ELLEN LANGER says you need to question everything

Welcome to Lives Well Lived. I'm Kasia de Lazari-Radek.

And I'm Peter Singer. Today we're talking to someone who has spent several decades exploring a question that lies at the heart of our podcast. What does it mean to live a good life and how much of it depends on the way we see and shape our reality with our mind?

Our guest is Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, a pioneering researcher in the field of mindfulness, and someone whose work turns many of our everyday assumptions upside down. She's witty, fearless, and wonderfully subversive. She questions everything, including things we didn't even realise were up for question.

Ellen Langer has written many books very relevant to this podcast. The most recent is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And that reference to chronic health is a characteristically paradoxical way in which she puts things to make us wake up and take notice. It's important to keep in mind that for Ellen, Mindfulness has nothing to do with meditation or sitting still, as the term is quite commonly used today. For Ellen, it's about paying attention, about noticing what's new, what's changing, and most importantly, noticing that things could be otherwise. That the world we take for granted—the rules we follow, the categories we use, even the way we hold a tennis racket—was all created by someone, often someone not like us.

In our conversation, Ellen shares how she demonstrates this point in her lectures by standing next to a man who is 6 feet 5 inches while she's 5 feet 3 inches and asking, should we really be expected to do things, physical or otherwise, in the same way? From golf swings to toilet heights, she shows us that most systems are built for particular kinds of people and that realising this can be liberating, especially for those of us who don't fit their default mould.

We talk with her about how this insight connects to the way we think about ability, performance, and even morality. Ellen argues that when you realise that all rules are made by people for people, and not by the gods, you become more open to doing things your own way. More adaptive, more experimental, more alive. And then she says anything is possible. As a child, she couldn't draw, and yet she has a book called On Becoming an Artist, which describes how she made herself into an artist.

The funniest part of this conversation is where she challenges you, Peter, to sing, and you really can't sing.

But I find a challenge hard to resist.

So, dear listeners, this podcast episode is your only chance to hear me sing.

It's not much, doesn't last long, but I promise you, if you hear it, you won't want more anyway.

No, you won't.

But getting back to something serious, Ellen also speaks powerfully about judgment, especially moral judgment. She tells us that behaviour makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it. And that simple idea, she says, can make us less judgmental, more compassionate, and crucially, help us develop real self-respect.

Of course, as philosophers, we push back a little on that. And Kasia, you in particular brought up some hard cases involving real wrongdoing. But Ellen's view isn't about excusing harm. It's about understanding the reasons behind behavior so that we can act more wisely and relate more generously, even when we disagree. To that extent, Ellen's approach parallels that of Meg Smaker, the documentary filmmaker we talked to in a recent episode, who made the film about jihadists, the film that then got canceled. But she wasn't excusing what jihadists had done as terrorists. She was helping us to understand it and believed that we can only act wisely in response if we do understand it.

We also spoke about forgiveness and why Ellen would rather not be forgiven She prefers to be understood. That was one of the most surprising and thought-provoking moments of the conversation.

Another of those thought-provoking moments was a claim that what people really want beneath all the striving for money, status, or power is self-respect. And that self-respect becomes possible when we stop blaming ourselves for not fitting arbitrary standards and start appreciating how we differ and why that difference might even be a strength.

This conversation was energising, inspiring, and often very funny. Ellen's joy is contagious. She reminds us that the world is far more flexible than we think, and so are we.

Well, perhaps we are, but are we as flexible as Ellen believes? In the conversation, we asked Ellen about what has been termed the replication crisis in psychology. Researchers have repeated some very well-known studies in psychology, and found they did not get the results that the original publications reported. This is a serious issue because if results cannot be replicated, then they cannot be regarded as a reliable contribution to knowledge. There are various reasons why results may not be replicable. In some cases, the researchers may have knowingly fudged the data to produce more striking results. But there are also more innocent explanations. Some studies may not have had enough subjects to get the statistical power needed to exclude the possibility that the results occurred by chance. The fact that journals are more likely to publish studies that find that a particular factor makes a difference in how people act, or makes a difference to their health, than they are to publish a study that finds a factor that makes no difference, in itself makes it more likely that positive findings that occur by chance will get published, whereas negative findings won't get published and so will remain unknown. Now, why am I telling you all this? Because, as you will hear in this conversation, at least one attempt to replicate a study that Ellen describes did not achieve the striking results that Ellen reported. Ellen responds that she's not aware of the study that failed to replicate her results, but she says she will take a look at it. We also discuss an attempt to replicate what is perhaps Ellen's most famous study known as the Counterclockwise Study. In this remarkable study, Ellen brought elderly men to live in an environment that was fitted out as it would have been 20 years earlier. And she encouraged them to talk about past events as if they were present events. She reported, as she describes in our conversation, that their vision improved, their hearing improved, and they looked younger. Well, in preparation for our conversation with Ellen, I wondered whether anybody had tried to replicate this remarkable finding, and I did a literature search. I found a published proposal for a study attempting to replicate Ellen's famous study, but that proposal was dated 2019, and I didn't find any publication reporting the results of the study. I suppose it could have been delayed because of COVID of course. In our conversation with Ellen, I asked her about this, and she says that the study was completed and has been published and did replicate her original results. But I still couldn't find it. So I wrote to the lead author of the proposal, Francesco Panini, and asked him if the study had been published. He replied that the study had been carried out, but it had not yet been published. It has been submitted to a journal, which is still reviewing it. He sent me the abstract, which states that it did replicate Ellen Langer's results, although the improvements in the health of the elderly subjects were only short-term.

Thanks for Clearing that up, Peter. Just before we go to our conversation with Ellen Langer, we need to let our listeners know that we will be taking a break over August. We plan to release our next episode on Thursday, September 4th. Why not use the opportunity to catch up on any past episodes you may have missed? But first, here is the wisdom of Ellen. —on mindfulness, malleability, moral judgment, and the freedom that comes from questioning everything, even what seems unchangeable.

Ellen, so you've said that watching your mother's experience with cancer had a formative influence on your ideas about the links between a person's beliefs, attention, and engagement with life, and their capacity to overcome a physical disease. Can you tell us more about that?

