 So Ellen Langer, I'm delighted to be talking to you. This is the first time we meet. And I wanted today to focus on one of your books, which is also, I think, one of your passions, which is creation, creativity, art, but of course, art seen as a way of life. And I took a few notes from your book just to trigger the conversation. I think there is a sort of a slogan in the book, correct me if I'm wrong, which is where we are is where we've never been. Yeah, I have another book of my paintings and one-liners that had been called from research over 40 years. And that's one of the one-liners where we are for people to recognize that everything is constantly changing, everything is new, which means everything is potentially exciting. Right, and that attention to the new is one of the ways you define mindfulness. Yeah, that in fact, it's actively noticing new things. And when you actively notice new things that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context and perspective and reveals to you that you don't know that thing you thought you knew as well as you thought you knew it. So then your attention would naturally go to it. And this act of noticing is the essence of engagement. So it feels good and all of that research shows that while you're doing this, the neurons are firing and it turns out that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Right, and the only other alternative is for us to deeply accept that uncertainty as ubiquitous. We don't know anything, we think we know. In fact, I define mindfulness often as frequently in error but rarely in doubt. And so if you know you don't know, then you naturally pay attention. But so many of us around the world have been brought up thinking that we do know. And so the way that shake us loose from that is this act of noticing. When I give talks to us, I enjoy asking people, I say, okay, how much is one in one? And then Lord, I think I'm crazy, whatever it is. And dutifully, they respond too. But then I inform them that no, one plus one is not always two. If you're adding one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. You're adding one watt of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal to as often as it does. And if you are, most people are not aware that one in one is learning and it is two if you're using a base 10 number system. If you are using a base two number system, one plus one is actually written as 10. So when somebody says to you, how much is one in one or almost any other question, the right answer is, it depends. Right. And that's interesting because you're a professor of psychology, I'm a philosopher. And in what you just said there, I could see at least three echoes to the philosophical tradition, right? Of course, the obvious one is Socrates who went in the streets and bothering people, telling them that they should admit that they don't know what they think they know. And actually it cost him his life, right? Perhaps less known is, I was thinking of the situationists and Guy de Bois in France in the 50s who were politically, were saying that it's actually even the beginning of a political liberation to be able to feel the freshness of every situation, right? And the third one with your one plus one and you talk about them in your book the surrealists, right? Who were very good at disrupting all the certainties that we may have about our present which in their return to psychology, sometimes it seems that we could define consciousness as the attention to this that is not the habit, right? Right, so given the fact that, and sometimes people say, it's strange because when we are kids, time goes very slowly and then when we're adults, it seems like times goes faster and faster. And the other day I told my daughter, well, because when we all, we think we know, we recognize and therefore we are sleeping all the time and that's what you say, right? But it's minus. Yeah, that the 40 years of research sadly has made clear to me that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. And the thing is that when we're mindless, we're not there. So we're not there to know we're not there. And so when people first hear me talk about mindlessness, they assume it's everybody else until they get some feedback on, you know, simple things like you're driving on the highway and you want to get off at exit 20 and all of a sudden you look up and it's exit 28. You know, where was I? But it's much, much more pervasive than that. And I recently have been writing a lot about how I blame the schools around the world for most of this mindlessness because it's the schools that are teaching us one plus one is one. And it's the schools that are teaching us that I'm better than that other person. I mean, after all, I'm a full professor at Harvard, you know, rather than a little song, this is gonna seem so silly to you, but to me it's so important. I wrote this little song, I can't carry a tune, so I probably won't sing it, but for my grandkids. And it's everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something, but everyone can do something else. And that's the world that I'm trying to create with all of this writing, paintings, and what have you. To take this vertical, you know, where everybody can be lined up on some dimension, ignoring always who decided the criteria and make it horizontal where everybody is respected and realize that the lives that most people lead and hurry through and they lead as if it's zero sum, you know, if you're the winner, that means I have to be a loser rather than life is not zero sum. Speaking of songs, if I go scintillate, scintillate, diminished celestial body. Does that ring a bell? Yeah, okay. That's a lot of things, that is a lot of what we do in academia, right? We think we discover new things sometimes, but we just make, we just put fancy words in twinkle, twinkle little star. And then I'm just, I'm not saying that for you, but for the some of the people in the audience, we might not, and that's not really finding something new, right? It's just employing a discourse that is rewarding in a certain field and creates a sort of a feeling of. Often, yeah, no, oftentimes that's the case, but, you