Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer On The Mind-Body Connection, The Power of Mindfulness, & Why Age Is Nothing But a Mindset

Harvard’s renowned “Mother of Mindfulness,” Dr. Ellen Langer offers an insightful assessment: the root cause of global challenges lies in mindlessness. With an illustrious forty-five-year career and the distinction of being the first woman to attain psychology tenure at Harvard. Her extensive work spans diverse topics, including the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health, challenging the conventional mind-body dualism in Western medicine. In her latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, Dr. Langer delves into the transformative potential of mindfulness for improving health. This conversation dismantles the separation between mind and body, exploring the concept of mind-body unity. She dissects the power of belief, dispels the illusion of control, and offers a novel perspective on decision-making and manipulation. The discourse extends to the psychological construct of fatigue, demonstrating how mindfulness positively influences physical endurance. Advocating for a paradigm shift, Dr. Langer encourages liberating ourselves from past experiences and conventional wisdom. This transformative mindset, she asserts, unlocks untapped potential, fostering increased agency and empowerment. The discussion reveals intricate connections between the mind and body, providing practical tips and cutting-edge research to empower individuals to take control of their health and achieve enhanced well-being. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF 👉 seed.com/RICHROLL Birch: Enjoy 20% OFF + 2 free eco-rest pillows 👉 BirchLiving.com/richroll On: Get 10% OFF 👉 on.com/RICHROLL Momentous: Get 20% OFF OFF 👉 livemomentous.com/richroll Waking Up: get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF 👉 wakingup.com/RICHROLL This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF your first month 👉 BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL. Dr. Ellen Langer will be hosting a private, intimate Couples Retreat in Puerto Vallarta Mexico March 9-14, 2026. For information please email Randy Lennon at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Ellen Langer?

  Most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds. If we could only wake up, life would be very, very different for virtually all of us.

• 1:15Rich Roll?

  Most of us live mindlessly most of the time. Dr. Ellen Langer is the author of several books on mindfulness, including her latest, The Mindful Body.

• 1:26Ellen Langer?

  Medical science can only give us probabilities. There's still doctors who will say something like, "You have six months to live." There is no way they could know that.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer showed that mental attitude can reverse the effects of aging. Her groundbreaking research spanning over 40 years delves into the mind-body connection.

• 1:46Ellen Langer?

  Everything you think you know for sure, every limit you place on yourself, is a function of your mindlessness. People think they want complete success, not knowing that if they had complete success, life would be empty.

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  That's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  Thank you for coming. It's an honor to meet you. I appreciate you coming to do this today. It's a treat to have such a legend in our presence today. You know, one of the things that I love so much about you and your work is just the kind of novel unconventional approach that you've taken to psychology. And you do it with this seeming kind of twinkle in your eye, like, you know, kind of pushing boundaries.

• 2:29Ellen Langer?

  That's right. Like, I'm doing what you're doing, but not.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  But with a beginner's mind and this kind of sense of awe and wonder says a lot about your imagination. Like, all of these studies, you've done so many studies over the years that the average person wouldn't even concoct in their wildest dreams. And you're just putting them to the test all the time. Like, over the course of your career, like, what is one of the wildest, craziest studies that you came up with and tested?

• 2:54Ellen Langer?

  We're doing one right now, and all you're doing is watching somebody eat pizza. That's the whole thing you're watching. So, we give different instructions. One group is supposed to count the number of times the person is chewing. That's the control group. The important group is imagining tasting it and smelling it and, you know, feeling it on the tongue, you know, so a whole...

• 3:16Rich Roll?

  Bringing a mindfulness to the...

• 3:18Ellen Langer?

  And so the question is, will they gain, lose, or no difference in weight? So, that's pretty wild.

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Ellen Langer?

  If they lose weight, I'm gonna have to rewrite physics.

• 3:31Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Well, you've already demonstrated that this has an impact on satiety, on hunger, right? Like, even with the time that you spent with your friend, and she's eating her sundae.

• 3:40Ellen Langer?

  And it was amazing. You know, in fact, I'm very external in that way. And whenever I go out to dinner, it's very important to know the time between when I get there and start watching somebody else eat and when they're gonna take my order. Because I don't want, when you're taking your last bite of that burger... For me, now order.

• 3:57Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:58Ellen Langer?

  Because I'm not gonna want the burger in another five minutes.

• 4:00Rich Roll?

  Right. There's so much to kind of extrapolate from that, right? I think there is some kind of, you know, weight loss, like guru, uh, protocol that we could divine from that.

• 4:11Ellen Langer?

  Okay, so here's one. Um, we haven't done this yet, but you know David Edwards?

• 4:15Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:16Ellen Langer?

  So David was at MIT, I think he still might be there. And he has these things, they look like hourglasses. And you turn it over and it emits an odor. One of these is the odor of chocolate. And it seems to me that if people smell chocolate and then have available to them all sorts of snacks, you know, chocolates, they're going to eat a lot. However, if they do it multiple times, they won't want the chocolate.

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 4:42Ellen Langer?

  It's like people who, you walk by a bakery, you have to have it, but maybe you don't have to have it. But the people who work there, you know, don't eat the stuff very much.

• 4:50Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you tested that with cheese as well, like people who-

• 4:53Ellen Langer?

  No, that wasn't mine, that was-

• 4:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, that was a different one, yeah, but it's in the book.

• 4:56Ellen Langer?

  But it was the same idea, yeah.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Imagining eating a bunch of cheese and then that translates into when you're actually presented with cheese, like you're gonna eat less.

• 5:05Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, similar, but the point here would be if you wanted to, um, control your weight by eating less. So the substance you wanna eat less of, you overdose on the smell.

• 5:16Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. At some point, you would develop a tolerance for that, I think, that we, you don't know. We haven't tested that part of it.

• 5:22Ellen Langer?

  I watched, um, remember Mad Men?

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:25Ellen Langer?

  And every minute they're smoking.

• 5:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Ellen Langer?

  So, and I'm a smoker, I still smoke. So I walk into the room-

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  No one's listening, don't worry.

• 5:31Ellen Langer?

  I walk into a room and Mad Men is on, and he's putting out a cigarette, one of them. And I didn't want a cigarette. Okay, so if they're lighting up, I want a cigarette. If they're putting it out, I don't. And so the, if you break up in your, in your mind, imagining difference, it's not, you know, one activity. It depends on where you are in the activity.

