Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer On The Mind-Body Connection, The Power of Mindfulness, & Why Age Is Nothing But a Mindset

27:51That's just a fancy way of saying being mindful. Being mindful is noticing change. When you're given a diagnosis of some dread disease, the assumption most people have is that it's gonna stay the same or get worse. But nothing goes in only one direction. There are always blips. You know, it's like the stock market, you know, goes up, goes down a little bit, goes up. If it's on a course to go up, you still have moments where it's falling and vice versa if it's going down. And if we paid attention, to when it's better, why is it better now? We'd have a way of controlling it. So we do these studies where we call people at random times of the day and ask them, is that symptom better or worse than before, than the last time we called, for instance, and why?

28:35Now, four things happen when we do that. The first is you start this process where you feel in control. You're doing something to make yourself better. Second, by noticing that now it's a little better, that feels good because you thought, yeah, it was only awful. And there are moments of some relief. Third, by asking yourself why you engage in a mindful search and we have so much data that that mindful search alone is good for your health. Last, that if you believe or look for a cure, I think you're more likely to find one. Now we've done this with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, arthritis, chronic pain, a host of real things, things that are scary for people to have.

29:24And in each case, we get a great improvement. And you can do this yourself, which is how it all started, which is people when they take a placebo, the doctor is wearing a white coat, gives you this nothing, you take it and you get better. Clearly you're doing it yourself. So what do we need the doctor for? And so that's how this attention to variability started. Most people have a smartphone. So you set your smartphone for an hour. In an hour it rings. And you ask yourself, is the symptom better or worse than the last time and why? Men set it for three hours and two hours and 10 minutes. Doesn't matter, just random times in the course of a day over the week, two weeks, whatever.

30:08And that even if you don't get the answer, you're going to end up better for the reasons that I said. Because you are paying mindful attention to what's occurring, which is connecting you more deeply to yourself. And when the neurons are firing, that's literally and figuratively enlivening. It's energizing, which is something that I often fail to remind people of is I think we should be mindful all the time. You say it to people, oh my God, it sounds scary to them unless you're an academic. It's confused with thinking and even thinking has gotten a bad rap, it's not thinking that's hard. It's the worrying that you're not gonna be able to solve whatever the problem is that's hard.

30:51So what we find is that the more mindful you are, the more energized you are. And the way for people to understand that is if they think of doing whatever they enjoy doing, that the only way you can enjoy it is if you're there for it. So it turns out mindfulness is energizing. turns out that it's good for you, turns out that it feels good. And you know that I've been doing this for so long, there's been lots of opportunity to put in all sorts of dependent measures. So it's better for everything. People see it was charismatic. It actually leaves us imprint on the products you produce, your relationships improve, your memory is better, so on and so on.

31:35So for somebody who's new to this idea of mindfulness or have traditionally associated it with a meditation practice, something formal like that. What is the process of getting somebody mindfully engaged? What we have people do is notice new things, three, five, really doesn't matter, but people need a number. So we say notice three new things about things you know. Go home and notice three new things about your spouse. Notice three new things about the lawn, three new things about something at work. And what happens is when you're noticing new things about the things you think you know, you come to see you didn't know them very well.

32:15So your attention naturally goes there. Now, the other way, the top-down way, is to accept that everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So uncertainty is the rule. Most of us have been taught from day one certainties. and those certainties are making us mindless. They make us unaware of all sorts of possibilities for every aspect of our mind. For me, life changed when I was at this horse event. You remember, I'm a straight A student. I'm the newest to also, well, we're the ones people hate. I might've even as a kid memorized what was underneath the pictures.

32:55I mean, that was terrible. Okay, so I know. Now I'm at this horse event. This man asked me if I'll watch his horse for him because he's gonna get his horse a hot dog. I roll my eyes internally so he can't see, important to be nice, and I think he's crazy. Horses don't eat meat, everybody knows, or at least all the A students know that, okay, good. Horses don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that everything changed for me, that everything became possible because all of the things that were preventing that possibility now just crumbled. There are so many ways that they're wrong.

33:36You know, that how many horses were tested in these studies? How much grain was mixed with how much meat? How hungry were the horses? You know, when you're doing a study, these sorts of questions really matter. And they're typically ignored when the results are being reported and reported in magazines.

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37:21From there, it's sort of a short leap to this idea of the illusion of control that we walk around with. Like in addition to these rules and these structures and organizational systems that help us make sense of the world that we kind of adhere to that drive a sense of mindlessness because we can just operate within that context. We have this sense that we are exerting some level of control over our lives and external events while also feeling like we're pretty good at assessing risk when it comes to decision-making. And of course, you know, I disagree with everything. I know, so I'm just lobbing you a softball here.

38:01But there's so much, I don't know which one to hit. All right, well, the first thing is that people hold things still because they think then they'll have greater control over it. If I can say what kind of person you are, now I know you're a whatever, then I can make sure you don't hurt me in that way. That's the evolutionary kind of explanation for why we're wired that way, that's what you're saying? No, no, no, never went there. If I think you're the kind of person who's late, so we're married and I'm gonna make dinner, we'll make it very traditional, though I'm too old for you, but that if I know that you're always late, I adjust myself accordingly, right?

38:46And, but you're not always late. And if I cared more about you and wanted to facilitate things in the relationship, I would pay more attention to when you were and when you weren't, just like the symptoms that we were talking about a moment before. All right, but I hold you still now. You're that kind of person. You're always late. You're always cheap. You're always whatever we call people. And that makes us feel in control. As long as I know how everybody else is, I know how I should be. But because everybody is changing and because sometimes you are this way, sometimes you're not. and even when you're this way, whatever that is, there are other ways of looking at it.

39:28So you're being careful with money, you're not being cheap. When we recognize that, then we actually have more control and the relationship improves. We pigeonhole people. We make comparisons all the time that are mindless as a way I think to exercise control, but since we're so often wrong, we're actually giving up control. I mean, if I see you as a snob, all right, what am I going to do? I'm going to avoid you, right? Why do I want you in my life if you're a snob? If I take that same behavior that looks like you're a snob, you see, he's really shy. You wouldn't expect a tall, handsome man to be shy, but he's shy.

40:11Now, every behavior that was true for you being a snob is also true for you being shy. Once I call you shy, though, I want to embrace you. That kind of speaks to this other idea that you have around transcending judgments and getting to this place of understanding. This is the most important, so funny, because in 45 years of research, and some of them life and death, changing the meaning of aging, big potentially big important things, this is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart, which is behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm gonna be clumsy, inconsiderate, and I'm gonna procrastinate.

