SP5 Special Edition Agile Brain: Justice, Ethics, And The Search For Meaning

We trace how justice, ethics, and transcendence shape a meaningful life and why chasing happiness fails while purpose endures. JD Pincus shares research, history, and a practical tool to surface unmet needs and align action with values.

• defining the spiritual domain and why it matters
• rules to ethics to transcendence as a growth ladder
• evidence for principle-driven sacrifice across species and cultures
• history’s awakenings fueling social change and justice
• trauma’s link to purpose and giving
• the hedonic treadmill versus durable well-being
• moral gray areas, disgust, and context effects
• risks of ends-justify-means thinking
• AI, misinformation, and ethical decision-making
• how Agile Brain reveals unmet emotional needs
• applying insights at work and in life

For anyone listening today, we would love to give you a complimentary assessment from Agile Brain. For those that want to go even deeper, we can talk with people about having a discovery call on the assessment results with a certified coach
Make sure they can go to any online bookstore and Amazon to get The Emotionally Agile Brain

Chapters

• 0:00 Entering The Spiritual Domain
• 3:34 History’s Case For Higher Principles
• 9:04 Religion Versus Spirituality
• 13:29 From Rules To Transcendence
• 19:39 Meaning, Suffering, And Purpose
• 25:54 Hedonic Treadmill And Real Happiness
• 32:19 Justice, Ethics, And Trauma Links
• 37:29 When Ends Justify Means
• 43:14 Disgust, Context, And Moral Judgments
• 50:09 Declining Knowledge And Distraction
• 56:04 AI, Truth, And Ethical Use

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

Welcome to a special edition of What's on Your Bookshelf with your host, Denise Russo.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our special edition series where we're living out loud the pages of this book called The Emotionally Agile Brain. It's about mastering the 12 emotional needs that drive us and written by Dr. JD Pincus. We are together exploring this book. I'm so honored and happy and elated that I get this time one-on-one with you, JD, to be able to ask questions that I personally have about these chapters. I hope it's resonating as well with the listeners. We were talking just before we got started with our episode for today about the importance of moving through these realms into now part four of the book. So, how about you uh share with us how to set the stage for where we're headed today?

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

Sure. And again, thanks for having me on here. Uh, this is really a pleasure for me, and it's a lot of fun to talk about. Uh, and this is where I think, you know, it really kind of comes together. You know, we've talked a lot about the the motives of the self, you know, the need for safety and authenticity, the need to kind of become your best self, the needs in the material world of autonomy and immersion and material success, the social domain of talking about inclusion and caring uh and esteem and sort of being uh looked up to as an example. And now we kind of have the culminating piece, which is the spiritual domain. Now we're going from self and social, sort of traditional boundaries of who I am as a person versus you and material concerns to now things that are immaterial, things that are you can't see. These are ideas, ideals, principles uh that drive human behavior. Uh and uh one thing I'd say about this, uh, first of all, is that traditional psychology basically dismissed all of this uh as basically either unimportant or um or non-existent uh by some. Uh, you know, Sigmund Freud uh said grudgingly, you know, that he it he admitted that people experienced what he called um uh uh oceanic feelings of boundlessness. That was what he called it. And but he he basically immediately in the same breath diminished it as it was a a immature craving to go back to the womb. That was how he saw it. Uh you know, Emile Durkheim also uh and and Karl Marx also basically dismissed it as a sort of you know the a set of controls that are used by you know the the powers that be to subjugate the masses, etc. Uh the the problem with that kind of dismissal is it it ignores a lot of really important evidence. First of all, you have so many people, so many examples throughout history and in daily life and in the news of people who are willing to suffer for principle. You have people who you know set themselves on fire, you know, to protest things, you have people who who dedicate their lives to working with uh you know lepers and you know, people who do things that are that are really not driven by any kind of reward, as we would define it classically in psychology. Uh and the reward is entirely theoretical and spiritual. It's something you can't see, it's something, it's a feeling you get. It's a it's a uh knowing that you're living in it in accordance with higher principles. Um we also see that animals in the animal world, uh, you know, rats, bats, Reese's monkeys, uh will sacrifice food. They will go way out of their way to help uh uh you know a sort of you know uh someone else in their species that's in trouble, someone that doesn't have food, they'll be willing to take shocks in order to feed some another. These are not very nice experiments, but uh they make the point that uh you know suffering for principle exists not just in the human world, but in the animal world. It's also the stubborn fact that every human society ever described, you know, even to prehistory, always left evidence of some sort of religious practice. So something that that is sort of spontaneously evolves in every single human society. And now they're even finding it in non-human. They found it in uh Neanderthals recently. There was a burial cave that was discovered in Africa that where people were buried with the tools and things and with various symbols of uh you know, basically preparing them for the afterworld. So it's it's not even unique to humans, but it's it's so pervasive. It's clearly representing a need that we have, you know, some sort of spiritual impulse that we have to try to make sense of why we're here. You know, what does it all mean? Where are we going? Um and uh it also shows up, you know, in in history, you know, there's these spiritual awakenings, at least in American history, certainly in world history, but uh you know, in the book I talk about American history, how really uh the American Revolution was immediately followed the first Great Awakening, which was a huge sort of mass uh you know um experience of the spirit, you know, basically, you know, uh promoting this concept of individual liberty and and uh and uh you know uh the freedom to have follow the religion that that you know it let you follow your conscience, uh and that that led immediately to uh basically seeking freedom from uh colonial power. Um you had the second Great Awakening occur, you know, in like the 1820s through 1840s or ish. That then led to the irrepressible conflict of the Civil War, where more human life, more American lives were lost than in all other wars combined. Why were we so willing to fight and die? It was basically on this insight that that everyone has a soul and that it's not okay to treat people as property. Uh and then coming out of that, you had all the temperance movements, uh women's suffrage movements, all of it coming from a spiritual place. Then you had a third Great Awakening after World War II, uh, where you had the civil rights movement, all led by religious leaders. Again, not an accident that all those things started in the kind of spiritual domain and then led to action on the ground. So that's sort of broadly my argument for why this matters so much.