know, so when I was writing or just started the work on mindfulness, it felt to me that it was just mundane creativity and that when you talk about creativity, there's too much attention on the product and this is attention to the process and that it made me think, you know, this is what you just brought to mind, that if I generate Einstein's theory of relativity, so the world is not going to applaud me, but for me, it can be very creative and mindful. So you've got, you know, both ends going, you have the people who, for whom it is brand new, the people who like to think it's brand new, but they're just putting new wine in old bottle or old wine in new bottles. And then the people where it doesn't matter whether the bottle is new or old, whether the wine is new or old, but the way I'm tasting it makes it a brand new experience. No, that's very important. And I think that it's important to stance that when you're saying attention to the new, we're not talking about the last Zara collection, we're really talking about the fact that at every instant, the world is changing. When you take, when you see a time lapse video, right? You see the time lapse, right? You see that. But, and that again, it's just for our philosophical followers that there's a lot of white head there and process philosophy. Bergson who said, I'm not just name dropping here because it's very beautiful for him. Creation was first and foremost, an emotion. And there is this emotion of attunement to the creative flow of the universe and of the multiverse around us. And that's what you're talking about. Yes, more or less. More or less? More or less. And so I'm going to go again. So there's a sentence we talked about that. The more we know, the more blind we become. Yeah, that people are oblivious to the fact of these changes. So we just said everything is changing, yet our expectations hold things still. And then we confuse the stability of our mindsets, the stability of these expectations for what's actually happening. And so now you, since it seems in any course with everything else you're saying, because Voltaire made clear, clearer in French than I'm going to in English, but that you don't know it, it's all uncertain and that's uncomfortable, but so be it. Now you tell us how he actually said it. Right, so I was identified for the French that I am. I thought I could disguise my accent, but and so people might wonder, all right, okay, so how do you change? How do you become more aware? And there's a sentence that sort of gives the first clue. There are others, but you say, it's about going from reference to preference already. So you focus on what is intriguing for you, right? It's sort of a almost a cogito, your mindfulness thing, right, I think that or I am mindful therefore I am. Yeah, yeah, and the reference to preference was really about how the more we notice of something, the more we come to like it. And so that it's more mindful you are, the more not just open you are, but the more pleased you are with the world you're living. So we did some of these things like we took people who hated head metal music and people who hated classical music and people who hated football. We had a lot of haters. We take all these activities, people who hate them. We have one group just do it, listen, watch whatever it was or notice one new thing about it. And the group noticed three new things. Another group noticed six new things. Doesn't matter what you're noticing, it's smart, silly, but the more you notice, the more you like the thing that you're noticing. And so you and that thing somehow form a different kind of relationship. You're not separate from the world around you. To go back, because this is one of the things, and I think this is consistent with Socrates, that behavior sense, this is very important, 100. That behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else the actor wouldn't do it. And that when we recognize that, so instead of when you think presuming, you know why they're doing it from the context in which it's embedded. And that if you actually ask yourself how to make sense out of that. So for instance, you may not like me because I'm so gullible. Well, from my perspective, I'm trusting. I can't stand you, Lewis, I only know you a few minutes, but that's just so inconsistent. But from your perspective, you're flexible. And it turns out that for every single negative characterization, there's an equally potent but oppositely balanced alternative. For every negative thing, there's a positive way of looking at it. And that then all of our relationships change. And our relationship to ourselves, self changes. You know, to be gullible, but would you like me to be less trusting? Probably not. Hmm. No, but I think that I almost hear some sort of a message of perhaps not universal law, but some sort of a harmonization of relationships because indeed, if I try to step out of my ingrained dislikes, I might start noticing and then I might, if not, fully appreciate, I might understand why others appreciate. Yeah, and I think that it's that, and we were talking before about thinking one in one as always too, so you don't think about it, you don't pay attention to it, you look down upon people who don't know that. This is the interpersonal version. Right. You know that where we also have people set up as superior, you know, more or less superior to other people without recognizing the sense that their behavior makes in its own context. So that, you know, that when you become more mindful and the way that I, who people will take notice of, you be, and less judgmental of yourself. And so that just opens up all sorts of positive interactions. Okay, a first possible critique here. And I'm sure you have a correct answer to it, but the paradox is like, okay, I become mindful and I start seeing that I could like everything. Isn't there a risk there someone might say of a sort of a dissolution of the self or sort of you lose your own character? And, oh gee, you know, I think that when you're a little kid and you don't have a clear sense of self and then you become socialized or whatever and you have a sense of yourself, there's a higher