 But I think that what COVID will do is already doing is helping us to determine what is really essential in professions and in institutions. And as far as I'm concerned, if you go to college and you don't learn to think differently about yourself and about the world, it's a waste of time. It's as simple as that. And so there are all sorts of things which college do, which is very nice, which is give you friends and let you play sports and gets you away from home. But that's not a reason for spending huge amounts of money in the society. And if you're just going, this is the more controversial point, if you're just going to get a job, then the employers should be doing the education. Welcome to Cambridge Forum, coming to live via Zoom. I'm Mary Stack, the director of Cambridge Forum, and today we are delighted to welcome back the very popular original thinker, author and all around whiz, Professor Howard Gardner. Famous for reimagining and redefining the definition of intelligence, Gardner debunked the primacy of IQ tests in favor of multiple intelligences back in the 80s in his book, Frames of Mind, which proved to be a game changer in the field of cognitive education. Today, his latest book, A Synthesizing Mind, is a memoir and an overview of his own evolution. And it also covers five decades of his observations about the human mind. Gardner contends that there has never been a better time to develop a synthesizing mind and proposes ways to cultivate that capacity. Welcome, Howard. Thank you, Mary. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here. This expression, a synthesizing mind. Is it not just another way of celebrating the Renaissance man, Howard? You know, the Leonardo da Vinci's who had competence and understanding of multiple fields. I think that's an interesting way to frame it. The interest in lots of things is probably a necessary condition, but synthesizing means that you put it together, and optimally, you put it together in a way that's interesting and novel. Not to take anything away from Leonardo, but he's very different from someone like Charles Darwin, who spent 20 or 30 years doing research of his own, being in contact with the great scholars around the world, raising all kinds of animals, focusing on the Galapagos Islands, and the flora and fauna there, and then put it together in a way which, as we all know, changed forever the way people think about what it means to be alive and what it means to be a member of a species. So, if I wanted to, I'd say the difference between being a dilettante and being a synthesizer. However, synthesis ranges from putting stuff together in a way that doesn't make sense to others, to a competent textbook, to a very original textbook. 50, 60 years ago, Paul Samuelson wrote a textbook in economics, and afterwards all the textbooks were children of Samuelson. And then the ultimate synthesizers, people like Darwin, actually changed the way we think about a huge terrain. But you certainly need to start with wide curiosity, and in fact, something that I just have begun to think about as a result of this memoir, are what are the early signs of someone who's going to be a synthesizer. And as a kid, I read Encyclopedias. What a weird thing to do. And yet, something was telling me that if I read the next entry, I might learn something very interesting. Now, of course, young people, anybody, people of any age can surf the net. You can discover all sorts of interesting things, but you can quickly get into some kind of a rut and just look at one sort of thing. So that wide curiosity, I think, is definitely an early marker for the synthesizing mind. Just going back to that point for a moment, I mean, I would have thought, even though he's brilliant, Darwin was very much a specialist rather than a generalist. In terms of he never really, he saw the scope of the significance in the big picture, but he pretty much stayed in his field. I mean, would you say someone like Elon Musk is like a modern day synthesizer, or no. Yeah, no I think so. I know much less about Musk than I do about Darwin. I think he's interested in the range of technologies. He asks new questions. He doesn't stick to earth. He doesn't stick to the conventional wisdom. And I don't know enough about him to know to what extent he does the dreaming and other people do they work out the details or whether he can go from, you know, very fine grain issue to to broad things. So students of Darwin would say that he was remarkably broad. In fact, Oxford is just putting out a whole book and Oxford on Darwin as a psychologist, something which most of us have not thought about. So let's put this way. I talked in the book about somebody who spent 40 years studying the retina. I think that's amazing. It's the sort of thing I could never do. I think studying the nature of life. That's a pretty big, that's a pretty good, pretty, pretty big topic. That's true. That's true. So I like the fact that you've been looking at this for five decades now, the field of what is intelligence and how do we define it and how many kinds of intelligences are there. You yourself have expanded that definition, I think, initially you had musical bodily kinesthetic social, and then the self reflection as the four forms of intelligence, and then you added existential thinking, naturalist appreciation and this teaching capability. So is this something that you're discovering more about or are we changing or are we, are we just changing how we perceive intelligence. Well, those are two different different questions. I think that actually the second question is the more important one for me. And that is rather than assuming because it's a single word intelligence. We just have one computer in here. And if it works well we're smart, presumably in everything. If it works average risk, presumably average and everything and if it doesn't work very well we're out of luck. That is the implicit theory of an IQ test and of the singular word intelligence. The move I made, and I've often said if I talked about seven talents, nobody would know who I was was to take the word intelligence and pluralize it. People think it's a mistake when I pluralize it but the