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  Sure. Well, it's that sort of cue, behavior, reward cycle, right? So if he's putting it out, it's telling your brain, oh, I've already satisfied the craving. Like, what's the wildest study that you would like to put to the test that you haven't yet?

• 6:09Ellen Langer?

  Well, one is, I would like to take hundreds of people who were just diagnosed with cancer. We could use three, four different kinds of cancer. And, you know, nobody is going to be happy when they get a diagnosis. So give them three weeks. Then after that, measure their stress level every three weeks, four weeks. And I predict, independent of their genetics, independent of their treatment, independent of nutrition and the kind of cancer, stress will predict the course of the disease.

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  That hypothesis comes from where? This idea that you have that stress is really foundational to way more than we think.

• 6:52Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, you know, I couldn't tell you where any of these ideas come from. But I'm overwhelmed, I can't get out of bed.

• 6:57Rich Roll?

  What is your, what is your process? Do you wake up in the morning and jot down ideas? Like, you must have hundreds of studies that you want.

• 7:04Ellen Langer?

  So I have, I have a friend collaborator who's a member of my lab, Philip Maiman, he's big in AI. And I know he can't possibly remember these, but at least I feel. So I go, Philip, I have this great idea. I tell him and then it's out. Whether it'll ever come back or not, I don't know.

• 7:24Rich Roll?

  So the foundation of your work is essentially disabusing people of this dichotomy between mind and body.

• 7:33Ellen Langer?

  When I think about it, and people talking about mind and body, these are just words. And people have made them, reified them in some sense. And it seemed to me, just the work on placebos alone, that there's more going on. And, you know, the mindful body, when I first, it was first going to be a memoir. So I have lots of personal stories in there. And two that speak to the mind-body unity. Broadly, both about pancreas. Now you tell me how many people you know who have even one story about pancreas? I have two.

• 8:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Ellen Langer?

  So I was married when I was very young. Foolishly, maybe, maybe not. And I went to Paris on my honeymoon. I was nineteen going on forty. And I have to be very grown up because after all now I'm a married woman. Doesn't follow, but it did in my mind at that time. So we're having dinner in Paris and I ordered the mixed grill and on the mixed grill is pancreas. So I asked my then-husband, which of these is the pancreas? He points at me, I'm a big eater, I love eating, I eat everything else with gusto. Now, the moment of truth. Can I eat the pancreas? And I feel I have to because I have to prove that now I'm all grown up.

• 8:55Ellen Langer?

  So I start eating it and then I get sick, literally sick to my stomach. He starts laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He says, because that's chicken, you ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay, so what was going on there? Another pancreas-related story with the same bottom line perhaps was my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. And then all of a sudden it was gone. And the medical world couldn't explain it. And so for me, just entertaining the possibility, even if just for heuristic purposes, just to generate new hypotheses,

• 9:36Ellen Langer?

  let's put the mind and body back together, see them as one and see how far we can push it. And that would explain both of those pancreas instances. And then we've done study after study and they just keep turning out to make it so that we don't gain anything, I don't think, by keeping them as separate. And the separate has delayed research because the question it raises is how do you get from this thing, fuzzy thing called the brain to something material called the body? And so, everybody's looking for mediators. And you put it back together, you don't need a mediator, because it's one thing.

• 10:14Rich Roll?

  Right. The findings are so astonishing that it's very difficult to digest. And I think despite the fact that the kind of advent and awareness around mindfulness is growing kind of exponentially right now, there is still this recalcitrance in the Western medicine, kind of, you know.

• 10:32Ellen Langer?

  No, there's no question about it.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  Corporate industrial complex to resist that notion when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.

• 10:39Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, there was an article that somebody wrote about me for, I was the head of the magazine section of the New York Times. And so, it took me forever to explain to him, mind-body unity. And then, when he turned the article in, and these are very smart people, who already agreed to publish the article, still, they kept asking, sort of, what's going on under the hood? What's going on inside? And I'm not suggesting that there's nothing going on. I'm simply suggesting that, more or less, it's all happening simultaneously.

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:12Ellen Langer?

  Now, decades ago, the medical model was such that they didn't believe that psychology mattered at all. I mean, it's nice to be happy, I'm sure they felt that way. But that the only way you're going to become ill was the introduction of an antigen, pathogen, what have you. And then, that model shifted to the biosocial model. So now, they know psychology matters some. And eventually, I think, we'll get to the point to realize that it's really, in some sense, the whole ball.

• 11:43Rich Roll?

  That, that leads me to recall the study around colds and flu.

• 11:49Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  That's in the book, which is so wild.

• 11:51Ellen Langer?

  Incredible. And it's so funny, because I've done several podcasts, once the book came out, and I've never talked about it. And that, you know, each time I say to them, "Talk about the cold study."

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, please, please elaborate.

• 12:04Ellen Langer?

  So, basically, people come in to the lab, or the room, and there's a large television, and the television is showing a video of people coughing and sneezing. The room is full of things like tissues, chicken soup, vaseline, whatever might prime a cold. And essentially, without the introduction of a virus, people who believe, for whom we prime a cold, get sick. There's no evidence, I think, I'm not sure of this, but that if your hair is wet and you go outside, that you're going to get a cold. But I believe that if you believe, you know, if you go outside-

• 12:46Rich Roll?

  That's a very persistent trope.

• 12:49Ellen Langer?

  With a wet hair, that you're gonna get a cold. And, you know, which would be a nice test to see, to take people to find out how they believe colds come about, and then test them in those circumstances. The interesting thing would be to put them in a situation, a different situation from that, where you're introducing a virus, and to see if they get sick.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  There were some added nuance to that as well, wasn't there? With some interesting prompts, like sort of telling people like, hey, you might be on the verge of a cold, or, and then having a control group and seeing what would happen, and then they would start to express symptomology.

• 13:24Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  And obviously, I guess on some level, we're all harboring, you know, viruses and bacteria, so maybe that-

• 13:32Ellen Langer?

  Well, that's what, yeah.

• 13:33Rich Roll?

  That sort of activates or represses an immune response.

• 13:37Ellen Langer?

  When I tried to explain it, and I thought, well, I mean, you know, where is it coming from, and all of a sudden you become sick? The weak hypothesis, and I couldn't answer that, but that would be the strong hypothesis. The weak hypothesis is that the last cold you got, or the cold before that, wasn't 100% cured, and so it's dormant, and what this did was make it active again.

• 14:03Rich Roll?

  Right. Human beings are insane.

• 14:05Ellen Langer?

