The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively With Todd Kashdan

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, you're basically training her to say nothing when a guy tries to push her to say nothing in the future when she's working at a company and basically she's looked over for a promotion. Like the status quo is fine. If trying to listen to you and incorporate your ideas is going to make me spend more time at work and less time with my family and friends that happen there, it's a different way of looking at these topics. Do we want people to agree with our views or are we interested in educating people to create a healthier future?

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, folks, so. So I got this book. It arrived. I don't even know who sent it to me. Honestly, it just like showed up on my doorstep. This happens to me sometimes. Then I, I am tempted to just toss the book because I need another book like another hole in the head, but this one just caught my eye. So I read it. It's called the Art of How to Dissent and Defy Effectively. And I honestly thought this was going to be something like the Alchemist Cookbook or some crazy title meant to incite riots and violence, but I was pretty wrong. It's actually really good. It's like this research based toolbox for, for people to be able to basically get along better. But also it's almost like a handbook to create a world with more justice and creativity and courage. And it's written by a professor of psychology and my guest on today's show, Todd Kashdan. K A S H D A N Kashdan and Todd actually gave a TEDX talk and I'll link to it in the shownotes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com insight insubordination he wrote or he gave a TEDx talk on psychological flexibility. He writes for Psychology Today. He writes the Curious blog for psychology today. Over 4 million people read. He has a PhD in clinical psychology. He founded the well Being Lab at George Mason University which just sounds like a very pleasant place to be. And this new book is basically like this guidebook for being heard and making change and questioning unhealthy or stagnant status quo, but doing so in a very level headed manner and even, even like at like a peaceful and impactful manner. And so I just had so many things I kind of highlighted in the book and so many pages folded over. I had to get Todd on the show because obviously it's pretty relevant to the times that we're living in as well, because there's so many things that we're tempted, you know, so many new normals, so to speak, we're tempted to rebel against, but yet we don't want to be that person who's inciting some type of a, you know, Molotov cocktail party downtown in front of the sushi restaurant. So, anyways, I'd love to jump into some of this st with you, Todd. Welcome to the show, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I should have you as my publicist.

That's great. No, I don't want that job. I've seen publicists, and I don't think I'm cut out for that. I'm not very good at sending out 100 cold emails a day. But anyways, insubordination. I think a lot of people maybe throw around that word, but possibly don't really know what it means. And since we're probably going to be using that word a few times in today's show because it's the link for the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com insubordination. I suppose we should define that word. How would you define insubordination, Todd?

Yeah, so we're intentionally being provocative by taking a negative and turning it into a positive. Every place that you hear about insubordination, whether it's a general, whether it's an athlete refusing to listen to their coach, whether it's a kid that refuses to abide by the orders of the school, is treated as a negative. Essentially, it's refusing and resisting the dominant social order. And the automatic question that comes to mind is, well, who makes the rules? Why does the authority have the right to tell me what to do, what to think, and where are they wrong and who taught them? And so in some ways, this is about questioning social norms. It's questioning authorities, and it's a questioning that the rules that the vast majority of people abide by that makes a functional, predictable society. But as we're going to get into, there's a lot of norms and behaviors and stands that people are taking that are just really nonsensical, really problematic. And we need these people who are insubordinates to ask questions.

Okay. All right. So that makes sense. And I suppose people can always look up insubordination in the thesaurus as well, if you need to review that definition. But, you know, this idea of basically, you know, not necessarily being a sheeple or a lemming, so to speak, is, I think, something that appeals to A lot of people, but so many of us, you know, maybe it's based on our education system that teaches us how to be good little factory workers and maybe question authority a little bit less. Or maybe it's just because it's so comfortable sometimes to just do what we're told to do and line up and not make a fuss or cause trouble. I think a lot of people just really haven't practiced insubordination in a healthy manner to any given extent. But, you know, I'm curious, what made you write this book? Was it the COVID pandemic and you seeing that people needed to stand up for themselves more? Was it. Was it something else? Like, how'd you actually get on the road and write a whole book on insubordination?

Yeah. This is long before Trump, long before COVID There's a personal side and there's a sociological side. The personal side is probably. Like many listeners, I grew up where my dad walked out of my mom's life when I was the age of two. My twin brother and I didn't have any male role models. We were raised by a single mom. I grew up in Unendale, New York, which is pretty much like a 90% or higher, predominantly black community. So it's kind of the inverse of what most people talk about. And you grow up in an environment like that of being raised by a single parent, being one of the lone racial minorities, but the opposite of how people think about it. And you have to learn in the most inefficient way possible how to be a man and how to figure things out and how to develop friends and how to be. How to tell good stories and how to win romantic partners by trial and error. It's the most inefficient way possible. People like you were talking about fitness and health and relationships. It's better to learn from people that have kind of field tested this beforehand. So that's the personal story behind this. I wanted to give the book that I wish I had, and I wish other kids and other adults who basically are just big children in adult bodies of like, hey, here's a way to improve the way that you live your life.

Yeah.

And then the sociological side of things. Now, remember, this is pre Trump. I've been doing this for about 10 years working on this book. Pre.

Pre Trump. But just to clarify, like, from what I understand is, because I looked at the. At the copyright, you know, inside flap of the book, the book just came out like, this is 2021 release. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. This I mean, you're an author. I mean, you know how long it is from when you start doing the research and writing and it finally gets into publication, it's supposed to come out.

So you're saying you, like, started writing the book kind of like pre Trump? Like. Like, you didn't. You didn't start this, like, a year into Covid or something like that?

No, this isn't a book about Trump or Covid, but it's every. Every issue that comes up, everyone that knows about this book is like, oh, my God, this becomes more and more relevant.

I know, it's, like, so relevant, you.

Know, but you did have the start of social media, and you did have the start of a massive level of voiceless people getting a voice and not really knowing how to wield it properly. And so I saw, you know, two things happen. A beautiful thing and an ugly thing happening. A beautiful thing is that, my God, you could be living in Idaho and you could be gay, and you could find a whole community of other gay people online and then speak your piece and then talk about what you want to, and then you find your tribe. I mean, that was amazing. And then on the destructive side was you found at both political extremes, but really all over the place is that any mishap or failing, or attempt at sarcasm or attempt to be funny that was misinterpreted ended up being, you know, the end of some people's mental health for the next few years or the rest of their lives, much less losing their jobs. When I wrote this book, this is when. I don't know if you remember, in 2014, Justine Sacco, she was the one that wrote a tweet of, hey, I'm going to Africa. I hope I don't catch hiv.

Oh, my gosh. And she was, like, getting on a plane. Is this the guy you're talking about?

Yeah. And then, you know, like, you had 2 million people following her as she's on flight, doesn't have access to her phone. It was a very interesting sociological moment in the history of society because.

Yeah, because she. She, like, landed and shit had hit the fan. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, she attempted a joke and she's not that funny. Right. And it just went. It was an attempt at sarcasm. She was kind of pointing out of, like, how absurd it is how. I mean, she's going to Africa. Clearly she has an interest in international travel and learning other cultures. But the book did, you know, the joke didn't land.

Right.

