Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind

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“Use your head.” That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But what if the brain isn’t the end all, be all of thought, and what if the extended mind were much more important? In this episode, Barry Kibrick gets into a thought-provoking conversation with acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Annie discusses the existence of the extended mind, talks about channels of communication and enteroception, or gut feels. Challenge the way you think with this exciting episode.

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Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind

Thinking Outside Your Brain

“Use your head,” that's what we tell ourselves when facing tricky problems or a difficult project. What we need to do, according to the acclaimed science writer, Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside of our brain. In her book, The Extended Mind, she delves into the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability. She mines the secret history of how artists, scientists and authors employ mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries and create new works. She explains how we can incorporate outside-the-brain thinking into our everyday lives. I want to give special thanks to my patrons who make this show possible. If you enjoy reading, please subscribe and visit my website, BarryKibrick.com, to become a supporter of the show.

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Annie, welcome to the show. I saw your book written up in The Wall Street Journal and The Extended Mind is what it's called. From the review alone, I was in sync with the material. I had to invite you on. Thank you for joining me.

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

That’s nice to know, Barry. I'm glad to be here with you.

As you say, “The future lies in thinking outside of the brain.” It is something I've always believed in but I've never seen it well articulated and researched as you did. Let's dive deep into why most of the future and wisdom lies in thinking outside of our brain.

Maybe we can help your readers understand what I mean when I use that phrase and what is meant by the phrase, “The extended mind,” which was a term coined by two philosophers, Andy Clarke and David Chalmers. What they meant by that is that they pose the question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” The customary answer to that is the skull and then everything outside it is outside the mind. They said, “No. The mind is spread across our bodies, below the neck and across the physical spaces that we occupy. It extends even into the interactions we have with other people.”

The brain is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to thinking. We think outside the brain in the sense that we pull in all these external resources, the body, physical spaces, other people, also our tools and devices into our thinking process. That can enrich, extend and augment our thinking processes in ways that the naked brain can't do. That's what I mean about the future lies in thinking outside the brain because the brain is rather limited in what it can do. Our world is complicated. To think as well as we need to face the challenges and problems of our world, we need to reach outside the brain.

That is one of the things we're not yet doing. That's why this book is not only observed as a reporter doing all this research, in a sense, it’s a call to arms as well. By the way, we can even take this to the thoughts of a possible common consciousness that may exist even outside of the connections of our contacts. It can go that far. If we don't do this, we're not only shortchanging ourselves, we're shortchanging our society and we need not do that now more than ever.

Students aren't taught in schools how to think outside the brain. Workers are not trained. It’s such a brain-centric society that all of our efforts at education and training are aimed at cultivating the brain and its abilities. That leaves our faculty for thinking outside the brain under-developed. All the potential that is there for thinking outside the brain is going unrealized because we don't have the knowledge to skillfully use those external resources.

You give a lot of attention to the reasons why to and two classic ones, “Are we either think of the brain as a computer or we think of the brain as a muscle?” Either way, if you think of it as a muscle, it could be “exercised” and grow that way. If you think of it as a computer, you can shove in more RAM or hard drives. It's not that we can't expand or extend our minds. It's that those two metaphors are not the way it's going to happen.

Metaphors are powerful in terms of how they shaped the way we think. Those are the two dominant metaphors in our society, “The brain is a muscle and computer.” I see both of them as problematic. I came up with my metaphor that I share in the book, “The brain as a magpie.” It’s that bird that gathers bits and pieces from its environment and weaves it together into its nest, whatever it can find in its environment. What I argue in the book is that we can think of our brains that way. They are drawing on the raw materials that are available in the environment. The quality of those raw materials affects how well we're able to think. Because we're such a brain-bound society, we tend to think that intelligent thought is dependent on what's up here. That's a much too limited view.

Extended Mind: We actually think outside the brain in the sense that we pull in all these external resources, the body physical spaces, other people also are pools and devices into our thinking process.

You give examples from Einstein to modern-day thinkers that they're less likely to “use their heads” and to extend their minds as you describe the magpie. By taking in all this other material and richness around them, that's how you strengthen the thinking and the thought process. Some of the examples were how some of the great thinkers would take a walk in the park with their friends and usually somebody that they could converse with because that's another element. Not only just nature but the fact that they're doing something else but thinking. That's when the door opens up for the riches to soak in.

That's a different view of expertise than the one that is conventionally available, which is we think that experts have crammed so much information into their heads and that's what makes them experts. If you observe, study and research what experts do, they are offloading a lot of their mental contents onto space so that their brains don't have to keep track of it. They're experimenting and iterating out in the world using movement and using conversations with other people to enrich their thinking. It’s a limited and limiting idea of what expertise is as somebody with a big brain. That's a notion of expertise that will be good to get past.

I love you for giving me credit for this. I want to remind our viewers, I am getting this because this is the information that you so richly put in your book. Although these are my thoughts and that's why I wanted you on the show, the words I'm using are blessedly mostly yours. Thank you, Annie, once again for doing that.

It's our shared extended mind, you could say.

One of the things which I've not heard of before, which is rare when you think of over 26 years and thousands of guests, is the word interoception. What that is the way we think with sensation and bodies. I’d love to begin to explore that for the readers because that starts to open up the pathways again even further. What’s interception?

Interoception is a technical word. Your readers probably are much more familiar with another term, gut feeling. Within our bodies, if it doesn't feel like it comes from our heads, we have a sense about what we should do or what we should pay attention to. The scientific term for that is interoception, our ability to sense internal cues and signals. Like we take in all this information from the outside through our sensory organs, we also have the ability to feel what's going on inside our bodies.

What was interesting to me about this research is that the way it works, the way gut feelings can often guide us in an advantageous direction is that there's so much information in the world. It’s much more than our conscious minds can attend to at all times. We are taking in all that information as we go through our daily lives. We're noticing patterns, regularities and tagging them for future reference. A lot of that has to be stored non consciously because our conscious minds can only hold so much information at one time. The way that we get access to that stored non-unconscious information is through the body. These are signals rising from within us, which means that if you're more attuned to your interoceptive signals, you can better use that accumulated wisdom that might not otherwise be inaccessible to you.

By the way, when we were talking about the mind as a computer and as a muscle, the way you can exercise it is by deliberately cultivating these gut feelings. This is what excited me when I read the review of your book. It happened a while ago for me but I began to sense that my body was telling me things before my mind was. I have story after story, maybe we'll get into some of them at some time. It took a while. It wasn't while it was happening. It was sometimes even years later when I said, “On that day when this happened, this is what my body was feeling.” It took a while for me to patch it all up. When I did, it is amazing when you realize that. You can prevent yourself from going off the deep end because the body gives you a little nudge. It would then save me from myself.

As amazing as it may seem, research has confirmed that sometimes our bodies know things before the conscious brain does. It behooves us to pay close attention to what our body is telling us. Also, cultivate and nurture that ability to perceive those internal signals. I suggest that people try the body scan, which is a component of mindfulness meditation where you're paying close but non-judgmental attention to all those sensations that are rising within your body. It doesn't even have to be a formal practice. Throughout the day, check-in with your body and what messages it's sending you.

You hit a keyword that I have triple starred and bolded in my reading of your book and you mentioned it, non-judgmental awareness. There are several times within the book that you used either those exact words or words that are similar to it. I cannot emphasize to my readers, my family, and friends enough that when we place judgment on these feelings, whether it's through a body scan, mindfulness, even if it's through our ordinary dealings, feelings of worthiness or worthlessness. When we view them with a judgmental lens, we take away responsibility and we put blame and shame on ourselves. Blame and shame get us nowhere. Responsibility, as they say, is the ability to respond. That's what you get when you have non-judgmental awareness. It's one of the easier things to say and difficult to do. It took me 50 years to get through that one.

That's another reason why staying with the body and the raw material of those sensations can be so useful. The more we can have a direct experience of those sensations and not be applying all these labels and judgments, the more in-tune we are to the body in a direct fashion, which is not something we're encouraged to do. We're often encouraged to do the opposite, to ignore the body's signals, to put power through and get our work done. That's not an effective way to engage in complex cognitive tasks.

You criticized some of the “modern-day” philosophers who are still going by those older rules, so to speak. You do it, especially, when you talk about resilience. Resilience, some people might have called it grit. True grit comes only from the mind. I must tell you, I was one of those people. I thought it was my mind that was doing this. You let us know that true resilience is coming from the awareness that we have rooted outside of our minds. When you said that in the book, I began to rethink my vision of resilience and realize, “Whoa.” It relieves a little pressure on you when it doesn't have to be that it's me being able to be resilient but it's because of my surroundings, friends and body sensations. You emphasized resilience.

Another function of interoception is that it acts as a gauge of how much energy we have to apply to a given task. That includes an intellectual task as well as a task of endurance or strength. To have a good sense of what you're capable of at the moment or if you're not feeling as capable as empowered to act, what you need to do to restore that balance. If you're so much in your head that you're not in-tune with your body, its energy supply, and its capacity to take on a difficult task, then you're going to burn out and get frustrated. You're going to give up instead of skillfully managing your energy so that you can always meet the demands of the moment.

When you write about emotions, you specifically get into exactly that. That's important because, in a certain way, we can't control our emotions but we can control how we feel about them and how we address them. You get into that in The Extended Mind in a passionate way. Please share some of those things with my readers. I always throw myself in the mix because it happens to me as well as everyone, I'm certain. We start getting into our heads too much. It sends us on a downward spiral rather than getting out of it a little bit and relieving ourselves.

I know that experience myself. One thing that I found helpful in the research that I reviewed for the book is this idea of paying non-judgmental attention to our internal sensations and then labeling them. This isn't applying a judgment but simply labeling them, saying, “My heart is beating. I have butterflies in my stomach. I feel a tightness in my chest.” Those bodily sensations are the building blocks for what we then call emotions.

The really interesting work of scientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett and others has shown that we play a role in constructing emotion. The emotion doesn't come to us or wash over us in some inevitable way. We're constructing what our emotions are out of the raw material of these bodily sensations. Once we know that and sensed those sensations and labeled them, we can get in on the ground floor of constructing those emotions.

Some examples that I give in the book include pointing out the sensations that come along with being nervous and scared. Those sweaty palms and racing heartbeat are similar to the bodily sensations that come along with being excited, energized, and alert. Rather than telling yourself, “Calm down,” which is a way of trying to suppress those bodily sensations, it doesn't work. They don't go away. You instead reinterpret them. That technique is called cognitive reappraisal. You're reappraising your internal sensations. Instead of saying, “God, I'm nervous. I'm scared.” You could try saying to yourself, “I'm excited. I feel these things in my body and I'm feeling psyched up.” It turns out that works much better than ignoring our feelings, denying them or berating ourselves for feeling the way we do.

Extended Mind: If you observe and study and research what experts do, they are offloading a lot of their mental contents onto space so that their brains don't have to keep track of it. They're experimenting and iterating out in the world.

May I quote you directly? You said it in the book as beautiful as you did now. I wrote it down. I don't want to blow the fact that I wrote it down. You said, “If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” It's not only calming you down. It's moving you even further forward. It's a double-edged positive sword.

Another element of this is that arousal is our body getting us ready to face a challenge. That can help us tackle that challenge more effectively. That's a helpful thing to remind yourself of when you're in the midst of feeling those feelings.

Especially in our times, if we have anything in common besides the opposing thumb, we humans have anxiousness right now that separates us from everything that's on the planet. I don't want to say escape because none of the words that you use take us out only adds to it. One of the things is the way we move. You said that movement is a key element in getting ourselves out of our spiraling heads.

It's ironic and unfortunate that our notion of how thinking happens is to picture someone sitting still at a desk and working their brain until the job is done as if the brain is the only organ that is involved in thinking. If we got up from our desks, took a walk, maybe even made some gestures or did some acting out of the problem in a physical sense, we'd be using these resources that the body brings to thinking instead of wasting them by sitting there still. It’s what we expect of students and workers, unfortunately.

You said gestures. I'm going to get to that in one second because that's important. Before I do, you also said movement. I had a friend who put together a routine for me of exercise where I would write at the computer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. I then would do a small bit of exercise. Throughout the day, you accumulate as much time as you spend in the gym but without any of the wear and tear on the body and the benefit of the movement. Every time you go back to work, it’s increasing those endorphins or whatever they might be that helps the mind work better.

That was a smart plan that your friend put together for you. Something I encourage people to do in the book is to take periodic not coffee breaks and not Twitter breaks or let alone news breaks, which can bring you down during the workday but movement breaks. There are a few different reasons that those are helpful and one is that moderate-intensity exercise sharpens our mental faculties. This is why recess is important for children. They need to go out, run around and then they can come back into the classroom with their attention in their executive faculties operating at their peak.

Another reason that movement is effective for enhancing our thinking is because we are embodied creatures and because we did evolve to understand things in terms of our bodies moving in the real world rather than these symbols and concepts that we deal in as modern people. We tend to put things in embodied terms and that shows up in our language all the time. We talk about reaching for a goal or, “I'm running behind schedule.” We put it in these metaphorical terms that have to do with the body.

The movement itself is a metaphor that when we enact it when we're moving through space, that primes our brains to think in a more dynamic and fluid fashion, which is all wasted. That’s not happening when we’re sitting still at our desks. Our metaphor for sitting still is being stuck or being in a rut. Those are the metaphors that get activated when we're sitting still. I encourage people to build movement into their workday and their school day as much as possible.

Because both of us are hand talkers, I want to get back to what you mentioned before and that's gestures. I found this fascinating. In your words, you said gestures were humanity's first language. Please talk a bit more about this because you say that through gesturing, “We are sharpening our minds.” We're taught even in school to sit with our hands folded and don't move. I remember when I was producing television, I used to tell all my guests, “Please, use your hands.” They were always taught to sit still, “Use your hands, it's important. Annie, you seem to grasp this at its core.” Tell my readers what the gestures are all about and how they can help grease the wheels.

You were smart to tell your guests to gesture because that helped their thinking and mess their communication in at least two ways. One is that we speak more fluidly when we gesture because our gestures can help share some of the mental load. We offload some of our mental contents onto our hands when we gesture. Also, this was fascinating to me, often our most advanced and our newest ideas show up first in our gestures. Before we have the words to apply to an idea, we're working them out, in some sense, gesturing at them with our hands. We then can read off of that to help inform our evolving verbal account of ideas.

Secondly, your guests were also communicating with others with their gestures. The research shows that people remember the points we make better when they're accompanied by a gesture. I did want to get back to your point about gesture being humanity's first language and that's true in two senses. One is that linguists think that gestures preceded the spoken language in our evolution. Our forebears gestured with their hands before they ever were able to speak words. That's recapitulated every time a baby is born because babies gesture and can communicate and understand much more than they're able to say. Before they're ever able to speak a word, they're gesturing. Gesture never goes away. It's always that second channel of communication and extended thought that's right alongside our spoken language.

