What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Sam Powell, Zach Elliott, Tom Schweizer, Dennis LaRue, and Michelle King.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
SP6 Special Edition Agile Brain: Climbing The Pyramid Of Human Needs
We map a four-sided pyramid of human needs—self, social, material, spiritual—and explore how foundations enable higher aims like purpose and transcendence. Research, culture, and real stories show why ethics, community, and conscious reflection turn values into action and bias into empathy.
• defining the four opposing life domains
• why foundations like safety and justice come first
• evidence from goal research and world cultures
• how self leads to social, then to spiritual
• in‑group bias, polarization and the contact effect
• ethics as the hinge between ideals and action
• integrating needs into a coherent life purpose
• practical steps to reflect, rebuild and align
Please get a copy of The Emotionally Agile Brain by Dr. JD Pincus. From now till the end of this calendar year, we’re gifting complimentary Agile Brain assessments, with optional deep dives with certified coaches.
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Welcome to a special edition of What's on Your Bookshelf with your host, Denise Russo.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another special edition episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our life and leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. My name is Denise Russo, and for this very special edition series, my co-host is the author of the book, Dr. JD Pincus, who's the author of the Emotionally Agile Brain, Mastering the 12 Emotional Needs That Drive Us. JD, I can't believe that we actually are in part five, which is almost to the end of this book.
SPEAKER_00:I know. It's amazing. Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. But it's been a real pleasure.
SPEAKER_01:I feel the same. So we're pivoting now from learning about the mechanics of the 12 into how to work with these motivations. And so I think as we get started for this part of the book, if you are listening and you don't have the book, I highly encourage you to get a copy of this book. You can get it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or directly from the website. I'm assuming, could you also go, JD, to the Agile Brain website and find out information of the book somewhere there?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there are links there as well for the book. So yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And if you missed our episodes leading up to this one, I highly encourage you to listen to those first as well as read along in the book. This book is so much more in-depth than what we get to talk about when we're together on these short episodes. But we're going to talk today about how the motivations actually work together. And what I'm most curious about as we start the conversation, JD, is if the people listening are either coaches or people that take the agile brain assessment, how they can best understand this. And if you're someone listening who's new to learning about this, we offered on the last episode that because of this series being such a special edition for what's on your bookshelf, that we are giving away complementary access to the agile brain assessments, coupled with being able to have a discussion with certified coaches if you want to take a deeper dive into the debrief of your own assessment. So let me take a pause there, JD. Welcome you to our show again today. It's always a pleasure to have you here. I'm looking forward to seeing how these motivations work together.
SPEAKER_00:Pleasure is mine. Yeah, no, this is exciting.
SPEAKER_01:So as we start to work on this, you start first by talking about the pyramid, which you imagine, if, or at least if I imagine, when I think about the people that built pyramids, they had to start with a foundation, but they knew what they ultimately wanted the top to look like, I suspect. And it was not built to be a rectangle or a square. It was built with a purpose to have some sort of direction to the north, but with a design to it. And so I'd be curious if you could help us understand when you think about these are 12 domains and there's different spheres of the pieces of it. What does the pyramid represent in a way that the layman can understand this?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So uh the pyramid is funny because Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often shown as a pyramid. And uh, you know, but it's one face of a pyramid. And you see this a lot in like, you know, uh management consulting and in in leadership and in all sorts of fields, there's a pyramid, but it's one face of the pyramid. Um, I think this was sort of what kind of struck me. I originally thought of this as almost a cylinder, you know, or or a kind of um a cube, you know, a sort of a rectangle, you know, moving up three levels. Um, but then it dawned on me that the pyramid is actually the best metaphor for it, since it has a foundation, like you said, it has a kind of midsection, and then it has a top. And the it has four sides. And those four sides represent sort of opposites. So there's north-south, the east-west, right? And just exactly the same way, we have four domains which are arrayed in opposites. So we have the self versus the social. People who think a lot about themselves and worry a lot about themselves tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about other people, and vice versa. Um, and then there's the material and the spiritual, which are opposites. Uh, again, people who would focus on the here and now, money, things, you know, consumerism tend not to spend a ton of time thinking about, you know, higher principles and ideals and values, and vice versa. People who, you know, are sort of you know monastic and think about that have sort of, you know, um, you know, disassociated themselves from material concerns. So that that what I love about the pyramid is that it it does that really effectively. It kind of says that these things are connected but as opposites, and then the other sides are connected as adjacencies. And there's actually quite a bit of evidence from the psychological literature that that's true. So, for instance, they did this experiment um where they would ask people to spontaneously uh list all of their goals, all of their, all their strivings. What's the thing that they were trying to achieve in life? And they found some number, like 40% of people, that might be overstating a little bit, maybe it may have been closer to 30 