But what was really interesting, that would never happen now, even seven Years later, and I can't even say it on the air is like, the amount of misogynist comments calling her a cunt, saying they want to rape her, saying that they hope that. That she kills herself with a cyanide pill. And this went on, and I mean, there's just hundreds and hundreds of strangers, and no one stood up for this woman until years later when Jon Ronson wrote a book about public. About public shaming. And nobody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait. Your comments going way too far. Like, wait, raping her because of a joke. Wait, she should die because of a bad joke that happened there. And I thought to myself, we need more heroes in waiting that are there to kind of stand up against the crowd. And then, you know, this just keeps on adding up. I mean, Charlottesville, you know, standing up against a bunch of people that are, you know, tiki torchbearers, and standing up against, you know, people that are saying that, you know, you know, we don't. We have a president that's not the actual president. And then on the other side, you've got people that are not allowing questions or allowing people to be curious about how diversity should operate in society, but basically being told, this is the way. If you don't follow the rules and the rules keep on changing and it's your job to keep up on the rules to change, then we're coming after you. So you've got all of this huge mess of voices that have. Some of them have pretty good intentions, but ineffectively trying to mobilize social change.

You know, there's like this term. I don't know if it appears in your book, but I know Charles Duhigg, who actually wrote a really good called the Power of. What's called the Power of Habit. I think it's called the Power of Habit. Really good book on habits. Charles Duhigg, he wrote a testimony for your book, and he said, this is the book all virtuous rebels need. Virtuous rebels is an interesting term, I think. How would you define it? A virtuous rebel?

Yeah, I just take. I mean, Charles is great. I just take. Use the word principled as opposed to virtuous, just to kind of remove it from religiosity. But essentially is. I kind of put this into a mathematical formula so people can remember this. You can think of a principled rebel. It's about the motive behind your behavior. And so here's the kind of the formula in a nutshell. You've got deviance in the numerator multiplied by how much authenticity you have, plus the attempt to make a healthy contribution to your group or society divided by the amount of social pressure that you're experiencing. Now, what's cool about a formula is there's two ways to become more of a principled rebel. One is you can reduce how much you're obsessed about your appearances and your social status and the social pressure that's being put on you. As that gets smaller, you become more likely to actually take action and do, and actually engage in courageous movements. The other way of doing it is to develop a greater ability to see the gaps and to see the nonsense in front of you and be able to speak your truth. And this has to come from a place where this is not something for you to do to gain, to gain status in your community by saying the right things. This is something that you believe in and you believe that society would be better if they were to follow through with questioning these beliefs, altering beliefs or taking a different stance for things. And you're seeing, you know, a lot of people are as opposed to being principled or virtuous rebels. They're really just kind of like this is a great way to get social status points and win and win kind of approval and move up the social hierarchy. In my personal tribe.

Yeah, yeah. And I think there's some people out there who are doing a pretty decent job at questioning authority and at presenting insubordination as more of a virtuous rebel. Like, you know, there are certain people I follow Charles Eisenstein, who I had in the podcast, who writes great series of essays and that includes essays, that kind of question is this whole process of all of us scapegoating each other? Another friend of mine, I'll link to these in the show notes. Tucker Max just wrote one last night about what he calls the impending doomsday. But he wrote it from a really level headed standpoint without, without necessarily scapegoating the opposite side or anything like that. And I think that your book serves as a good kind of guide to be able to do that. But how would you begin to describe the difference between what you would call principled insubordination versus more destructive forms of disagreement? What's an example that you could draw of principled insubordination?

Yeah, I'll give you an example that happened last month that didn't get that much attention. This is in my neighborhood in D.C. at Howard University. Dozens of students had a sit in, in front of the president's office, outside in tents because basically the dorms had they had rodents and they had mold. I mean, there was like a chemical leak in one of the dorms. And basically they were saying, listen, these are not. These are not livable conditions, like, for any human being. Much less we're paying, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for t. Finally, the president kind of came out and made a statement. And, you know, many like myself probably thought, listen, these are. These are your paying customers. You're going to make sure to improve the dorms. You're going to put them in a hotel. And he said, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. And I'm going to ask people to leave the grass, return to their dorms, return to the classrooms, and go back to. To normal. It was a very interesting contrast. So you have these students that are basically risking, you know, risking their physical. Physical comfort for weeks. And actually, you know, some of them went on food strike to kind of make the statement that happened there. And they were asking for, let's have a conversation and a dialogue. This is happening at a historically black college, which is really designed so that we. They could have a dialogue and they can actually produce societal change. And this whole notion of agreeing to disagree is, essentially has a few tenets which leads to destructive forms of dissent, which is we underestimate the benefits of productive conflict, so we try to avoid it. We don't realize that conflict is just a source of information. It's not something that's bad or problematic. It's just we're having a dialogue and we happen to not be. Have the same. The same talking points going in that happens there. We underestimate how much influence we have. I don't think that these students realize they could get the president to come out and speak. That's why they were there for weeks. And if you hear, you know, reports of the news, you'll see that they're surprised that it's still going and that they still have a coalition that's still. That's still, you know, cohesive together, fighting against the university and the president on the other side of this, in terms of dissenting from this group that's asking for something is basically saying that I don't realize how much influence I have in this conversation. And so I'm going to call it a draw. But he had a ton of influence, and the students had a ton of influence, but neither one of them actually allowed a conversation to take place where they can kind of work through the mechanics of where can we find a place where hospital living is a right of Any student that goes to university. And the other part is. The other part that leads to reckless and problematic dissent is when our identity gets too tied up in the groups that we're with and we're not focusing on the topics and the issues at hand. And this is the big problem in politics, it's a big problem in social media, is that we really focus on our group winning and we're not going in with the goal of learning and growing from the disagreement that could occur.

Yeah, okay. Okay, that makes sense. I want to get into some of the practical nitty gritties here. Like, you have a section of your book that you title the Nonconformist Cookbook. And you get into how we can begin to persuade other people, but do so in a very graceful manner that that doesn't instigate or spark conflict and riots and hopefully avoids things like a violent approach to changing. And you highlight five principles that we could use to be more persuasive, like to maximize the persuasive potential of our message. What are those five principles that we could use? We want to be more persuasive, but we don't necessarily want to just necessarily shove stuff down people's throat or cause a bunch of conflict.

Yeah. Let me separate the first two from the final three because it's good to think of this as a series of questions. So I should probably preface by saying we're really talking about when you're in the minority. So whether that's you're lower on the power hierarchy, you're talking about, you know, you're talking about privates that are in the military, you know, you're talking about school students, whether it's, you know, kindergarten through 12th or at a college campus that happens there, or you're an intern or just, you know, an administrative assistant working in an office, or demographically, you know, there's a bunch of people that don't look like you in the organization or the group. You know, race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, you know, age, class, you know, you name it, and you don't have the numbers. So we're talking because the way you persuade, when you have power and status is different than the way you persuade as a minority. So what I'm going to share here is when you're in the minority, demographically, numerically, or empowering status, you cannot persuade except by luck, if you don't follow what I'm going to say. And this is based on science. This isn't me proselytizing here. So there's two questions in the Beginning that you want the audience to be able to answer in the affirmative. The first one is you want the audience to answer this question, is the minority member that you part of our in group. If they're able to say yes, you just won the group identity test. That's like at the first thing that people think about in terms of the group. So if someone walks up in, you know, in Silicon Valley, you're at, you know, Uber, Google, wherever, and they're an 18 year old kid and they're talking to a room full of adults, the first thing want to know is like, are you one of us or are you like, are, you know, are you a mole? Are you like a Russian spy? Are you like a human bot that's coming in here? So you have to showcase, you have to showcase like, you know, your record, your behavioral record. What have you done here at the organization that makes you worthy of having a platform?