I also learned that many times, everyone from investigators to Navy SEALs to police communicate in gestures only because they have to be silent. You'll be surprised at how communicative a gesture can be. It’s amazing.

Extended Mind: We're often encouraged to ignore the body's signals, to push through and get our work done. That's not a very effective way to be engaging in complex cognitive tasks. 

It’s interesting how sophisticated that communication can be. We do tend to disparage gestures or think that they're trivial, that they're just so much hand waving. We focus so much on the spoken word but there's a whole other channel of communication going on through our hands.

You even said that when you do it, your words, it'll bring the right term to your lips. I never thought of it that way. You hit it right on the head like that.

This is something I've brought into my own life. As a parent, for example, if one of my sons is trying to explain something, I'll say, “Try moving your hands when you say that.” A gesture is like a tool that is always available to us. Barbara Tversky, who is a researcher in this area, says that gestures are like drawing a diagram only in the air with our hands. We always have this tool with us and we don't use it as much as we could. We're not instructed in how to use gestures, for example, to enhance our memory when we're learning a foreign language. We could be not just reading our new vocabulary words or hearing them but we could be pairing them with a gesture, which is one more way to reinforce our memory and to help bring those words back into mind when we need them.

Another thing you dedicate a large portion of the book to is the natural spaces, our surroundings, and how our minds are tuned to certain organic frequencies. You even get certain specific organic frequencies. Although, you say that even if it's a glance out the window, that still is good. Let's talk about the value of that natural space, especially in our urban environments. By the way, you can still escape to many natural spaces too even with art. Let's talk a little bit about that, to begin with. I want the readers to understand why it is important to extend their minds.

This is another body of research that I enjoy delving into because we know intuitively that when we go into nature, we feel more at ease, more relaxed and less frazzled. That's not the kind of gauzy I love nature reaction. There's the real science behind why we have that reaction. Humankind evolved in the outdoors. It's a development that we spend upwards of 90% of our time in houses, buildings, and cars. Our species grew up in the outdoors. The way to restore those mental capacities and faculties is to spend some time outside in that diffused and relaxing mental environment.

You’re careful to emphasize that we don't have to wait for the perfect moment, environment or amount of time. You even say if it's 20 to 60 seconds, that might be enough. I want to explore that because when people think, “I don't have the time to go hiking Yosemite. That means I'm never going to calm my mind.” Listen to what Annie says. She says that you can do this by going out to the backyard or staring out the window and looking at a plant. Doing anything will help not only restore the mind but, as your book is titled, extend the mind as well.

Even 40 seconds of looking outside at nature, which scientists call a micro restorative break, can bring back some of those attentional faculties that get drawn down by our demanding work. There's even interesting research to suggest that experiences of virtual nature like watching a video of the nature of animals can bring some of that restorative potential back to us. Even if you can't look out the window, you can always have access to a nature video.

I'm on the board of an art foundation that is using the art of Kamran Khavarani, who is a fantastic painter who paints in natural scopes using his hand and what he's feeling like. There was research done up at New Paltz University that showed his paintings. They were images not of nature but of nature-like, which made them more powerful. He didn't even have to paint the exact nature. They had healing power and they were able to monitor this. I began to get involved with him because I had him on my show. His work is beautiful. It can be as simple as a picture that gives you that chance to escape the internal mind wrapped up in that skull.

Fortunately, one place that's gotten this message is the health care sector. Many hospitals and facilities for people who are undergoing medical procedures are being redesigned with nature in mind. They’re bringing natural elements and natural light into the places where people are sick or recovering from surgery. It does seem that nature has these healing qualities and may even reduce pain, which is such an amazing force that nature would have for us even in this day and age.

That's what this nonprofit I'm on the board of does. We supply these paintings to hospitals. That's exactly what it is because that's where it has the most use. I'm thinking of expanding it to prisons and all sorts of places because it is restorative. As your book says, “I always like to say restorative is one thing but extending is one step further.” I'm glad that you saw that. In the book, you write these words, “The key when you experience this is to have a non-judgmental response.” I almost thought for a second, how would you even have a judgmental response to being outdoors? There must be ways because you emphasized having a non-judgmental response to the environment that you're in.

Extended Mind: If you're so much in your head that you're not in tune with your body and its energy supply and its capacity to take on a difficult task, then you're going to burn out.

It's important to leave our devices behind too when we go out into nature. That might be part of this idea of leaving behind all the preoccupations that occupy us when we're inside working and to go outside and be in nature and taking it in maybe without analyzing it. You're right. It's hard to think about how you'd be judgmental about nature. Soft gazing was a term that I use in the book, which applies to the act of taking it all in and not letting your attention be drawn here and there. That's the relaxed, diffused focus that you want to adopt in nature.

That is different from bird watching, for example. I'm not knocking that. Bird watching is great. What I'm saying is that diffusing of it. That’s why I said that these paintings are more impressionistic. You're not judging, “Is that a real butterfly? Is that a real leaf?” You're letting it wash over you.

That is the key to the restorative experience that you get in nature.

When we do this, you give us even one more level or notch that it can go to. You say that this experience could be called awe. That itself is a reset button for the human brain. It's not something that we can bring up in our own minds. It's something that we do have to experience in some way outside of ourselves. I've done this before because awe is something that you want to feel every single day and you're blessed if you’ve experienced it once in a lifetime. It is something that you can appreciate. Patient and gratitude go hand in hand with awe.

The point you made there was important, Barry, which is that we can't manufacture or muster within ourselves the experience of awe. We have to go out. Usually, the experience of majestic, amazing and vast natural spaces is how awe gets created in us. We have to go out there, get outside ourselves, get outside the little screens that we're staring at so much and experience the vastness of nature. Allow it to work on us in the sense that we feel small, we get a sense of our tiny space in this vast universe and yet we don't feel diminished. We feel a part of this huge, vast world. That's the experience that can shake up our mental schemas, our usual ways and perspectives of looking at the world. Awe is an experience. It’s the potential to change the way we look at the world.

I want to make one correction. Those weren't my thoughts. I thought that I could figure it out in my mind. It was only when I read your book that those words came to my mind. I want to give credit where credit is due. Those were your words, Annie. That is what made me realize, “That's another little trinket I can put on.” When I was reading about the awe, the one interesting thing is prior to our conversation, I had a conversation with Ron Garan, who wrote Floating In Darkness and The Orbital Perspective.

We've seen everyone from Jeff Bezos and Bronson going up into space. There is a certain awe that only they could experience. Ron lets us know that if you take in the words of the awe that they experience, you too can feel that awe. It’s that sense of feeling small in this massiveness but realizing how important your smallness is in this massiveness. When you combine those two things, that is where the awe may lie. Otherwise, you can feel like nothing in the vastness. The truth is you're important.

What's striking about those accounts of astronauts is they line up in remarkable ways to the extent that it's gotten a name from psychologists, The Overview Effect. When astronauts are out in space looking over the Earth, what they feel is this incredibly powerful sense of connectedness. They see how all the parts of the Earth are connected and how all the people on Earth are connected. They don't feel like separate individuals so much as part of this enormous ecosystem. That's an incredible experience of awe. Maybe one day we'll all be having that, too. We’ll be going up in space. In the meantime, it's interesting to hear that is the personal experience of astronauts who are able to get that view of Earth.

We talked about city life and how many of us are now city dwellers. You even gave us hope and truth to the fact that even our built spaces can affect us. The classic example you give in the book is with Jonas Salk, who believes that his experience at a monastery was what allowed him to come back and create the polio vaccine.

I love that story. Salk was working thirteen-hour a day in his laboratory to get this polio vaccine created to work it out. Working in this brain-bound way, applying himself and pushing and it wasn't working, he realized he needed to get away from the lab and put himself in a different context, different surroundings. He chose a beautiful place to go, which is this thirteenth-century monastery in Italy, The Basilica of Assisi. He spent several weeks walking around, taking in the light and these beautiful old structures and working out in his mind this problem that he had struggled with so much back at home at his lab in Pittsburgh. When he left the monastery and returned, he was able to solve this problem that had bedeviled him before. He gave credit to the inspiring architecture that he'd experienced in Italy.

I want people to know about the book and what it does. What your writing does well, Annie, is you give us balance to everything. When I was reading that, I found that at first, I would go, “This sounds like a dichotomy.” I then go, “No. Annie is explaining it.” What I want to bring out is a wall. When we were talking about space, the last thing I would think about is a wall. Yet, you want us to know how sometimes a wall of some sort is what you also need. Once you go out, come back in. The funniest thing is while I was reading this, we had a beautiful fence built around our house. It's not like one of these close-off-the-world-type fences but it still separates our space. In a weird way, it's affected us in a positive way because there's a sense of protection, which a wall gives you. It wasn't the closing of. It’s weird. It was an opening up.

It doesn't sound like you're necessarily expected to have that experience but it is how it felt once that wall was built.

I wasn't expecting it at all. Now, what do I want to do? I want to go outside more to look at that. It's not a wall. It’s a fence. I want to look at it more because it looks pretty. You let us know that it is important to go out. Sometimes when you have to formulate and go back into your mind, you're not taking us just on one path but you're bringing us back. What I enjoyed thoroughly about the way you wrote this was that you give us all the tools and we don't have to feel guilty. I'll go back to your words, “We don't have to be judgmental.”

That word balance is important. We do need interaction with other people. We do need to experience new and stimulating spaces. We do need to get outside. We need to do that hard work of focusing on idea generation. We don't want too much social input. At that point, we need to be generating our thoughts and focusing on our thoughts. That's when walls are the best collaborators. They protect us from all the stimuli that would distract us. As I explained in the book, when we're trying to focus on a difficult cognitive task, that distractibility is a real disadvantage because it keeps drawing our attention away from the task at hand. That's why a private, quiet space is as important as having those spaces where people come together, talk, collaborate and brainstorm.

Humanity itself seems to be at a loss. It's a dilemma that I see happening. It seems that we should be doing a lot better because our minds are extended. We've gone so far and yet, it seems like there's a chasm that still needs to be crossed. Why I wanted you on the show is a book like yours helps us cross that chasm but it still needs to be crossed. I don't know what's holding us back. I was curious about thoughts you might have on that.

The essential struggle or conflict here is that our world is complex. With the expertise we've accumulated as human beings, there's so much information coming at us all the time. Yet, our brains are still stone-age brains. They're the same brains that our forebears had. They evolved to do a specific and limited number of things. That would be bad news except that we, as humans, have learned to transcend those limits by bringing in all these external resources, the body, space, other people and all these resources that we've talked about.

We need to learn to do that more skillfully and to do it more intentionally. We do it a bit haphazardly. Maybe we rely on the body, spaces or other people sometimes but it's not something we've been trained to do in any systematic or holistic way. I say in the book that we all need to acquire a second education, not just cultivating the brain and what it can do but also thinking outside the brain. To me, that is the hopeful vision for what could lie ahead for us as a species.

Annie, I’m grateful that you came and joined us to help us extend our minds. I want to end with the way you ended your book with these words and I want you to tell us why they're important, “Acknowledging the reality of the extended mind might well lead us to embrace the extended heart.”

Those are the last lines of the book. I ended the book that way because I wanted to leave the reader with this notion that although in our society, we're encouraged to think of ourselves as individuals who achieve as individuals and accomplish what we accomplish as individuals, that's a delusion. It's an illusion. We are connected to each other, our bodies and our worlds. We are creatures of the particular world that we live in. As we all know, the worlds that each of us lives in and the raw materials that each of us has access to in terms of what we build our thoughts out of, they're in no way equal or equitable. That's something I would love to see us work to change.

Annie, I'm grateful you joined us. I thank you for helping extend all of our minds.

You're welcome, Barry. I'm glad to have had this conversation with you.

 Important Links:

• The Extended Mind

• Ron Garan - Past episode

• Floating In Darkness

• The Orbital Perspective

• https://AnnieMurphyPaul.com/

About Annie Murphy Paul

Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” She has held the Bernard Schwartz Fellowship and the Future Tense Fellowship at New America; currently, she is a fellow in New America’s Learning Sciences Exchange. She has also received the Spencer Education Reporting Fellowship and the Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship. Paul has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition; her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has served as a lecturer at Yale University and as a senior advisor at the Yale University Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.

Cassie Kozyrkov - Chief Decision Scientist At Google

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Decisions are what create our life and dictate our futures. All our decisions have infinite compounding effects that shape the world. With that in mind, it is vital for us to make intelligent decisions when it matters. Chief Decision Scientist at Google and a leader in the field of Decision Intelligence, Cassie Kozyrkov, unravels the process of decision-making and what role data science and the concepts that underlie play. Cassie explains the importance of humans - the decision-makers - in the safe, reliable, effective, and responsible production of artificial intelligence. She emphasizes how we can use our innate analytical decision-making to better ourselves and society for the future.

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Cassie Kozyrkov - Chief Decision Scientist At Google

The Humanity Of AI

Cassie, welcome to the show. I'm honored that you could join us.

Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here.

You created the field of decision intelligence and you are also the Chief Decision Scientist at Google, but what I found most impressive is your mission is to democratize decision intelligence for all of us. That is why you're here is because we are all data analysts in a way, and you're going to help my readers and me hone and sharpen our skills, even if we're not involved with high-tech data science. To give a big tease to my audience, we're also going to be dealing with the super Sci-Fi word of AI, which is another thing that you are an expert in, and I looked forward to that, but we're going to save that later. Why this mission to help all of us become good analysts?

I like to call myself a recovering statistician. I find data really beautiful as do many of my kind. What I realized is that while data are beautiful, it is decisions that are important. It's through our decision-making that we affect the world around us. What we should all be focusing on is turning information into better action. Whether we do that with data in its electronic form or simply the information that we take in through our senses. If we all get a little bit better at turning that into better decisions, then we'll all make the world a much better place. Call it purely selfish, but I would love to see a better world and I would love for that to start with all of us getting a little bit better, moving a little bit towards the best decision-makers that we could be.

I want to bring up something that you just said because right now we are at a time where so much data and information is plowed our way that it is obviously even a more difficult task. I remember the famous quote by T.S. Eliot, where he says, "Where is the knowledge we've lost in information, and where is the wisdom we've lost in knowledge?" Part of your goal is to find that out for us because now we're inundated with information, but not necessarily knowledge and we have to turn that knowledge then into wisdom.

One of the things that one starts getting in the habit of as one gets familiar with the practice of decision intelligence is moving from a passive consumer of information of data to an active seeker of the information that you need. It's a little bit about flipping your order of approach. Here's an example. If you were interested in figuring out whether you wanted to stay at a particular hotel, and I told you that this hotel has a 4.2 out of 5-star rating, a 4.2 out of a 5-star average review.