or 20%, but it was a significant number of them that just spontaneously would say things about spiritual goals. You know, I want to, you know, uh, you know, achieve transcendence, I want to, you know, be closer to God, I want to, you know, live my life ethically, uh, you know, whatever it is. Like that just was spontaneously uttered. And then they looked at all the other goals, and then they could actually draw correlations between them. And what they found was that people who said those were more likely to say things uh in the self-domain around sort of becoming my best self, uh, you know, the sort of potential, the top of the self-domain. And they also were more likely to say things in the social domain about, you know, um spending time with family, um, wanting to achieve more harmonious relationships, uh, that sort of thing. But what they were less likely to say were purely sort of materialistic uh things in terms of strivings that they had. So that was some really nice evidence that the structure that we're proposing, this pyramid indeed is borne out by the research. It's also borne out by just uh, you know, world cultures. Uh the two axes that define world cultures uh most consistently and across all the research that's been done is the difference that we're all familiar with, which is the individualistic uh, you know, United States were sort of the poster child for that versus the kind of communalistic of Southeast Asia. And there's all sorts of reasons why that is. Uh, you know, where the people who came to the United States basically were looking for sort of individual liberty and to kind of strike out on their own, in many cases, sort of left their community uh in Europe or wherever and to kind of do that. Um, whereas in Southeast Asia, they have a kind of a history of collective farming, like you can't grow rice on a hillside yourself. Everyone in the community, and not just your community, but the communities next door and next door to them, all have to be in coordination. So you end up with a very communalistic kind of a society. But to return to the point here, uh individualistic versus communalistic is basically the same thing as self-oriented versus other-oriented, you know, self versus social. And that's the major differentiator between sort of east and west in world cultures. The other major dimension is has to do with industrialization, right? And the more industrialized uh countries tend to be in the northern latitudes, uh, and they tend to be much more materialistic and consumer-oriented uh in focus. So they're consumerist versus the south of the, you know, the southern hemispheres tend to be more um idealistic, uh, you know, in sort of indigenous religion focused. Uh and there's a reason why, you know, the Pope traditionally spends a lot of time in places like South America and Africa and Southeast Asia, uh, Australia, even, uh, because there's just a lot more natural kind of spiritual energy down there, and there's much more sort of consumerist sentiment in Northern Europe, Japan, the US, Canada, et cetera. So those, again, it happens to be the exact same axes that form our model. Uh so again, it's not a coincidence if these came up. Uh, I did the whole literature review and found I think it was on 12 or 13 different world systems in philosophy, religion, psychology, history, uh, that basically propose that these are the four domains of of human life. And in a sense, they all they represent trade-offs, right? If you're more focused on yourself, you're gonna be less focused on on others, and vice versa. If you're more focused on consumerism, you're less focused on on spiritualism, and vice versa. So uh again, not a coincidence. One of the things that uh another thing about the model that I really like, the pyramid model, is that in addition to it kind of um uh representing different sides as opposites and adjacencies, it also shrinks, it narrows as you go to the top. And what that tells me is the stuff at the foundation is where most people are. Most people in the world are not able to think about self-transcendence and becoming their best self. They're they're trying to get through day-to-day, they're living hand to mouth. Uh, and the truth is they are much more likely to be at the foundational level. And you see this in every country where it's been researched. Uh, you look at income distribution, income inequality, and there's just way more people struggling with things like safety and justice issues and feeling excluded and feeling um like they don't have autonomy, they can't make their own decisions. That's just an unfortunate reality right now in terms of the way the world is distributed. And then if you kind of think about it in narrowing to the experiential needs, once you've met those needs, now you can start thinking about experiential needs, needs for you know being your authentic self. Uh, you don't see many people who are starving talking about becoming their authentic selves, for instance. Uh, you know, it's it's it's just uh it's a hierarchy. Um, you know, wanting to immerse yourself in the moment, wanting to feel a greater sense of caring and being cared for, uh, and a sense of ethics. Uh, those are all things that are built on that foundational level. So it shrinks a little bit in terms of the people who are able to access that. And then it shrinks again at the aspirational level. We're talking about things like becoming your best self, you know, self-actualization, potential, um, you know, material success, uh, you know, experienced by the relatively few. And we see, I think uh Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, which is a hard thing to even get your head around. I can't even imagine what a billion dollars looks like. But uh, you know, be that as it may, you know, so it shrinks again as you get to the top. It shrinks again in terms of kind of recognition, respect, esteem, and also in terms of self-transcendence, you know, the higher purpose. What I like about that also is that it kind of brings it together to a point. There's an apex at the very top. And that's a lovely metaphor for what I propose happens when you've achieved all of your needs. And this, again, very few people are lucky enough to experience this. But what happens is there's a blurring of categories at that point. The domains collapse, they no longer hold themselves as separate domains. Uh, what I do for work and what gives me sort of uh pleasure in terms of you know working toward a goal is no different than what's meaningful to me. What's meaningful to me, I don't have a separation anymore between what I do for work and what's meaningful