SPEAKER_01: 7:57

I know that we'll get into the discussion today around how this applies to business, but before we get there, a couple of questions for you in regards to the beginning here is that there seems to be, especially when you tell the historical stories about how America has evolved, that there's a contrast between religion versus spirituality, meaning that religion seemingly causes separation, war, and fighting worldwide, even with what we're seeing in the news today in places that we would not be visiting. And yet faith or the spiritual side is very personal and it's relational and it's about love. And so when we talk about this section of motives of the spiritual world, I'm curious because this isn't about a religion, it's about this transcendence, like you were telling me earlier about how when we move from justice to ethics to transcendence, which are the three sections of this part of the book. And and listeners, I really encourage you to please just get into the book and read it and deep dive for yourself because we're going to attempt to go through what looks like about 70 pages in a very short amount of time. There's no way that we could cover all of it. But but I want to touch on that with you, JD, because you had said something profound to me right before we started, which is my understanding of how to apply these pages for myself. And one thing you said was that as we look at the levels of whether you're looking at agile brain as a whole or each of these chapters, that at the foundation you're looking at how do you apply this. Then you mentioned after you apply it, you figure out, well, how can you challenge your thinking about these things? So maybe you get the basic understanding. And once you understand it, how can you challenge your understanding? And then from there, you move beyond the rules and you get into this transcendental part. So even though transcendence is the third part of this chapter, it almost seems like it's the stair step of each of the other sections as well. That you have the base layer, then you challenge the thinking of that base layer, and then you move beyond what you think and about how it goes beyond yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 10:22

Yeah, that's right. That's sort of the meta structure of how the levels work, is that you kind of start off sort of um you know with the most basic resources and sort of applying the rules of that thing, whether that rule is, you know, the rules of survival for security, the rules of how do you get work done in autonomy, how do you make relationships, you know, start in uh inclusion. And in uh the spiritual domain, you know, what are the basic rules of right and wrong? You know, sort of the Ten Commandments type rules of don't kill people, don't steal, that sort of thing. Um, and that you're in all of those domains, you're basically then transcending that and then applying it to a sort of uh you know real world in the moment kind of experience, uh, whether it's you know, sort of in in the self-domain, it's sort of becoming your authentic self and saying, okay, I can, I am, I'm safe enough to really be who I am. Uh in the work world of um of material, you know, you're basically going from autonomy to immersion, saying, okay, I know how to make this work. Now I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna make it happen. You know, now that I'm included in the social domain, I'm gonna care for other people and they're gonna care for me. And in the spiritual domain, it's that transcendence from, you know, I know what the difference between right and wrong to I'm now I'm gonna apply it to the gray areas of life, and I'm gonna sort of restrain self-interest in the way that I think is best, in the way that is uh that is, you know, basically applying right and wrong to areas where there are trade-offs. And and I think that makes a ton of sense. And uh then finally you get to that top layer, and there it is about sort of reaching for the the end, you know, it's the brass ring in each one of those domains. You know, once in within myself, I can kind of be who I really am. I want to be the best version of myself. That's the brass ring in the self. Uh in the material domain, you know, I have the permission and the ability, and I've got the uh the focus and the immersion. Now I'm reaching for success. I want to achieve some kind of important goal uh materially. Uh in the social domain, I'm going from you know, sort of feeling included, including others, caring for people, being cared for by people, and then reaching for basically reputation, you know, that uh that that uh you're respected, uh validated, affirmed, you know, people uh you know, set you as an example. Uh in the so in the spiritual domain, it's again starting with the basic right and wrong, building on that with a bit of uh, you know, kind of applying that to the gray areas, the sort of aesthetic judgments about you know morality, and then finally to abandoning that and saying, you know, what's what's how do I go beyond sort of conventional morality to begin to think about how am I connected to the universe? How am I connected, how are we all connected in a sort of you know unbroken unity uh with each other, with all life, with the universe, with God, you know, with everything. And you can think of sort of you know Spinoza's philosophy is sort of very applicable here of monism, that that there's sort of only one substance, you know, and it's it's everything interconnected, uh, which is almost a kind of Buddhist, you know, type philosophy. But very popular among you know a lot of scientists, including uh Einstein, uh, because it actually fundamentally sort of makes sense that that uh that this separation that we live with every day uh is kind of an illusion.

SPEAKER_01: 13:55

I was watching this video, I think it was this morning, and it was from a doctor, and he was talking about something like mitochondria and cells and how sugars work and the way that that there's there's ways that your cells have to unlock themselves for good sugars to get in, but not too much sugar, or else it gets blocked out. And it was fascinating to watch because it got me thinking about something you just said, which is if you don't know how all these things work, even things you can't see, then you can't possibly optimize the way that you live. And if you take it on a bigger scale, like what you're saying, is that isn't it really that if you don't, if you aren't a person that that thinks about or maybe is curious about what your purpose is here, and you really don't have a purpose, then maybe it's easier to neglect things like um common uh terms of morality or ethics or those types of things. Because if you don't think your life has a purpose or meaning, then what's the purpose of life? And for you to move through it in a way that matters. You mentioned in the book about Victor Frankel's book, Man's Search for Meaning, and he was going through a very unethical, harsh, terrible time, and yet still found something beautiful in the midst of tragedy.

