The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Todd Kashdan - What are the best ways to be influential when lacking power and status?
Show links:
Todd's website - https://toddkashdan.com/
Todd's Substack - https://toddkashdan.substack.com/
Kenny's Substack - https://positivelymaladjusted.substack.com/
Examined Life youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpKC6L_IJ2zvL6E6M8Ly1AA
What if the most influential voices in our society are those often left unheard? In this episode, I sit down with Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University and the mind behind "The Art of Insubordination," to unravel the complexities of influence and dissent. We begin by discussing how individuals with little power, status, or majority support can still make a significant impact. Todd and I explore the significance of offering constructive ideas, no matter how imperfect, and the necessity of ensuring diverse participation in discussions to amplify marginalised voices.
Next, we shine a spotlight on the indispensable role of principled dissenters in driving societal progress. Through the inspiring stories of Richard Feynman and Nelson Mandela, we highlight how challenging groupthink is not just courageous but essential for improvement. We dissect whether individualistic or collectivist societies are more conducive to nurturing such brave voices, drawing lessons from Mandela's resilience and leadership within a collectivist context. This chapter delves deep into the sacrifices and personal risks associated with being a change-maker, offering listeners tangible examples of how dissent can lead to monumental shifts.
Finally, we navigate the virtues essential for fostering a culture of curiosity and intellectual humility. We discuss the trade-offs one needs to make for a meaningful life, and the importance of creativity, experimentation, and living authentically. We discuss how education systems can nurture or stifle the principled insubordinates of tomorrow and the critical need for inefficiency and curiosity in both educational and professional settings. This episode has practical tips on how you can cultivate the power pave your unique path against societal norms. Special thanks to Todd Kashdan for his invaluable insights.
We are consciously and unconsciously influenced by whatever society says is the cool way for living your life, and what I'm arguing for is that, relatively independent of this, are you saying and doing the things that you've always wanted to do? And you now, finally, are in a situation where you have enough people that can listen to you? If not, how big does your bank account have to be? How big does your badge have to be for your company? And if the answer is never, five years from now, 10 years from now, I would say that you're not living the right life. You're waiting for someone to anoint you and I would say is stop waiting for permission, because you're never going to get it, because people like the structure if it works for them.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Examined Life with me, kenneth Primrose. For any of you new listeners, let me introduce the podcast to you. This is a podcast about finding wise guides for life who are exploring questions that really matter. Each episode takes a deep dive into a question that an influential thinker believes we should be asking ourselves. So far this season we've heard Dacher Keltner explore what awe tells us about living a meaningful life. Elizabeth Oldfield has discussed formation of our characters and indeed our souls formation of our characters and indeed our souls. Dougal Hynde explored with me what it means to live at a time of endings. I also spoke to Eve Poole about human distinctiveness in a world of AI, and last week's episode was with Ian McGilchrist, where we discussed what it was that our culture might be preventing us from seeing. These conversations are edited to the size of this podcast 50 minutes to an hour thereabouts but the longer versions are available on YouTube. I've also been trying to process and apply what I learn in these interviews on my Substack channel, positively Maladjusted. The link is in the show notes. If you sign up for those, I promise you I'll try really, really, really hard to make it worth your while reading whatever I write. Hopefully that will be enough of a payoff, but if it's not, then you can enjoy the comfort of knowing that you have at least given me some minor encouragement by signing up Today.
Speaker 2:I am delighted to be in conversation with Todd Kashtan. Todd is a professor of psychology at George Mason University, where he also directs the Wellbeing Laboratory. His work has focused on curiosity, meaning and purpose in life and psychological flexibility. Today's conversation is rooted in his book the Art of Insubordination, where we explore his question what are the best ways to be influential when in the minority, lacking power or status, and the numbers behind you? It's a great question, a really important one, and I love discussing it with them. I hope you will enjoy listening, todd.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Examined Life. I'm delighted you are joining me in conversation today. When we corresponded over email, you sent me a question that we could discuss, something that had been on your mind you'd been preoccupied by. I'm going to read it to you now and you can tell me whether this still works, whether this is still what has been on your mind. So you asked what are the best ways to be influential when you're in the minority, lacking power or status and the numbers behind you. Is that still the question that you think we should be asking ourselves? Perfect.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Well, I'm excited to hear more to dive into the question.
Speaker 1:Oh no, this is something I mean you're talking about from Copornicus and Galileo onward. I mean, there's never a time where there's someone lacking power and status, who has great ideas, who is completely being ignored and has no idea. How do I get a platform and a channel?
Speaker 2:As you intimate. This is how history moves forward. You get these voices, dissident voices, sometimes from the margins, questioning received wisdom or orthodox ways of doing things. You've written a book on this the Art of Insubordination. Is this a kind of subject of academic inquiry for you, or is there also, you know, something personal at stake here? What is it that drives your inquiry for this, the art of insubordination? You know how people without influence can have a voice.
