Todd Kashdan || The Art of Insubordination

seek familiarity in thoughts, behaviors, and interactions. But Todd cas shand argues that deviating from norms isn't always a bad thing, especially if it's in pursuit of positive change. To enact principal dissent effectively, Todd teaches us how to persuade the majority and how to embrace unconventional solutions. We also touch on the topics of conformity, intimacy, influence, victimhood, and curiosity.

So I now bring you Todd Kashton. Odd, how you doing, buddy, So good to see you, So good to see you too. Welcome back in the Psychology Podcast, and congrats on your new book. Yeah, thank you. Very nice bookshelf behind you, by the way, thank you, thank you. Likewise, I see the art of insubordination there behind you, multiple copies of it. You feeling very insubordinate today, Todd. That's my status quoe default. So there's nothing for you want to say? Can you?

Can I get you to the formal appropriate mode? That's the better question. When I hear the term insubordinate, and you're gonna set me straight on this, but when I hear the word, I conjure up an image of like Dennis the Menace, or like like some naughty little boy, you know that like goes to detention. You know. Oh, you know what's cool is you ask everyone about this question. Everyone has a different answer. I mean, the first thing, when I think the modern world, the first person that

comes to mind is a lexey Albame. Okay, but then again, I haven't watched Dennis the Medicine since I was since I was seven years old. Fair enough, So we'll set the record stra because you really are arguing against a very specific thing. You're arguing for a very specific thing called principled in subordination. Could you define what principled in subordination? Is yes. So there's four elements, and I think it's really useful of following Nietzsche, which is language dictates consciousness.

So you get these formulas and then you can figure out where can I intervene to kind of increase a good thing or decrease a bad thing. So at the top elements of this you have the key element is deviance, is that you have some non normative belief or non normative behavior that's in your arsenal. So if you know, when COVID started, we had this decision to make of like how do you greet people that are your strangers or your friends. Do you hug them? Do you fist

bump them? Do you just touch hands like et with your fingers And you're still trying to figure out this norm now. So in some ways you're going to find characters who, almost as a natural oppositional response, will go French or Spanish and will kiss each person on the side of the cheeks as opposed to hugging or fist bumping or whatever. That is. So the deviance parts in

the equation, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is there's also authenticity, which is your Maslovian idea of can you reduce phonius to zero zero? Can you act in ways that are congruent with your values? And if you deviate from that, you're really moving away from the principled part. The third part of the numerator of this equation is contribution, and that's are you trying to construct something, Are you trying to reach your human potential,

you're trying to help other people reach their potential? Are you trying to detract from people's well being? Because as soon as you move towards that, you're now moving away from the equation of principled. It's just regular, ordinary, reckless, problematic in subordination. So all those things in the numerator are things. The more you enhance them authenticity or deviance or contribution, you're going to increase the propensity that someone's

going to be principled. And the denominator is the thing you want to keep at a low level, and that's the social pressure we have. And one of the challenging things about questioning the status quo is what pops into your head automatically is why am I having this idea and no one else is thinking like me? And unless you're extremely confident or your research area really high on narcissism.

You tend to have this doubt and uncertainty of I must be wrong because all these smart, wise people around me are thinking something differently or acting differently than me. And the other one is I don't want to be persecuted. I want to have friends. I want to fit in with groups that I care about. So there social pressure that's there. It sort of is a barrier to becoming a principle in subordinate. Yeah, I want to This is

great and I want to double click on this. Need to be liked is something I've been fascinated with for a very long time. Why is conform me so darn alluring?

Why did we were we hardwired that way through evolutionary principles? Yeah, there's a great paper buy under pronounces name wrong, Jordan Thibolt, and it's in the Laws of Nature Physics, some journal that none of us would ever read in our free time, and he talks about another framework for thinking about conformity, where the reason that we have these three pound brains is that we're looking for prediction and we're looking for

a reduction of uncertainty in our world. And so when we enter a social interaction and you text me, which you normally do, and you'll say, hey, how are things going. It's this really predictable question, and it always stymies me because my head goes in a million different directions. For you, it's predictable. For me, it's predictable, but my brain wants to do something unpredictable to get the conversation steamrolling into a really intimate, close connected direction as fast as possible.

Now here's what Jordan says in this work of his is that by me acting in an unpredictable way, and I'm deviating from social norms. So I might jump right in and say, hey, I'm just learning how to surf and I'm going to Puerto Rico to try it. It's not the thing you were thinking about when you asked, how are you doing, but it's where my brain happens to be. And when I do that. The reason that it's problematic is I made our conversation high maintenance. Your

brain has to catch up. You have to use a lot of metabolic energy, and then for the two of us to get into synchronicity, it's going to take a little bit longer than if I just said, oh, I'm working on this really cool paper, which sets up a softball question for you. What are you excited about and working on these days? Yeah? Yeah? Are there certain personality traits that are more predictive of this kind of personality?

