Speaker 1: It's great to welcome to the program today, Daniel Goleman, who is, of course,
well known for his writings on emotional intelligence, on meditation, a number of other topics that
that are very interesting to me.
It's great to have you on today.
Speaker 5: Thanks, David.
Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: So maybe maybe just to start the conversation, we're hopefully starting to
get to the beginning of the end or the end of the middle or some somewhere closer to
where life will in some ways return to normal vis a vis the pandemic.
But one of the things I've been talking with many people about are kind of speculating
about what the longer term effects might be of this pandemic.
I think certainly some degree of of the feeling that the world is a hostile place which may
connect to some agoraphobia for many people.
People may be realizing that the risks that they were taking before were bigger than maybe
they acknowledged.
And changing behavior going forward.
It's just some ideas.
How are you conceiving of this kind of exit process and what the impacts may be emotionally,
psychologically?
Speaker 5: Well, I see two upsides coming at some point.
One is that.
Everybody's been under tremendous stress because of the lockdown, particularly working parents.
I mean, how do you work from home and manage kids running in and out of your room and,
you know, life goes on.
And that, just as I realize, is the stress level to a point where people may be feeling
emotionally exhausted and that hopefully will be relieved when things ease up.
The second is a kind of disconnect.
We haven't been able to see our friends hanging out in the way we usually do and zoom or Skype
these video conferencing ways of meeting people do something a little weird to the social
circuitry of the brain.
And that is I can't look you in the eye at the same time.
I see your face Speaker 1: if you're right there, either looking
at the camera, if you look at the camera, it looks like you're looking at me, but then
you're not really looking at where you see me on your screen.
Speaker 5: Exactly.
So the disconnect is that there's no eye contact anymore, at least on screen, and we'll be
able to have that again.
What a relief to to the extent we can see people.
And you're right, people still have to be safe.
I'm double vaccinated.
And we just saw some friends outside still with masks.
You know, I'm of an age where I might be vulnerable.
I've got to be very careful and people need to be careful to not just for themselves,
but for other people they love and contact regularly.
But then the big unanswered question is the one you raise, what will be the long term
consequences of having not been able to see people, as usual, I think, on children and
teenagers, because the social and emotional circuitry of the brain is the last part of
the brain to become anatomically mature.
It doesn't get set in place until the mid 20s.
And at every stage, children and teens need something.
There's what's called a five to seven shift when kids prefrontal cortex comes online and
circuitry that allows them to just say no, the emotional impulse gets stronger and stronger.
But then as they develop, they need to be with other kids who the kids learned an immense
amount emotionally and socially from their peers.
And all of a sudden it's gone and we don't know what the consequences would be.
I tend to be an optimist.
I tend to think, well, you know, kids are really adept at remedial learning and I hope
that turns out to be true.
We just don't know Speaker 1: yet from from a strictly mathematical
standpoint, a 30 year old being home for a year and a 60 year old being home for a year
as a proportion of their lives is very different than someone that was six and from six to
seven.
That's that's more than 15 percent of their lives.
Is that kind of relative comparison important in thinking about who might suffer the biggest
impact?
In a sense, Speaker 5: perhaps what that mathematics does
not factor in is the rate at which children might be able to make up for what they didn't
get.
And, you know, you see this children or children's brains are remarkably plastic that way.
So we have a model of the family unit to parents, you know, when a kid or kids as being essential.
But actually the human brain was designed for all kinds of tragedies.
Maybe your parents get killed.
You know, maybe someone else takes care of you.
You can learn the same things from the caretaker that you would have from your parent.
That's the way the brain is designed.
So we'll see how adept kids are at undoing what has been done to them.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've been noticing myself is now is someone who's double vaccinated.
And I'm following all the CDC guidelines, which now include that unless you're in a
big crowd outdoors, you don't have to wear a mask.
President Joe Biden telling us this, the CDC telling us this last year.
But yet I still find myself thinking, even though I know I'm following all the guidelines,
when someone else goes by without a mask, there's a second where my mind does something
where I say, whoa, hold on, this is this is dangerous in some way.
But then I remember hold on a second.
At the worst case, one out of a thousand cases were being transmitted outdoors.
The person's 20 feet away.
I've been conditioned in a sense to perceive danger, maybe where there is not.
Is that something that you expect will persist for some time?
Speaker 5: Well, David, you're very probabilistically oriented.
Yes.
And that's kind of a cognitive control.
You're reframing the situation.
I completely agree.
And not many people can do that.
Lots of people just react viscerally, they don't have the cognitive wherewithal to to
say, well, it's one of a thousand and it's outdoors and so on.