Many years ago, my mother had breast cancer, and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas, and that's the endgame. And then magically it was totally gone, and the medical world couldn't explain it. So that had a profound influence on me. They didn't know somehow If they didn't do it, she did it herself. There's another story that I write about in The Mindful Body that goes along with that. So I'm probably the only person you know who has two pancreas stories. The other one is humorous. I should say that The Mindful Body was first written as a memoir, so there are lots of very personal stories in it. This is one. I was married when I was obscenely young. Don't tell anybody. All right. And so now, We're going to Paris on our honeymoon, and I'm 19 going on 40. We go into this restaurant. I order a mixed grill. On the mixed grill is pancreas. So I asked my then-husband, which of these things is the pancreas? He points to something. I eat everything else with gusto. Now comes the moment of truth. Will I be able to eat the pancreas? And to this day, I don't understand why I thought being married meant I should be able to eat the pancreas. At my age right now, I probably still wouldn't eat it anyway. But then it meant if I was going to be sophisticated, I would eat it. So I start to eat it and I literally get sick. In the meantime, he starts to laugh and I say, why are you laughing? And he said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay, so here we had a situation where I had made myself sick and my mother had made herself well. And my feeling is that there must be something very big going on here. Now, I had been studying elderly populations since, oh, the '70s. So a long time ago and for a long time. And the earliest study we did was we went into a nursing home and we gave people what now I would call a mindfulness treatment, but an opportunity to make choices. Not big choices because the powers that be in the nursing home wouldn't let us turn everything upside down and now put the residents in charge. But, you know, where do you want to visit with people? Do you want this plant? We're showing a movie. Do you want to see it? And that was the whole thing, the whole treatment. And we went back 18 months later and twice as many people who were given these choices were still alive. So very early on in my career, I had this incredible finding. In fact, it was so big, I must tell you, when we did the first set of measures, they were good, but not profound. Yes, they were happier, they were more active, more alert. When we did the follow-up study, we actually questioned whether or not we should publish it because it was so extreme. And of course we did publish it. And from that time on, combined with the two stories I just told you, I started thinking about the profound effect we have over our health.

Right. So what do you think is really the underlying mechanism that's going on here?

It's so funny, Peter. I have answered a version of that question for 40 years. I was the COVID story of the magazine section of The New York Times years and years ago. And the person who was writing the story, it took me forever to get them to understand and then him forever to get editorial board at the New York Times to understand. So when I say that mind and body are a single unit, it's one thing. Then you don't have to ask how one is getting to the other because it's one thing. The main problem with mind-body dualism, which most everybody who hasn't read my work and thought this way believes in mind-body dualism, people don't know they believe that. But when they ask a question, how is it happening? That's really what they're asking. And the question, if you have a mind and a body, is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And everybody has experienced the direct effects. You see somebody vomiting and all of a sudden you feel like vomiting. A leaf blows in your face and you get startled. Your blood pressure and pulse increase. Until you recognize, oh, it was just a leaf. So I feel good that I've had some influence, but it takes so long. It's been so many decades. Now people talk about mind-body connection. The connection idea still leads to Peter's question, how are they connected? And what I want is for people to see it as a single unit. And then if the unit is here, every part of the unit, your toes, your mind, Your bloodstream, your pancreas is here. And if it's here, it's all here. But doesn't mean that I'm saying nothing is happening, as my colleagues would say, under the hood. Certainly there are all sorts of changes. What I'm saying is that it's more or less simultaneously. It's not you do this and this leads to that and that leads to this, because as soon as you look at it that way, then you have the major problem of how do you get that first step from a thought again to something material. And it's interesting that the medical world, and now they're starting to come around, which I'm thrilled about, but it's funny that it took them so long when I believe the strongest drug we have is the placebo. And the placebo, separate from our experiments, is the best evidence. Here you take A sugar pill. You take a nothing, you think it's something, and then it does the work of something. All right. So, you know, your beliefs are what are actually affecting the final outcome. And my whole journey here, starting with the experience with my mother and grandmother, is if a placebo— it's clear placebos are very strong medicine and it's not the placebo that's making you better. Because by definition, the placebo is just a sugar pill. So we set up this drama where I have to go to a doctor who then prescribes this nothing. I take this nothing thinking it's something, and then I get better. I'm making myself better. And so in The Mindful Body, towards the end of the book, I talk about a treatment where you can use it for chronic illnesses. Without having to even engage the medical world. And I have great respect for medical people, although sometimes it doesn't sound that way.

Okay, so let's talk about it a bit because it seems to me that there are illnesses where it wouldn't work. Yes. So I have thyroid problem, for example. I need to take the thyroid hormone. Yes.

And it wouldn't help me if I took sugar. I don't agree with you. We don't know to assume that the mind isn't crucially important in, in every disease, I think limits us unnecessarily. Isn't it a bit dangerous?

Because on the one hand, you do say that you have respect for the medical world. Respect. Thank you. Respect for doctors.

There is nothing that I recommend either in these interactions or in any of my books that should suggest you shouldn't see the doctor. But as everybody knows, these doctors are very, very busy. There can be a very long time period between you get that first test and you actually find out what you have. And nothing that I'm recommending can't be done in a coordinated way with the doctor. So let me give you an example, and maybe this will work for your thyroid as well. And I don't know that it would. I just don't want to discount the possibility. Okay. Okay. And so When people are diagnosed with chronic illnesses, what people tend to believe is that that means you have no control over it. That's not what chronic means. All a chronic illness is, is the medical world doesn't have an answer for us. Okay? It doesn't mean that there isn't an answer out there. So you have a chronic illness. People tend to believe their symptoms are going to stay the same. Are they going to get worse? Well, it turns out nothing moves in only one direction. Take the stock market. If the stock market is going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It doesn't go down in a straight line. It goes up a little, down a little, up a little, and so on. The same thing with our symptoms. Our symptoms are always changing, but we hold them still in our minds. Now, what we do, and you can do this for yourself, the way we did these studies across very serious diseases, we would call people periodically. 'Kashi, I'm calling you now.' How is the symptom? Is it better or worse than the last time I called and why? Okay, now that very simple question produces many things. The first, most people who have a chronic illness feel helpless. So all of a sudden you're actively engaged in your own health care and that feels good. Second, you notice, hey, now it's a little better, or even if it's a little worse, just to notice there's change. Is interesting. Third, once you answer the question, why now? Is it better or worse? That engages you in a mindful search for answers. And we have many, many studies where the simple mindfulness is active noticing turns out to be good for your health. And then finally, I think you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking. Okay, so we did this with people who have multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, stroke, arthritis, chronic pain, and some others. And in each case, we get a very nice improvement in symptoms. So how is this like the placebo? The way I've just described it to you, it's not. But I think most people in Poland, people in Melbourne, where the two of you are currently located, people in the United States, almost everybody has a smartphone. And if not, they should get one, borrow one, find a smartphone, and you set that smartphone to ring, let's say, in an hour. And when your smartphone rings, you say to yourself, how is this symptom? Is it better or worse than the last time? And then set it to ring 2 hours and 5 minutes. Just keep varying it in the course of the day and over the week so you can do it yourself. You don't need an experimenter calling you.

I just wanted to get back to the placebo effect that you mentioned because Obviously, placebos may have some effect, but they clearly don't have the same effect as the drug, right? If they did, there would be no point in doing experiments in which you use a placebo as a control.