to me. That they are now joined into the same thing. What I do for myself is what I also do for other people. Uh I there's no difference between them. I enjoy for myself and for my own self-esteem helping others. And so they're beginning to collapse that way as well. And they can collapse, you know, on the adjacencies, also to the point where you end up with ideally a kind of undifferentiated whole uh need that is multidimensional, you know, in its foundations where it came from, but now exists as sort of an overall life purpose. So you're not, it's no longer these 12 separate needs, it's now this one kind of integrated wholeness. Uh so I love that about the pyramids. I also love that uh the fact that historically uh the pyramids of Egypt um don't look, didn't look like they look now. They weren't that sort of rough stone. They were painted white and they were smooth, and the top, I believe, was gold or silver, the apex piece. So it must have been the most dramatic looking thing. Uh and it really made the point about you know, uh that that higher, that higher set of needs really, you know, being quali quantitatively and qualitatively different. And I think that's nicely reflected in uh the Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill, you know, where we have the pyramid, uh, and then the top is the eye, you know, uh, which is a Masonic symbol, but I think, you know, I actually reproduced it in the book because I thought it was just so apt. That that's I said good things happen at the top of the pyramid.
SPEAKER_01:So thank you for simplifying what is a really complicated uh section of the book to really understand. And I I really like how you were talking about that when we look at something, we see it maybe in the one-dimensional space of the face of that pyramid. But the way you just described it is that our lives are made up of these three or really four dimensions, I suppose. If you are somebody that gets to these higher transcendent levels, when I'm I'm curious about when you think about maybe even the example you just gave where the pyramid was lovely, but the the top of it was much more brilliant than the bottom. And so it's almost as if to say, well, if you want anything in life, you have to climb up toward it. And it seems like the conflict is that if people are climbing toward that thing, they make compromises perhaps as the climb gets more difficult. John Maxwell has this great quote that says, anything worthwhile is uphill. But he also couples that with something that he has as one of his laws of teamwork, which is this law called the law of Mount Everest. And the storyline of the law of Mount Everest is that it takes a team. And so as he he describes the story, he's talking about the two guys who sort of were proclaimed as the first men to summit the mountain. But as the story goes on, it talks about how these uh Sherpas were living on the mountain for hundreds, thousands of years. They already knew up and down, they knew all the ins and the outs, they knew the weather patterns, they were the ones carrying all the equipment, they were the ones that knew where the campsites needed to be, they were the ones that were actually providing all the resources that these climbers needed. And yet the the claim to fame goes to these two guys. And so where I find a little bit of interesting conflict is when you're talking about self versus others, I find it interesting to think that self-centered people love to be around other people, but for the wrong, wrong reasons, maybe.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. I mean, it's not a coincidence that, you know, who do we remember? Lewis and Clark when you were in in school. You don't hear about Sakajawika so so much, the one who actually made it possible. You know, and uh all of the uh sort of uh European men that that uh mountaintops are named after, uh, as if they somehow did this alone. You know, no major accomplishment was was done alone. In fact, you always needed to rely on indigenous, you know, local people's knowledge of things and places, uh, and and that's the sort of you know untold story. And you know, because we have this sort of Western tradition that rewards like the individual, you know, you don't think there was an old joke in a New Yorker uh uh comic I remember seeing where you see a a statue uh on a pedestal, but it's like five people. And the guy is saying to his son, he said, There are no great men, you know, son, there are only great committees. And it's it's the joke is that's not the way we think about people in the West. We think about the one person. Uh, and when it's never, it's never the one person, it's always a whole team. And people, I think, try to give lip service to that. You know, they try to, you know, you talk to athletes who've won a game. It's they they they know now not to take credit for it. They know to say it's team effort, you know, participate, the fans, the my teammates, you know. It it that's that's sort of gotten out to the world that we don't, it's not about I am the greatest anymore. Like that's not cool. Uh, and and that's a healthy change, I think. You know, you don't you don't want to take credit for other people's achievements. So I think there is again, it speaks to the whole dichotomy between self-focus and and other focus. Other focus is required in order to get to the spiritual domain. That's that decentering that goes on from I'm worried about myself, you know, self-concerns, then material concerns, then social concerns, then spiritual concerns. That's because uh statistically, we see some of the highest correlations are between things like caring and ethics. In a way, the things in the social domain, I have to put aside my own concerns for the moment and think about others, to think about my relationships with others, you know, including others, you know, recognizing others, being recognized by others in order to abstract those ideas so that they can become principles. The difference between the social domain and the spiritual domain really has to do with whether or not you know the people involved. The social domain is all about, you know, kin. It's like people you know, your relatives, your friends. Uh the spiritual domain is the same principles applied to strangers. People you don't know, people you will never know, but understanding that they deserve the same treatment that you would give to your you know friends and relatives. So uh there is that hierarchical progression. And I think that that that difference between self and social, you know, really it matters and it continues to matter all the way through the hierarchy.