Like I feel like there's something within you that makes you want to take some take it to the more, to the deeper level, or or to shake things up a little bit. What is that? As openness to experience the disagreeableness? What is it? I mean, I'm high. I'm probably high on both of those, there's no question about it. I mean, my you know, for a personally child trait that's really I think we'll hit back to a little bit later. Is I'm really high on need for cognition,

and so are you. It's why we get along so well. Like we like effortful cognitive processing. I like Christopher Nolan films. I love sitting there with my kids and watching Inception or Memento and trying to explain like what's going on and then realizing I don't even understand this enough to explain this to my nine year old or my fifteen

year old sitting next to me. And that's so pleasurable that we're trying to unearth what the hell he's thinking of when he has a sequence of a dream within a dream within a dream, and each dream level has a different time span of what one minute is worth. And it's one of those it's a complicated thing to get your head around. And for a lot of people, that kind of movie is it's not the relaxing, tranquil

entertainment they're looking for. But for me, I want stimulation when I'm off the grid and no longer working, and that same mentality is when I'm socializing. I love to see, like what are the inner workings of someone's brain, Like what are their deep fundamental motives, Like what makes them tick? You know, what are their dreams, their aspirations and their fears.

And and then there's a question of how many questions and conversation topics does it take to get there or can you skip the rungs of intimacy and just jump in there and see what happens? Yeah, yeah, that's that's a really good point. You argue that principled rebels are more relevant now than at any time in recent memory. I would argue that there's a lot of we have a proliferation of unprincipled rebels right now, maybe that's why

we principled rebels are more relevant. Do you agree with that or and elaborate on why it is more relevant. I love that framework and I completely agree with you. I mean, what, the people that are dominating the airwaves are rarely the ones that are pushing for healthy social change. So Alexei Navelne, he's arrested, he's in prison, and we're not talking about anymore as if there's closure on this

guy's life. And he's trying to bring down a you know, an authoritarian system of government, and you've got one guy at the helm of this mission. And then you've got someone like Snowden, who everyone thinks that the big problem about him in terms of his descent was that he leaked government records they shouldn't have, But that really wasn't

where the principal descent came in. The principal descent of Snowden was something Obama never gave him credit for and other people don't give him credit for, which is that he made us realize all of these big tech firms are collecting information on us, the government's collecting information on us, and nobody's warning US, and years later after he had extradite himself to Russia. Not that I'm obsessed with Russia.

Here is all of a sudden, Apple has an update where now every single app by their by their company rule has to say, hey, do you approve yes or no of them tracking data on you. That's all trace to Snowdent, and it leads to I know this doesn't answer your question. It leads to one of the really cool principles about principle and subordination is your change often will be delayed, and you often won't get credit, but other people will benefit from the stand that you took.

So nobody was writing an inc magazine or Fast Company or Harvard Business Review of saying this new edition by Apple is because of Ed Stodent. But it was. It was because he made us realize that. And I think what you're saying is so accurate is that the more disarray or chaos that exists in society from people making their own rules and not thinking about the welfare of

society or other people. It's basically, you know, the Batman beaconing call for Hey, for all of the principled rebels among you, this is the time where we need you to band together to mobilize and stand up against people that kind of are you know, banning books and schools, or they're they're they're questioning whether a vaccine is effective, or you know, they're taking you know, they're asking themselves of is you know, is there a place for being

transgender in sports in America? And all of their focuses on where they can't go, not where they can go, and they're not even having a productive dialogue, and so all of these non principled forms of dissent. They're just sitting there waiting for someone to kind of create some kind of constructive activity that can speed up cultural evolution. Enter Todd Kashton just giving a guidebook, you know, you're not just giving a guidebook. You are out there making

some controversial points as well. Right that in a principled way. You're taking some of these ideas that exist in the public dialogue and you're trying to make them more principled. Right, you're trying to live your words. I mean I do. I have always stood by the belief the only purpose of having tenure is to actually take a stand on strong, valued aims. And it's disappointing in the world of academia. Have it been here for sixteen years as a professor.