Okay, Peter, so this is much bigger than we should get into on this program, but we don't know how much of the effect of the drug itself. Okay, so here's something. And everybody needs to know that in this point in the Western world, all over the world, I would think, that in order to bring a drug to market, as you're suggesting, Peter, the drug has to outperform the placebo. All right. So in a trial where you're giving a drug and the placebo, how might that person know that they've been given the drug? Well, it turns out that many of these drugs have side effects. Placebos don't have side effects. So you have the side effect. Now you believe you were given the drug, and that belief itself helps the recovery. I think that people miss out. We want to believe. We want people to understand how powerful placebos are. So if you're running an experiment and I'm making up numbers, let's say the drug is successful in 60% of the cases and the placebo is only successful in 50% of the cases. That's a lot of people who are being helped with a sugar pill. And it's across virtually all drugs, all diseases, and in some cases more than others. And here's something that I found out. I was teaching this a few years ago. I was shocked that— so if I asked you, who's more likely to be helped by placebos, the smarter or less smart people? That people with higher IQs or lower.

I suppose you would expect people to think that those with lower IQs are helped more by the placebo.

We have this feeling about placebos that is given to us from the medical world. Placebos are wonderful, wonderful drugs. You're taking nothing to hurt you and you're exercising your own abilities. But because the pharmaceutical companies around the world are not happy with placebos, right? If that placebo outperforms the drug, I'm out millions, billions of dollars. And so that has gotten into the general population is what? It's only a placebo rather than, wow, I did it myself. That's what we should translate. If a placebo does it, you're the one who's doing it. And then by realizing that, we become much more powerful. All right.

So I need to tell my story. So Accidentally, 2 years ago, I went through breast cancer and I was treated at the hospital. Although I'm a really happy person, my optimism probably could have helped, but I met other women with the same illness and one of them, she didn't believe that doctors can help her. She believed that she will get cured with her own mind. Yes, visualization and so on. And she died half a year later because she didn't go through treatment. Although I do believe that how we think about certain things may help us getting cure or, for example, live longer, I do worry that people who listen to talk like yours may, for example, stop doing what has been shown. You know what I mean?

Sure. If there's a treatment that works, one should use it. I'm adding to that is a few things. First, part of the reason that treatment is working is because of our beliefs in it. So even for the people who are going through chemotherapy, radiation, I have so many things to say. I don't want to— I'm going to get lost here. We did a study, one of our early studies on mind-body unity that was actually on a nocebo. Now everybody knows what a placebo is. A placebo, you take nothing, you think it's something, it works like the something. A nocebo, you're taking something or doing something that everybody believes is real, but you don't believe it works and it stops working. Okay, so let me tell you the study. We took these chambermaids, and these chambermaids, these are women who are cleaning hotel and motel rooms, so they're getting plenty of exercise. First, we ask them, how much exercise are you getting? They say they're not getting exercise. What? But that's because they think exercise is what you do after work, and after work they're too tired. We divide them into two groups. This is Ali Crum and I did this study. Very simple study. We teach one group that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, and so on. So now we have two groups. One group who doesn't realize their work is exercise. One group that's changed their mind and sees their work as exercise. We take many, many measures before the study, after the study. One group is not working any harder than the other. They're not eating any differently. Nevertheless, the group that believes now that their work is exercise lost weight, there was a change in body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down, and just by changing their minds. Now, what this means though is that those people, if exercise is good for you, all of them should have been the same, right? But without knowing that exercise was good for them or seeing themselves as exercising, now, Kasia, you are saying, when people are in treatment, I'm certainly not trying to dissuade them. But there are people who don't seek treatment, and this can be helpful. The things that I write about and the research we've done over the past many decades can be helpful even if you're in treatment. Okay. And I think that because of this nocebo effect, then discounting the effects of things that we're suggesting or the medical world is suggesting, there's enough evidence now that it works very clearly against you. Our minds are very powerful, and I think that we've only begun to take advantage of just how powerful. People might not know the counterclockwise study. This was my first study on mind-body unity. Remember, I take mind and body if we see it as one. Wherever we put the mind, the body is also there. So we took elderly men to a retreat we had retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and we had them live there, their minds live there, as if they were 20 years younger. So they talked about past events as if they were just unfolding and so on. In all ways that we could do it, it was the past being responded to as if it was today. Okay. As a result of this, their vision improved. These are elderly men. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger without any medical intervention.

Well, I guess the same effect you can reach when you fell in love or when you fall in love.

Yeah. And all of a sudden life is brand new. Yeah. Nice. Exactly.

I have a question about the counterclockwise study you just mentioned, because I was preparing for this interview and I read about it. But I also found online a proposal to repeat it, 2019 protocol, actually listed you as a co-author doing it in Milan, if I remember rightly.

Francesco Fanini did the study. And it was also replicated. Yes, and it replicated. It wasn't an exact replication. The original was you had to take people away for 5 days. It was a very big deal. It was an abbreviated version of that. There was also a replication in South Korea and someplace else that I don't remember at the moment. It's hard to run these studies that I tell you it was very— I don't know, when I was interviewing these elderly men, I was young and it didn't occur to me what I was taking on as a responsibility. The adult daughter would usually bring them to the lab. And so I'm here in my office and they're walking down. And if I ask myself, I didn't know if he would live through the day, no less be able to go away for the week. And so here— and you only do these things when you're young, not realizing what I was getting myself— I was in charge of everything in their lives. It was a very big undertaking. And I'm glad that I did it. And the results were phenomenal. And it's had an effect in many ways, at least on my own research since then. But I don't think that Francesco would have had the resources to do this in Milan. You know, the BBC. Did you see the BBC version?

I know they did a program on it. That's right. The Young Ones, I think it was called.

Yeah. And it was also— the change was palatable as it was watching these men. And for me, there are people who would argue and not fully understand what I was saying. You can't get younger. Well, of course you can't get younger, but whatever abilities you had that you wrote off and you said it's all downhill without having enough evidence for that to be the case, and you can reverse a lot of that. It's true for almost everything that as you get older, you need very little evidence that you're decrepit. I'm 78 and my friends, as soon as somebody forgets something, everybody zooms in. As if now they have dementia. So I teach Harvard students, and before I teach them, I go through the lectures on aging. I ask them a simple question. So the class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Thursday I asked them, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? None of them remember. They don't care that they don't remember. My friends care too much. And so I think that We do this with many things. The medical world can't take measurements for each of us over time. They do once a year, but everyday things are changing. For example, you go to the doctor. I see, Kashi, you're wearing glasses. So you go to the doctor in the States, they show you the Snelling eye chart. So here's a chart where the letters get progressively smaller and smaller, harder and harder. I'm different. I'm bizarre. Most people just tell the doctor what letter you think it is. For me, I get annoyed. Here you're building in the expectation that soon I won't be able to see because it's getting smaller and smaller. So we do a study where we reverse the eye chart. Now the letters get larger and larger, changing one's expectation. And you know what happens? People can see what they couldn't see before. Now, when you get glasses, Kasia, you're making a commitment to not being able to see.