In telling you that, I have crushed your ability to use that data, that 4.2 for making your decision. Because if in your heart of hearts you really want to stay at this hotel, you're going to say, “4.2 out of 5? What an amazing score.” On the other hand, if you didn't want to stay at this hotel, then the way you'll respond is what, "Am I some kind of animal to stay at a 4.2 out of a 5 stars hotel?" What has happened is that information is no longer able to drive your decision.

You're allowed to frame the way that you ask your question based on what that information was. If you already have a decision that you want to take, you're just going to let confirmation bias drive that you're just going to let what you already want it to do be what pushes you towards your outcome, and you're just going to use that data, that information as an excuse. The way that you would want to approach the decision, that you like to start with is the default action.

In the absence of any information at all, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay there or are you not? Being honest with yourself about how you would take that decision if you've got no further information, is an amazingly powerful starting point. From there you move to what is perhaps the career-making question for data scientists and all of us should get in the habit of asking ourselves this question as well. This question is, "What would it take to change my mind? What has to be true about the universe?" Let's say that you do want to stay at this hotel, the question you're asking yourself is, "What information would convince me not to do that? What has to be true for me to change my mind?” You would then ask yourself, "Am I framing it in terms of a score that is below some number and what number is that?"

Is that below 3.9? Is that below 4.5? It will vary from decision-maker to decision-maker, but you were then going to go out and seek that information after having figured out how you want to frame your decision. Maybe for you, it's not the stars at all. Maybe you want to know something about bedbugs or whether they have free Wi-Fi or a whole host of other things. Maybe even a blend of factors. By really understanding what you need, you're then going to tailor your approach through seeking information, and you're going to be more immune to people, throwing all kinds of things at you, "This hotel has three bounce castles and six swimming pools." Maybe that has nothing to do with anything for you. Six pools, that's not what you're looking for. You won't get swayed by this outside irrelevant information.

You mentioned the word bias and the one thing you want us to be totally aware of is without exception, we human beings are biased. We can't help it. In fact, in a certain sense, it's a feature that literally has allowed us to evolve. We never would have gotten out of the plains of savanna if we were not able to be biased. Yet you want us to curtail those biases so that we are able to make a proper decision, and I find that to be so difficult in itself.

One needs to realize that the word bias is both complicated and technical. Different disciplines use it in different kinds of voice. We need to be clear on what we mean by bias. If we're talking about bias in the algorithmic or AI sense, what we mean here is that there's something wrong with the inputs. The inputs are skewed in some way. What you mean in your use of the word bias here, is cognitive bias and that is that our brains have evolved to take certain shortcuts through our decision-making. Because, if we're being attacked by a lion on the savanna, we don't have time to sit down and perfectly think through the best route to take to run away from the lion. We have got to act quickly and we've got to take certain shortcuts. Also, the brain would require so many more calories from us if we optimized everything.

Decision Intelligence: As one gets familiar with the practice of decision intelligence, they start moving from a passive consumer of information and data to an active seeker of information that’s needed.

We need those shortcuts, but those shortcuts don't serve us well in every situation and we didn't evolve those shortcuts in the environment that we find ourselves in now. We may find ourselves taking our decisions in ways that are completely unsuitable in our modern setting. First, being aware of how we make our decisions, why we do what we do and then thinking through whether we do want to use our intuition or heuristics. If we want to let our biases drive us. Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they're not.

Bias as I'm using it now is more of a technical term. Also, there's a use of "bias" in the sense of unfairness and that's not the way I'm using that word. Treating people unfairly is never a good thing, being nasty to our fellow humans. And I also want to make it clear when I say that things like "Data don't let you make objective decisions because there's always some human subjectivity in there." "Humans are fundamentally biased because of our cognitive limitations and because of the types of information that we use." When I say that, I'm never saying that this is any excuse to treat anyone else badly. It’s a totally different conversation. I'm not talking about that bias. I'm talking about shortcuts that might've been helpful and healthy on the savanna that aren't helpful and healthy in modern life.

You said you're a recovering statistician. I saw that video where you said that and you used the thing that must be used which is assumptions, to make assumptions. We've been always raised those assumptions are the worst things you can do and how all of a sudden, assumptions are based on the information, how do we then turn that theory around so that assumptions become beneficial for us?

Here's the thing with assumptions, when you're asking any questions... let's go back to this hotel example. Think about all the shortcuts that we've taken to boil down the question to what rating out of five we would accept for the hotel? We are assuming just so many things. We are assuming so many things about what a hotel is. We are assuming so many things about the experience that you don't need to explicitly build into your metrics. We are assuming that there's a bed in the room. There are so many shortcuts that we're going to take. If you also think about our structures for language... so let's think about defining what is a bed. What makes a bed? On what kind of fine-grained level? What's in a bed frame? What subatomic particles are in it? We're not discussing any of those things.

What we're doing is we're assuming them away. There's a joke that physicists like to make about themselves and that is in order to make progress in physics, they have to narrow their attention to what they're interested in at the time. They're going to assume away all of the rough details. The joke is that the physicist will say, "Assume a perfectly spherical cow." Cows are not perfectly spherical, but for the purpose of discussion, let's assume that the cow is a sphere and move along. What that will do, is that will make the calculations easier? That will require us to deal with less of the ugly real-world detail and it'll let us focus on what seems important. What we also do is ignore a lot of reality by making assumptions.

That's a good thing. I always tell my fellow former statisticians that the more fine-grained you go with your assumptions, the longer your calculation is going to take. You don't want to make perfect assumptions because the value of the decision and the calculation are not infinite. If you're going to keep checking every tiny, next level of detail on every little assumption that you make, you will find yourself sitting in a cave for 5,000 years trying to do this data analysis. Getting more and more fine-grained. It never finishes and you don't even live that long. To get things done, we make assumptions. That's why they're useful.

By reading all of your works and watching all of your videos, I even made the awareness that there's a difference between a statistician and an analysis. An analysis is basically telling you the story according to you the data or the information. I couldn't help, but think of Mark Twain's and then you paraphrase it in a different way where he said, "Lies, damn lies and statistics," and you came back with, "Lies, damn lies and analytics."

One of the things I know is that the analytics has to be made by what you can physically see. I've learned that from you. It has to be in the now. It can't be something from the past or the future. It's what you can tangibly see now, but how do we get away from that notion that statistics and even analytics can steer us astray? You give a great example of it when there was a front page of the byline of COVID in New York. Everyone who read that one line would have had a whole different image in their mind about what was going on, than the reality.

About that COVID byline and I wrote that blog post and I was a little bit cheeky in making that title sound like. I took issue with the article. I didn't at all. What I took issue with was how people would read it and what they would take away with it. This brings us back to assumptions. Every reader is going to bring some assumptions to it. As they read, they will fit that information onto their assumptions without reading deep enough to have some of those assumptions challenged. All those small shortcuts that we take, can lead us astray if we're not aware of it. Now to your specific question about analytics versus statistics. I like to think of data science as the discipline of making data useful.

It's an umbrella term that holds three sub-disciplines, statistics, analytics, and machine learning/artificial intelligence, AI. The way that you separate these disciplines is based on how you use them to make decisions. I think of it like this, it is none, few and many, because with analytics, statistics, and machine learning. If you don't know what decisions you want to make before you approach the data, what you are doing is analytics. You are going and you're having a look at the data that you have. What this will do for you is it will inspire you to ask good questions, but the one golden rule is don't take any of it seriously.

Statistics is where you're making a few important decisions under uncertainty. That is about the quest for good answers, not for good questions. There you know already, what the data need to do to get you to go one way or another way. Statistics plus analytics together is how you find good questions and you get good answers to them, but you need to use the two together carefully. In machine learning, that's about automation. That's about making many decisions.

The statistics and analytics combo is a powerful one, but what people misunderstand is that analytics is specifically about having a look, taking in the data, the information from your environment, and being inspired to ask questions, not to take yourself seriously. Data doesn't have to be in an electronic form. This is when, if I never look outside my window, then I might never notice that there's a whole bunch of emergency vehicles outside my windows. I might never notice that.

Decision Intelligence: By understanding what you need, you can tailor your approach by seeking information.

I might never ask any questions about it but, as I walk up to my window and I see all that, all I can conclude is, "Interesting. Six ambulances on my street," and now I can start wondering, "I wonder what happened," but I'm not able to answer any of these questions carefully and rigorously. Not to think well about what sorts of decisions I should make. I can start framing those decision questions. I can move on to statistics from there.

If I start getting confused and I start jumping to conclusions and I start overreaching based on what I'm seeing, I can lead myself and everyone else astray. I have to be very careful and remember when I just casually take a look and I let the information find me that I don't know what decisions I'm making in advance. I'm not seeking information carefully and actively. That is like our hotel example. What I've seen outside my window is 4.2. Is that a big number? Is that a little number? Who knows? There wasn't any decision framed.

You even say that rather than say, "We conclude." A good way to express an analysis would say, "We are inspired to wonder." I want to dig deep into that inspiring to wonder because one of the things you say about even statistics is its ability to change your mind when you're uncertain. That in my opinion includes the ability to wonder because wonder is dealing with uncertainty. I have a personal mission here since I live my life uncertainty, I want to dig deep into the importance of inspiring wonder. That's one of the highest levels that a human can attain is the ability to wonder. That doesn't necessarily mean a question. It could also mean just having thoughts that you wonder about.

I can see it in the way that you're framing these questions that you've got this deep commitment to wanting to use information in the most awesome way that you can. What we are looking at is turning information into better action. The way that an analyst contributes is they are about going and seeking information, looking at it and recognizing what they're seeing. Taking information in through their senses, whether that's digital information or whether they're just interacting with their universe.

There are certain principles that an expert analyst is just great at, but every person can also do. We're all analysts already because we're all absorbing information through our senses. Principles like not taking the information that you possibly absorb too seriously, trying to encounter as much of it as possible without getting stuck on it. The open-mindedness of coming up with many different explanations for what you're seeing. A great analyst is a person for whom you hold up one of those Rorschach blots. One of those inkblots that you drip some ink on a page and you fold the page over and it makes some shape.

If you ask a good analyst of what they're seeing there, they might say, "I see a bat and I see maybe two goats." A regular person might stop at the bat. I see a bat. That's what I see and that's my thing, but a great analyst will just keep going, "That could also be a pumpkin. That could also be a butterfly. I also see an angel." They're looking at exactly the same data. The data is that ink thing, but they are seeing many different things that it could meet.

They just keep going. They've got this incredible open mind and that's a principle that all of us could bring to it. We see some inflammatory tweets, the non-analytic mindset would go, "I'm going to take us exactly at face value." The way that it aligns with my personal biases, I'm just going to take that and remember it as strengthening my belief. If you take the analytics mindset, you start saying, "It could mean this. It could also mean some other thing. It could also mean twenty other things and anyway, how were they able to make the statement that they made? Let me find some alternative sources on this. Let me just force myself to extend all the impressions that I could get out of this." I think that would help us, help humans in navigating information that's thrown at them. Remember that Rorschach blot, remember to see as many explanations from that same piece of data as possible. Also, as a good analyst, find as many other Rorschach blots as you can to really try to get the fullest picture.

To me, even as you're talking, it seems almost joyous to be free to absorb. Because we're always in such a state of fear of making mistakes, we're not allowing ourselves the pleasure of pure absorption, which is joy in its highest form.

This is where that one might say, I might even have been abused a little by my statistics programs because a statistician comes into that part of the information project where you have to be careful and rigorous and go so slowly because the biggest sin in statistics is coming to the wrong conclusion. You want to make sure that when you come to a conclusion, it's the right conclusion. You're so careful. You go so slowly and it's very rewarding work when the decision that you're helping to inform is one that is worth that careful tiptoeing with bated breath. You get so used to going slowly and freaking out whenever anything looks sloppy, and then you move over and you see analytics, and it's just so free. Because what we're doing over there as we're saying, "Rigor is not the game here." Not in statistics because we're not coming to any conclusions beyond our data. We're not doing any of that stuff. We're not coming to conclusions.

All we're doing is we're describing our reality. All I know is what is here, not going anywhere beyond it. How do I become the best analyst that I can be? What I do is increase the speed with which I explore my reality. I'm doing the opposite of what a statistician does. I am putting on that jet pack and zooming through. Having a look and enjoying what's around me, just taking in as much as I can through my senses. Am I doing it well? No, but I don't care. Because later a statistician will follow up. Maybe if I'm the statistician, if I'm the data scientist, I'm going to do both, but it's a completely different mindset.

Decision Intelligence: We ignore a lot of reality by making assumptions.

Another thing that confuses both statisticians and machine learning engineers about expert analysts, people who understand what quality looks like. We'll praise this person for being an amazing analyst. When we look at how they write their code and it's the sloppiest code ever. How they document their work and how well they even take notes, and it's all over the place. Actually, they're doing it right for what their discipline is all about and that is quickly exploring your reality. If you sit down, the equivalent is exploring the world. A statistician will have a specific question about a specific thing that is specifically in Paris and they will go and they will go to Paris carefully and they will write 100 pages of documentation that is carefully about this one thing that's in the Louvre.

An analyst says, "I don't even know that it's the Louvre that I want to be looking at. How quickly can I zoom through all of the world's museums?" If I'm stopping at each one and for each item in each museum, I'm writing 100 pages of documentation. I'm not going to get through the whole world in my life. I mustn't approach it that way. I have to free myself to run around. I go into this museum. I quickly find out it's not what I needed. I turn around and go to the next one as quickly as I can. That's exploration. It's a lot of fun, but don't jump to any conclusions. You need to totally switch your approach and mindset if you want to believe that you can make a rigorous conclusion. It is joining the three together.

This reminds me very early on when I had my show on PBS. I had the great science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, on my show. I can’t forget the line he said and it's paralleling with what you said. He said, "Sometimes you have to jump off the cliff and then build the wings on your way down." That's what it sounds a bit like. I love that and you seem to say the same thing. Don't be afraid to start, just keep starting, just keep moving and you'll sort it out as you go. Here's where I want to get into a perfect transition, for us to get into AI. Because what happens with AI and science fiction is it becomes a little tricky because we think we were talking about data before, just by our own absorption. Now, these machines take in data at the speed of light practically.

One of the things that you shatter right away is you say AI is a Sci-Fi term. It's machine learning that we're talking about. What machine learning is and this blew my mind, is label making. AI is label-making. When we get into that, we'll explore some of the ways that we can expand our notions of AI and also take away some fear. That's what you do so well. Let's talk about the first thing is, it's a label-making machine. Is that all it is?

Even machine learning, are the machines running around learning? Is there a nursery for machines where they're being shown their ABCs? That's pretty Sci-Fi as well. I like to joke that if statisticians had named machine learning because we statisticians like a thing to be named to say exactly what it does on the tin. We like the most boring names for things. If we would have named it, we would have named it Thing Labeling with Examples.