How many people get tenure and they're just trying to bank dollars as opposed to banking their social capital so they could take risks. And for me, it's an important one is that whatever your area is, you know, whether you're studying suicidality, whether you're studying for head of mine as a treatment for PTSD, or whether you're talking about how to help you know, civilian veterans re enter society is start taking some risk and figure out some better

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I want us to really emphasize that nuance. Another thing, not just between principled and unprincipled in subordination, is also the idea of winning. A lot of people want to win these days, but you'd argue for winning responsibly. And again, this is an important nuance. Can you kind of explain what that means. Yeah, there's a study by Juan Perez and Serge Moscovici in eighteen eighty. I think it's been cited forty three times, and that's, you know, over forty

years ago. This is an amazing study. This study basically asked the question if you are a minority, So just to define that, because it's important for this conversation It could be in terms of your actual physical visible qualities, right, race, gender, sexual orientation. It could be by numbers. There could be just one or two of you in an organization that's

a woman in a male dominated field. Or it could be power and status where you walk into a room and everyone ends up having you know, they're running newspapers, they're politicians, and you're just happen to be a guy that owns an ice cream truck and any one of

those situations. You are a minority. Now. One of the things that Sergey Moscovici and then Juan Paraz asked is if a minority is trying to persuade the majority to change their ways because they are creating unnecessary barriers for them to accomplish the things that are desirable to them,

just inequities. What happens if the minority group betrays themselves as a victim, and what happens if they betray themselves is they are an agent of social change that's putting their skin on the line because they feel as if there's unfairness and there's harm that's being caused. Thinking of kind of John heights, moral dimensions. So and this has real relevance for, you know, victimhood culture and the coggling of the American mind that people are talking about now.

And what they found was, and they focused mostly on gypsies in Rome, and these gypsies have been mistreated for hundreds of years. And they basically want to know is if these gypsies came out and said, listen, we've been persecuted for hundreds of years. We don't have access to education, we don't have access to clean water, we don't have access to cable, we don't access to any of the

fine things that you know everyday citizens get. We want equity, but more importantly than that, we want to be compensated for how we've been mistreated historically. So this fits very nicely of what's happening in America in a conversation about what do we deal in the aftermath of slavery, what do we do in the aftermath of Japanese encampments in World War Two? You know, do we not only un try to make sure there's equality across races, but also

do we owe something in terms of reparations. Now, what they found was, if you portrayed yourself as needing compensation for past historical injustices. You got your concession, you are more likely to get that money, You're more likely to kind of get a quota where Gypsies are represented in political government, get spots at universities. But once the majority alleviates their guilt, they feel as if they've shuck hands

on the deal. You're good, I'm good, I don't have to feel guilty anymore, and the status quo is maintained where they tend to still be discriminated against, still be mistreated, and they're still not treated with dignity. So the race is a big question about this endgame, which is do you want the long game where you want equable treatment and you don't want to be treated differently because of where you came from, who you are, color of your skin,

whatever your background happens to be. Or do you really just want this short term compensation to make ends meet and kind of put an end to the deal. It's really hard to get both, and it's a very difficult conversation because you're really talking about a long term unnecessary suffering at the hands of the majority, and you want to make a better future, and you want the both, and you really want the both, and but the science just really doesn't sell the point that that's really a

healthy strategy. And it's a lot easier if you can actually think temporarily, time course wise of what do I want the short term, what I want intermediate term, and what do I want for my kids, my grandkids and my great grandkids. Wow? Wow, different time scales. It's very hard to think at the largest time scale when you're suffering in the moment. Yeah, so, how can you harness disobedience just a little? We're the kind of phrases you

have in your book, like harnessing disobedience? It sounds fun. I mean, I think I must share a similar personality structure as you because I like that. But how can we harness that? In ways you have really cool advice, like extract wisdom from weirdos? For instance, can we let's just double cook on that one, because and we'll go on to some others. How can you extract wisdom from weirdos? Yeah? Well, so let's let's use like some common examples that don't

have the weightiness of the ones I've used so far. So, for example, I just had dinner with a friend of mine who was having a hard time with his second marriage. Not because of the woman. She just said, he hasn't been getting along with the kid. The kid's got some behavior problems, a little bit on the high on the psychopathy scale, a little bit high on the machiavellianism scale. I know, you do the light try this is the

dark trio. It stuff, this dark trib Yeah. So we're having dinner and I'm to help them, try to resolve my things because people people basically pay me for food, and then I give them free psychological advice. And then two days later, I get a call and saying, listen, Todd, I'm moving out. I was a god like is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Like that? I'm sorry that you reach that point, And he said no. We decided why do we have to have a traditional relationship,

like because our main problem is just the kid. What if he lived in separate places, kept our marriage alive, and then just minimize the contact with your kid. Just don't tell them this is the reason why I'm moving out. And I just you know, one of the things when you write a book is you become very hyper sensitive to the elements in that book. So I'm very hyper

sensitive to people challenging conventional social norms. This is very esther perel land of like, yeah, why not Like if you don't get if you get remarried and they have children and you really don't get along, whether it's unidirectional or bi directional, like why not consider these other kind of options. So they're basically going back to this romantic

dating and they're challenging the status quo. Now, just hearing his story, for some people listening to this podcast will be like, we'll ask themselves what conventional views about marriage and long term relationships am I holding? Just because that's what I saw in the movies, that's what I saw with my parents. That's all I've ever been exposed to.