  Oh, there's no question about it.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  And you've sort of backed this truck up into this world that pulls the covers on like, you know, we think we're sentient and we're making logical, rational decisions all the time, and we're not easily manipulated, and that we have agency and control. And, you know, the book really pulls the covers on that, reveal a very different picture of how we operate, how easily we're conjured into believing one thing or the other, how we can be manipulated, and the power of belief- On outcomes in terms of physical manifestations.

• 14:38Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, no, I don't know if it's how easily we're deceived. Because I think the whole structure, since we're little kids, everything is sort of conspiring against us. You know, you're taught right and wrong as if these are completely different. You're taught absolutes at every turn. And so then when you grow up and you believe these absolutes absolutely, it doesn't seem quite as surprising. Within that structure, then you can prime people and move them around.

• 15:08Rich Roll?

  Those structures give us this illusion of control or a sense of security, which of course leads to this idea of mindlessness, which is really how you kind of enter this world. Not through the traditional Zen Buddhism world of mindfulness, but from the opposite direction.

• 15:26Ellen Langer?

  It's even worse than that, Rich. Okay. So I start studying mindlessness. And from the very beginning, I'm going to have data, so much data, showing that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. Then I had a conversation with somebody, and I wish I could remember with whom it was. Because he said to me, I don't know if he said it in this nasty way, but I don't know how you make this nice. You are what you study. I took it seriously. So then I decided to look at the other side of it. And it was only after looking at the other side of it that I learned all about Buddhism and, you know, eastern philosophy and so on. But my ideas had already been formed. And what was interesting to me was for me, from a Western scientific perspective,

• 16:11Ellen Langer?

  to come to, you know, the same point time after time as this ancient thinking felt that, you know, there must be something there.

• 16:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. The idea that we're mindless most of the time is a disturbing thought. But when you reflect on that, it becomes very clear how true that is. And there's a couple quotes that I jotted down that you said that I think can kind of set this up. You said... We don't enjoy our lives enough because we are not actually there. We are mindless, not mindful. Virtually, all the world's ills boil down to mindlessness. Most of us live mindlessly, most of the time.

• 16:51Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, no, I mean, big. It's even bigger than that when I give talks about it, where I have a slide that says, "Virtually, all of our ills, personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness." Now, when I give a talk on that, I say, "And just among us and the other million or so people I've said this to." I mean, all. So, yeah, I think that if we could only wake up, life would be very, very different for virtually all of us.

• 17:25Rich Roll?

  Well, let's tease that out a little bit. Like, what would be a good example? Like, I'm thinking of those moments when you're driving the car, and then you kind of come to and realize you don't even know where you were the last 10 minutes.

• 17:38Ellen Langer?

  Oh, yes. It was that example that made me realize it in the first place. You know, that I'm driving and I think I'm gonna be at an exit 32, and I say, "I'm at 38, where was I?" No, everything you think you know for sure, every limit you place on yourself is a function of your mindlessness. I mean, we make people more mindful and they live longer. So, we're talking, you know, we're talking about very big changes as a function of giving up this view that you know. The power does that be, I think, would like us, even in our democracy, to stay mindless? Because that instantiates the status quo in some sense. But I think everybody knows they don't know.

• 18:23Ellen Langer?

  They just don't know that they can't know. So, they pretend, and they opt out. And when somebody acts as if they know, then what you do is genuflect or give them the power of a stage. But because everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. You can't know. So, when I lecture on this, I often give this example. One thing that everybody thinks they know. How much is 1 plus 1?

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I'll play along. I've read the book, so the answer is 2.

• 18:53Ellen Langer?

  Okay. So, it is sometimes 2, but not always. If you add 1 watt of chewing gum plus 1 watt of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. If you add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal two as or more often as it does. Now imagine, right after we finish talking, someone comes over to you and says, "Rich, how much is one plus one?" You're no longer going to mindlessly say two. What you're going to do is pay some attention to the context, and then you're going to answer more mindful and say, "It could be," and then you can say, "It could be one, it could be two."

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Right, and what does plus even mean?

• 19:32Ellen Langer?

  Exactly, yeah, right, right?

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  It's simultaneously humbling, but also confronting. And as, you know, a scientist who is in a world where the scientific method is everything, and there are guardrails and rules and protocols, and this is the way we do it, and we don't do it like this, and this is the way it has to be, I would imagine that you're ruffling some feathers here and there.

• 19:56Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, but I'm oblivious to it most of the time. I just ruffle and then find... I had written in another book about becoming an artist. I started to paint.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  You're a painter.

• 20:08Ellen Langer?

  And I didn't, I was applauded for not following certain rules. And then I admitted I wasn't following, I didn't know the rules, because I couldn't find them. So, much of the time, when I'm being recalcitrant, it's out of ignorance rather than courage. I think this is really important, especially, but not exclusively, with respect to health. Medical science, like all science, can only give us probabilities. An experiment says, if it's reliable, that if you do it again the exact same way, which you can never do exactly the same thing, you're likely to get these findings.

• 20:45Ellen Langer?

  Those probabilities are presented in medical journals, textbooks, what have you, as absolutes. When you know something absolutely, you don't pay any more attention to it. And people need to know that everything they're told is a probability, is a best guess. You know, so, I mean, I can't imagine, but there are still doctors who will say something like, "You have six months to live." There is no way they could know that. And when their prognoses become self-fulfilling, then I, you know, I get upset.

• 21:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Ellen Langer?

  Even the diagnosis of cancer.

• 21:24Ellen Langer?

  That you have cancer. You could have something that people have called cancer, but is different from it in, you know, in these ways and those, you know. Um, we just don't know. Uh, so, you know, and if I got sick, I'd certainly go to the medical world, but I wouldn't just hand myself over to them. And any doom and gloom hypothesis, um, I don't think I would be quite as willing as many people seem to be to accepting the truth of it.

• 21:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there is a sense, despite the illusion of control, which we're gonna get into, there is this kind of hopefulness around agency that emerges from the book. Because when you realize, uh, that you do have a little bit more control than perhaps the traditional dynamic of a doctor telling you this is the way it is and this is how it's gonna go, um, it's empowering.