SPEAKER_01:I was talking to somebody uh this week that was getting ready to take a flight, and they were um they were in a row that was really crammed. They were gonna be in the middle seat, they didn't want to be in the middle seat, so they were looking for any out to sit somewhere else. Well, as it so turned out, there was a younger person sitting in an emergency row, and it was somebody who was neurodivergent and had a little bit of difference in in processing abilities. And that person, uh, once the flight attendant got to that row, was saying, you know, are you willing and able to assist in the event of an emergency, read your brochure while everybody else is kind of just like not paying attention? And the person said, uh, personally, no, I'm not comfortable. I'm not comfortable being here because I don't even think I could take care of myself, let alone the whole entire plane, in the unlikely chance that this plane goes down. Well, so as the story ends, the person who didn't want to sit in the middle seat ended up going into the emergency row. The other person was able to move. It satisfied both self-wants, I suppose. But then if you take it a step further, when they say if there is an emergency and the oxygen mass comes down, put it on yourself first so that you can help others. So in your pyramid and in the way this is being described, is it important first to do, as you said, is become your best self? Because until you can be, can you really be your best for others?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's there's definite movement in both directions. So, yeah, we talked a lot about them in the individual chapters and the sections. Uh, but yes, you have to put on your oxygen mask before you can help anybody else. Uh, so we say the self-domain comes first. It comes first ontologically, you know, it comes uh and phyllog uh genetically, you have to first take care of yourself. And and it's sort of as you grow as a person, you begin with that state where you don't really know the difference between you know your where your body ends and the world begins. You think it's all just connected to you. Uh, and then you get things like object permanence, you know, that that it's like, well, that object continues to exist even if I'm not able to see it, you know. Whereas before that, you think if I can't see it, it's gone, you know, and and I I think that there is a kind of a basic egocentricity uh to us that that we have to sort of overcome, and it's we want to overcome it, you know, like there's a natural curiosity and drive to want to explore the environment, have relationships with other people, and then begin to think about principles and think about justice. And we probably starts with somebody being unfair to us, you know, or feeling like we're excluded, but then we can then generalize from that and through our experience. But it does take that same uh hierarchy, going from self to material to social to spiritual, and you're going from foundational to experiential to aspirational. So you're moving sort of up and over as you go through life, hopefully. Um, the problem occurs when people get stuck. You know, you if you're stuck because of your personality or circumstances, you know, you're just in a really bad place. You've got no food and you've got, you know, no shelter, you're gonna be stuck in that first square. You're not you're not gonna be able to move out of it until just you know, you change or or the environment changes, or both change, and then you can begin to move out of there. So um, you know, I feel like it there is a natural progression that begins with uh psychological safety and ends with uh sort of self-transcendence. And it's interesting how the beginning is all about preservation of the self and the end is all about basically extinguishing the self and saying, I don't matter. You know, I've I've basically done what I need to do here, and and I'm not important anymore. What's important is the higher principle and the the legacy, basically.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. I love how you describe that. I'm curious when you were talking about geography, this was fascinating to me the way you were discussing about the hemispheres of the world. And I'm curious if, based on that, obviously everybody has different personality styles, different learning styles, different processing styles, but when you think of the geography, does that have any variance in what you find when somebody takes something like the agile brain assessment?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we actually have a lot of data on that now, uh, fortunately. We have data that we collected in Ukraine. Um the Ukrainians have really uh you know accepted Agile Brain in a big way. We now have uh Agile Brain in the public school system in Kyiv, the capital, and it's being rolled out to pretty much every public school they've got there. And it's you know thousands and thousands of profiles we've collected. We also are in Nigeria now. Um we have people who are using it, um, you know, uh a couple of different um sort of nonprofits there that work with after-school programs, uh, they're collecting there. We've got uh people in in just you know every part of the world who are using this now and collecting these profiles that we have access to, which is wonderful. Uh and what we can say is that yes, you know, these these needs are universal. How they get expressed changes by culture. And of course, we change the image sets that we use uh around the world. So we have a uh you know an image set for Central Africa and West Africa that that you know we don't use in the US and we don't use in in Japan. Uh they have their own image sets. Uh but the the general relationships between you know the trade-offs between self and other, the trade-offs between material and spiritual, those are universal. So these these concepts hold up everywhere. Uh and and what's great then is that the data holds up everywhere. Uh what we expect to see is in countries that are more communalistic, you're gonna see more activity in the social domain. Uh when you're in an individual individualistic society, we're gonna see more things like safety, authenticity, and potential in the self-domain. And we do. We see that there's just you know a lot more about I want to be the best that I can be. And that's a bit of a foreign concept in places like you know, Japan, Korea, and uh and China, where it's much more of a communal focus. Um, although that doesn't mean that doesn't exist, it's just a little bit muted. Uh so it what's nice is it it does translate really nicely around the world. And uh because these are sort of general principles based on you know the sort of first principle concepts, ideally they they would apply anywhere in the universe, you know. Uh, and we'll you know, maybe someday we'll find out.
