Wisdom in Education - A Conversation with Charles Cassidy and Igor Grossmann

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The key thing in most wisdom frameworks is really this focus on shifting your perspectives and metacognitively integrate. So it's not really just about thinking, it's about how you approach the experience. It's really this kind of a meta-level process that helps you to think better and to feel at the same time.

Welcome back to the podcast. It's fantastic today to be able to speak to Charles Cassidy and Igor Grossman, who amongst other things are the presenters of the On Wisdom podcast. Charles Cassidy is the director of the Evidence-Based Wisdom Project, whose mission is to translate academic research regarding the psychology and science of wisdom into understandable and helpful resources for the wider public. Charles studied physics at the University of Manchester in the UK and taught taught maths and science in London for 15 years. Building on his work at the Evidence-Based Wisdom Project, Charles has written widely for many publications including Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, as well as appearing on talk radio across the United States. Igor Grossman is a social cognitive scientist and passionate world traveler. Since childhood, he has been fascinated by how people make sense of complex social challenges, and he is now the director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo Ottawa, Canada.

There he also holds the post of Associate Professor of Psychology.

Igor's work has been published extensively and his contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Sage Young Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. I very much hope you enjoy the conversation and please do continue the dialogue with Charles and Igor and myself on social media and check out the On Wisdom podcast.

Ah, hello.

Hello.

Well, it's exciting to be on the other end of things. So this is quite nice. I don't have to worry about sound levels. I don't have to worry about the flow of the show. I can just relax and enjoy it. Someone else's problem this time, which is nice.

Exactly. That's me.

Good. Well, thank you so much for joining me and it's a real pleasure and a bit of a celebrity status on the show today. I'm really happy to have Charles Cassidy and Igor Grossman from the On Wisdom podcast. And both of you have a background in teaching. Am I right?

Well, I guess Igor being a professor, you can't get away.

It has to do some teaching, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, I can't get away. That's a right way to phrase that. I can't get away.

Yeah. And I'm sure you love teaching. I can imagine you in the classroom striding around like a colossus. Yeah.

Colossus. Okay, good.

Yeah, that's how I picture it. Yeah, my background is in teaching, so that really, to be honest, I know a lot more about that than I do about the wisdom research area, so that's something that's much newer to me. But yeah, so my background is in teaching and tutoring for years and then teaching maths and science in the classroom, usually 10 to 13-year-olds. Really nice age. They haven't kind of, they haven't decided that they're not maths people yet.

No, that's a good age. I like teaching that age as well, for sure. So what we're focusing on on the podcast is a kind of broad view of education and what's going on in education right now. So having some experience of either reluctantly teaching or, you know, passionately teaching is a good start. But for me, my interest in what you guys do, which I completely love, and, you know, an avid listener of the On Wisdom podcast, but it kind of got started when I read Stephen Hall's book, Wisdom. From Philosophy to Neuroscience. That kind of got me interested in this idea of the science of wisdom. There definitely is a lot of resonance for me in terms of what we do in education and how we are trying to prepare young people for this big, complex, crazy world. But I feel always a little bit uneasy about talking about this idea of wisdom anywhere near a school or near a classroom. And I just wondered, first off, what, what your thoughts were on that. Why is it a more of a difficult topic to talk about in relation to education?

Well, I do have a thought on this because I share your reluctance. Yeah, it's not— it does just sort of sticks in the throat a little bit, the word, and I'm always confused why, because when I step back from it, I think there's nothing more important than we should be talking about than this. But there's always that slight self-consciousness when you bring the word up, and I have thought, is there a better word, you know, that we could get away from? But I think it's something partly, you know, you're kind of at the forefront of, you know, 21st century education skills— what is it that we need to be teaching these kids for the future? And there's something about wisdom which has a sort of dusty, archaic, otherworldly, not really practical sense to it, and maybe even that it's like wisdom is just trying to preserve old ideas, you know? It's like, well, we're trying to pass down the wisdom that your forebears accrued, and that sort of it's not very dynamic and exciting. It can sound a bit like people might misinterpret wisdom for being, we're trying to preserve the status quo. Don't tear everything up, you know, remember the wisdom of the past. So I think that's a misunderstanding, obviously, of wisdom, but I think that's a little bit from my end, that's what holds me back a little bit.