• 22:14Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, for one thing, when you're told you have a chronic illness, the way people understand chronic is it's uncontrollable. Well, you can't prove that anything is uncontrollable. All we know is that we don't know. It's indeterminate. Now, if you think you definitely can't do something, you're not gonna do it. If you think, who knows, maybe not, even probably not, you may try it. And so, um, there's always a modicum of control we can exert. Even the simplest thing, I believe, this one I don't have data for, but that if something is ailing, you know, your arm is in bad shape, if you make the rest of your body healthy, um, you're gonna have a better chance of beating whatever the disorder is. You know, imagine you have an Olympic runner

• 22:59Ellen Langer?

  and you have a couch potato who's, you know, overindulging in bad food or whatever, uh, and they're both exposed to, um, COVID. Uh, I would bet on the athlete.

• 23:11Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 23:11Ellen Langer?

  But so then you can't say it's uncontrollable.

• 23:14Rich Roll?

  There's two things operating here. One is sort of the calcification of thoughts and ideas and possibilities on the one hand. Um, and then on the other hand, it's, uh...

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  It's about the power of language and how we communicate ideas and how potent the words we choose to describe certain things can be in terms of how we think about ourselves, our belief about possibility, and the physical kind of outcomes and manifestations that we demonstrate physiologically.

• 23:44Ellen Langer?

  I'm so glad you pulled that out because that's a very important part of the book. But when I start talking about it, I usually just end up with all of the, you know, exciting to me studies on mind-body unity. But language, you know, even a simple thing. So I went to visit a friend who had a very bad case of cancer. She just gets back from the hospital. "Hi Eva, how are you?" She said, "Fine." I said, "What'd they say? My cancer's in remission." And then all of a sudden, I thought about it. "Oh, wait a second. If I went for the very same test, chances are they'd tell me I don't have cancer." Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission? And that seemed to me a way of understanding almost everything in this culture, that, you know, you could have the thing as bad, you have it in remission as better.

• 24:29Ellen Langer?

  But they never go the whole distance. There's a better-than-better way of understanding almost everything we do, and hopefully I can give examples of that. But to say your cancer is in remission, what does that mean? Is it lurking someplace? No, it's sort of, in some ways, the medical world edging their bets on if it comes back. But the understanding that if cancer comes back, it's in some ways the same cancer. That's why we call it cancer. In some ways, it's different. And what we need to do is attend to the ways it's different. The example I use is a cold. You get a cold. When the cold seems to be gone, you don't say you're in remission. You say you're cured.

• 25:10Ellen Langer?

  Now, if you get a cold after that, you see it as a different cold. Just like it's cancer. In some ways, it's the same. In some ways, it's different. By seeing it as different, you're empowered. "I can beat these. Look at how many I've handled in the past." And then the one thing that drives me the craziest is the five-year rule. That a woman has breast cancer, the cancer is gone, and they call it a remission, they would be better off calling it cured. They have to wait five years without it reappearing. For the medical world to say it's cured. Believing that it could be there is very stressful. And we've made clear my views on stress. You know, so in the choice of language, they're keeping people in a state that I think is very unhealthy.

• 25:55Ellen Langer?

  And before I did this, by the way, so I had my views of remission cure. Then I called Susan Love. Susan was, when she was alive, was a breast cancer, an expert, the expert. And she agreed with me. So I felt a little more comfortable going against the many people in the medical world with that.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  It's not just a differentiation in language and word choice. It's really a different paradigm.

• 26:23Ellen Langer?

  Oh, yes.

• 26:23Rich Roll?

  Because on the one hand, these are binary, dualistic terms, where there's hard lines before and after, and kind of a concretism to the whole thing, where your whole deal is attention to variability. Everything is in flux all the time. Nothing from any moment to the next is the same in any conceivable, possible way. And within that, there is this, again, hopefulness, like a sense of possibility or something being different, and an appreciation or a mindful attention to that offers new ways of perceiving it and ultimately considering and treating it.

• 27:01Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, I mean, we have several studies, as you know, on what I call attention to symptom variability. That's just a fancy way of saying being mindful. Being mindful is noticing change. When you're given a diagnosis of some dread disease, the assumption most people have is that it's going to stay the same or get worse. But nothing goes in only one direction. There are always blips. You know, it's like the stock market. You know, it goes up, goes down a little bit, goes up. You know, if it's on a course to go up, you still have moments where it's falling and vice versa if it's going down. And if we paid attention to when it's better, why is it better now? We'd have a way of controlling it. So we did these studies where we call people at random times of the day and ask them,

• 27:46Ellen Langer?

  is that symptom better or worse than before, than the last time we called, for instance, and why? Now, three things hap- four things happen when we do that. The first is you start this process where you feel in control. You're doing something to make yourself better. Second, by noticing that now it's a little better, that feels good because you thought, you know, it was only awful. And, you know, there are moments of some relief. Third, by asking yourself why, you engage in a mindful search, and we have so much data, that that mindful search alone is good for your health. Last, that if you believe or look for a cure, I think you're more likely to find one. Now, we've done this with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's,

• 28:31Ellen Langer?

  arthritis, chronic pain, you know, a host of real things. Things that are scary for people to have. And in each case, we get a great improvement. And you can do this yourself, you know, which is how it all started, which is people, when they take a placebo, you know, the doctor is wearing a white coat, gives you this nothing, you take it and you get better. Clearly, you're doing it yourself. So what do we need the doctor for? And so that's how this attention to variability started. Most people have a smartphone. So you set your smartphone for an hour. And an hour it rings. And you ask yourself, is the symptom better or worse than the last time? And why?

• 29:15Ellen Langer?

  Men set it for three hours, and two hours and 10 minutes. Doesn't matter, just random times in the course of a day, over the week, in two weeks, whatever. And that even if you don't get the answer, you're going to end up better for the reasons that I said.

• 29:31Rich Roll?

  Because you are paying mindful attention to what's occurring, which is connecting you more deeply to yourself.

• 29:38Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, and when the neurons are firing, that's literally and figuratively enlivening. It's energizing, which is something that I often fail to remind people of. Because I think we should be mindful all the time. You say it to people, "Oh, my God, it sounds, you know, scary to them, unless you're an academic." It's confused with thinking. And even thinking has gotten a bad rap. It's not thinking that's hard. It's the worrying that you're not going to be able to solve whatever the problem is. That's hard. So what we find is that the more mindful you are, the more energized you are. And the way for people to understand that is if they think of doing whatever they enjoy doing, that the only way you can enjoy it is if you're there for it.

• 30:23Ellen Langer?