order where you're just not concerned with yourself, you know, concern with self to me suggests a lack of self-esteem. When you really have high self-esteem, you're not a steaming, you're just being. So, so there. Okay, but my question was also, and I see that it sort of connects with what you just said. So it connects with the idea of flow, I said. But my question was also on the creative side regarding to style, right? We often say that when an artist has style, she knows exactly what she wants to do and it likes all sorts of other things. Yeah, you know, I remember when I started painting and somebody commented on my style and that was, oh, I didn't know I had a style and I was very excited about it. But if you were here, you came into my studio, if you thought that having a specific way of doing something, you know, when you can tell, you know, this is a Picasso, this is a Mondrian, whatever, you would either conclude that your thoughts about needing to have a specific style or wrong or I'm schizophrenic because, you know, what I do, it represents what I'm feeling at, you know, at the moment and my feelings are varied and so the quote style will vary. And I don't know, I think, you know, that, I mean, Monet was able to paint the same water lilies thousands of times, you know, and because he was mindfully paying change in the sunlight or, you know, or whatever it is. But I think to keep that feeling of novelty when you're doing the same thing over and over and over again is probably gonna be hard for people. And I think it's fun experimenting. But I don't think there's a right way, you know, the important thing is to recognize it almost doesn't matter what you do, what matters is the way you do it. And if you do it mindfully as opposed to mindlessly, the ramifications, the advantages are, you know, are enormous. Right. No, and I think that's, you speak of being authentic and I think that's what I really appreciate in your practice of painting. And I encourage people to go at least see some images on online of your paintings, is the idea that you don't need to really care about did my, does this painting resemble my previous painting, right? But that's also, here I'm trying just not to agree all the time, just to keep a dynamic, right? Although I do tend to agree, but someone would say, oh yeah, but that's because she's a professor and she paints on her spare time as opposed to a professional artist who needs some sort of like to brand herself. On the other side, we can say, look, when she's a professor, she only talks about mindfulness all the time. So she does have a time. No, she doesn't. Although that's cute. Because I mean, mindfulness is a superordinate category. You know, no matter what you're doing, as I said, you're doing it mindfully. So it's hard to get away from it. So yeah, so in some sense, yes. But putting that aside, I don't think that there's a right way of doing things. And, you know, I tell the story in the on becoming book, a friend of mine who drinks too much. And so she first saw the art and she was a fancy art collector, the African art. And so she saw one of my paintings early on. She goes, now there's something there on, you know, there's something that I don't think you're Rembrandt, okay? Why should I think I'm Rembrandt? But I didn't say to her, because I didn't think she would, she was a mistake to hear it. And I wouldn't say it to most people because they might not understand what I mean by it. But, and Rembrandt isn't me. And that if I'm true to myself, no one can do me better. And I would rather be an original Ellen Langer than a, you know, a millionth Rembrandt, you know, which is not denying the skill of the great artists, you know, that have been in existence. But the painting brings me great joy. And so that's why I do it. But I do it also as a psychologist, which is that something will happen. And then I ask myself, well, did this just happen to me? Or has this had some more general truth to it? So an example, and I think I talk about this in the Army Coming book, I was painting and I accidentally dipped the paintbrush into the wrong color. Whatever that means is ridiculous. But, and I looked up, oh no. And I take a paper towel and I start rubbing it open, wiping it off. And I mean, these were cabinets in the background. And it actually, to my eye, made it look better. Okay, so theory, psychology, which was if you make a mistake, first of all, mistakes are good things because the only way you're not going, you know, if you make a mistake, that means you are mindless and you're better off becoming aware that you're mindful. Now, if you go forward, this becomes complicated, but I'm gonna tell you anyway, if you go forward rather than go back, it turns out that now you're, whatever you're doing, there's the imprint of that mindfulness. So we have symphony orchestras, art essays, you know, that we make people make a mistake, they go forward and incorporate that mistake and they end up with a superior product. Okay, so that led to a whole different theory of decision-making, which is in brief. So the only way you can make a mistake is if you have a rigid plan, right? Because if you say I'll sort of and then you do something else, it's nothing, but it's when you say, this is what I'm gonna do. And to recognize that that plan was just a decision moments before. And for it to be a decision means there was uncertainty. Now, what happens with us, we make decisions and then we freeze and act as if, this is the only answer. Forgetting that just recently, we had no idea what we wanted, what the answer was going to be. Anyway, so the short of this long story is that I go back and forth between painting and then writing and doing my research. And it's fun. I mean, my first painting was on a shingle and it was a woman on a horse, to my mind, racing through the woods. And I thought afterwards, wow, was she in the woods because I was painting on wood? Normal people don't ask themselves these questions, but I had another painting where of this alcove I have in my house in the cave and I'm there and my dearest friend is there and she is reading and I'm leaning forward with the book in my lap