SPEAKER_00: 15:23

Yeah, exactly. And and he's not the only one. Um, interestingly, uh the the uh the founder of psychosynthesis, uh Sagioli, uh, was an Italian psychologist who's actually a student of Freud's, and he was terribly persecuted in Mussolini's Italy, and uh he ended up having to go and retreat with his family and live in a cave in the Alps uh you know to hide from the authorities. And his only child, you know, died of tuberculosis or pneumonia, one of those in in the cave. And he eventually was arrested. Uh why the charge was because he was praying for peace. That was the thing he did wrong. Uh but while he was in prison, he really kind of went deeply into himself, very similar to Frankel, at around the same time, and came out with this sort of philosophy of you know, uh basically meaning and and purpose and finding uh a sort of spiritual basis for your life, um, and then kind of you know, wrapping everything else around that core about sort of you know will and and and peace and unity and and interconnectedness. So uh yeah, I mean Franco's very important, Asagioli is very important, um, and I think that really helped to drive the kind of humanist revolution that happened in the 50s and 60s.

SPEAKER_01: 16:46

I would even say, and and this doesn't have to be whether a person is quote religious or not, but King David probably is an interesting example. As a young boy, his brothers kind of shunned him off because he was the little runt of the family. They didn't want him meddling in their business and their dealings, and they were working with dad, and then he ends up killing the giant, becoming famous for that. But then the next battle is with King Saul, who wants to kill him because he's jealous, and then he ends up having an affair, and then his best friend gets excommunicated from him, and then he has all these challenges where he's running away into the mountains and hiding in caves and trying to escape being uh put to death. And in all of it, he also had a fascination and love for music and songwriting and ended up writing all of the psalms in the Bible, which all stem around purpose and meaning and love and belief that there's something bigger than the thing that he's either running away from because he wasn't running away from it, he was running towards something more important. And then, of course, obviously, for people that are quote religious, the lineage then leads itself to being to the life of Jesus. And if you really think about the end result here about what makes a life matter and worth living, and you look at the way his life was and what he stood for, again, whether or not you believe in him as a religion, but if you believe in him for what he did uh while he was alive, it all seems to be around this concept I was saying earlier, which is it's not about war and separation and fighting, but isn't it more around this relationship we have with ourselves, with others, with these things that you can't see? It's like when you're saying about where you can't see something, or even like this video I saw about the cells. There was uh recently I've been studying uh the book of Revelation, which is a really hard, hard book to understand. And it's crazy. The stories in it seem absurd and sci-fi, but in the end, it's there's this this chapter I'm on today is is in the 10th chapter. And so it's talking about how in this particular chapter that uh John, who is the author of this book, is seeing these things that are unimaginable to see. And so he's talking in this one part about how this angel is coming down and that his body is like a cloud. And I started thinking about it this morning, JD. Like you can't you can see clouds, but you can't touch them. You can't really feel them. They move, they change shape. And just because you can't touch them doesn't mean they're not real. And just because they can change shape doesn't mean that they don't have some sort of form to them. Or if you think about clouds and wind, like wind, you can't really see wind. And the Bible even talks about how you can't see where it's coming from and you don't necessarily know where it's going, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00: 19:49

Right, exactly. I know, and people don't have any trouble uh believing in radio waves and the TV waves, even though you can't see them or touch them. But you have the right device, you can bring in the signal, and all of a sudden there's something there, there's something real happening there. Uh, you know, that that's uh I think it was Deepak Chopra who talks about that, that that basically uh, you know, that in a way we're all sort of like receivers of this signal, you know, this signal that's sort of being broadcast through the cosmos, and that, you know, that's a way of thinking about what life is, you know, that's sort of you know getting that signal. Because there doesn't there's there's no real reason that anyone can give for why life exists, right? Like why does it even exist? Why does the universe even exist? Like it doesn't have to be. There could have been nothing, and and that would have been it. There's just nothingness. It's hard to think about, but uh we do exist. And we there is this sort of temperate belt around you know, suns where life can exist, at least life that that we would recognize. Uh and we're seeing it with these new telescopes as more and more of these places that seem to be viable for some sort of life. There seems to be water there, there seems to be sort of it's like, why, why, why was that a feature of this universe? You know, like it doesn't seem to make any sense uh unless there's some sort of reason that we I I think a very humbling and important insight, I think, is to know that there are some things we will never understand. That's okay. Uh and and that we can speculate about them, but that uh you know we should just acknowledge them and respect them, you know, respect the mystery that we that there are things that that are not going to be understood by the capacities of our brain. In fact, um Einstein had a really good point. He had a great uh uh quote here, which I underlined here, which is uh it kind of takes me back to the Psalms, which Einstein referred to. The Psalms are fundamentally statements about transcendence. It's seeing in the commonplace, in the fields, in the trees, in the animals, uh in nature, evidence of the divine. It sort of you know mixes those constantly. And uh Einstein says, you know, that in the Psalms there's sort of an intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world, of which man can form just a faint notion. Uh and then he goes on to say that these kinds of revelations of the divine take the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. And you know, this is maybe the smartest guy who ever lived, who's basically emphasizing that there's an intelligence that we can't begin to comprehend, and AI will never be able to comprehend it, and and it will it it's just sort of qualitatively different. And that when you let that thought in, it can transform your life because it makes you humble, it makes you realize that you're actually part of something much, much bigger.