What do I mean by this? What do I mean by the labeling? This is a way that we can put inputs into a system and get outputs or labels out. That's what computer programmers are already doing. What does the programmer do? They write some code and what happens is, some input comes into that code and then the code gives out an output. That's what programmers have been doing for all those decades that they've been doing it.

It could be any system. It could be something that controls the temperature in your home. The programmer might write that if the temperature rises above 75 degrees, then turn on the cooling. Some input comes in from a sensor and some output that is a decision or action that the machine takes is now to turn on the AC. Where does that recipe or that code come from in the middle? It comes from the human. They have to sit and communicate with the universe and they say, "Here's how we're going to react to the inputs." If it's more than 75, now here is what we do. If it's 60, now here is what we do. If it's 200, ...oh dear.

The programmer who has to reason about how that recipe in the middle, takes the inputs and turns them into outputs or labels, actions, decisions about how that has to look. What machine learning does is it turns that around a little bit. Machine learning says, "Instead of the human, having to craftly come up with that recipe themselves, cook it up in their own brain. Why don't we let some data speak?" Why don't we look at some patterns in data and automatically turn those patterns into recipes? Human doesn't have to author it themselves. Maybe you have this big old dataset that showed you when users of your system would turn on the cooling themselves, and maybe it wasn't at 75 degrees.

Now you don't have to apply the arrogance of the programmer to decide on behalf of all the users that 75 is where we should start turning on the cooling system. If we were automating it, now we can look at the data and we can say, perhaps under these circumstances with this combination of patterns that the user is doing, now we turn on the cooling. The difference is that the people, the programmers, are using data and information as well. They're using their lived experience and they're stitching that information they took in through their senses into a recipe. We can also just take the data itself, which we collect carefully, and we curate carefully and think about what would be the right data for designing the system and then we can pull patterns out of that data. We can then propose a recipe based on those.

That is what machine learning is all about. We're not finished right there because what we're also going to need is analytics and statistics in this process. Because with machine learning, you think you've made a recipe that works. Does it actually work? That's a very good and important question before you release and launch the system. The, "Does it work," is the part that is handled by statistics at the end. There should be some performance bar and you should carefully test that it does work. What about analytics? What sorts of data inputs are even worth trying out for building a recipe about suitable? Someone's got to look at available data inputs and suggest them.

Is it that users fiddle the dial themselves? That seems to be an easy one, but what if there were some other interesting indicators that might perhaps suggest, that now might be the time to start cooling? Maybe you had sensors that figured out that the users are moving away from the AC. The fact that they're stepping away from it, they might not even realize maybe they're doing it because they're cold. Maybe that could be a sign that the distance from the AC unit is worth using in the recipe to decide where to switch that unit's temperature.

Decision Intelligence: Statistics plus analytics together is how you find good questions and get good answers to them.

You say recipe because you give us another example about finding the lamp. You rubbed the lamp and the genie comes out. You say it's important and I think it plays right off of this because what are you using as your information? You say, "It's not the genie or the machine that's dangerous." That's the fear that everyone has with AI. Your quote and I'm quoting you. You say, "It's the unskilled wisher." We have to wish responsibly. That goes back to the thing you said earlier in our conversation, that we as humans must take into account the golden rule. We must care about our fellow humans. We must understand what virtues we possess, our benevolence, all of those things, if we're going to wish responsibly.

When it comes to machine learning and AI, what we're really doing is we are automating the generation of these recipes. The technical term would be models that take data inputs and create data outputs or decisions or actions. We are automating decision-making there. A programmer also does that same thing by crafting the recipe or model themselves carefully by using their imagination. What happens is that when the programmer has to do that, they have to craft and maybe the code is 10,000 lines or 100,000 lines. They have to write every single line of code themselves. Maybe it's not one person who is writing the whole thing, but at least human hands would have written every little part of that. Maybe you can think of it as Lego blocks and then collections of Lego blocks that they have to put together to turn it into this model, but at least that's all been written by humans.

Let’s say a hundred thousand lines of code written by humans, whereas when it comes to generating these recipes automatically, there's a whole lot of code that needs to be written, that's because the tools are ugly. You're fighting with these tools that I'm sure in the future are going to get much easier, and then everyone will be able to create these machine learning recipes. All that code boils down to two lines only. Which data do we use for finding patterns in and what does success look like? How are we going to score this system? What score is our minimum for releasing it? How well does it need to do? It's those two simple things which data and what does it mean for it to work? That is something that the human decision-maker who is in charge of creating the system comes up with. That is the form that the wish takes. That's the extent of the careful, intelligent human interaction with the design of this recipe. What am I asking for and which data?

You say that is the uniqueness of the human. That's what we bring to this table. It's the inspiration. There's something else I wanted to share with you and get your take on it. I remember this line from Westworld. Talk about taking AI to its Sci-Fi. I'll never forget where one of the artificial intelligence gurus who we find out is an AI machine. One of the others that you think is gaining some form of consciousness almost because they have such sentient types of behavior.

They said, "What is the difference between an AI and a human?" The “AI man” who responded said, "The one difference is the human cannot be replaced." I found that to be beautiful. I found that to run through almost everything you bring out. The human cannot be replaced. If it's great art that the machine is making, it's the human that inspired it to make that art. You even used the example of carrying a bucket. Buckets are better water carrier than a human, but it's a human who made the bucket. I love the way you see AI, its future and the human quality of it all.

What it really all boils down to is the idea that it's the human that decides what is important. To go back to the start of our conversation, the way we do that is by blending some subjective things, taste, judgment, individual qualities with what we seem to have collected from the environment with our lived experience, with some data that we might have done some analytics. We take those two things together and we say, "Based on what I know, here's what I would say is important." Maybe you will see exactly the same things as I did, and you will say, "For me, something else is important." That's okay.

In fact, we can clearly see that we have done that because we're both extremely successful in two different kinds of jobs. We have at least found some things in life where we have different views of what is the most important way to spend our time. There is no one right answer. There's no perfect answer to the question of what is important. That's fundamentally subjective and individual. We might also answer questions like that on a social level, but different societies at different points in time will believe that different things are important.

Figuring out what's important, that is something human. We might use data to inform that, but in the end, our judgment cannot be automated. It's not objective, it's deeply subjective. The role that we take when we interact with any systems in any technology is we have to first say, as humans, "This is what's important. This is what I want this thing to do," and then we build the solution that does it.

Cassie, you add one more thing, and I want to use your exact words because I think this takes it to the next level. You say, "It's not only that, but it is through our action that we affect reality." It's not just what we program. It's not just what we think, it is how we act and how we behave. That affects reality. You never let that leave your mind in almost every lecture, every class you teach. I always see you concerned with what actions are we going to take.

Why worry about what's important if we don't do anything based on that? The way that we think about what's worth doing and what's valuable, is for us to prioritize our actions, our efforts and our ability to interact with our world. All of these tools, all these from the bucket that holds water, we have to first decide that it's important to have the water to bring it to a particular place. Then we lift the bucket and we might move it with our hands. That is us moving the water. Taking the action to move the water in a better way than just cupping it in our hands, but it's still us extending ourselves with the bucket.

Decision Intelligence: Figuring out what is important is something human. We might use data to inform that, but in the end, our judgment cannot be automated.

If we build a big, complicated technological system based on AI that also moves a whole lot more water from one spot to another spot in a much more efficient way than we could by cupping our hands or by using a bucket, that is still the person could have decided, it is important to do this, and let me now act on it. That individual or group of individuals said, "This number of tons of water needs to be moved from one place to another place and then moved it." They have changed their world. It is them that did it, not the pipes, not the bucket, not the AI system, but the people who chose to take that action. All of our technology extends us. It allows us to scale our actions.

Besides speaking about the importance of framing everything from the perspective of our actions and our decisions, I also like to remind people that, as we extend ourselves and scale ourselves with technology, as we enlarge ourselves, it becomes easier and easier to step on the people around us. We have an extreme responsibility to enlarge ourselves responsibly in a way that doesn't do damage. We have to learn to drive these larger and larger systems that we built because what they do is they take one individual or a small group of individuals and they extend, they inflate those people's ability to have an impact on their world. As we scale ourselves, we also have to put a lot more effort into doing that responsibly.

Cassie, I promised you that I would let you go at a certain time because I know you're not a busy woman with all those jobs that you do, but I know how busy you are. I know you have to go. I want to thank you so much, but I do want to end with your words. When you say these words, this is when I got goosebumps. You say, "Make sense of your universe and do something useful with it." You have done that. You've shared that with me and my audience and I am so grateful that you took the time to be here with us. Thank you so much, Cassie.

Thank you so much for having me, Barry. It was an honor and a pleasure to be here.

Important Links:

• Cassie Kozyrkov

About Cassie Kozyrkov

I'm a data scientist and leader at Google with a mission to democratize Decision Intelligence and safe, reliable AI. I bring a unique combination of deep technical expertise, world-class public-speaking skills, analytics management experience, and ability to lead organizational change. I've provided guidance on more than 100 projects and designed Google's analytics program, personally training over 20000 Googlers in statistics, decision-making, and machine learning.

Ron Garan – Floating In Darkness

Listen & Subscribe Below!

Did you know that you can open your mind and create a whole new perspective on life? That’s what Astronaut Colonial Ron Garan knows with certainty and can show you how to fill your mind with new ideas, connections, and creative solutions.

As one of the few humans to live in space, he learned how a foundation of awe and wonder changes everything. It is the “secret sauce” that underpins our conversation about his book FLOATING IN DARKNESS. Together we deeply explore new ways to view ourselves and our societies from a different perspective that will enrich and enlighten our lives.  

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Ron Garan – Floating In Darkness

How To Gain A New Perspective On Life

Do you want to fill your mind with new ideas, connections and creative solutions? Astronaut Ron Garan can show you how. As one of the few humans to live in space, he learned how a foundation filled with awe and wonder changes everything. In our conversation about his book, Floating in Darkness, we explore how anyone can develop a new perspective on life. Plus, a special thanks to my patrons who make this show possible. Thank you and enjoy our conversation.

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Ron, it is such a pleasure and honor to have you back. To see you again, my friend, is a true joy. Welcome back.

Barry, thanks for the invitation back. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Ever since we did the episode on The Orbital Perspective, I'm like, "I need to get back and talk to Barry again."

We spoke while we were testing the report out. I said, "What you did here was as is if you took The Orbital Perspective and then did a major deep dive because this is so rich and filled with an explosion of thought in regards to the depth of The Orbital Perspective."

The subtitle of the book is Floating in Darkness: A Journey of Evolution and this journey of evolution continues. I don't know how deep you want to get right off the bat. I'll hold it at that right there and then we can talk more about that.

We can't go too deep in my opinion. Don't worry about it. The truth is, you've been a man on a mission since you were young. I remember reading about your boxing and football. I remember what football meant to me and I was so relating to that aspect. We will talk in detail about your F-16 work as a Desert Storm Commander, as a Nuclear Commander in Germany of the whole fleet and then two missions in space. You start this book off with a new mission. Floating in Darkness is designed as you write to bring us all who are seeking the light of truth together. We also have to have the courage. That's the most important and difficult aspect to obtain, to peel back the layers of reality.

The purpose of the book is to be a unifying force to bring people together. That was the main motivation for writing it.

You even start with, "We are one!"

You're referring to the prologue, which is a very metaphorical and abstract part of the book. My intention for the prologue was to get people to start reading this. They probably picked it up because I'm an astronaut or maybe they heard that there was some military stuff in there or out of curiosity, not knowing what it was because it has got a pretty cool cover. They start reading the prologue. What I hope happens is people read it and say, "This is a little different. I'm not sure where this is going. It might be a little weird but you've piqued my curiosity. I want to see where the story goes." That was the objective of the prologue.

You know where it goes. It goes with you saying, "We are a species no longer confined to our planet. When you are up there at the space station, you are floating in darkness and all sorts of epiphanies. The awe and the wonder bubble up within you."

I often describe my experience as an epiphany in slow motion. I don't think there was a single time where the light was shining down from heaven and a choir of angels was singing. It was little seeds were planted here and there that, in some cases, took years to blossom. The subtitle of the book is A Journey of Evolution. The book itself is an evolution. With the language I used and the worldview I described at the beginning of the book, my philosophies and mindsets changed throughout the book. The words I used, in the beginning, are not the same words that I used at the end. I caution readers, "If you come across something that you don't agree with or that makes you feel a little uncomfortable, keep reading because it's probably going to change."

Change but in an interesting way. You do that specifically, boxing, football and F-16 pilot. Those were different tribes like we have ethnicities, nationalities and all of those things. When you're having The Orbital Perspective, even though that’s the name of your other book, Floating in Darkness, which gave you the orbital perspective. The truth is that you also say, "We don't lose those other qualities of our ethnicity, religion and things. Even if we are looking to create oneness on this planet and this feeling of unity, that doesn't mean that we lose our individuality. It makes us even stronger individually."

Our diversity gives us strength if we allow it because one of the things that diversity gives us is a diversity of perspectives. When you see a situation from different perspectives, if you see it from two perspectives, you're seeing it in stereoscopic vision. In 3D, you're starting to see the depth. The more perspectives we can apply to a situation, problem or challenge, the deeper our understanding of that problem is. It ceases to become two-dimensional and us versus them. The nuances start to bubble up.

Floating In Darkness: A Journey Of Evolution

That allows us to incorporate the total perspective into the problem-solving process and arrive at long-term, viable, effective solutions that are going to make a difference as opposed to what we're doing is living solely within our tribes, slapping band-aids on things and thinking those are our solutions. That's a critical point that you brought up. We don't have to abandon all those things that we have previously identified with. We have to see them in the context of the bigger picture and see how they fit into the bigger puzzle because there is a bigger picture. That's the incredible interdependency and interconnectivity of life itself on this planet.

You see the evolution how that evolves. Let’s go back, you cannot speak to a commander of the nuclear command in Germany, one of the head F-16 pilots of Desert Storm and an astronaut without going back to some of that evolution in the beginning. I want to go a little bit back to some of the things that touched me, even if it was part of the old tribal way because you were always looking for a path you said, either over obstacles or through obstacles. I always think of that song. I mentioned a song because of the music. I bet people had never realized how much music plays in the role of being an astronaut. I was stunned by that. Music plays a major role in the life of an astronaut.

For some reason, I was counting up the number of musical groups or composers that I listed in the book and it's over a dozen. Music is our connection back to Earth and the natural. When you're living on a space station, it's a very artificial and sterile environment. I remember the first time I was in space and I heard music playing. Somebody had a speaker set up connected to an iPod. I was working somewhere on the space station and I remember all of a sudden feeling relaxed like, "What happened? Why am I relaxed all of a sudden?" I realized that I was listening to music. The reason why it relaxed me is that it gave me a bridge back to the only world I've ever known and to the natural world through that music. There are some interesting lyrics in the book that I used as a literary tool. There's music throughout the book to set the stage for certain scenes in the book.