world is more forgiving. The issue of identifying intelligence is what I spent five years doing in a project that span the late 70s and early 80s. I set up a set of criteria for what counts as an intelligence, and then I identified which candidates so to speak, qualified or didn't qualify as an intelligence. And as you say Mary originally a laid out seven. But then I added the naturalist, and that was spent I spent a year studying that I didn't just say whoops, the natural intelligence whoops, there's a cooking intelligence whoops, computer intelligence, I don't do that. Then I could say, I went on to other things, but more honest answer is, as I didn't want to spend of my rest of my life, being the intelligence tester or Taster. And so I've speculated that there might be a intelligence for asking big questions which I call existential intelligence for knowing how to teach different audiences, because we can take two people who have exactly the same knowledge of a subject. And one knows how to teach it to older people younger people more informed people less informed other person is absolutely curious. They just stand in the blackboard and repeat themselves. But I have not done the necessary research to give the seal of approval to existential or to pedagogical, but to me. If somebody wants to do that, that's great. And if nobody wants to do it will live with that. I think it was the pluralization. And the, I guess I would say the, the authorization of what anybody who's a teacher, who has a lot of kids knows that kids aren't just either you know, their kids are very good in school in a disaster outside of school, the kids are very musical but can't find their way around the simple maze that people have a lot of understanding of other people and no understanding of themselves. And I've given, I've created a vocabulary and a set of, I say criteria where people can say, you know, so and so, you know, doesn't do very well in school but has amazing interpersonal or social intelligence. And we should guide that person toward you know sales or politics if you will or therapy. I don't mean taking it I mean being a therapist because they have, you know, enormous understanding of the differences among people. As I said earlier, they may or may not may or may not understand themselves I call that interpersonal intelligence, and I quipped that the only people who can assess your interpersonal intrapersonal intelligence is your psychiatrist because he or she knows whether you understand yourself and not. And I like to use Ronald Reagan as an as an example because I think he had lots of understanding of other people. So he had any particular understanding of himself and it doesn't matter that that wasn't the business that he was in. We could talk for the next hour about Trump's intelligences but I But it is interesting and I've actually written a blog about this which will be posted soon that as soon as in the first debate, maybe the only debate. When he used the word smart, Trump jumped on him and said smart smart let me tell you about smart and Trump actually has a real thing about smarts and anybody with the slightest bit of psychiatric understanding would know that he's uncertain about his own intelligences. I think it makes such a big deal about how this cabinet has the highest IQs and how he got into very selective schools, but Mary Trump tells us how he got into very selective schools, and if he wanted us to know his grades we would know them but he has threatened to sue for them and if they revealed his grades so I think we, we know he wasn't a very good student. Somebody else certainly sat his SAT for him but anyway, speaking of SATs and you talked about people, students having certain, you know, abilities or bends, a creative bend to woodworking or whatever. Do you think that still having the SAT is just a waste of time. I mean, I used to teach the SAT test, and I gave up because as soon as they dropped the essay I thought this is ridiculous. If they don't want someone who's able to write, why are they going to college? I mean it's diet became an optional. So do you think we should just throw out all these SAT things? It's just such an arbitrary way of categorizing someone or do you think they have some value? Well, I have to say before I answer your question that your perspective is very British because the ability to write and for that matter to speak well, which was something I was not able to do because my own education are things which Americans back in the day admired Brits about because in fact, to get into a decent university in Britain, you used to have to be able to be to express yourself orally and in writing. Things have changed everywhere. And it's probably much less required now it is than it was years ago. The SAT is a, it's an interesting chapter in American history. I probably got to go to Harvard College because I had good SAT scores, despite the fact that I came from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden also comes from. My parents hadn't been to college and I didn't have any particular, and I was Jewish, which was not as much of a handicap as it would have been 20 years earlier. So, you know, the SAT was designed as a way, as they used to say, of finding people who came from remote and apparently inferior schools. The quotation from the guidebook. But of course, as everybody who's listening to this watching this knows, you can gain the SAT. All four of my kids took the SAT and I certainly didn't hurt them by sitting next to them and telling them, you know, don't come up with the answer that occurs to you first because that's been put into seduce you. And let's practice some vocabulary words and let's do some quadratic equations. So, it can be gained. And the more serious question is, who are we admitting to college and what do we want to accomplish there. And I hope in two years I can come back on the Cambridge forum, because Wendy Fishman and I will have published a book called the once in future college, which is based on 2000 interviews at 10 different campuses, very disparate from one another, trying to understand American colleges and universities roughly from 2010 through 2018. And