rather than reading. And I had no idea that this is what I was painting when I started. And that was the reality of the relationship where I'm trying to get her attention. So what was interesting to me is I think I'm painting us in the chair as reading. And then I'm just totally lost engaged in what I'm doing. And then afterwards it tells me a whole other story. Some of the things that mattered to me that I didn't realize at the moment. Anyway, it's fun. Yes. And I mean, in the book, I see that you have some sort of experimental curiosity, even psychological curiosity when you paint such, for example, that when your colleague told you that I think it was the legs or some piece of furniture that didn't look right. And then you corrected it, but then you realized no, actually from a certain perspective. It's more interesting. That was right, right? And you do right. Reconsider the mistake and decide to take advantage of it. Yeah, but when you start the game or for me, when I started, since I had no formal training and your listeners should know that this is intuitive art, we'll say, self-taught, different, much of what you'd see in a museum. So I didn't know of the painting of the dogs playing poker. And so I painted my own dogs and people playing poker, oblivious to that painting. Or you thought you didn't know it. Yeah, no, I really didn't know it. Of course, who knows, deep in the recesses, I might have seen it, but at any rate, my table was floating in the air. And when I realized that, then I thought, oh, so I painted it again, grounding the table, making it look more like a table in a room with people sitting around it and dogs sitting around it. And it wasn't interesting any longer. And so that happened a lot when someone would tell me, because I would seek out advice from people to get a sense of what I was doing. Like I had this young boy bringing groceries to this woman sitting on a bench. That was what was in my mind. Now, she was close, he was far. He was very large, she was small. So a friend said, that can't be, the perspective is all wrong. And I thought, oh, yeah, but that's because the fact of him bringing the groceries is the main event, you know? And so then I changed it. And then I changed it back. I said, no, the other is nicer. One of my friends who's a very good artist says, why do you listen to people? I don't know. I mean, that's what I do for a living, I guess. Exactly. And so, but there's a lot there. I say, I'm just trying to, I'm not gonna monopolize the speech here, but so on decision making, it's even worse because now people are letting AI supposedly make the decision, right? And of course, Jean-Paul Sartre, another philosopher of French, would say that's just bad faith. They are actually making the decision, but they don't wanna take responsibility for the decision. Yeah, because you have to always decide whether to accept that person's decision. Right. And so you're saying that mindfulness is also about making choices, being less reactive. I didn't think that this talk was gonna be about connecting mindfulness to philosophers, but Nietzsche is pretty big on saying reacting is really bad, you need to act. And so you're right. When we make more choices, you're less reactive. Yeah, but it's fine. I mean, just, we don't have time now, maybe in the future, but I've written a lot about this in other places and not in the on becoming book. My decision theory, the mindful decision theory can be summarized or the bottom line to it is rather than spend time trying to make the right decision, we should make the decision right. So we can work back to start and everybody else. It doesn't matter what the option is because you're always deciding about something unknown in the future. And most people live their lives as if the future is going to be a replication of the past, which typically it's not. So we always use yesterday's solutions to solve today's problems. Mindfulness preaches a different way of being. And that's a real problem because so I do a little bit of philosophical health counseling with a multinational called Vattenfall, which produces energy in Europe, mostly in Sweden. And there are a lot of engineers. But some of them are really aware of their sort of biases and one of those biases is precisely to try to gather as much data as possible before we take a decision. And of course, what happens is that they never take a decision or if they take a decision, it's actually sometimes not even related to the data. So here's a way to argue with him or not only is there no endpoint to the amount of information you could consider relevant information, but it's also the case that each piece of information can be understood in multiple ways. And so even if we take what I said before about, are you, am I gullible or trusting? Now, if you wanna make a decision, should we be friends? It's very easy when you're adding things up if you seem me as trusting when you say, okay, we should be friends. But what if you see me as trusting and gullible? Well, then it cancels out. And so with every potential consequence, you have the exact same thing, but there's a way that consequence is good, better and different. It all depends on how you understand it. So you can't add up costs and benefits to figure out what to do. And that's okay. Again, flip a coin, use some, I don't know, you can say that you can make the decision, the second option that occurs to you. It doesn't matter what it is. And I suggest then make it right. There's people, you see decision-making, oh, I'll keep quiet, but you got me all excited now. I'm excited too, but I'd like to finish. That, this is another biggie, but that prediction is an illusion. And so all decision-making relies on the presumption that you can predict. Because if you can predict, then what are you deciding? So I do this little thing in my advanced decision-making class at Harvard, and I'll say to people, okay, I've been teaching a version of this class for 40 years. I've never missed a class. What is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week? When we go around the room, and these are Harvard students, they won't say 100%, say sweet things like 