SPEAKER_01: 23:01

There's a song by this band called Switchfoot, which is sort of like a crossover rock band, kind of California-ish rock band. And in one of their songs, they have these lyrics that say something to the order of life was meant to be lived for so much more, but it seems we've lost ourselves. And so it kind of goes through the storyline around well, why are why do we care? And you talk about this researcher, Robert Emmons, who provided evidence that when individuals have spiritual aspirations in their set of life goals, their goals are more integrated and harmonious. When spiritual goals are absent, then there's higher intergoal conflict. And so I wonder if even when we think of it in terms of work, I was watching another video, I can't really remember who it was. Maybe it was like Simon Sinek or something, but it was somebody like that that that is known in the business world that was talking about how you can look at anybody who has climbed a ladder, clawed over on top of people to get some sort of title or some sort of a salary, and they're not happy. You actually talk about happiness at the end of this section, but but these people are searching for something that they feel is missing in their life. And the more they gather and the more they get of this thing they think is gonna drive that happiness, or you talked about it in past chapters about things like dopamine or or people that get addicted to certain things, and that that isn't that isn't happiness. And so I wonder if the thing that they're searching for is this thing that they can't see, touch, or feel, but they think they can find it in something else. And when they get that something else, they need more of that thing because it isn't the thing they wanted, but they just want more of it, and then the more they have of it, the less happy they are.

SPEAKER_00: 24:50

Yeah, they call it the hedonic treadmill. It's like you can never get there. And there's a great quote I put in the book uh from James uh Bugenthal, which is uh, you know, happiness would elude the hand that eludes the hand that would grasp it. Basically, if you try to become happy, you will not succeed. And and we see that again and again in our own research, and we see that in a lot of people's research, that basically if if personal happiness to you is one of your highest values and goals, you tend to be a very miserable person. It's because happiness isn't an end. Uh there was a uh a philosopher, I can't remember his name offhand, but he basically says, you know, happiness isn't a goal, happiness is the way. You know, it it's you know, joy is the way. It's the pursuit of something else that produces happiness. It's it's the kind of thing where you know there's certain things in life which you kind of just need to let happen. You know, there's things like, you know, like you can't sort of decide when you're going to give birth, you know, like it's sort of it just happens, you know. There's certain bodily functions, things like you know, sleep, you have to sort of let go in order to let them happen. And I think it's very much like that, where you you have to understand that you know, living a good life, you know, being uh basically you know, fair, just, equitable person, living morally and then beginning to transcend your own needs, uh, and think about you know, sort of the universe and think about life in general, that process leads to happiness. Like you can't do that and not be happy. You can't do that and not be fulfilled. But all of the things in our consumer culture that are sort of dangled in front of us as sort of like little quick fixes to happiness, none of them work. Literally none. Uh, if you think about it, I mean, uh having an expensive house or an expensive car or multiple homes and multiple cars, they just produce worries. It's just, it's, it's like, yeah, you may get some joy from the experience of living in it and driving it, but most of the time you're paying really high taxes on it, you're paying really high insurance on it, you're hoping it doesn't get scratched or burnt or this or that. And and there's no joy in it. It's it's you're basically uh suffering to create an image, and and that is not happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of like purposive, you know, intentional living.

SPEAKER_01: 27:21

So I did a year study with Sam on our regular podcast that comes out on Wednesdays about books on the science of happiness, and some of the things that we were finding were that it had nothing to do with money or titles or things. It had everything to do with relationships, with peace, with things like expressing gratitude, being mindful, uh having a positive mindset versus a fixed mindset about things like being able to focus on your own self-care and optimizing uh your own health and things like uh having hobbies and passions that drive your interest and not just being alone and not around things like nature. And so I think that when I got into this chapter and I started thinking about meaning and how to apply this in terms of my emotions, I started really digging into the section that you have in here around maybe it maybe it's in the section around justice or so. I'd have to flip through, but it was talking about how you look for meaning in like people that you love, or what happens if you're somebody that experienced trauma or somebody who on the flip side experiences deep love and why you want to do things for other people, sometimes at the expense of yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 28:49

Yeah, no, that's that's a really important point that I didn't want to miss making, and I'm glad you brought it up. And that is that, you know, in in in each of these chapters I talk about statistically when we see this need activated, what do we see go along with it? What are their characteristics, personal characteristics go along with it? This is a really interesting one in that again, it just speaks to why these things stick together justice, ethics, and transcendent purpose. In every case, the same profile emerges. If you have a big need for any of those things, it tends to be very much associated with being a giving person, someone who cares for other people, and that could take a variety of different forms, you know, taking care of a disabled elder, taking care of a disabled uh adult child, taking care of, you know, having unmet needs for care, uh, you know, a whole bunch of different things that we ask volunteering, uh, charitable giving, all of those things where you're sort of giving of yourself for others. Uh that goes along with it. The other thing that goes along with it is an experience of personal trauma. So if something really bad happened to you, it sensitizes you to the need to kind of see the big picture, which it turns out is like maybe the most effective way of dealing with trauma is to basically contextualize it, see, try to find a meaning in it, and seeing how it relates to a higher purpose uh to kind of guide your life. So it's not an accident that that all three of those levels are associated with that profile. So uh again, really interesting that that um you you know, if for anybody who's a skeptic around uh, you know, you know, does can I have a higher purpose without really caring about justice and ethics? Turns out the answer is no. You you they they are intimately linked to each other.