Well, it happened the other way around, really. I didn't wear glasses. I used to not wear glasses. And one day I couldn't read something, so I needed them.

Yes, but what I'm saying is once you needed them at that day, at that time of day, at those set of circumstances, you then assumed you always need them and you're training your eyes. Look, if you couldn't go to the bathroom You take a laxative. Now, if every day you take a laxative, you're training your body not to go without that laxative. And that's what we do with glasses all too often. It may be the case for me, I see better in the morning than I do in the afternoon. I see things that are moving different from things that are still. I see things in color different from black and white. All the things you're tested for. If I'm hungry, Kasia, I can see that restaurant sign very far away. All right. So the point is that even our ability to see varies. But what we do— and when you go to the doctor at one point in time, you're given a number that holds things still as if that's your vision for all time forward. Or as you get older, believing this is the best it's going to be, it's only going to get worse as you get older.

I'm so happy I believe I'm 20-something. Oh, good. That's good. I had this experience. That's really terrific.

I used to wear a soft contact lens in one eye. And so one evening I'm getting ready to go to bed at night and I'm trying to get the contact lens out of my eye and I'm killing myself. I can't get it out. Then I realized I never put it in and I saw fine all day. And that was part of my then not wearing them again, seeing when I actually needed it. And this, of course, everything we say is going to be not true for some group of people. I mean, if you're legally blind, I'm not saying drive without your glasses on. All I'm saying is that our abilities, our biological processes, everything about us varies and we mindlessly hold things still. So if I asked you, I in fact I did, I asked somebody in some lecture, I said, do you know your cholesterol level? And there's somebody waving. He's bragging his cholesterol level is perfect. I call on him. He shouts out his cholesterol level. And then I asked him, when did he have it measured last? He said, 6 months ago. I said, oh, and you haven't eaten or exercised since. And if you never get it measured again, you'll die a healthy person. The point is, that's not his cholesterol level. That was his cholesterol level at the time it was measured. If we asked ourselves why this variability is happening, then again, there's an opportunity for us to potentially exert more control over our bodies.

So I'd like to talk about getting older because you said you're 78. I was until last week, 78.

You don't look a day over 77. I know.

Yeah, I just had a birthday, so I'm now 79, but we're pretty close. And I think I have a positive outlook on aging. I think I'm doing pretty well. I still go surfing, for example.

It's winter now.

It's a bit cold, but when I'm when the weather is warmer, I'm surfing. But I have noticed over the years that I can't stay out in the waves for a couple of hours like I used to. I get tired much faster. And that just seems to me to be an inevitable part of aging. Do you disagree? Is there something that I could have done so I could surf as long as I did 20 years ago?

I don't know. I mean, chances are you gave up prematurely, but sure.

I haven't given up. I'm still doing it. I just get out of the water because I'm too exhausted to paddle for the wave anymore. Okay.

But if you didn't, you know, if the pedaling or not pedaling wasn't a big chunk of time, if you said to yourself, let's, I don't know, how long are you in the water now?

Well, now I'm only in the water maybe half an hour, right? So say it used to be an hour.

Oh, if you're in the water half an hour, do you think you could manage to be in the water 35 minutes?

Yeah, probably if I rested more between waves or something like that.

And now, now you're up to 35 minutes. Do you think you can actually be there for 40 minutes.

It's not so much how long I could stay in the water. If my wetsuit is good enough, I can stay there a long time. But the question is, how many waves can I go for, right? How much strength do I have to get on to paddle out for the wave, catch the wave, stand up on the board, ride it in without collapsing with exhaustion?

I think that people don't realize that we can never know what we can do. All right. That science, for example, can't prove that something can't be done. All you can know is what you've tried didn't work. And so what I'm suggesting is, I don't know how much it takes to surf a wave, but there must be some smaller waves. If I know they're—

I'm definitely on one of the smaller waves.

So if you're in the— and so there's probably a place with even smaller waves. If you were surfing with even smaller waves, chances are you'd be able to do a few more of those waves than you currently do.

Probably. But that's still an effect of aging, isn't it? That I can't go for the bigger waves anymore.

Well, I'm saying is we can't differentiate your mindset about aging from your potential ability. Now, I'm not suggesting that things don't change. What I'm suggesting is that too many of us hurry those changes along, accept more changes. So when I don't remember something, so I don't remember it. I know a lot of things. I know more things than the student I'm teaching who also doesn't remember things. It's what you do with the little bit of evidence. Draw very big conclusions that, oh my God, I now have dementia. Oh my God, I'm not fit for surfing anymore. And you can't— we don't know how fit you are for surfing. But if you tell yourself that because of your age you can't do more than a half hour, then certainly you're not going to be able to do more than a half hour.

Okay. So you're not denying that there's some physiological changes in our body that change what we can do?

Yes, exactly. I've gotten older too, Peter. Not as old as you because I'm a year younger.

Okay, Ellen. So I would love to know and get to the point, what you prescribe?

What is the mindfulness and how can we practice it? Okay. So when people hear the word mindful, mistakenly, too many people think of meditation. Which is great, but it's just very different from what I'm talking about. And I did early research on meditation. Meditation is a practice you engage in, hopefully to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, is more immediate. And you can achieve this mindfulness in one of two ways: top-down or bottom-up. Top-down is recognizing that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives, which means we never know. Now, everybody thinks they know. You're taught in schools all sorts of facts. But let me tell you, my life changed one day. I was at a horse event. Remember, I'm a straight-A student, the one that everybody hated when I was a kid. I think I even memorized what was underneath the pictures. I mean, I was crazy. So here I am with all my knowledge. I'm at this horse event. This man says, Will you watch my horse for me? I want to get my horse a hot dog. A hot dog? No one knows better— as well, but not better than I— horses don't eat meat. Sure, I'll watch your horse. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Now, most people realizing that they don't know anything would be upset. I was thrilled because it opened up all sorts of possibilities. All of the things that people said can't be, I became my 3-year-old self. Why not? Why not? Who says so? And the other one example I use often when I'm lecturing is, and we'll do this with, let me ask Peter, how much is 1 1?

I think it's 2. Okay.