40:58So when people are doing things that get on your nerves, what is it from their perspective? Now, so I was doing therapy when I was at Yale. At first it was fun and then I didn't have the patience for it because I wanted to say, you have all of the behaviors you want, just do them. But of course you can't say that to people, just do it. So what was it that was keeping them from doing it? And then I realized that when people are trying to change a behavior, they're not looking at it as the same way as when they're motivated to do the behavior. So, for example, I am scarily gullible. Really, it's very easy to take advantage of me, several have.

41:42So I want to change, you see how gullible I am? It's not good for our relationship. You've gotta change. I keep trying and trying and I'll fail. And the reason I'll fail is that because going forward, I'm being trusting. And I don't wanna stop being trusting. Even if it means sometimes people will take advantage of me. So you are so damn inconsistent, it's really hard to tolerate you. I love your flexibility. I am so impulsive that I need to change, but that's because I value my spontaneity. So we did a study ages ago. We gave people 300 behavior descriptions. And we said, circle those things that you've tried to change about yourself and you have trouble.

42:27Gullible for me, impulsive. Okay, then you turn the page over and in a mixed up order are the positive versions of these. Now circle the things you really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So in other words, with this, you can see how relationships would improve, right? Because now there's no reason to demean you because what you're doing makes sense. I was just mindlessly saying it in a rigid way. There's always a reason for the behavior. And what you're referring to are the values that motivate and underlie the behavior. So trust is a value that is important to you.

43:10and the manifestation of that is gullibility. You can change gullibility and still hold on to trust. Not really. You can set healthy boundaries and do, I think there's ways that you can play with that. No, what you're saying is you can be a little less gullible by being a little less trusting and sure, but the two are the same, it's the same thing. But I think getting to the values that are driving the behavior is the pathway to understanding. and to your point that every behavior is motivated by some reason that makes sense to the person who's perpetrating it, it's this idea of my wife says this all the time, like every man or every woman is right from their perspective.

43:54And if you can understand that and embrace that, I think it allows you to kind of have a little bit more grace and a sense of empathy and understanding. Yeah, I think that because we're brought up mindlessly, which means we seek single explanations for events, that if you see something different from the way I see it, I see it the way I see it, it must be right. Because if it weren't right, I would change it, right? So anything you do that's different from me means that you're wrong. And so we have to open up all of that. And all of that stems from, strangely, I think, a belief that the things that we're after are scarce.

44:31You know, that we both can't be important, happy, full people. There's always this, you know, who's better on which dimension, whether it's, you know, with friends, relationships. And I think we're taught that in the beginning. We're taught that in schools by there being a normal distribution for grades. You know, Harvard had this thing, this was years ago, where we got a printout that compared the grade you gave the student with the grade that student got in other classes. basically saying you shouldn't give that student an A because the student is a B student. And I don't know, I think sometimes I give all A's because they all deserve A's.

45:16Well, it's interesting how rules and institutions and structures drive that sense of a scarcity mindset from the moment we come into the world, right? And we're not even kind of consciously aware of it. And you have a whole chapter on this in the book, this difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset. I came to pass with somebody that I knew who, I'm like a little kid and I went, you know, you wouldn't believe us, I got these sneakers on sale. Okay, big deal, right? You have a lot of energy. I do. And this is your third podcast today. Yeah. So this mindful approach is working for you.

45:49Yeah, no, mindfulness is energy beginning. So I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight because I'm gonna be too energized. Anyway, so I come back and I say, I got these sneakers on sale, excited. my mind, what I'm doing is sharing, right? I got the sneakers, you get the sneakers, I'll tell you where to go. She thought I was bragging and it took me so long to figure out how could I be bragging? But because her mindset was one of scarcity. So if I got them, now there are fewer available for other people. Mine was sneakers can be gotten at this price. Which led to her resentment or jealousy. But how does mindfulness work to disabuse us of a scarcity mindset?

46:37Well, for one thing, you see how things are more abundant. You see how several things can be used in several different ways. You know, we have notions of natural resources. You want more natural resources? Call more things natural. You know, it's, I mean that, you know, seriously. The things that we care about, but people don't know that this is what they care about, are not limited. They're not scarce. As I said a moment before, despite all the normal distributions we set up saying some people should have a lot, some a medium amount and some very little, whether it's talent, beauty, money, health.

47:18The things we care about are not limited. That we can live in a world, you can just forget the world, have a relationship where both of you prosper. It doesn't have to be, here's my domain, where I'm better than you, here's your domain, which is when the good relationships work, tend to be that way. Scarcity isn't unrelated to control issues either, right? Like if you're driven by a scarcity mindset, you wanna kind of control what you have access to, et cetera. And that kind of gets into this idea of future casting and probabilities and how we as human beings think we have a sense of what's gonna come next.

47:59And your whole thing is like, virtually nothing is predictable. This is so hard to communicate to people. People think they can predict all the time, because they're making predictions. And then if I make a prediction that you're going to smile, you see, but I could have kept it. You're a manifestor. I could have left it for three days, right? And at some point you're going to smile. So it's very easy seeing that our predictions are right. We think we can predict because we're so good at post-dicting, looking back. So an example, John and Mary are at a party, they're fighting. And if I said to you, you think they're gonna get divorced?

48:36You say, how do I know? People fight. But if we don't have that conversation, you see them fighting, a month later, two weeks later, doesn't matter, somebody says to you, hey, did you know John and Mary are getting divorced? I knew it. You should have seen them go at each other. And I think that people don't understand that, while you may be able to predict for the group, nobody who knows anything about numbers believes you can predict the individual case. So what does that mean? If I were to say to you, here's a used parking lot, a lot of cars in another parking lot, and here's a Mercedes dealership.

49:10Now you go and we pick 20 cars at random, look at 100 cars, and we just tried them once, chances are more Mercedes are gonna start than the used cars. But I don't know if anybody who'd take the bet for all the money, all the future money you're going to make, and I'll match it, that any Mercedes that we pick at random will start. Because we know things happen. If I am in a foul shooting context with Michael Jordan, whoever's the lead now. I could win if we only shoot one ball. I sometimes get it in, he sometimes misses. If we do many, you know, the difference in our talent will reveal itself. And most of the time what we're doing is making decisions about individual cases.

49:59Now, when you know you can't predict, it throws everything into disarray, but it also makes life easy. Most people get themselves crazed with, should I do this or should I do that? The decision is based on a prediction, right? Should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great, or this, which will be great, which will be greater, I don't know, and so on. When you can't predict, it doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then life actually becomes easy. So my bottom line, rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right. Randomly choose.