SPEAKER_01:I want to venture for a moment into the um the section on social versus spiritual without it becoming political, but yet it might be a little bit, I suppose, in reading through the chapter and in light of some things that have happened in our in our space over these last couple of weeks now. It seems as though this contrast or confluence culturally causes controversy. And yet you were just talking about the West versus the East in the world and how even the Eastern culture is yang versus yang, so there has to be opposites in order to have a whole. And so opposites would imply maybe that there's somebody that's right and there's somebody that's wrong. And I'm really conflicted by this, JD, with things I'm seeing in social media over the last week or two in light of some unfortunate events that have taken place that have taken lives of various people, some of them well-known people, some of them not well-known. And so this social aspect seems to also be where socially there are groups of people that are aligned with something culturally, whether it's a religion, whether it's a political party, whether it's just something that is opposite of or different than this other thing. And yet, as you read through these posts, it's like, well, who's wrong and who is right? And is there a wrong in the right or is there gray in the middle?
SPEAKER_00:Right. And I think that's it's one of these illusions that that unfortunately through evolution, because we basically evolved to protect our little band, you know, our group of kin that lived out in the savannah, and we had to be careful of storms and lions and other bands and nomads and all the rest. We have a very strong in-group bias. So once we define an in-group and an outgroup, it's amazing the favors that we'll do for the in-group and the amount of discrimination and bias that we'll show to the out-group. They've done this experimentally, even with things as stupid as randomly assigning people to say, I prefer the art of, you know, uh Kandinsky uh versus uh who was the other one? There was another abstract artist. And they basically just randomly assign it and said, You seem like you like Kandinsky. And then, you know, you were, and there's a group of people who are other Kandinsky, you know, followers, you know, who you we're gonna put you over here with this group and the other groups over there. And then they played these games and they were kind of computer-based games, and it was actually not with real people. But what they found was that people would make all sorts of allowances and favors to the in-group on this completely arbitrary dimension that wasn't even real. It was something they were just told that they had. Uh, then and and they would sort of punish the outgroup, you know, in these in these sort of cooperative and competitive games. Uh, it's just that that the experiment's been repeated in real life. You know, you did the that was the thing with that uh Sharif did, I think it was the 1950s, where they had uh campers at a summer camp, these boys who were about the same age, and they basically separated them. And one was like the the eagles, and the other were the rattlesnakes or something, and then they basically uh kept them separate and then made them aware of each other's existence, and then began to have them compete with each other. And they were because they had formed these in-groups and then were suddenly exposed to an outgroup, they would like get into fights with them. They would like try to actively sabotage each other. Like it was it was fascinating, just simply because there was a difference, you know. So we have to be really careful with with drawing categories, and I think that politically is getting incredibly exacerbated. It's like our worst, most primitive, most immature instincts are now being played out in social media and and the sort of media echo chambers where it's like, okay, not only are we right, but the other side isn't wrong. They're evil. You know, they know we're right, and yet they're choosing to be evil. And and that to me is is one of the most infantile perspectives a person could have. What you need to understand, like everyone needs to understand, is that every horrendous, horrific tragedy, you know, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Hitler in in Nazi Germany, they thought what they were doing was right. They genuinely believe what they were doing is right. The Ayatollah, you know, believes that he's right. They they don't question it. They don't think that maybe it's immoral. They think it's right. They think that the you know, ends justify. The means. And that we have to understand that everybody who's our you know opposed to us believes just as fervently in what they believe than as we do in what we believe. And they're not evil. They they just we consider them misguided. They just are maybe misinformed. Maybe the way it's framed, the situation is framed, is different than ours, but they're not evil. We can't kill them, you know, we can't punish them. We should engage in debate. We should engage with them. And the best thing you can do of all is actually to get to know them. And that's a thing that sadly is has been completely forgotten. You know, there's the contact hypothesis in psychology that if there's two groups that are sort of in competition with each other that don't like each other traditionally, if you actually make contact with them and get to learn people, you know, their name and and something about them, where they're from, their perspective, all of a sudden the general uh tendency toward uh out-group bias is diminished. So there is a way out. We just uh I don't think we've found a way to tap it yet as a society.