what the people there think, and what we think they should think. And I think that, you know, if you don't bring it up somebody else is going to bring up COVID. I have no information about COVID that anybody who scans the media will not have. But I think that what COVID will do is already doing is helping us to determine what is really essential in professions and institutions. And as far as I'm concerned, if you go to college, and you don't learn to think differently about yourself and about the world it's a waste of time. It's as simple as that. And so, there are all sorts of things which college do, which is very nice, which is give you friends and let you play sports and, you know, gets you away from home. But that's not a reason for, you know, for spending huge amounts of money in society. And if you're just going this is the more controversial point. If you're just going to get a job, then the employers should be doing the education. But if you are having a non vocational school as hundreds if not thousands of colleges and universities in the United States claim, if they cannot change how you think about yourself and how you think about the world, then it's a waste of money. That's a good point. It's a very good point. I think it's even more of a point now my daughter's actually just started a master's last week. You see San Diego in public health, which is, you know, all virtual. I don't know how you do that all virtual but anyway, this is the new world where but you're still paying the same fees. And for the people who are abroad, including, I think that some friends from Columbia, the idea of four years, which is not vocational is a very US idea. I mean, most students will go to sometimes better secondary schools. In other parts of the world than we have here. And then when they get to be 18 or 19 they're expected to choose their vocation and, and that's fine. And England is a mixed picture England Scotland, because our Ivy League schools were patterned after Cambridge and Oxford and Scotland and Edinburgh and other Glasgow other European other English greater schools. And there while they were vocational they're soft vocational. I mean, at Oxford you can study PPE right. And that's not going to prepare you for a single job, but it might change the way you think about the world. And when you were talking earlier about Darwin and I think unfairly dismissed him as just a biologist. I was going to counter with John Maynard Keynes. Oh, he was just an economist, one of the great synthesizing minds of the 20th century and died very young. Interesting. Just while we're talking about that about gaining capabilities and maybe losing others. I was thinking of two things, the people that you held up as being exemplary synthesizing minds in your view. I know with these people that don't fit the bill from history, for example, Edison was a really bad student so bad that his mother had to school him at home. He couldn't sit still in class and he had all sorts of issues Mozart was almost considered to be, you know, on the autistic spectrum. I think perhaps that people that have extreme talent really have perhaps some electrical. You know, Oliver Sacks talks about this as well sort of dysfunction or aberration in their brain that overstimulates a certain section and makes them super very fast in a particular area or capability. I used to say this is a huge question. My wife Ellen winner who's probably known to some of the people who are with us now studies gifted children. And some children are gifted academically and other ones who get high IQ scores and they're often pushed through school. But there are other students who are gifted and are very in an island. I'm the extreme are often autistic youth who might be very good in drawing or in music or chess. Interesting whether they might be precocious in in the social sphere I haven't have an interest in that. But I think this interacts with personality and with child rearing. So I mean I think you couldn't go you couldn't fly from Edison to Elon Musk I just you know that there's so many different different factors, and you know people homeschool your children for very different reasons. You know they may think the school is all wet. They may still like the way school relates to religion, and so on. This is the Amy, the Tara West over educated issue or the new Supreme Court nominee also had a very strange kind of kind of education. So, I guess, I don't think we can generalize about that, except to say and I think maybe this is what you're hinting at. The more you don't resemble the prototypical good student, which is somebody who's good in language and logic those are my first two intelligences, the greater the challenge for parents and for the educational system. Summer Hill school that you will know about in Sudbury Valley is a local school. This is for kids who really do not fit in the school at all. But somehow there's a feeling if you just leave them alone and don't push them at all. They're going to find something you're interested in and they're going to go going to go quite far. But there can be false positives and false negatives. I will tell an MI story multiple intelligence story. That was most hostile to the theory other than psychometricians that people who make their living giving IQ tests so you can understand where they don't like it are mathematicians. Because mathematicians think there's one way to be smart and that's to be a good mathematician until Mary, when their child, one of their children doesn't do well in school. Suddenly, oh, I like an aesthetic social musical. So it often involves a mirror to yourself, as well as to your, as well as to your children. Okay, let's go back to human qualities now. Because you talked about self reflection being a form of self of intelligence, which indeed it is emotional intelligence. Sherry Turkle has written quite a lot about this. In fact, we were discussing this about this new book she's doing on empathy, which I think we are, everyone would say we are losing empathy, the capability of feeling or imagining the thoughts or emotions of another human being. So part of this is to do with technology, of course, and part of