SPEAKER_01: 30:35

This makes me think of Tim Tebow. And the reason being is that this guy was Heisman Trophy, college football player, was drafted by Major League Baseball and the NFL, was treated unfairly, didn't get a fair shake at anything he tried out for, even though he was one of the most celebrated players in the Hall of Fame, et cetera. But he dedicated his life to this transcendental piece. And so I was watching this video not long ago about him talking about his foundation, the Tim T both. Foundation where he fights for the underserved in the world. And he grew up with missionary parents and things of that sort. And he was talking about how he sees these injustices. He and his wife work a lot with people that are trafficked and how to solve the plights of the world. And yet you see all these bad things happening in the world. And he's a person that is looking past the bad and not blaming God for it and not saying, you know, I'm doing this because I'm religious. He's he's doing it because he feels that his calling from God is to be able to do well on this earth so that not one day when he gets to heaven, somebody says, Hey, good job. You are great at this, a great ball player, you were great at solving the world's problems, but so that the people that he's trying to quote unquote save will be able to experience something after this life that is better than the life they're living. You were talking when we started the episode about even these Neanderthals that maybe have evidence of preparing for this afterlife. And I think I've seen so many episodes of ancient aliens or something where they're looking in the tombs of all of the pharaohs and the things that they they buried themselves with because they felt like it was something they were taking with them. But if we believe that ashes to ashes, dust to dust, when you get into the into either the furnace or the ground or however you're gonna leave this earth, that you are going the same way you came, like absent. And so what matters while you're here? And if you don't have something to live for, strive for, love for, then what really matters? And so I want to switch real quick into the section you talk about about ethics, because if you are someone or know someone that is unethical, then you maybe have a certain feeling about that, but that person thinks that they're okay to be that way. Because if they didn't think it was okay, then they wouldn't live that way. And so I'm curious where does this disconnect come where not everyone wants to live with a set of morals or values or ethics, or culturally, what's in one place is culturally unacceptable in another place.

SPEAKER_00: 33:29

Right, right. And that's an important insight. And I try to keep that in mind all the time when you get really frustrated by things you hear or you know, think of people's behavior. You have to understand that there's a, you know, the emotion comes first, uh, the the sort of drive to do whatever it is, and then there's a whole sort of you know, rational uh scaffolding that's formed around it to support that decision. So even if you take the example of like the worst people in history, you know, uh Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, they didn't think what they were doing was wrong. They thought what they were doing was right. I think they knew in their hearts that it was, you know, immoral by any conventional standard. But every massacre, every mass killing, Rwanda, you know, um uh, you know, uh in the South uh Asia, uh it, you know, it all of those massacres, uh, the Armenian genocide, all of them always began with some sort of utopian vision of how this is going to make everything better. You know, it wasn't like we're bad people, we're gonna do something bad. It was this utopian insanity that that basically drove them to try to make this better world. And it it I think that's the thing that that is so dangerous about you know, sort of um belief gone wrong and and the willingness to skip right over basic principles of justice and ethics. And I wrote a piece about this recently. Uh I it talked about um uh what is it called? Uh uh by any means necessary. People who say by any means necessary, and you hear this you know being bandied around these days. To me, when anybody says that the the the ends justify the means, that is basically you're saying that the I need to accomplish this thing by any means necessary. You're saying that the basic rules of justice and ethics don't apply here. Like because this thing matters to me so much, I can do it any way I want, any way that I think is going to be the most efficient. Well, guess what? That's exactly what led to the Rwanda genocide, that's what led to the Holocaust, that's what led to uh, you know, all of those horrible uh examples in history was somebody who said, you know what, this thing's so important to me, or my group's been treated so terribly that the rules don't apply to me anymore. It's lazy, it's irresponsible, it's dangerous, and it's a slippery slope. And I can't believe that people aren't called out on that more often. You see people out in the streets, you know, with signs that say that. I don't care that Malcolm X said it, you know. It's like Malcolm X had some good things about him and some not so good things about him. Uh, it doesn't make it okay, you know, and and if you willfully ignore principles of justice and ethics to get to your idealistic utopia, you're gonna find that it's a hell, not a heaven. You know, it's it's gonna be a place that is uh despised for generations, not a place that's ever held up as an example.

SPEAKER_01: 36:25

Man, I think we see this in the news so much now where there's division and hatred coming in the name of religion. Yeah. Yeah, I I don't uh shy away from saying on any of our episodes I'm a person of faith. And that is what drives my life. But there's nothing that drives me more sad than people that use religion as an excuse to be hateful to the least of these and the people of this world that that need to see that there is something humane about humanity. And, you know, when we were talking about ethics and the examples you gave, those are extreme examples. Of course, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine years ago when we're talking about cannibalism and how, you know, well, how can you say that it's wrong just because in our culture it's wrong to eat people, when in maybe another culture it's okay? And we started getting on the topic of, well, what about those guys that were in that airplane crash in the mountains and they had to eat their friends? Like the basic need was not being met, or they were going to die, and they had to make an ethical choice, right? To decide to eat their dead friend.