50:39Now you can randomly choose if you want an Almond Joy or a Snickers, nobody's gonna care, right? But it's the exact, this is the hard part to swallow. It's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not, getting married or not, taking the job or not. Doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small, you can't know. That's a very confronting idea. Yeah, well, I mean, you can only live one life. If there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids and live a life as somebody has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids, maybe I can make a comparison, but you don't have that available to you.

51:20So I say to my students, so let's say, should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale? So they made a decision to go to Harvard. So let's say it's terrible. They screw up royally and they say, oh, I wish I had gone to Yale. There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse, better, the same. And that's why regret is so mindless, because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming would have been better. And there's no evidence for that. But we have this predisposition to haunt ourselves with these sorts of things, looking retrospectively over our life and wondering what could have been or what should have been, had this or that gone differently.

52:00But you only do that when your present is not happy. But the labels, good, bad, better, worse, are all words and subjective thoughts that we place on top of these things and they become real or emotional experience only by dint of the fact that we've made that decision and labeled them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And mindfulness is a way of putting distance between you and that. Well, the way you put distance between it is by seeing it in a multifaceted way. So here are five ways it's good here, five ways it's bad, I don't have to. What is good or bad? Well, but if you're using that language for yourself, right now we have, if it's good, I have to kill people to do what I can to get it, right?

52:46Stay up all night. I mean, I have to get that thing because it's good. And if it's bad, I have to do everything I can to stay away from it. Now, when you know it's neither good nor bad, I don't have to do anything, whatever. If this podcast is wonderful, that's great. If the podcast turns out the cameras aren't working, it's also great because I can enumerate all the advantage. This is funny. The other day I was told of this very, very large prize. If you can extend life, which is what I've been doing right for the past 45 years. Okay, so somebody - Is this the Peter D. Manis thing? Somebody tells me about this,$100 million.

53:26Okay, so I'm driving by myself, I have an hour drive. So, oh, okay. Now, first to the government, I don't live in that moneyed world, but I'll assume the government wants 50 million. What am I gonna do with the other 50 million? And it's taking me my whole ride home. You're already mad at the IRS for taking away so much money from you. No, I didn't care about that because the 50 million wasn't up from me. And if I give this to you, oh, then you're gonna be upset that I didn't give as much to you. At the end, I was fine not having the money. You created your own like sort of accelerated suffering as a result of trying to experience what that might be like.

54:03So the point is that with everything good, there's a way of constructing it, understanding, construing it so that it's not so good and vice versa. And people need to understand outcomes are in our heads, the value of outcomes. The outcome is nothing. The way you understand it will determine and your emotional response to it. And there, the more mindful you are, the more ways you can look at it, the more choices you actually have. How well do you practice that yourself? I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, I virtually never experienced stress. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I've had some big things happen in my life, major fire that destroyed 80 % of what I own.

54:45My mother died when she was young, these sorts of things. But when the house went up and smoked and I called the insurance agent, came the next day and he said to me in his 25 years on the job, this was the first time that the damage was worse than the call. Oh my God, oh my God is what most people say. And it's nothing, right? Here, it was a lot. But my feeling was I had already lost the stuff. Throwing my sanity away wasn't going to get it back. And I also felt I'm not so attached to things. I love nice things, but I don't need them. You know, so, and those things were all part of my past. As long as you have a rich present, you don't need the mementos from the past.

55:31What I extracted from that story is like the sort of. Golden lining are the benefits of this, where it was like a new kind of understanding of the meaning or importance of material things in your life realizing like, okay, that wasn't so great, but like I'm actually fine. And then going and lecturing without your notes and having a kind of revelatory experience of finding something new and different. Yeah, that one. So I didn't care really about anything that I lost in the fire, except that in a short time from the date of the fire, I had to give a large lecture class and my notes were destroyed.

56:10And so what am I going to do? What am I going to do? So what I ended up doing was calling a student who took the class the year before and I borrowed our notes like a telephone came. And because they were somebody else's notes, even though they were basically copying down from what I had said, I involved myself. I engaged myself in the preparation for each lecture in a way that I hadn't done in a while. The problem PowerPoint slides are wonderful, but once you have it, it's sort of hard to change your thinking about all of it. So here, since I didn't have any of the slides, everything was new.

56:50And I think it was the best class that I had taught. Do you have a formality in the way that you bring mindfulness into your moments and your hours and your days? Or is it now just a muscle memory where? It's none of those things. I mean, I think that it's the way I do everything. It's sort of up and out, you know, in some sense. A lot of people ask about my doing a study, has the study changed my life? The results of the study surprised me or whatever. And I don't know if I do this backwards, different from other people. But for me, I do something and I notice the doing of it. And then I say, well, do other people do this?

57:32and if not, why not? And then I set up the study. So I already have evidence. I don't have evidence that it's going to be broadly done, but at least evidence that at least I do it. It feels like a natural inclination that you have as a result of this, that you can kind of see things through a unique different lens that other people don't see. And that energizes your imagination. It's not that I see it the way you see it and I see it the way I see it. And that many times I'm oblivious to the fact that you're seeing it differently. And it's only then talking about it. I remember, and even because that was, had a lot of memoir stuff in it, that when I was an undergraduate and I had been helping this professor with something and I came up with something that she didn't come up with, which is gonna happen, but she then decided it was because I was creative, which was never a label I had for myself.

58:29Those were the people, the kids who could draw or who were in band. So now I'm creative. Then almost at the same time, I had written a program text for a paper, a final paper in a class. And the teacher wrote back, got my A's. I wrote back, I have such chutzpah. Well, it's Yiddish, it means you're able to go out there, break the rules and do whatever. And I wish I never saw myself that. Now I had double permission, creative chutzpah, telling me that I can break out of a structure that is stifling for people. I wanna get back to this idea of how much agency and power and control we unknowingly kind of yield over the wellbeing of our bodies and our minds, not to be dualistic about it.

59:24But I think a good way to kind of elaborate on that is some of the work you've done around aging and belief. And in particular, maybe, you know, start with the counterclockwise study. Yeah, well, the counterclockwise study was the first test of the mind-body unity hypothesis. Again, mind and body, if it's one thing, wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily going to put the body. So we have a host of studies, we would put the mind in strange places and take our measurements. In this case, what we did was to retrofit, a retreat to seem to be 20 years earlier. And we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves.

1:00:06So they would be talking in the present tense about things that had passed, the books, all of the props, the TV shows that we showed. Everything said this was 20 years earlier. The comparison group stayed in the same retreat, not at the same time. and talked about the same thing, except they were talking about it in the past tense. And it was clear that now is now and then was then, where those emerged for the first group. And their results were big, I think, that in this period of one week, these are men in their late 70s, 80s, and that was, you know, 20, 1979. So lots of years ago when 80 was probably like 100.