it is to do with our lack of community activities, you know, the bowling thing we were talking about bowling alone. Wait, Davis was on here anthropologist in the last program and he was saying that in Canada, unlike America they still have maintained this sense of community. So, is it possible to re acquire to rewire the brain do you think to to re incorporate empathy and community spirit, if it has been lost. We're specializing in simple, simple questions. I'm actually going to try to make an important distinction about multiple intelligences. And I think it will be helpful for our conversation. I think intelligences are ethically and morally neutral. You can be very good in linguistic intelligence. I always use Goethe and Goebbels as examples. Goethe wrote great poetry and drama. Goebbels fomented hatred. They were both very good at using the German language, but they used it in very different ways. And then my other 20th century pair is Nelson Mandela and Slobodan Milosevic. They both had plenty of interpersonal intelligence. They knew how to touch people. Mandela brought a warring country closer together, at least for a while, Milosevic ethnic cleansing. You know, let's, you know, let's, let's, let's kill the Bosnians. So the intelligences are value neutral. A person would have social intelligence. Well, let's use, let's use Mark Zuckerberg as an example. I don't know Mark Zuckerberg. Obviously, he understands a lot about how to, how to reach other people. If you were a critic, you'd say how to manipulate other people. He said community is the most important thing. So he actually tries to use it in a positive way. The point there is, is that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't lack an understanding of what it takes to get people to communicate with one another, but we could differ while violently on whether he uses it in a positive or negative. I mean, yeah, I am not a fan of Trump. I suspected nobody who's attending to this broadcast would be. He obviously knows a lot about how to move a crowd. You know, I would be happy to borrow his brain in that way. But, you know, when he moves them to riot, to be aggressive, to people don't agree with them, that's a very hostile way of using it. You're asking a different question. You're asking the, what Robert Putnam in your book and we talk about this, Fishman and I in our book, the tension between I and we. In our study of college students, we interviewed over 1000 students. We looked at how often the word I was used as how often the word we was used. I think you can guess American college students use I nine times more than they use we do this from big data, and the we is almost always family and close friends. And the dramatic thing is when we ask students about problems on campus, they have no problem, do list them. But then we asked him what to do about it and never says they don't say very often. Well, I want to get to go with some of my friends and try to figure out how to do this, and then, you know, run a campaign or something. So we, as you are implying in Canada, etc. We are incredibly singular minded society. And what Robert Putnam argues in his new book the upswing is, this is dramatic change from the 1960s. However, what he doesn't bring out but in a recent discussion with Daniel Allen and other people on zoom. He's bringing out that the, the we was typically whites. It didn't include minorities. It didn't include gaze. And, you know, it's it's quite clear that the campaign that Trump and Pence are running is, is to have a we but the we is an exclusionary we wears black lives matter and many other current movements, including the use of pronouns and things like that is to expand the notion of we. And here's the, here's the point as somebody now uses all the time. In the history of the world, and this goes back in the prehistory, we were mostly with people who were like us, they looked like us, and they had the same training and so on. And it's a new experiment to put people who look together, who look different, who have different sexual orientations with different history together and say, get along. And the countries, which are the most communal at this time in history are the Scandinavian countries, which had the least experience in that I mean, you know in Finland, most people are finished and have been finished for a long time. And Sweden, which is the most open of that countries is also had the most strain. So, as I say this is a very big question there people who study it, all their lives, but multiple intelligence I think is useful in saying the computers there, but how that computer is used is, is where we have to do a lot of work. Indeed, the last part of the book, I talk about the work I've done for the last 25 years, which is what we call good work and the good project. And it actually all comes out of multiple intelligences so let me tell you an anecdote from the synthesizing mind. In 1993, so 10 years after I published my theory, I heard from a colleague in Australia, and the colleague wrote, your ideas are being used in Australia, and you won't like the way they're used. I said, all right, with the evidence. So, we said a lot of materials. And the more I read the more discouraged and depressed I came. And the worst was a program in one of the six Australian states. They listed all the racial and ethnic groups and which intelligences they had and which ones they lacked. My God, this is a total perversion of everything I believe in. Moreover, there's not a shred of evidence for it. But once you give people a scheme, this is no different SAT, people then begin to evaluate everybody in terms of that scheme. And my close colleagues, William Damon and Mike, Chicks sent me high, both psychologists, we began something which eventually became the good project. And it was a study of how do we make use of human capacities in ways which are positive. And for anybody who is involved in this broadcast, if you just go to the good project.org, very simple, the good project.org. And to learn about our thinking, we've created all kinds of toolkits, good work toolkits, good collaboration toolkits, good play toolkits to help move the needle in more