There was one that I was waiting to see. You can't help it when you're reading this. You overcame so many obstacles to get to where you are. I thought of music. I was thinking of OAR's music where they go, "We go under. We go around. We go over. We'll go through." That's almost words that you specifically state. That's what reminded me of it. I bet you had heard it because you mentioned him, Tom Petty. I thought for sure you would need the waiting because waiting is the hardest part. That seems like almost what you do more than anything as an F-16 pilot and aquanaut because you practice a lot of being an astronaut under the sea. As an astronaut, much of the time is spent waiting.

The song that you brought up in the book is Tom Petty's Free Fallin'. There's a scene in the book where my five crewmates and I on the space station from three different countries are relaxing at dinner. We have a speaker set up with an iPod going and Tom Petty's Free Fallin' is playing. We are all literally free-falling. The entire space station is free-falling back to Earth. I look over at Sergey Volkov, a Russian cosmonaut. He is laid out with his arms up and back arched like a free-falling skydiver. The conversation that we were having was so poignant. It wasn't just the words that were being said. Everything was part of this poignant moment that was captured in the book that leads to the nature of reality, our place on the planet and in the universe. It was a sublime experience and music was a part of it.

When you say our place in the universe, the evolutionary thought that goes through it is, "We at one time are so small within this cosmic interstellar universe and at the same time relevant and important." That is something you make us aware of throughout all stages of your own growth through this book is, "Our part and parcel of this game as well as it being massive."

One of the main tenets of the book is that we are much more powerful and we have so much more impact on things, especially on the future than we could possibly imagine. It's an awe-inspiring thought but it's also a sobering thought because with that comes a lot of responsibility. Throughout the book, I'm touching on various explanations of why I'm making that point that we are incredibly powerful. There are a lot of people that are somewhat reluctant to make a difference in the world because they think, "What can one person possibly do to make a difference?" I go into a lot of depth and spend a lot of time talking about how powerful each and every one of us is and how to leave a true legacy, not the legacy that the world teaches us as important. A legacy that will not rust, fade away and grow exponentially over time versus what we do. A real legacy, not one that we tend to strive for that's impermanent.

The legacy we're going to get into it because when you describe even legacy and how the effect we have on our communities, ourselves, planet and universe, we'll drill deep. In the very beginning, you captured our attention with "coincidences." I am a collector of stories of coincidences because I love them. One of our favorite shows to watch is NCIS and Gibbs. The lead character played by Mark Harmon says, "There are no coincidences." I tend to sometimes think there are no coincidences. In that realm, something occurs to you as you're deciding to become an amazing astronaut. For instance, are you the only man on this Earth who crashed an F-16 two days in a row?

To be clear, I didn't crash the second time.

I'm sorry. I mean who will have to make a forced landing. Let's leave it at that.

On the first day, I ejected less than a second before I would have not survived. The next day, I had to do a forced landing to make a long story short. I'm pretty sure I'm the only astronaut who had to do that.

At first, you think, "How is this guy going to even become an astronaut?" You realize they investigated you with a microscope and you were not at fault in these cases but at the same time, there are things that I found such a contradiction. As much as you wanted to be an astronaut because of your experience in the Air Force and also some weird situations with your physical health, it was almost impossible for you to even become an astronaut. He was told by so many people, "Do not even bother trying."

There were probably at least four things that would require a miracle to overcome in order to become an astronaut. You mentioned a couple of here.

Share a little bit about that because I don't think people could even comprehend that. How could an F-16 Air Force pilot not be at least up for being an astronaut? It didn't make sense to me until I read the book and then I saw why. At first, it would seem a good example. Too many years of experience in the Air Force, that would seem odd.

Perspective On Life: If you come across something that you don’t agree with or that makes you a little uncomfortable, keep reading because it will probably change you.

In order to take the path that I was on, I needed to go to test pilot school. To go to test pilot school, I had to have the right degrees. Not only did I not have the right degrees to go to test pilot school, but I also did not have the right degrees to become an astronaut, either. At an advanced age, working ungodly hours and raising a family, I had to go out and get some advanced degrees that were completely outside of my field of experience. On top of that, even if I had those degrees, I had too many years in the Air Force to qualify to go to test pilot school. I would need a waiver.

What I was told was the longest waiver they had ever given was three months and I needed a three-year waiver. They said, "First of all, you're not qualified because you don't have the right degrees." Second of all, I had too many years in service at that point. I said, "It's their right not to choose me to go to test pilot school, but it's my right to apply anyway." I applied several times and did end up getting selected and getting the three-year waiver. I was also medically disqualified, had the wrong background and was too old. I didn't go to test pilot school. It was a ridiculous obstacle after a ridiculous obstacle that had to be overcome.

I talked about this in the book. When I set out to become an astronaut to give it my all, I didn't expect that I would be successful. What I wanted to avoid is being the grumpy old man who looks back on his life in the twilight years and wonders what would have happened if I had given it all to pursue my dream of becoming an astronaut. I wanted to be able to say, "I didn't make it but I truly believe that I did everything I could possibly do. It wasn't in the cards. It was beyond my control." In this case, it worked out. I shouldn't say I didn't expect it, but I knew that it was going to be a long shot is because of all those miracles that were beyond my control that had to occur in order for me to be accepted. I needed to be medically qualified, get this waiver that has never been granted before and a Master's degree in a subject that I don't even have a Bachelor's degree in. The list goes on of all these things that I had to do.

Even when you talked about Physics, we all know that randomness is 99.9% of everything that happens anyway that we have to fight that randomness is persistence. How many times are you going to swing that bat? That's one thing. Persistence is an underlying theme. It's not something you talk about too much, but as far as watching your life unfold, persistence is a key message throughout this book. It was that sense of purpose and mission. That breeds persistence because when you have that sense of mission, you'll do everything humanly possible to keep it alive.

I felt that I was on the path that I was supposed to be on while I was going through that.

We talked about the vastness and how small we feel, and yet at the same time, how important we are. This goes through the mission of the book to show us our importance. At the same time, you want to try to get a grasp and want us to get a grasp on why is it that in our society to function, we are continuously not keying on all the miracles that do occur every day and all we focus on are the terrible things that seemed to not happen even that often. The miracles around us, if you're willing to observe them properly, they're almost a moment-to-moment happening and yet our society is focused so much on the trivial rather than the miraculous.

There are two things there. One is and I described this early in the book about how we all put ourselves in a small limiting subset of reality in order to function, do our daily commutes, pay our bills and do all the things that we need to do. That's one part of it. The other part of it as you brought up is our tendency to focus on the negative. That's because we're bombarded with that constantly day after day. With our 24/7 news cycle, that does pretty much not much more than tell us all the bad news that's happening because that's what sells newspapers, brings people to online news agencies and draws us in.

It probably has something to do with the amygdala or something but that doesn't show the complete picture. The complete picture is that it's much more balanced. There's good happening and there is a bigger world out there than we normally keep in our day-to-day awareness. One of the analogies I use is talking about the Greek philosopher Plato's story about the allegory of the cave. There were these guys who were chained inside a cave and they had been there their whole life. They knew nothing outside. They had no desire to leave the cave because they didn't know of a better life outside the cave. They got very comfortable there.

There was a fire behind them. It was casting shadows on the cave wall and the sounds from behind them echoed off the walls, leading them to believe that the shadows were making these sounds. That was their reality. They worked hard to classify the shadows on the cave wall and felt very comfortable with it. One day, one of the prisoners escaped and saw that there was a world outside the cave that was superior in every way to the dark place with the shadows. The shadows weren't real. They were reflections of the true reality that was outside the cave wall. They didn't want to leave and believe him when he tried at a symphony to go back and explain to them.

We get so comfortable in our perspectives, opinions and worldviews that anything that challenges that is seen as a threat. Even if it's something that will broaden that and make life better, it's seen as a threat because we've worked hard to classify those shadows on the cave wall. There's a lot in the book about breaking down those barriers and walls that we've built around ourselves that close us in from the greater, larger and superior in every way reality that surrounds us constantly.

This is what you want to send home is there's no doubt that when you are shot up into space. We will talk about some of the specifics of that but first, let's go to the big picture. You see the Earthrise. You want to send home that an astronaut's perspective would automatically be different but you want us to know that we have that same ability to feel that Earthrise experience, even if we're not shot up into space.

That started with The Orbital Perspective. The main tenet of The Orbital Perspective is you don't have to be in orbit to have the orbital perspective. That's why I included in that book so many stories of people who exhibited the orbital perspective without ever having gone to space. That's the main tenet of Floating in Darkness, too. There is absolutely no requirement to go to space to realize any of the truths that are illuminated in the book.

There's some fun stuff in there I want to share with readers as well. Everything from trying to take a pill to try to sleep, people don't realize when you're used to laying down your head and it's a pillow. It's very hard when you can't do that. You're floating up constantly. Tell us a little bit about that feeling because when you read it, all I kept saying was, "Even if I don't want to go into space, I want to feel that."

It is a euphoric feeling to be weightless. It took me about a month to figure out how to fall asleep in space, which is unfortunate because my first mission was two weeks long. I didn't get too much sleep on that first mission. We're used to gravity pushing us into a comfy bed and our heads gently down into a comfy pillow. There is no gravity to push you into anything. You're floating. Where my head would naturally go as I relaxed was uncomfortable for me. I don't know after weeks up there if the tendons on my neck stretched but eventually, it was not an issue. It's a great sleep because you're not tossing and turning because of pressure points that occur throughout the night.

Perspective On Life: We are so comfortable in our worldview that anything that challenges it is seen as a threat, even if it will broaden that and make life better.

You did something at least in the Kindle edition of Floating in Darkness and I'm going to guess it's in the print edition. For some reason, there are almost whole paragraphs when you are probing your own consciousness and they're in italics. Did you do that on purpose? Was that only in one edition? There are whole paragraphs specifically done when you are probing the depths of consciousness that one would expect to see in a philosophy book, not just a biographical and metaphysical book like this. I'm thinking these things now. I'll give you a perfect example is when you realize that you have this one day to live, this thought comes to your mind. You break it then down into how many nows has one have. There's something about that. I was going to read the whole paragraph but I figured we'll save it for the readers. Share that moment because that was powerful.

Going back to the stylistic points, anytime I'm thinking to myself style-wise, we put that in italics. What you're talking about is in a scene where it's a dream on the space station. We don't have time to get into the entire dream. Part of the dream, I'm pondering the meaning of time, "What is time? Is time an arrow that has a series of successive nows in them? If so, how long does a now last?" What the conclusion of that was that there's a vertical dimension to time. There is what we understand through our finite minds as the linear arrow of time that's going from the past through the present to the future but there's another dimension to that I call a vertical dimension where there's depth, height and it's not finite. That is tied later in the book to our underlying unity because it all comes full circle.

In a sense, by breaking down the now the way you do, we don't even reach a moment of death.

We become immortal.

You talked about legacy. It's not so much what you leave behind. It's that you never really leave. There's truth to that. I'm going to use your own words. This is another one of those. Sometimes it was hard for me because I was into the philosophy to determine, whether this is the dream or is it Ron thinking this awake. It doesn't matter to me. I didn't care. It was too great of a thought. This is what you wrote, "Could the now be a perpendicular doorway between the finite linear time we know and the infinite exponential existence that is beyond our perception?" I want to focus on that a little bit because very few people talk about that notion of, "Beyond our own perception, there is us still there. We are leaving this mark and trail almost like a comet's tail that will never go away. No matter who remembers it, we leave this mark."

Tying that to legacy as we talked, the world teaches us that to leave a legacy, you have to be some great person where they build my name and surname universities after you. Every great statesman, poet, movie store, top-notch and world-famous celebrity will be forgotten. At best, you're going to be a historical footnote that eventually will mean nothing, even the physical things we create. Every great cathedral and pyramid will eventually be brought to dust but there is a legacy that not only doesn't fade and isn't impermanent but increases exponentially.

The difference between where our world would be and will be if you had not lived is unbelievable. Every thought, action, word and single thing we do every moment of every day ripples out exponentially and changes the course not only of our own lives but of society and civilization. One of the examples I used in the book is a giant asteroid coming towards the Earth. It's so big that if it hit the Earth, it would destroy all life on Earth. If we knew about it soon enough, we wouldn't have to send a whole big team of people to blow it out of the sky.

We could send a small spacecraft with the force equivalent to the weight of a feather, given a slight little nudge. That little nudge over the course of the entire trajectory to Earth could lead to thousands of miles of miss distance saving every living thing on the planet. Everything that we do is a little nudge, either positive or negative so the trajectory of our civilization. Going back to the thing about time is what I'm trying to describe is the light that's streaming in from the cave entrance. There is a bigger world out there than we normally perceive. Every once in a while, we get glimpses into that. That was my attempt to share a glimpse into that world outside of the cave.

For us to realize it, all it requires is our little nudges. We don't need anything more than that little tap. If you take that little tap like the trajectory, that's another thing. When you're traveling hundreds of thousands of miles into space, you're going to land into a space station. We're now talking about inches. Whatever happens here on this planet, you talk about a ripple effect when it comes to the trajectory of the world, the universe and our lives. That ripple effect needs the nudge and you can be millions of miles off and then nudge it back. You can take that 100,000 miles to that 3-inch space that you need to fit the rocket into the International Space Station.

When we're talking about things like understanding reality, it's not even that, "It's just a small, little nudge." It's less than a nudge. It takes effort from me. All we have to do is get out of our own way. The effort is in keeping up the walls that separate us from those truths. If we're able to get out of our own way, which throughout the book I defined as our ego, then a lot of these things naturally become apparent.

You are so attuned to the fact that getting out of our own way is way harder than getting out of the way of an asteroid or anything else. That's the puzzle that I'm always struggling with is getting out of my own way.

That's what everybody struggles with.

That's what I mean. Getting out of our own way is the universal element that we struggle with.

One of the things that going to space did do and it does this for almost everybody who goes to space is it makes you realize that a lot of the things that we think are so important, fight and quarrel over blur into insignificance from that vantage point. Part of the equation of being able to get out of our own way is to realize that 99% and a whole bunch of 9’s after that percent of the things that we worry about, we don't need to be worrying about.

Perspective On Life: Every single thought, action, word, or thing we do every moment of every day ripples out exponentially. It changes the course not only of our lives but of society and civilization.

You give us something in the book that I want to play off of that thought exactly. It is another way to get out of our way and this is what you were able to do. I believe this is why we want all of us to experience this. I'm going to use your exact words, "Immersed in complete awe and wonder, I am also filled with gratitude. I think if you fill your life with awe, wonder and gratitude, I am convinced you will get out of your way."

