Howard Gardner - Frames of Mind

30:15And that's, you know, I think of like children put in a room and it's like, cool, these kids might have higher aptitudes or abilities, but there's just one that it takes little effort relative to the others that are learning. But there's a very important point here, and you may know my wife, Ellen Winner, is an expert on gifted children. And what she will tell you is that what you're describing is the prodigy, the person who arrives at an adult performance level when they're very young. Yep. Very different from being creative. Okay. There are many, many kids who, I'm going to use my primitive example, who can get through calculus by the age of 11.

30:56But that's not in particular if they're ever going to do anything original. And I was a very good pianist, but there's no evidence whatsoever that I would have been a good writer of music. I just learned to play Beethoven easily, I mean, for a kid. So the prodigy is not the same as somebody who's going to be a creator, someone who's going to discover new things or do things in a new way. And I don't understand Silicon Valley well enough to know the difference between, let's say, the hundreds of kids, you're more likely to be boys these days than girls, who can master computer science very quickly, and the much smaller number who can actually do something new.

31:38Sure. quantum computing or something which, you know, we might say it takes them into new territory. Similarly with something like physics, you know, probably before we had Einsteinian physics, before we had black hole physics, and before we had quantum physics, you might have used a different set of abilities to be a physicist than we do now. When I was going to school, and you've admitted that you weren't even born then, being interested in animals and plants was very important for biology. By the time I was in graduate school, it was genetics, and now it's probably physical chemistry. So even recognized fields make use of different intelligences as those fields themselves change.

32:29And what everybody who would bother to listen to this thing would be asking, let's take politics and diplomacy. What did it take in the First World War? What did it take in the Second World War? What does it take now in 2026 to be good in that area? I don't have any idea. Well, the other thing that I thought a lot about, you know, you mentioned right at the outset, you said, OK, great. You have a high IQ, so you can join Mensa. And what does that do? You're in a club of other high IQ people that doesn't determine the value of it to society, for example. It just says you have a high aptitude for thinking and whatnot.

33:12The other thing too, and I want to ask you this question. I don't have this in my notes, but I think this is really important. We've talked a lot about in this podcast that these large language models do have intelligence in various forms. They're a linguistic model, so we obviously know that they can do language very well. as an example, my question to you is, do this also cause scarcity in other intelligences? So for example, I am a economics and history double major from Whitman College. What has been the kind of the paradigm shift in higher education has been a move away from the humanities, for example, and in light of computer science is becoming more dominant skillset for kids to learn in college.

33:56So I also think about like, how does that change the value in society? And one of the questions being asked today is, are these large language models going to cause things like coding to be less valuable because they're more attainable from an average intelligence level, if that makes sense? Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. You have to be a historian to understand the extent to which what we used as criteria for getting into selective institutions has changed over time. In the 19th century, if I wanted to go to Harvard, I would have to read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The classics, the classical education.

34:35Those languages. I'd have to be able to read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Even in the 20th century when I went to college, that seemed absurd. And now when a large language entity can translate any language into any other language, it's clearly just a poem in your hat, but it's not something you need. So, yeah, anybody who looks at the history of these things sees that what's valued changes over time. I mentioned earlier that even the verbal SAT, which my wife and I had no trouble with 60 years ago, is a different verbal SAT now for my granddaughter than it is for me. Yeah. But you're also raising a question of values.

35:14And that is, it might turn out that computer entities are able to do certain things much better than human beings. It's a policy question. If you're running educational institutions, what sorts of things which we should value? So let's just take poetry. We were talking about my student studying poetry. It may turn out that large language instruments can write poetry better than anybody except Emily Dickinson and John Keats. That doesn't mean we shouldn't write poetry, but it means that we have to write it because we want to and not because we can do it better than a large language entity can do it.