constructive ways. Before we talk about that actually about how we actually develop a better synthesizing mind. I want to ask you about these terms genius and talent and creativity because I actually get so tired of them being bandied around willy-nilly the amount of times people are referred to as geniuses. They've lost all currency the words. So, when did you when do you think was this the meeting that average became exemplary. Can you talk about three elements which I'd like you to elaborate a bit. You say there's three elements that have to combine for true creativity, individual combined with the domain combined with the field. So that really is pretty specific, that wouldn't include all the people that are called geniuses these days. So could you just tell us a little bit about that, how you came up with that. Well, you know, we're banding about terms which are widely used and Voltaire reminded us that if you want to use some terms you have to define your define them. The MacArthur Foundation announced this week it's geniuses MacArthur doesn't like that word. It likes the word creative. And that's actually easier, I think to define them genius. I have a definition of genius. Somebody who sees the world in a way that nobody has seen it before and actually changes the way other people afterwards perceived that world so when I talk about people like dying like like Darwin or Einstein or Leonardo I mean I think those are geniuses I think Mozart was certainly a genius but it was a genius of a different sort. Almost nobody I know, and I know a lot of people who would be called smart will have changed the way the world thinks about things and that includes me. I won't change the way the world thinks about things. Maybe have a little change in the sphere. I think there's a lot about cognitive science. And I think Noam Chomsky is probably somebody, both in politics and in scholarship who will be read in the 100 years from now, as will Bertrand Russell. So those are people who I would consider to be geniuses of a sort but it's not, I wouldn't I wouldn't and I don't think MacArthur's are geniuses I want to MacArthur and I don't have any illusion that I'm, I'm a genius. Now, the insights about creativity actually come from to accept my hide when I mentioned before, the Hungarian American flow right. That's right. And Mike, as we call him, did change the conversation about creativity, because he said we shouldn't ask, who's creative. We should ask, what is creative. We should ask. Where is creativity. And I don't have a, I guess I have a triangle here. You have the individual. You have the domain which is the area the individual works in and you have the field, which are people who can make judgments. And to be creative it's not it's not enough for you and your parents to think that you're very original. You have people who are competent, who can judge whether or not this is original and whether or not it actually makes some kind of an impact. And we might, we might call genius, the highest form of creativity, chicks up and high chicks and the high and I talk about big C and little C middle C, creativity, little C is your child makes a drawing and you put it on a refrigerator The domain of the field aren't affected. The middle C might be a paper that Science Magazine publishes and it maybe does change the way some people carry out the work and then every once in a while, Darwin or E. O. Wilson comes along and really redefines the field in significant kinds of ways. So I guess to make a kind of a meta comment, what we would do and I are talking about Mary are words that we all bandy about loosely creativity genius talents or talents, people who do what I do which is soft social science, try to define these things and we can talk with at least rough measures of them. And if we're effective we at least affect the way other people write about these things and think about these things. If we're very very effective we might actually change. I mean, when, when the computer begins to accept intelligence as plural as a word, then we've had some impact. I don't know, I don't know what it takes to do that. I want to ask you about one thing that's always fascinated me. I mean, your own experiences are really interesting in the book. So I would say if you get a chance to pick up the book, anybody, it's, and you like memoir fascinating. Because you know you were kind of a bookish, somewhat solitary kid in some ways and you explain certain reasons for that, because your older brother passing your parents were overly helicoptery with you and lots of elements. I love this idea about introvert etch extravert because that seems to have taken a new kind of people are starting to view this differently now I remember not too long ago. There was a newsweek cover story on shyness and how you could help your child be coaxed out of being shy and do all these things you do. And now I think we're starting to appreciate the differences between extroverts and introverts and the value that they bring. Would you say that's true. This is not something that about yourself about yourself. But I right thought away something that you may know but most listeners probably to know the work of Anthony store, who was a great psychiatrist and wrote a book about solitude. And store whom I knew quite well, believed that we won't call them geniuses that highly creative people wanted and needed solitude and he, he collects, he collected a lot of evidence for that. And I remember showing that he was a man of his time like people like me are, they were almost all men. And I think that's a very interesting kind of torque. Because being an introvert as a woman maybe much less accepted. And I am an introvert, but somebody once pointed out to me something I've used ever since it's probably in the book. I'm a compensated introvert, which is even though every morning I walk for an hour and I play the piano for an hour and I'm quite happy. I don't have a family but not having lots of contact with others so I'm not as bad as somebody who said the pandemic is good for me because of favors introvert. I don't have a great need for, for, for other people, but I'm able to be social, because