So you see everybody, this is the thing you think you know the best, right? But 1 and 1 isn't always 2. First, let me give you a sophisticated answer. 1 and 1 is 2 if you're using a base 10 number system. If you're using a base-2 number system, 1 1 is written as 10. But who cares about number systems? Peter, you take one pile of laundry, add one pile of laundry, 1 1 is 1. You take one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, 1 1 is 1. You take one cloud plus one— In the real world, 1 1 doesn't equal 2, as or more often as it does. All right, now what's the difference? Why do you need to know this? Because now, Next time somebody comes to you and asks you a question, you can— how much is 1 and 1? You can say 1, 2, 10, possibly other things as well. When you're mindful, you have choices. When you're giving the rote answer that you learned, absolutely horses don't eat meat, 1 and 1 is 2, your vision is whatever you said the numbers were, and so on. We hold things still when they're changing. Okay, so now. I can persuade you if we had more of the day that this belief in uncertainty is crucial to our well-being. You don't have to feel bad about not knowing because nobody knows.

Well, nobody knows anything or nobody knows— or there are some things that nobody knows.

No, nobody knows anything for sure. Okay. You can't know because everything is always changing. How do you get to that? Let's just bottom up. Notice 3 new things as you walk outside. You've lived there for 20 years, but you never noticed that. Notice 3 new things about your spouse or best friend or somebody at work. You notice a few new things about things you thought you knew, and then you come to see you didn't really know it at all, or as well as you thought. And then eventually everything becomes new. You don't have to practice this. So let's say both of you came to visit me right now at my house in Dartmouth, Mass. It's beautiful on the river. You wouldn't have to practice anything. You'd walk in the house and everything would be new. You'd ask yourself, oh, look at those books she's reading. Did she do that painting? And what is this thing over here? Everything would be new. And once we recognize that it's being old is just because we're confusing the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon, we give up the excitement that awaits us. And the people around the world are like robots. And I've got 50 years of data showing me that almost all of us are mindless almost all the time. When you're mindless, you're not aware that you're mindless, so you can't quickly switch it around. When you're acting like a robot, can you be happy? Are robots happy? No. Do robots have choices? No. And why would we choose to live like that when we're enjoying ourselves? So you're at my house and we're having a great time. You start doing a crossword puzzle or whatever thing you enjoy doing. You're surfing. And if each wave, which of course is ridiculous, but if each wave were exactly the same, And each time you approach the ocean, everything was— it wouldn't be fun for you.

No, that's why I don't go to wave pools. They've constructed these wave pools where you have machines that make waves that are exactly the same. Yeah. I don't go there. I think one of the great things about surfing is that every wave is different and every moment is different.

Exactly. And dealing with that difference, what we find that when people are mindful, so the neurons are firing and it's literally and figuratively enlivening. It's the way you are when you're engaged and having fun. So what do I suggest for people? They break the seal to the unlived lives that most are living and that people— so Peter's age and my age now are obsessed with exercise and eating right and whatever to make our lives longer. And, you know, and that's fine. But in my view, we should spend our time adding more life to our years. Rather than worrying about adding more years to our life. And when we add more life to our years, I think magically we're going to find not just that we're happier.

Okay, but how do we do that?

Yeah. So the way we do that, there are several things. So the first thing is just practice this active noticing every day, 5 times, 10 times a day until you really see you don't know. Now, once you don't know, so I'm like a kid in a candy store because I know I don't know. So everything is fun. Everybody is potentially interesting. So you want to come to understand that uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. So you can exploit the power in uncertainty. Now, what we also need to do is recognize that outcomes are in and of themselves not good or bad. They're just happenings. They're just events. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events. So if you're mindful, you have many more options for how to understand something, and stress tends to dissipate. And in my view, this is the only thing I'm going to say that I don't have data to support, but still my view is that stress is the number one killer. And stress is psychological. Stress means that you assume Something is going to happen, and when it happens, it's going to be awful. And you need to approach both of those because prediction is an illusion. So you think something's going to happen? Give yourself 3 reasons, 5 reasons why it may not happen. So you're immediately less stressed. Let's do the harder part now. Let's assume it is going to happen. How is that actually a good thing? So not under all circumstances.

So I'm thinking of the hardest examples of losing one's kid, for example. Yes.

I mean, no, I think that if I were a mindless academic, I'd probably try to argue that truth with you. But let's assume that we leave a few things out, that even the person who's lost a child has the rest of the day when those thoughts aren't occupying them. And how are they spending that part of the day? And if they're spending it mindfully, then the neurons are firing. And what that is doing is helping them be healthier and happier.

I want to come back to knowledge. You were skeptical about knowledge, but I want to relate that particularly to psychology because— I'm not skeptical of knowledge.

I'm skeptical of the acceptance of whatever fact as absolute, like 1 and 1 equals 2, horses don't eat meat.

Some of the things that we thought we have learned from psychology, it seems like we didn't really know, right? Psychology's been going through this crisis of replication. We've talked about that already briefly, but there are many studies that were quite famous that I think we maybe should not have relied on. We know now, like the study that if you adopt a power pose, you stand in a particular pose that suggests power for just one minute, that's going to change your testosterone levels, your cortisol levels. And also your behavior leading people to make riskier bets. So that seems to have been not replicated. And there's a number of others too.

You know, wait a second. So that's Amy Cuddy's study. You know that when a study doesn't replicate, it doesn't mean the hypothesis was wrong. It just means that the replication didn't provide evidence for it being true. It doesn't provide evidence against the hypothesis.

So we don't know it then though, right? We don't know that the hypothesis is true.

But you look at people across the board and you have somebody who stands who is speaking reasonably fast, who's sure of themselves. There are things about that person that are very different from— we've all been there— where you're afraid to speak and you're looking, you don't know if you're going to be insulted or punished or whatever. How could that not have an effect? So there may be mitigating circumstances, but I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath. I don't know the study that didn't replicate it. But if it's one study that found it, one study that didn't, I don't know where I'd put my money.

So do we have any reasons to choose one thing against the other?

That's an interesting question that it depends on how you understand that thing. So if you understand the way most people do most things out there, these are good things and I have to kill myself, step over people in order to get them. These are bad things. I have to run as fast as I can to avoid them. Once you recognize that whether it's good or bad is really very much within your control, you can just be still. Let me tell you, I was doing a podcast and I was explaining this and I used as an example, I said, look, and it's too late for me to use the same example now, but let's say our internet connection goes out. All right, so I'll go have lunch. Now, the fun thing was that then our internet connection went out. And I did have lunch. It just— I think that what we want to ask ourselves when we're stressed— this is a one-liner that I have where people put it on their refrigerators to remind them. Next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Now, that doesn't mean there aren't real tragedies, as the loss of a child that you were saying before. But for most of us, I missed the bus, I screwed up the project, I hit the car. These are so what? And as soon as you ask that, you say, yeah, it wasn't such a big deal. You can become more yourself.

So I think that it's easier when it's me.

Yes.