  So it turns out mindfulness is energizing. Turns out that it's good for you. Turns out that it feels good. And, you know, you know that I've been doing this for so long. There's been lots of opportunity to put in all sorts of dependent measures. So it's better for everything. People see it as charismatic. It actually leaves an imprint on the products you produce. Your relationships improve. Your memory is better, so on and so on.

• 30:50Rich Roll?

  So for somebody who's new to this idea of mindfulness or have traditionally associated it with a meditation practice, something formal like that, what is the process of getting somebody mindfully engaged?

• 31:04Ellen Langer?

  What we have people do is notice new things. Three, five, really doesn't matter, but people need a number. So we say, "Notice three new things about things you know." "Go home and notice three new things about your spouse." "Notice three new things about the lawn." "Three new things about something at work." And what happens is when you're noticing new things about the things you think you know, you come to see you didn't know them very well. So your attention naturally goes there. Now, the other way, the top-down way, is to accept that everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So uncertainty is the rule. Most of us have been taught from day one certainties.

• 31:50Ellen Langer?

  And those certainties are making us mindless. They make us unaware of all sorts of possibilities for every aspect of our mind. For me, life change. When I was at this horse event, you remember, I'm a straight A student. I'm the, you were also. Well, we're the ones people hate. I might have even, as a kid, memorized what was underneath the pictures. I mean, that was terrible. Okay, so I know. Now, I'm at this horse event. This man asked me if I'll watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog. I roll my eyes internally so he can't see. Important to be nice, and I think he's crazy. Horses don't eat meat. Everybody knows, or at least all the A students know that. Okay, good. Horses don't eat meat.

• 32:33Ellen Langer?

  He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that everything changed for me. That everything became possible because all of the things that were preventing that possibility now just crumbled. There are so many ways that they're wrong. You know, that how many horses were tested in these studies? How much grain was mixed with how much meat? How hungry were the horses? You know, you know, when you're doing a study, these sorts of questions really matter. And they're typically ignored when the results are being reported and reported in magazines.

• 33:17Rich Roll?

  From there, it's sort of a short leap to this idea of the illusion of control that we walk around with. Like, in addition to these rules and these structures and organizational systems that help us make sense of the world, that we kind of adhere to, that drive a sense of mindlessness because we can just operate within that context. We have this sense that we are exerting some level of control over our lives and external events, while also feeling like we're pretty good at assessing risk when it comes to decision-making.

• 33:52Ellen Langer?

  And of course, you know I disagree with everything you just said.

• 33:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. So I'm just lobbing you a softball here.

• 33:56Ellen Langer?

  But there's so much. I don't know which one to hit. All right, well, the first thing is that people hold things still because they think then they'll have greater control over it. If I can say what kind of person you are, now I know you're a whatever, then I can make sure you don't hurt me in that way.

• 34:16Rich Roll?

  That's the evolutionary kind of explanation for why we're wired that way. That's what you're saying?

• 34:22Ellen Langer?

  No, no, no, never went there. If I think you're the kind of person who's late, you know, so we're married, and I'm gonna make dinner, we'll make it very traditional, though I'm too old for you, but that if I know that you're always late, I adjust myself accordingly, right? But you're not always late. And if I cared more about you and wanted to facilitate things in the relationship, I would pay more attention to when you were and when you weren't, just like the symptoms that we were talking about a moment before. All right, but I hold you still now. You're that kind of person. You're always late, you're always cheap, you're always whatever we call people.

• 35:05Ellen Langer?

  And that makes us feel in control. As long as I know how everybody else is, I know how I should be. But because everybody is changing, and because sometimes you are this way, sometimes you're not, and even when you're this way, whatever that is, there are other ways of looking at it. You know, so you're being careful with money or not being cheap. When we recognize that, then we actually have more control, and the relationship improves. We pigeonhole people. We make comparisons all the time that are mindless. As a way, I think, to exercise control, but since we're so often wrong, we're actually giving up control.

• 35:47Ellen Langer?

  I mean, if I see you as a snob, all right, what am I going to do? I'm going to avoid you. Why do I want you in my life if you're a snob? If I take that same behavior that looks like you're a snob, I see, oh, he's really shy. You wouldn't expect a tall, handsome man to be shy. But he's shy. Now, every behavior that was true for you being a snob is also true for you being shy. Once I call you shy, though, I want to embrace you.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  That kind of speaks to this other idea that you have around transcending judgments and getting to this place of understanding.

• 36:23Ellen Langer?

  This is the most important... It's so funny, because in 45 years of research, and some of them, life and death, changing the meaning of aging, big, potentially, big, important things, this is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart, which is, behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today, I'm going to be clumsy, inconsiderate, and I'm going to procrastinate. So when people are doing things that get on your nerves, what is it from their perspective? Now, so I was doing therapy when I was at Yale. At first, it was fun, and you know, then I didn't have the patience for it

• 37:04Ellen Langer?

  because I wanted to say, "You have all of the behaviors you want. Just do them." You know, but of course, you can't say that to people, "Just do it." So what was it that was keeping them from doing it? And then I realized that when people are trying to change a behavior, they're not looking at it as the same way as when they're motivated to do the behavior. So, for example, I am scarily gullible. Really, it's very easy to take advantage of me, several have. So, "I want to change." "You see how gullible I am? It's not good for our relationship, you've got to change." I keep trying and trying, and I'll fail.

• 37:45Ellen Langer?

  And the reason I'll fail is that because going forward, I'm being trusting. And I don't want to stop being trusting, even if it means sometimes people will take advantage of me. "See, you are so damn inconsistent. It's really hard to tolerate you." "I love your flexibility." "I am so impulsive that I need to change, but that's because I value my spontaneity." So we did a study ages ago. We gave people 300 behavior descriptions. And we said, "Circle those things that you've tried to change about yourself and you have trouble." "Gullible, for me." "Impulsive, okay." Then you turn the page over,

• 38:27Ellen Langer?

  and in a mixed-up order, are the positive versions of these. Now, circle the things you really value about yourself. My spontaneity and my being trusting. Mm-hmm. So in other words, with this, you can see how relationships would improve, right? Because now, there's no reason to demean you because what you're doing makes sense. I was just mindlessly saying it in a rigid way.

• 38:54Rich Roll?

  There's always a reason for the behavior. And what you're referring to are the values that motivate and underlie the behavior. So trust is a value that is important to you. And the manifestation of that is gullibility. You can change gullibility and still hold on to

• 39:12Ellen Langer?

  Not really.

• 39:13Rich Roll?

  Trust.

• 39:14Ellen Langer?