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it sometimes smacks of backwards looking, but I agree, that's probably a misunderstanding of how important and relevant it is. Igor, from your perspective, teaching older university students, undergrads, postgrads, do you feel comfortable talking about it? I guess it's a core part of your research, but how does it come up in your field?

Yeah, it's tricky because the term is loaded.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the main thing. It's like, it's not really clear what people mean by that. If I tell them, like, I study wisdom, it's like, you study Bible? Are you a religious scholar?

Yeah.

It's like, no, no, no, no, I'm a math teacher, or I study economics. I was like, really? How's that? Yeah. So the misinterpretation by the audience is often the fault, I mean, because we don't have a clear definition. It is sort of like thinking about studying intelligence before there was intelligence research. Until about 100 years ago, there was no intelligence research, there was no clear definition of intelligence. So if you would go into a classroom somewhere in the middle of the 19th century and would say, "I study intelligence," people would be saying, "What do you mean?" So that's kind of similar. But you know, you could, you could combat that by outlining what exactly is it that you're interested in or what exactly is it that you are focusing on?

Yeah.

Be it specific ways of thinking, solving problems, something about rationality and what that means. Also a loaded term. But yeah, I think it's the main issue deals with the communication difficulties due to misunderstanding of the term.

Yeah.

But that's, I suppose that's on us as well. You know, you can't just say, well, it's people's fault for misinterpreting it, you know, part of the responsibility lies in how we choose to present it, don't you think?

Yes, absolutely. At the same time, it's also about, you know, it's basically you're fighting against the whole society and the whole cultural narrative where the term has been used as a basically a lay equivalent to anything that's good or anything that sounds good.

Yeah. I mean, in some ways it's so big. So kind of all-encompassing as a concept that it kind of means everything and nothing all at the same time.

Yeah, that's right. And that's, I think that's the issue because normally in education we want to be more precise.

But I've seen a couple of schools focusing in on it a bit more explicitly in some of their mission and vision statements. There's an interesting school in New York doing that, the Avenue School, and, you know, talking about wise reasoning or the application of wisdom to decision-making basically. And I think, I think when you start putting it in the context of big complex problems like climate change, et cetera, you can see that there's more of a focus. If young people can reason in a wise way, that maybe has a little bit more resonance with people and makes it a bit more forward-looking and less dusty, as you say, Charles.

Yeah. I think, yeah, I note that Igor often refers to wise reasoning rather than wisdom as such and wise decision-making. And I know like University of Chicago, their centre is called the Centre for practical wisdom. So yeah, there are all these sort of little ways of just bringing it down to earth a little bit. And I think the decision-making thread is pretty key. I think that's a good one because it instantly makes it feel practical and relevant.

Interesting. And I mean, I would say what you guys are doing with the podcast and with the science of wisdom generally, hopefully, is making it more explicit and understandable to a wider audience. And then it's becoming more innovative and forward-looking to kind of reclaim it from the libraries, which is good.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the plan.

So one of the things for me in terms of the big debate around, you know, the 21st century skills kind of argument is usually positioned against this kind of more knowledge-focused, more traditional, as the stereotypes go, view of education. Especially, I know in the UK, the knowledge-rich curriculum and the education policy there. So what, where would you see the role of knowledge in achieving wisdom?

Well, I mean, I suppose on this debate, this sort of knowledge or more discovery kind of debate, I instinctively, I'm more on the discovery thing and value less the knowledge, and I'm more about the processes, which I think wisdom does fall more in line with. But I think if you think, you know, again, try and make it practical. If we're talking about wise decision-making, you can't make decisions if you don't have access to the knowledge that will impact on the decision you're taking. So I don't think it is an either-or thing. I kind of think wisdom operates depends on the knowledge, you know, so the wisdom space needs to be populated by the relevant knowledge, and then you can sort of make use of that knowledge. And you wouldn't be able to take a wise decision if you didn't have that knowledge, but the knowledge alone without approaching it wisely is not going to lead to a good outcome. So it's maybe one of those false dichotomy things. I think that they're both key if you're going to try and, you know, make sense of what's in front of you.

I mean, in a way, the whole debate is a false dichotomy, really. And I'm reinforcing that false dichotomy by asking the question, I suppose. But it is a big tension within education and some people emphasize one or the other more. But Igor, did you want to come in on that?