35:56Let's see. So I want to pivot our discussion because you talk about kind of like athletic intelligence is how I think about it. There's been books written like The Sport Gene, for example, where people have these abilities that are just unique. They could be prodigy-like, but today is May 18th, 2026. I just watched the PGA Championship yesterday. And what I've learned, Howard, is that it doesn't matter how many times and how hard I work in my life, I will never be that good of a golfer. I just – I know that. I'm very at home with that. But to your point about intrapersonal, how often is it that people don't evaluate themselves that well?

36:45In other words, they're good at things, but they have trouble introspectively looking in and saying, you know what, I'm just never going to be that good. And therefore, what do I need to spend my time thinking about or what can I be better at? Is that maybe the most misunderstood intelligence because it's just so tough to be self-reflecting? Well, I agree with your conclusion, though I haven't written about it, that interpersonal intelligence is the most puzzling. I think I quipped even in frames of mind, only your psychoanalyst knows how much intrapersonal intelligence you have because he or she notices how often you miss the point of things.

37:30What I would say is that knowing your limitations is not the same as what you decide to do about it. I mean, I might not be very good in learning French and I might be smart to know that, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't keep trying. Those are two different kinds of things. And yes, you're not going to win the PGA, but your lucky golf is a sport where you're lucky to get at least not much worse as you get older. Well, but I can have a lot of interpersonal interaction with other people and that might be something that I can use as a conduit to be interpersonal, for example. Sure. Yeah. No, I think even chess has an interpersonal aspect to it.

38:17And golf has a very interpersonal aspect, unless you're just trying to show that you can drive the ball further than anybody else. Which we're all trying to do that, let's admit it, right? But I do think that evenly the knowledge of self is something that's a fairly modern Western phenomenon. I mean, I do a lot of work in anthropology, and the notion of self and of I is much more dominant in the West and it's much more dominant in the United States than it is in Asian cultures, in Confucian cultures, Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, and so on. we are a quite egocentric and egotistic society and that's been an advantage at some point i think at this point it's a big disadvantage because it's one planet and it doesn't matter if we're the best on the planet if we destroy the planet but that's moving into into into the political sphere when a lot of people would argue that's you know that's been true ever since the protestant reformation, right?

39:21The idea of self rather than a more corporate view. So explain what you mean by a sense of self as like the balance every individual and culture strikes, because we're touching on this between inner feelings and pressures of other persons or people. You talk a lot about the West versus other cultures you've studied as an example. Yeah, well, I think you You pointed to the Protestant Revolution. I think that probably starting around 1500, Europe and the countries that Europe sent people to, like the United States and Canada and parts of Latin America and Australia, went on a somewhat different track than more traditional societies in the Middle East and in the Far East.

40:12And it has both strengths and weaknesses. You know, we take the individual and his or her soul much more seriously than other more traditional cultures. And that can be positive or negative. My own feeling is that the United States today has become much too much of an I society. That's I like capital I with not much attention to others. And so a lot of my own work, this would be a subject for another podcast, is about how to develop in young children the sense not just of I, but of we. and a they, but they not in the sense of they as being enemies, but they as being entities that we should care about.

41:04And my own research group is now working on a fourth area, I, we, they, and it. Because young children now are not only relating to other human beings, they're relating to Alexa and other kinds of AI entities. And for all we know, for a three or four-year-old that's at least as significant as another animal or another person. And in the world of your grandchildren, Cole, they'll be working with all kinds of intelligent entities that are not flesh and blood in the way we are, and they're going to have to have relations with them as well. So the notion of human intelligence as being the mark of all intellect is no longer of the case.

41:52In the introduction to the new issue of Frames of Mind, which just came out in April of 2026, I talk about animal intelligence, plant intelligence, AI, and AGI. Because when we had one kind of intelligence, and then Binet said, well, maybe we have two kinds of intelligence. And then Gardner said, maybe we have seven or eight kinds of intelligence. That's all 20th century. But now we have to be aware that plants communicate information to one another. Certain animal species, little ones like ants, huge ones like whales and octopi, can communicate in ways which we can't. And nobody knows about the extent to which various kinds of AIs will be able to go someday.

