighting up my brain. I think it’s a great example for the Dalai Lama and you go back to your example of Churchill. Do we respond differently because of his background and what he looked like or helping in putting an end to World War II?

Yeah. It’s become a very popular, more apropos phrasing than ever, because everybody wants to see the person in front of them as a singular identity. It’s always a falsehood. Just think about it. There is no person ever in the history of Earth whose sole identity has been their nationality, or what they look like because they have interests, they have values, they have preferences, they have habits, they have personalities, they have social networks. You cannot effectively describe a person by not capturing this level of complexity. The problem is, we don’t have the time to do a comprehensive download because we’re not spending 37 hours of very concentrated conversation with no distractions and because of that, we have to think about how do we work with stereotypes and how do we constantly update them every little bit of information that we collect in terms of trusting, but verifying and updating as we go.

It’s a great question. This book I think is going to change my life trajectory for what I focus on for the rest of my life. I want to really help people to find their sense of courage, their sense of curiosity, their sense of intellectual humility, and to really focus on what are the paths to being influential without being anointed by someone if you now have the power. You now have the stage to actually do something. That’s a never ending journey.

But, the next stage that I want to do and I kind of reference it by, designing a classroom for this content for younger individuals is, I want to start moving to children’s books and actually getting the science to younger adults, as young as ages of 5 and 6 and helping children who don’t have the fortune of having parental figures, who are really espousing moral development, social development, and making sure I can directly influence them by getting a book in their hands.