And I just limited the number of options available. And one of the ways of paying heed to the weirdos among us is when you hear these stories about these atypical approaches to human behavior, is to try to cultivate a sense of other people have lives unlike your own, and personalities unlike your own, and histories unlike your own.

And if you could default to having this open minded, receptive attitude of asking open ended questions, that's your default when you meet these people as opposed to I can't quite fit you into a square hole or a circular hole, so I'm going to avoid you. So it's just this approach move as opposed to avoidance move when we meet these atypical characters, which sound so simplistic, but it's a

really hard thing to do. But if you think about if you think of everything as a choice point between approach, approach and avoidance of like, can you just lean towards the approach more as opposed to the avoid Yeah, you talk about engaging the outrageous. That sounds like an approach behavior, right, Engaging the outrageous. A lot of people avoid it because they don't even want to be bothered. How do you

define outrageous? First of all, I mean it's you know, the term is meant the terms in this book are meant to be as emotionally laid and provocative as possible. So because that's how you're gonna remember thinks, it's as pedagogical value. I mean, the outrageous is really any variant of thinking, of attitude, of behaviors, of motivations, of approaches

to living that are outside of conventional thought. And so you know, one of the things things that happen in covid is you had this huge van life culture and there's nothing really super strange about this except that it's just a typical. Is that you don't have a physical home that you kind of walk into every day, where you have you know, our bookcases behind us and we know where our TV is. You really, your GPS system

is not stable. You're just moving from place to place because all you need is Wi Fi and all you need is a plug to make sure you have air conditioning, your heat, and you're going to be basically all over the United States over the course of the next year. And when you listen to the details of how these people live their lives where they don't have to go into an office, I mean, why wouldn't you live the

van life? I mean it's the idea of being anywhere from Tennessee to Idaho to Palm Springs, California over the course of a four week time span is a lot more interesting than living in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Sounds fun. I know. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's hit the road. We need a two day test in at least one vacation before we can go for a four week period together. That's fair, that is very fair. But it's possible. It's possible someday. So why is it important

to do a cartwheel in the library. Well, this is a story about the first woman I fell in love with. I was a late bloomer, so it's freshman year in college, and it's about social scripts. It's about what are the social scripts we've adopted to as a man, as a woman. It's just as whatever age we are, you know, what's the appropriate behavior for a forty seven year old man

in terms of working out, in terms of conversations. And when I was a freshman in college, I was in a library with two of my guy friends and there was this woman in the library who was doing cartwheels, and then she cartwheeled right over to where the three of us are sitting on a couch, and I just somehow eked out a few words of conversation. Was like, I have never seen a more beautiful, interesting person who has not said one single word to me in my

entire life. She looked at me and did not say anything. I don't know if I wrote that in the book, but she didn't say one single word to me. We made this crazy eye contact that I remember. When she left to do this pulp fiction style. My two guy friends were like, what was that about? Like you have you met her before? Like you guys didn't even exchange

a word? What is what is that? All she did was put her finger to her lips, picked up the book that I was reading, a textbook, flipped open a page, wrote her phone number in, and then it cartwheeled away as if she was, you know, in some kind of Saturday two pm karate film that you would watch in the afternoon. And I didn't call her for a while. I had a girlfriend at the time, And when I got to that page in the book, I found her number and I was like, how have I not called

this woman before? And as soon as we did, you know, we hit it off and it ended up being my first love. But the important part of that story is there's nothing in their fits with anything you ever hear about how you pick somebody up, find yourself attracted to someone, approach somebody, and everything about it is exactly kind of the to engage in behaviors that match our personality as opposed to there's a one size fits all approach to to meeting you know, the man, woman or whatever of

your dreams, you know, Todd. I love that story, absolute story. So have you ever cartwheeled over to a woman you were interested in? I'm not even sure I can do a fully formed summersault forward or backwards without leaning towards my side, So definitely not metaphorically metaphorical cart wheels. Yes, yes, excellent, Okay, actually love that story. I guess it's like I'm just imagining like nineteen year old Todd, Like I could just

totally see him like awkwardly saying something like that. You know, nowadays you smoothly say stuff like that. But I could see the origin story of it, of Todd Cashion all shock. And it was the attractive thing about her was she was more shocking than me. I mean, she was always trying to outdo me in terms of, you know, performances

and the types of things she would talk about. And I remember the third date that I had with her, she took me by the hand and said, I need to show you something and we saw this, I think it was dazed and confused, the first Matthew McConaughey movie. And so we watched the movie and I could tell she was nervous the whole movie because her hands were sweaty and they were kind of shaking. And I turned to her and I just kind of asked the same

woman was like, like, what's going on? Like what's like, you know, like listen, I got you, Like it's like, I want to be with you. Whatever's going on, I'm here. She's like, I just I wanted to show you something. On the roof third date, we had to climb like like one of those like doric columns of this of this building on the Cornell campus, and then we climb on the top and she got up the first I

got up there, pretty scary. And then she just picked up a handful of rocks and she was just throwing them down this like brick pathway on the roof and had this this bizarre kind of boing boing boing sound that kind of the rocks had, and she was just doing this over and over again. It's like, is that beautiful? And we're just doing this for about fifteen minutes, and she grabbed me by the face and told me she loved me, and this is this is how she did.