  Well.

• 39:14Rich Roll?

  You can set healthy boundaries and do, there's ways, I think there's ways you can play with that.

• 39:18Ellen Langer?

  No, what you're saying is you can be a little less gullible by being a little less trusting. And sure.

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Ellen Langer?

  But the two are the same. It's the same thing.

• 39:29Rich Roll?

  But I think getting to the values that are driving the behavior is the pathway to understanding. And to your point, that every behavior is motivated by some reason that makes sense to the person who's perpetrating it. It's this idea, my wife says this all the time, like every man or every woman is right from their perspective.

• 39:49Ellen Langer?

  And exactly.

• 39:50Rich Roll?

  And if you can understand that and embrace that, I think it allows you to kind of have a little bit more grace and a sense of empathy and understanding.

• 39:57Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, I think that because we're brought up mindlessly, which means we seek single explanations for events, that if you see something different from the way I see it, I see it the way I see it, it must be right. Because if it weren't right, I would change it, right? So anything you do that's different from me means that you're wrong. And, you know, so we have to open up all of that. And all of that stems from, strangely, I think, a belief that the things we're after are scarce. You know, that we both can't be important, happy, full people. There's always this, you know, who's better on which dimension? Whether it's, you know, with friends, relationships. And I think we're taught that in the beginning.

• 40:42Ellen Langer?

  We're taught that in schools by there being a normal distribution for grades. You know, Harvard had this thing, this was years ago, where we got a printout that compared the grade you gave the student with the grade that student got in other classes. Basically saying, you shouldn't give that student an A because the student is a B student. And. I don't know. I think sometimes I give all As because they all deserve As.

• 41:11Rich Roll?

  Well, it's interesting how rules and institutions and structures drive that sense of a scarcity mindset from the moment we come into the world, right? And we're not even consciously aware of it. And you have a whole chapter on this in the book, this difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset.

• 41:28Ellen Langer?

  Well, this came to pass with somebody that I knew who, I'm like a little kid. And I went, you know, you wouldn't believe it, I got these sneakers on sale. Okay, big deal, right?

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  You have a lot of energy.

• 41:39Ellen Langer?

  I do.

• 41:40Rich Roll?

  And this is your third podcast today.

• 41:42Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  So this mindful approach is working for you.

• 41:45Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, no, mindfulness is energy beginning. So I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight because I'm going to be too energized. Anyway, so I come back and I say, I got these sneakers on sale, excited. My mind, what I'm doing is sharing, right? I got these sneakers, I'll tell you where to go. She thought I was bragging. And it took me so long to figure out, how could I be bragging? But because her mindset was one of scarcity. So if I got them, now there are fewer available for other people. Mine was sneakers can be gotten at this price.

• 42:23Rich Roll?

  Which led to her resentment or jealousy. But how does mindfulness work to disabuse us of a scarcity mindset?

• 42:32Ellen Langer?

  Well, for one thing, you see how things are more abundant. You see how several things can be used in several different ways. You know, we have notions of natural resources. You want more natural resources, call more things natural. You know, I mean that, you know, half seriously. Yeah. The things that we care about, but people don't know that this is what they care about, are not limited, they're not scarce. As I said a moment before, despite all the normal distributions we set up, saying some people should have a lot, some a medium amount, and some very little, whether it's talent, beauty, money, health. The things we care about are not limited.

• 43:16Ellen Langer?

  That we can live in a world, you can just forget the world, have a relationship. Where both of you prosper. It doesn't have to be, you know, here's my domain, or I'm better than you, here's your domain. Um, which is when the good relationships work, tend to be that way.

• 43:33Rich Roll?

  Scarcity isn't unrelated to control issues either, right?

• 43:37Ellen Langer?

  No, of course.

• 43:38Rich Roll?

  Like if you're driven by a scarcity mindset, you wanna kind of control, you know, what you have access to, et cetera. And that kind of gets into this idea of future casting and, you know, probabilities and how we as human beings think we have a sense of what's gonna come next. And your whole thing is like, virtually nothing is predictable.

• 43:58Ellen Langer?

  This is so hard to communicate to people. People think they can predict all the time. You know, because they're making predictions. And then, if, you know, if I make a prediction that you're going to smile. You see, but I could have-

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  You're a manifestor, though.

• 44:12Ellen Langer?

  I could have left it for three days, right? And at some point, you're gonna smile. So it's very easy seeing that our predictions are right. We think we can predict because we're so good at posticting, looking back. So, an example, John and Mary are at a party, they're fighting. And if I said to you, you think they're gonna get divorced? You say, how do I know? People fight. But if we don't have that conversation, you see them fighting, a month later, two weeks later, doesn't matter, uh, somebody says to you, hey, did you know John and Mary are getting divorced? I knew it! You should have seen them go at each other. And I think that people don't understand that while you may be able to predict for the group, nobody who knows anything about numbers believes you can predict the individual case.

• 44:57Ellen Langer?

  So what does that mean? If I were to say to you, here's a used parking lot, a lot of cars in another parking lot, and here's a Mercedes dealership. Now, you go, and we pick 20 cars at random, uh, like, look, 100 cars. And we just try them once. Chances are, more Mercedes are gonna start than the used cars. But I don't know if anybody who take the bet, for all the money, all the future money you're going to make, and I'll match it, that any Mercedes that we pick at random will start. Because we know, things happen. If I am in a foul shooting context with Michael Jordan, whoever's the lead now, I could win if we only shoot one ball.

• 45:42Ellen Langer?

  I sometimes get it in, he sometimes misses. If we do many, you know, the difference in our talent will reveal itself. And most of the time, what we're doing is making decisions about individual cases. Now, when you know you can't predict, it throws everything into disarray, but it also makes life easy. Most people get themselves crazed with, should I do this, or should I do that? The decision is based on a prediction, right? Should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great, or this, which will be great, which will be greater, I don't know, and so on. When you can't predict, it doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then life actually becomes easy. So my bottom line,

• 46:25Ellen Langer?

  rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right. Randomly choose. Now, you can randomly choose if you want an Ammon Joy, or a Snickers. Nobody's gonna care, right? But it's the exact, this is the hard part to swallow. It's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not, getting married or not, taking the job or not. Doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small, you can't know.

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  That's a very confronting idea.