One of the things because some people reading this might think, "What on wonder do I have?" A lot of being immersed in on wonder is simply opening your eyes to the on wonder that surrounds us constantly. The very fact that you took a breath and you're here is a miracle. If we added up all the probabilities that you would be you, we come to the mathematical certainty that you are a miracle of incomprehensible proportions the fact that you're here. Here's the other side of that coin and that applies to everyone else, the person who flips you off in traffic, the troll on the internet and the person who doesn't agree with your political views. Every single person you meet is also a perfect miracle. That's a foundational and mathematical truth with mathematical certainty that we need to take into our everyday Calculus.

As you say it even, all of a sudden my shoulders dropped with everything else. It's funny. The deeper you get, most people get a little tense when that happens. The truth is when you do experience that feeling as we talked about awe, gratitude and wonder, you can take a deeper breath. You don't have to feel so uptight because you realize it's that weird dichotomy that we're small, insignificant, large and important. When you come to terms with that, you can relax about it. You also tell us, "We, ourselves are not from Earth. We are of Earth." You used those words and that's another soothing little mantra that we need to play over in our head. We are a part of this universe and world. Don't be afraid of that. Rest in comfort with it and be grateful for it.

Say that 100 years from now, we have a spacecraft with one astronaut on it that flies 75,000 light-years away. The radius of the Earth became 75,000 light-years because that's not somebody from Earth that's out there. I used that line which was not my line. I've heard that many times from many different people that, "We're not from Earth. We're of Earth." I juxtapose that thought and mindset, which I had on my first mission with a thought I had on my second mission, which is, "We're not in the universe. We're of the universe." You get that same thread. There's a scene where I do talk about some music and lyrics. It's on the launchpad in Kazakhstan where I go much deeper into what I mean by that.

Is that the U2 song? I don't mind you doing a little bit of it. I must tell you this. You almost recite the song in its entirety but when you do hear, "One love, one blood, one life," I find it correct. Maybe I'm almost positive this is where it was. It was when you entered the Soyuz capsule when you were going to go up in space with the Russians. You realized at one time you were a fighter pilot, guarding Europe against the Soviets and now you are brothers flying together. There was a flag, both the American flag and the Soviet flag. I remember you talking about that U2 song. You include the lyrics in it and tie those lyrics into the emotions that you're going through.

I did feel and I don't think it was just me but I felt that we were embarking on a mission of unity for all of humanity because of what you said. We had former Cold War Warriors that had beaten swords into plowshares, whatever that saying is. I'm lying on my back in the spacecraft, getting ready to launch. The song One comes over our headsets because each of us was asked to pick a few songs that the Russian launch personnel could pipe into our spacecraft during the times of relative boarding. One was one of the songs that I picked because of its message of unity. As I'm lying there, this certainty of beauty was washing over me and I understood why the words were beautiful. They represent unity which is a beautiful concept but I couldn't understand why the underlying melody was so beautiful.

In this scene in the book, I dissect what's happening with the underlying music. It concludes with that juxtaposition between, "We're not from the Earth. We're of the Earth with we're not in the universe. We're of the universe. What does it mean to be of the universe?" I take it one step further and I say, "We are the universe." That's all related to the song, which I have permission from U2 to use the lyrics that I did use in that passage. When I read the book and I don't know how many times I've read it now, that's one of the most moving parts of the book for me is when I read that passage because it rings so true. There's a powerful truth in there that if you're on the same wavelength, it's going to ring true for you. I'm laughing because the whole passage is about wavelength. "What is music? It's a sign wave. What is an individual note?" The beauty does not come from the individual note. What connects the notes is where the beauty comes from, which has a lot of applications for our life here.

I decided to use the name Between The Lines for the show and PBS series because I'll never forget being on a train in Germany. I was sitting next to a composer who was a classical pianist. He was going to one of these Deutsche Grammophon. I remember that. It was a concert that they were putting on that was going to be the most classical concert there was. He was a professor of Music at New Paltz University in New York. I said, "Professor, you're playing classical music. Why is Vladimir Horowitz when he is playing classical music so famous? I didn't want to offend or anything but I've never heard of you. What is the difference? You're playing the same notes." He said, "It's what's between those notes and frequencies that we see the awe and wonder."

There's a part of that translates to this other element. That is, you talk a lot about the kindness that we need to show to others. When you're kind to others, it's not something you have to think of as an altruistic thing. This is the example used, "As if you would pull your hand away from touching a hot stove. Being altruistic is a sense of, in the truest way, it's a beautiful form of selfishness. It's because you are by being of giving, you are receiving."

Maybe a different way to look at it is not as selflessness but you're expanding your definition of the word self. Like at the end of the book, I expand my definition of the word home. I say, "If we expand our definition of the word home to include the entire planet, it doesn't come with a requirement to forget where we came from our national, cultural, religious or ethnic identity is. It simply means seeing those things in the context of the bigger picture." If we expand our definition of the word self to include more than just what's inside the skin right here and equate it with all of humanity, all life on Earth or better yet, in the universe, we do that without losing our own personal identity. We could become something bigger.

The other point of the book is, "There is no them. There is only us. The word them is not a real word." When we're being altruistic to some person or creature, we're not necessarily in the true sense of the word being any more altruistic to our hand when we pull it back from a hot stove. That's us. If somebody is altruistic and the hero of a natural disaster in some other part of the world think those poor people over there, open up their checkbook and write a check, that's all great but where we go wrong is the first part of that, those poor people over there. It's not those poor people over there, that's happening to us. What's normally beyond our perception for most people is this underlying unity. It's more than just words. There is a truth to that that is normally beyond our awareness. A truth that it's not a platitude and cliché. There's a real fundamental truth there.

You emphasized that same fundamental truth by taking us back into orbit. You asked this question, "What is an orbit? It is when we no longer need our engines." We go back to that, almost it becomes a reaction rather than something we have to do. We don't even need our engines anymore. We are free-floating in the darkness. You also tell us, "Through our darkest moments is when we are given the opportunity to see the brightest light."

What you're referring to is another scene where I used a metaphor that a rocket is launching and it's launching a lone passenger. The passenger represents all life on Earth. Not only all life that presently lives but all the lives that will ever live. It was a literary tool that I use to try and paint some of the requirements for an effective course correction to the trajectory that our civilization is currently on, which if we extrapolate it out leads to disaster and to get on a better trajectory that leads to a positive restorative future that gets us to orbit. One of the things that we have to do to get to orbit is to jettison the weight of the first stage of the rocket. We're at the point where we need to let go of the first stage.

All the things that led to technological development and humans being the rulers of the world and being able to control a lot of the facilities and functions of Earth, that's what brought us to this point. If we try and hold on to the weight of what brought us to this point, we'll never make it to orbit and come crashing back down in a fiery violent crash. I don't want to give too much away of that scene but that to me is somewhat prescriptive in some of the things that will get us on the right track.

Perspective On Life: If we added up all the probabilities that you would be you, we come to the mathematical certainty that you are a miracle of incomprehensible proportions.

What you say also will help us unlock the doors that keep us contained. You used the word ego or false identities. It does open us up. That was the mission of this book and it's a beautiful one. If you don't mind, I want to use your words again that I feel sends us home. Let's leave it at that. Like you said, "What is home?" You redefined that. These are your words, "I am filled with the optimism of what our species can achieve when we come together and celebrate our shared humanity. Through us, we will come to know ourselves that there is but one universe and we are it." Ron, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time, wisdom and insights. You're enriching all of us.

Like you always do, thank you for taking so much time, putting effort into dissecting, analyzing and bringing out all the important things. I appreciate the work that went into that, the patience and your dedication to telling me stories.

It's easy with a gentleman like yourself. Thank you, Ron.

It's my pleasure.

Important Links

• www.BarryKibrick.com

• https://www.RonGaran.com/

• The Orbital Perspective

• Floating in Darkness: A Journey of Evolution

About Ron Garan

Astronaut, Fighter Pilot, Test Pilot, Humanitarian

Having enjoyed an illustrious career that has cemented Colonel Ron Garan’s place as one of the world’s most influential individuals, the iconic father of three is a decorated NASA astronaut, fighter pilot and test pilot, a humanitarian, and a social entrepreneur.

As part of a select group of individuals who have been fortunate enough to see the world from space, Ron champions his “orbital perspective” message to improve life on earth. Ron is celebrated not just for his research in space but also for his humanitarian contribution to life on earth.

Jon Levy - You're Invited

Listen & Subscribe Below!

Despite the many interesting things promised in networking, people continue to stay away from it because of its culture of manipulation. It's missing one important element: a sense of belongingness. Join this conversation with Jon Levy, a behavioral scientist, to talk about his book, You're Invited. Our discussion takes us through a step-by-step process of cultivating influence to improve work, business, and life. We delve into how people can grow and move forward by forging genuine emotional connections, even in the face of vulnerability and imperfections. Life must be treated as an infinite game, bringing people together on an endless journey of trust, honesty, and benevolence. 

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Jon Levy - You're Invited

The Art And Science Of Cultivating Influence

Do you want to know how to cultivate influence and meet those who do? Then you're going to love my guest in this episode, Jon Levy. He is a behavioral scientist specializing in influence, human connection, and decision making. He also started the Influencers Dinner, a dining experience for industry leaders, ranging from Nobel laureates to Olympic athletes, and from celebrities to executives. With his book, You're Invited, Jon takes us step by step through the art and science of cultivating influence to improve our work, our businesses and our lives. A special thanks to my patrons who make this show possible. If you enjoy reading, please subscribe and visit my website, BarryKibrick.com to become a supporter of this show.

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Jon, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure having you on. What I find so interesting about the book, You're Invited, was the reason which I never knew before, why you decided to bring people together and the definition was in a way, that's different from networking.

First of all, I grew up really unpopular. I was a super geek before being a geek was cool. It’s now like the Avengers and comic books, and people are like, “Me too.” Everybody loves that stuff. When I was growing up, I didn't fit in but I figured that if I could understand how people behave, then I could maybe figure out how to make some real friends. When I was in my twenties, I made some progress. I was in the seminar. The seminar leader said that the fundamental element that defines the quality of our lives are the people we surround ourselves with and the conversations that we have with them.

That left me with two options. Option one was to talk to the people in my life about different things and option two was to figure out how to connect with people. I realized that if I connected people to one another, then it only served to strengthen the relationships that we had. I want to know the most extraordinary people and I want them to know each other, so those positive behaviors spread through a community.

More than knowing, you emphasized it a number of times in You’re Invited, your book and it is the feeling of belonging that you want to nurture and develop. That's an added level as far as I can see.

You mentioned that people dislike networking and I would wholeheartedly agree. The issue with networking is that it makes us feel dirty and research has shown us that implicit association is wanting to wash. We don't feel that way about making friends and that's because one feels natural and the other one feels a manipulation. It’s like I'm using somebody. Human beings evolved in groups and we're not the fastest and strongest. Our strength for survival is fundamentally being able to work together and that requires belonging. If you look, the greatest punishment, in most places, is either solitary confinement or exile, which means that, for us, the biggest punishment is saying you can no longer be part of the community. At the core of being human is this need to belong.

Connections according to you, they're not knowing each other. They are sharing emotions. Shared emotional connections are the key to fostering this feeling of belonging. I belonged to a bowling league once and it was cool, but I didn't get that shared emotional connection. In fact, it's why I quit. I wasn't able to stay on that same level with everybody in that league. That's an important element that people need to hear. It's not connecting on a level of activity, it's caring and sharing on an emotional connection.

Here's what's interesting about what you said. First of all, human beings have no logical side at all. We're basically emotions that justify things with bad logic, which is why if we're having a bad day, we’ll justify having a dessert or buying ourselves that thing that we want at the store. The interesting thing about that is that it's not about being a part of a community. It's feeling like you are. It’s not about belonging, it's about the feeling of belonging. I could be a card-carrying member of the bowling league but it doesn't mean that I feel like I belong and that's what's important.

There's great research by these two guys, McMillan and Chavis and they were realizing that for us, for humans, it's about this sense of community and this feeling that we're part of something. They founded the four critical elements. The first is this sense of membership. There's a clear group that's on the inside and the outside. In the bowling league, it might be that you're a card-carrying member and the Girl Scouts, it might mean that you took some oath and wear the uniform. For doctors, it might be passing all of your medical exams and being board certified but there's a clear distinction.

There are also several other characteristics and one of them is influenced. Feeling that you have an impact on the group and the group has an impact on you. You might be part of the bowling team. If you feel like you don't matter, then you won't feel a sense of belonging. If you have no influence over the group or your fellow players, there are two other factors and essentially an alignment of integration of fulfillment and needs, which is that you're heading in the same direction. If everybody there wanted to be a pro bowler and you didn't, they wouldn't be the right community for you, because you're not aligned on what you care about. The final part is shared history and values. What I love about that one is that stuff's clear for religious organizations. What's even funnier to me is that it doesn't even have to be real history. Did you ever read the Harry Potter series?

If I say I didn't, I'm in trouble. If I say I did, I'm lying so either way, I'm going wrong here. I'm going to take the Fifth.

It’s a good answer in your case. There's this incredible photo of two young women dressed up as students at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, the school from Harry Potter. There is Universal Studios at Diagon Alley, the Harry Potter portion of Universal. They're dressed full-on and they're holding wands and they're crying hysterically. The reason they're crying isn't because there's something wrong, but more so that they for the first time in their lives feel like they're participants in the story that meant so much to them. They had a shared history and values. It was so emotionally overwhelming, even though it wasn't real. Everybody acknowledges it isn't real but it's real to them as a set of values in history.

You say what that does and I want to be careful how we phrase this because it has almost another term. Emotional safety is what was developing there.

It’s called psychological safety.

That’s what’s happening between them. They sensed that for the first time they're not alone.

They fundamentally feel like they are part of something that is larger than themselves. They belong, feel safe and they feel recognized. That in itself is pretty rare. Here's a staggering piece of knowledge. In 1985, the average American had about three close friends besides family. By 2004, less than a generation later, we were down to about two. This is absolutely insane. In nineteen years, Americans lost 1/3 of their social ties. This is way before the pandemic clearly and far before social media took off. The culprit here is probably moving for work. The more people pick up and move, they have to reset their social ties each time and as a result, they end up feeling isolated, disconnected or losing social ties.

Sense Of Belongingness: Human beings' strength for survival is fundamentally being able to work together, and that requires belonging.

What's concerning about this is a few things. One is that the greatest predictor of human longevity isn't a papaya cleanse that you picked up at the local Whole Foods. The greatest predictor is number two, which is close social ties and number one, is social integration. Coming in contact with a lot of people and feeling like they're part of a community. What concerns me about this is that if we're becoming more and more isolated, then we have less and less of this feeling of belonging and we have less and less social ties.

Jon, may I ask you something, because I have noticed that but at the same time, some of my ties because have gotten more contained, they also feel a little stronger. I don't know if that will compensate for the fact that they have shrunk by 1/3 but I do sense that in my case and I can only speak for myself, I'm not a scientist like yourself. I feel like the ties that I do have seem to fulfill me in a certain way that the larger group did not. Maybe that's because I'm getting older. I don't know the reason why but I am feeling content with lesser ties than I did in my earlier years.