I mean, everything about her was bizarre and unusual and atypical and just doesn't fit with other people that it hated over the years. I love it, and I think I just fell in love with this woman for hearing these stories. No, well, I love people like that in general. Yeah, they're my jam for sure. So as you work toward being a better rebel, why is it important to take good care of yourself. I thought this was a really

important point that you made in your book. One of the things about being rebellious is you're not getting close to one hundred percent approval. I mean, just by definition, you are decent stabilizing whatever groups you're in. I mean, even if it's your friendship circle. And you start to say, hey, why don't we do a cross country trip, why don't we do the Adirondack Trail, even though none of us have our camp before. You're raising these questions, and you're

raising these possibilities that the group hasn't considered before. So there's this lack of cohesion about well, I'm not you know, I've never trained, I've never trained for it. I'm not really comfortable sleeping outside, and I don't know if my lower back is strong enough to hold a backpack for you know, three seven eight days for hiking that happens there.

So you have these these rifts that form, these factions of those that are physically fit that could do the Adirondack Trail, those that are actually questioning themselves, those people that want to be fit. So it's aspirational, but maybe that they're not there yet. You've now broken that harmony and that positivity and that ease, that low maintenance nature where it takes just as much energy as required to have social interactions because now you're con they're playing other

ways that the group can interact. When you have that level of challenge, you know you're going to get a little bit of ostracism, a little bit of rejection, a little bit of loneliness, a little bit of negative valuation, a little bit of static, a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of guilt about the things aren't as smooth and easy as they were before. And so, knowing this, all the qualities that you and I teach in our classrooms, and you know I preach and read books about talking

about self compassion. You're talking about self distancing. You're talking about how can you better tolerate distress and frustration, You're talking about managing your self presentation around other people. All of these coping strategies come into play, but you have to anticipate that you're going to need them before you actually start publicly revealing the thoughts and behaviors that are counter to whatever the norms are. That's great, that's great advice.

That's really great advice. What are the minority rules for producing powerful influential messages, especially people who lack power, status, and numbers. Yeah, again, keeping like those multiple definitions intact.

So William Crano has this leniency contract model. That's where he kind of I grab this from, and he talks about when you're going to offer some ideas that are a contrary to whatever the group tends to do, there are two big questions the group's going to ask, and you have to pass these or the minority doesn't have

a chance at survival for their idea. Your job. So, if you're in the majority and you have power, I mean you are in the c suite of a company, you are running the well being Laboratory, you are a professor at University of Pennsylvania and you're teaching you know, a really highly popular po psychology class. You've got the

power you decide what the norms are. And so if you decide in your po psychology class University of Pennsylvania, then everything's going to be held outside, and you're not really taking questions about out who wants to do it, who doesn't want to do it, who's got immunological issues,

who ends up being like allergic to pollen. You might skip all of that and just say it's going to be outside, and most people will not speak again to even though they would prefer sitting in their chair inside of a classroom where you know the temperature and the lighting is perfectly situated for actually acquiring information. You've got the elements outside, you've got, you've brought in randomness into

the equation. Anyone that likes orderliness, anyone that likes low levels of uncertainty, is going to have a little bit of problem of you making that. But because of your power, people will comply with your request, even if it's a very weak, fragile belief that they're holding, and it can be convinced very easily that you're wrong, but it'll look as if they are totally hook line and sinker behind you. Now, the minority can't leverage their power because people don't want

to be like the minority, at least not yet. So what they're doing is they're not making a comparison between who am I right now and who can I be if Scott my professor my psychology class, if I won his favor. The majority sets up a social comparison where people think to themselves, oh, I would prefer to win Scott's favor. Who has power and status over none, So I'm going to follow him. For the minority, it's about validation because nobody wants to be like them or win

them over. It really could care less. It's like, I want to validate your view to see does it have merit, would it be efficient, and would it be effective in my life. So the minority, the group's going to ask two questions. Number one, are you one of us, Like, have you shown that you are worthy of being, you know, a recipient of our attention and a recipient of actually being invited to our social gatherings. And so I know

you had Yang on your podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but one of the mistakes he made as a mayor. As a mayoral candidate in New York City was he actually showed that He really wasn't in group member. He wasn't able to persuade anyone that he really understood New York City, that he was a Yankee or a met fan, that he knew the best pizza there, that he knew what it was like to live in an apartment that was so expensive for such a small amount of space in Manhattan. He just didn't pass any of

the tests of you're an in group member. Everyone was very clear that you have great ideas, but you're kind of on the outside looking in. I don't know if you can actually do the job in New York proper. So he kind of failed that test, and that actually was one of the challenges that his campaign had as being mayor. So let's say you passed the test. Let's say that he could talk about Yankees in nineteen eighty four. He can whip out Don Mattey's stats as a first baseman.