my mother was a very social person she was a connector. And so I've learned how to do that and it's a very valuable kind of, it's a valuable personality trait to be able to, to, to connect, to connect people. The issue of when is it helpful to be with other people we talked earlier about how when you've done a synthesis. It doesn't matter if you just think it's good. Other people have to be able to react to it to that's the field, so to speak. On the other hand, if you'd like to eat a certain way, as long as you don't project it and other people that's perfectly, that's perfectly fine. The, I wouldn't, I mean, when you brought up introvert I thought about the, you know, there's been books about quietness and silence and solitude and so on. Yeah, I think those are worthwhile but I'm going to be a little bit professorial here. These are books where, you know, basically the title sells the book, and if you read the title you don't have to go too far. And when stuff's been neglected like the advantages of solitude or quiet introversion. It's good to bring attention to it. I didn't want to correct one thing that you said because I think it's important for people who are listening to me as a biographical subject. My parents were tremendously helicopter when it comes to my physical well being, because my brother was killed in a sleigh riding accident in front of my mother. My parents had lost everything. And my mother hadn't been pregnant with me they were going to kill themselves, because they were German Jews who expelled from Germany and arrived here on crystal not the night of the broken glass and they lost everything. They were helicopter parents, when it came to my interests. They let me pursue whatever I wanted to never told me what to do. I make a wisecrack which I don't think is in the book. When I won a MacArthur award, and I didn't have a job, because I was living off the grants I said finally my parents can say my, my son the genius foundation but it's a very important point and was when you were raising earlier in another context. We should not try to project our own values of intellectual or aesthetic nature onto our children we should try to project our moral ethical values, assuming that they're good ones. But we should realize that people that kids can be bright and talented and interested in different ways. And your obligation as a parent and now I'm a five time grandparent is not to try to make them like you, but to figure out what they're good at and help them get there. If they need to do some things for school whether it's SAT for my kids or writing essays it is for my grandson now fine, but that doesn't mean just because I'm a writer I should try to make him into a writer that's very bad. One of the key notions of the, of the enlightenment is that we didn't try to make everybody just like us. And, you know, it's a real thought line in the world now to think it's, we should all be one way whether it's personality wise or intellect wise or interest wise. I want people to put their questions now because I don't want to neglect all these wonderful people that are involved in watching this from all over the place actually, including Columbia. Meanwhile, you can tell us how you think we can help develop a synthesizing mind. I mean, do you think it's innate or do you think anyone can nurture. I don't think it's innate in the slightest. And to the extent my book is a how to book. The last few chapters are what we I think we can do educationally to help people develop a synthesizing mind. Actually, I think we can do a tremendous amount, because it's been invisible. That is, I don't ever in my own education, or in that of my children's have the notion of synthesizing what it is and how to do it better. Inexplicit, I mean, when you get reactions to a book report or to a term paper, you know, you may get some feedback which helps you do it, but it's been entirely invisible. And so the, in the book I quote Murray young on the Nobel laureate in physics who said in the 21st century, the synthesizing mind is going to be the most important mind. And I think we have actually front or failed as a society and probably all over the world in helping people understand what it means to survey things widely to have a sense of where you want to end up to look at earlier efforts to do this sort of thing. And here's the, again, to quote Mr. Biden, here's the point. There are different ways in which to synthesize using different kinds of intelligence. I, for example, I'm a taxonomizer. I love to make taxonomies, but you can make make mental maps. You can make equations. You can take, you can do works of art. You could have debates. You can have. You can create three dimensional architectural architects. And all of these are aids to help you put stuff together in ways that make sense to you, and what makes sense to other people. And until I began to write this book, even though I've known for a long time, I had this kind of mind. I didn't realize how important the musical the naturalist intelligence were for me. And musical intelligence because I love music, particularly classical music, though I like jazz and show music. But I think about writing very much like like a musical composition, you know, with introduction and development and feedback and so on. And even though I don't think anybody would read the book and say it's a symphony. It's how I think. And the net and the part of the naturalist intelligence is making categories making species testing their limits and so on. And that's what I do all the time. And I've written books about creativity and leadership and about cognitive science. And in each case, what I'm doing is putting these pieces together in different ways and saying, does this work for me. Does it work for people whose judgment I trust. And can I put it together in a book. And an important point for any aspiring young people who are listening, I was trained to be a psychologist which is a scientist and I did experiments like everybody else and I got them published in peer review journals. But I realized probably by the age of 30, there were many, many people could do experiments as well as I could. And lots of