Speaker 1:Both, I mean. For me, this book started, I don't know, let's say like seven or eight years ago, where I was realizing that in academia and the organizations that I work with, you typically have a proxy for intelligence and creativity, which is are you assertive, do you speak loudly, do you speak clearly, and then do you take over the room. And we know from people like Susan Cain, who wrote the book Quiet, where your ability to be loud and dominant in a room has a correlation of no more than 0.10 with how effective you actually are. But yet here we are in 2024, where I've been sending these emails for 20 years at the same university, of saying we have the same two or three super loud men who are of my age, who are dominating these meetings, and it hasn't changed at all. And the reason is because people have so much inertia to figure out. How could we design a way where we don't dissuade them from talking, but we bring more voices in, and what we keep doing is we keep adding and adding things that could make it potentially easier.
Speaker 1:The meetings become longer, people disengage, so the new strategies don't work, and so for me, I've always offered and this fits in with one of the answers to the question, which is always try to offer an idea, not just a provocation, even if your idea makes no sense whatsoever, because someone else might pick up on the breadcrumbs and developing something from it.
Speaker 1:So before we went on air, we were talking about Lord of the Flies and the idea of like how do you survive this chaotic and social environment where you don't want to be piggy and be torched and thrown off a cliff and stabbed with wooden knives is you can think about a conch, where you only get three opportunities to speak per meeting, but you can have a caveat where someone can offer you their conch and now you are making a social norm of reciprocity which is I'll give you my conch now there might be a meeting in the future where I might want your conch. That happens there and it's just a very simple behavioral strategy to experiment with, to make sure that the loudest people do not determine the decisions that are made and what we think are the good ideas that are worth contemplating.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, right, the more you think you have to offer, the less Is this what it is the dunning kruger like the more confident you feel at something, uh, the less competent you actually are something like that. But the you know. They say the uh life and business and you know all kinds of institutions. They're like a swimming pool. All the noise is at the shallow end and I guess susan kane would have said something similar right in her book quiet, that that it's those who have the most to offer. They often don't know how to get any purchase in a meeting or with people or whatever. So why does the status quo make it so difficult for us not us for one to have influence? What are the characteristics of our culture that you would seek to change to create more space for the trailblazers?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, one of the things is that we walk through the world and I think I want people to think about this more consciously, because we do this on the fringes of conscious awareness, about this more consciously.
Speaker 1:Because we do this on the fringes of conscious awareness, we're always thinking about what do I have in the tank in terms of bioenergetic resources that are available to me, and one thing that we know from the work of Jim Cohn at University of Virginia and elsewhere is that your bioenergetic resource is not just about whether you had coffee in the morning, it's not just about whether you did a functional mobility workout in the morning, but if you have trusted allies that are proximal to you, near to you, you view them as an extension of yourself.
Speaker 1:It's almost like you have a backpack that's not heavy, that's near you, where you can open it up, and their strengths, capacities, skills and abilities, philosophies of life and their social network is accessible to you, just as they have a backpack with everything about you, which they have access to as well. Like you can go into my house, grab whatever you need. I want you to prosper in life and you have the keys to mine as well. That is the quintessential, reciprocal, gradual self-disclosure of a true, confidant or close relationship. We often forget that that's what other people do in our lives and because of that we don't leverage them. When we're in meetings, when we think that we're under threat or like where this conversation is going, we think we have a really good idea and we want to wonder how do I get some traction? It's going to be through those other people.
Speaker 2:This reminds me of. I mean, I wonder what truth there is in psychology that you are the average of the five people you spend most time with. Does that resonate from your experience?
Speaker 1:I don't love it, but I like the general gist of where it's going. I don't love it, but I like the general gist of where it's going. To me it's if you thought about who would you tell secrets to that you believe they would take it to the grave. What we know from science is that the ideal number of close friends is three. So we have a loneliness epidemic that's happening here. Most people have a massive decline in the number of close friends they have. You only need three. You actually don't have the mental bandwidth to attend to too many close friends, even if you say that they're close friends to happen there. And so for me it's that to what degree are you allowing them to be proximal to you so they don't have to be physically next to you? It could just be like.
Speaker 1:I have a friend of mine from grad school I haven't seen them for I don't know 18 years David Dierenfeld. He was just so calm, cool and collected when he spoke. I mean I just picture him having one of those 1930s long golden cigarette holders and just holding this, not even smoking the cigarette, just having it between his two fingers, very chill, relaxed under the most stressful situations, and always knew what to say. And so I think about him on my shoulder, so he's proximal to me, even though he's not physically near me for decades, because I'm like what would David Dierenfeld do? How would he behave in this social situation? And when you imagine and integrate other people into your lives, especially the best parts of them, you become stronger, wiser and smarter.
Speaker 2:Thank you, so I think that's helpful. I can think of a number of friends who I would try and channel. In certain circumstances, channeling might be the word that's a good word. So you're talking about principled insubordination. I think it's probably worth parsing out what you mean by that. So what is the difference between a principled insubordinate and someone just being rebellious and pushing against authority?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you think about insubordination, it comes from military organizations, from the Israeli Defense Forces in Israel to whatever behemoth we have in the United States, and it's the idea of you are challenging authorities in a social hierarchy that are above you, and in most organizations, including the military, it is considered an offense, it is considered something that is worthy of severe punishment. And what I would argue is that, if the ideas that they are offering or the ideas that they are criticizing deserve criticism, this is not an offense. This is actually someone that shows great care and concern for the group, such that I am willing to risk my hide, I'm willing to be rejected, I'm willing for you to actually throw me under the bus, because I want this group to be healthy and I want it to last for a longer period of time.