Because I do think that I have some control over my mind, but it's really difficult to see others suffering. And if I know that I have influence on their feeling. Yes.

You know, since I'm a little girl, You would tell me, so I say, why don't you look at it this way? Always educating people, trying to help people. But you wouldn't do that if you thought that view that they had was the only view that was available. I tell a story in The Mindful Body, because I know people can hear me speaking about everything is fine and what have you and say, what does she know from her ivory tower? So there are lots of stories that make clear I was out for dinner. I came back. It was like 12:00 at night. All my neighbors were outside because my house had just gone up in smoke. And that was 80% of what I owned. So that's a biggie. Okay. I called the insurance company the next day. The guy comes over and he says, this is the first time— this is not— I want to get to a different point of the story, but this is the first time that the call wasn't as bad as the damage. Most people, oh my God, oh my God, he gets there, not such a big deal. And for me, I didn't go, oh my God, oh my God, and it was a big deal, but I had already lost it, whatever I lost there, and I didn't see how throwing my sanity away was going to get anything back from me. Now I have to move into the Charles Hotel or someplace because I don't have a house. I'm a sight to be seen there with my two little dogs. Good. This is Christmas Eve. I go out, I come back to the hotel. The room is full of gifts, not from the people who own the hotel, not from the management, but from the so-called little people. The chambermaids, the people who park my car, the waiters and the waitresses. It took me years to be able to tell that story without it bringing tears to my eyes. And every Christmas— this is decades now— I am reminded of the goodness of people. And I don't remember, except for one thing, anything I lost in that fire. So net-net, even this more extreme bad experience than most people had still turned out to be positive for me.

You mentioned the hotel study you did with the cleaners. That's a study where there is another attempt to replicate it. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but done by Dixie Stanworth and others where they used Building service workers, but with the same sort of thing, telling some of them that their work was exercise that met the Surgeon General's recommendations and not telling others. And they did not find a— Yeah, I didn't see the paper, Peter.

Some of the stuff I find totally ridiculous and almost offensive. If I want to do a study and not get an effect, it's very easy to do it, right? The way the instructions are given, exactly what the instructions are. But I haven't seen that paper, but this paper is now part of many papers that we've written showing the mind-body unity. And that's what we did. That's what we found. Uh, check, double-check, and so on. My students, when they do these studies with me, are very careful researchers because they know that I don't want to do anything that isn't going to make a big difference in the world in some way. And anything that's going to make a difference, there are people who are going to try to tear it apart. There is something with my research where it's very different from many of these studies because in my research, typically I'm trying to test possibilities and rather than tweak something that somebody else has done one way or the other. But I'm happy to come back on and take a look at that study. It's I'm sure that it won't be hard for us to deal with it.

Do you think that psychology maybe in the earlier years was less rigorous than it should have been?

I don't know what you mean by rigor. It depends on the study, you know. So let's say I do a study. I'm on an island and I have a lot of monkeys and I'm able to make the monkeys actually talk. And so as I'm on the boat leaving the island and goodbye, Dr.

Langer, it was wonderful.

Now, even if I were only able to make one monkey say, "Goodbye, Dr. Langer, it was wonderful meeting you," it would be phenomenal, right? So let's say we tried to make 10 monkeys talk and only one is able to. It would be hard to publish that because of the standards that currently exist. In the past, I think it might have been easier.

The problem is that when we tell those stories, we may draw different conclusions out of them. Yes. So in case of your mother and in case of my friend who died from cancer, there may be other causes than the working of the mind.

But that's why we do the study. So in fact, I was going to say to you, when you talked about your friend, without any disrespect, we really don't know what her thoughts were. Okay, so I gave this lecture to 5,000 women who had cancer. It was early on and I was very excited. And this man raised his hand and asked me a question. He said, are you saying that people may be able to control their cancer? And I'm saying, yes, they may be able to. I'm not saying you can. We certainly can't prove that one can't control. And he said his wife died just like your friend. And she, she was positive and she fought that cancer. She fought and she lost. And I thought, okay, look, first thing I made clear to people is that I'm not blaming the victim. That if it's the case that the cultures across the world teach us that we have no control, then to believe we have no control is not something for which we should be blamed. And when eventually we find out we had some control. But then I thought about it more carefully. The very metaphor She fought the cancer. Okay, so if you have a little kid pulling, a 2-year-old, 3-year-old pulling at your legs, your trousers, you don't say you're fighting the kid.

It's an annoyance. Yeah, I hate the language, by the way. I hate when people say that we lost the battle. It's really awful.

Yeah, because fighting the cancer, that to you was a very big thing. And the bigger you see it, the enemy, The less likely you're saying you're going to win. So the reason in science that we do whatever we're doing with a sample larger than a single person is because we can never be sure. There's always noise. There are always multiple explanations. So let's take the counterclockwise study because a lot can happen in the course of a week. So somebody might say it was the social life. It was the fact that they're adult daughters weren't there babying. Who knows? It didn't matter to me because the important thing was not turning the clock back. You know, Peter to see himself as 50. I want Peter to say to himself, how do I know I can do those things that I was able to do at 50? And so we have behavior all sorts of things like, you know, hearing, vision, memory, and then looking younger actually improving. So for me, the excitement was not that it's because I turned the clock back, but rather that people who are older can improve in ways that were not considered possible. When was the last time you heard anybody of any age their hearing improved? No less than 80-year-old or their vision.

So it's the case of my grandma who is now 102, and we actually thought that she would have died 2 years ago, but she didn't. And now she's better.

But is she improving? Is she, is anything getting better?

Well, she actually has improved for the last 2 years and especially because she's in this special place where she has been well treated.

Yeah, so we have a relative who's on— just on July 4th had her 101st birthday. She lives in Philadelphia and then lives down here where I am in the summer. And about 3 months ago, I might not have that exactly right, but she started using a walker, which she hated. All right. Now, if it was Peter using the walker, Peter would then continue probably to use the walker, right? Because as you get old, you just fall apart.

And not yet, but that day may come. He'd be grateful.

He'd be grateful that at least he could walk with the walker. She would not accept it. And I was stunned when I saw her when she first got here this summer walking. To go along with what Peter was saying before, she wasn't walking as quickly, as assuredly, as she did last year, but she was not using that walker. And I think that what happens when we get to a certain age, we just assume that we can't. And if you assume that you can't, then you don't, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Okay. So that's a nice segue to what we always ask our guests as we get closer to the end, and that is, how do you evaluate your own life in terms of living well and also looking forward to the next 10 years or 20 years or whatever you may have?