So I think people will be reacting now and for some time from their emotional centers
rather rashly and cognitively.
Speaker 1: You've been doing more and more work, or at least I've been seeing more and
more of your work related to meditation of late.
And I've been studying with great interest some of the research that is done into the
effects of meditation on the brain.
And there are all sorts of different opinions about is the effect overstated or understated
or do we not yet really know whether in the context of the pandemic or not?
Can you talk a little bit about your focus on on meditation and why you think it's an
important thing for in particular now?
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's a natural next step from emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence, as in my mind, has four parts.
There's self-awareness and then using that awareness to manage disturbing emotions well
and marshal positive ones.
Well, it turns out that meditation is a very good tool for doing that.
It is an exercise in self-awareness.
And I just did a book with Richard Davidson, who's a neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin,
and we looked at the very best studies we found from the beginning.
People tend to be more calm and more clear if they meditate and there's a dose response
effect so that the longer you do it, the more hours you put in, the more this seems to happen.
Long term meditators are triggered less often, less severely and recovered more quickly.
We found from the data and very high Olympic level meditators are a whole other thing.
And it turns out that if you do an exercise that increases warm heartedness, compassion
or caring, you become more compassionate, caring.
It's kind of a no brainer.
But it turns out that the part of the brain actually that.
Were those circuits reside, become stronger and that behaviorally you're more likely to
help someone in need.
You're more generous and so on.
So meditation seems to work.
And the second part of emotional intelligence is empathy.
And I'm I'm rethinking emotional intelligence now.
Can I mention my podcast, please?
Of course it's available.
I just started a podcast called First Person Singular, where some of my newest thinking
is shared with people.
And one of the ways I'm rethinking it is in terms of what is empathy.
I know it's cognitive.
I know it's emotional, but it also is empathic concern, which means you care about the other
person, not just, you know, how they think, you know how they feel, but you want what's
best for them.
It's like a parent's love for a child.
And I think this leads to compassion or to that whole unfolding of warm heartedness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what's very interesting to me about this, and I don't want to make
everything political and I'm glad not to, but one of the things that I've been I've
been reading quite a bit about is that on well-designed sort of assessments of the level
of empathy and compassion that are triggered in people when they are told the particular
story or see a particular image, it can very accurately predict one's political leanings
on a sort of general conservative liberal spectrum, as we might imagine it in the United
States applies to Democrats and Republicans.
And then the next question sort of becomes how much of this is nature?
How much is nurture?
How much is the environment you grew up around and kind of what your parents modeled for
you versus is there something in the brain?
And different people have different opinions.
In theory at least, this could be very relevant from a policy standpoint, could it not?
Speaker 5: You know, it reminds me of some data I saw years ago when I was a science
journalist at The New York Times, and it was a behavioral genetic study of different behavioral
variables, one of which was conservatism, which turned out to have a very high heritability,
which suggests that part of this may be in our inherited circuitry, the tendency to want
things to be safe, to want things to be the same, and then translate that into a political
orientation.
And then the policy question becomes a very interesting one, but not one I'm an expert
on.
So I'm going to finesse it.
Speaker 1: Well, no, but I guess I mean, from from the standpoint that is more more relevant
to your work, there is that question of when we say heritability, is it genetically heritable
versus is it culturally heritable?
My instinct would be that and that while there may be a genetic heritability, if you take
a group of kids that are statistically more likely to be Republicans from Utah or something
like that, but you raise them in liberal Massachusetts families, my instinct is that the upbringing
will have a significant impact even on whatever genetic heritability is there.
I don't know.
I'm thinking out loud.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
David, I agree with you.
It's always nurture as well as nature and how kids are brought up or the culture you're
socialized into has a great impact on how you behave, even given, you know, X, Y, Z,
inherited tendency.
So I, I'm with you.
I think it would matter, but we don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you, um, do you take an evolutionary perspective at all on human empathy?
Because I've read a lot one way or the other about the evolutionary advantage of empathy.
And there are there's the position that it's sort of vestigial, that that an advantage
that was at one point relevant may no longer be today.
I don't know.
Is that something you think about?
Speaker 5: Well, I tend to take an evolutionary perspective.
And from my from that point of view, empathy has a real upside, because when humans started
living in groups and cooperating, which takes empathy, teamwork basically made humans the
species that was a standout.
Regrettably, evolution did not foresee the predicament we're in now where our economics,
the everyday things we buy and use, are degrading the ecosystem we depend on to survive.
And I think that will become a more and more compelling reality for younger generations.
As time goes on, I think it will reverberate back into the business world and that corporations
companies will be fine.