Speaker 1:And I think we have to flip this a little bit on its head and realize that most dissenters that disagree with the group that are coming on a regular basis. They're coming to meetings, they're responding to emails, they're on the front lines, if you're talking about a military example or as a metaphor, and the reason they speak up is not because they think that they're amazing, it's because they care so much about the group and we think that dissenters or insubordinates, they don't care about the group and they want to basically burn it to the group. And we think that dissenters or insubordinates, they don't care about the group and they want to basically burn it to the ground. And so what I want to do is say we need a cultural shift in thinking about. This is, if someone critiques something in the organization or in what our group is doing, to ask yourself is there any merit to it? Now, if there's even a 15% merit to it, now, if there's even a 15% merit, that is worthy of a conversation and a reflection.
Speaker 2:Who are some of the people that you think and you mentioned a few in the book. Who comes to mind when you think of people who have been really powerful, principled interordinates? Who are your heroes in the Hall of Fame there?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, my hero is Richard Feynman, who is the Nobel Prize winning physicist who, if you watch Oppenheimer, I found the movie to be extremely boring and almost fell asleep. But there is actually a scene where you only see the back of Richard Feynman, who is part of the Manhattan Project to basically develop an atomic bomb to actually end World War II, and he gets no lines in this movie. But here was a guy who was trying to figure out quantum physics on his own in his laboratory. He was also invited for the Manhattan Project to stop World War II. Nasa 1984, when they had the explosion and they lost the first teacher who is an astronaut in space.
Speaker 1:Um, he was invited onto a panel to figure out what the hell did we do wrong? And so his whole life was about how do I educate the world about science so that we can have better aircrafts, better space technology, have more peace, less war? Um, and this was a guy who was controversial, not because of the quality of his ideas, because he spoke out of turn. Here you are, this professor of physics at Ivy League school, and we see the same thing today. As soon as you hear Ivy League school, you get the word elitist thrown at you and I would say I don't care where you go to school, what I care about is quality of ideas. I don't care what you look like, what I care is quality of ideas. And Richard Feynman is my hero because he was extremely good at describing why this criticism has merit.
Speaker 1:So I'm not going to go through all the details about when he was on the commission to figure out why did the space shuttle explode in space and actually lose several astronauts.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that he did was there was back in the day when you had the major media networks were there and they all had their cameras and they were videotaping him. He didn't go through a spiel about the physics. He actually took a little O-ring, put it into water and actually showed you why it would distend and potentially be weaker over the but with the elements the elements of water and oxygen hitting up with this o-ring. And so you watch this as he was talking and you can see this little, little tiny three, you know, three, three dollar fifty50 experiment that's happening there and say, oh, if that's what was anything that was on the space shuttle, then it would make sense why it would explode to happen there, and that's the beauty of being lacking power, lacking status and making impact is that. Can you get people to see what you're seeing? Not because of your perspective, because you're taking their perspective, which is unlike your own.
Speaker 2:And it's a yeah, one of your um, one of your points, which, which adds to this, is like, produce messages that are more likely to change people's mind. Like, how are you going to, how are you going to communicate to good effect here, um, do you think people like Feynman, uh, and other kind of heroes you can think of, are they more likely to emerge from individualistic rather than collectivist societies? Is there a relationship between, um, between how much we, we let you know principled interordination, like flourish, and clearly it's not enough, uh, in enough in an individualistic society rather than a collectible?
Speaker 1:That's a really good question. I think it's more attuned with to what degree are you mirroring the values of the society that you're a part of when you're trying to persuade other people? So I'm trying. I was just trying to think for Nelson Mandela after 18 years in prison. Was he in a collectivist versus an individualistic society? And I'm not.
Speaker 2:Actually, I think it's more collectivist than individualistic If I had to think yeah, I mean, it's like Ubuntu is a Zulu word, right, they, they have this I am because we are, so I think you're probably right.
Speaker 1:It's more collectivist. So another one I think most people's hero Nelson Mandela makes the top 20 list is one of the most amazing things he did is and you really have to break this down you are in prison for 18 years and you're in the right. That's a hard thing to get your hands around. And what does he do when he walks out? One of the guards who was for lack of a better word a white nationalist, who was identified by his racism against black Africans. This is how he identified Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 1:When he came out, did not decide that I'm going to reject you, ostracize you and go back to quote, unquote, my in-group. What he did was say you've spent all these years with me, I've listened to you. I think there's a better version. This is not his words exactly. There's a better version of you out there. I want you to invite you into my group to improve Africa in this reconciliation moment. And he became one of the most loyal people in the cabinet of Nelson Mandela, and this was a white supremacist, a white, truly a white nationalist supremacist.