SPEAKER_01:I have a great friend who's a mentor to me named Ricardo Gonzalez, and he wrote this book about the five stages of cultural mastery. And the fifth stage, which is sort of like that pinnacle of the gold on the top of the pyramid, is called endearment, which is it isn't so much about do I know you, do you know me, are you different than me, am I different than you? But it's truly about can we be different and be endeared to one another? And there's a super powerful scene in one of the latest seasons of this television show that can be streamed online called The Chosen. It's a it's a it's basically a television series about the life of Jesus, but not done in a corny way. It's actually one of the most, I think, best produced, best choreographed, best scripted, best acted, best directed shows on television right now. But anyway, that's a total aside. It's just one of very quality piece of art. And the scene is a scene where basically the Jewish leaders are getting ready to decide that they want to convict Jesus. And if you are a person who is a Christian, you may be very limited in your knowledge and understanding even of the Bible, and just feel like, well, those people were bad, they were wrong, they they killed our Lord. And yet, to your point, the people that did that were very strongly held by their convictions and beliefs that they're following what they thought God wanted them to do. And in this scene, it's so moving because it helps you open your eyes, your mind, and your heart to maybe see a glimpse into how the other person felt and thought and what made them make those decisions so that you didn't look at them as just purely evil people, even though the end result was evil. Likely no different than anything we're experiencing today is that there is just evil in the world. That's the way it's been since the beginning. Well, you know, a couple days after the beginning, I guess. But evil, evil is it, it is. And so when you think about this idea of in the beginning of this section of your book, you talk about sanctification and then self-transcendence. How do we how do we look at the levels of your pyramid to get ourselves out of that cocoon that is uh you know political division and environmental um things that are causing beliefs that one side is evil or that racism is a real thing, or that there are issues with people that haven't evolved their way of thinking to be able to communicate, collaborate, and and be one with your neighbor, like actually knowing who your neighbor's name is, even.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the surprising things in the book. Uh I pulled out these statistics of the percentage of Americans who don't know their neighbors and and aren't friends with any of their neighbors, and it was like the majority. And it was also a majority that didn't want to know their neighbors and didn't want to be friends with their neighbors. And that's really sad commentary, you know. It and uh they they I talk about this in the book a lot in terms of the inclusion uh section, about how you know there's philosophers who have said that basically the precondition for totalitarianism is loneliness. That we once we feel disconnected from each other and from a society, we no longer feel that we have any responsibility for our neighbor, our brother, or sister. Uh that lets us begin the process of dehumanization. And that lets and we basically are nihilists, you know, we have no beliefs, and there's some external source that we go to to tell us what our beliefs are. And you see that now, like that that was written at a time long before social media, you know, long before this degree of political division, and it's actually come true. And I think my hope is that by exposing people to this hierarchy of needs, essentially, this sort of pyramid of needs, it will help people understand that every single one of us has all of those needs. And that we we tend to champion one or another. Some are more popular, you know, some are sort of more socially desirable than others. It's very socially desirable now to say, you know, I want to become my best self and and uh and virtue signaling, I want to appear to be a uh, you know, charitable giving person. Uh, you know, you hear a lot of people say, Oh, I'm a spiritual person. Uh, I guarantee a lot of those people, if you kind of scratch the surface on that, there's really nothing behind it. Like, what do you mean you're a spiritual person? You you mean what? That there's there's something more. Do you have any more to add to that? You know, beyond that, or or that's it? Or does that mean you're sort of open to crystals and tarot? Like, I what does it really mean? And and I think again, we all have all 12 needs, and actually 24. We have the all of the negatives of all the positives. Um and my meta point is if we don't sort of address those needs in ourselves, in our communities, and then get to that higher level of understanding, the sort of golden, you know, uh apex of the pyramid, um, it's very hard to overcome these sort of inherent biases that we have, you know, where we we don't give people the benefit of the doubt, we kind of just assume the worst about people, you know. Um, as a George Carlin said, why is it that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and everyone who drives faster than you is crazy? You know, it's you made a good point. It's true. It's like this idiot won't get out of my way. I'm like, oh, that guy's crazy, you know. Like, no, they're not crazy and they're not idiots, they're just not doing exactly what you're doing. But we have this inbuilt filter that says, I'm always right, everyone else is always wrong, and that applies then to not just me, but but my group. And uh it's you know, we better fix this before it it kills us all, you know, seriously.