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43:21Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. To your point about what intelligences arise, and then I will add my second part in what intelligences fall. For example, interpersonal, between us and others, we can't seem to crack the interpersonal problem of marriage. It's on a long-term decline. It's down 40 % over the last 40 years. And it seems to be that we have these other intelligences coming about and we're losing prior intelligences in like, how do you talk to a potential mate? You made a lot of assumptions there, which I think we would take a different podcast to make.

44:14you know we could easily say that people can't afford to get married now well they're not even they're not even having sex or drinking that there's a much lower hurdle there so it's it's i find it interesting it's it's uh it everyone seems to understand the problem and by the way just to give you a sense people most people talk about the symptoms of that so say oh childbirths are down the childbirths are not down if you look at people that marry childbirths are very normal compared to 40 years ago. It's marriage that's declined and caused lower total birth rates among the population. So I think a lot about what, you know, it's kind of like in physics.

44:52For every action, there's an equal and an opposite reaction. And there is a relational movement that I agree with you. There's new intelligence that's coming about. My ability to interact with Claude and use it successfully like a good intern is an intelligence. Some people know how to do that and some people don't. Or how you want to use those models for what they're good at or what they're bad at, you know, versus how do I talk to the person down the bar from me that I've never met? Well, I want to separate out something quite sharply. The decline of marriage can be an entirely different issue than whether we know how to understand other people.

45:30The decline of marriage is a sociological phenomenon. Marriage itself was only invented at a certain time in life. And marriage in my great-grandparents' time was totally different than it is now. So whether marriage is something desirable and whether it's something we should be worried about is a entirely different issue than whether people understand one another. And interpersonal intelligence is not about marriage. It's whether we understand one another. Maybe it's because I understand you well. I don't want to marry you. Well, I agree. But that would also mean like the mathematician logician would say, but we're going to die.

46:09And the problem is that that's logically bad for humanity. so that again but there are eight billion people in the world so i'm not too worried about the species uh declining because of lack of marriage even though i'm a great believer in marriage i'm very worried about the species uh dying out because we kill one another but because the planet gets too hot uh i think those those are more those issues that one should be vexed about so critics ask whether common sense originality and metaphoric ability are themselves intelligences How do you respond and why do you locate originality within single domains rather than across them?

46:51Well, the second one, and you'll have to remind me of the first one, the second one is simply an empirical question. Namely, it might be the case with people who are original and creative in one area are also more original and creative in another area. I don't know of any evidence for that, but it's an empirical matter. if you and I were doing a thesis and we decided to look at seven different areas, let's say chess and name that tune and writing a poetry, and we found that people who were good in one area were actually good in other areas, that would be evidence for a more general creative ability.

47:26If we found that strength in one area didn't predict strength in the other area, then we'd say, no, they're independent. So what was the other one that you were asking about? Common sense, originality, and metaphoric ability. Okay. Well, originality would be close to what I would call creativity, namely doing something that is unusual and that other people value. I mean, there are lots of things that are unusual. I could continue our conversation by pulling my hair out. That would be original, but it wouldn't be worth imitating. I think that probably if we had all the instruments at our disposal, we'd find some correlation between desire to be original or creative in one area and desire to be original and creative in another area.

48:15I don't walk Saturday Night Live, but I would imagine the people on that program can probably be creative and original in more than one area, more so than I could be. But it's an empirical question whether originality is domain-specific or cuts across the terrain. I just don't have a good answer to that. Well, because to your point on metaphoric, I think of that as being – we often talk about factors in mathematics, let's just say, and then there's the interaction effect of various factors. So we have all these intelligences and a metaphoric ability is the interaction. Much like you're saying, you might be musically talented and inspirational in that regard, but you also have other intelligences and that could create originality because it's not just unique to one.