Well, as you just mentioned, the tension in various educational systems, certainly throughout the last two centuries or so, does suggest that not just focusing on knowledge by itself, especially when it's delivered in an abstract form, as is often done in, in the UK system, but also in the French system and the Eastern European systems is not ideal because it does presume that you somehow will figure out a way to deal with that knowledge, and that's the tricky part.

Yeah.

So, you know, the development of the so-called critical thinking skills, whatever that means, I think in many ways it just means exactly this type of wise reasoning. So being inquisitive about the knowledge, especially in the age of fake news and proliferation of all sorts of informations and opinions that are presenting themselves as knowledge.

Absolutely.

It's critical. So understanding how to deal with that, where to inquire whether this knowledge is sufficient, whether you need more information, is critical. But there's another thing that is also missing here, and that is just by the virtue of the knowledge being presented in an abstract form, other forms of knowledge and understanding and experiencing the reality in front of you are often sort of going into the background. So we have put this premium, certainly in the Western educational context, on this abstract, reducible to a most common denominator type of information, assuming that then we can transfer this information to a new context and apply it. But that often comes at the expense of, you know, your experiences, your feelings, and you create this dichotomy between your mental process, which you reduce really to this kind of abstract reasoning, and your experiential process, so your feelings, your thoughts, which may provide as more recent research suggests, like very critical information. I mean, because you know, you may intuitively know what to do, but then you didn't really get there yet in terms of your, you know, cognitive elaboration.

Yeah.

And so like what's really important is this kind of abilities to figure out, integrate these different features together. And so that goes beyond just knowledge, just abstract logic and abstract thinking.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, again, I would say there's a lot of good stuff in the wisdom frameworks. Monica Ardelte, her framework with the 3-dimensional wisdom scale, you know, it resonates with what you're saying with the, the cognitive dimension is only one part of it. And then you've got the reflective dimension and the compassionate dimension as well. You know, so I would agree with you. A lot of time we focus in on this abstract reducible cognitive domain and perhaps we ignore the others.

Yeah, it's not quite right. It's not quite— there's a misinterpretation. And part of it is, I think Monica's unfortunate heritage, where she was coming from, she was trying to build on some common jargon terms that existed in the literature, ended up with 3 terms that actually don't really correspond to what's most common across the different aspects. That her scale, but also many others are measuring. And there's actually much more in common across those three dimensions than there are differences between them. The key thing in most wisdom frameworks, and we know that now according to research, is really this focus on shifting your perspectives and metacognitively integrating. So it's not really just about thinking, it's about how you approach the experience. And that you are able to be, let's say, unstuck. So instead of being stuck in the moment in this particular way of thinking, just focusing on X, that you're able to flexibly shift from one way of thinking about it to another. And that includes emotions, that includes sort of different goals, different perspectives. But it's not just cognition versus emotion again. It's really this kind of a meta-level process that helps you to think better and to feel at the same time.

That's good. There is increasing amounts of conversation in education about metacognition and learning to learn, to try and scaffold some of those skills for young people to know how to navigate complex problems and shift perspectives and take on other people's perspectives, which is a very fruitful way to go with it. But again, I would say there's a lot of difference of opinion in terms of how to actually approach teaching of that. You know, do we teach it explicitly or do we—

Yeah. In many ways, if you think about it, it's almost like the continuation of this discussion about critical thinking, which was a big topic and it didn't go anywhere, if you ask me, because the term was very loaded, never really specified. The research was questionable, measures were not really developed. And I think if you like, just replace that term with metacognition now without specifying what are the best ways to do it. What is it that we're actually focusing on, then it will also not go anywhere. We need to be mindful and critical of terms.

Yeah, I was just— you know the term metacognition which you hear around? Are emotions like cognitive processes? So like metacognition would include—

for sure, for sure. I mean, look, it's really what metacognition— or some people even call it, are you ready for it, it's another fancy term, meta-consciousness. Nice. Conscious about consciousness. Those terms, what they really refer to is the ability to regulate different types of experiences. And experience can be, you know, affective, it can be just your cognitive deliberation, and it can be physical reactions about the situation, just some feedback. If you're sitting in the chair right now, that feedback is physiological feedback. That is also, if you start integrating it, that requires sort of a metacognitive component to it, because without it you will not be able to integrate this physiological experience with the concept of chair and sitting. Those are two concepts, otherwise it would become abstract concepts. And the way how it becomes really critical for education and for other types of teaching-oriented process, especially in the domains that we are discussing here, is when you start dealing with concepts like morality. And say you want to come into classroom and you just tell kids, okay, today we are studying justice, and they are like, what do you mean? What do you mean by justice?

