Kurt Gray

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Kurt Gray, a professor of social psychology

at u n C Chapel Hill. Kurt received his PhD from Harvard University and as the author of The Mind Club, who Thinks, What Feels and Why It Matters account. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five percent of our

listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. Hi, Kurt, Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called The Mind Club, who

thinks what feels and why it matters. And this is one of those that I could probably go a couple hours on, but we won't. But before we get into the book, let's start like we always do, with the parable of the Wolves. So there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops. He thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Yeah, So it's quite relevant because I study moral decision a king right, how we treat others in our daily lives, and so for me, that parable really means how we perceive the minds of others, because my research suggests that how we treat others, whether we're kind to them or cruel, really hinges on whether we see them as having the same kind of mind that you or I have. Take, for instance, you know someone who just immigrated. So I've been thinking about immigration

a lot because I just immigrated. I just got my citizenship, and you know, I'm sitting in this room with all these other immigrants, and I think, you know, many of these people may not speak English, but I think they have the same kind of mind as I do, and that means I have to treat them as I might treat my friends. I think that's an interesting way to look at it. In your book, you talk about sort of dehumanization in different ways, that we make people unlike ourselves,

but at a much more basic level. You know, your book is called The Mind Club, and you're saying that, you know, the Mind Club is those people who, to your point, have a mind that's similar to ours and that we sort of include in that collection. And you say that basically, we see people or we see minds in terms of two fundamentally different factors. What are those

two factors? The title for the book That Never Happened that I wanted was called the Zombie Paradox uh, which I think is flashier, less descriptive, but a little flashier. And the idea behind that paradox is, look, you look out at other people and it seems obvious that they have a mind like you do. They look the same, you know, the same eye, same mouth, whatever, same everything. But you can't actually ever know whether they do have the same mind as you do because you can't experience

their experiences directly. Right. If your wife tells you listen, I love you, she probably feels the same kind of love that you feel towards her. But like, how can you ever really know? Right? You can't ever really get inside the head of someone else. You have to kind of like guests or infer that they have the same mental states that you do. And so there's a many philosophers who talk about the zombie problem. It's hard for me talking to you, even I don't even know if

you have a mind. You could be a zombie, just programmed to recite back words that sound like they fit the things that I say. So there's really this uncertainty about the minds of others, and that's why we can choose to perceive minds and others or to withhold those perceptions. So let's talk about what the two fundamentally different factors

are in how we perceive minds. So one factor we call agency, which is the capacity to act and to do, and the other factor is called experience, and it's about feeling and sensing. And the best way to kind of understand these is to imagine that you are making a robot. You're gonna make a robot and it's going to go out in the world and try to do stuff. And what you're gonna want is that robot to be able

to act upon the world. So you probably give it like hands with little robot clause and moving around and the open doors, And you would also want that robot to sense things in the world that if it got too close to the stove, you wanted to back up. If it got too close to a car, you want to back up so you didn't get hit. And so experience is really that sensing of the world by pain and pleasure and fear, these kind of emotions that drive

us to do things. And agency is about acting and doing, and so those two things together are typically what we think makes a mind right. But you describe a lot of times where we tend to put things things being people or robots or animals or pick your thing. That we tend to put things into one or other of those categories, and that that distinction of which category we put them in has a lot to do with our morality and how we see what's right and wrong based

on those two categories. Typically, agency and experience are things that go together. So you and I have both agency and experience, whereas the table has neither. But as you mentioned, there are things that I only have one or the other. So robots, right, are often perceived to have lots of agency, so they can drive a car, but they can't feel. Right, if you think of a self driving car, you're not like, but as the car really doesn't love me the same way,

right that I like really love my fancy car. Um. Conversely, there are some things that really only have experience and not agency. So I just had a baby a few weeks ago. Um, congratulations, thank you, thank you. And you know I perceived the baby is having lots of experience, right. She cries often, she's always hungry, right, but it's not clear that she can really do anything except wildly hit

herself on the face. Right. And So the kind of mind that we give an entity, whether more agency or more experience, as you mentioned, changes how we treat them in a moral sense. So with agency we infer more responsibility. If a car driving itself kills a bunch of children, we think that's a bad car, right, behold it responsible? Uh. But if I gave my daughter a gun, she's three weeks old, right, and she's like kind of you know here in America, now that I'm American, and I think,