1:00:58Yeah, it was different. Yeah, anyway, so without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. In a one week. One week. And you were measuring all these biomarkers. Yeah, yeah. Well, the funny thing is before I started this and I was trying to get the measures together, I called all the geriatricians that I could think to call. And I said, okay, if I have a 50 year old man in one room and a 75 year old man in the other, what measure do you want me to give you so you'll know who's who? They couldn't come up with anything.

1:01:37You know, so whatever that means. So what do you extrapolate from that finding? Most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds. that we see with old people, I experience it myself, I forget something, oh my goodness, am I becoming demented? And for me, it's odd, I mean, I teach undergraduates, they don't get 100 on the test, they forget also. The thing is that they don't worry about forgetting. As we get older, we stop ourselves, we presume we can't do things, so we don't do them. And by removing that, that all sorts of possibilities present themselves. You know, that you can do the same things you did before, maybe it's better to do them differently.

1:02:25You know, I'm thinking about when I played tennis with these young kids and I was playing very differently from them. They were 16 year old boys, full of energy, running all over them, but I knew the game. And I knew if they're standing there, the ball's gonna come here. They're standing, the ball's gonna go there. I don't have to be racing around quite as much as they did. And so if you assume that as you get older, you become wiser, you should change some of your behavior. But if you're not aware of changing your behavior because of these positive things, we tend to always make negative explanations for why we've changed.

1:03:01It's always based on you can't. And I don't think that there's any, we can never prove that we can't, which people don't seem to understand. And trying is the whole ball game, which this is the piece that, I don't know how this came about, but this massive misunderstanding where people think they want complete success, not knowing that if they had complete success, life would be empty. So an example I'm fond of using, you play golf. If you got a hole in one, every time you swung the club, there'd be no game, right? You know, an example I used earlier today, you're in the elevator, you're a little kid, you try to reach that button, you can't, you can't, your father picks you up, you press the button, wowee wow.

1:03:44Then you get a little, you still can't. Now, finally, you're tall enough, you press the button. Tell me how many times you've been in an elevator where you were excited about press. So once we can do it, it's no longer meaningful to us. Right, I got you. But what I do do is I always press the door close button. Oh, me too, even if it doesn't work. And I know it doesn't do anything. And I know you've written about this as well, but I still do it every time. Yeah, me too. In reflecting on the counterclockwise study, I can't help but wonder if part of it is the sense of hopefulness. Like the idea that you're younger, there's a future that's unwritten that lies ahead, that kind of drives a sense of youthfulness, as opposed to the person who is sitting in their older years and looking in the rear view mirror where life is about memory and the sense of possibility for the future seems much more curtailed.

1:04:38That's what people say. my own feeling is that if we're both here now, we're in the same now. And that, it's nice for you to decide in 10 years you wanna do X, but it would be stupid, mindless, if you really had a commitment because you don't know what you're going to wanna do in 10 years. So I don't think most of us, when I was younger, I didn't spend that kind of time I'm thinking about the future. People say that, but at least for me, it wasn't true. So, do people ask you what your five-year plan is or your 10-year plan? I tell you, it's worse than that. I was in Australia and I gave a talk and there were several people giving talks.

1:05:23Then the person who organized this had us all come out on the stage and surprised us and asked, what is your bucket list? Which is the same sort of question, right? About the future, what is it? And so each person, big shots, give their bucket list. she comes to me and I don't have a bucket list. First, I felt bad I didn't have a bucket list if everybody has a bucket list. And then I said, wait a second, if I don't have a bucket list, it's good that I don't have a bucket list, why? And then I realized, you can't make the moment more full than when it's full. And so, it'd be nice if I were unhappy here now, I might long to be in Paris again, not having the pancreas, but just being in Paris.

1:06:05If I am filled up while I'm here, mindfully engaged, enjoying myself, I don't need to be any place else. That's a beautiful way to think about that. But it's the same thing with looking in the past or looking for the future. Yeah, if you're fully present for what is happening right now, that sense of yearning for something better over the horizon isn't nagging on your soul.

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1:08:10We've all had that experience of looking at photographs from a bygone generation. What does a 60-year-old look like in 1880 or 1920? and then looking at photographs of people today at the same age. And it's very clear that we have a different relationship with aging, like people do look younger now. And I have to believe that that's because we have a different sensibility around what it means to be a certain age. There's some crazy illustrations of this same thing in the work that you've done. Like in the studies that you talk about in your book, like I think one of the ones that stuck out the most for me is the ones that you did with the diabetics around perception of time and perception of sugar intake.

1:08:57Yeah, so we have people come in who are type two diabetes and we give them all sorts of tests and then we sit them down at a computer and the reason for what I'm gonna say next will become clear at the end of the sentence. So we're gonna have them play computer games and we tell them, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. That's to ensure that they'll look at the clock that's by the computer. The clock is rigged, but they don't know it. So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time.

1:09:35Most people would assume that blood sugar level will follow real time. What's the difference with what the clock says? Our hypothesis, which was confirmed, was that blood sugar level will follow perceived time, clock time. Now, it's the same thing we did with people in a sleep lab. They go to sleep, we change the clock, so they think they got more sleep than they actually got, less sleep or the amount of sleep. Cognitive and behavior functions seem to follow perceived amount of sleep. And this is also relevant to a larger thing, I don't know if we talk about fatigue. So fatigue is largely a psychological construct.

1:10:15As an athlete, this is really fascinating. Yeah, I mean, you know, but people believe that the body is such and if you don't do your weights and build yourself, you know, you're gonna peter out. That's all there is to it. Now, you know, the more mindful I get over time now, the more animated. But so the first thing we do is I give people, I ask people to do jumping jacks, simple, very simple study to start. Do 100 jumping jacks, tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 70. We have another group do 200 jumping jacks. Tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 140. Then we have many of these sorts of things.

1:10:50Now, I say to my class, how far is it humanly possible to run? These are smart kids. They know the marathon is 26 miles. They know I wouldn't ask the question if the answer were 26. So they start guessing, and it becomes like an auction. 28, 30, 35. No one ever goes beyond 50. Whoever says 50, everybody groans, right? Impossible. Then I play a video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's a video of the Tarayumara, a tribe that lives in Copper Canyon, Mexico. I had the author of Born to Run here. Okay, there you go. These people can run 200 miles without stopping. Now, to my mind, the difference between those who can run, I haven't, not that I can't, but I've never run five miles.