That's what I was thinking when you said that.

You a story about justice, like somebody doing something just, and they're still not getting it. And so what you need somehow, this process that would connect it to their experiences and makes it really a richer concept that they can relate to. And exactly those features of making it a richer concept, making it relatable, and then the actual process of relating to it, breaks down this abstract concept. That's what metacognition is really about, in my opinion.

Very good.

It's interesting because, you know, when you talk about making something concrete, I'm often encouraged by people who aren't maths teachers to say, you know, you need to make this more relevant to the children. You need to, oh, imagine you've got some pocket money and you're saving up for some— I'm like, ah, that's not really maths, to be honest. I, I love making it as abstract as possible. Now, Igor, you're probably going to take me to task on this, but it feels if you make it as abstract as possible, then you crystallize it into a form that can then be applied. In as many contexts as possible. Whereas if it's like context-specific, then it's hard to work out how you transfer that to another context. So there's a bit, seems a tension there. Yeah.

Well, Tim, what do you think about that?

Well, I mean, well, it's very often the maths teachers who are wanting to remain in that kind of domain of abstract pure concepts that then you can apply to different things. And, you know, there's some interesting people in, in that field trying to make really deep and rich real-life examples to be be able to apply increasingly complex maths concepts. But there is a need, as you say, for young people to connect. And in a way, whatever it takes for them to connect with some of these concepts in a more experiential way, then you can, you know, pull them back towards something more abstract. But it's kind of a little dance in between the real, the concrete, and then back into the abstract for me.

Yeah, that's exactly how I think about it. I think that there are different phases that you ideally need to entertain.

Yeah.

And breaking it down, especially, I mean, you also need to realize that not all students are alike, obviously, and you need to know what their strengths are.

Yeah.

And for some people it is, for me, like for Charles, when I think back of my school days, abstract thinking was so easy and so enjoyable. And being able to synthesize it at bring it back to the most common denominator, be it in math or other natural sciences, was just something that came natural. But I know a lot of people for whom that is not the case.

Not for everyone.

And for whom it's kind of abstract thinking, so it's almost frightening and you need to break it down first and then you can scaffold them or nurture them towards the abstract concepts. There's also this work that was done among the street kids in South America For instance, they could not really use abstract math, but when you ask them to apply it pragmatically in terms of the goods they were dealing with, whatever they were dealing with on the street, then they were able to count very well. It's just really abstractly they couldn't do it. So sometimes you have to take that into consideration, including the cultural background and the individual proclivities of the people.

Interesting. Yeah. It's also somehow connected with the idea of tacit knowledge that people have maybe an ability to reason in a particular way or to do something, but they don't necessarily realize that they can do it, or they can't necessarily explain exactly what it is they are doing in more abstract terms. So pulling away from it, maybe that's back into that idea of metacognitive skills is the ability to kind of step away from it, to look at yourself.

Yeah, that's right.

And articulate what you're actually engaged in. So just to move on slightly, but connectedly, one of, one of the things in schools now is a big focus on self-regulated learning and getting young people to be able to do a lot of these things that we're talking about. But if we're talking about wisdom, as one of our big high-level impacts that we're really aiming to develop in our young people. The question then for me comes back after reading some of the interesting stuff about aging and wisdom related to aging. Is it even possible for young people to develop wise reasoning at their age, or is it something that you require a life worth of rich experience to be able to then pull together and reflect on in order to be able to really reason in a wise way? So Igor, is it even possible for young people?

Well, I mean, if you connect it to the idea of metacognition that we just discussed, this ability to switch, I think you would see development of that starting fairly early on, you know, so as soon as you're able to sort of navigate and deploy attention, then I think you can start learning it. And that can happen fairly early on. I mean, even among the teenagers, you would see that. I mean, in terms of like that, where would you get this master level ability to switch? Well, you know, according to some mindfulness experts or Buddhist monks, if you want, that probably continues throughout your whole life. But whether you have the capacity to start doing that early on, I think you do. I mean, you know, we have that in cultural narratives, you know, like, do you need to be an old Yoda to be a wise Yoda? Or is this idea about the potential Baby Yoda is kind of already some kind of an onset there. But also like, you know, among the normal narratives, I mean, to make more concrete examples, for instance, when the Buddhists choose their next leader, the reincarnation of the Lama, the Dalai Lama, when he's young, is he not a real Dalai Lama? I mean, there's an assumption that he has certain capacities, he has certain abilities. And I think some of it really boils down to this ability to switch and integrate different sources of information. But it doesn't preclude him from learning throughout his whole life. So that's my take on it. So I think you can definitely start developing at a young age and you probably can even reach fairly substantial level of ability fairly early on. It's not as likely, but it's also not as likely that just by the virtue of living you will have the ability to switch because a lot of people may not have had the chance to either reflect on some experiences that would make them shift perspective. So maybe their life was fairly steady and didn't require that at all.