you know, I should buy my daughter a gun. So I give her a gun, and you know, someone gets shot. No one thinks she deserves a lot of responsibility, right, she's only three weeks old, because she has only experience and not agency. But conversely, we care a lot about protecting her, right, So I worry a lot about protecting her from harm, and I worry less about protecting an autonomous car from harm. And so agency gives responsibility, experience

gives protection from harm. Another way you refer to these is that we have thinking doers, so things that think and do things, and then we have vulnerable feelers. So the thinking doer is the robot or a CEO of a corporation or somebody very strong, and the vulnerable feeler is, to your point, a small child or a puppy or you know, things of that nature. And and so you talk about how a lot of our moral outrage is

really driven by I think you call it dietic completion. Yeah, so when we make moral judgments, you know, the prototype of morality is really pairing a very clear agents or thinking doer with a very clear victim or a vulnerable feeler. Right. So prototypes sound very technical, but if you know, you think of a prototype of a football player, you think of a really big guy, right, and maybe not someone

who's like four ft eleven and so forth. And when you think of someone immoral, what you think of is typically someone who has lots of thoughts, that thinking do our harming a vulnerable feeler. So as CEO, I think the example we use as a CEO kicking a dog, but the opposite, a dog kick a CEO. I don't even know how that happened, right, A little nip of

a CEO. That's not really that immortal, right, So you know when we really get upset is when entities like corporations or presidents or CEO is harm something very vulnerable like a baby or a puppy or so forth. Yep, So help me understand how these things that we give mind to, what are some of the day to day ramifications of the way that we tend to see the world, These these thinking doers versus vulnerable feelers. Yeah, so you know,

as you mentioned moral outrage, that's certainly important. So imagine that you have a child, right and the and the kid does something to make you angry, so throws up on you or keeps crying, or if you have an older kid, bring something very expensive. Now, if you think that your kid is a thinking doer, right, then you're kind of justified in some sense to get angry at the kid. And so maybe you shout at the kid

or say how could you do this? But if you think the kid just is a vulnerable feeler and doesn't have this kind of capacity for intention, right, then you're less likely to get upset. And actually research shows that people who kind of abuse their very young children are those people who inflate the kind of minds they give to their kids and see much more thinking and responsibility. So certainly very important UM. And conversely, if you deny

thinking and doing to your colleagues, for instance. So there's work on objectification and how sometimes UM particularly has been studied when men perceive women, right. So some of the stuff I talk about in the book is like objectification. So if you are a man and you're working with a woman and you just see her in terms of her clothing or her body, you strip away her capacity for thinking and doing, and then you don't see her as worthy of her promotion, right because she's just a

body in a skirt. She's a vulnerable feeler in that case, that's right, exactly. Yeah, I think it's really interesting because one of the things we talked about on this show often, and that I talk about with some of the coaching clients I work with is that assuming intention from people is a really easy way to get yourself into trouble. And what you're talking about here is a version of assuming that intention. It's assuming capability, maybe not as much

as intention, but it really does matter. When we look at why we think somebody does something has so much to do with how we perceive what that thing was absolutely and in fact, people do perceive intention, not just the capability. So one example we talk about in the book is this idea of when there's kind of suffering right to kind of match this prototype of morality in our head. When there's a vulnerable fueler, we automatically infer

the presence of a thinking doer. So if you walk across a street you see a child crying there, then your first thought, well, it's like I should help this kid, But your second thought is typically who did this to the kid? And so I think of this all the time when I'm driving. So I lived in Boston for a long time, and I'm like, I used to aggressive drivers, but I get angry when I drive. And so you know, when someone cuts you off, you don't think Oh, they must be in a hurry. I hope they get where

they're going on time. Right. Your thought is like they screwed me over on purpose. Right, they're trying to kind of mess with me or something like that. And so right, people and for intention when they shouldn't. Here's the rest of the interview with Kurt Gray. So what is moral typecasting? So moral typecasting is well, I guess we can just start with what typecasting is because the listeners will probably be familiar. Right. So typecasting is when you stick people

in these enduring roles in films. Right. So Leonard Nimoy, it's hard to imagine him is like the fun loving uncle, not only because he's dead now, um, but also because he was Spock right, it's like very rational um. And child actors it's often hard to think of them as like really thinking doers, right because they're you know, always

the kind of victims of things um. And so extending the kind of general typecasting into the moral domain it works with spock and child actors too, um, because we typically perceive others to be enduring, thinking doers, right, only the kind of doers of moral deeds, or only as

vulnerable feelers only the recipients, only victims. And so if you think of an orphan, right, we often think of the orphans suffering and being mistreated, but it's hard to think of the orphan as really being responsible for evil. R Likewise, if we think of someone like a CEO who's always doing things, it's hard to think of him or her as being a victim ever, Right, So that's really is and lots of interesting things come out of the view of looking at the world through this view.