97%, as if there's some calculation they did. But so essentially they all say 100%. Now I say, okay, let's go around again, but this time I want each of you to give me a good reason why I might not be here. Always the first person says, well, you've always been here. You deserve the time off. The next person says, your car got a flat tire. The next person said your dog had to go to the vet. We get 12, depending on how many people in the room, 12 to 16 good reasons. Then I say, okay, what is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week? And now the 100% drops to 50%. People are wonderful after the fact, making sense of what's going on. Going forward, there are too many possibilities. And so if you can predict, and I need more time to persuade you fully of that, but if you can't predict, then decision making makes no sense. But here there's a very interesting, because I was willing to ask you a question five minutes ago. And in fact, it's sort of the same than I want to ask you now. Five minutes ago, you said, it doesn't matter the critics, because I'm just trying to do... I'm not even trying. You're going to say I'm not trying. I'm being ill and longer when I paint. So there's a notion of identity here that I want you to hold. And then you were talking about decision making. And so the first question was, but it's a little bit the same idea of the dissolution of identity. Might not be the self, but this idea that if you're authentic, doesn't that mean that you're sort of on the pathway of unveiling who Ellen Langer is genuinely? That's the first question. If you can hold it, make it to the second. I can stop here if it's too long. You want to answer that one? And then I'll keep the second. You have a different question. I'm going to give me the second one. Yeah, so the second is, in the Middle Ages, the French aristocracy invented this idea of the motto, right? And so it was this idea that spread around the world that if you had a motto that expressed your mission on earth, like for example, John Dark was in the name of the king in the sky, which was very powerful for her because then she could talk to kings in on earth at equal level. So that motto helped people maintain a sense of their vision, mission on earth, which they repeated daily, not to close themselves to what could happen around them, but sort of to filter their awareness. So it's a sort of dialectics there of being me and in anger. And at the same time, because I'm trying to be me, I can perhaps be more aware to new things. Or am I? Yes, no, that's all very interesting. I think that the me that you're talking about is something from the outside looking at me. The, as the actor of the actions, I'm not trying to be anything. I'm just being. And that certainly if I'm, oh, we can take silly examples that you have your favorite stories and every time you meet someone new, you tell your favorite stories. So that's something that you're doing that other people aren't doing, not the same stories. So that can make it look like there's a you. But I really think, as I said before about these three levels, and in general, this is the way I think about the world. We'll start in three levels of sophistication. It's not really about sophistication, the first level. So let's take, you see some, an old person drops their cane. So what do you do? You're a bore. You don't anything, level one. Level two, you Russian to pick up the cane to help her. Level three, you don't do anything. You watch because she's going to feel better if she picks up the cane herself. So level one and three are not doing anything, but they're so different. You know, so you have little kids, a different example. Little kids are uninhibited. They haven't learned the rules. Level two, almost everybody we know is inhibited. Level three, hopefully you get to the point in life where you become disinhibited. Now, lots of these older folk, I'm a part of this group. It's not that they don't know the rules. It's that they no longer care about the rules. And so being disinhibited can look like uninhibited, but again, it's for a whole different reason. We can take all your famous philosophers that you've talked about, and we can have level one, people who don't know who they are, haven't read level two, people who become obsessed with their work. Level three, people who say, you know that if I allow myself a certain way of being in this world, I'll come to all of the information myself. So they're both attempting to exactly who said what, but again, very different. And the problem in this world, as I say it, one of the problems is that there are a few people at this level three and that people at level two see them and missee them as level one. And then at the way to move beyond. But so part of this, when you're young, you don't have a style to go back to what you're saying before. You don't know the rules. Level two, now you're playing by the game, playing it well or not well. And that when you get beyond that, I think that it's just all open territory. So you can go and you can paint, if you want to stick with that, in oils and you can be very realistic and then you can turn around and do something very abstract, which Picasso did and so on. So it's certainly not heard of to change styles, but. But young people, you could tell you this. I really understand this idea of, you know, genuine region as some sort of liberation, but I'm too afraid because I'm young, right? Is it something that comes when you have a certain age where you know that you have some form of security? Or is it possible? I'm going to make a confession. I think I'm too creative. And that put me in a lot of trouble when I was young because I had a hard time just giving the expected standard because I could do it. And but in some situations in life, you do need to deliver that normality. And it's sometimes hard. Yeah, but you make the choice and that's what you were in doing as a kid. You know, you can say this is a situation where, well, I'm going to draw within the box or whatever the margins, or I don't care. Nothing forces you if you can see things that other people don't see. In other words, someone says to me, how