Yeah, I like the idea of a prequel, like when Yoda's in high school and he's like trying to work out whether he should, you know, go with the hot girl to the prom or he should go with his friend, you know. Seeing all Yoda's kind of growing pains could be interesting.

How about Baby Yoda?

Baby Yoda, yeah. See, this just— this writes itself. This does It's kind of interesting because to me, like, I think wisdom, right, seems like a good thing. So therefore let's try and get, get into the education system because it's a good thing, right? So why wouldn't you put it in the education system?

Yeah, seems to make sense.

But there's just a little question mark in the back of my mind around the period of youth. Is there some benefit for it to be a sort of safe space when you, the expectations of your wisdom are fairly low, so you can do stupid things and you can learn from those. And have that experiential sort of lesson that you really take into your bones. And, you know, by trying to impose these kind of quite high bars on the behavior of the young, might you actually be damaging their long-term— the range of experiences that you accrue in those teenage years that, you know, Yoda might do in the high school scenario? Could it be counterproductive? It's just a thought that occurs to me.

Yeah, from my perspective in the schools I'm working with and some of the accreditation frameworks I'm working with, there's a big emphasis now on the inquiry and the experiential learning, but primarily with an opportunity to allow young people to try and fail, you know, this lean kind of entrepreneurial idea of, you know, you've got to just fail often, fail fast and learn from those experiences. And so I would say that's a positive development because it's kind of institutionalizing the idea that young people should be trying. And failing, and that's not necessarily a problem. And actually, maybe adults should be trying and failing more as well in terms of having a learning disposition towards life and growth.

We had Adam Grant on the podcast a few episodes back, and I was reading something he'd written saying he advised CEOs to not employ people that had perfect grades because he says that just essentially means you're not taking anything that you think you won't get an A in. But yeah, I just, I just wonder if We don't associate wise people with making errors really and getting things wrong, and I wonder if by sort of encouraging young people to be wise from too early, that might go against that idea of allowing yourself to fail and learn from it.

Yeah, interesting. But do you not feel that, that there isn't a dimension to wise reasoning or wisdom that is about a reflection that, that you don't know everything and that you probably will fail, and that kind of intellectual humility idea?

Yeah, absolutely, of course. I mean, that's kind of, that's central to it, isn't it? It's just making the expectation that you're striving for this sort of high level of reasoning so early on. Yeah, it's quite a lot to put pressure to differentiate two things here, guys.

One is the expectation from the outside, and again, this kind of ominous, all-encompassing lay idea of wisdom that is shared in the general population. It's like happiness, anything can be happiness, anything can be wisdom as soon as it sounds good. And the specific focus on, be it metacognitive abilities, abilities to think, abilities to switch between different forms of experience, which involve recognizing your limitations in one way or another. Because I think like encouraging the second doesn't really mean that everybody would be doing the former. In other words, I think the idea that a young Yoda, maybe having the metacognitive capacities to reason wisely, will not make any mistakes is a silly idea, and attribution of it to a particular stage in life is also not desirable because I think the learning can go throughout your life and mistakes are being made throughout one's life too. I mean, going back to the Yoda example, if you look at those 3 prequels, I mean, it was his folly, his hubris that led to the empire.

I think those prequels are folly, generally speaking.

Yeah, that's right. So in other words, there is this idea that, you know, if you're wise, then you're not making mistakes. And I would really want to dissociate those two processes, because the outcomes are often dictated by so many other things than one's capacity to think through the situation. There's so much randomness and other social factors that may be playing a role. So I would not worry about teaching kids, you know, like, look, these are things to pay attention to. You have to be skeptical. You have to question yourself. You have to be critical about the information you receive. You have to consider different perspectives on an issue. And I don't think that will preclude them from making stupid mistakes from which they hopefully will learn in life.