• 46:58Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, well, I mean, you can only live one life. If there was some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids. And live a life as somebody has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids. Maybe I can make a comparison. But you don't have that available to you. So I say to my students, so let's say, should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale? So they made a decision to go to Harvard. So let's say, it's terrible. You know, they screw up royally. And they say, oh, I wish I had gone to Yale. There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse, better, the same. And that's why regret is so mindless. Because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming, would have been better.

• 47:43Ellen Langer?

  And, you know, there's no evidence for that.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  But we have this predisposition to haunt ourselves with these sorts of things, looking retrospectively over our life and wondering what could have been or what should have been had this or that gone differently.

• 47:56Ellen Langer?

  You only do that when your present is not happy, right?

• 48:00Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. But the labels, good, bad, better, worse, are all words and subjective thoughts that we place on top of these things. And they become real or emotional experience only by dint of the fact that we've made that decision and labeled them.

• 48:17Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  And mindfulness is a way of putting distance between you and that.

• 48:23Ellen Langer?

  Well, the way you put distance between it is by seeing it in its multi-faceted way. So here are five ways it's good, here are five ways it's bad, you know. I don't have to...

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  Or what is good or bad?

• 48:35Ellen Langer?

  Well, but if you're using that language for yourself. Right now, we have, if it's good, I have to kill people to what I can to get it. Right? Stay up all night. I mean, I have to get that thing because it's good. And if it's bad, I have to do everything I can to stay away from it. Now, when you know it's neither good nor bad, I don't have to do anything. Whatever, if this podcast is wonderful, that's great. If the podcast turns out the cameras aren't working, it's also great because I can enumerate all the advan... This is funny. The other day, I was told of this very, very large prize. If you can extend life. Which is what I've been doing, right, for the past forty-five years. Okay.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  Is this the Peter DeMandis thing?

• 49:18Ellen Langer?

  Somebody tells me about this, a hundred million dollars. Okay, so I'm driving by myself, I have an hour drive. So, oh, okay. Now, first, to the government, I don't live in that moneyed world. But I'll assume the government wants fifty million. What am I gonna do with the other fifty million? And it's taking me my whole ride home.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  You're already mad at the IRS for taking away so much money from you.

• 49:40Ellen Langer?

  No, I didn't care about that, because the fifty million wasn't enough for me. And if I give this to you, oh, then you're gonna be upset that I didn't give as much to you. At the end, I was fine not having the money.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you created your own, like, sort of accelerated suffering as a result of trying to experience what that might be like.

• 49:59Ellen Langer?

  So, the point is that, you know, with everything good, there's a way of constructing it, understanding, construing it, so that it's not so good, and vice versa. And the people need to understand, outcomes are in our heads, the value of outcomes. The outcome is nothing. You know, the way you understand it will determine your emotional response to it. And there, the more mindful you are, the more ways you can look at it, the more choices you actually have.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  How well do you practice that yourself?

• 50:27Ellen Langer?

  You know, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, I had virtually never experienced stress.

• 50:33Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 50:34Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, I mean, I've had some big things happen in my life, you know, a major fire that destroyed eighty percent of what I own, my mother died when she was young, you know, these sorts of things. But when the house went up in smoke, and I called the insurance agent, came the next day, and he said to me, in his twenty-five years on the job, this was the first time that the damage was worse than the call. "Oh, my God, oh, my God," is what most people say. I can't, oh, and it's nothing, right? Here, it was a lot. And but my feeling was, I had already lost the stuff. Throwing my sanity away wasn't going to get it back. And I also felt, I'm not so attached to things. I love nice things, but I don't need them.

• 51:17Ellen Langer?

  You know, so, and those things were all part of my past. As long as you have a rich present, you don't need the mementos from the past.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  What I extracted from that story is, like, the sort of...

• 51:32Rich Roll?

  Golden lining or the benefits of this was like a new kind of understanding of the meaning or importance of material things in your life, realizing like, okay, that wasn't so great, but like, I'm actually fine.

• 51:43Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Rich Roll?

  And then going and lecturing without your notes.

• 51:46Ellen Langer?

  That was the best.

• 51:47Rich Roll?

  And having a kind of revelatory experience of finding something new and different.

• 51:52Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, that one, so I didn't care really about anything that I lost in the fire, except that in a short time, from the day to the fire, I had to give a large lecture class and my notes were destroyed. And so, what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do? So what I ended up doing was calling a student who took the class the year before, and I borrowed her notes, like a telephone game. And because they were somebody else's notes, even though they were basically copying down from what I had said, I involved myself, I engaged myself in the preparation for each lecture in a way that I hadn't done in a while.

• 52:31Ellen Langer?

  The problem, PowerPoint slides are wonderful, but once you have it, it's sort of hard to change your thinking about all of it. So here, since I didn't have any of the slides, everything was new, and I think it was the best class that I had taught.

• 52:48Rich Roll?

  Do you have a formality in the way that you bring mindfulness into your moments and your hours and your days?

• 52:55Ellen Langer?

  No, let me tell you.

• 52:56Rich Roll?

  Or is it now just a muscle memory where?

• 52:57Ellen Langer?

  It's none of those things. I mean, I think that it's the way I do everything, it's sort of up and out, you know, in some sense. A lot of people ask about my doing a study, has the study changed my life? The results of the study surprised me, or whatever. And I don't know if I do this backwards, different from other people, but for me, I do something and I notice the doing of it. And then I say, well, do other people do this? And, you know, if not, why not? And then I set up the study. So I already have evidence. I don't have evidence that it's going to be broadly done, but at least evidence that at least I do it.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  It feels like a... A natural inclination that you have as a result of this, that you can kind of see things through a unique, different lens that other people don't see. And that energizes your imagination.

• 53:53Ellen Langer?

  It's not that I see it the way you see it, and I see it the way I see it. And, you know, that many times I'm oblivious to the fact that you're seeing it differently. You know, and it's only then talking about it. I remember, and even because that was, had a lot of memoir stuff in it, that when I was an undergraduate and I had been helping this professor with something, and I came up with something that she didn't come up with, which is gonna happen. But she then decided it was because I was creative, which was never a label I had for myself. Those were the people, the kids who could draw or who were in band. So now I'm creative. Then, almost at the same time, I had written a program text for a paper,

• 54:37Ellen Langer?

  a final paper in a class. And the teacher wrote back, my aides, I wrote back, "I have such chutzpah." Well, it's Yiddish, you know, it means you're able to go out there, break the rules and do whatever. And, you know, which I never saw myself that way. Now I had double permission. Creative chutzpah, you know, telling me that I can break out of a structure that, you know, is stifling for people.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  I want to get back to this idea of how much agency and power and control we unknowingly kind of yield over the well-being of our bodies and our minds, not to be dualistic about it. But I think a good way to kind of elaborate on that is some of the work you've done around aging and belief. And in particular, maybe, you know, start with the counterclockwise study.