much is one in one? In many circumstances, I'll probably just say two. But that doesn't mean that I don't know that there are many circumstances where that's not true. And I think that you felt squash suffocated because of the schools. And that's what I said originally that schools are suffocating more so than educating students all over the world. So I tell this story. I've told this so many times, I don't have a feeling of its truth anymore. Whether this is how I learned this or not, but I was at this horse event. And this fan asked me, could I watch his horse because he was going to go get his horse a hot dog? You know, well, I'm Harvard Yale all the way through. Nobody knows better some as well, but nobody knows better that horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. Good. Sure, I'll watch your horse. He goes, he comes back with a hot dog and the horse ate it. And everything changed, everything. And so you can follow the rules and be aware that they may be silly. If they're harmful to you or somebody else, I say don't follow the rules, which is what you did with your career and you seem to be doing just fine, rather than give up your soul to people whose rules or visions that were based on an earlier time that might have made sense in some circumstances. And clearly didn't in others. So, you know, once they break the rules, what I say is whose rules are they? And I use this example in one of my health class where I make clear, you know, you have insurance companies have to decide what is a drug, whether they're going to reimburse you for the drug. And so that means how serious is the disorder or disease. And, you know, so you have to have people make this decision. So let's say the drug is Viagra. And the people on this committee making this decision with the insurance company are all 50-year-old men versus all nuns. My guess is if they're nuns, they're going to be less inclined, you know, to pay for the Viagra than if they're a lusty 50-year-old man. The point is there's always somebody behind it who has made the rule. And when you reveal that, it gives you much more latitude, you know, that for everything that is was at one point a decision. And for it to be a decision, as I said, that means it was uncertainty. And if there was uncertainty, it means there are alternative ways of doing things. So every time something doesn't work, I think change it. No, indeed. We could say you are a dangerous politician disguised as a respectable Harvard professor. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. These advices are, and of course people, you write in your book, for example, and that's André Gide, the French writer, you write one, quoting him, one does not discover new lands without consenting to the sight of the shore for a very long time. Right. So it does sound a bit risky, right? Well, for sure. But it's that or living a life where you're painting by numbers, you know, which, so to me it's an easy decision. Right. I'm glad that you mentioned numbers because I have a slight problem and I would like to collaborate with them. I have a slight problem with psychologists. They, a lot of them seem to be what I call a rhythmomaniac, right? They want to crunch numbers. They want to, you know, questionnaires. How do you combine, as a psychologist, you had to also do some quantitative... I'm a crunching, sure. Right. Sure. But you, you know, you always stay in charge. The numbers don't rule. And that, you know, that if it's garbage in, it's garbage out when you're doing things like, you know, that's what they say about factor analysis. You know, you get all these things, what are the four or five things that are really going on here? I think that much of what I did actually is very different. I mean, I didn't discover this early on. I thought I'm doing the same kind of studies as everybody else is. And then I realized that much of the research that's done is descriptive. It's trying to tell you what's happening now. And much of my work is trying to see how we can be better, how it can be different. You know, so that's how I came to the counterclockwise study. This is where we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier. And old men live there as if they were their younger selves. And without medical intervention, we got improvement in hearing, vision, strength, memory, and they look noticeably younger. And, you know, you wouldn't use those measures if you didn't think that you were going to affect that sort of a change. Even the earliest nursing home study where we gave people choices and plans and found out that they were living longer. They all have the same sort of flavor. And we have some fun studies now. We have, I probably shouldn't mention it, but I will. I can't give you any information about it because we don't have the data yet. But the counterclockwise was to take people back in time. So now we're taking people at different ages, young people forward in time. Because I believe people are capable of doing far more than they think they can do. And in fact, we've done that. I would say to people, do as many of whatever and they do it. And then I'd take another group of people and I'd ask them to do twice as many as those and they would do it and so on. We have a theory of fatigue, which is that you get tired around two thirds into a task. So we have people do push-ups. We'll have new jumping jacks, it's easier. And we'll do 100 jumping jacks. You tell me when you're tired. Why don't you get tired at around 67? I have another group of people going do 200 jumping jacks. When do they get tired? I ran 138 or whatever, twice a period. And so I'm pushing the envelope, but I believe fatigue, satiation, virtually everything is a function of the way we think of it. Right, so it's the double-edged mind over body. Because sometimes- Well, it's not even mind over body. Yeah, no, no, but because my theory is mind and body are one. Right. Therefore, wherever you mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So we have lots of studies where we put the mind in strange places and take our measurements. And we know that people have been worried. Psychologists, researchers, oops, did