Forever. I'm not going. I tend not to evaluate my life. I tend to just live it. And that doesn't mean there aren't things on occasion that throw me, but I recover pretty quickly. And I'm basically— I think I make a game out of almost everything. Not in a I don't take a serious situation, you know, if Kashi is talking to me about life and death, I'm not going to make it into a game. But for most things that I'm doing, whether I'm using a water flosser or have to pass time waiting for some event to happen, it's all just, it's fun. And I think that in my having fun, I take what I do seriously, but I don't take myself so seriously. And I think that lets me enjoy most things. And as I said, that to me, I think the secret, if it is a secret, is to add more life to what you're doing. So my life tends to be reasonably stress-free. And because I take all that I've said to you seriously. So if something throws me, you know, who cares? Whatever the silly thing is that for the moment bothered me. It's true. Yeah. You know, I'm probably difficult to live with for that reason. In fact, the person I live with will say I wake up singing and it's irritating. But when I was a child, my father used to say to me, cheer down. I've been blessed by growing up with parents that were exceptionally loving and supportive, and that just allowed me to look for a better way of understanding whatever was happening. And I don't take the words, I can't. See, I started to paint when I was 50 years old. Now, I was one of those kids in school who couldn't draw. There was nothing that I would have done when I was younger for anyone to say that this would be something that I would do in the future. And it's great fun. Why shouldn't I do it? There is hope for me.

Yeah, you've written a book about it, right? About the creative experience. I have to say that I find that impressive. I certainly was also a kid who couldn't draw. I could take up abstract painting, I imagine, but I do not believe that I could take up painting in which I presented realism. Peter, surely you can sing. Yes, Kasia knows that. Kasia is far more musical than I am. So there are some things that I just accept.

So I have, I have a YouTube, you should watch this, with all of my Harvard students right behind me. And it opens up and I say, I can't sing, but I love singing. Why shouldn't I sing? There are lots of things I can do. And then they join me in singing. I'm going to sing it for you. I'm going to be sorry. Everybody doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else. And when you realize that there are things that I can do, why shouldn't I sing? Why shouldn't you draw? Who decided on the criteria for excellence? Peter, look at how I just put myself out there. You did.

That was great, actually. But I continue.

It was the fact that you do it. You draw something now and show it to everybody. And then you say you're—

Peter, you've been seeing some Beatles.

She loves you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that enough or you want more?

There you go. No, that's good.

With a love like yours. Do you think that's right? Yes. You think you should be sad, right? No, I— Actually, the first people to tell me and my wife, who's not much better at singing than I am, that we shouldn't sing was our children, because we used to go for long car trips in which we would sing. And that was fine when the children were, I don't know, 5, 8, something. But then at some point they got to high school and they took music lessons. And then they said, stop it. You can't sing. Neither of you can sing in tune.

So here's what you should have done, 'cause I was also told, but not by parents, by friends, because they can all sing. But I know the words to all the songs. So I became like that little ball that ahead of time tells you what the lyrics are. And that became my role.

Yes, I'm good. I'm good with lyrics too. I know lots of lyrics and I used to enjoy singing, but as I say, my children stopped us and now Cash is just reinforcing the unfortunately.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I've just had Peter singing for a few times.

Yes, I visited your place where you sat around a fire outside and you've played the guitar and you sing beautifully. But you don't want me singing. It spoils the occasion.

If you don't read the whole book, you should at least read that part of the book where I talk about who chose the criteria for excellence and that it turns out that the more dissimilar you are from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly follow the rule. So I'm lecturing. I'll see if there's some very tall guy. And for some reason there always is somebody 6'5" and I'll invite him up to the stage. Now we look ridiculous. I'm 5'3". He's 6'5", right? And I just stand there, let people look at us. And I say, should we do anything physical the same way? It's preposterous to think that we should. Now, if his group wrote the rule and I'm trying to do it, hold a racket, a golf club, anything. Imagine if we're both not at the same time, but using the same toilet. One of us is not getting our biological needs met. All right. Everything that is was put there by people to meet certain people's needs. The more different you are from those people, the more important it is for you to do it your own way. So women are never going to play the sport as well as men if the experts, of course, do this naturally. If they hold the racket this way, hold the golf club this way. No. Even for you yourself, if you hurt your shoulder and you still have a game coming up, you don't want to hold the racket or the club the same way you did when your shoulder didn't hurt. When you slept better and so on. The point is that everything should vary. The larger, larger point that we didn't get to, let me throw it out, the large point is that everything, everything, go on, Peter's going to start to think of the exceptions. Everything that is was at one point a decision made by other people to meet the needs of other people. And that means that Everything is malleable. Everything is mutable. Everything can be changed. Everything. Now, what happens is when we learn about the world, we learn about one and one is two, horses don't eat meat, this is the way you do it. And it then doesn't occur to us to make it so it meets more of our needs. So for instance, to make it clearer, If you're playing tennis with me, except I'm a very intermediate— the expression doesn't make sense. I'm a very intermediate player. And I throw the ball up. I'm always playing doubles. I kill it, my first serve, and it doesn't go in. Now I have a wuss follow-up serve. It always goes in. If I wrote the game, created the rules, you'd have 3 serves. The first one I throw up, I kill it. It wouldn't go in. The second one I throw up and I killed it. Now I'd be getting better. 'Cause I would've learned from the first serve and I'd still have the follow-up third serve. What people need to understand is somebody decided how everything is. You drop the dishes, um, pulling them out of the cabinets. That is because you are 5'3" and the person who designed the cabinets is 6'2". And when you recognize that everything can be changed, everything becomes easier. So now when I play tennis, if you came and we're just playing the two of us, I may say, let's serve 3 serves each, or we'd play 2 serves. But I know that I would be likely to be a better tennis player if the game were designed by somebody more like me.

3 serves. Yes. So the spectators might get bored watching.

No, that's right.

No, but the point is there's pros and cons with all these changes.

Right? Yeah. No, I'm not saying to make the change. What I'm saying is to recognize that it's because of the way you differ from the person who wrote the rule that your performance is not as good. And so you should do it your own way. So when I started painting, I had this friend who is an art collector, and she sometimes drinks too much. And she came over and she saw one of my paintings. Ellen, there's something there, which I was thrilled. Then she says, Now don't go thinking you're Rembrandt. Right. Which wouldn't be fair to me because there's nothing— I still can't draw. Anyway, but I said to myself, not to her because I didn't think in her stage she would understand or accept it, and Rembrandt isn't me. And that I would rather be the best Ellen Langer I can be than the 4,325,000th Rembrandt. And if people recognize that to take advantage of the ways that they're different, and you're more likely, I think, to take advantage of the ways that you're different when you recognize the way things are was not handed down from the heavens. Somebody decided. And if it's just a decision, if the table is too high for you, cut the legs of this, raise the chair. Everything that is can be changed. And once we are aware of how naturally things change, we stay more mindful because everything is potentially new. And as we notice this novelty, the neurons are firing, and that's the essence of engagement and what feels good and turns out to be good for us. I love the thought.