Speaker 1:That happened there and that is to me emblematic of Nelson Mandela's approach, which is, I realize you have 25 to 40% of people that live in Africa who hate people that look like me.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to just persuade you. I'm going to bring some of the people on your group and bring that into the group and we'll integrate together to figure out how do we create a better society so that, basically, our kids are less likely to experience suffering over flourishing. That happens there and it's hard to imagine, even to this day, watching someone who was a Democrat that would make it into office and say you know what? 50% of the country is probably going to vote for Donald Trump. I'm going to bring some of the maggots into my cabinet. Or do the same thing in Poland. Do the same thing in Hungary. You can't even imagine, decades later, anyone doing what Mandela did. What I think that we need to do is have a better understanding of history, deconstruct what worked, what didn't and break down those strategies. And scientists have been studying and we know that if you bring out group members into the in-group and you explain the rationale for it, that group becomes stronger by having those dissenting multiple perspectives.
Speaker 2:Right, and some of this power in the Mandela effect is also, it seems, connecting with people across divides who previously were able to reduce you to a caricature. But when you connect with them and you're humanized, that's no longer the case. When you connect with them and you're humanized, that's no longer the case. I'd like to ask about age and stage and principled insubordination. What I mean by that is it's the case that you know young people the younger you are, the more idealistic you are and also the less you've got to lose. So people tend to be kind of left wing when they're young and right wing when they're old, and part of the reason for that is perhaps that there is more to lose. We earn more money as we get older, we have more influence, we have more skin in the game.
Speaker 2:I've heard it said that ideals are like farts you hold on to them tightly, then you let go of them quietly, and you know, I think there's some truth in that. I can see it in my own life, and so my question, I suppose, is about whether you have any words of wisdom to those of us who would be principled insubordinates but feel like we've got a lot to lose and being a principled insubordinate when you have a mortgage to pay and kids and so on, is more challenging. What do you say to such people?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm glad you bring this up because I think of the whole world as tradeoffs. So when I think about therapy, when I think about psychotropic medication that you're taking whether it's right now we're talking about psychedelic-induced positive psychotherapy with ketamine and MDMA that's showing some efficacy with veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder here's what's not in the conversation. You take a medication that's going to alter the reuptake of dopamine or serotonin. There's going to be a trade-off. So the question is what are you willing to absorb? And that's the big question that I want people to think about.
Speaker 1:So when I think about in my own life, in terms of sacrifices that I've made to speak out against issues that I think are problematic, I've almost always taken a hit financially, socially, reputation-wise. And the thing is, how much do you actually need? And I get the idea stockpiling. If you have kids, thinking about the grandkids, you want to pass down intergenerational wealth, your home. But in reality, when you think about what you want to do in a given month, there are many times you feel like you need to go to Malaysia, to one of those amazing resorts, or like you need a four-star hotel. Of course, everyone likes like a nice bed, like a nice shower, and everyone wants to go dining every once in a while or order good food, but in reality, we don't need that much for our well-being. We need it for a sense of status. We need it because we compare ourselves to other people who have great things.
Speaker 1:And I think that when you think about legacy, you want to think about did I contribute my abilities and strength that I think are worthy of attentiveness because they can move the needle a little bit In the small sector of society I'm a part of. How am I going to feel about that versus the extra $100,000 a year that I'm compounding over the course of time, which is, like everybody else, your unique DNA, of your one chance on this earth is going to be profound meaning and purpose that you make on something. Now I know I studied this, so I think about this all the time. I'm willing to take hits all the time, but I do realize that not everyone is good at responding to negative feedback, criticism, people trolling you, and not everyone is willing to have an entire room of people go quiet when you raise your hand and you say something. And I would say is that these moments, these crucibles, are what make you offer the unique contribution to the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, as you say, like it takes, it takes balls, and some of those come with um, like taking the long view. Like you say, if you, if you want to be a contributor, if you want to move the needle and have a meaningful life. You make me think a little bit of you know, david Brooks' book, the Second Mountain, where he talks about you know, the first mountain is you're building an ego, basically status and that kind of thing. But ultimately well, at least this is what I take from the book either you get to the top and it's pretty disappointing the view is not that satisfying or, more likely, you get knocked off. But what really is rewarding is committing to something that's bigger than yourself, some kind of yeah, I think that probably involves a moral or spiritual direction for which you're willing to make sacrifices, and therein, lies the at least no small part of the key to feeling like your your days are meaningfully spent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is this is a great spinoff into a related topic. So I I've talked about, um, these archetypes of principled rebels or principled insubordinates. Treat them like synonyms, and one of them that gets very little attention is a niche carver, and that's that you were just constructing your own life in a fulfilling way that doesn't match the zeitgeist or the social norms of the day. So I think about during COVID, a lot of people had their van life where they decided I don't want to stay in one place, I want to like this is travel constantly, meet new people, eat new foods, and I I'm just gonna live in a van and do it this way, and there's a lot of pushback from a lot of people like this is not a healthy way to raise children. Um, there's no evidence, by the way, to support for or against that kind of lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Or you have a new movement that's really taken taken like roots in america, which is polyamory. Not my thing, but for a lot of people, the idea, the idea of maybe monogamy was never the proper way for humans to behave or to be more pragmatic. There's a subset of people that cannot imagine living their lives as just one person having this romantic life. No judgment. My only concern is are you doing this intrinsically motivated or were you coerced by a partner to enter into this kind of lifestyle? It happens there, but if you do it and you approach life in your own unique way, like this, is fantastic, and I think many of us, no matter what we say about you, know success is overrated in terms of focusing on money and status and power.