I just lose you? Nope, you just, there we go. There's just more light. It was an enlightened part. I'm gonna say something profound, that's why I needed to add the light. But what was I saying? Oh, yes. That researchers in the past couldn't explore the extent to which we can control our health because they were always looking for the mediating mechanism. Meaning, how do you get from this thing, a thought, this fuzzy thing to something material called the body? And so that problem has kept things at bay. I say, these are just words, mind, body, who cares. Let's put them together. Where you put the mind, you're putting the body. And we've done really very unusual sorts of experiments all starting with that counterclockwise study, which we've replicated all over the world, not all over, but in many countries in the world. So it's true. And it's a very, there was supposed at some point to even to be a movie with Jennifer Aniston, right? Jennifer Aniston was playing me, yeah. But it turns out, the other day, somebody referred to it as a very famous study. And I thought, okay, well, I guess it is a famous study. And the reason I can say that is that if you watch The Simpsons, The Simpsons go to Havana. They actually talk about the study. So we didn't get the Jennifer Aniston movie, but... You got The Simpsons, which makes it more iconic. Maybe. But I like the idea of unity, which is very Spinozian. Sorry, not last, hopefully last... I was waiting, you know, but, Louis, I must tell you, as you were going through all of them, I was waiting for Spinoza. Right. Because that's the love he's got. Yes. Tell people why. And it's interesting because Spinoza had this idea also that the core emotion from which all others derive is joy. And in a way, this is what you write in all your books, right? The Joie de vivre. And that's a little pause because we all aspire to that. But there is, and I lost myself. See, I got mindless in this idea of joy. But you speak about renaissance, which is connect close to that joy. I like to, so you research mindfulness. I research what I call philosophical health, which I'm discovering are quite close. And it's the idea also that we would like to have a certain echo, coherence, harmony between our values, our sort of the way we interpret the world, our worldview, whatever that means, and the way we act. And very often, when I do my consultations, I see that we tend to hold beliefs that are contradictory and therefore we act in the world in contradictory ways, which means, which sort of relates to your idea that if we simply pay attention, right? We will perhaps make, not make less mistakes because we said mistakes are important, but at least we will make our own mistakes, right? The ones that nourish our personal destiny. Well, and I said that if we're mindful, we won't make mistakes because we don't have a rigid plan from which we would deviate and result in a mistake. So there's no rigidity in the first place, there's no mistake in the second. But yeah, so philosophical health is interesting. I think that for most of the people that their, it's philosophy at a whole different level. I think that sometimes people are asking, what is the meaning of life? But most of the time, it's, they're just negating their daily lives. And I think that when you say that they're behaving in ways that are inconsistent, that what is it, thesis, antithesis, synthesis would bring Hegel in, that these things, there's a higher order that brings them all together. That I don't know, it doesn't feel right, but I can't think of many instances one way or the other, whether people walking around feeling that they're behaving in ways, yes, okay, people do behave in ways different from the way they wish they would behave. They wish, oh, I wish I didn't say that. Oh, I wish I didn't smoke that cigarette. Oh, I wish I was able to return your email. Yeah, so there they're not doing what they think they should do. For me, I would counsel them and tell them that again, behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else the actor wouldn't do it. It made sense to you to do whatever it is in that situation. And yeah, so I thought, Lewis, that that was going to lead to some profundity. I apologize. No, but I appreciate the rhetorical move in taking the most dogmatic of philosophers Hegel to sort of disqualify philosophical health. I think that actually, this is a very good example because, so Hegel, it's all about dialectics, right? This idea, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I rather speak of Creolectics, which introduces the multiplicity. And in fact, I don't speak of synthesis, I rather speak of anthesis, which is the blossoming of flower. So I do agree that it's not about making people into these sort of rational machines that we cannot be, right? It's that in our everyday life, sometimes we all, like I had this example about this Russian guy, he couldn't understand why at 55, he didn't have a love of his life and he didn't have a child. And I spoke a little bit with him about his, you know, the perceptions of women, et cetera, et cetera. And on the one hand, so he wanted love, which is an idealist position, right? When he spoke of women, he thought that the way to get one is either through money, having a nice suit. So he was holding both an idealist position and a nihilistic one. And so those things are interesting. But I think we are arriving because we've been talking one hour and I've been meaning to ask you a question, which for me is like, perhaps like going too much into like sort of, maybe it's metamindfulness, it's if you were to say now and hopefully you're not, your last words, the final sentence of your life, what would it be? Well, I think I probably would repeat some version of what I've already said, that the way to be in this world, I believe, is to be confident and uncertain. And that will lead you to be mindful. For too many people, their confidence rests on certainty, that's simply wrong. So that's the frequently in error, but rarely in doubt. And that people need not be afraid, let me end with this other, that we can understand our uncertainty in two different ways. And for most