In the book, you talk about psychopaths, right, and psychopaths are sort of the ultimate in a doer who doesn't think or feel. However, if you reflect upon the psychopath as somebody who biologically was unable to develop those things through no fault of their own, it changes the way even legally we tend to look at those people. Yeah, psychopaths are are really interesting example, because our gut, right is certainly that they are pure thinking doers, pure agents.

And in movies like American Psycho, right, Christian Bales depicted is like this rational, calculating, right, really evil guy who's just trying to get what he wants, and so we're like, well, let's put him in jail. For a long time. But at the same time, you know, as you say, psychopaths

are born that way. And so imagine, you know someone I think the examples in the because someone's born without hands and they're just they're a terrible piano player, right, I mean, because they just don't have the fingers to kind of articulate on the keys. Right. We don't put them in jail for being a terrible piano player because they're just born without fingers. But psychopaths just happened to be born without empathy. And yeah, exactly what we do

is we put them in jail. And so you know, I don't have a good answer to this, but certainly you kind of grapple with this idea of like, well, they do these terrible things, but is it really their faults? Well, it's not clear. Yeah. I was having this conversation with some of the other day about pedophiles and how you know, the incidents of people who are pedophiles having been abused themselves is so high A lot of us think of

it as the worst crime. You know, to your point, you've got the vulnerable feeler that child, and it is. And yet if you look at it from the perspective of they were made into that by the abuse they suffered, Then what do you do? What's the right answer? I think addiction is another one of these, and I'm a recovering addict, but the way you look at addiction can be very much in this way also, And those two

examples perfectly illustrated typecasting. So with a pedophile, you either think of them and usually in pairs, right, so you either think of they're the pedophile with a child or you think the pedophile as a child by someone else. And so you really get this. There's always the kind of thinking do or in vulnerable feeler, it's just the question is is the person in question? Which one are they?

And that dictates hugely how you treat them. Another interesting thing that comes out of this is that often as a result of this, we will treat our heroes poorly. Why is that? Yeah, so it's a pretty interesting thing. So you know, there's this idea of karma. Good people should have good things, right, just desserts, And so what that suggests is that the more good you do, the more good you should receive from the world, but also from other people. And yet typecasting suggests that maybe it's

not so simple. So when you think of people who do good all the time, you think of them as being thinking doers. And that means, because of typecasting, right, you tend not to think of being that sensitive to pain. So think of Mother Teresa, the Dali Lama um. Maybe you know people think this way about Obama as well. Right,

So here's someone who's done a lot of good. It's hard to think of them as suffering or right, it's hard to think of Mother Teresa as really being sensitive to pain, or the doll A Llama right, really being hungry or embarrassed even. And what that means is that we're more likely to discount their feelings even when those feelings are pain. And so we ran one study where we ask people to imagine, you know, how much pain did Mother Tree to feel if she stepped on a

piece of glass? Right, people think that Mother Teresa barely feels any pain I stepping out because she's Mother Teresa, right, She's a saint. She's got like all this kind of power um and control. And so what that means is when push comes to shove and someone has to get stuck with pain, sometimes people will pick the saints to

suffer yeah, you talk about another study. I don't know if it was one that you did or someone else did, where people had to choose whether to give pain to Mother Teresa or I think it was a bank teller and and they chose, although very grudgingly, that would give it to mother Teresa because of that sense of she could bear it better. So that's a studay around a few years ago. And it's totally right. Like people aren't

happy to give Mother Teresa pain. They're not like, yeah, take that, Mother Teresa, like you've done all that's good, and now I'm giving you pain. But there's a sense of like, well, if someone has to get hurt, I guess she can take it. And so oftentimes people are like, well, you know, mother Teresa devotes her life to helping the poor,

and so maybe she just wants to suffer pain. But if you think back to your workplace, or your marriage, or your group of friends, what this means is that the more you kind of are a mentioned help others, right you grudgingly help others, the more likely they are to give you suffering. Yeah, exactly. No, No good deed goes unpunished, I think is the saying that comes out of that exactly. So we're describing this moral typecasting where

we see people who are suffering as vulnerable feelers. But we also have a just world theory, right, where people think that if you're suffering, you must have done something. So how do those two work together? They sound sort of opposite. So what causes one of those to be an effect or the other. Yeah, that's a great question

because certainly they do see opposite, right. Moral type asking suggests that you know, when others are in pain, we sympathize with them, and just world suggestment others are in pain, we think they did something to deserve it. Uh. And it turns out what determines typecasting from a just world is whether you had a hand in their suffering or whether you think you had a hand. So I ran one study a few years ago that involved torture the fun things you can do in the lot of that

social psychologist. I couldn't actually torture people, but basically people sat in a room while they listened to someone hold their hand in ice water and the person, you know, I, was like, oh my god, oh my god, it's so cold. Can we please take this out? And the expander was like, no, keep it in there so you know they were clearly

in some pain. And what we manipulated was whether the person had met the person who was suffering, right, whether the participant had met the torture victim in other words, or whether they hadn't met the torture victim. And after you meet someone, you have the sense of closeness and then you feel this kind of like responsibility for their suffering. Right. You're like, I could go over to this room right now and stop it and protect them, but I'm not

doing that, right, so I'm kind of responsible. But if you don't meet them, and you don't even realize that they're really next door, then there's nothing you could have done, uh to prevent them from being tortured. And what we found was that if you feel responsible, if you met them and you could have intervened, then you think their torture is deserved, right, because I'm not the kind of person who stands by what others are tortured, so they

must have deserved it. On the other hand, if you're just hearing about it and you're not even sure if you could intervene, then you think, well, they're being tortured, they must be innocent, that poor, poor person. Yeah, you say that when people were physically, temporarily and psychologically distant from the torture, they linked more pain to less guilt.

So if if we were distant from them, and then you also say we were all conscientious objectors until we pull the trigger, when psychological process is then engaged to justify our behavior exactly. So it's easy for people when they read the New York Times or the Post or whatever and they think, wow, that person did a bad thing and harm that person, Like I could never do that because clearly, you know this person is suffering and

I'm not that kind of person. And yes, people we think they're going to people do bad things every day. And the reason we can do that and still live with ourselves as we rationalize our behavior and think, well, I harmed them, but they must have deserved it. I think that's an interesting finding because you're saying that people that are distant from us, we are giving them more

sympathy and and all of that. And yet you know, one of the things that people think is often a problem in getting people to say help end poverty is the fact that people are so physically distant from us. What's your thought on that. You know, I think both are true, and I think probably what drives it is just how salient their pain is to us. So in the study that I ran, right, the suffering of this other person was very salient. They were listening over headphones

as the person was kind of moaning in pain. But when people are far away in another country or even continent, right, we don't even confront ourselves with their pain, right, I see one more picture of a Syrian refugee and I just click close. Right, I'm not even exposed to their pain most of the time. And so I think if we're really confronted with the pain is in our face, as we are with someone suffering on the street right in front of us, then we would probably give just

as much to Syrians. But we're not on an everyday basis, and that kind of distance allows us to be epathetic. Yeah, you make a couple other interesting points around who perceives God or who who believes in God to a certain extent, And you say the wealthy feel control and agency in their day to day lives and have little need for divine order. In contrast, those struggling with poverty face a number of challenges in their day to day lives, and the comfort of a caring creator may serve to create

order in an otherwise chaotic world. Yeah. So there's a longstanding finding in research literature that religiosity is negatively correlated with wealth. So the poor you are, the more likely art to believe in God, you know, as you as you kind of summarize the reason for that is because God often serves as a as a proxy for us. Right, I may not have control in my life if I'm poor, but I believe in God and I pray to God,

and God can do things for me. And one study we did, actually it's it's not even just kind of a general feeling of lack of control, but really feeling like you're suffering in life that really prompts these kind of perceptions of this intentional God. So every time there's a natural disaster, right, what people say is that God intended it for some reason. And this seems kind of funny because you're like, well, but God's a really good guy. Why would he intend an natural disaster? Right? I mean,