Yeah, yeah, I like it too. I think we've agreed that your position really is everything can be changed within limits. There are some limits that you maybe can't change. And you've also said you don't want to evaluate your life. You just want to go on living it. And I think that's an interesting attitude. One would have—

I'd also add, Peter, that if we evaluate, there's— so I have findings. You maybe, if you've studied all this stuff, you say life and death findings for 50 years now. The thing that meant the most to me was when I realized this one simple thought That behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it. And when you really grasp that, you become totally nonjudgmental of yourself. So you like yourself better, of other people. So I don't want, now that you and I are buddies, Peter, because we're the same age, Kasia, you still have to catch up and get a little lower for us. Okay. That I don't want you ever to forgive me. I want you instead to understand why I did whatever I did. Okay, so let me make this clear. I was asked to give, since we're telling stories, and I have much of this in the Mindful Body, I was asked to give a sermon at Harvard. I say yes to everything, so I said yes, but I'm not religious. A sermon at a church? So I'm not religious and I'm Jewish. So the combination should have led me to say no, but I said yes. So now what am I going to talk about? So I came up with something that was almost sacrilegious. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's good. That is good. Okay. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's bad. You can't forgive people.

But they're going to do it.

You can't forgive people unless you first blame them. So it turns out our forgivers are our blamers. Oh my goodness. Now, events are neither in and of themselves good nor bad. Do you blame people for good events or bad events? You blame people for bad events, but it's not in the event. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame and then forgive. Hardly divine. Now, if you blame, it's better to forgive than not forgive. But better than better, and I talk about many examples of this in the book, is to understand why they do what they're doing. You might hate me because I am so gullible, which I am. It's terrible. Taken by two psychopaths, really. And you're going to train me not to be so gullible. But we're always going to fail because going forward, my intention is to be trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to be gullible. Kasia, you're so inconsistent. It really gets on my nerves. Kasia, I show her all the ways she's been inconsistent. She doesn't want to be inconsistent. But going forward, Kasia isn't saying to herself, I'll be inconsistent. What is she doing? She's being flexible. So the point is that all of the things we take ourselves and other people to task for has an equally potent but oppositely balanced alternative. So for gullible, it's trusting. Inconsistent, it's flexible. Spontaneous, it's, um, um, what am I thinking?

Planned? I don't know.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, that people inhibited, do you mean? Impulsive. Impulsive is spontaneous. What we did was a study that was cute. We took, I don't know if it was 200 or 300 of these behavior expressions, and we gave them to people and said, circle those things that you keep trying to change about yourself but keep failing at. So for me, it'd be impulsive, gullible, and whatever else. Then you turn the page over, and in a mixed-up order are the positive versions of these. Now the task for subjects is circle those things you really value about yourself. My spontaneity, Am I being trusting? So if you want me to stop being gullible, all you need to do is get me to stop valuing being trusting. You want me to stop being impulsive? Get me to stop valuing being spontaneous. Okay? Because going forward, nobody gets up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be obnoxious, rude, aggressive. So what are they being from their perspective? All behavior that, you know, that we have to change somebody's behavior or to change your own behavior You need to understand it from the perspective of you or the other person going forward, not looking back. All right.

But you would agree that there are people who act in a really horrible way and put pain and suffering to others, right?

Whatever I say, Kasia's job now during this interview is to find the extreme case.

We're both philosophers, so we do that. That's fine. That's fine.

No, I think even in the extreme case, it doesn't mean you have to tolerate it, but the person's intention. Now you can say if somebody is, is a psychopath or whatever, if somebody's intention is to hurt you, yeah, sometimes people intend to hurt, but more often than not, when you're hurt, that wasn't the person's intention. All right. So in typical interactions that we have, when somebody annoys you, or you're annoying somebody else. Their behavior is being driven by something very different from what you're calling it. Don't tell me not to be impulsive. I don't want to be impulsive. I don't want to be gullible. But when I am being those things that take those labels, there's another label that also explains it. And then we have much more control and we become less evaluative. I understand that.

So I understand that we can find causes of someone's behavior. Yes. But I do want to preserve judgment and moral judgment, of course. I mean, take Putin. I have war just at the border. Yes. Millions of people have been killed now in our eyes.

Yeah. I'm not suggesting that one has to or should want to endure the consequences. But the person who is committing the evil deed probably has some reason that makes sense to them. That's all.

They have some reason that makes sense to them.

Yes. Yes. I, I, I— We say for ourselves because none of us are at the border killing people. But still, my guess is neither you nor Peter are happy all the time and are happy with yourself all the time. So here I'm giving you in code the key to happiness. So people around the globe believe that— a lot of young people— I have to make millions and millions, billions of dollars, because when I have billions of dollars, then I'll be happy. Or I have to teach at Harvard or Yale or Princeton, Stanford, whatever, because I need that status, then I'll be happy. Or I have to be in the business world, be a titan of industry, because that power will make me happy. It turns out in each of those disciplines, many people are simply not happy. You have a lot of unhappy billionaires, millionaires, high-status, powerful people who are not happy. So what people miss is that it's not the money, the power, or the status they want. It's thinking the money, power, or status will get them the respect of other people. Now, why do they need the respect of other people? Because then they will respect themselves. And what I'm telling you is this very simple expression, "Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective," cuts through all of that. Because now I know, I don't care how much you two yell at me for this thing that I did. At this point now, I know I did it because it made some sense to me, or else I wouldn't have done it. And so I start to gain my self-respect. And one can do this if they also sing our song, recognize that everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else, everybody can't do something, everyone can do something else. So they feel better about themselves. And that's what the whole game is about, I think. People fight each other for limited resources, but the resources we seek aren't limited. This self-respect is simultaneously available to all of us. Thank you, Ellen.

I think that's a great note to end on. And I think you've shown even in this interview that you really live that and that you live on with your life and you get on with things. I threw you a couple of tough questions, but you didn't disturb your equanimity at all. I'm glad to say. So it's been a fantastic conversation.

I wanna thank, thank you for that. It has been so much fun.

Yes, I just want to mention the book about your art. You didn't— your agent would criticize you because you didn't mention the title, which is—

On Becoming an Artist. On Becoming an Artist.

That's right. If you want to look more about that—

Peter, Peter, that was very funny because when I wrote the book, I sent it to the publishers with the title Mindful Creativity. So it was recent and they have lots of my paintings in that book. They send it back to me with the title On Becoming an Artist. I was so excited about being called an artist, but the book is about interpersonal mindfulness. So I think that it hasn't been appreciated by people who might actually have liked it. Good.

I hope we'll get you some more readers for it. Really, thank you very much. That was terrific.