people, I know that I don't know, you're acting like you know, therefore I'll pretend and just hope I don't get caught. So that's a personal attribution for uncertainty. What I'm suggesting is people ignore that and they make a universal attribution for uncertainty, which is, I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. And then we can stand tall and be confident and then find out. But the finding out isn't finding out in any absolute sense, because again, everything is always changing, which makes everything continuously exciting. But now you make me think of something else that we could have covered for people, which is that for people to recognize, this is epictetus, that stress, it's the view you take of the event, events are nothing, consequences don't come prepackaged. And so you can see any of them as positive, negative, or neutral. When you recognize that you have this control over the way you're going to experience whatever happens, then not knowing is not scary. Oh my God, what are you gonna say? Will I be able to answer it? Just say, sorry, I don't know. Confidently, it doesn't matter. The point is that all of our interactions with other people at work and with ourselves change when we recognize that we don't know the fun is in trying to find out and that you don't know either. And I can make the world whatever I wanted to be. For every negative, there's an equally potent but oppositely balanced positive alternative. So for me, Lewis, if we get off now, that's good. I'll go and I'll paint. If we stay on now, that's good. I'm enjoying talking to you. Whatever happens is good. But I like the message of learning because I think that's what you're saying also. It's like if I'm able to tell myself, I actually know less than I think I know, I can start learning something new. That's one thing. And the other thing, because people might be willing to get some sort of life advice is all, we didn't speak too much about that, but improvisation seems to be an important correct me if I'm wrong, but... No, no, surely, but I think that there's a lot of it. But in fact, when you said you wanted to talk about the unbecoming book, there's a quick fun story with that. I had sent the book to the publisher's Random House as Mindful Creativity. They sent it back with the title, I'm Becoming an Artist. It was so new in my painting career that I loved being called an artist. It was silly. But the book is really about interpersonal mindfulness and has all the advice. So yeah, so the idea is no matter what you're doing, be there to do it. And that means actively notice and that keeps you happy, healthy, engaged, active. And we have lots of data that the paintings you paint, the products you produce, all bear the imprint of that mindfulness so they all end up better. So in other words, by not paying attention to how good they are, just doing them fully and enjoying them, they end up better. Can't beat that. And I don't want to hold you more because if you said that you were going to be painting, it's probably a little bit more interesting. No, no, I enjoyed this. And this was like a philosophy course. I hadn't thought about many of these people for a long time, so... There could be a book there, you know, Mindfulness and the Philosophers. Let's talk about that some other day. Yeah, that would be great. Okay. Anyway, this was fun. Yes, so really, thank you very much. Usually, so I can end the conversation here unless you have a comment, say anything you would like to add. No, I feel... I mean, it's up to you. Go ahead. Is it good? No, I have nothing else to say. Okay, okay. No, thank you. It was great. Fantastic. All right, good to see you. And we'll talk about that book. Yes, let's keep in touch and do that book. We can announce. Now we need to find the title and then that's 50% of the work. You know, I was a publisher in Paris for many years and I loved the game of finding titles, because very often you find a good title that sort of guides you at least to, you know, like your exercise people to... So what do you think of this? Okay, so I have two titles, a title like this for my new book that I sold to Random House. This is what they bought, which is Why Not? And the Psychology of Possibility. The other, which people love or they hate, is Unimpossible. So to create a new word. Yeah, I think that the conservative, more expected title is Why Not. And there's the book of Why, which is a big hit in AI. Unimpossible, it's less expected. So let me think about it. But yeah, I think I have a preference for... Why not? For an impossible... Oh, really? Yeah, because that's... I told you before that I was too creative. Too strange, right? And my book won't sell, so... I have to fight with the publishers if I use that one. So if it's not, you know, Slam Dunk, I'll probably end up with Why Not. But that's a very... One of the chapters of Impossible. That's a very good conclusion, because how I found you, and how I just a few days ago, I heard about you before, but how I really decided to, let's have a chat, is because I Googled Psychology of the Possible. And I've been writing two articles for there's an encyclopedia coming. It's called the Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Oh, really? Right, and I wrote in there about Creolectical Intelligence and Philosophical Health. And they have... I'll send you the link. They have a lot of interesting stuff and not only psychologists, but philosophers, et cetera. So I think that the concept of the Possible is coming back. So it's a great subtitle is great. Maybe that's the title, the Psychology of the Possible. I used that, you know, I used the counterclockwise, the Psychology of Possibility. Right. And so this will be Why Not, the Psychology of Possibility or Unimpossible, the Psychology of Possibility, that doesn't flow as you. No, because you repeat two times. Okay. Let me think about that. Think about it. And about also our book The Mindful Kogito. That's a bad title. All right. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ellen, thank you very much. My pleasure. You stay well. And let's stay in touch. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.