people could do it better. But I was a book writer and books were my natural metier. And when I became interested in the arts or creativity or leadership, I should work in a book of articles too small. So if this book accomplishes anything, it should alert anybody who's involved with their own mind or with the mind of children or students into a latent talent, which we can develop and nurture. And at worst, it helps the person make sense of things. But at best it helps other people make sense of things. And I think that I could probably point to many relatives that helped me do that and many teachers. And I would say it was a self education because nobody ever said this is how you should go about taking all the stuff and making sense of it. I had to figure it out for myself. A couple of questions have come in. Michael Simon says, perhaps you can elaborate on the intelligence of discernment, i.e. critical thinking. There seems to be so many conspiracy theories or non truths out there that people believe. But I think that the American populace in this respect. I think that we were never very good. And I'm not just talking about the United States, I think people in general. The fact of a non democratic society is typically more talented people come to the leadership positions. So, you know, benevolent dictator is the best kind of leader in Churchill smartly said, democracy is the worst form of government except all the worst one. I don't think we should romanticize the, you know, the critical thinking of any population, though the American population of land owning males in the 18th century was incredible. That was probably unique. But you know they didn't consider blacks to be equally equal human beings. So they had pretty pretty big blind spot. I think that social media has made the job of critical thinking and of truth, which I've written a great deal about much much more difficult. And I think it's going to be a herculean task to figure out how to make people intelligently discriminating about things that matter. The book called truth beauty and goodness reframed which I think is arguably my most important book. I talk about the only way to understand truth is to understand the methods which lead people to make the assertions that they do. You know, if you're a historian or a psychologist or a politician, when they say something, you have to say on what evidence did you make that. But this is so much more difficult now, Michael and Mary, because I mean, you can make a video of Obama, which looks like he's talking and it's not him. Yeah. I think we're going to go up, doing two things. One, we're going to find certain people whom we trust, and they can be famous or not but they're people who are very discriminating and who are willing to admit that they're wrong. Every morning I scan, not only the New York Times and the Washington Post, which I tend to agree with, but the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and I really agree with the World Street Journal. But it gives me a better sense of what the landscape is like, because you can read after a debate. If you read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, it's two different debates, even though you watch the same film. So I think it's extraordinarily difficult. Thank you for asking the question, Michael. I would say, either we have to organize our entire educational system around that in good luck, or we have to find those people whom we trust for their judgment. You know, I always look now at who writes articles in the New York Times. And when Peter Baker and Maggie Haverman put their heads together, I know if they're wrong, they're going to admit it the next day. And I have friends who are pundits like Norman Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute, or Tom Carruthers from the Carnegie Endowment, and they admit when they're wrong about something. And frankly, the bullshit that we find on cable channels across the board. I won't watch it and I haven't watched it since 2015. When my wife puts it on, I walk out of the room. And I also think I might add, from my own perspective, I think people have to be prepared to pay for good information. They pay for all sorts of things. I mean, subscribe to something like The Atlantic or The Economist or The Washington Post to support it, because you can't get good journalism unless you've got the funds to do the investigations. This was proved by the Boston Globe with the spotlight team. If you don't fund it, it's going to die. I'm going to ask you this question, Mary. I agree with you in large part, though I thought that George Soros would simply endow the New York Times in perpetuity. That would have been a better way of doing it. But, you know, let's say Howard Gardner gives a talk like this and is charged for it. You can go to YouTube and you can find hundreds of talks I've given for free. So how do you help people say, well, when I'm with Mary Stack on the Cambridge Forum, it's worth paying five or $10 for, but when I go to YouTube, I can get it for free. That's a big problem. I mean, paying people aren't used to the idea, not the young generation of paying for information. They'll pay for all sorts of other rubbish, all sorts of rubbish. You know, all these various channels that they want to have, but they will not pay for information because, you know, most of them are getting it on their phone, unfortunately. And you should mention the Guardian because I used to write for the Guardian. I will mention the Guardian. When I go to the Guardian, it jostles me, it nudges me to make a contribution a few times a year. Right, otherwise, we're only going to have crap. Yeah, we are. But some people want crap. Yeah, well, unfortunately, didn't confront. We have to raise the bar. Somebody else has got. Right, Shandra. Thank you for your fantastic point about Americans increasing use of the word I we have seen so much entitlement from Americans over the last seven months such that many of us who are more civic minded are horrified. Jean Twenge wrote the narcissism epidemic, but individualism is also an American cultural value how to separate these two. What can we do to push people back towards we. I