SPEAKER_01:Understatement. I think that as we kind of finish out this book, I think the most profound part for me, and this has been 400 pages of book, either 20 of the pages are the bibliography. This this is such a chalk full of information book. And the one thing, if I could only pick out one thing, well, that's hard because there's really more than one thing, but if I could really only pick out one thing, I feel like it would have to be the dark horse theory in the beginning of the book because it made me think about what do I want my legacy to be and why do I even care? Like if I'm gonna be dead and I don't even know what people think about me when I'm gone, what does it matter how I live? But there's still this pull of wanting to feel like I left the world a little bit better than when I got here, and that the impact I had on people's lives did more good than damage. And I wonder if that's what makes us different than a plant or an animal, I suppose, is that this quest or this need for something different. And and for me, looking at things like um uh culture, celebrity, how unhappy people are, the more money they get. I don't know, the trillionaire deal. I don't know if it's gonna make him any happier or not, but um doubt it. I uh I'll tell you, I was reading, so this is uh the this month that we're recording this is a month that I've go through certain chapters in um in the Bible for my own understanding and to try to gain more wisdom and knowledge. And so it just so happens that my birthday is on the 22nd of a month, and there's 22 chapters only in one book of the Bible, which so happens to be the last one in the book. And so today is the 18th of September, and in this particular chapter, it just so happens it's in the front of my conscious mind because I wrote about it this morning. Um, but it basically is talking about this conflict that is actually an interesting conflict between it's really first of all. I have to say this if anybody's never read Revelation, or maybe even if you have, it's like a sci-fi movie that you won't even believe if you read it just because it's so otherworldly and symbolic, and you just really have to spend a lot of time to understand it. But anyway, in this particular chapter, there's these two kind of primary uh characters. One is a prostitute and one is the beast. And the way that some of the theologians or or experts that diagnose this symbolism were talking about it, they were saying, like, the prostitute is really like um uh people with a quest for social status and celebrity, and like the people who are on TikTok that want to be a famous TikToker. And then the beast is of course sin and Satan and darkness. And at one point in this particular chapter, it's talking about how you would imagine that these two things would be paired together, and they are in the beginning, they're like working together, everything is going great because they're trying to combat good in the world, they're trying to extinguish light. But what happens is they start to devour themselves, and the and the basically the end of the story is it it basically self-implodes, and so the prostitute is devoured by the beast, and then darkness is thrown into a river of fire and different stuff.