SPEAKER_00: 37:38

Exactly. Exactly. Context really matters. That's the thing that I think is one of the most important lessons of the 20th century, uh, particularly in psychology, is that the context you find yourself in really does matter. And that you it's very hard to just, you know, apply principles across the board and say, yeah, eating people is wrong. Uh, you know, I mean, uh and one really interesting insight that I tried to call out in the book was that the reason that we as a society or as humans tend to um find certain things unethical that don't really have a victim associated with it is because of the emotion that it it elicits in us. So there's a whole bunch of things that that I list a whole bunch that are are kind of victimless crimes. Uh you know, things that uh you know are not always pleasant to talk about, but they're uh things that that that it it does no lasting damage to anyone who's consensual in any words that no one was harmed. Uh but yet we find them completely abominable. And the reason we do is because of the disgust reaction that is elicited inside us. And that it's actually very easy to manipulate people's morality just by making them disgusted. Uh so they'll you know have people think about some disgusting thing that happened in their life, or they'll put an unpleasant smell in the room, and they'll find that their attitudes shift uh toward being more rejectionist of whatever it is. Uh it again shows the real fundamental importance of emotion in in driving what we think and how we think and how we make decisions. So I I thought that was really fascinating. And you talked also about sort of ethics and and you know what's what's appropriate in a society? What is the sort of conventional wisdom of what what's what what is good and what is bad, what is wrong and right. Um I just was struck by this terrible story in um in in Charlotte, North Carolina, of that Ukrainian woman who was on the train who you know is just sitting there innocently, and this guy behind her who has mental illness uh gets up and he he stabs her in the neck three times and uh she's she dies. I that was a terrible story. But I saw something today that made it ten times worse. Um I watched the whole video where what you see is he does that, he's crazy, it's an awful thing. But the people sitting around her do nothing. He stands up and he walks to the exit. Nobody checks on her, nobody comes to see if she's okay. She crumples to the floor, bleeding, and no one stops. Uh and it's like the Kitty Genovese story back from the uh, I think it was in the early 70s, where that woman in Queens was, you know, screaming for help and people saw her and saw each other, and nobody called the police because they figured somebody else did. This was even more immediate. This was right in front of them, and nobody lifted a finger to either stop it, uh, just to give her help. And it makes me really sad for our society, you know, to think that we're like even after all we've been through, that's still where we are. We or we may have even gone further backwards. Uh it's it's just uh shocking. And it's just a really clear-cut case of an unethical behavior, not because of something you did, but because of something you didn't do. You know, like a behavior was called for, and and no one no one could answer that call. Uh, it's just much easier for them to just walk right by.

SPEAKER_01: 41:09

That's horrible because I bet that's not the only story that's like that at all. In fact, I was recently visiting a nursing home, and there was this woman that clearly had some sort of a mental illness, and even the nurses said that the person did. And they said, Well, just be prepared. There's a lady down the hall that's a screamer. And so we were sort of prepared to hear something that was maybe like biasing our way of thinking. Oh, there's something wrong with a person, right? So the person started to just say over and over, can somebody help me? Can somebody help me? Can somebody help me? Can somebody help me? Like on repeat. And what my brother and I noticed was at one point, all the nurses did was go and turn the television louder so the other residents didn't hear the person say, Can somebody help me? instead of going to the root cause of why did the person think they needed help. Now, it could be like, you know, I'm a parent, okay? So there were some times when my kids would ask me things 700 times and it would get annoying. But if you don't get to the root of why the person's resolution isn't there, they're gonna keep asking for it. And it's no different than when you think about ethically, um, you've got uh you were talking about even these people sitting there doing nothing. What is happening when we see anything in the news? There was an article that came out this week about how as a country, they've been doing this research over the last 10 years or something on the decline of knowledge of middle school and high school kids. Yeah, drastically plummeting. And it's almost just like, well, and at six o'clock, we'll tell you the weather. Instead of just saying, why are we allowing this to happen? That like 60% of kids have even a basic knowledge of math, science, and social studies and English. And 40%, four out of 10 kids don't.

SPEAKER_00: 43:12

Yeah. No, it's I have to say, I, you know, they'll be on some of those night late night shows, they'll do a thing like uh kind of man in the street, you know, they'll go out to the to Hollywood Boulevard and just interview people and ask them basic questions, you know, but like really ridiculous things like, do you think it was inappropriate for Martin Luther King uh to not come to the inauguration or something? It's like, you know, obviously anybody knows that he was assassinated a long time ago and that he is not available to come uh to uh a Martin Luther King Day parade or whatever because he is dead, right? And the number of people who will then answer the question, like the sort of like feigning giving it a thought, and be like, yeah, I can see why somebody would be upset that he wouldn't come. It's like it, but to me, that's not funny. That's not entertaining. That is scary. That is that is how really terrible things, you know, mass movements get started when people don't know even the basic facts about their own history, like even the most fundamental things, they they have no idea. And then the problem is you can then convince them of virtually anything. Uh and and uh you mentioned the the kids who are just basically having declining test scores across the board. I think the most important uh nuance of that story is that everyone says, Oh, it was COVID. You know, COVID did this. They said this actually was happening long before COVID. This is just a continuation of that same trend. And what was it? It was social media, smartphones, video games, uh, you know, instant entertainment uh and monitoring of your sort of social position, you know, and looking at mindless, you know, junk, you know, whenever and forever and without interruption, uh, this constant distraction from reality. It's a frightening thing.