49:05domain. I think that's true. And I think, again, if you were a student of mine, we might pick randomly 20 famous examples of creativity and see the extent to which they seemed to be based largely in one intelligence, as opposed to putting together a number of different intelligences. And that would be an empirical matter. I don't have a strong opinion about whether they're each rather independent or somebody who's creative in one area might be more likely to be creative in another area. Somebody asked me a really good question about a year ago. And if you give me another five or 10 years, I'm going to try to answer it.

49:46I wrote two books 30 years ago, one about creativity called Creating Minds and one about leadership called Leading Minds. And in each book, I talk about 10 people and describe their creativity and describe your leadership. And this person asked me a wonderful question. He said, Howard, those were all 20th century people. If you were doing this in the 21st century, who would you look at? And that really froze me because areas I know nothing about, like finance, which you know something about, I would never thought that that was an area of great creativity. The guy you mentioned, Charles Munger, right?

50:22I'm lucky I know who he is because I wouldn't have known who he was. I didn't know who Warren Buffett was. But Elon Musk, Elon Musk would have been completely, or Steve Jobs would have been completely invisible 100 years ago. But I think the very important point you're making is the areas in which people show their originality and creativity now may be different than ones that we looked at 100 years ago. And so we have to be looking elsewhere, not just where the light is, but also where people are. I've written about Donald Trump as a media genius, because he has such a command of different media, particularly social media.

51:07And that would have been worthless 100 years ago. We didn't have a range of media like that. Yeah, no question. It went to your point that the media, that the dispersion of media is a factor that we didn't have. I mean, there were just fewer ways to communicate at one point. And now there's millions of ways to communicate, hence why we're talking to each other as an example. You worry about uncritical application of the Western educational model to societies with different traditions and different flavored blends of intelligence. What do you wish more education reformers understood about this?

51:40Well, this is something that I'm thinking about very seriously as we're talking in the spring of 2026. I'm going to tell you my current thinking which is that a lot of the traditional curricula are going to be unnecessary once kids learn what we would call the three R's on the basis of computing namely reading, writing, arithmetic and understanding something about coding and so on I think that the educational system 50 years from now 100 years from now, if it still exists if the planet still exists is going to be much more about human relations and how to get along with other people, how to disagree without killing one another, how to find common values.

52:31I mean, we think we come from different backgrounds. And the examples I use from my own background is scouting and religion. I was a scout, and I've worked all the way through from explorer, from cub scout to eagle scout. I have no relationship to scouting now. I was raised as a Jewish boy. I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed. I have no relationship to Judaism now. I'm not hostile. But I think learning how to deal with other people, particularly people who were different from you, learning how to handle disputes without getting violent, in my own terms, developing interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence is what's going to determine whether the planet survives.

53:15And you're talking now to me right after Donald Trump was in China and Putin is about to go to China. And there are a few very powerful people in the world who feel that they can make decisions and those decisions could well destroy the planet. I think that the assignment for the next century is to help people get along with people, even if they don't agree about things, without getting violent. so I see it much more in a religious sense of what's of different kinds of good and when I talked about our society being very heavily I focused, we need to become more we focused and we need to be aware that people who are different from us they're they, but that doesn't mean that they're evil and they should be eliminated I won't be around to see it, you may not be around to see it But your grandchildren will know whether we've learned to get along as a planet or whether we've just pursued our own egos and ended up destroying the planet.

54:24This wasn't probably why you asked me to be on the planet. So I actually have a very different take on this, but similar need. Let me give you an example. So I actually – so back to your point on like earlier 20th century education. Okay. We called it the classics because it was considered timeless. Okay? So to your point, all the original college educated people were learning and same things. Even to this day, I went to Whitman College. We did a class called Core where you took antiquity and modernity. And that's what we had, to your point, in common with prior educated people. Now, by the way, that's been pretty much gutted in most even private institutions to where you don't even learn about, you know, Plato or anything like that.