He was really clear that he knew that Patsy's was the best pizza. So he passes. Then he faces the second question by the group. If we listen to your ideas and elaborated on them and brought them into the forefront, would you increase the strength viability and longevity of our group, or would you threaten our group? And so this is the group viability test. If he passes that test, and he passes, you're in group member test, like you're kind

of one of us. Then the audience says, hey, you've got our attention, you've got the platform, you have the stage. We're going to listen to your message, and now you better have a good, a good highly you know, highly attuned, high quality message, because we're going to really think carefully about whether it's worthy of our attention. Yeah. I love in this book how you outlined very clearly what it

takes to be uh principled insubordinate. But one of the things that that's really really tricking along this path is overcoming audiences emotional resistance. Can you give our aspiring principled rebel some advice on how they can do that? Yeah? I mean this some of this hits what I was mentioning before about question number two. Right, will your message, your beliefs, your attitudes, the behaviors are suggesting will it? Will it improve the longevity and health of the group.

And this with this question, if you want to expand it further, you're really talking about can you spark curiosity to intrigue instead of threatened fear. And so there's a few ways that you can do this. I mean, one of the ways is if you're opening up with a narrative about what's been difficult for you, and you make yourself vulnerable and why you chose this innovation you want to share. So, whether it's you know, Steve Jobs saying, listen, blackberries,

cell phones, that's not the wave of the future. I've got this little thing, this little iPhone thing that's actually going to be better for this, it's a scary precedent to be I have to learn something completely new. I've got to figure out, like what do I do with my songs, what I do with my CDs, what I do with my records and tapes? Like how do I wait?

I'm gonna how am I gonna write? My fingers are just too big for the you know, for this thing that doesn't even have a keyboard that's involved with it. It was a lot of things that people had to overcome in terms of the switching costs that happened there. But Steve Jobs being the master, he sparked curiosity the way that he framed the iPhone when it first came out. Was he didn't go through here all the specs. Here are all the technological advantages. Here's how quickly it charges like,

here's how great the battery is. Here's how many songs you could put on there. He basically showed you a visual of like what it looked like in terms of video games that were playing on it, songs that were playing on it, phone calls that you can make, and how smooth the transition was to move from one app to the other. So we didn't explain the how he gave you the wow factor, And the only way to find more information was not from him. It wasn't even

from Apple. The only way you found information when an iPhone first came out, which is hard to do to go back in time to two thousand and seven when this first arose was you found from other users were posting information on message boards and posting videos of like, hey, when Steve Jobs is talking about how you switch from a phone to play music, this is how you do it.

Nobody even cared. People were buying it with no knowledge whatsoever, and it was all from let me trigger your curiosity and wait, you want me to go like one step further with actual concrete tips about this. Oh yeah, that'd be great, man, of course. Yeah. So in the world of curiosity, you can think about this as how do you close the curiosity gap? And there's really like a

three point process for doing this. So the first one is you have to anticipate in your audience, as the minority voice, what is the problem people are working towards. What are the difficulties of the challenges and strains that people are facing. So you have to do this, you know, this mind reading, this mental simulation, this real perspective taking in terms of not what I want or desire, but this exact audience. What do I think they crave, What do I think motivates them? What do I think is

rewarding to them? And most entrepreneurs and innovators forget that while they might have a creative idea, they have to bridge this gap between what they're thinking and what other people give a crap about. So, first, exposed that you know what the problem or the aspiration is that's in their eyes, not yours. Second is to give a little bit of information that closes the gap between what you

have and what they're desiring. So this is what Steve Jobs did right, just showed that there's these things called apps that even give them a word, just scroll through them on a screen that happened there. And the third one, which most people get wrong. So if you think about television advertisements for new cars, what you have is an aerial two font at rapid speed. Is dozens of paragraphs are appearring on the bottom as you're watching a car being driven on you know, Route one in California at

an amazing pace while the roads are closed. You can't acquire all the information you think it's important. But because two things are happening, curiosity isn't elicited. One, you're getting way too many words appearing on the screen in a car ad to every car and truck looks exactly like the other one. Every ad looks the same. You're driving on a closed road, you're driving in the city at nighttime,

you're driving on a country road. It looks gorgeous, the setting is amazing, but you can't remember which car and truck you're even looking at. What Steve's Jobs did was he provided a very small amount of extra information and you he gave you the autonomy. Listen, you're smart, You're intelligent. I'm treating them as such. If this interests you, go figure out the rest of jigsaw puzzle pieces on your own and then figure out that what I'm talking about.