Right. So, so I think you call that the principle of working it from the inside, figuring out some way that you can establish, even if you're not a part of that group, some type of a common bond with the group that you are attempting to influence or change.

Exactly. Common purpose, right? So take a concrete example of someone who failed at this. When Andrew Yang ran for governor of New York, he was pretending to be a New Yorker. I think he lived in Minnesota at the time. And you had a bunch of local New York citizens that were asking, yeah, what's your favorite pizza place? Hey, Yankees or Mets? Like, hey, what's your favorite part to go to? Like to hang out and have a beer with your friends. And he couldn't answer any of these insider questions. And right off the bat they're like, you're not, you're not one of us. You're not a New Yorker. You don't ride the subway every day. You don't go to papaya dogs for $1.50 hot dogs. You're an outsider trying to gain some status on your rise to becoming a presidential candidate again. And people saw right through it. So he lost right then and there about being an insider.

Right.

So once you pass that test, if you pass it in terms of the insider test, then there's the group viability test, which is, you know, a jargony way of saying, is your message more of an opportunity or a threat to the group's health and longevity? So they want to know like, is this, should we be afraid of you? Should we be afraid of what you're going to say? Should we be in defensive mode? And this is really. This is like a really important principle of you have to. It takes more time to give a message where you're making people intrigued enough to wonder, how is this related to my preferences? How is this related to making my life easier? And are you going to make my life harder for me? And if so, I'd rather keep things the way they are. The status quo is fine if trying to listen to you and incorporate your ideas is going to make me spend more time at work and less time with my family and friends to happen there. So your job is to be very clear up front in terms of whatever sacrifice I'm going to ask. Here's what's going to come in just a few weeks or a few months.

Right. I think that one of the examples that you use when you're talking about kind of inciting change but doing so from a spirit of trying to get people curious about your unique approach versus kind of like coming at things from a spirit of fear is the story of Dr. Semmelweese. Right. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, but the guy who came up with the idea of hand washing to prevent human sickness, and I guess from what I understand in your book, like, he actually really didn't make any attempt to reconcile his findings with the current theories of diseases. He went out of his way to attack doctors who rejected his thesis. And he basically was very divisive in his approach. And as a result, like, I don't think it was until, correct me if I'm wrong, like after he died, when his crazy ideas at the time actually became widely adopted and lended themselves quite well to current modern medical hygiene. But at the time he was vilified. But he also went about things with a spirit of fear versus, like, curiosity and working hand in hand with the current physician thoughts at his time.

Right. Now I know why you almost went to medical school. Excellent reading. Yeah, I mean, I mean, and you can, and you can. You can easily see the parallels to the mistakes over the past two years that the CDC and epidemiologists have made with the public of assuming. Listen, all you have to do is be presented with the evidence and surely you'll think like a scientist like us, even though you're not a scientist. You know, you're a janitor, you're. You're a carpenter and you're a firefighter. Obviously the evidence will be so amazing you'll change your behavior. Well, no, that's not how persuasion works. You basically have to explain the costs and benefits and be very clear. And one of the great strategies of persuading people as a minority is if you could be upfront about the fact that there are sacrifices that you will make, you win the audience's attention and you win the audience's respect of saying, oh, you're trustworthy and credible because you're not just making this like very hyper positive statement. You're very clear that there's uncertainty, there's doubt and there's actually going. Everything's trade offs. So there wasn't a good explanation when you had epidemiologists that basically were having were unclear about what to do about people protesting for a vote. Very good cause how to deal with the trade offs about that they mess. It was a blunder. I mean, I don't blame them too badly, but we should learn from those mistakes. The blunder was there were two things that were really important. Trying to reduce the transmission of the virus so it wouldn't mutate further and kill people with immunological problems. And it's good to protest once you have the numbers and you've got a really nice coalition on your side to start making social change. Whenever that happens, whenever you get mobilization, like ride it out, but not addressing that there were costs and there was a little bit of by leaning on that the protests for racial equality were valuable and not saying that this deviates from the message we're having. And there's a question of whether or not it's worthy to do that. They didn't raise it as a question. They raised it as a fact that it's okay. And that was a bad message. And that lingers a year and a half later in terms of people losing their trust and credibility in epidemiologists talking. And I think these are great moments to kind of think about, okay, how do we be more. I mean, most of your work that you do, Ben, is about health promotion, right? How do you get people to exercise knowing that the first few months, if you've been sedentary for most of your life, are going to be physical hardships and extremely painful. And in terms of eating healthier foods, the level of willpower that you're going to have to engage in to start switching from black and white frosted cookies to eating broccoli, it's not going to be a pleasant experience. But this is the benefits for this sacrifice that you're going to make. And you have to really spell up front that this is not a pure happiness story. This is a story about meaning, purpose and mission.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You just gave me an idea too for some type of broccoli flavored Oreo. Black and white on the outside, maybe some green on the inside. Kind of like mom used to sneak vegetables into the spaghetti sauce. So we've got the fact that, you know, minorities have these special persuasive powers, but we have to articulate how like this common identity exists between ourselves and our audience. And that would be the first way that we can enhance our ability to be able to persuade someone to change. Next, we would want to operate out of a spirit of curiosity versus fear, like not shaming or blaming the current status quo enthusiasts, but instead kind of adopting this conciliatory approach in a more friendly tone. And then what would be the third principle for talking persuasively as a principled insubordinate?

Right. So now that you passed the first two tests, now it's all about the quality of the message. And so in this. So now it's now you moved from the source of the message being the minority, being the person, kind of, that's the outsider. And now it's basically like how do we craft this nicely to kind of get people to be. Huh. This is worthy of me thinking about the merits and I'm going to elaborate and think about this more deeply. So the next one is about really honing in on where things are objective and where things are subjective or about taste. Right. So like my before COVID I took one of my twin daughters, I think she was nine at the time, and we climbed Mount Fuji together.

You have twin daughters?

Yeah, and I'm a twin as well.

How old are they now?

They're, they're about to turn 15 next month.

Okay, cool. I have 13 year old twin sons.

Oh yeah. I mean this is. Okay, so you know that the first two years are, I mean, the most painful thing humanly possible. When people tell me they have twins, I'm like, I'm so sorry.

Those first few years, it gets better after that because they have insty friends so it's a lot easier. There's always a built in playmate. Okay, so basically you were talking about this third principle, the aura of objectivity.