55:12So what does that give us? I agree with you. It's less in common. It's less that we can take through the periods of generations. And it's more like what the dog pulled in that day. And I think my concern with that is that just gives us less in common. And so I agree with you, the commonality, the we is lost. And if it's just like, we're going to let the music of the season be the season, the seasons change to your point. They're always changing. And that's why education has been changing with it. I think my question is, what if we go to something more timeless to have more commonality, for example?

55:48And that way from there, we go out to do use our own intelligences from there. Well, I'm now sharing with you what I'm thinking about all the time. And that is that when I talk about having people, especially young people who are different from one another, getting together and dealing with issues, I'm talking about issues in their life, in their world, in their community, which are difficult and which may cause lots of conflict. And I think that's the point at which people become motivated to look at the law, to look at history, to look at geography, and to make use of stuff that you and I may have learned in college because it was assigned, but we may well have forgotten because it didn't fit into the problems we were trying to deal with at the time.

56:36And I've actually, you may know this television program, Finding Your Roots, that Henry Louis Gates has on public broadcasting. It's about where people discover their genes. I've written a blog, which will be posted soon, about how starting with genes, G-E-N-E-S, you can get to any subject from history to biology to physics to the arts. And if you don't like genes, G-E-N-E-S, you can take genes, like in blue genes, G-E-A-N-S, or you can take jelly beans, like food, and any kind of an entry point, you can go to any discipline. And that's the way I think people should learn about disciplines in the future.

57:15Not because, oh, it's the second semester in my granddaughter's class recently. The teacher said something about the Second World War. So my granddaughter said, what was the First World War? She just said, you'll learn about that in seventh grade, a prototype of a bad teacher. I hope she's not watching. But yes, so I think we might, I just created this, we might call this learning on demand. You learn about things in your world at a time when it helps you solve a problem. And you can start anywhere. And that's the kind of school I'd like to see in 50 years. It's not going to happen next year. It shouldn't happen next year because you can't change institutions too quickly.

57:56But what I learned from my exploring of large language instruments is not only do they know everything better than I do, they could teach everything better if they were properly trained. And so I would like to leave to human beings the sorts of things which we need to deal with. And that would include your question. I wouldn't call it marriage, a question of long-term relationships with people and what's expected in those things. And are they good and are they bad? I mean, I grew up believing in them and I think you did. But Margaret Mead, who was a famous anthropologist, said every marriage should last for 10 years and then it should end because you don't get anything out of it.

58:34I think it's kind of silly, but it's a very different way of thinking about things. Well, except that the data would argue against that because you're and my grandchildren would be worse off for that. That's the catch, right? So the interpersonal is a legacy issue too. But let me pivot a little bit because, again, I think – I always ask like what's the rate of change, right? So for example, I totally agree with what you're saying. To bear my soul, I would have been a bad student of yours in college. I would have been a bad student versus as a 42-year-old man, I just found your work incredibly fun to read, thoughtful, playful, creative, everything.

59:17my mind wanders and i i think a lot about as i hop around different fields how my mind is allowed to wander and ponder and do those kind of activities but that's just that's what i get excited about but the core reason i'm doing that is i'm reading which we know reading is dying on the vine and so i worry about that i worry about that as much as you do well so so if we go back to an oral tradition which you were kind of talking about interpersonal which is more of an oral tradition, that means the people in the room that can read are going to be really valuable because they'll say, well, let me synthesize out everything that's being said and write it out for us all to understand what is going on and to communicate to more people than are just in this room, let's just say.

1:00:06And I think it's getting, it's like the profitability of reading via symbols or language is actually going up, even though the large language models can do that really well. Does that make sense? I would say that nothing you said brought me up short. But of course, if you have dyslexia now, it's much less of a problem than it would have been before we had large language instruments. Because it can be read for you. What I'm trying to do in the examples I used is to find things that motivate people to want to know more. And solving problems in the community is a good motivator. And if you can draw on something, whether it's law or art or history or mythology, to help you deal with those problems, you should.