It's freaking awesome. If you give too much information, you've closed the curiosity gap. What you want to do is activate it and keep it open for the other people on their own in the audience to close the gap by their own in their own way, on their own time. Brilliant, brilliant reverse engineering there of his techniques, Steve jobs techniques there. It seems like a really important step. And everything you're describing is building stronger alliances with even your enemies, especially

during times of conflict. So can you give some advice to the aspiring principled rebel along those lines as well? Yeah, I mean this is how you and I supercharged our relationship really quickly. You know, you know, we talked about our high school years. I don't remember. I don't know how much you remember about this, but I think I was telling you about how I sucked in every single sport, and then it took about ten for me to realize the only sport, because I really wanted to be an athlete,

the only sport. I can find any above average athletic prowess in was throwing a shot put a sixteen pound metal ball as far as I can. And you had that story that you tend to talk about how you met Kobe Bryant where you know in gym class. You know you weren't an athlete, you were I mean, you

were a musician. And so this is interesting thing about where we met was not where we were really amazing, but in our failings and figuring out like where we could find the small few domains that we were exceptional

at and it took a while to get there. And if we just if we had met, and this has residents, I think for anyone, if we had met with the conversation where you talked about how you're an amazing opera singer and musician and I started talking about how I was an all county shot putter in track and field,

we would have met. We would have we would have met in a place of ego, and we wouldn't have met the you know, the key, the key for us meeting and connecting as human beings was what led us to those moments in terms of where we found our excellence.

And you don't connect over the greatness. You connect over Oh you're the type of person that puts in the hard work at six am in the morning, and then after everyone goes to sleep, you get back to work and you go outside, you know, to play your musical instruments. You don't wake up your roommate. And I'm going outside.

And I bought my own shot put and actually drew a circle on a soccer field in my neighborhood and we just heave it hundreds of times over to soccer goal by myself at night while I had my You know, those are those sponge headphones with the walkman that you would carry and people would pass me by and be like Todd, dude, when are you going to and they would drive past me. It's that perseverance, it's that obsessiveness, it's that love of figuring out like what are we

capable of? That's where we met. And I bring up this example because the way that we meet people, especially men, men are given a script of you show the best side of your personality, and you don't show the challenges and difficulties and adversities to help you get there unless it's an amazing story where you know you're rock climbing, you're a mountaineer. You got into a fist bit really manly man kind of you know, uh ways of dominance,

hemiway kind of action. Right, We're traveling a foreign country. I'm by myself. You know, I woke up drunk in an alleyway. I picked myself up and I couldn't even find my hotel, so I slept on the floor, you know, of a hostel. Those stories are not vulnerability. Those stories are kind of like humble bringing stories in some ways. And so where we meet with our even if so even if we have a good ending, if we meet in the painful journey to get there, it super charged

the speed that you develop intimacy and connection. And when you meet someone that actually faced a similar diversity to you, you know, they lost a parent, they may have had older siblings that picked on them, they may have been physically weak when they were younger, so they were bullied, and you meet someone has that. It's amazing the lasting

residue of those connections. And so the form alliances as a minority is not necessarily in the area where you're trying to persuade an influence, but in the area of being a minority as like in terms of identity, that's

a stronger way to form connection, to form your alliances. Yeah, and can't you sometimes form alliance of someone even a specific form of suffering is not similar, but just the fact that, like, you come across someone who you can tell that they've they've really had some traumas in their past, and you've had some traumas, and you just you just bond with a fact you've both overcome something really significant,

even if the things you've overcome are quite different. Yeah, I mean here, I mean, here's a question for you, which is, when you meet someone that does a slight reveal about that adversity or trauma, how do you stay in the zone of I'm meeting you as a future potential friend versus going into therapist mode, which is your

you have your psychologist Scott coffin mode. Oh, I mean, when I meet people outside of a professional context, I try to keep my professional hat off as much as possible and just have fun with the person, just the person I am. I mean, I I don't I don't see that that usually doesn't become a problem for me. I don't psychoanalyze people as much as just kind of jump into the stream of their consciousness with them. Yeah.