Right. So what you want to do is really clarify where it's objective, subjective. So I was giving the example of my daughter and I hitting Mount Fuji together. And one of the things is they have like an enormous number of KitKat flavors in Japan. So when you climb down Mount Fuji, it's basically like Disney World in terms of things that you can Buy. So you've got sweet potato Kit Kats and you've got green tea Kit Kats and you have, you probably have broccoli Kit Kats that go in there probably. And so the way to sell this to people why it's so wide, it makes so much money in Japan and neighboring countries and not in the US is because they're very clear of, listen, we as a company, we respect there's so many personal preferences. There is no like taste bud that matches everyone in Japan. And so we've created everything humanly possible. Find your match and be open to exploring to see, hey, what have you not tasted that could expand your taste buds. But they're very clear about that. This is subjective. And then, then when they make advertisements or they're selling Kit Kats they make very clear in magazine articles that there are things that are objective that makes Kit Kats different than every other candy bar. Objectively. Just like sushi, where you basically balance the crunch of the seaweed and then kind of the soft unagi or crab, whatever it is you're interested in. The idea is matching the crunchy and the soft together is what makes sushi amazing. KitKat's very clear. We've added a crunchy inside flavor along with the soft outer coating. And it's the combination of the two that's different than other chocolates that are out there. So by them separating the objective part of why there is nothing to argue about this is clear, KitKat is superior. And the subjective part essentially is we've got all these flavors because we appreciate how much variability there is in what people are into. That's part of what the magic of how KitKat's so popular.

So when it comes to this idea of approaching things with an attitude of objectivity, I suppose that the way that I interpret this is let's say that I want to convince people, gosh, I don't know, like there's the big vaccine debate going on right now and I want to convince people that I'm either pro vaccine or have hesitations about the vaccine or I'm anti vaccine or alt middle or whatever. The very, very best way for me to be able to have a platform that is respected regarding all of that is to take a status of objectivity, not to say, hey, my third cousin twice removed seems to have come down with what I'm pretty sure is autism after having gotten XYZ vaccine versus saying okay, hey, here are, you know, 14 peer reviewed research papers that do or do not show some type of vaccine induced Injury. None of this is coming from me. This is all just objective research based data that I've found. Do what you want with it. And, and, and that approach versus like this whole like anecdotal, subjective, well, in my personal experience type of approach is probably going to be far less effective and less well received.

Yeah. Let me add to what I think is desert. Those are excellent persuasive strategies. There's some work by Kurt Gray at North Carolina Chapel Hill that actually shows that if you do give a personal narrative, you should be clarifying the objective harm that you have experienced. So one of the most persuasive moments for conservatives in the vaccine debate or in the midst of COVID was when Chris Christie, famously known for looking like a kidnapping victim behind Trump on stage was when he basically told his constituents in New Jersey as a center, is that, listen, I'm extremely overweight. A joking comment. Also useful persuasive strategy, self denigration. I am at high risk for suffering from everything humanly possible. And he went through some of the science and if you went onto his website, he had additional scientific research of the problems of being obese, close to morbidly obese, Chris Christie, that basically immunosuppression, he was more likely to get everything. Him talking about the difficulties that he experienced when he got Covid and how there's research showing is that people that are obese, they experience greater symptoms, longer recovery, more likely to actually have long term effects, more likely to die than people that are physically fit. So objective data combined with the objective physical harm that he experienced turned that anecdote into a persuasive story that worked.

Okay, got it. All right, so basically we've got establishing some type of common bond. We've got working from a spirit of curiosity, not fear, we've got using some type of aura of objectivity versus like subjectivity and anecdotal data as the first three principles. What would be the next one?

So the other one is something that I think people forget because there is a desire to be humble in front of other people when you're speaking. And I get that. But it's about projecting the personal sacrifices that you made by either speaking to the majority, trying to influence people or in your experience of whatever it is that you're talking about. So if you go back to the Howard University example of the students protesting by being intense for several weeks in front of the president's office, the way that they are persuasive to win over the public as opposed to seeing like entitled Gen Z or Gen X, which is the kind of a dominant storyline about younger adults in the world, is by them talking about what they sacrificed. We don't have WI fi here. This is what I've ate over the past two weeks. You can look at my legs. This is basically the gangrene that's forming in my legs, in my toes. After week three, in the cold, sitting outside the president's office. As soon as you project the self sacrifice you're making, what that does in the audience, it says, oh, you're very serious about this. You're committed to now. I'm listening. Because you have skin in the game.

Yeah, yeah. And it makes sense because, you know, it's obviously pretty easy to, I suppose, be the person that, let's say is making some kind of a. Or taking some kind of a stance against, I don't know, a medical issue or a health issue or whatever. But you aren't actually able to show how your stepping out and being uncomfortable. Like, I guess a good example would be for our family in 2022, one of our New Year's resolutions, because we are, we're pro life. And my wife volunteers at the local agency that supports expecting mothers to be able to find a nice home for their child rather than having to resort to abortion. And we just thought it would be consistent with our family values to begin to avoid purchasing household products and foods and medications and things like that that directly support the abortion movement. And, you know, I could just come right out on Twitter or whatever and say, hey, I don't like abortions. I am pro life. And therefore, you know, I'm gonna put it out there right now that y' all need to stop, you know, killing babies or something like that. Whereas if I'm like, hey, I haven't had a Nestle or a Kraft or frickin Pepsi product and haven't like used Netflix or bought anything from Patagonia for the past two years. Because I'm actually standing by my beliefs and my convictions and no longer wanting to support these companies. It actually shows that, you know, I'm making some sacrifice. I got some skin in the game and there's a little bit of psychological vulnerability, you know, and you, you even say in the book, like, to even consider, like saying aloud, like, I feel seriously uncomfortable disagreeing or that you lost some sleep over this decision or that it's kind of scary for you to be publicly interrogating the status quo, but basically kind of like being willing to take a difficult journey and being able to share that with others to support the stance that you're taking will cause you to have more respect when you actually are cause you to receive more respect when you actually are defying the status quo on a certain topic.