1:11:39The difference between, let's just say, 26 and 200, metaphorically, is the difference I'm saying between what we think we can control now and what we actually can control and maybe beyond. That we're nowhere near living the lives that we could live and to go back to what you're saying about language, all our language conspires against us, seeing we make a little progress and we think that's the end. You know, I was thinking today about another thing. I don't know if it's the medical world. I don't know who to blame for this, but that as soon as you take people, we have people who can remember lots and we call them super memories and super tasters and super whatever, making it as if that's a closed category that the rest of us can't get into rather than that it's on a continuum and these people do it a little better and so maybe we can proceed in the same way.

1:12:38And I believe that any category where you have a super is something available to all of us. That's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time, I love it. And I got a new video you're gonna wanna show your class because we had a guy in here the other day who ran 450 miles. Oh wow, yeah, I have to see that. 200 ain't nothing anymore. Yeah, so that's incredible. But to take these videos, the other thing, did we talk about piano stairs? No. Okay, so one thing that people have to understand. So when I say you wanna be mindful all the time, you see from the way I am now, mindfulness is energy beginning.

1:13:16Mindfulness is the way you are when you're having fun. So these people, I think Scandinavia, I'd say Sweden, turns out, I didn't know this, then subways all over the world, they're the same. You have an escalator and you have stairs and all over the world, everybody is taking the escalator. The random athlete like you will run up the stairs, the young boy up the stairs. Now what they do, they lay down a piano keys on the stairs. So it actually makes noise. Do, do, do. Now in almost no time, everybody takes the stairs because it's fun. And what I say to my students is, why do you have to wait for someone to put the keyboard down there?

1:13:59You can do this in your mind. is like just do, do, do, you know, whatever. Everything can be made to be fun. And the world has taught us quite the contrary. You're not supposed to have fun at work. So you have work versus play. Studying is hard. Learning is college is hard. All of these things. Yeah. And it all keeps people in place and it's not a good place to be kept. Framing. This is something you did with the chambermaid study as well. Like, is it work or is it exercise? Yeah. First thing that was interesting, We take these chambermaids and we ask them how much exercise they get. This was surprising to me.

1:14:36Because these women, all they're doing is exercising all day long, but they don't think they do exercise. Because to them, exercise, according to the surgeon general, is what you do after work. So for those who sit in a desk all day long, they're not really exercising, is when they go to the gym afterwards. Okay, so now, imagine we didn't do this, but those who exercise, the chambermaids are exercising, should be healthier than socioeconomically equivalent people who are not exercising. But they're not. So what we do, very simple study, we take the chambermaids, divide them into two groups in one group, we just teach them.

1:15:19Do you know your work is exercise? Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, sweeping is... Okay, so all we've done is change their minds from not realizing their work was exercise to seeing that their work is exercise. We took lots of measures to start. When the study is over, we wanna find out, is she working any harder, expending any more energy? Even this, no. Are they eating any differently? Those who see it as exercise, no differences. Nevertheless, those who now see their work as exercise, we get they lost weight, a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index and their blood pressure came down.

1:16:00And the control group, no change in the other group. It's so crazy. Now it's interesting, but you know, let's talk about mindlessness that when I give these findings, I could just say they lost weight, but doesn't it have more of a scientific heft when I say there was a change in body mass index and waist to hip ratio. And how are these results received by your colleagues? Oh, you know, the people in the world love it because now they can see themselves as exercising and losing weight without, you know, exerting more energy. You know what Mark Twain, I'll get to the question if I remember it. Mark Twain said about exercise, No.

1:16:40Sad, you'll hate it. He said, every time the urge to exercise comes over me, I know if I just sit still for a moment, it'll pass. Right. Well, what if you just sat down and imagined yourself exercising or tried to visualize or experience what it feels like to be fatigued from exerting yourself? Your imagination is far, far more powerful than most people believe. There are studies by others of people who are flexing their muscles and that imagined versus real. and the outcome is basically the same. Imagine exercise. That's a hard one to believe. It's not mine, so I don't care if you believe it or not.

1:17:23But to go back to the question, what are people's responses to my work? The people who hate it or whatever, don't come to me, so I don't know. And I think that I've been in the field for so long that I think that people assume that it's true. When we think of placebos, we think of the sugar pill or the capsule that we're given that we're either told or not told is a medication or not. But placebo is actually a much broader concept. It's an expectation and our expectations control our behavior in ways that we're not aware of. A simple example, most people have used the Snelly night chart to see your vision.

1:18:12And this whole thing is so remarkable to me that people buy this. You look at letters that make no sense in a doctor's office, which is necessarily stressful for so many people. And the doctor gives you a number and you see that's the way you see, it wouldn't occur to me. I just did that like two weeks ago. Okay, and I see you wearing glasses. Okay. I've worn them my whole life though. Then I started to feel bad about it. I don't want you to feel bad about it, but we have remedies. Anyway, so, you know, I look at this chart and we've agreed implicitly that I'm bizarre. And when I say the eye chart, I don't see it the way other people see it, I think, if they think anything.

1:18:51I see it as, this is a setup. The letters are getting progressively smaller, which is leading me to expect not to be able to see. So we come up with a different eye chart, where now the letters get progressively larger, creating a different expectation. Now the expectation is soon I will be able to see. And what happens is that people can see what they couldn't see before. One more expectation study. Most people assume when you get two thirds of the way down the eye chart, you're gonna have trouble seeing it. What we did was we took the original eye chart. We just took the bottom two thirds. So you don't need those big letters anyway.

1:19:33Two thirds of the way down there are much smaller letters than on the original, but they both occurring in the same place, right? Two thirds of the way down. And again, people saw what they couldn't see before. You also did this study with pilots, fighter pilots. Yeah, they're different variations on the same thing that if you believe you can, then all of the things that prevent you from doing whatever it is are eliminated. Pilots are saying to have excellent vision. So what we do, we put people, we test their vision, we put them in pilot uniforms, we have them go into a flight simulator. Have you ever been in a flight?

1:20:13It's very real. There's an oncoming plane and we want them to read a very small set of letters that was taken from the eye chart on that oncoming plane. When they're pilots, they can see it. And the ones that were in the control group who were told the simulator was broken. They had to simulate everything. They didn't score as high. You know, I mean, if you had trouble doing something and I had you put on an outfit of Superman, okay. You know, so you see yourself, I think you would be able to lift more weight. If you were Einstein, you know, I have people because they think that I am less afraid than they with certain things.

1:20:58So if they have to go into fighting with a waiter or somebody, employer, they pretend that they're me. That's fine, but I believe I can sing. If you saw me, not saw me, but heard me in the shower and when I'm being Maria Callas or Barbra Streisand, I get a lot of notes, but it's me, right? They're not there. So I think that we all, not all, but many of us tend to underestimate our abilities And so some of these studies just sort of free us from whatever is holding us back. It's very encouraging and empowering to understand that, you know, belief can drive better outcomes for ourselves. And if we can get to a place of, you know, disabusing ourselves of all the assumptions that we make about how things work and don't work and what our limits are for somebody who's watching or listening to this, who's saying, well, that's great.