1:01:00You and I and our families are free to play mahjong or to learn Sanskrit, but those should be options. But learning how to live with other people and in this sense it is about inter and intrapersonal intelligence. I think that's what's determined whether we still have a planet and not whether we invent machines that are even more logical. Yeah. So kind of one of my final questions, looking back across more than 40 years since you've published this original book, what has surprised you the most about how the theory has been taken up and what do you wish you'd better understood in 1983? Okay, good question.

1:01:44Well, the first thing that surprised me was that psychologists didn't have much use for it, but educators thought it spoke very clearly to them. And if I'm known anywhere around the world, it's because I'm a multiple intelligences guy. And I guess I would say now, except for the strictest psychologist, just the general idea of things like emotional intelligence and personal intelligence and artistic intelligence. Those are pretty much accepted, except by nitpickers. So in that sense, it's surprising and kind of heartwarming. What I didn't anticipate at all, because I followed computer science and cognitive science very carefully, was that the whole notion of intelligence being just a human feature was very constrained.

1:02:36I learned much, much more about the sorts of things that all kinds of animals, from the tiniest to the largest, can do, and even the kinds of communication that plants can do to members of the species to avoid certain kinds of danger and to encourage other kinds of absorptions. And of course, AI and AGI, anybody who's paying attention to this now, knows that all sorts of things that we thought only human beings can do are being done effortlessly by these computational entities. So in the essay that I'm writing right now, I'm saying, let's stop having human beings being the only definer of intelligence.

1:03:19Let's see what each of these species and each of these entities, what they would value as intelligence. and by implication, what would they think was important but wasn't not intelligence. And I think I'm going to end what I'm writing now by an issue which is even harder than intelligence. What's consciousness? And by the way, that is the question of the ages. I would agree with you. So I love that you came to that because we've been discussing there's intelligences, the large language models can have that, but they can't have consciousness. And so I don't know why this comes to mind, But the feeling of being in knee-deep powder deep in the mountains is a conscious cerebral feeling that I cannot repeat, which is why it's so incredible.

1:04:03And so just the feeling of that or loving my wife is a conscious feeling. And therefore, it's tough to deal with that in a large language model. So I totally agree with you. And by the way, for the record, Dr. Gardner, being the multiple intelligences guy is still a great way to go through life. I have no complaints. I just wish that the world that your children and grandchildren live in and my kids and grandchildren would be a peaceful world. Well, you're talking to the eternal optimist and to quote Winston Churchill, the United States will always do the right thing after exhausting every other avenue.

1:04:42And so we will get there. It's just a question of when. Where can people follow you going forward? You mentioned things you're writing. Do you have a blog? Are you on social media at all? If you go to my website, howardgardner.com, there's something called blogs. I'm an inveterate blogger. I'm blogging all the time. And I think those appear on LinkedIn. But when I have thoughts, I write them out. And if people are interested, they should just go there. And if they have comments, I'll read them. And if I have something to say, I will. And I'm lucky because I'm well into my ninth decade, but I still have some neurons left.

1:05:18You are sprightly, to say the least. So this has just been a ton of fun. I really appreciate you coming on, Howard. Your book, Frames of Mind, reminds me that the human mind is not a single ladder to be climbed, but a landscape and a cornucopia of distinct capacities, each with its own logic, its own development, and its own cultural expression. To recognize this is to expand what it means to be intelligent, to be educated, and like we talked about, between ourselves and in ourselves, human. Our listeners should go out and buy a copy today. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to A Book With Legs.

1:05:57Give us a review. Tell others about the books and great authors like Howard Gardner that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on X. Our handle is at SmeadCap. Thank you for joining us for Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode.

1:06:48Thank you.

1:07:17Thank you.