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up because in my world of academia, the idea of being anything that deviates from pro choice, you will be ostracized from the community. And I've had a problem with this. I have a next door neighbor and this fits with what you're saying. I have a next door neighbor and I'm an atheist. He's religious. We get along great. We've hung out in fire pits for the past two years. And one of the reasons why he's so persuasive to me in terms of his views on abortion is that and he has five kids, he donates to orphanages, he spends time and has trained all of his kids that they will spend multiple times per year at orphanages providing food, giving gifts for their birthdays, giving gifts for the holidays that happen there, facilitating adoptions. And so he's doing everything that someone that had a differing political perspective of like, I'm caring for all kids that exist that are alive, especially those that don't have parents and a secure household right now, that happens there. I'm actually living these values in terms of as many kids as God gives me, I'm going to have that happens there. And you can see all the sacrifice he makes with his time, his effort and his life. And with that, I regularly say to him, I, I can only have praise and admiration for your life. And even though we're like, even though we disagree on this issue, and yet you've moved me further away from where I was. And this is kind of a key point I'm skipping a little bit here, is that when you are in the minority and you're trying to influence the group, you can't expect a full conversion. I mean, if you think about people's identity, they revolve their lives, about the groups that they identify with, the causes they identify with, with their friends tend to have similar views. Right. You know, these echo chambers that we're part of. And so the idea of fully converting to another viewpoint is very difficult. So expect at the most, in the short term, small, slight changes, like just the fact that I'm talking, you know, a different attitude about, you know, the abortion debate. That's the influence of my neighbor having on me. That's what a minority descent will often do to people. Regardless of whether I'm flipping The script in terms of what I would say publicly about this topic. But one of the things that is really useful on this topic, and I think it's worth kind of thinking about these points in context, is you ask provocative questions, you go back to sparking more curiosity and less fear. What if scientists in the next couple months discover that at 10 months after a baby is born that it can experience pain? And then if you can actually detail exactly what happens neurologically in terms of the pain that 10 month. I'm sorry, 10 weeks. 10 weeks in what they experience, how would that change or not change your view and why? And so with these provocative questions, it forces people to have to grapple with. We tend to reason motivationally. We look for evidence that confirms our views, and we ignore or really fight hard to argue against information that conflicts with our views. But provocative questions force people to go as opposed to winning or losing, and seeking information that helps you win or lose, it just has to make you think. And we really should be thinking more about not educating or training people, but asking people to spend the effort to contemplate issues that are so important to humanity. And that's part of this kind of curiosity sparking as opposed to inducing fear.

Yeah, that makes sense. And kind of, kind of related to that is this idea that. And I think this is actually kind of related to, like, the fifth principle of persuasion that you get into is you do want to be consistent. Right. You know, back to my analogy. Like, it, like, like, you know, people are gonna be watching me now, right? It'd be inconsistent for me to say this. And, you know, mostly not drink Pepsi, but maybe on the weekends, you know, especially when I'm out and about or at the club, you know, have somehave some Diet Pepsi here and there and, you know, maybe somesome Nestle and Kraft products, you know, here and there. And, like, not necessarily stick to my conviction. So you say that we need to be consistent, but it has to be like a flexible consistency. What's that mean, a flexible consistency?

Yeah, so just if you look at the science really hard and you take 97 studies on what makes minority descent persuasive to other people in the group, the number one predictor is consistency of your actions, consistency of your statements over time. Now, this is important because people are really pushed. Especially we have a speed problem for thinking in the culture right now where we're looking for. The faster that you respond, the more that you can recover from a misstep that happens here. But this issue about consistency is, I'm Asking people to deliberately pause because your desire to reduce the negativity that comes at you from an audience that's skeptical or cynical is going to prevent you from not only sticking with your own value system and you're sticking with your own belief system, but also preventing you from actually making sure that the message is actually heard. And so, you know, the worst thing that people are told as a politician is that you could flip flop on an issue. So if your thoughts are going to evolve on an issue over time, let it be because of evidence and because of personal experiences, not because the social pressure is. You should take back the statement you said because we, these random characters in the world are saying we don't like how you're saying it. For the consistency part, you really want to have a track record, a behavioral track record to showcase what you're about. So if you think about Seal 6, when a lot of these individuals come out of the military and they go into organizations and they're trying to kind of increase fortitude, make people not so much more compassionate, but more aware that there are strategies that you can engage in to keep people focused on the mission and realize that perseverance and devoting sweat equity and substantial effort is worth it. If you have clarified what the mission is. And this is one of the big principles that are moving through organizations and the school system right now. Taking the military strategies and applying it, applying it elsewhere. Well, to do this you have to show like, that you've actually have, you know, the scars, the bruises, the dirt, the rejection, the failures and that you've kept going and modified your behavior because you learn from those mistakes and those failings and those errors that happen there. That's part of the flexible consistency. Another part of the flexible consistency is when do you give concessions. So not disband your beliefs, but when do you like if you wanted to convince people that maybe we should get rid of Columbus Day and maybe we should have Indigenous Peoples Day now, you could force it into people and shame them. That if you don't agree with this principle, there's something wrong with you, you are immoral in some way that goes against everything we know about how to actually get people to change their belief system. You will get public compliance where it'll look like they agree with you. And then when they're hanging out in small groups at barbecues and the water cooler and at parties, they're going to be talking about what they really believe in. And that's not how you want to persuade people. You don't want compliance you want people to be interested in something because this is a better approach to living and it's a better way to respect diverse groups that live in society. And so one of the ways of being flexibly consistent in that is if you're going to take Christopher Columbus out of the historical equation, a concession would be is historical characters that you are going to still accept and add in additional information of during the time that they were alive. Most people are racist, most people are discriminatory, Pretty much everyone was. And actually the greatest behavior that you often saw in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s was that you would befriend someone of a different race. And we should remember that and also realize that we live in a different time now. And you would wonder how they would change their behavior in the present. A simpler way was about these concessions that are actually flexibly consistent is think about the Confederate statues that were removed in, you know, my, my land of the woods in Virginia is, you know, a lot of people argued is keep the statues up and basically put in the inscription and they were racist, as most people were at the time. And so when you pass by the statue, it wasn't pure admiration, it was a sense of, huh, this was a person in their time period that engaged in behavior that may have been useful then, but it's definitely problematic now. I'd like to tell more. It's good to know that society is changing. Let's hope we don't have a backslide back to this time period. It would evoke more thought. And I'm not saying that's the answer, but I'm saying is that it's a different way of looking at these topics in terms of do we want people to just on a superficial surface level, agree with our views? Are we interested in educating people to create a healthier future?

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And one thing that you really get into that I really loved in the book was the idea of teaching our kids, like raising a new generation of youth who feel emboldened to disagree and defy and deviate from so called problematic norms or standards for the sake of progress. And I want to ask you a few questions about the whole parenting and children component. But before I do, you bring up something in the book that I think is important to consider. And that's this idea that let's say that we are in the minority, but this once minority becomes the new majority. And one of the reasons that we may have been motivated to replace the new majority was due to whatever, maybe anarchism or Totalitarianism or some type of unfair treatment of the minority and oh, hey, cool. All of a sudden the once minority has become the new majority, using the tactics within your book and affecting change or whatever, and that's all wonderful, but then we risk making the same mistakes as a majority that came before us and ostracizing or scapegoating whoever is the new minority. Now that we are the new majority, are there specific ways that you think the minority is? If we come in and start some type of new structure, a new thought pattern or new legislation or whatever, how can we avoid making some of the same mistakes as the majority that came before us? Does that make sense?