SPEAKER_01: 45:04

Very much so. And and a key conversation in the world of coaching right now is the ethics of using AI. I uh yesterday I was searching up something using uh a large language model, and I had asked it to give, I was looking for the name of the song, and Google wasn't finding it. I was putting in the lyrics that I could remember, and they weren't the right lyrics, but they were close. So I figured, let me just try one of these other tools. And so I said, find me this song with these lyrics, and who is the this author? Well, it ended up giving me something that sounded amazing, like it did, and it was a person, like a band I knew. It was the lyrics spot on to what I was looking for. It gave me the title of the song, and then I was like, I don't really remember the name of that song. So I ended up dropping the name of the song in Spotify, no such name. Ended up looking to see if there was anything related to that song title from that artist, no such song title. Ended up being that the lyrics are right, totally different song title, totally different artist. But what's happening is lazy-minded people are just believing the first thing that the GPT spit out, using that as fact, instead of really looking to see. It had to learn something from somewhere. And so, where did it learn the thing from? And did it learn it from somewhere reliable? Did it learn it from something ethical? Like there was some article that came out maybe yesterday or so about how um Elon Musk bought one company with one of his other companies, and and it was he bought Twitter with one of his AI companies, not XAI. And so it's an interesting transaction because he just became even richer by buying one of his failing companies, but in order to take the data from the failing company to drive the success of this new company, and there's got to be questions in there that people would wonder is that ethical, or what is the driver behind just acquiring more what? More money, more fame, more prestige, more power. Power, I guess, is what it is.

SPEAKER_00: 47:14

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's it's we're living in an interesting time where a lot of ethical questions that are really hard to get your head around are are becoming you know present-day concerns. We're already seeing the labor market shrinking for new graduates. Uh you know, it it's all of those sort of things that you do in your job to kind of get learn the ropes. If we have AI do it, where are we gonna train the next generation of people who think? And I think there's this naive belief that we're gonna never need people who think again because we'll have machines that think. Uh I think that that's not true. I think we're always gonna need people who feel and think and process and and get the big picture. Uh, an algorithm can't do it. It can fake it very effectively, but it doesn't really understand. It doesn't really understand anything. Uh and and I think you know, we're in a kind of a really strange period right now where we're relying on on robotics, basically, uh and artificial intelligence to do all of our thinking for us, uh, which is uh truly frightening. And it's producing most of the news articles, it's it's basically creating the new, you know, uh common base of knowledge. It's going to be basically made by machines. And uh I guess can't see anything good coming out of that.

SPEAKER_01: 48:36

Well, it's funny because you know, the first word of AI is artificial. And going back to this nursing home story, there was they were serving the patients their ice cream one day. And the stuff sits there forever. If you're not in a hospital, if you don't come come back and check out people, right? So the stuff was sitting there for a while, and finally I opened it for the person that we were visiting, and it was like still, it wasn't cold, but it was formed. And so I started reading the label and it said artificially flavored vanilla ice something, not cream. There was no cream in it, there was no milk in it, there was no actual sugar in it. And so the more I was reading the ingredients, I was there with my brother, and I was laughing because we were like, How can hospitals feed this crap to people when it clearly is not healthy? It is artificial in every sense of it, and yet they're there touting that they want people to be healthier and have longevity and quality of life, but the very thing they say they want, they aren't doing. And so I guess this gets to past justice, path ethics, now into this last piece of this section on transcendence, which is there's a need for this, but what do you do if you're in a job or around people that don't care about any of that? Like they just want to climb, they want to climb a ladder, they don't want to climb into this elevated way of thinking or emotional state or being or doing. And how do you how do you handle that when when you're working maybe in a very competitive environment or working wondering if you're gonna be laid off or struggling with how can you meet your goals at the end of the quarter?

SPEAKER_00: 50:21

Yeah, I mean, I I think that's a really important point that that this is we're basically taking a look at like the entire pyramid of human needs, and now we're up at the pinnacle here. We're at the apex. The truth is, you know, Maslow said this, and and others have said it, not everybody's gonna get there. You know, a lot of people, they're just not gonna get there for whatever reason because maybe they're struggling for survival and they're stuck at like safety needs and autonomy needs, and maybe they're being discriminated against and they're stuck at like you know, justice and inclusion needs. And and you can't, until those things are met, you're pretty much stuck there. You can begin to think about some of those next things, but just the daily deprivations are gonna make it such that you you really can't progress onward. In a way, talking about this is kind of a luxury, you know, that we're we can talk about our basic needs are met, thankfully, our you know, a lot of our social needs and our material needs, and and we, you know, have an opportunity to educate ourselves, we have an opportunity to to think about questions of justice and ethics. And now we're at a point, you know, uh, you know, we're reasonably educated and and we have the luxury to have time and and ability to think about things like you know uh global, you know, issues and and uh you know human rights and and and that sort of thing. Uh that is a kind of um a luxury, you know, that not everybody gets to have. Uh and a lot of people who come from a deprived background may not even value that stuff because they sort of grew up in a kind of deprivation mindset and they may be thinking about, you know, I really want to make sure that I, you know, have my foundational needs met, and I'm gonna chronically focus on those, you know, to the exclusion of these higher needs, uh, because I'm so afraid of ever living like I once had to live, or how my family, you know, once came from, or whatever it is. And you can't blame them for that. Uh, I think it's just, you know, it requires us to be to take that perspective that not everybody is gonna get to, you know, to transcendence. It's just and and that's the way it's always been, and that's probably the way it'll always be. Uh it's just uh a thing that you've got to work toward, and a lot of the things that happen to somebody that facilitate transcendence are not pleasant. You know, um, Paul Bloom talks about this a lot, that that uh and I talk about it in the book, and a lot of this suffering involved, you know, to kind of heighten the need for transcendence. Uh there's the sort of you know having to look past your own needs and kind of subjugate them, um, you know, whether that's because of you know internal desire or external realities, uh, that those are things that facilitate transcendence. So we can find ourselves at work, you know, uh in a kind of transcendent mindset. Um, but it's important to always remind yourself that not everybody is there, and you know, in some cases, you know, it's too bad for them, and in other cases, you know, it's good for them that they never had to suffer and they're happy with their, you know, sort of uh set of needs being fulfilled as far as they know. Um but I mean ultimately it is sort of tragic if people never can get out of that sort of materialistic worldview. You know, um you see certainly enough examples of it of people who never have enough homes and cars and boats and and and they're not happy and their kids aren't happy, and uh it's it's a uh uh it doesn't ever end well, you know. So I I I guess it's it's you know, transcendence is a value that I hold dear, um, but I also know that that's sort of a thing that I'm privileged to be able to do.