Speaker 1:We are consciously and unconsciously influenced by whatever society says is the cool way for living your life, and what I'm arguing for is that, relatively independent of this, is that are you saying and doing the things that you've always wanted to do? And you now, finally, are in a situation where you have enough people that can listen to you? If not, how big does your bank account have to be? How big does your badge have to be for your company? And if the answer is never, five years from now, 10 years from now, I would say that you're not living the right life. You're waiting for something. You're waiting for someone to anoint you, and I would say is stop waiting for permission, because you're never going to get it because people like the structure if it works for them.
Speaker 2:And maybe authenticity. Is that one of the words that you connect with being a principled rebel, having a connection with what you intrinsically care about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you described it very nicely. I want people to rebel against things, because if no one else heard about this except for the people they're talking to, doesn't get any publicity whatsoever. Is this the thing that you want to be known for? That's a nice, simple indicator of is this message authentic? Is it tied to your core values and interests? For a lot of people, it's to show that I'm a good group member, I'm a good liberal, I'm a good conservative, I'm a good representative of blue-collar workers, I'm a good representative of universities or whatever the thing is, and I watch as activists.
Speaker 1:Social activists really do a piss-poor job of making impact, because you could tell you could read it from the outside that you don't really care about this. You're doing this to get attention, and so I don't know if you saw where I forgot what country it was in, but it was pro-Palestinian protesters that were taking knives and were cutting up artwork from the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, and it was almost universally despised because the two didn't connect to each other. And it's saying is that you don't care about culture because you're destroying artwork from beyond our time period and you're losing fans and advocates and potential allies very quickly because there's no connection between you shredding up old artwork in museums and then Palestine, other than you're getting attention, and this is a like. I wish I could meet regularly with activists, and I don't even care if I agree with the issue. Climate change, racial dynamics, gender issues, trans issues, a lot of these social activists that are out there. They're not using science based principles to bring people in other than people that are already advocates.
Speaker 2:And that's kind of exactly where your book comes in, this raft of scientific data on how to give oxygen to principled insubordinates who might have something really helpful to say. You say in your book that this is for anyone who yearns to see more justice, more freedom, more financial stability, more purpose, more humanity and it's like who doesn't want that? But for that to emerge the freedom, the purpose, the humanity, et cetera we need to create spaces where we can listen to each other, and I feel like one of the problems is that we don't create those spaces for listening to one another. We're kind of chronically bad at listening to people who think differently from us, who will trouble and disrupt whatever, you know, structure and status quo we have. So I guess you know how do we create those spaces to allow conversations on justice and flourishing to emerge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean think about my colleague, john Haidt and Gene Twang, who right now are on the fight to have phone-free schools from elementary school to high school, and it's hard to argue against it. And yet you have people that do, because of inertia, in terms of like, well, how are we going to do that? And then what if they need to call their parents? And in there becomes lots of interesting questions, like you're saying, to listen to, which is to what degree do you trust the people that are working in the school? Because now, this is now it's actually being put to the test.
Speaker 1:If you're saying that a seventh grade child, a 13 year old child, needs to have the phone on them, where they can go on social media throughout the day and be distracted from all the lessons about history and math, and you know in English, uh, because they can call their parents, you are implicitly saying or explicitly saying I don't trust the nurse, I don't trust the teachers, I don't trust that they will take care of the welfare of my child. And then you have another question, which is why do you think that people take a pay cut to become teachers? These are not wealthy people who are seventh grade teachers of 13-year olds. They're doing it because they care about children in general that are going there, and so you can start with the conflict. Should we have phone free zones in schools and then go down all these questions?
Speaker 1:And I want people to actually have to stand up and say I don't trust any of the teachers, and then I want the vice principal to say why and put the onus back on them Because, just like you're saying on social media, this isn't happening. We're not having pauses where you're given an open-ended question where now you have to say why would you say you don't trust any of the teachers here? Then why are you living in this area? Like your kids are young, you can go to to the school over what's missing in other schools that you think is not here in terms of the staff that's caring for your kid. My guess is, once you start having this very interested, curious conversation about this topic, most people will eventually say I don't know and they can't defend it, and now you actually can have some persuasive power in this conversation. But it does really require an inefficiency, very slow time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I think you've nailed it there. Todd the inefficiency. Building efficiency and utilitarianism into everything we do has been a massive curse. It feels like that human element and curiosity needs oxygen right, needs space, and it needs to hit dead ends and call the sacks uh, in order to, to kind of to, to allow it to thrive and take you where it needs to take you. I mean, I think, the Jonathan Highton gene. I always pronounce your name wrong it's Twenge, not Twenge.
Speaker 1:I say Twenge. I'm going to see if she gets mad if we say Twenge.