Yeah. This is one of my favorite chapters to write because I don't think this has been discussed often enough, which is as people are developing new initiatives, I've been involved with, well, being initiatives in the universities, particularly George Mason and organizations, anti racism initiatives. When you're doing this, a question everybody should be asking publicly and privately is what's the end game? When will you know it's effective and when will you modify the strategy and maybe titrate and reduce some of the legislative powers to kind of make change because you're making progress? And what are the things that we're measuring to make sure that we're seeing like, okay, you know what, now that actually there's a power shift, we're actually going to kind of move in a different direction. It has to be an evolving mechanism. There's a few, there's a few strategies kind of to make sure that we don't end up becoming the thing that we hated previously. At the core of this is the trifecta of curiosity, perspective taking and intellectual humility. Intellectual humility might be one of the keys here. Where you have to realize is that everyone's knowledge base is fallible and none of us are able to fully grapple with how many individual differences there are in a group, much less a society. And so, you know, I remember when I was on the diversity initiative panel at George Mason University and I was one of the, you know, the only people in the room to just ask from the get go, like, hey, can we go over the definition of diversity? And right away a number of people on this committee said, no, no, we're done with that. Now it's about, no, now it's about like, what are we going to do to actually increase diversity? I'm like, no, but first we have to kind of land in on the definition, like, what's included, what's not in there and why? Right. A place of curiosity, not fear. And so someone asked me, with kind of their arms folded, which was like, what else should we, what else should we include? Do you think, as a white heterosexual male should be included in there? I'm like, well, I said one social class isn't in there. There. So economics, in terms of we have first generation college students, but there are also people that might be third generation college students, but you could have multiple people losing their jobs and they drop down. In terms of economic mobility, why are we not including that in diversity? And then there's neurodiversity. So everyone's brains are different. And the idea that we don't have, if you're on the autism spectrum, that that wouldn't fall into the category of diversity. Like you literally see the world differently and visually gaze at faces differently. You spend less time on people's eyes, you spend less time on people's faces, and you spend more time on the environment in which the person is in. I mean, if you think about diversity, their actual scanning of the environment is different than you and me and many people on the planet happens there. And what about personality? Susan Cain wrote this great book, Quiet.

Yeah, great book. The Power of Introverts.

Yeah. So I mean, she basically made the case that if you're introverted, living in a hyper social world where everyone's supposed to be positive and effervescent and seeking out social interactions regularly, if you're introverted, you are going to lose out on opportunities in terms of promotions, in terms of, you know, being invited into meetings and invited to sit on boards. And so isn't that a form of diversity in terms of how you operate socially and how your energy is depleted or activated as you walk through the world? I didn't have the answers, I just had questions. But it was shut down right off the bat. And this, it's just an example of we have to keep the questioning constant over the course of when we win, after we win, and if we don't, what happens is the group often disbands because there's a sense of, for the once powerless, that no longer has that power. There's a sense of I need to find another group to identify with and be part of because this is no longer my group. You have to consider these individuals. They must have knowledge and skills and expertise and unique contributions that are possible. And to think otherwise is another question asked, like, you know, how are you able to dispel and dismiss everybody that believed in the old way immediately as opposed to seeing that Their belief in the old way is not them. It's just one of their many beliefs, values, skills and personality traits that happen there. So we need to be able to see the complexity of individuals and we need to be able to welcome people in. And you know, there's been lot of a. There's been a big movement for saying like, as opposed to calling out culture, that we should have a kind of a call in culture, which is not to make people responsible for having worn out views that no longer last the test of time, but actually helping them to evolve and kind of figure out where can they find a place in the new world where they might lose, they might have lower status right now. And that is the path to having a group that is more formidable and to have greater longevity that the group and the belief system has a chance of survival.

Yeah, yeah. And when it comes to avoiding the moral hypocrisy that can arise when we do become the new majority, you just have so many great tips. But I love the idea of providing assurances to everyone involved in the war of ideas. Like, like friends and foes and neutral observers that their opinions still count. Like basically when you're setting up the new majority, make sure that you are weaving in the ability for people to be able to engage in open discussion with their opinions and to stay focused on the ways in which power can compromise self awareness. Like just being aware that if your side is one or if you are more powerful, if you are the new majority, just being aware that that can actually cause you to become more closed off to the Midori's ideas just based on the fact that you're in the majority and then basically recognizing the skeptics power to reshape and refine the orthodoxy. Meaning that while you do want to have, in my opinion, some type of absolute truth or moral structure or definition of right and wrong, you should also at the same time remain open. Like that's something I'm always trying to do, is remain open minded to all the beliefs that come in after I interview a podcast guest or people are asking questions or comments in the show notes or whatever. Like I'm always asking myself okay, is this something? Is this like a firmly held belief or a hill that I'm willing to die on because of some type of pre programming or because I'm in charge baby, because I'm the majority?

Or.

Or is this something that I need to reconsider and I'm constantly finding myself reconsidering and changing my mind and staying open to others opinions and beliefs. But I think that just being aware of the potential for dogmatism while at the same time being willing to stand up for your beliefs and acknowledging the existence of some type of of morality, some type of truth and falsehood, some type of right and wrong, but then also being able to listen to others beliefs and being able to listen to others opinions. I just think it's such a wonderful strategy. That whole chapter I agree on not being a moral hypocrite was really good. Now you have this whole part and I'm writing a book on parenting right now. So this just really struck a chord with me, this chapter on raising insubordinate kids. And while I would encourage people to get the book and read that entire chapter, towards the end of that chapter you just lay out in a really nice concise way, like three different steps. You know, you call them your recipe steps for raising insubordinate kids. And I just want to give a head nod to those and spend a little bit of time explaining what those three steps would be to help us raise more insubordinate kids who are virtuous or principally insubordinated. So what are the three recipe steps for raising insubordinate kids?

I don't remember what the three steps.

Are, but I wrote them down. So if I say them, I'm sure you could riff on them.

Sure.

Okay. So the first one in my notes here is you wrote to foster a sense of agency in kids.

Yeah. One of the things that's important to think about kids is that that we often treat them as that they're these underdeveloped creatures that don't have their own identity, their own sense of self, and their own narrative about who they are and who they aspire to be. You know, one thing that I do, I have three daughters is from the age of five onward is I talk to them as if I would talk to other adults in terms of the content. And also often I try it with the words as well. My nine year old regularly says to me, listen, dad, when you talk to me baking, or you're talking about pickleball, whatever. Like I'm working with her at the time. Like, I don't want you to use simpler words just because they understand them. The only way I'm going to learn things is if you talk to me about the things I don't know. Like, it's like, it's like an amazing. It's like she's sometimes. And every kid's like this. But every once in a while your kid shows that they are almost like these, these virtue prodigies where she's showing this level of wisdom. I'm like, I didn't make that. That's not my genetics. I'm like, what the hell is that? Like, that's like, amazing. Because she hears to her older sisters in a different way and she's like, I don't want you to talk differently to me. And I don't think we should. The goal of the chapter is we don't want to wait for our kids to say something. And many adults, no offense to how you parent or how you run a classroom or how you run a doctor's office, but to put the onus on kids, to assert themselves, to say, talk to me as if I'm intelligent. Talk to me as if I can comprehend what you're doing. Talk to me with the belief that if there's something I don't know, I'm going to try to find out about it later and just start with that default system and right away you're training your kid that they have the power to walk through the world as someone who will be listened to, someone that could speak for themselves. And when they speak, they'll be heard. And then you're not going to face the problems that you face where right now, if you look at the organizational psychology literature that women are less likely to ask for negotiations where for higher salaries and higher promotions, they wait for their annual evaluations compared to men. Well, I'm training my three daughters not to wait and be hunters. If you think that you are deserving of more, realize you have more power than you think. The worst they can do is say no and just learn how to say it. Well, this is about training youth of, you're supposed to question authority, not because you're a teenager who's supposed to be the next James Dean in Rebel with a cigarette hanging from your mouth while you're driving, driving a Mustang. It's because the authorities aren't always right. There was a moment that I had with one of my twins who's now 15. So she was in fourth grade and the music teacher came around and was having a hard time recruiting students for the orchestra. And so she took all the kids outside of class and said, hey, you guys liked music with me last semester. You guys should do it again. And my daughter, I'm so proud of her. I got called into the principal's office. My daughter said, hey, I thought you're not supposed to put pressure on the kids to join orchestra. And she wrote up, my daughter this is in fourth grade. So I came in, met with the teacher, met with the principal, and said, if you're upset that my daughter said something that was. Right now, she might not have said it properly, but she's in fourth grade. But she basically, she called out the teacher for wrongdoing. The teacher got upset because she was engaged in insubordination, and she just got punished right now. And I'm saying, if you want me to hold her tongue until she can frame it properly, you're basically training her to say nothing when a guy tries to push her to do something she doesn't want to, to say nothing in the future when she's working at a company and basically she's looked over for a promotion, you're training her now. Like, bite your tongue on things. And that was the end of the conversation. They're like, you're right. Like, that's. And we should train our kids to engage in that insubordination. And we should also, as an adult, we should have training where as much as, I mean, parents, okay, they should really get a training manual. But any adult that's working with kids should be trained to accept some level of disobedience. And your job is not to shut them down. Your job is to help them say it even better the next time.