agree 100% with the sentiment, though, I don't interpret the data about social media in the same way that Jean Twenge does I think it's a more, it's a more complicated picture, then she, then she puts forth. But the answer is, there is no shortcut. I'm not religious. God does not play a role in my life. But I think that the world, not just America, but the world is in the need of something which isn't a religion, but is like a religion. You don't have to have God in it. I don't care if it does I have nothing against God. But we need a way of thinking, which is really planetary, because whether it's climate change or nuclear weapons, or even not being dominated by artificial intelligence. This is not going to happen just because China wants it or because the United States wants it or because India wants it. It's not going to be happening if there is a real a real consensus and consensus is have to be led. They can come with all the wonderful things about coming up from the ground and Arab Springs and so on. There need to be leaders. I don't know where the questioner comes from. I always say that Gandhi was the most important person to the last 1000 years. I don't want to say more than 1000 because I don't want to step on Christ or Buddha or Muhammad, but Gandhi understood that if we didn't get along the planet would vanish. And if we try to do it through violence, that was terrible and I imagine many people who are listening to this are horrified by what happened in Michigan just in the last day or so where we discovered that people actually wanted to take over, kidnap the governor and take over the state house and the administrative positions. You know, now smart and Luther King understood Gandhi and he paid for it with his wife. You probably haven't tuned in this to hear me who asks wax, philosophic or religious, but I guess the answer to row its question is there's no quick fix to get away from selfishness. And we each who think that's bad need to do our part. I try to model reasonable behavior and the good project is an effort to get individuals to think about ethical issues. In our study of higher education, we found that almost no students knew what ethics was, except for cheating they didn't know what an ethical dilemma was. And when we asked them, who do you turn to on campus for ethical dilemma they had no idea. So it's not even on the radar screen of American college students. And these aren't bad people. I don't like the notion of bad people at all. But these are individuals who've not been raised in a society where other things matter. With my grandchildren the other day I went through the tank of mammaries and I and we. And, you know, I think that, you know, believing that Jesus Christ was the son of God, I think it's too big a stretch, but understanding the values of our great religious leaders whether it's Jesus or Gandhi or Moses. And again they weren't working alone. There's a great wisecrack about Gandhi by one of his associates and said it costs a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty. And I've written extensively about this. All the great leaders are dependent upon the media for communication. Moses wasn't a good talker he used Aaron Gandhi needed the telegraph because when Gandhi went on strike hunger strike is the rest of the world didn't know and get upset. He just died. And with the Rose of Franklin Roosevelt with the radio Hitler with the radio. John Kennedy with television and Trump who I think made clear I have no use for it. Trump is inconceivable without the apprentice. These big rallies and Twitter. And here we are in old fashioned media Mary talking intellectually, but admittedly by zoom that's new but radio. We have to do what we write we have to do what we think is right. We have to model it. And when people are willing to listen we have to explain why we do what we do. That's my answer to Michael and Rohit. So Rosario, who I think you know, Jeremiah has said, you're going back to the original sin of selfishness. You forgot Fox News. I didn't single out Fox though it's probably the worst MSNBC, the other direction. And as you all know there are all kinds of websites, which I don't the names of which I don't even know which just spew hatred. And so, you know, Fox and MSNBC, at least have the semblance of bringing in different points of view, but the kind of cue a non kinds of sites, which says you hatred. Yeah, like the other ones which send people to Michigan to try to try to kidnap the governor. Well, you brought us to a very good segue there because I'm actually going to be closing shortly and next our next program is going to be about trust and polarization. And that's one of the things that Pew has recently found that not only is our trust in institutions at an all time low, but that distrust or mistrust is now evolving or descending into hatred, which is new. We haven't had that happening here, not on this scale. So we're, we've got a couple of minutes left. I don't see any new questions coming in in the chat room here. Somebody's put something here I don't quite understand somebody said loving the conversation. Rosario said you need an eight blocks to assemble equals synthesize some funny is a sound synthesis. I think she's been playing full with words there. Is she a poet. She has a beautiful name. Yeah, she does. Longs to a wonderful group that I do know in color in Columbia. It's wonderful. Well, very glad you're joining us from Columbia today and that's wonderful. We've just posted some wonderful photographs of Columbia on the website by the way because Wade Davis last week has just published a book on Columbia, and he let us use some of the photographs for you to enjoy there and magnificent on the website. Okay, well, I really, really enjoyed this today. It was just so, so interesting and so vast that the subject but you really did make it understandable to everyone which I thank you for how it was really very clear and comprehensible. So I'd like to thank everybody. How it included for listening to today's Cambridge forum with original thinker author of a synthesizing mind and memoir and Hobbes research professor of cognition and education Harvard Howard Gardner.