I mean, but you know, but you do have the post traumatic growth expertise and kind of post ECSTATICALWTH expertise. So I can imagine like there's there's a dual part of you. One is hot getting to know you. The other one is, oh, I see like someone that's suffering, and I want to be with you and work with you because I can see there are some other ways that you can actually maybe even live a life with

a little bit more effective coping skills in your palate. Yeah, now that you mentioned it, maybe there are some subconscious ways in which I'm actually even more attracted to people who've suffered in the past because maybe subconsciously I feel like I can also help them grow, and I want to help them grow. Maybe, now that you mention it, if I you know, if this was a psycho analytic sssion right now and you were my psychologist, maybe that would have been one of the insights that I would

have had about myself. Yeah. No, no, And that's and that's an attractive element of like of a relationship. Is I mean, I think we we spend a lot of time, especially I think this has been hyper active in the past few years, where you know, you have this heavy level polarization, heavy level ideological extremism, and heavy level of intolerance.

So it's kind of this trifle and I think people spend too much time in the first one, just the polarization, but it's really the intolerance and extremism that I view is actually more problematic. And when that occurs, you're less leaning and you're less receptive to people that have these you know, these personalities and these ideological stances and these

storylines that are really diverging from your own. Like we're if we feel that we're in a socially threatening environment, which kind of this you know, the current social media world is a very strange norm. It's almost as if I keep thinking to myself, why would young people want to create such a damn stressful environment and spend so much time in it? Point because we're not digital natives.

So everything about this environment, I mean, you and I we exchanged texts about some of the horrific trolls or not criticisms, but just like mean vitriol look responses. It's like a fun thing that we kind of we've traded over the years and it's you know, we bond over that.

And it's weird that people would want to spend more time than necessary in such a stressful, like you know, cortisol inducing environment, whereas like sitting here talking to you, even though there's a camera here, I mean, just your physical presence, even even through like you know, even through the screen, is calming and relaxing, and there's a tranquility

that occurs there. And I think about this, It's like I can't imagine being sustainable, not because social media doesn't connect people, but because the stress level knowing that the negativity bias of getting vitriol at you is so powerful that like, what's that going to do mentally and physical health wise for people that spend twenty thirty years where this is the dominant place where they're interacting with people. And anyone says they knows the answer, like, by definition

doesn't know the answer. Yeah, And I wouldn't claim to know the answer. But I think a part of the puzzle is that people really fear boredom. People are terrified of low stimulation responses to the environment. And you know, even sometimes if it's they hate it, at least it gets their adrenaline going, and they prefer it. But this is only a small part of the puzzle. I don't claim to know the whole thing. Yeah, that's that Tim Wilson research where people take electric shocks over sitting in

the room and being bored daydreaming, even just daydreaming. Yeah, yeah, mind wandering. Well, that's that's interesting, is you know the impetus for mind wandering because it's such a simple, easy access portal. I always like recommend this to my especially my three kids, all the time of like, don't enjoy this boredom moment. Just know this is the quickest, most efficient way to really creative storytelling and thinking and processing.

So it's common around the horizon. It might not come this time, but like one in the next seven board moments, you're going to have a creative insight. It might not be that amazing like the new comic book to create, but there's something going to be there and you just want to make sure that you can trap it with soft hands and be able to write it down and retain it in some way. And so that's kind of how I always communicate with them of like, boredom is

not something to fear. It's like this. It's the waiting room in a doctor's office, but the doctor's office is really will you want his chocolate factory, but you do have to sit in the waiting room. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's brilliant. I love that. So kind of ending our interview today, I want to point out something. You have a clinical psychology background, right, like you've training in clinical psychology. I actually believe that you are one of the most

underrated psychologists of our generation. And I don't I don't think I've ever said that to anyone on this podcast before explicitly, but I want to make this explicit that the full breadth of the work you've done in your career and the topics you've covered, and the seminal papers you've written for our listeners who are not as familiar with Todd Cash and I mean it really, truly is remarkable what you've contributed to our field in a really

rigorous scientific fashion, and the extent to which you've moved the needle in the field of positive psychology and really significant ways beyond just happiness. So I would feel remiss if I didn't bring that up, not just because I'm your friend. I would have said that even if I wasn't your friend. I mean I appreciate that. I mean I have an amazing set of collaborators to include you on several papers. I mean, every paper that I'm proud of has multiple scientists, and I mean we have the

best profession possible. We get to sit there, talk, think, and take anything in the environment that interest us, and then create questions and test hypotheses. Thank you, Tod, Thank you. I want to end on this quote of yours that says, remember that what will most benefit the world is not what you share in common with others, but what sets you apart. Push hard into your uniqueness and help others

do the same. Do it boldly and compassionately. Whether you succeed or not, It's the only way to reach your human potential. This is a beautiful, beautiful quote, and I think really nicely encapsulates the main point of your book. So I wish you all the best in the book tour, and thanks again for coming on my show. Listen anytime anyplace, I'll talk to you anywhere. Thanks DoD. 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 the discussion at thus psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.