SPEAKER_00:You have to read it to right locks up for a thousand years or yeah, right, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so it's so interesting to think about even how you're describing these pieces here that culminate this whole book about what's important in life and who do you want to be and what do you want to be known for? There's an awesome book by Jeff Henderson. He used to be the head of marketing for the Braves in Chick-fil-A, and a he was a pastor, and he uh has this book called For F-O-R, and it's a really short book, it's a short read, but it's basically about the idea of who do you want to be known as, or who do you want to be be known for? And he wanted to be known for people. And isn't that kind of that transcendence of going from self to others? That yeah, you want to get yourself right in order to do this other piece. And so I know it's probably a little bit of a ramble to tie it all back together.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. I love it. That made me think of a quote that I pulled. Uh, it was Captain Marvel from the MCU who says, Good is not a thing you are, good is a thing you do. You know, it's like and it's the same self versus you know action in in the world with other people, for other people, you know, that it's it's and I think a lot of people don't understand that. They think that, well, I'm a good person, you know, I don't give to charity, I don't donate blood, I don't pay, you know, I cheat on my taxes, I, you know, I cheat on my spouse, I like, yeah, but I'm a good person, you know, and and I think that there's a lot of that belief, that naive belief, that because I'm conscious and I'm in my body, I get to decide my moral status, you know. And and of course, because of all the biases we've talked about, you're gonna say, well, yeah, I'm right about everything. And and there was a reason, there was a justification for every single one of those things that I did. The truth is there is a kind of an absolute reality that you know supersedes your own, you know, self-judgment. And that that that that that actually matters, and that that actually, if you're ever going to achieve these higher levels of consciousness, you have to take that it has to be that reckoning, you know, that sort of personal audit and inventory of your own behavior and the things you supported and the things that you and we talked about this the last time, I think, that that by any means necessary, you know, as a slogan, that that this concept that the the ends justify the means is basically you're you're just when you say that, you just signed up for I'm never gonna self-transcend. It's like I I have now made excuses because I thought this thing was so pressing that I was gonna bend the rules in the favor of my group, and all of a sudden now you have lost any moral position, and and whatever comes out the other end is gonna be permanently stained. And people don't get that still. Uh it it shocks me. Uh, although, you know, and then it took me a long time to actually um figure this out, you know. This took a lot of writing and reading and and working. Um, but I want to get that message out and I want to share it with as many people as possible that that the the the road to that the spiritual, you know, everybody says I'm I'm so spiritual, the road is not an easy one. It involves justice and ethics. And if you skip those, you will not get there. You're gonna get to some other place, but to just getting high, you know. You can go, you know, to ayahuasca, you can go get high. You have made no spiritual progress, you know. That's it's it's not the same thing.
SPEAKER_01:So maybe to sum it up as we finish up our episodes, is that if we want to get to this higher level of consciousness or to this transcendent means of our purpose in life, is the first step that we have to go deeper first into our subconscious mind. That's where we understand the emotions and these 12 needs that do drive us. And until you can understand those, you can't come up out of that in order to evolve.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And that's sort of the the point that I use to sort of wrap up the whole book is that my my big point here is that you've got to bring these things to consciousness. You know, we have these two brain systems. We've got the sort of system one and the system two, the system one being that sort of fast, emotional, intuitive, like instantaneous. Um, and a lot of us just rely on that through life. We're sort of just uh we we don't second guess anything. We just go with our gut, you know, which is some people see that's a good thing, some people say it's a bad thing. It depends, I mean, it leads people to a lot of trouble, frankly. Uh, we have that other system to reflect and deliberate what makes it into our consciousness. And for a lot of people, they've got these filters that will basically screen out anything that sort of, you know, makes them feel badly about themselves, makes them question any of their choices, denial, avoidance, and they'll just screen that stuff right out. But there's a real value in bringing those things to light, letting yourself really ponder them and really, I mean, that's what my hope is for this book and this whole movement is to get people to immerse themselves in each one of these 12 needs that they have and really take stock of where they are. You know, uh it's not something you just get, it's not it's not a gift, it's something you earn, and it's something you earn through deliberate action. Uh and for some people that may come easily, and for some it may come hard, but it's it's something that you have to do intentionally at the end of the day, and that's the way you make progress. That's how you grow as a person, that's how you you transcend your concerns and your local concerns and your in-group concerns and begin to think about the cosmic and universal.
SPEAKER_01:Beautiful. So, even though we are done, sadly, with these episodes, there's still more to come. So there will be a lot more things coming from Agile Brain and your organization, JD, that take us even beyond these discussions, whether it's through the assessments, the deep dives with coaches, the opportunity to get involved and engaged, reading the book, likely some other opportunities for people to have experiences with you directly, which will be amazing. I can't wait for all of that. I want to just thank you for honoring me with your time and your wisdom and knowledge and all the research that went into this, for entertaining some of my crazy thoughts and stories as I'm learning it myself and letting me have a front row seat into how you developed this and how it can help me uh develop it into my own life. So I just want to say a very sincere thank you for spending this time with me over these last several weeks.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Thank you, Denise. This has really been a pleasure for me. Uh so uh uh it's great to get a chance to actually explore these ideas in a kind of uh without a strict time limit, you know, which has been really a treat.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Well, friends, if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with others. If you are new and you missed the other episodes, definitely encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier ones. Please get a copy of this book, The Emotionally Agile Brain by Dr. JD Pincus. It's worth your read. It's worth being on and off of your bookshelf and into your life. And again, from now till the end of this calendar year, we're going to uh gift people complimentary agile brain assessments, and you can go deeper with a coach for a deep dive into a discovery of your results. JD, thanks for being here with me, friends. My name is Denise Russona. On behalf of my friend JD Pinkis, this has been another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf.