Andrew Yang || Humanizing Education

reimagine education and my revised hierarchy of needs. Without further ado, I bring you my discussion with Andrew Yang. It is my pleasure and privileged. I've been looking forward to this ever since he and I connected to Welcome to Yang Speaks. Psychologists, author, actualizer of human potential. Pretty much everyone who wants good things in their lives should be listening to this man. Scott Barry Kaufman, Scott, welcome to the podcast. What a dream this come true. This is for me. I've wanted

to talk to you for a long time. It's such a pleasure to be here. Well, I felt the same way. You're such an incredible thinker and your work is so up my Alley, it's pretty wild. Likewise, it's bidirectional. Yeah, I agree. I feel like both of us have been approaching some of the same problems from kind of different angles. What would love for you to introduce yourself so that people can get a sense of your background. You have a PhD in cognitive psychology from Yale, you studied in

the UK. I think you have like a BS and also cognitive science from Carnegie Melloner or one of these other, very very frankly like esteemed institutions. But tell us a little bit more about yourself, like how you arrived at that point and how you became passionate about studying how people frankly can be like happier, healthier, stronger. Sure. Yeah, So I'm a humanistic psychologist and I have a training

in cognitive science. But I'm really interested in understanding what it means to be human, what it means to be a vital human, to live a life of meaning and purpose and creativity. And I really got interest in this topic as a young kid when I was put in special education for a learning disability that I had, and I felt as though the kids that were in the classroom with me in the special ed classroom were capable of so much greater things than anyone gave them credit for.

And do you have a sense as to why they put you there or identified you in that way? Yeah? Well, I had an auditory processing disability that just made it hard. I had a lot of food in my ears, so it just made it hard for me to process things in real time. I have a friend who had a son who had that issue and then you know, like his teachers categorized him as like, you know, like having a learning issue and really you just couldn't hear stuff.

I mean that's all it was. Yeah, and they took that extra couple milliseconds and some sort of indication that I was stupid. And not only that, but I was also like I definitely wasn't odd ball in terms of my creativity and my imagination. Like when all the other kids were sitting in the circle listening to the teacher read a story, I was running around in my Superman cape.

So there definitely were they didn't know what to do with me, for sure, But I was put in special Ed and I just I remember, even at a very young age that I just thinking to myself, you know, there's got to be a way to show the teachers and parents what my friends are capable of here in Special Ed. I mean, they are capable of so many

amazing things. And then you know, I got into this field wanting to study intelligence, and so that was my entryway into the field was the cognitive science of intelligence and IQ testing. Wow, this is a very fraud topic. I mean, and you you were ahead of the curve as you've been studying this for decades at this point, so tell us more well. So I was kept in special until ninth grade, and I remember sitting there bored

out of my mind. Were supposed to be taken untimed test, they would remove me from the mainstream room history history classroom and put me in a special room to take an untimed test. I remember thinking to myself, like, if this is untimed, by the rest of my life to finish this test. So I'm like checked out, like this is boring, and Special ED teacher took me aside who had never seen me before, and after class she just said, I think I see you. It was like a terrifying moment.

I was like, what is she seeing? But She's like, you know, I think that you know why are you still here? You know, I can tell that you're you're you're clearly uh not challenged. And it quickly turned from like why am I here? To like, yeah, why am I here? And I called my mom. I ranted the payphone and I called my mom and I said, hey, Mom, I'm not I'm not reporting back to special let ever again. And she's like, can we talk about this when we

get home. But I set up a school a whole meeting with like the school superintendent and uh and the school psychologists and everything, because I was the first one in like warmer in high school, you know, the school district to break out a special head. I was the first one to come, you know, the stud the student themselves say you know what, I'm out of here. And they said we'll let you out on a trial basis,

which didn't feel like a great vote of confidence. They said, like, if you get out and you fail all your classes, you're coming back. So I said, okay, well I'm going to prove you all wrong. And one semester I went from a d remedial I wasn't supposed to ever go to college to like straight a honor student in one semester. Now and then you kept putting up straight a's. I assumed for a while to go to, you know, a place like except for dance class. Except for dance class

in college. I got to see, yeah, well you're a dance class at Carnegie Mellon, which I did not know. Well, there's actually so this is more. This is more to the story. This is kind of interesting. The reason why I was in dance classes is because I was so determined to study intelligence and psychology that I went and I auditioned for the opera program at Carnegie Mellon so I could still get into Carnegie Mellon. It turned out

that I had some music talent. My grandfather was a cellist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I was taking voice lessons and I sang my heart out, and I got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon for my opera singing, and then I transferred in through the back door to psychology once I got there. That's incredible. So you were such a talented singer that you could actually get into college

on that basis. When did that talent become evident? After I got out of special ed in high school, I signed up for everything because I became, I was like, what am I capable of? You have to understand Andrew, I had no prior to that moment at my education system, I only viewed myself as this disabled, broken kid, you know. And then so I signed up for everything I signed up. I was like, I'm gonna do West Side Story, I'm gonna do this and this, And I was joking one

day with my friends. I had a friend who was in the choir and I was I was in there and I was joking because I was like, you all sound like this, oh oh. And then the choir teacher was like that's really freaking good, Like are you an opera? Like do you have training? And I was like no, I'm making fun of you all. And so it turned out like, you know, I actually have an aperatic voice.

Who knew who knew? And then I started to take some lessons and I fell in love with like Ley Miz and my dream was to be Javert and that was my audition song at Carnegie Mellon was Stars from

Ley Miz. What a story. So then when you went to college on the basis of your musical talent, did you know the entire time that you were going to frankly divert your energies from music to these other pursuits, or did you show up thinking maybe I will make a thing of this music career and then go to Broadway And the rest of it was that a thought. There was a thought that if I never got into the psychology program, that I, you know, I'll be I'll

just be on Broadway. That's fine, I'll settle. I'll settle for Broadway. But but what happened is I discovered I took a course on cognitive psychology with Anne Fey at Carnegie Melon and I was reading this textbook and and I got to this the chapter on intelligence, and it was Howard Gardner calls us a crystallizing experience. There's this moment in your life where you suddenly realize, oh, that's

what I meant to be doing on this AE. And I looked at the front cover and it said Robert Sttererenberg, Yale University, you know, who was the author of the book. And in that moment, I said, that's it. I'm going to study with Robert Scherenberg. I'm gonna do everything that it takes. I'm going to like be the grittiest mother Beeper, and I don't know if I can curse on your podcast. I'm gonna be the the grittiest person you know, be

a person ever. And I'm gonna make it into Yale and study with Robert Sternberg because he's he just he just inspired me so much with his thoughts about intelligence. Then he had creative and practical intelligence. He said, we're important in addition to analytical intelligence, and I said, that's exactly what I've been saying since I was five years old. There are these ideas you have out there, and then when someone puts it into a term, you're like, yes,

and it's such a gift to the world. I try my best to take the advantage of that in ways big and small. Where As an example, when I'm on a team and then someone said like, hey, we should do this particular project, and I get excited about it, my first move is to name the project. Because as soon as you name something, then it becomes much more

real to people. So two of the first steps I take are number one, you name it, and then number two you look at someone and say, and now you are going to be responsible for a project, you know, red table or whatever it is. So it's great that you encountered that in Professor Sternberg, and then you got hooked and you ended up getting a PhD from Yale, like studying with him. Yeah, that's exactly right. I did a cold email. I said, can I be your personal

assistant intern for free over the summer. I'll come to Yelle, do anything you want. I was doing that with everyone I was also studying. I don't know if you have you ever heard of Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winner, Herbert Herb Simon. He studied us. He came up with the idea of satisficing that most people don't actually choose the best decision. They're like good enough. They choose decisions that are good enough. Right. Give that man a Nobel

prize exactly? Yeah, yeah, that's what he I mean. It was a brilliant idea, you know, at the time, because I believe it or not, Economists at the time had no I didn't didn't even It didn't even dawn on them that that's how humans make decisions. They just assumed that humans were maximizers. Isn't that interesting? No, we're not. We're not maximizers. We're definitely satisfycers. I studied with Herb Simon and he took me under his wing as well,

and I was just like, teach me everything. I just like everyone I could find, I said, teach me everything. I cold call, cold emailed the head of this Cambridge University psychology department. I said, can I just like take off a year of Carnegie Mellon and go to England

and will you teach me everything about IQ? He was one of the leading IQ researchers, and I thought that I it'd be really cool for me to keep my own past a secret and not tell any of these IQ researchers about that, Like their tests are what limited me in my life. But just try to learn the truth and just try to like just like make a contribution to the field. So they would take me seriously somedays, so that could then change the field. But I knew that I had to learn the classics, so to speak.

It's a very patient approach, Scott. It's a very impressive

patient of determined. Determined. One of the very large aspects of the way that our kids get measured in school is really their ability to conform to whatever behavior is going on around them, you know, what I mean, like like if you're not sitting quietly in the circle or you know, repeating back what you need to repeat, then that's actually a very very serious problem, you know, in a school setting, and you can easily find yourself put in in specialized or some other category because of those

kinds of issues. And then the second thing, and this is not you, but I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and shockingly high proportion of them were dyslexic as kids. Actually true of some entertainers too, And so these kids are dyslexic, they come in the classroom like they have trouble processing information the way that other people do. Teachers think that they're like completely you know, like useless and like don't you know, like like shouldn't be anywhere near anything.

But then a lot of them wind up finding really creative ways to do their school work, to do projects, to get things done, and then a shockingly high proportion them wind up becoming very successful entrepreneurs because they just apply that to the real world in a particular way.

There's something going on with our school system where it's rewarding a certain degree of behavioral conformity in a particular form of intelligence, and then if you're another type of human, you can easily find yourself relegated to this like, oh, you know, never go to college, Like, might as well just prepare yourself for like a particular type of life kind of tracking system that I know that I'm sure you're like violently against giving both your experiences and your work.

I'm a big advocate of gifted education. You know, I'm not anti intelligence, I'm not anti ability or talent. But I think that we have very misguided notions of the different pathways that one can achieve giftedness and one can achieve their ultimate dreams in their lives. We have very narrow sort of metrics. And I've been arguing for a humanistic education. I call it humanistic education that treats students as human first. I think you might might like, yeah,

uz that my presidential campaign slogan was humanity first. When you saw that, you were like, did they take it from me? Acknowledgement? Please? Yag I've been saying that for ten years. Yeah, but that's why I was like, I was, I mean, I'm so, I was so on bored. I don't know if you saw all my tweets, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going when you're ruting for president, I was definitely

supporting the heck IDIA. But but no, I'm really all about a school system that treats students not as like what score they could appear on a test, but that views them as the totality of who they are, and sometimes that does include intelligence. So I'm not I'm not one of these extreme anti IQ kind of researchers. I think that there are kids who have extraordinarily high aqs and they're not served well by the school system. My argument is more that no students are being served by this.

So you've now written several important books that each put forward very important ideas, and I think one of your earlier books talked about what you call the dual process theory of human intelligence, which struck me as related to this idea of the fact that there are different forms of intelligence than this kind of very linear academic analytic that we measure, particularly through standardized tests and the like.

And so was this your original research. Was this something that you developed over an extended period of time alongside other folks who've been looking at this for a while. Yeah, this was an insight that I had when I was doing my PhD work, I knew that I wanted to go beyond the standard metrics of IQ, but I wanted to do it in a very systematic way that would earn me the respect of my fellow intelligence researchers. I did just want to like say, you all are stupid,

you know, like like the whole field sucks. No, I wanted to actually do something meaningful. And when I was looking to the literature, at dawned on me that almost all these IQ tests are all at the conscious level, a conscious reasoning, and and it always and there are people who seem to intuitively learn things that they were never explicitly taught. Is this related to what people call

street smart? Yeah it is, Yeah, you know what, Yes, absolutely, it's a it's a it's a core component of street smarts, absolutely, But it's also the core component of social skills, you know, being able to like earn the patterns of the social world. But also just like beauty nature, I mean, it goes deep, it's it's it's there's these there are these deep unconscious learning mechanisms that we share with other animals. You know, other animals aren't aren't aren't good at IQ tests, but

they're intell they still have an adaptive intelligence. You know. We we do have these really inten diligent systems, unconscious intuitive systems. And my question that I was curious about is what is the relationship between those who are really quick at picking things up intuitively versus those who are good at IQ tests. And my hypothesis was that they'd be uncorrelated. Now, this was believe it. This was a

believe it or not. This was a controversial hypothesis because intelligence researchers had been studying IQ for one hundred years and they said, forget it. You're never going to find anything that's not correlated with IQ. We no one has ever. And I said, I think I found to Like so okay, So I created this test and I published this in our flags flagship journal called Cognition, where I reported a zero correlation between intuitive intelligence ability and IQ ability. Wow,

so I called. I was so excited. I mean, this was like really exciting. I was like I made a contribution to the field in some way. I mean that's all I wanted to do, was just like to be like considered, you know, like I could make a real intellectual, hefty contribution to the field. My father was a professor, my grandfather was a professor, my uncle was a professor. My brother is a professor. So being a professor is kind of the family thing. I'm kind of the academic

grunt of the litter. So so I just wanted you to know that I understand when you say, like I wanted to make an intellectual contribution, because when you're in that environment, like you want to put forward like a

big idea or finding that is novel and groundbreaking. It's funny though, because you know, when looking back on it now, it's like I put so much work into to impress five people, like you know, like it's not like, you know, the amount of people working in that really narrow niche of the field, like maybe five, you know, five people

that I impressed. You made this this discovery or you found that intuitive learning was uncorrelated you know, with this other more standard measure, and so like what that happened then, was there like this massive level of attention. It opened up a whole world for me, and that world is called activity. So what I discovered once I discovered was able to operationalize and actually measure in a reliable and valid way this what this intuitive intelligence kind of ability.

I found that it was predicting forms of creative achievement in particularly in the arts, much much more than i Q, much much more than wow. This is like this sort of creative dimensions test wow or measure not test measure? Yeah, an indicator. Yeah. It got the interest of a bunch of people. So my Colin de Young was a post doc at Yale with me at the time, and his grad student was a man called Jordan Peterson. I don't

know if you ever heard of that guy. And and so he hops on board that we get this published and this paper, show this follow up paper. So I had I did that initial paper, but then I did this follow up paper showing that that if you want to predict the arts achievement, it really is all about this openness to experience. It's all about this ability to really go uh uh, be open to your kind of inner emotions and appreciation of the patterns of beauty, you know,

and these sorts of things. And that is that's an important skill that we don't even we don't even like appreciate it as important at all. We definitely do not, brother, I mean that that is for sure. I was around kids when I was young, at these things called nerd camps. They were run by Johns. Hopkins. So it's like the opposite extreme of kids who frankly, you know, did very

well on various aaronized tests. And then you talk about how folks who are more intuitively intelligent maybe have degrees of social skills or creativity or you know, let's call it like you know, judgment or problem solving any things like that. Like, these were the nerdiest kids ever, Like,

and I was right there with them. You know, It's like I'm not excluding myself, but if you were to put them into put us into a situation that required some degree of like intuitive problem solving or social skills or whatnot, like we would have all been atrocious. Like it was the most socially awkward group of adolescents and pre adolescents that one can imagine, like just straight out

of whatever stereotypical you know thing you have. I mean, you know, back in the eighties at that time would be like kind of Revenge of the Nerds type material. So so there was always I get this feeling that there was like some sort of like an inverse relationship between like a degree of book smartness and social skills and street smarts or common sense. Andrew, you know, I did go to Carnegie Mellon and I the one of the nerdy. I mean, I felt at home. I finally

felt like I came home. I actually then added, I don't, I don't really, I don't think I've ever told this on a podcast, but actually ended up adding on a computer science degree from there as well. Before I left, I was just like, I felt so at home with the nerds, and I mean I joined a fraternity, but it was like we're nerds in a fraternity, you know, like you know, so I it was. It was a

really nice feeling coming home. And also it can be comfortable to be a nerd and to be among your friends and not have the pressure to have social skills. So there's a wonderful thing about the pressure to have social skills. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. It's true,

you know, like it's a wonderful thing. So after you'd identified this other measure or scale of intuitive intelligence, like I feel like that would have led to like a lot of other research, a lot of other folks trying to dig in and see if there were other qualities that they could have a measure for. Is that correct. There was a turning point in my life where I was teaching at n y U right after I graduated,

and I was doing that kind of research. But then Martin Seligman, who's the founder of the field of positive psychology. Have you heard of Martin Seligman by chain? Yes? Okay? Cool? And I genuinely love positive psychology. Oh cool. So he's like the founder of the field and he just put like plucks me up. He's like, hey, we're starting a new cent called the Imagination Institute here at Penn Do you want to run it? And I was like yeah,

So I just quit everything. I was like peace n YU, you know, and I and I and this was great because keep in mind I was born and raised in Philly, so this was a chance for me to come back and be closer my parents. And so so that really, you know, things happen in life that are unexpected, you know, you don't expect, you know, Martin selg you know, be like, hey, do you wanna do you wanna? I think you're the

man for the job. So I ended up for three I spent four years in my life at Penn and I studied and my whole research interest and everything shifted so focused on what is the human imagination and how does that We were curious in how that differs from like intelligence for instance, for instance in the brain, and we published some neuroscience studies on this, but we also

funded a lot of researchers to come up. We held a call, open call for everyone in the world who can come up with the next imagination test, like creativity test, you know, And so we funded like fifteen projectors. So we also went and had about ten different domains of

human endeavors. We brought like the most famous, like most imaginative people across different fields from humor to math, to physics, to a wide range of things to spirituality, and we have these imagination retreats where we scan their brains and then we try to understand what the special source of creativity is. Wow, that was four years of my life. Four years of my life. Yeah, So what do more human centered schools look like in practice? Have you come

across the future project may chance? Yes, there's an educational organization where they put in an office of a dream director in the school system and any student can go to the office of Dream Director and say well, this is my dream. This is you know, I have this idea or this this goal, like I want to end bullying. I want to I want to make the world a better place. And the dream director is like, great, let's help get you there, and they help give mentors and

resources to help them realize their projects. The kind of shift I want to make is a shift from a culture of evaluation to a culture of inspiration. So that's kind of my tagline, from evaluation to inspiration, because we're we spend so much time in our school system right now evaluating a valuing of valuing that we have no time left over to actually activate the potential at all. It's like it's like what are we doing here? People?

You know, like we're devoting like virtually one hundred percent of our time to be like okay, you know, uh, here's stuff, did you learn it? Here's stuff did you learn it? Here's stuff exactly exactly. Here's your test. Here's your score, here's your score. Next, here's your next score. Here's your next score. It's sole it's not it's I mean,

for these students, it's it's it's soul sucking. Right, So I want to kind of put the soul back into the human the human that that might have sounded too wilou, but I want to put the human human back into the education system where we treat students as human first, and I think that we can have self actualizing schools where the schools UH care first and foremost about the self actualization of students, not the test scores of the students.

And of course knowledge is important. I mean, I'm not trying to make this extreme argument and say you know, no math forever. I'm not saying that, don't worry, you can calm down. I know you like math. I do too. Well. One of the things I just want to let you know, like, you know, I'm very open to the fact that, and this is data driven, is that arts and drama really

help kids, right exactly. Yeah, like college readiness goes up, interesting college goes up, you know, like that, so you should know I'm very, very open to the fact that arts and creativity should be central in our education, particularly as most people know, like if you're concerned that AI and technology are going to do a lot of rote tasks and so you know, trying to teach our kids

to become better processors and robots themselves is probably a loser. Yes, yes, yes, so you know so like I'm not just like this pro math person. And on that front, there's a whole new emerging field of positive education as well that has various pillars. So if you tackle positive education is a good tagline, just like positive psychology is a good time like positive education, because a lot of education does seem kind of negative right now, it really does. Which do

you like better, humanistic education or positive education? Positive somehow, you know, you have to be funny. Maybe instead of humanistic, you'd just be like human education like that that actually makes me laugh. But there there is something to that word. I mean, I obviously love the word human like you know again, it was like one of our main ideas. But to me, like human education, like there is something inhuman about our educational system right now, I mean that

that is happening. Well, maybe we need a positive humanistic education, Like let's get all the word passive education is good because there was also a sense that our current educational system is a little bit negg. It's a little bit like you know, conformist. It's preparing kids for an economy that really has not existed for decades and you know, like there are other things like that that you can

look at about our current system. Well, it's incredible You've become like this champion of creativity, imagination, intuition, and it really is like at a whole different access than a lot of our current schools are teaching at. So what is that movement looking like? Like what is that energy? So you've got like sealing men and pen You've got like but like what does it look like? Grit large and who are like the major figures in addition to you that are trying to push things in a more

human direction. So they have big positive education conferences, you know, with like thousand thousand people from all over the world, you know come to these conferences. But you know, if you if I can just give some shout outs, Peggy current over in Australia is leading the way of positive education in Australia. It's for some reason, England and Australia in addition to the US, are the ones that are most interested in positive education. And you know, virtually all

of Australia and England educators come to these conferences. So that's really big over there. But there are certain schools, Like even in Philadelphia, Shipley School is leading the way in terms of the entire schools based on a positive education model. So there are schools that have this. So yeah, and there I could name schools in Australia that are

that are that are doing this. It's very interesting to me, Scott that you cite international sources, because I have this sense that's been building over the last number of years that American culture and thus a lot of our schools are really really mechanical, hyper competitive in a particular way, like it kind of built to like kind of trying to crush like a bunch of people through a gate that can only accept like like some you know, like like very small proportion of them, and that we're all

kind of trained this way that there's like a real sort of competitive savagery to like a lot of like the American system, and that extends from our educational institutions to our economy, which now our economy is like the most savage, winner take all thing that you know in human history at this point. And so when you talk about people who work on positive education, like you're like, oh, the yaw sees the UK, and I'm just like, like you know, come on America, like we like, America genuinely

needs like a massive expansion of humanity. I mean, that's so well put it that I wanted you to be president again. I'm just gonna repeat that again. I'm just gonna repeat that again, like that would have been such an amazing thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. No, but the expansion of humanity is absolutely what we need. But if I may, if I may, just go even a little bit further to more concrete proposals, because I really do believe in bringing data. I believe in evidence. I

don't I don't want to make arguments. You know, if you try to build something on just ideology, for instance, that's like building something on you know, a sand castle, you know, like you need it to have evidence based to a certain degree, and you have to be flexible to update the evidence in light of new information. So I think that these following basic human needs are things we need to learn more in an education system, and they have a really strong evidence based in positive psychology

and humanistic socology for them. So need for connection, Okay, that's a big one in our school system right now, kids are profoundly only of course, right now being virtual, that's even worse. And then so you have a need for safety and that can include, you know, feeling as though your environment is that you have a secure attachment to your environment. You know, attachment theory comes into play here. It's important to have a secure attachment to your not

just your parents. But we don't often talk about the necessity of having a secure attachment to your teacher, you know, like who's who's talking about that? You know, And what that just means is that you feel like you know they have your back if you fail, if you fall down, you know that you can trust. There's trust in your environment. We have a real trust crisis right now in America with each other. The next one in my revised hierarchy of needs is the need for self esteem. But I

specifically talk about healthy self esteem versus narcissism. We do see a lot of narcissism around, you know, in the in the current generation. Would I say that the current generation of kids get mad at me? A lot of it's social media, man, I mean that there's like a real you know, I mean you literally have numbers attached to how many people like you exactly exactly. But that's different So narcissism is, you know, how do you think you're you're better than others. But just a healthy self

esteem is that you just think you're worthy. And I do think we have a crisis of people feeling as though there are a lot of people do not genuinely feel like they are are worthy. And you know, and you the argument in a Scientific American article that this is tied to the way we're treating people through things like the economy or the lack of universal based income.

It was one of the points in my campaign was like, look, if you had universal based income and then you could all look at your child and say, your country loves you, your country values you, and you're gonna be all right, and we're gonna invest in you. Like you know. And and as someone who's run organizations, I've made this argument, it's like you can always tell if an organization is investing in you and if it's not. It takes you approximately two days to figure out if an organization's a

yes to get you and right now. Sometimes yeah, it's like right by the second day, you're like okay, I like I see what's going on here. And this is one reason why when organizations put on these frankly kind like sometimes sort of like overdone or ridiculous like trainings

or boot camps or in like rituals and whatnot. No matter how like frankly like dumb it is, it actually still shows like a form of investment, like they're trying, they're willing to like spend company time, like you know, like whatever the training rig moral is, that's actually an excellent sign in the scheme of things, even though some of those things are you know, a little handhanded. So right now, our country, in my opinion, is not investing in people in a genuine way, and people are kind

of picking up on it. And then it's like like do you feel like you are worth something? You know, you can put on a brave face, but then like when you press on it, like a lot of people you know are struggling with it. I couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more. And we're not we're not listening to each other's suffering, you know, we're we're kind of putting our own suffering in a lot of ways is and in a lot of ways we're not realizing that a lot of other people are really going through a lot of this same kind of suffering, even if it takes a different form basic need. The basic need is unfulfilled.

And I think, you know, it would be wonderful if we could rally around the common humanity of the basic needs that are being unfulfilled, versus making everything into a coalitional thing where you know, our suffering is so different you would never understand, you know, I mean, I just want to move towards a world where we try to understand at least well, well well, these are universal needs you've identified that it'd be very hard for anyone to argue against.

It's like, look like, shouldn't each of us have, you know, like a feeling of connectedness and safety and esteem and so so. The values you're identifying right now are something of a recasting of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in your latest book, which I believe is called transcend Is that right? This book came out fairly recently, I want to say,

just last year. Oh well, yeah, I know. Well, for those of you have the video that there's a copy of, like the book, what's the stud here, what's the still here? Go ahead and read the subtitles. Got yeah, it's the New Science of Self Actualization. The new science of self actualizations. Let's continue past the need for esteem excellent. So, first

of all, Masoll never drew a pyramid. So that's a big misconception I talk about in the book that everyone you know, everyone knows the peer the pyramid with like Wi Fi at the bottom or paper at the bottom, it's it's it's a meme. It turns out Maslow never drew a pyramid. So I have a sell boat metaphor. So I argue that we have a boat that needs not have too many holes. In eurose you don't go anywhere.

But if you if you just have all your holes, you know, if you if you if you just have the boat secure, you're still not going to go anywhere unless you open up the sails and and and and risk going knowing that the winds could come crashing down anytime, knowing that I don't know if that was right metaphor winds. I don't know if wins crashed down. But anyway, you see what I'm saying, waves crashing down, waves crashing down, wins, you still need to go. Which is the bottom of

the boat. Is that safety is that conected this? And safety? So the boat is security and and the sale is growth. And the three needs that comprise security are these for safety, connection, and self esteem. So the ones we just discussed was the boat, Like we already just all I got it. That's the boat. That's the boat. And if you can have those three needs secure, you feel like you can start to explore the world in a way that you

feel vulnerable. Yes, I love it. And this is one of the arguments I was making, which was like, look like, you can't get people concerned about climate change if they can't put food on their table that day, you know what I mean. And so so you have to address like the connected, the safety, and esteem. So what does the mast look like like? How so if you open the sale, Yes, if you open the sale. So whereas the base of security is safety, the base of the

sale is exploration. The need for exploration is a really deeply evolved need we share with other animals, but takes unique manifestations in humans. Because we can bring in the intellect, we can bring in intellectual curiosity. That was another finding that I that I that I found in my dissertation research was that intellectual curiosity was not the same thing as i Q. I found it was only about a

point five zero correlation. So there's some very bright people that are totally in curious, not curious at all, yes, not not one iota, not one iota. So being able to do what we call in our research, we call it cognitive exploration. So you can have behavioral exploration like you know, like Columbus set sail and you know that's the physical adventure seeking, but you can also have cognitive exploration like the human imagination, you know, like is just

like are you reading books and stuff? You know what I mean? But you're talking about that they need to explore, yeah, exactly. So that's the base and if you can go so when you open the sale, you are moving with the spirit of exploration. You're not driven, You're not driven by fear anymore. See, this is the distinction that Masula made

between deficiency motivation versus growth motivation. When you're when you have a deficiency motivation everything in your life, what you're trying to do is to make the world comport to your own uh, deficiency motivation. Exactly. We're living in a deficiency motivated nation, that's correct, that's what you know. The language I used on the campaign was mindset of scarcity but it's it's the same, the same thing, exactly exactly, so you know, because when you're hungry, right, you're saying

feed me. When you're when you're profoundly lonely, you say, you know, like me. When you don't feel like you've respect, then you start say respect me, I deserve respect. But but all of that takes the flavor of the deficiency realm. If you in existence, when you can get to the if you can uh get to the being realm of human existence or the growth realm and open up that sale, you are no longer driven by what you are deficient in.

You uh, you're you're very forward looking, and you you're driven by a spirit of exploration of the unknown, and you're okay with the unknown. But most importantly, you have what Maso called be love, love for the being of others. It's you can think of it maybe like universal love. But I've tried to make the case in my book that the need for connection is different than be love.

You can be very very connected to people that share similar political beliefs or religious beliefs, or in your inn group, and have a lot of hate for anyone that you perceive to be in your outgroup. But when you have being love, you really have a deep, abiding love for the being of everyone that you meet. There's kind of

a sacredness to the unique system. Is that the sales up a fifth thing after the need to exect word, Yes, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly right, So exploration and then be love. And then the third one is the need for purpose. So I argue it's a whole system. Okay, So if you're driven by a spirit of exploration, you have a humanitarian kind of loving sort of orientation. It's like, look, you know, I'm I love people that you may disagree with me or like I don't have certain things with exactly,

and you have a sense of purpose. So from this sailing metaphor, you have a very clear vision of what island, where you're going, where you're going, even though you might be very far away from your going, and even though you know there's gonna be a lot of setbacks. There's gonna be like the sea is unknown, you know, like

that's life, folks. I'm sorry to like tell you, and Santa Claus doesn't exist, you know, in the sense say, like you know, life, there's gonna be a lot of unknowns and and but you still have to go, you still have to move. So so one side of the ledger's deficiency motivation, the other one is growth motivation. Is that right growth or mas we called it the being realm of human existence. Sometimes he uses those two chings,

the B realm, the B realm. So I think most people listening to this can easily understand and relate to the need for connected as connect in this safety and esteem. You know, if those those things aren't present, then it's very very difficult to feel like, you know, you can make positive things happen, or even that you know you deserve things like you know, do deserve a thousand bucks

a month? I mean, you know. And then the the higher order needs are around the ability to explore to love people that aren't like you necessarily and then have

a purpose. And you know, if you ask many people, I think, you know, like what is your purpose, they'll look at you like, you know, like like it's a very very odd question, frankly, and I think there are a lot of people that think, like even trying to ascertain your purpose is like a very privileged pursuit because at that point it must be that your other needs

are being met. And this is all tied together where there are so many Americans who are struggling right now in ways big and small that you know, it's like like trying to have some when trying to address some of these higher questions, a lot of them aren't in position to be able to consider them very rightfully, so, you know, and it's one reason why as a society, we have to do a much better job of trying to address people's sense of safety and connectedness and esteem

from day one. And I think our schools are not doing a good job of those things. It's not just schools, I mean, the fact is, like one of the things I said on the campaign trails that schools control about thirty five percent of our kids educational outcomes, and then the other two thirds are family environments, income level, unfortunately, type of neighborhood, number of words read to them when they're child, stress levels in the household, like all of

these things. And so we're holding our schools in some ways to an impossible standard because you know, if like a kid's going home to an environment where they're not going to be able to learn, it's like well, or in this case, you know, maybe they haven't been in school for a year, you know, like, and so they're going to show up and you know their their ability to catch up is going to be more constrained or diminished.

But this is an incredible framework and it's something that I think most everyone can understand and would agree with.

And it kind of builds on and adapts Maslow's work in a way that's I think very directed and actually more practical in a way, because like I think we've all heard Maslow's hierarchy of needs and then you're like, all right, like see the pyramid, where whereas I feel like your work is a little bit more instructive, like it moves us in a direction, and and these are the ideas from your book, transcend the new science of

self actualization. That's right, Yeah, that's right. And has the response to this book been but probably I'm sure it has been. I'm sure a lot of people are excited about it. Yeah, I'm really really pleased at the reception in the field of psychology. Just almost just universal kind of that that seems very modest to say that universal praise, But it's like if that's but like I don't know how to say it in a way that I I don't come people like it. It's okay, yeah, don't like it.

People like it. I've just been very, very pleased with the reception. Aaron Beck who the founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. He's ninety eight, He's ninety nine years old, and he wrote burb he said, this is a significant advance in psychology. And so that was a wow, such high praise. That must have been so meaningful to you. That was like I was in tears, you know, yeah, yeah, that must have really given you some b love. Yes, yes, yes,

you're fulfilling your purpose, Scott. I mean you really are fulfilling your purpose. It's actually so are you Like tremendous to see. And I think when someone when when someone's doing the kind of work that you can feel like comes from a very deep place within them and it's happening like people do sense it. I think that's one reason why people are drawn to you. I mean, you're doing what you're meant to do for sure, and you're

making such incredible contributions. If someone wants to keep up with you, support your work, find out more about your ideas, like how how can they follow you or get in touch. Oh, thanks Andrew. Well, my web page Scott Barret Kaufman dot com. I have kind of everything everything there, so my podcast, I host the Psychology Podcast, which all the episodes can be found on there. And I have free of resources section.

You know, if you're a parent, you're a teacher, or you're just a you're an adult and you want to self actualize, I have lots of free resources, so I kind of put everything there on my web page. I also have on there some tests self actionation tests I developed and scientific validated. They can tell you what your main sources of self action. But I also have a test that tells you where you are on the dark side or the light side of the Star Wars Force.

It actually is a scientifically validate test that can kind of tell you, you know, if you need to work a little more on Okay, people, I know if you don't like tests, but you know what you love. You love those quizzes that tell you fun things about yourself. So he head to Scott's website to find out how light our dark you are force is and where you are in terms of self actualization. I think you're going

to get a lot of takers. Man from this recording, because who does not want to know how self actualized they are. I'm so glad we finally got to connect Scott your force for humanity, and I'm thrilled to have someone like you fighting for the positive changes that so

many of us know we need in the world. Yeah, consider me a friend and ally, and hopefully we will have more people see how important your work is and then most importantly, actually make the changes necessary in the real world to be able to prepare our kids and our people for what's to come. Thank you. That means a lot to me. It was so fun talk to you today. Thanks for listening to this episode of The

Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.