And maybe actually it's a useful kind of counter-narrative because there's already a huge amount of pressure within the education system for them to be not making mistakes and, you know, getting all the right answers to get the top grades, to get to the top universities, to constantly be striving for this thing that they're chasing. And, you know, there's already, that's built into the system already. So it does bring a huge amount of stress on young people and, you know, it's a big issue. So, you know, in some ways I think this, this counter-narrative would actually do the opposite and actually encourage them. Maybe this could be bringing some positive things as well, rather than heaping on even more pressure.

That's good. I mean, that's good. I think you've both allayed my fears. So I'm convinced. No, I mean, it sounds interesting the way you have both framed it, because it sounds like it very much addresses the exact concern I had in itself. You know, not only is it a very useful set of skills, but it is also going to take care of some of the things that I was worried that it might Do the opposite of, so. Yeah.

So if just one last question about if we were developing these capacities in young people in terms of ability to shift perspectives and wise reasoning, how would we know that we've been successful in doing that? Because as we've just been talking about, the assessment system does drive a lot of, of the decision-making that gets made in schools. And in terms of the way that you're doing your research, Igor, are there some any interesting assessment vehicles that you're using to identify when these skills are being developed in people? And do you think there's any way of using those same types of things within more of a school-based environment, maybe self-report questionnaires or things like that?

That's a very good question. It's tricky because adopting things that have been developed in the laboratory for research purposes to general population, especially the school context, may be challenging for two reasons. Number one is the context is different, so you need to know exactly what is it that students are most familiar with. But the other thing that is really critical in the research context, we often assume that there is not much of an incentive for the people to present themselves in a particular way. They still do it. They have no idea. They just want to present themselves as nice, normal, upstanding citizens, at least that's the assumption, but otherwise there is not much of a motivation to fake it or, you know, be X. In school context, especially when it comes to educational assessments of performance, it's always motivated by, you know, presenting yourself in as best light as possible. That is particularly challenging for tasks that deal with the concept that has such a loaded value as wisdom, especially because, you know, people don't think about it in terms of this kind of what is really essential to the wisdom, namely this kind of metacognitive features, perspectives, and so on. And instead just think about sort of like goodness, good outcome, good moral person.

You don't want to fail that test.

Makes it really challenging to adapt it to the educational context. But I mean, some of the stuff that we have done, if you break it down And if you can make it into a set of situations in which people would have to think through a set of issues, not just one, but multiple set of issues where we know, A, they are relevant to school kids, and B, people will not be necessarily tempted to lie or self-deceive. It's not necessarily that people want to lie, but they deceive themselves by saying, I do X. It turns out that if you focus specifically on what people do instead of how they think they are, so the big difference between like some kind of a general impression of yourself, like you say, like, I'm X versus I did X. So people are less tempted to lie or deceive themselves if they are reporting on what they did as compared to who they are, because there's less of a sort of a stake that they may have done something that isn't appropriate. It's not really who they are, but they're sure they have done it. So by using this type of tools, you can even incorporate them in the self-report questionnaires and develop measures that could potentially be used for educational context as well. We haven't done that yet, but we're moving slowly in that direction. I'm very hesitant to say, "Look, we have this measure that can be used anywhere," because I'm very mindful of the implications of that, exactly as you pointed out. So we still like doing baby steps.

Yeah.

But I think we're more confident now that it can, under some circumstances, be useful, much more useful than abstract questionnaires that just focus on your personal beliefs of who you are. Because those are all permeated by this kind of desirability and motivation to be viewed as nicely, as positively as possible.

Yeah. I was listening to one of your recent podcast with Mark Alfano, maybe, where you were talking about, about the people most likely to self-report as high in intellectual humility were perhaps not the people with the highest intellectual humility.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, you can call it whatever you want. There are certain politicians in North America, and I think in Europe that you could describe as, you know, they're very much narcissistic and bragging. And yet they also claim to be the most humble people Interesting.

Well, thank you so much. I hugely appreciate your time. I could talk to you all day, but I've got children to pick up from school and you've got places to be, I'm sure. So I just, huge thank you.

And, um, oh, it was brilliant. I really enjoyed being on the other side of the mic. Nice.

Good.

Yeah.

It made me more empathetic. I can, I can now take the, you know, multiple perspectives. Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed that.

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