Yeah. You know, this seems to tie in really well to, like, our parenting approach that we use in our house of love and logic, which is basically this idea of educating your children on the consequences of any decision that they can make, and then, as much as possible, letting them be empowered to make their own decisions. And this idea of kind of, like, consequential parenting seems to do a really good job fostering that sense of agency in kids. And then we also really go out of our way to let them have opinions, be engaged in discussions, and chat in the same way that you've kind of dictated as adults adults or like, adults with the rest of the family. Like, you know, I read all the little current events magazines that they get. Like, they subscribe to this one called the Week and another one called World Magazine for kids. And I read those when they arrive, and I'll circle certain things and then bring them up during our dinner table discussions just for my kids to be able to engage in discussion and generate their own thought patterns around certain current events. And we really do chat with them, mom and I, in the same way that we chat with, you know, a couple of adults who we'd be out at a restaurant with. And so I love this idea of fostering a sense of agency in kids just because I think it really allows them to really, in a more intelligent and responsible way, stand up for their beliefs versus kind of swallowing hook, line and sink or what an adult says to them because they've been raised in a disciplinary household that focuses on, yes, no, do this, do that, thank you, sir. And if you don't do this, then you're going to be punished. And I just think that the parenting approach being used can or cannot foster a sense of agency in the kids, depending on how it's being done. You also talk about building a kid's critical thinking skills. That principled insubordination is going to hinge on a kid's ability to be able to sift through information at their disposal or to filter out the useful stuff from the BS or convince others to accept the. The useful stuff as well. Is there anything that you think stands out as far as, like, one parenting approach that you think really works in terms of fostering this whole critical thinking skill type of approach for kids?

Yeah, I mean, this is an extension of Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit and just applying it to kids. I mean, one of the most important principles is that nobody gains your allegiance. It has to be earned. This comes from political figures. This comes to adults in the community. Now, this isn't about respect. This isn't about kind of, you know, showing a level of, you know, politeness and kind of communicating in an effective manner and being nice to people. But this is like, you train your kids to basically look at what people say and do, not at their status and not because they're big people and they're taller and they're heavier. That happens there. And it's important to look at the sources. Like when you look. When you look at the sources that are providing information to you as a kid, your job is to look at the merit of the messages. And your job is to kind of. And there's. And there's a couple principles in there in terms of the merit of messages is, does it make sense with how the world operates? And so if, you know, you have a number of books that have come out in the past couple years talking about, you know, the fact is, like, did aliens actually land on Earth? Like those alien abductions that were on Unsolved mysteries in the 1980s, did they actually happen? Well, you have to. If you raise those kind of questions and a child is learning about science and astronomy, they have to see, like, does that fit with how the world works? Does that fit with how the mind works. You know, how come all alien abductions often occur with somebody in the country on a highway in the middle of the night, and that's where they fall asleep and they're abducted? Is there a simpler explanation for such an extraordinary phenomena? And once you learn about the nature of sleep and you learn about the nature about, in terms of visual acuity at nighttime, you start to say, huh? Well, how do you rule out these alternative hypotheses? And this is kind of a cool way for kids to have fun about learning how to think constructively, how to think critically and how to think for themselves is take these really benign stories and events and walking through, huh? What evidence do you have to refute in order for this to be true? And once you work through, you know, alien abductions, then actually, then you can start applying that for them to think for themselves when it comes to vaccines, when it comes to, you know, sleeping eight to ten hours per day, when it comes to, you know, why you would exercise five times a week and what are the consequences of sedentary behavior to get, to get to the really important hard stuff. You can teach them to think through the really fun stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And I think one other thing that we find works really well in our house for generating these types of discussions that build critical thinking skills is not only the, the idea of game theory and the fact that we play games a lot like almost every night as a family at the dinner table, but the nights we don't play games, we often use these, these table topics cards. You get all sorts of different versions of them you can buy from Amazon, but we'll draw a table topic and it might be something like, you know, would you rather have, you know, $100 today or $1,000 in a year? Right. And, and little questions like that begin to foster these really cool critical thinking skills in kids and also allow you to have discussions kind of related to that first principle in the recipe of, with your children that allow you to treat them like free thinking, independent, spirited, resilient adults. So if you don't have any table topics cards for the table and some good board games to play at dinner, I recommend that as well. There's one really good game called Rhetoric that literally like assigns the kid a topic and then they, they make a defense on the pros and the cons or the top five things related to that topic, etc. So that's a really good one as well.

I love that.

Yeah, yeah, it's super fun the last one. And I know we're getting Kind of long in the two. So. So we'll probably address this and then I'm going to encourage people to go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com insubordination and grab Todd's book and give the whole thing a read because we literally like have barely scratched the surface of everything that's in his book. But I just want to, I want to give my audience just a few of the goodies here. So you say expose kids to various forms of courage and give them the language to describe their own bravery. How can we teach kids to see themselves as, I think, what you describe as heroes in waiting? Like the people who are actually going to step up to protect a stranger from a bully or take the time to support a grieving friend or even just stand up when things are going wrong politically when they're older and step up for theirs or others rights.