Let's separate two things. One is, you're outgoing, charismatic, and spend your life connecting with people. You have more social ties than 99.9% of the world. You pruning that down when you feel like you have different priorities in life probably won't have a huge impact in terms of total numbers versus a person who only has four close friends, moves and is down to two. Those are different experiences. The other aspect is that the loneliest people in our society are not the oldest. It seems to be inversely related to age.

Gen Z is reporting feeling completely unseen and unconnected. They feel isolated. That means that they're probably not experiencing a profound sense of belonging anywhere. With people spending less and less time at companies and now not even ever going into a company, people are getting hired online, living in their parent's homes and meeting only the three or four people that they need direct contact with in the company. Our social circles are shrinking even more and that's what concerns me.

That goes back to You’re Invited. You want to bring more people together. Let's separate this because you're dealing with influential people who come together and I was honored to be invited to one of these most amazing dinners. What does Gen Z, Gen X and whoever else might be suffering from? What outlets are we going to create? I don't see the Mason’s Lodge opening up again. I don't see everyone going back to church. There was that bowling. There was even a great book called Bowling Alone. It's shrinking. By the way, this is going to sound strange, but that's how I used to bowl. I was by myself. That's how I loved it but let me take myself.

The key with behavioral science is never to confuse people for a person. What I mean by that is that I might give a statistic that says 95% of people fit into this category. You could be in the 5% that don't. There are too many mitigating circumstances to evaluate any one person but across the general population, these things tend to be true. As human beings, it’s something called this false consensus effect which assumes that most people agree with our opinion of the world. We assume we're intelligent and thereby others must hold the same view.

We also have something called the frequency illusion, in which we misevaluate the frequency to which things happen simply because they are more salient to us. If I ask people, “Are they scared of shark attacks?” They said, “Yeah. They happen all the time.” You look at the statistics and they never happened. People are terrified of terrorism. Nobody dies of terrorism. Nobody has died of terrorism in I don't even know how long. It's not because we might have a great intelligence community supporting us but because the things that kill people are walking like heart attacks and cholesterol. The slow killers but we don't think about that because those things aren't as salient. They aren't as easy to remember. They're not as terrifying to see as a building exploding. The key when we're looking at human behavior is understanding that there are certain generalities that are true across most people and they might not be true specifically about you and that's fine.

You hit it on the head. I always assumed, if I'm feeling it, someone else is feeling it. I still think there's an element to that. There is still this human connection we have. A perfect example from the book is we all struggle with something. By the fact that we all struggle and especially as you said, when you were younger you felt a failure, almost all of us at one time with some outliers, feel like a failure and feel like we're struggling. You give us a little key to that and that is you say, being honest about our struggles could set us free and maybe even reverse some of the negative aspects of the way we're moving if we do open up about our struggles. That might even be the easiest way to reconnect because what else do we all have in common? There is the fact that we struggle.

You bring up two interesting points. The first is that people love to try and seem perfect and that they have it all together. It turns out that there's a behavioral bias known as the pratfall effect. It essentially states that if you screw up a little in front of people, they’d like you more. The reason why in romantic comedies the lead male or female are always falling all over themselves. They're clumsy and silly is it makes it endearing. If people looked too perfect, it makes us uncomfortable because there's nothing human about it. Researchers ran an experiment where they had people go in for interviews. They had some of the participants accidentally spill some coffee on themselves or drop some papers.

When looking at ratings, the ones that dropped stuff and spilled stuff, rated higher. That's because it takes the pressure off when somebody is imperfect and acknowledges it. It comes back to how human beings develop trust. There's this misconception that trust precedes vulnerability but it doesn't. The two of us were walking down the street and I said, “Barry, writing this book was the most stressful, exhausting experience of my life. I'm totally burnt out.”

At that moment, I've signaled vulnerability. I've said something that doesn't necessarily make me look perfect. You have a few options. You can ignore me. You can make fun of me, “Jon, you're so weak. Be tough. Work your way through it.” If you do either of those two things, trust will be reduced because I don't want to be yelled at or ignored. Instead, you acknowledge that I said that and signal vulnerability back and say, “Jon, during COVID, I've been super stressed as well. Work has been crazy. What's going on?” Suddenly you've signaled vulnerability back to the same degree and now the two of us know that we can trust each other at that higher level. That's how trust is formed. It's through these vulnerability loops. When somebody has a pratfall moment, let's call it, they dropped their papers. It's a moment of vulnerability. This gives people the opportunity to complete the loop. It's why we find them endearing.

That's why so many people were willing to cook you dinner and why you started the Influencers is because you open up vulnerability. Even as I'm listening to you, I'm going, “I’ve got to become more vulnerable.” One of the things and maybe it's generational again or what but I love to show my mistakes. I'm proud of them even and I make them often and the same ones all the time. I find that an interesting thing. I always find people who say they never make the same mistake twice. I say, “You lied because I only make mistakes over and over again.” They're not the same exact mistake, but it's the same type of mistake.

There are words that I've never in my life spelled correctly and every day I misspell the same word over and over again. You would think at 40 years old the guy would figure out the difference between there and their. The I before E in the word friend or something. I’m literally making that mistake every single day over and over again.

I had to make it part of my personality and pride myself on it. They even had a guest once who wrote The Art of the Mistake. I said, “That's what I am. I'm the art of the mistake because I do it over and over again.” At the same time, though, I want to get back to this vulnerability loop because although I am not ashamed of the mistakes I make nor am I ashamed of showing how vulnerable I am, there is an element in me that says, “I'm invincible. I don't want this to come out. I want to feel this sense of invincibility because it'll protect me in the long run and it will protect my family.” When I'm listening to you, and I even hear how the empathy pours out of your mouth, I'm a little jealous, because there's no doubt that I know, I feel sympathy but empathy is that extra level and I'm fairly certain I don't have that and I admire it in yourself and in others when I see it.

First of all, thank you. Secondly, it's interesting because, in general, human beings look their best when they're willing to look terrible. The only question is, how terrible are we willing to look? If we want to build trust and meaningful relationships, the kinds of relationships that are predictive of longevity or even team success. The greatest predictor of a team succeeding isn’t IQ and genius but something called psychological safety. The idea that you won't be eliminated from the group or reprimanded for having a dissenting view or opinion.

To have these kinds of levels of belonging requires either that we pay attention when people are opening those vulnerability loops so we can close them or it means that at times, we have to take the lead and open those vulnerabilities. If we don't then and they feel uncomfortable, then it'll never happen. Some people say, “Aren't you risking getting hurt badly?” My view is, “A few seconds of pain or whatever it is, won't compare to losing 5, 10, 15 years from my life because I’m lonely.” Loneliness is on par with smoking almost a packet of cigarettes in terms of its health impact. That's crazy.

There’s another thing you bring out and I was funny before I started doing this, I was doing a thing called Thoughts Through Time where I was looking at different philosophers. I ended up starting that with Adam Smith, the creator of the book, The Wealth of Nations, and the Father of Capitalism and Modern Economics. What I found interesting when I read your book, was that in You’re Invited, you use a term that he stressed that was so important in both the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations and now more than ever and you say this as well, benevolence.

Sense Of Belongingness: The greatest predictor of a succeeding team isn't IQ but the idea that you won't be eliminated from the group or reprimanded for having a descending opinion.

When you attach this community together, and as you say, “Trust and vulnerability, these things form a loop but benevolence is one step above.” That is when you are truly, even above competence, honesty and integrity. I remember reading that in your book. It's benevolence. When you can show this goodness, not as a, “Look how good I am,” but show this goodness to your fellow member of your community or even larger than your community.

When I was researching the book, I thought I had a pretty decent understanding of trust. I then came across a researcher by the name of Kent Grayson from the University of Chicago. He looks at understanding the deep science of trust. He pointed out that we all talk about trust as this absolutely essential factor for company success, our personal lives. If people say, “You won't have a great relationship, what’s the most important thing?” Trust and then we say communication is the tendency. That's super interesting because if I were to ask most people, “What is trust made out of?” They can't tell me.

Kent was able to break it down. He described it as trust is made up of three things. Competence, the ability to do something. Honesty, if you're truthful, and the third is benevolence. You pointed to this, Barry. They're not all equally valued. If Michael Jordan were to shoot and miss, you wouldn't say, “He's incompetent. I can't trust him.” He's arguably the greatest basketball player of all time but what you would probably say is, “He missed the shot and he’ll probably make the next one.” Breach incompetence is not a big deal. If we found out somebody was lying to us, we probably wouldn't say, “It's a one-off.” We'd probably begin to doubt everything and everything they say moving forward but there's this weird loophole and it works like this.

The two of us are walking down the street, you turn to me and say, “Jon, do you mind if we stop by a friend's house?” I’d say, “Sure. I'd be more than happy to.” When we get there, 40 of my closest friends jump out and scream, “Surprise.” It's a big celebration in honor of my book launch. Everybody has copies of You’re Invited signing everybody, whatever it is but it would be really weird if I turned to you and said, “Barry, you lied to me. I don't think we can be friends anymore.” That would be super strange and that's because as you pointed out, human beings value benevolence above honesty. If you have somebody who's incredibly skilled but has no group orientation, you don't want them on the team because that'll mean arrogance because they don't care about anybody but themselves.

Meanwhile, if you have somebody who has a higher group orientation and a lower skill, you can always upskill them but it's virtually impossible to train somebody to care about others. The people that you'd prefer are the ones that might be technically less capable but you can deal with that and care about the other human beings around them. If you're stuck in the middle of a firefight, you want to know that whoever's behind you has your back even if they're not the top shooter. That's because it doesn't matter if somebody is the top shooter if they've run away unless you are there alone.

There's a new series out called Ted Lasso. I don't know if you're familiar with that series.

I love that series.

I am begging to get Jason on my show, in fact, because I so much love that but you gave almost the plot away. I mean that in the sense of you were because what he does is the most important thing to improve that team is what you said, “Someone has your six,” as they say. Someone has your back. Not the best kicker. In fact, he trades the best player because he wasn't part of that team and the team begins to win once he does that.

That's what's interesting. In the ‘90s, the Bulls were this team that everybody admired. They had Pippen. It’s funny that I'm referencing all the sports stuff but I know nothing about sports. I know more about Quidditch from Harry Potter than I do about real sports. Dennis Rodman had this reputation of being super disruptive. Somebody asked the coach about him and he said, “You can have one Dennis Rodman, but no more.” The moment that you have another disruptive player, you've lost it all but we can handle one especially if they're that talented. I get it. Sometimes, it's tempting to have an incredibly talented person that goes to the beat of their own drum but it's also corrosive for other people because they feel less valued.

According to Project Aristotle, which is the Google project I mentioned, psychological safety is an absolutely critical element. There's a player named Shane Battier, an absolutely brilliant guy, two-time NBA champion from when he was on the Miami Heat. Somebody did a scientific study on him, but he is not a legendary player like LeBron James, Michael Jordan, or any of these other guys. He's a glue player and it's interesting because a guide Battier researchers found that every single team he was on played better because he was on it. It's not because he's the best player. It's because of his ability to function as the glue of the team. He has such incredible sportsmanship and work ethic that it causes everybody else to elevate their game. He gives people this experience of belonging and that's pretty incredible.

Jon, you emphasize that not only is that important but how do you maintain that and you say something in the book, You're Invited, caught my attention. I'm going to paraphrase it a bit but these are your words. It's the over and over of doing these micro-actions, these are all incremental improvements that are a part of what you would say, creates that glue. It’s the essence of what that player must do because they see it over and over.

If it was a one-off, it wouldn't mean anything on the positive either, so it's got to be done over and over again but the actions themselves could be small. People do not have to think that you have to do great things constantly. It's a small gesture. It could be a tap on the shoulder. It could be the fact that you do anything in a small amount of time in a small way but you do it over and over again. We're talking about group trust, it builds your own inner trust, as well.

Here's what I love about what you're pointing out. We talked about vulnerability as this base element. Traditionally, friendships or relationships are built over the long term because it takes time for those vulnerability loops to open and close. I bumped into you on the street and I asked about how your son is doing. The fact that I remember that you have a son and that I cared enough to ask opens a vulnerability loop and you can close it by sharing.

In the book, You're Invited, a little epiphany went off in my head because it would be the last thing I would have thought of. You say, for starters, you should ask people for more favors because this builds again that sense of you need them, they need you. Again, maybe it's the generations I don't know but the last thing I ever wanted to do was ask someone a favor but you opened up my mind when we even had the Zoom meeting. That's why I began to start this. When I heard you say, “You need to ask people for favors.”

I raised my hand and that was fun. You press that little button, if you don't know just shout it out. I'm the only one out of hundreds of people on this thing. I had to shout it out because I didn't know. I shouted it out and I asked a favor. I said, “Jon, I want you to be on the show.” It was, “That's why I'm going to do this.” I didn't realize that. It's weird not to realize something for so long in life and finally say, “Asking people favors is important according to Jon. I'm going to take him up on this.”

Here's what's super funny about this. I grew up the same way, “Let's not bother people. Save my favors for another day,” but it turns out that works counter what's to our benefit. The reason is like the IKEA effect. When people invest effort into us, they care more about us.

May I explain something because I don't think we talked about the IKEA effect? I read it in your book, but explain it a little bit.

The IKEA effect is that people disproportionately care about their IKEA furniture because they have to assemble it. Anything we invest effort into, we care about disproportionately. That’s why people care about their kids and not other people's because our kids are a pain in the butt that we have to get up in the middle of the night to change their diapers, feed them, help them with their homework, and wake up early to take them to soccer practice so on and so forth. This is all to say that, if I came to you, Barry, how many Emmys do you have?

I have three for doing this show and a total of six for other shows that I've done.

If I come to you and I say, “Clearly, Barry, you have an expertise in media. Can I get your advice on something?” I'm probably scared that I'm bothering you and I might be but here's what's interesting. On average, you're flattered that I came to you.

Jon, you are understating that. I'm so flattered and you're right. That's why I'm saying, I can't believe it didn't enter my mind even though that's the way I personally felt because you're right. There's nothing better than that feeling.

Here's what's even more interesting. Not only are you going to be flattered, but you will also think more of me for coming to you because, in your mind, you're pretty smart. You know your stuff and if I'm recognizing the fact that your stuff, then you think I'm even smarter. It’s like, “Clearly Jon's a smart guy. He's coming to me for advice on this topic.” When you do invest that effort, it causes you to care more about me. Not only am I benefiting by flattering you but I'm also benefiting from you investing effort and caring more.

The key is reciprocity because nobody likes a taker. Somebody who's completely selfish who takes all the time but it's pretty wild. It means that when people offer support and we say no, we're stopping a vulnerability loop. It can be insulting. I used to think of it as, “I don't want to bother them.” When somebody offers me a glass of water when I get to their home, I'm like, “I'll take two shots of tequila and a lasagna.” “But we didn't offer it.” I'm like, “Yeah, but you will.” The reason is also funny.