1:21:57And that's super entertaining to hear that. but like how do I begin to construct my version of this? We already said that if you take on the assumption by the assumption that everything is uncertain, there's a way that you naturally approach things more mindfully, but if you take any explanation, if you have children and they ask you a question, don't answer it with a single answer, answer it with multiple answers, answer it with answers that then take those answers and show how, gee, these are negatives, even though they seem positive and vice versa. Just open everything up and it will all happen naturally.

1:22:33The other, in a more mundane way, that most people are stressed most of the time. That stress means that they're making predictions about things that can't be predicted. And they're oblivious to the fact that they're in charge of their experience of that. So think of the things you were scared of in the past and how did it turn out? It almost always turns out fine. So going forward, you don't have to be so afraid. Well, anything you worry about, it either doesn't happen, which means that was a waste of energy and time, or if it does happen, it happened. And there was no reason worrying about all that time that you wasted worrying about before it happened.

1:23:18That's the main thing there. So there are people who I wrote about this, I think it might even in the book, about defensive pessimism. And some people, so you have people like me who are clearly optimistic, but everybody thinks that they're realistic, right? I don't think that I'm thinking positive, but deep down I know it's negative. This is the way it is. And the negative person is not being negative. This is the way they experience the world. But defensive pessimism is basically the idea that what you should do is hope for the best, but expect the worst. Okay, now that would be fine if the world existed independent of human presence where you could actually count things without influencing them.

1:24:05That if you are expecting the worst, you're gonna see the worst. And if you're gonna see the worst, it's going to have a very different effect on you. And that the alternative is to see the best. You know that if you worried this, I wrote this for people at school about worried about being COVID. And that worrying about COVID is only making you weaker. Should you have to deal with COVID? What you need to do is develop a plan at the time. So it was, okay, I'm gonna wear a mask, I'm gonna wash my hands. Okay. And I'm gonna stay away from people who are coughing in my face. Now I have a plan. Now I'm just going to live my life.

1:24:46Now, if it turns out, if instead of this, you worry about getting COVID, your stress, as we said many times now, is very bad for your health and you may get it or not get it. So you start off, you're doing these things, you can get it or you cannot get it. If you don't get it, as you've said, you've wasted all this time. If you get it, all that time you've spent worrying makes you less able to handle it. Right, because the stress and anxiety - It's not six of one, half a dozen of the other. People keep thinking that, you know, glass half full is not the same thing as half empty. If you see it as half empty, you spend your time being thirsty, worrying about where you're gonna get your next glass of water or whatever the martini, whatever is in the glass.

1:25:32And being in the presence of somebody who is so beautifully and eloquently mindful and practicing, you know, this idea and kind of exuding the sensibility is actually contagious. Yeah, we have studies on contagion, but let me tell you that there are times I'm mindless. My response to my being mindless is probably different from your response to your being mindless. When I'm mindless, I say, yes, I'm right. It's out there. I mean, I've been studying this, caring about this for 45 years or more. And still there are moments where I do something mindlessly. But the more mindful you are, I suspect, the more questions arise and the more uncertainty becomes apparent because things aren't as they seem, the more you're paying attention.

1:26:22Exactly, exactly. Now, the way it's contagious, there are several ways. The first is that when you're mindful, you tend to be more charismatic. And so people are giving you more attention, more positive regard. And that allows you to feel better and then to be even more mindful. But if I'm mindful, there's a way when I'm talking to, let's say you are usually hiding what you're feeling or whatever may be the case, you feel safe. And if you feel safe, then you're going to be more mindful because it's better. Okay, it just leads to all sorts of good outcomes. So that's one thing. Another is that it actually seems, this is wild, to be in the air.

1:27:11So what do I mean? This is a study we did with meditators, actually. So we have meditators meditating in a room. They leave. Now the participants come, and we give them tests, cognitive tests, memory and things like that. Or there's no one in the room, and the participants go into the room taking the same tests. When people had just finished meditating, the participants perform better than in the empty room. Somehow it's in the air. Now, I make clear that these studies and the others like them are at the end of the book, you know, with enough disclaimers, you know, I'm just telling you what I found.

1:27:56I'm not telling you what you have to believe. That's fucking crazy. But the idea being that there's a residual like vibration, they meditate, they leave, there's some energy force in that room that is influencing the test takers. Yeah, next time we do the study, if there ever is, we should have a fan. So whatever is there, blows it out and then you shouldn't get it. So you have meditators. Is it waves or is it particles? We're going quantum here, right? Yeah, like. But the more, the less crazy, not crazy, but different are things like with autism. So now I think another thing that you can pull out of my philosophy of life, if it is a philosophy, is that every group that is diminished in some way probably has some asset that's being overlooked.

1:28:50And so I thought, you know, I don't know anybody autistic. So this is purely most of the things that I come up with come from experience. This is just derived. What if most people are mindless and if mindlessness is off-putting, which it is, I have other data, where you're interacting with a mindful or a mindless experimenter and just it's uncomfortable when the person is not there. And we have expressions like the lights on, but nobody's home to acknowledge that when someone's not there, you don't like being with them. Okay, what if the kid or adult who is autistic is hypersensitive to other people's consciousness, more aware that in that regard, that means that if you're mindless, it's gonna have a bigger negative effect on me.

1:29:44So what we do is we take autistic kids and we have them interact with adults being mindful or mindless. And when the adults are mindful, the kids are just like, well, the other kids. I don't know. Another example of that is - But the point being that that disabuses the idea that autism is about like an incapacity for emotional intelligence. Yeah, exactly. It speaks to the opposite of that. But I'm not, you know, this is one study, one brief thought. I'm not suggesting that now I'm an expert on autism or that this explains everything, but it'll end up, I think a piece of the puzzle down the road.

1:30:24But the other study, so there are people who drink a lot. Yeah. Now, nobody, okay. Well, once upon a time, Ellen. Okay, but so nobody drinks to hurt their liver. That's the first thing. So when you tell people you have to stop drinking because of these things, again, it's what I was saying before, the behavior makes sense going forward or else people wouldn't do it. I'm gonna mix and match 20 different things here. Another way of helping people have a drinking problem is keep a diary. This is attention to symptom variability. Make a column, you know, columns where you're going to note different times of the day.