Yeah, there's a lot in that question. Again, thanks for the deep reading. I mean, we often see in the news and we often spend a lot of time about physical bravery. So we honor our military. We honor people that are actually willing to physically protect somebody else. First line responders, EMT workers, police officers, firefighters. And we spend a lot less time about moral bravery. And it goes, you know, we do have our whistleblowers that get a lot of attention, but we have characters like Snowden who, you know, this was a guy who was, had a, you know, close to a 50, 50 love affair, hatred for, in terms of him leaking documents from the government. And we have to explain that there are multiple ways that courage can manifest. One of it is persevering on something that's that they're trying to work on a skill, whether it's learning how to do an ollie on a skateboard or it's learning to surf, to surf when you go on vacation. There's the courage of vulnerability. To break free from social scripts and for boys to be able to cry and express their sadness and anxiety and for girls to constructively express their anger and break those scripts. There's the notion of the courage of resilience, of going through adversity and then making the attempt to build and reconstruct a life for yourself in the aftermath of a car accident or having a bone marrow transplant or being, you know, on the front lines of a war or seeing someone die or being maimed or hurt in front of you. So once we expose that there are different ways of being courageous, then kids can kind of identify as it, as opposed to viewing themselves as Courageous or not, is that it's really about actions in the moment when you experience fear. And so the willingness to take action despite the presence of fear. And if you don't have the fear, you don't get to claim the moment as courage. And so when you see somebody, you know, I don't know if this happens anymore in schools, but if you see someone who says, listen, me and you, we're gonna fight, three o', clock, you know, in the park, you know, in the parking lot after school, most people do nothing. Most people are super excited to see a fight, just to see some action in their lives. You know, kids that don't have cars yet and they've got nowhere to go and nothing to do that happens there, but you potentially have the person to actually intervene before something happens. Especially if it's a lopsided affair where you've got, you know, the 95 pounder who likes, likes to read Harry Potter books in their free time and you've got the mixed martial artist who wants to beat the crap out of this kid. I think we underestimate that there. The social pressure that exists to do nothing and join the crowd and get excited about seeing a fist fight versus I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure that this kid is not physically harmed because this is not a fair fight in the first place, that happens there. And the heroes in waiting theme is borrowed from Phil Zombardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which essentially is you should walk through. And this isn't just for children and adolescents, but also adults. Walk through the world as if you are waiting for the very rare moment where you get to stand up for your principles and help someone else stand up for their principles that maybe doesn't have the voice or the fortitude to do it themselves. That happens there. And this is like being a life card at a pool. You're basically sitting up there with your, you know, your whatever that orange device is, red device that.

Yeah, I don't know what it's called. The floaty toy.

The floaty. So you're sitting with the floaty for the one time the entire summer over the course of three months that a kid will almost drown and not even really drown. Like you're staying awake and keeping your eye on every kid for just that one moment. And that's the heroin waiting principle is it's a very low frequency situation. You're going to see someone's hand grab someone's butt, you're going to see someone go into someone's pocketbook and try to take it. You're going to see someone cut in front of someone in line. You're going to see someone throw a piece of food at someone's car. These are very, these are very. I mean, in general, people tend to be pretty kind, compassionate people. But in those moments, like, sit there, wait, like, I want to be courageous and have your. Have the youth set up of like go through the world wanting to be courageous. It's such a beautiful thing. You will feel so good about yourself and do good for the world. And that's an attitude that should be trained into kids as early as possible. Especially those kids that have, they are widely accepted and popular, they have high social status and the people look up to them. I mean, those kids can focus on, keep on maintaining their status or use it for the forces of good.

Yeah, yeah. I think a big part of this too, when it comes to developing heroes in waiting who will have courage is beginning with them, developing, preferably in some state of ego disillusion, their own internal courage. Probably by the time this podcast comes out, I will have released a podcast that I did with Rich Christensen, who's like a family branding and legacy guide. And one of the things we talk about in that episode is certain years of a child's life in which the parents systematically weave in some type of rite of passage or adventure, one based on courage and one based on non entitlement, meaning a rite of passage based on courage might be after that child has trained for a certain period of time when they're 13 or 14 years old, doing a solo overnight in the wilderness, you know, with like their backpack and a wool blanket and a knife, being able to face their own fears and being able to be in that state of ego dissolution and develop their own internal courage, which they can then turn around and used to develop more courage in outward facing circumstances. And then the other, the non entitlement. And this is another really, really lovely one that he weaves into his own kids upbringing and that I've woven into my own children's now as well. It's this idea of recognizing the value of forgiveness and also the state of living of others who might be living in a different scenario or environment than you are by, for example, when a child is 16 years old between say high school and college, taking them on a trip in which you're going to go build a school or a church or engage in some type of a service or charity project in an underprivileged community, or when his kids are actually in their 20s, he takes them to a prison and they just basically hang out at a prison for a couple of days, speaking with prisoners and learning about the mistakes those people made and learning about the value of forgiveness and also looking at the consequences of certain decisions that people make. But this idea of systematically weaving in episodes where a child learns courage and episodes where a child learns non entitlement, I think really, really lend themselves well to developing heroes in waiting who are willing to stand up for what's right in a responsible way in an act of principled insubordination when the time calls.

I love that. I mean, one of the things that people forget as they're thinking about multicultural experiences, traveling to other countries, meeting people from different walks of life, is you're not taking people's perspective, you're in the process of getting it. You're learning their perspective. So you're really kind of actively asking questions, listening, paying attention. And you're not trying to be interesting. You're trying to figure out what's it like to run a rickshaw in Sri Lanka, what is it like to operate a train when you're in Kyoto, Japan? That happens there. You can't have a kid read this in a book. You can't have this in a lecture format. This has to be of someone describing what's it like to live in different circumstances which allows a kid, exactly what you're describing me, to realize where do I have this privilege in my life and where do I have this sense of entitlement? And the hope is that you can use this as a linchpin to return back to you regularly. It's very different than our parents or grandparents saying, listen, you need to finish all of your P's, because think of the people that live in Ethiopia. That doesn't mean anything. I haven't taken their perspective yet. I don't know enough about Ethiopia. I can't even pick it out on a map. I'm 11 years old. So they skip so many steps that it's a completely fruitless endeavor to actually get people to actually be more virtuous and to be more strength focused in their behavior.

Yeah, yeah, well, there's. Gosh, there's so much more that we could dive into. But I know we're kind of out of time for this show, but man, I really, really love the. The way that the book is written in such a manner that we can disagree with others, we can affect change, we can engage in healthy discussions in a society that, especially right now, tends to be highly polarizing and rife with scapegoating and name calling. And that doesn't mean that change cannot be affected and there can't be new normals. We can go about doing things the right way. So I love the book. It's called the the Art of How to Dissent and Defy Effectively. I'll link to the book. I'll also link to everything that Todd and I talked about today if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com insubordination where you can also leave your own comments and questions and feedback. So again, it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com insubordination Todd, thank you so much for coming on the show today, for sharing all this stuff with us and for writing the book.

Yeah, you know, I'm gonna say I think I learned as much from you as whatever I said to you. I mean, thanks for being so thoughtful and comprehensive in your thinking. I'm gonna start listening to your podcast more often.

Awesome. Well, thanks man. And I appreciate that the feeling's mutual and just keep me posted if I can help out with anything at all. I'm overjoyed to be able to get the word out about this book because I would love for a lot of my audience members to be able to read it. So again, BenGreenfieldFitness.com insubordination and I'm Ben along with Todd Kashan signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy list legal disclaimer.