Speaker 2:I'll wait and find out. Yeah, their research is so important. I'm a huge advocate of minimizing technology, and not at all for kids. Um, but I, I, yeah what comes to mind. Krishnamurti the philosopher, has a nice quote. He said it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. Um, and I think you know the way that we well, you're well adjusted now if, what, you have a smartphone when you are less than 10, you're in social media. When you're 12, you're. You're kind of constantly anxious, depressed, fear of missing out. Looking at, you know, porn, way before that's ever ruined, like those things take time to pay attention to rather than being swept up with the kind of the drift of culture. So I wonder, when you write, when you wrote this book, or when you think of principled insubordinates, are there areas that you hope that you know principled rebels might appear? Like? Where do you see that we are particularly sick right now? Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:I mean yeah, no, no, no, and I love your, I love your phrase of curiosity, needing, like the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs, like the air to breathe. I mean you're, you're talking poetry to me. I love this. Um, I mean for me, as I end the book I'm talking about, how can we train young children to be bullshit detectors, critical thinkers? It's really kind of after one of my other heroes, carl Sagan, kind of like extending his line of thinking on this, and I mean to me it's you got to think about. I mean I'm going to turn 50 in two months with this conversation right now, and so I'm five years.
Speaker 1:I've been into generativity of like how do we prepare the next generations? And I mean it has to be the young people. Like it has to be the young people. And just because this is the inertia is that all these tools exist. Obviously, tools can be for good or for evil and everything in between that happens there, but we can't assume that we can just hand them things and they'll automatically know what to do with them, and so what really bothers me is a number of societal trends.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, plenty of people talking about the phones, but one of the things that's disturbing listening to my high school twins is when they say that teachers don't talk about any current events because they don't want to elicit any controversy, where parents will call in and complain. Just think about this you have kids that are going to go to college next year and become the leaders of the world Not everybody, but like some of them, or they're small fiefdoms, like in the organization that they're part of, and you can't mention Ukraine and you can't mention Russia and you can't mention Israel and you can't mention Palestine because you're afraid it's going to go off the rails. That happens there and a parent is going to complain To me. That speaks of how are you planning to have this conversation? Have you been trained in productive conflict, like, have you made rules of engagement that happen there?
Speaker 1:And then for the parents that complain the first one that complains have a meeting, the whole school, not just that parent, all of the parents and say bring out all of your tension, all of your concerns and worries, and then again you have this very inefficient, curious conversation. What do you want to do with a bunch of 16 to 18 year olds that we're trying to train to become the next leaders of the free world and you don't want to discuss anything that's happened in the past five years. You want us to talk about the Cold War and you want us to talk about World War I and World War II and the American Revolutionary War, but you don't want to talk about now why. I want to hear the answers because I want to hear what those parents have to say in terms of what they're going to do it. What's their training in history and knowledge and geopolitical conflict that happens there and we need to have those conversations. So I really believe strongly of disrupting the school system.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. I think that fear of conflict and disagreement and causing offense has been, like, tremendously destructive to our ability to think clearly and to coexist with difference and with controversy. So one of the things that, as an educator, I'm really interested in is character formation. Dealing with conflict and contemporary issues and controversy etc is as much about disposition as it is about knowledge, perhaps more about disposition, and so I wonder whether you might be able to pin down a few of the virtues that you think are helpful in rearing people who either perhaps become principled insubordinates themselves or at least make space for those principled insubordinates to raise their voice, to make their points and to be listened to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for me it's the triangle of curiosity, perspective getting and intellectual humility. So, since we haven't talked about intellectual humility directly, one of the strategies that I think is very important is try to figure out who's going to be your greatest adversary in whatever it is that you're interested in. So if you're going to go into a meeting and say that we need to invest more in technology because you know I want to make sure that I can show all the kids in my classroom the things that they're interested in, so I need access to technology quickly, fast, like really good bandwidth, so we can talk about the videos of why this is pseudoscience and garbage and why this is empirically based, and have them tell me like, what do you see? Like, what are the markers, what are the signals that go in there? You're gonna need good technology. So when you go in that room, before you go into that room and have that conversation, think to yourself who's going to be against you and what you want to do is take social group dynamics out of the equation by meeting them privately, one-on-one, no audience. So now we're not shooting for how many thumbs up do you get? How many down thumbs do you get? And you're telling them. I'm coming to see you because I'm going to bring up this topic and I have a feeling that your stance is going to be the opposite of mine. So can you point holes in my argument and can you help me so I can actually talk about this in a more effective way? I promise I'll give you credit. You're meeting a one-on-one. There's no. Everyone's nicer one-on-one when no one else is there. This is why everyone's mean on social media, because you think millions of people are listening when really it's like 30,. Meet on social media because you think millions of people are listening when really it's like 30, but it feels like millions when you get into that meeting and you introduce we need to have more technology because it's going to help us connect with young folk in the classroom. That happens here Now.