1:31:01Did you have a drink? Yes or no. Did you want to drink? Yes or no. And you do this even for the course of just a week. You're going to see there are times you didn't drink when you wanted to drink. You're going to see there are times you drank when you didn't want to. And all of a sudden, despite what people argue, shows you that you have some control over your drinking. And then the decision to stop or whatever is much easier to make than make you feel that you're just low down, whatever. People who drink, if I said to you that here's John, John gets stressed and when he gets stressed, he does X and then he's unstressed.

1:31:48There's nothing irrational about that, is it? So now we put in, he takes a drink, or too many drinks. All right, so I think that many of the people who are serious heavy drinkers are extra sensitive to other people's consciousness, just like the autistic person, and that drink is to settle them down. So now we run a study, it's a wine tasting study, and you can drink as much as you want. All we wanna know, you believe, is your view of the wine. The experimenter who's blind to the whole study idea, but the experimenter is mindful or mindless. Well, it turns out when that experimenter is mindless, you drink more.

1:32:38I really like that study and this note. Like I do believe that there is something to the hypersensitivity of the alcoholic or the drug addict. And I'm somebody who's been in recovery for a long time. And I think that sensitivity makes the world kind of a scary or uncertain place. And a coping mechanism is drugs or alcohol or whatever. Which is not irrational. Right, it's a survival mechanism to reduce anxiety and stress and kind of eradicate that uncomfortable feeling that you have. And we all know addicts or normal people, whatever, when you go into a room and there's somebody on the other side of the room who you don't know and you know immediately whether that person is safe or unsafe, like you can feel that energy.

1:33:33And I think there is this idea that perhaps some people are more sensitive to that than others. And that leads them towards behaviors that are not in their best interest, but energy is real. Like, we all have had those experiences or we walk into a room in a house that we've never been in before and we feel something. Yeah, well, that's what I was trying to capture, but it is still a little woo-woo. When I first wrote the book, the chapter was called the woo-woo chapter. You know, say, look, it was, I had an experience that I took out several of these. Your editors were like, this is too much.

1:34:09Yeah, but this one, I'm gonna tell you because I don't understand it, but it happened. So I had just gotten back from Japan and I'm having dinner and we're talking about let's go someplace. And so my partner says, well, it's too expensive now, which is self silly because somebody is always paying for these trips, but somehow we still managed to spend too much money. Okay, where should we go if we go? And we can't remember the name of the place. At that time, it felt very exotic. Then we remember Kuala Lumpur. Okay, she says, we can't go because it's too expensive. I say, maybe I could get the Harvard Club to pay for it.

1:34:53Now, this was insane. I never had any interaction in my life with any Harvard Club. I don't know what I'm talking about. the next day I get an invitation to Kuala Lumpur from the Harvard club of Kuala Lumpur. Now I've had conversation after conversation, this is a long time ago with statisticians, we'll be very nice to each other and all of a sudden they walk away from me. I just wanna understand it. How do you understand it? What do you make of that? I don't, first I thought, I wonder, did I have a sense where I'm picking up things or am I putting them out there? You know, because you can't tell from that experience, right?

1:35:38That if I'm picking it up, so the mail is coming, you know, the Kuala Lumpur and, you know, I don't know. All I know is that we know so little about the things we think we know that if we only recognize that, these sorts of phenomenon wouldn't seem outlandish, necessarily wrong from the start. I mean, so I turn on the television and I'm watching people in New York. How could that be? I mean, and I can give some electrical, electronic, I don't really understand it. And most of the science explanations that we have are just naming things. And when you go up a level of analysis in the name, it's like you understand that you go down a level, but it's really, So, you know, when I realize I don't know that, then my not knowing something else, I don't know it, but I accept it, makes it easier for me to accept other things like this.

1:36:40So when you turn on the TV and it's not New York, but it's a congressional hearing around UFOs, what's going on in your mind? You know, I think that, you know, what do we mean by a UFO? There's so many unidentified objects that I don't know. I know that I don't take a hard line about anything not being true. I just don't know. But I also am not going to put myself out there and argue that it is true. I don't have a position one way or the other. But people do have strong positions about some of the things that we're talking about. And they say it's impossible. And I think that we just lose an awful lot by that view.

1:37:29So to me, everything is possible. Everything is potentially interesting. Life is fun. And if we could all inhabit a level of mindfulness that you speak about in your work and in your writings, we have a chance at approaching this mindful utopia. that you talk about. So yeah, so this was a tease. At some point I'm going to write the book about mindful utopia because I, so my goal in life, right now, life, the world is vertical. You have people like us who are near the top and people are ordered, you're not so good, you're okay, and so on. And I find that offensive and I want to take the vertical and make it horizontal.

1:38:19that none of us are better than, you know, when I say to somebody that I don't think anybody is better than I am, she am modest, but I don't think I'm better than anybody else. You know, there's a different way of understanding how we might be living. And so I wrote this little song for my grandkids and I was just talking about this earlier today. Actually, I almost sang it. I'm not going to sing it for you, but it says it all. Everybody doesn't know something. Everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something. Everyone can do something else. Now, it's hard in two minutes to get the full feeling of that, but I'm in the car.

1:39:04The kids are five years old, twins. One of them starts whistling. I say, Theo, you're such a good whistler. The other one says, Grandma Elle, when Theo was learning how to whistle, I was learning something else. You know, it just seemed to me perfect. So he doesn't have to feel bad that he can't whistle. He doesn't have to feel one down. He doesn't have to compete with his brother. There's no scarcity. There's no competition. There's something for everybody. And the world is infinitely abundant. Yeah. Everyone doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else.

1:39:43When I start, I have a little video where I start and I say, I can sing, but I like singing. Why shouldn't I sing? There are lots of things I can do. And then we break into the little ditty. I don't know, it could be simple-minded. I think it's rather profound. Okay, because that's the world that I see that we could be living in. I don't see that there's anything that really prevents us from getting there, except that a whole lot of mindlessness. Well, along this continuum on the evolution of consciousness, like where do we currently reside? Where would you like to see us going? And I know that your predictions are not your bag, but we're heading into kind of a tricky year.

1:40:34And I am interested in the concept of elevating conscious awareness? Yeah, I think, as you said, I don't have to predict because we can predict and this one in particular, we can predict. It's a very strange time, but there'll be a lot of good things that come from it. And I think we're in the midst of an evolution in consciousness. And it can only be good. I think some of the stuff with AI, which I don't claim to be an expert on, You know, people just keep finding things to worry about. AI is a tool and it'll help us. I remember years and years ago, I came out of a movie in New York. Neither of those are necessary to tell you for the story, but, and this person wanted me to sign a petition because he felt that VR videos, what are they called?