God is good. He's defined as as being good and full of love. And yet people need a way to kind of make sense of this, so they think, well, God is good, but he must have had a reason for this. He did it for a good reason, because people need reasons for random things. Right. The other thing I thought was interesting you you talk about how people were more likely to attribute mind to things if we

are either lonely or if we are seeking control. Can you help explain that a little bit more, because this kind of gets to what we were just talking about in the last section there about God, because you're seeking some kind of control exactly exactly. It's definitely a kind of general tendency that people have. So we often think of perceiving the minds of others as just something that happens or sometimes doesn't, but it's really kind of motivated.

It's driven by what we need in an instance. So if we need social connection, for instance, if we're feeling very lonely, than what we do is we ascribe experience. We make others into vulnerable feelers. This explains why we make jokes about cat ladies. Right, you're super lonely if you don't have a lot of people to spend your time with, well you buy some pets who are already kind of feelers right there, Like free and don't have

a lot of responsibility. And then you see even more minded them, right, like each of my cat really really loves me. If I went away, you know, little Mr Muffin would be super sad because he loves me so much. But I probably Mr Muffin just wants some chicken and you to go away. But you have to perceive him as really loving you because you need love in your life. Um. And then, as you said, the other one is about feeling control and if you lack control, you can see

all sorts of agents is having more intentions. So sometimes God, but also computers are a great example. If your computer isn't working, you think your computer has in mind, You're like, please just work for me. Right, you start talking to your computer like there must be something I can do, Please just tell me, just this time, work for me. And if you have a computer that works, you never talked to it, so clearly it's like motivated by needing control.

I want to change gears here a little bit because you go into a little bit around how to have self control, and we talk on the show a lot about behavior change, about habits, and you say that there's one especially powerful method to increase self control implementation intentions, Can you tell us briefly what those are? So this is not my research, but it's in the book because

I'm just so impressed with how powerful these are. And I think as a general rule of social psychology tells us that self control is very hard to have, but these things work so amazingly well. Uh. In fact, I have a colleague here who read about the implementations intentions study and he didn't believe it, and then he started running studies on it, and now that's basically all he does because they work so powerfully. And so here's the study. The study is, Um, you get college kids and you

ask them to write an essay over Christmas break. This is a terrible task for college kids, right, No one wants to write an essay over Christmas break? Um, and thinking do er would assign anything like that to it. Poor helpless college kids, right, poor poor vengee drinking kids. Um. So right, you give them the essay, you tell them to do over Christmas. Half of them you just say,

send the essay on Christmas Day. The other half, the other half of the college students, you give them when and then then right, and so you say when this happens, come up with a plan for doing what you'll do then, right, So one example will be like, well, when we finished opening presence, I will go upstairs to my room for half an hour and then I will write the essay. That's it. That simple plan. So when then or if then,

that alone hugely increase the essay returns. So I think in the one condition where kids were just told write the essay, only about a quarter of them sent it in when they had the simple plan. When then you got sev kids turning in those essays, Yep, it does

make such a difference. I talked about some of the coaching I do, and that's you know we I don't I haven't called it that before, but a lot of the similar things this idea of if you know where and when you're going to do something, you're far more likely to get it done if you just actually say, all right, this thing, I'm gonna do it Saturday at three pm, and I'm gonna do it at my kitchen table. Yeah.

And then um, we had Gabriella eton Gen I'd never can say her name right, but she had a similar thing, which was if you're you know, working on goals, is to work out that if then if this happens, then I'll do this, and if that happens, then I'll do that. It's so powerful and it's so simple. Actually, her husband is Peter Goltzer, and he's the one who discovered implementation intentions. Got it? Oh interesting? So how did I mangle her name? I don't want to say it because you just leave

lots of vowels in it. You'll you'll just leave it to me, all right, that's fairy, I get it. But why those works so well is in fact because they take away self control entirely. That you know it's not up to conscious control anymore. Like imagine yourself was kind of a robot and you've encountered this situation, right, Like when I walk into my house, I will go upstairs

to my office and work instead of going to play Xbox. Right, that's a simple one for I like playing Xbox, so I like tell myself this, um And then it's very You're like programmed like a robot. You walk into your house and then the program gets triggered in your mind. Like I'm in my house, I will go upstairs and start working, right, and you don't even have time to kind of really consider what should I do? And so