It is in their best interest to do things in a better way for the environment because
they want to keep market share and people will care.
Speaker 1: Do you think that there's or is there a particular lens that you think is
a valuable lens to think about the issues you work on that's essentially missing right
now from the national conversation?
In other words, if you are sort of going to the typical news sources and informed by what
people see on social media, some some aspect of thinking about the society in which we
now live, that's not really getting the attention it deserves.
That you think would be a great thing if it did.
Speaker 5: I call it radical transparency and I mean ecological transparency.
And I actually I just did a podcast on this.
It's an idea who I think whose time has come.
Basically right now we have full transparency about the cost of products.
We have zero transparency about the ecological impacts of products.
So if you were to buy a new mike or a new shirt, ideally, and the methodology for this
exists, you could know the full environmental impact of that over its full lifecycle.
And you would know that a point of purchase this this is the ideal and it might happen
one day and I think it may be expedited by younger generations.
The reason being the coming climate crisis, which is being the engine of which has been
our economic system.
Speaker 1: Let's see if we can do an example of that.
So we know that a lot of clothing is now really cheap.
And we intuitively know that part of the reason it's inexpensive is it's produced in countries
with very that pay very low wages.
And that is why we are able to get a shirt for seven dollars that maybe would otherwise
cost thirty dollars.
The idea of the transparency you're talking about would be when you see the seven dollar
price tag of the Sri Lankan made shirt, it might have something there that says the full
product life cycle makes this really a 40 dollars shirt.
Now, I, as the buyer, may not be out of pocket for the additional thirty three dollars, but
it would at least be available to me to know that that cost is part of this purchase.
And it may be more expensive than the 30 dollar US made shirt.
I mean, in theory, to come up with just an example of what you mean.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I would I think that the ecological transparency would probably be
more powerful when you're choosing between a seven dollar and a ten dollars shirt.
And you find out that the ten dollars shirt is made with alternative energy and is made
with cotton, which is not grown in a place where water is super scarce and it's driving
people away because of that.
And the factory that it was made in actually pays a decent wage rather than starvation
wage.
And you may think, well, you know, I'm going to do some good with that extra three bucks
and I'm going to buy the ten dollar shirt rather than the seven dollar shirt.
And I think that will start to show that transparency would shift market share so that the guy who's
making the seven dollars shirt and say, hey, why aren't people buying my shirts and find
out and say, OK, well, I'm going to do this and this and this and then get certified by
an independent body that he's improved and then he's now again competitive with the ten
dollars.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
I mean, I think you're right that the comparison is much easier.
The decision is much easier when it's seven versus ten.
But maybe that's some of the difficulty as well, because I don't you know, I don't know
enough about the production of shirts to know this, but it's conceivable that the difference
would be far bigger.
And so the the financial impact on an individual might be less trivial than maybe seven to
ten dollars might be.
Speaker 5: I actually think that in in the actual competitive arena of companies who
are looking at their supply chain, how they extract, how they manufacture, they would
do incremental changes.
And so, you know, the two seven dollar shirts would say, hey, my civilian shirt doesn't
isn't going to threaten the climate.
That guys is right.
In other words, that's more likely to be the arena.
And, you know, another interesting example is our cell phones.
Everybody's got one these days and.
Who knew that they all have rare earth, as they're called, some of which are mined in
places that have slave labor?
Yes.
Yes, well, darn, you know, what are you going to do about that if we had transparency about
that?
I think that that could change.
Yeah, a lot of ways in which transparency and it's really bizarre because one of the
fundamental principles of the free market economy is transparency.
And there is zero transparency.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, the electric car example is an interesting
one because I think this is being improved upon, but the footprint of making the batteries
is not insignificant.
And then what you do with the batteries after the fact is I think we're closer to solving
that.
But the disposal is also significant.
And that is is completely opaque, I think, to most most electric car buyers.
Speaker 5: And plastics is the same.
If you were to do a lifecycle assessment of plastic and that's what this method is called,
it would look like plastic bags are better than brown paper bags, but that's because
the lifecycle assessment does not include end of life.
Right.
And plastics, as we now are finding out, are in us and fish and birds and everything else.
And it's a huge problem that we had not realized.
So anyway, you asked what's missing and I think that's what's missing.
Speaker 1: That's a great example.
Yeah, that's a that's a beautiful note to to to end on.
We've been speaking with Daniel Goleman.
We will link to the podcast as well as some some of his books.
Daniel, such a pleasure having you on.
I so appreciate your time, David.
Speaker 5: It's a real pleasure.
Thank you very much.