1:41:31The cassettes. Virtual reality, oh, VCRs? No, VCRs. We're going to put movies out of business. And they were threatened. There's always somebody threatened, but that's also what leads us to progress in many ways. So there'll be that. I think that if AI is able to help take over lots of jobs that will free people to be more innovative, creative or mindful in my terms. Once you start paying attention, you can take all that I've said and use it to reform almost everything. Yeah, there's infinite applications. Yeah, so for hospitals, hospitals I don't think have changed in important ways since they were created.

1:42:16And that it seems to me insane, if I may borrow a term from my field, that here's a place that you go into and are stressed when you enter it, just as I said with taking the eye test and you're going there to be healed. You know, there's no reason that hospitals can't be more spa-like. There's no reason that we have very high burnout in the medical profession. And burnout is a function of being mindless. So if the nurses were taught to look for the smaller changes in people, it would actually help their health. People, when I'm mindfully engaged with you, you feel seen. Everybody prospers. So it's a way of making everybody in the organization more mindful.

1:43:07There's no reason, we have washing machines. We don't need to have so much white. There are so many changes. People, we know that social support is really important for people's health. Yet in hospitals, everybody is kept separate and so on. So I have a list of these. If I constructed the mindful hospital, If I constructed the mindful organization, it would also share, you know, have many differences. You're gonna love this. So I was reading this part of the book, which is at the end of the book this morning, sitting in a waiting room at a diagnostics lab down the street here, because I was getting my blood drawn for a blood test.

1:43:50And I'm reading about the mindful hospital and all the like everything that you just described. And I looked up and took a mindful assessment of my environment and I was in this waiting room and there were some people who were like staring at their feet, the walls were peeling, the wallpaper was peeling off the walls. There was a like bulletproof glass window that was sort of opaque and there was no human being behind it, except there was a little sign on it that said, please don't bring firearms in here. And then there was an iPad where you could check in. And I literally felt like I was in a room waiting to meet with my parole officer or something.

1:44:33It was the most dispiriting, dystopic, like environment where you're going to, into this room to kind of be vulnerable and have like this procedure done, etc. It's a clinic, it's not a doctor's office, but the point remains, like, there's a lot of room for improvement here. Yeah, I had many years ago had to go to court. I think I was taking out a restraining order. I don't remember what it was. It was a restraining order. There's probably a good story behind that. Well, no, it's a boring story, but the point is it was all fixed in some sense. The person who took me there, everything was wired in some sense.

1:45:13I hadn't done anything. It was, I was on the accusing end. and being a public speaker for so long, all of this, right? At Harvard, Lofton University, I go into this courthouse to make this request for, and I felt scared. I already had the answer. And I look at these other people, and I thought it's criminal to borrow a term. You know, that I think that the way we've constructed so many environments is a way of again, instantiating the status quo, keep people in place. Have you had hospital administrators or any healthcare executives approach you as a result of? Well, I haven't had this out there, the book came out in September.

1:46:01This one thing I was talking with people in China about doing a mindful hospital. I don't know if that'll happen. And it's interesting to me because I have mindful schools that are vastly different from our current schools. And they're people from India and Canada, nobody in the United States. It's out there, it's out there. Whether I lead it or somebody else, it will have an effect, it can't help but. It's pretty cool. I mean, if you just got one up on its feet and then you could study it and then you have a test case. I know it's one of those things where it's a fabulous bet that I just can't imagine that the mindful hospital or the mindful school wouldn't be successful.

1:46:51It almost can't be as bad as things are now. Yeah, it's not good. No, I mean, when you think about school, you have the kids who get D's and F's, they become our killers or whatever, right? You know, nobody's letting you think well of yourself. you have to make a reputation some way. The kids who get B's and C's, they are average, who wants to be average? But then you take those of us who get A's. Now, we don't know how we got the A. Everybody expects us to get A's. We don't know if we're gonna continue. It's stressful, nobody wins. Also, you're being evaluated on an irrelevant metric, which is your ability to memorize stuff and take tests.

1:47:30Yes, I mean, it's totally insane. It's also the case that the tests are designed to find what you don't know. Everybody knows something. You know, when I give a test, tell me what you do know. What does it mean that there's, who decided that this thing that you don't know is so important that you can't pass the course without knowing it, it's ridiculous. So if you found yourself - As a teacher, yes. If I found myself teaching, my exams would be different. Right, well, I was gonna broaden that. If you woke up and you were the secretary of education or maybe you were the new surgeon general and you have this agenda to roll out the mindful hospitals and a re-imagination of education, like you could wave your wand, what does it look like?

1:48:16Oh, I mean, I've written about such, you know, the hospital would get an inclination from here. And, you know, the mindful school, everything about school now is mindless. you know, the looking for single right answers to things, giving teaching information in an absolute way, horses don't eat meat, one in one is two. You know, you can change the content to make it more sophisticated, but it's the same idea that doesn't lead you to look more broadly at things, but rather, you know, close, helps you close your mind. So in the mindful school, one of the things that we were going to do, And I can't do all of these things at once.

1:48:59And I say yes to everything, because everything is exciting. So that's why none of this gets done. But I would find if somebody wanted to do this, could afford to do this, this would be more interesting to me than the secretary of education, or you said health, whatever. Surgeon general. Surgeon general. Yeah, no, I would like to just be able to do it. And so what I wanted to do was to build the school with the building itself is upside down. So everything about it says, this is different. And, you know. There should be some Silicon Valley person who's up for that. If they call me, I'm happy to listen.

1:49:42Well, hopefully you'll get a call. Your class must be very popular at Harvard. Is it very hard to get into? Is there like a long waiting list? No, no, no, no, no. You have to decide early on. And then they petition and they petition and they plead. You get letters slid under the door of your office and stuff. I almost always say yes. So I don't know how long I'm gonna be teaching this particular class. And I already told people at Harvard that I want it open to everyone. And right now you have to have certain requirements, which you don't really have to have. So that'd be my last hurrah. Well, I'd like to come and take it.

1:50:27Does that mean I can come and take it? Yeah, I would like it to. You're an absolute delight and an inspiration. This was really fun. Thank you. I've enjoyed it too. Your work is really important. It's revelatory. We are in an evolution of consciousness or perhaps even a war of consciousness that implies a duality, I don't know. But I think the way in which you address these topics from your lived experience and all these experiments that you've done is really, it's fun, like reading your book is fun and also mind blowing in many ways. So I encourage everybody to pick it up if you haven't already in the mindful body.

1:51:07And will you come and talk to me again sometime? Oh, I would love to. This is great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Cheers.

1:51:19That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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1:52:41portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis appreciate the love, love the support see you back here soon peace, plants namaste

1:53:12Thank you.