There was this great study done where people were stopped on the street and asked for directions. Often, they wouldn't give them because complex directions can be a pain in the butt. If they were asked for the time and asked for directions, most of the time they would give it, which means that the key is in stacking favors from small to large. When somebody puts a bit of effort into your relationship, you're viewed as somebody worthy of effort and thereby, if you ask for some more, you're more likely to get it.

You have to be careful, especially asking New Yorkers because I remember when people would ask people how to get to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, New Yorkers didn't know because they never went themselves.

I have never been to the Statue of Liberty. I assume you take a ferry from somewhere.

It's exactly right. It’s a wonderful experience by the way. I had the pleasure of doing it but it was many years after living in California, never while I was in New York.

I've lived in New York for over 40 years and I've never been to the Statue of Liberty.

I used to tell people, “The New Yorkers aren't rude. They don't know how to go to those places.” We asked them where the nearest original Ray’s Pizza is, they’d know that one but that. Jon, let me go with another thing too, especially when you were talking about Gen Z. We are now in this instant gratification feeling. In fact, it took my computer for whatever reason to open up the Word document and it felt like hours. I looked at the time. It was about two minutes. Prior to that, more than 30 years ago, you would have had to roll in a paper on a typewriter. Our time has gotten so condensed and we get so much more anxious but you are adamant that in your book that all of the things required to keep connections up, to build this trust to build this vulnerability loop, you have to look at these things as not being a sprint. It’s not something that happens immediately but you have to be patient enough to let these things evolve over time.

Finite and Infinite Games

I believe there's a book in the 1980s that came out by James Carse called Finite and Infinite Games. Carse argues that every game we play in life is either a short-term game, finite, where the rules and the score system are clear. Everybody is in agreement on it. Let's say tennis. We know how long a tennis match lasts and how you score. The rules are clear and the game has a beginning and end. The moment it ends, it's over and that's it. You can play another game after it but that game is over.

The other type of game is an infinite game. For example, the game of business. The game of business started before we were born and will continue after we die. There's no clear winner or score. It is not better to be a profitable company that earns billions versus a company that earns hundreds of millions if your personal metric is an environmental impact. There are no clear winners, no clear losers. The objective of an infinite game is to play because of the sheer joy of playing. On top of that, everybody can pick their metrics and their status or what they care about.

The key is to keep the game going as long as possible. The problems occur when people try to play infinite games as if they're finite. If you launch a company and you put lots and lots of pressure to sell a lot as if the next quarter is all that matters and you have a huge quarter but then nobody wants to do business with you after that, because you're so pushy, you have now applied finite rules to an infinite game and nobody wants to play with you anymore.

Right now, you see that occurring physically in our study of economics right now. You have this wisdom and you have this influence. How do we push that out there? Without that, I'm concerned. As you were explaining that example about business and I know that everyone is only looking at that next quarter, it makes me a little bit nervous. Not that I don't feel deep down that we as humans hopefully will figure it out but it does seem something we have to push out.

I don't have a simple solution for you. What I can tell you is that human relationships are often played, and this is why networking stinks, as if it's a finite game. As if the number of cards I collect allows me to win or lose. The number of phone calls I make allows me to win or lose. I'd say, that’s a little short-sighted and the reason is that if my only objective is to meet as many people as possible, it seems that there isn't that much joy in that. I might be able to do it for a week, but not a lifetime. The true joy of human belonging and connection is the long-term benefit. It’s developing those relationships over time. For that to happen, we need to play an infinite game. In my mind, it doesn't matter if you have a best friend now or not.

Sense Of Belongingness: If selling a lot is all that matters to you when running a business, nobody would likely work with you because of that pushy attitude.

When I was a teenager, I did not have a best friend. What matters is that we play the game of human relationships, human connection, friendships, and communities as the game that it is, which is infinite. It is played for the sheer joy of playing it. Over time, as long as you play it that way, you will probably have an improved community that has more and more interesting people in it. When I started the Influencers Dinners, it wasn't, “By the end of this quarter. I better have a Nobel laureate there.” No. The Nobel laureates will show up when they can attend. We'll keep inviting, we'll keep improving the event. We'll keep improving the invitation to make it more and more appealing and eventually they'll come. If they don't come, that's fine because I was doing it to develop great relationships, not to have this one person come to the event.

We talked about Ted Lasso and how both of us are fans because of that same philosophy that he has. You have someone in the book that I happen to also love and I had her on my show and that's Valorie Kondos Field and you kept mentioning before in this last little chunk about joy. That's the whole purpose of what she did in her philosophy of coaching the UCLA gymnastics team. It was to bring back joy into the competition. Many of those girls were brutalized practically by their coaches in the past but her sole mission was to bring back the joy. We can't overstate that. Joy is joyful.

Valorie is such an extraordinary woman because she realized, first of all, that the game she was playing was wrong. She was playing the game of, “Win at all costs so we could have bragging rights.” She then had a serious moment where she realized, “I don't value that. That's not something that inspires me. It's something that's making me miserable.” As a byproduct, all of her student-athletes were miserable. Everybody touching the program was miserable.

They went from being a solid program to being the one the worsts in the country. She realized that what would make her joyous is if she could get her student-athletes to come out of UCLA being champions in life. If they were well-rounded women ready for the world and what it had to offer. Win or lose on the court or on the mat, her job was to develop them into people that make great decisions and to build up their confidence and strength so they can succeed. The moment that she made that shift, the entire game was played differently.

I want to circle it back to your thing about asking favors because I know when she made that change, she confided in me. She made that change when she decided through her husband to ask the great Coach John Wooden, the winningest NCAA basketball coach of all time, a favor. How do you do it? She asked him that favor. That favor went back and that's how she then began to realize what John Wooden says, “Success is doing the best that you could possibly be and it's not the win or loss count.” He never ever said, “You’ve got to win this one.” It was, “Do the best you can.” It circles back. You asked favors and you bring joy. It is amazing how the words in your book tie all of that together and here you go full loop with someone who learned this by asking a favor of the greatest coach potentially of all time.

He was an exceptional human being. Decades before anybody was even considering ideas like belonging and connection, he redefined success. He defined it not by the score on the board but by the satisfaction of knowing that you put in all of the effort you could and left it all out there. He was so far ahead of his time that it's pretty incredible. What's amazing is that, in an era where everybody's obsessed with optimization, results and every piece of data that we can find, there's something amazing about hearing from coaches who value human beings first.

In your book, you talked about that and I'm going to use your words because you just said it. It was so extraordinary. The word you use and it's a word that I love and as you say, it's the most desired feeling or emotional state we have and that is awe. When we have awe, according to everything I've read and especially in your book, it's such a state of reflection and existence that it inspires us when we experience it. Yet, at the same time, we can't almost go out and try to get it. It has to come to us. You can't seek it. Awe has to find you. All you can do is be open, so when you finally see it and feel it, you can love it and appreciate it. I don't know how you can find it.

Awe is a moment that redefines your perspective on the world. You think the world is one way and you realize that it might be a completely different way. It shifts your perspective and people describe it like that moment when they held their child for the first time. Nothing physically changed between then and the moment before. They had a child in both but suddenly, they're holding this being and the universe disappears and they're fully engrossed at this moment and they realize that everything's going to change. That's pretty incredible and it's arguably the most desired human experience. If you look, what's nice about it is that people also feel more generous and more connected as a byproduct. If you can trigger it somehow, it will fundamentally redefine your ability to connect.

Maybe you just have to trigger what you can control in this random universe of ours and that would be the openness to be accepting of it. When opportunity knocks, don't forget, you’ve got to answer the door. In this case, when it happens, you’ve got to answer the awe. It comes to you.

Probably the more you're exposed to it, the more likely you're going to experience it. I often associate that with the moment when I realized how big the universe is versus how small I am. That only occurs as a byproduct of a moment of realization. I need to either be exposed to experiences or knowledge to even have something that like happen. There are twist endings of movies that can almost get us there. You watched The Sixth Sense, and you're like, “That's crazy. How did I not see that coming?” That plot device won't always get us there.

When you experienced the awe of the size of the universe, I wanted to add another layer to that. When you experience how awesome you are within that universe, that role that you play, even as infinitesimal as it may be compared to the vastness, that's another layer of awe. Let me ask you this because you hinted at it. The words you use in You're Invited, I found too irresistible not to bring it up again. It was when you were talking about the way at the top of the show, the personalities of us as individuals versus the persons but there's a term you use and you say it like this, “Our wonderful irrationalities. We are, as a species, predictably irrational.” There's something about that throughout all of this process of having to do so much in life to realize the wonder of our own irrational behavior. It is a little moment of awe for me.

The term was coined by a great behavioral economist, Dan Ariely. It is that we don't make sense but we consistently don't make sense in the same way over and over again. It's irrational but we can predict that it's going to happen. Here's a fun little example. Readers, you can play along as we do this. Barry, imagine you're going to be offered a vacation. You can either go to Romania, have your wallet stolen or go to Croatia and have an incredible meal. Which do you choose?

I read the book, It's Not Fair, Jon. I almost know the answer that I have to give here. I'm going to give the exact answer. As I always do, I always relate everything to me anyway, so that's not a problem. I'm going to give you the example back if I can. Long story short, I had an opportunity of going to a racetrack when I had no money. It’s a weird story and I'll tell it some time on another episode. I was invited to go to this track. I bet on my favorite number, which I'm not going to give because it's practically in every one of my passcodes. I bet on this horse and I bet the double and up came the two long shots and I won over $900 on this $2 bet.

You'll see how this comes back to you. The next day, I felt lucky that the guys that invited me to this wanted me to play some poker with them. During the poker game, I lost $75 to $100. I felt horrible losing that $75 to $100 that I lost all of the joy I had from that almost $1,000 of a $2 bet. Getting to that response, I don't want to get my wallet lost. That would hurt me more than the great meal would make me feel.

Human beings have something called loss aversion, which is that we tend to feel 2.5 times more pain from losing something than the pleasure we get from gaining it. On average, losing a new laptop will hurt way more than getting a new laptop or winning that money versus losing it. I don't remember who did this but they research the effect on intimate relationships. If you say something mean to your wife, Barry, that's going to take five compliments to make up for it and not 2.5. Watch out. It's why you need lots of flowers, chocolates and so on when you screw up.

This is to the readers, if you're like most people and you chose to have a great meal in Croatia, that's because human beings tend not to make decisions outside of a context. You weren't choosing between the three options. You were choosing between the ones that were similar that you could tell one is better than the other. Having a great meal is probably way better than having your wallet stolen, so you ended up in Croatia. The thing is there was nothing stopping you from having a great meal in Romania.

The entire decision process was irrational but it was irrational in a very predictable way. We knew most people were going to end up having a great meal in Croatia. Whoever among you who's reading said, “No, I wanted to have my wallet stolen because it would have been a great story.” Let me know. I can tell you where you can send your wallet. I will be happy to take it. I will take your money and that would be great. It's no problem. You can have a great story and I'll have more money. Barry and I can go to an off-track betting and see how lucky he is.

Sense Of Belongingness: Once somebody puts effort into your relationship, you're viewed as somebody worthy of that. If you ask for some more, you're more likely to get it. 

You have a whole thing in the book about when you had to convert yourself to a Zoom situation during the pandemic. “You shouldn't just do a lift and shift.” I'm learning how to do that between a TV series and the podcast now. I'm learning that I can't lift from what I did and shift. I do have a little bit more time to play with you, so I'm going to take advantage of it. No matter what, I'm not going to have that much time to cover it. I do want to say that in the book, there is a section in particular about business and success in business. You hinted at what success in business was. In the book, there are guidelines of how you can influence people and be doing so in an endearing manner that is tremendous for your business.

When I say business, I don't mean even if your business is whether Google, Apple, your home business as a creator, an accountant, it doesn't matter to me. We're not going to be able to cover everything in the business section, which is important. We'll leave that for the people to read it in your book, You're Invited. The key element is showing gratitude. That is something that if I even do a little bit of a mantra in the morning, it's what I call my gratitude mantra. For some reason, when you can not only show gratitude, which is what's important on one level, but if you could internally feel grateful, you can't help but create gratitude amongst all those you come in contact within business and life.

This is super fun that you bring this up and there's a wonderful study. When you look at human happiness, there's virtually nothing I can do right now that will have you be happier in a month. If you get a new house after a month, you get used to it in maybe two months. If you get a new laptop within a week, it's what you're working with. It's often known as the hedonic treadmill. Once you get to that higher level, you get used to it and then going down feels terrible.

There is one thing that researchers have found that has an impact three months out on your happiness and that's a crazy amount of time. What it is, is if I have you sit down and pick somebody that you admire and write a letter to them expressing why you respect them, adore them, what they've done for you that's wonderful, and then you're going to do something a little bit scary. You're going to go and meet them and read the letter to them. It turns out that doing that can have a measurable increase in your happiness for the next three months. That is insanity. There's virtually nothing else that can have that impact. Even if you look at people winning the lottery, they're not particularly happy after. It is fundamentally this state of gratitude that can have a huge impact on the quality of our lives. I love that you bring that up.

Jon, on that note, I'm going to say how grateful I am that you were my guinea pig and my first invite to the show. I don't know who better and who more grateful I could be than having you as that guest, Jon. I thank you so much.

Barry, this has been an absolute treat and a privilege to be number one. Thank you for having me on.

How can people connect to you?

The website is YoureInvited.info for the book stuff. On social media, I'm @JonLevyTLB. I'm on all social media channels.

I'm going to end with your words, Jon, “The beauty of an invitation is that it has the ability to fundamentally change the dynamic.” You have changed all of our dynamics and I'm grateful that you joined me. Thank you, Jon.

Important Links:

• Influencers Dinner

• You're Invited

• Bowling Alone

• Thoughts Through Time - Apple Podcasts

• Adam Smith - Previous episode on Thoughts Through Time podcast on Apple Podcasts

• The Wealth of Nations

• Finite and Infinite Games

• Dan Ariely

• It's Not Fair

• @JonLevyTLB - Twitter

About Jon Levy

Jon Levy is a behavioral scientist best known for his work in influence, human connection, and decision making. Jon specializes in applying the latest research to transform the ways companies approach marketing, sales, consumer engagement, and culture. His clients range from Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Google, AB-InBev, and Samsung, to startups.

More than a decade ago, Jon founded The Influencers Dinner, a secret dining experience for industry leaders ranging from Nobel laureates, Olympians, celebrities, and executives, to artists, musicians, and even the Grammy-winning voice of the bark from “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Guests cook dinner together, but can’t discuss their career or give their last name, and once seated to eat, they reveal who they are. Over time, these dinners developed into a community. With thousands of members, Influencers is the largest community of its type worldwide.

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