SPEAKER_01: 54:11

Gotcha. Well, as we start to wrap up our time together today, help us understand in maybe just a quick minute or two about how can agile brain help someone with these things we've learned. We've gone through the four sections so far. Next week we're gonna talk about motivations, but how can agile brain help someone?

SPEAKER_00: 54:31

Sure. So the beauty of agile brain is that it's this quick three-minute exercise where you don't even need to know any of this. You know, this is this is where this whole discussion in the book kind of is going beneath the covers and looking at, you know, under the in the engine, like what are the parts and pieces and how do they work together and you know, your carburetor and your transmission and all that. Uh, you don't need to know any of that in order to benefit from agile brain. So agile brain is basically this three-minute image-based exercise. It's basically a sentence completion task. We say, uh, you know, thinking about my current situation, I wish I could feel a little bit more. And then you see images flash at you one every second. You can't process them, you don't know what you're seeing half the time. Uh your brain is is understanding at a subconscious level, and you're basically clicking that that completes the sentence, or it doesn't. People go through, it's very kind of off balance, but it's over in three minutes. And instantly it generates a profile for you and says, your biggest unmet needs have to do with things like, you know, let's say uh authenticity or ethics or caring. Uh and turns out those three happen to be very closely related, right? Uh and you can get this sort of map produced with no effort that you put into it other than to sort of, you know, be a participant. Uh, and then it can lead to some very interesting and profound conversations with a coach or a therapist or whoever it is you're working with, or even with yourself, uh, to kind of begin to explore what it is, you know, what is it that you really need? You know, we all think we know what we need. A lot of the time we don't know what we need. And it can be a revelation to people to have this sort of subconscious exercise. Just put it out in front of them and explain to them, okay, this is a need around you know, self-expression and really getting to be who you are. You may feel like your people are causing you to have to conform and kind of not really reveal your true self. And people will be like, oh, that's that's exactly how I'm feeling. Uh, I didn't have the words for it, you know, um, and it has implications. And then you have a series of questions that you'll ask yourself about, you know, where do I, you know, where am I uh in terms of you know my social relations and my my hierarchical relationships and structural, you know, bureaucra bureaucratic relationships that are either letting me be who I am or holding me back from who I truly am. Uh so it it gives you sort of keys to unlock these doors of of true need fulfillment. Again, not what Madison Avenue tells you you should want, or not what your neighbor, you know, uh makes you think you should want, but what you truly want, what will truly make you happy and feel fulfilled. So it's a lovely thing that it's it's uh it's so fast, it's so painless. Uh and uh we're doing it now all over the world. We're doing it in Ukraine, we're doing it in Nigeria, South Africa, uh all over Europe. Uh you know, it's it's spreading around the world, which is incredibly gratifying to me. Uh, because you never know when you hook these things up. Like, will it, you know, ever get used? Yes, this is getting used. So I'm very grateful for that.

SPEAKER_01: 57:39

I am grateful for it as well. And so as a gift to our listeners today, Zach has ways. Zach is our producer, so Zach has ways for you to reach out to us directly. And for anyone listening today, we would love to give you a complimentary assessment from Agile Brain. Thank you, JD, and the team at Agile Brain. And uh, for those that want to go even deeper, we can talk with people about having a discovery call on the assessment results with a certified coach. So really excited to be able to offer that to the listeners. What we also would love for the listeners to do is make sure they can go to any online bookstore and where else, JD, to be able to get the emotionally agile brain.

SPEAKER_00: 58:24

Yeah, I usually point people to Amazon uh because that's uh that that seems to hold, you know, most of my reviews, which is nice. Uh uh I think it's like 30 reviews, and they're all five stars, which is incredibly, you know, I'm very grateful for and humbled by. Uh, but that it's at Amazon.com. It's the emotionally agile brain. Uh, you'll find it there. Um I'm I think Barnes Noble has it. The publisher Bloomsbury has it, but I think that the default for most people is just to go to Amazon.

SPEAKER_01: 58:54

Awesome. Well, I'm really happy that I have my copy. I encourage you to get your copy, friends. JD, thank you for being my personal tour guide so far up until part four. Next time we're together, part five, which is working with motivations. And I'm really looking forward to that discussion with you. Thank you so much for joining me again today. And for those listening, thank you for joining this episode of What's on Your Bookshelf.