that's the key of these things. They take self control out of this like effortful thing and make it into kind of a program. Yep, yep. I think it's so powerful in so many different ways. It's also you know, we talk about breaking a bad habit is what do you do instead? Right? What what do you put in its place? And that's just another variation on an implementation intention. So yeah, they are very powerful. So let's transition as

we kind of get near the end of this. The last chapter in your book was about the self, and this show has had a fair amount of Buddhist teachers and other spiritual teachers who talk about this idea of the self being not as solid as we think it is. So some people would call it an illusion. Other people would say it's just a construction, and this is coming from a spiritual viewpoint. But in your book you kind of wrap things up by talking about what it is

that makes the self? What is the self? I guess I'll just leave it at that, what is the self from the perspective of the work that you've been doing. So I think they're there are kind of lots of elegant analogies about what the self is. One thing I mentioned in the book is it's kind of like this, you know, spider web glistening in the sunlight. Um. But the analogy I really like, and it's a lot less elegant, is particle board, Right, that that mainstay of ikea furniture.

And so I think it's a great example because particle board is is real in a sense. It's like firm, it's strong, you can sit on it, right, But if you put it in water for long enough, what happens is everything starts to dissolve. Right. You realize that what you thought was a solid piece of wood is actually just all these little bits of piece together, just like pressed pressed together through time in this kind of force.

So I think that's a great analogy because those little bits and pieces are memories, are friends, kind of shaping around perceptions, our histories, our emotions. None of those things are kind of really that strong, but you just kind of push them all together for long enough, and you get this enduring sense of stelf. But it doesn't really hold up to the kind of uh, scrutiny of well, I said water, but scrutiny of this kind of like lasting forever, right, it changes over time and so forth.

And you say that when you ask people kind of what is the essence of stuff? There were some people who did some research about the thing that people perceive to be most essential. So if I look at you, and if you were to lose your arms and dye your hair and you know, do all these things, I would still see you as you. But the way you respond morally is the thing that if that changes in you, I no longer recognize you as you in the same way that that's the thing that when we're looking itselves

from the outside, is the thing we see most essential. Yeah, that's right. So it's some pretty interesting research done by you know, a collaborator of minding a strong manger and in this philosopher named Sean Nichols. And the most interesting study they did was looked at people suffering from dementia. Right, people get a older, sometimes their brains change and it

changed their behavior. And what they did was they took all these different dementia patients and they asked their families, typically their kids, so their spouses, is this the same person? And what they found was that when they thought they really changed was when they had a different sense of morality. So if someone used to be very kind and now they're really mean. Like speaking of the wolves, right, if they have a different kind of wolf, that's kind of

getting expressed. That's when they really seem different. But it's not just from kind to means. Sometimes really mean people get really nice, right, get really sentimental, and they think, that's not my husband anymore. I'm happy to have a new husband, don't get me wrong, right, but it's not the same guy anymore. And so it's really the sense of morality be that seems to make us who we are,

at least in perceptions of others. Yep. And in the book, you have several other analogies that I think are really good in there, and you also talk about how a particular philosopher, Parfit, talks about how he thinks it's memory. Memory is the thing that constructs the sense of self.

But as we're running out of time, I'm just gonna read something from near the end of your book and ask you if there's anything you want to add to it, and then we'll kind of wrap up, because I think this is a really profound statement and and brings together a lot of the book. Being trapped in our own minds prevents us from fundamentally connecting with others, and there is no way to escape our own minds. We are

forever a point of view. Even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception. But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion, but also that other minds can

be more and less than they appear. I think that says it all. Yeah, you're like, I wrote it as well as I could, and we totally skipped over free will because that's like four or five episodes in itself. I those concepts are completely crazy. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. It was lots of different things.

The other thing I didn't get to bring up, but I was really excited to was I've been waiting to find a way to bring in cognitive animal thinking because I want I've been wanting to talk about how smart crows are, but in the book was the first chance I got to do it. But we're not going to have time. So but crows are very smart. That's that's very clever. Clever corvids and their relatives a very smart yes. All right, Well, thank you Kurt so much for coming

on the show. I really enjoyed talking with you, and we'll have links in the show notes to your book and to your website. Great, thanks so much for having me on. All right, take care, alright bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support