Speaker 1:I met with Stacey before this because I thought to myself you know what, she's probably not going to be thinking the same way as me. Well, she brought up some really great ideas that made me tweak what I was going to say and what I actually want to say. Now that statement is going to trigger curiosity Like wait. Todd met with Stacey. They met one on one. They spent time with the other, those two, the hot ones there. So now everyone's defenses come down a little bit. Everyone's a little bit more intrigued. Huh, what the hell is Todd going to say? What was he originally going to say, and what's this new version with Stacy's tweaks that are in there?
Speaker 1:So I have now introduced a platform where I have people engaged. I have people attentive. When you're attentive, you absorb more information. When you absorb more information, you can elaborate more on what I'm saying and improve or criticize effectively my ideas. And Stacey, who's in that room, her ego is flying because I'm saying she's a co-creator here, she's a collaborator. I have basically disarmed all of her opportunities to rip me apart, because I said she already ripped me apart to happen there. And so all of this is a really effective social persuasion strategy in groups, and what we normally do is we go into that meeting and say to ourselves what do I think Stacey's going to say, and feel yourself with white knuckles, anxious, ready for Stacey to pound on you. Why would you do that? So here is a preemptive strategy, psychological jujitsu, where you're going to bring Stacey as a collaborator on the team before you meet the larger group.
Speaker 2:That's helpful. That's super helpful. Maybe it kind of answers my question. Already I was going to say you're a scientist, right, that's the work that you do, and you've studied, principled insubordination, but you call it an art, the art of insubordination, rather than a science. Is there anything to the distinction between those words, do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean Einstein. I don't remember the quote exactly, but talks about art and science are similar because both are transcending reality. I think about this all the time. Is that really good art? You're talking about Dostoevsky. You're talking about that new movie on Netflix May-December which is about a 36-year-old teacher who had an affair with a seventh grader. They open it up as really a conversation in terms of they're married for 20 years. Now how do you respond to this relationship 20 years later, retrospectively, when it was like kind of wrong in the starting point? It's a lot of very complicated questions. You're transcending reality.
Speaker 1:What you want to be doing constantly is the art is. You're looking for tests, you're looking for experiments, you're looking to play with these ideas and when you're in a mode of play, you're open to like oh yeah, what a great new rule to add to make tag even more fun is the idea of is basically is like if you are physically in the air, then you have these new rules that are in there. Like it's harder when you're not. Your feet aren't on the ground and you get to design anything the way that you want to.
Speaker 1:In this room of people, you're supposed to have three, four, five, six different iterations of ideas possible before the room ends. What do we typically do in the workplace is one person has an idea and then we vote are we for it or against it? It goes completely counterintuitive. Everything that we know about the art, the art of actually creating something is that we should have competing ideas, diverging opinions, viewpoint diversity, challenging. But we're not argumentative. We are having this productive argument because there is room for more than one idea, because the goal is not to be right. The goal is to produce the best possible outcome.
Speaker 2:That's such a good answer. I love it. The art and science both transcend reality. It makes me think of the writer Frederick Buechner said all good art should sharpen your hearing, and there's a sense in which I think, like good insubordination has to sharpen your hearing, like make you pay closer attention. I love that. Yeah, I love it too. I love the art. That twinning of art and science is transcending, uh, our, our current constructs of reality have you ever been a juror before in a court case?
Speaker 2:it's one of the things I'd actually quite like to be, but, um, every time I did, I like I've been asked. It just couldn't happen. So no, how come?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, because, um, so I've done it a few times. I grew up in New York City, so I've been on a couple of court cases. I was on a kidnapping case, some pretty nasty, a mafia case, and so one of the things when you're in there is there's a lot of great research on courtroom activity, but there's also the art in terms of when you're with 11 jurors that you've never met before. When do you speak? How do you speak? How do you direct the room? How do you make sure that you're not an overly dominant force? Because we know from reality TV shows, from Survivor onward, is the way to get kicked off the island is be the loudest, most powerful attempting person in the room. You don't want to be the loudest person, you don't want to be the quietest person, you want to be in the middle and in the juror. When you're in a jury deciding on the fate of a kidnapping case is you want to be like fifth and you just bring up an idea in terms of like. Well, I mean, why would they? They must have a motivation and an internal motivation that we don't have access to in terms of why they did this. So the question is is it first degree or is it third degree? Because we don't know if there's intentionality here. Does anyone really feel like they have an understanding of, like, what this person's mindset was? And again, no answers. Go back to the strengths you mentioned before. What are the strengths? Intellectual humility I have an inkling, but I might not reveal my hypothesis yet because I don't want to be the first person to speak and so I'm inviting other people to share their opinions and once the conversation gets going now, we're going to have a bunch of different ideas. We might actually realize, like you know what, like now that I'm starting to the other strength, try to get the perspective of this alleged kidnapper. You might realize. You might realize like we don't really know anything about this person. To be first degree, there has to be clear intentionality, and from this conversation it seems like we don't know anything about them.
Speaker 1:It is the greatest place to understand the value of dissent If everyone agrees upfront. This is a terrible crime. Nobody should kidnap anybody. Let's throw everything at them. That's not how the legal system should work. The legal system shouldn't work with how upset you are. The legal system should work in terms of is there, to what degree does this match the exact criteria for the exact crime that exists, and so it requires dissenting voices. Exact crime that exists, and so it requires dissenting voices. And just as it is in the courtroom or when you're having, like you know, a proceeding meeting where there's a convening of the jurors, is it should be no different than a parent teacher association meeting. It should be no different in your if a bunch of coaches meeting with their kids before an athletic event, and there should be no different when you're with your family deciding what should be the family vacation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it Brings to mind Columbo, my favorite cult detective. I reckon he had that great way of persuading people, but also not until he'd shown quite a lot of humility and deep listening. I wonder if I thought I could bring this to land with one, like last question, that when we talk about the cultivation of certain virtues curiosity, critical thinking, humility and so on, uh, they're, they're democratic, like they're open to all of us, but when we think about principled rebels, we think that's for them, that's not for me, that's like somebody else is doing that to what I like, I guess, maybe, maybe it's two questions. If I kind of fudge it, how do I know if I'm a principled insubordinate just waiting to hatch um, or or is it? Is it something you're you'd be happy to say? Uh, you know too many kooks, it's not for everyone. Let some people do it and they'll know who they are it's not for everyone.
Speaker 1:Let some people do it and they'll know who they are. Great questions I really feel strongly about. We're not trying to increase the number of principled rebels in the world. We're trying to permit and embrace their presence. And if you're the type of person that has opinions about the people that are above you in the pecking order that means your institutions, government, education, international relations, whoever is deciding the fate for your livelihood, for your livelihood if you have opinions about them that are divergent from what people are actually doing, you're basically a principal insubordinate in the making who just kept your ideas privately, and so what I'm actually saying is that we need to have social groups where we permit people to disagree from the majority. So one thing, for example, that I do when I'm in workshops or I'm in my classes and teaching is that I tell them I'm looking for the minorities of one, the one person who disagrees with everyone. I will like you the most in the room, because I know that it's risky, I know it's crazy. I will find the nugget in whatever idea that's not described perfectly. I'm going to look for it and I'm going to respect you, even if everyone disagrees with you. That happens there.
Speaker 1:We need to be doing this more often. We need to be saying is that I want to hear the one lone voice that disagrees with everyone and you don't just let them speak, you make sure that you basically give them praise of. I want to see more people that are like Jackie so there are more Jackies in these conversations who are minorities of one, that are saying nothing because they know I don't want to be negatively evaluated, I don't want to be judged, I don't want to be ostracized and rejected, I want to hear the singular voices of everybody. Even if they're wrong, you want to praise them, and that's permitting and embracing principle and subordination. And then for us, if we actually haven't given ourselves like a voice for these thoughts that we have, is consider caveats.
Speaker 1:Starting your conversation with a caveat, which is this is not what I study, this is not my area of expertise. I know there are tons of smart people in this room, but I had a thought that hasn't been raised yet Dot dot, dot. So I call this the discomfort caveat. With that, again, you are trying to intentionally bring down people's defenses, increases people's curiosity by having this movie trailer. I'm about to say something that's kind of weird that no one's going to agree with right here, and so you're going to. But the way you're saying this is that I'm not the smartest person in this room, but I have a thought that hasn't been raised so far. Everyone's like ooh, like I wonder. I wonder what you're going to say, and that's going to be a very effective strategy for when you do the reveal man, thank, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that answer. I, I I love the things that we've covered, though, on authenticity, on humility, on listening well, and permission, like permission for others and permission for ourselves to to be those outliers, um so, thank you so much, todd you. Uh, you've got me very stimulated, especially thinking about how we can cultivate the next generation of uh kind of trailblazers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I appreciate it, and you have clearly reading more books than me, because I didn't know any of the quotes that you mentioned, so I'm going to have to try to retain them.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, todd. This is a subject that, for me, feels different from many of the others covered in this series, but I'm persuaded of its importance and its place within the series. How do we make room for those people who might be able to point to better ways of being and behaving and thinking, who can call us out on our blind spots? How do we give those people a platform, how do we give them oxygen, and how do we become those people ourselves? If we are, you know, principled insubordinates? When the status quo feels broken in so many ways as I think it does, then change is often going to come from the margins. It's not always going to come from subtle shifts and cascading ideas and management, but from those people who have the ability to see what others cannot. I hope that you enjoyed listening to Todd as much as I did. Do please look up his books and subscribe to his newsletter, which I'll link in the show notes. It's called Provoked and is excellent.
Speaker 2:Personally, I'd be fascinated to hear from you on two questions. Firstly, if you have any experience of principled insubordinates that you would be happy to share, or can think of events from history that seem to tap into this. I find them inspiring. I'd love to hear from you, secondly, whether you've been part of a culture that creates space for this and how it did that. I'd be, again, fascinated to hear your thoughts. I'm going to sign off now. As ever, my thanks to you listeners and to others who've helped make this episode, to Todd Kashtan and to Colin Primrose. If you are interested in more input like this, then subscribe to the YouTube channel and my sub stack, where you'll find more content as well as my own thoughts on processing some of these questions and applying them to my own life. My hope is that, in examining life, you will learn to become positively maladjusted to a sex society and, in terms of this episode, that you might learn to listen to principled no-transcript.