• 55:31Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, well, the counterclockwise study was the first test of the mind-body-unity hypothesis. Again, mind and body, if it's one thing, wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily going to put the body. So we have a host of studies where we put the mind in strange places and take our measurements. In this case, what we did was to retrofit a retreat to seem to be 20 years earlier. And we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they would be talking in the present tense about things that had passed.

• 56:08Ellen Langer?

  The books, all of the props, the TV shows that we showed, everything said this was 20 years earlier. The comparison group stayed in the same retreat, not at the same time, and talked about the same thing, except they were talking about it in the past tense. And it was clear that now is now and then was then, where those merged for the first group. And their results were big, I think, that in this period of one week, these are men in their late 70s, 80s, and that was, you know, 1979, so lots of years ago, when 80 was probably like 100.

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was different.

• 56:54Ellen Langer?

  Yeah. Anyway, so without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger.

• 57:05Rich Roll?

  In one week?

• 57:06Ellen Langer?

  One week.

• 57:07Rich Roll?

  And you were measuring all these biomarkers?

• 57:09Ellen Langer?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is, before I started this and I was trying to get the measures together, I called all the geriatricians that I could think to call, and I said, "Okay, if I have a 50-year-old man in one room and a 75-year-old man in the other, what measure do you want me to give you so you'll know who's who?" They couldn't come up with anything. You know, so whatever that means.

• 57:36Rich Roll?

  So what do you extrapolate from that finding?

• 57:39Ellen Langer?

  Most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds. You know, that, you know, we see with old people, I experienced it myself, I forget something, "Oh, my goodness, you know, am I becoming demented?" And, you know, for me, it's odd, I mean, I teach undergraduates, they don't get 100 on the test. You know, they forget also. The thing is that they don't worry about forgetting. As we get older, we stop ourselves, we presume we can't do things, so we don't do them. And by removing that, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. You know, that you can do the same things you did before. Maybe it's better to do them differently. You know, I'm thinking about when I played tennis with these young kids.

• 58:24Ellen Langer?

  And I was playing very differently from them. They were 16-year-old boys, full of energy, running all over them. But I knew the game. And I knew if they're standing there, the ball's gonna come here. They're standing, the ball's gonna go there. I don't have to be racing around quite as much as they did. And so, if you assume that as you get older, you become wiser, you should change some of your behavior. But if you're not aware of changing your behavior because of these positive things, we tend to always make negative explanations for why we've changed. It's always based on, "You can't." And I don't think that there's any, we can never prove that we can't, which people don't seem to understand.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:05Ellen Langer?

  And trying is the whole ballgame. Which, this is the piece that, I don't know how this came about, but this massive misunderstanding where people think they want complete success, not knowing that if they had complete success, life would be empty. So, example I'm fond of using. You play golf. Go. If you got a hole-in-one, every time you swung the club, there'd be no game. Right? You know, and the example I used earlier today. You're in the elevator, you're a little kid. You try to reach that button, you can't, you can't. Your father picks you up, you press the button, "Wowee, wow." Then you get a little, you still can't. Now, finally, you're tall enough, you press the button. Tell me how many times you've been in an elevator where you were excited about pressing.

• 59:49Ellen Langer?

  So, once we can do it, it's no longer meaningful to us.

• 59:52Rich Roll?

  Right, I got you. But what I do do is I always press the door-close button.

• 59:55Ellen Langer?

  Oh, me too, even if it doesn't work.

• 59:57Rich Roll?

  And I know it doesn't do anything, and I know you've written about this as well, but I still do it every time.

• 1:00:03Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  In reflecting on the counterclockwise study, I can't help but wonder if part of it is the sense of hopefulness, like the idea that you're younger, there's a future that's unwritten, that lies ahead, that kind of drives a sense of youthfulness, as opposed to the person who is sitting in their older years and looking in the rearview mirror, where life is about memory and the sense of possibility for the future seems much more curtailed.

• 1:00:33Ellen Langer?

  That's what people say. My own feeling is that if we're both here now, we're in the same now. And that, you know, it's nice for you to decide in 10 years you want to do X, but it would be stupid, mindless, if you really had a commitment, because you don't know what you're going to want to do in 10 years. So I don't think most of us, when I was younger, I didn't spend that kind of time thinking about the future. People say that, but at least for me, it wasn't true.

• 1:01:09Rich Roll?

  So if people ask you what your five-year plan is or your 10-year plan?

• 1:01:12Ellen Langer?

  I'll tell you, it's worse than that. I was in Australia and I gave a talk and there were several people giving talks. Then the person who organized this had us all come out on the stage and surprised us and asked, "What is your bucket list?", which is the same sort of question, right, about the future. And so each person, big shots, give their bucket list. She comes to me, and I say, "I don't have a bucket list." First, I felt bad I didn't have a bucket list. Everybody has a bucket list. And then I said, "Wait a second. If I don't have a bucket list, it's good that I don't have a bucket list. Why?" And then I realized, you can't make the moment more full than when it's full. And so, you know, it'd be nice, if I were unhappy here now, I might long to be in Paris again,

• 1:01:57Ellen Langer?

  not having the pancreas, but just, you know, being in Paris. If I am filled up while I'm here, mindfully engaged, enjoying myself, I don't need to be anyplace else.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  That's a beautiful way to think about that.

• 1:02:12Ellen Langer?

  But so it's the same thing with looking in the past or looking for the future?

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah. If you're fully present for what is happening right now, that sense of yearning for something better over the horizon isn't nagging on your soul.

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  我们都曾有过这种经历，从一个逝去的世代的照片中 看看60岁老人在1880年或1920年时的模样 然后看看今天的人们同样的年龄的照片 很明显地我们对年龄有着不同的认知 现在的人们看起来更年轻 我必须相信这是因为我们对年龄的感知 有着不同的认知 在你所做的工作中，有一些令人疯狂的图像 比如你在书中提到的研究 我认为最让我印象深刻的是 你对糖尿病患者进行的测试

• 1:03:17Rich Roll?

  关于时间感知和糖分摄入

• 1:03:20Ellen Langer?

  是的，我们有患者患有2型糖尿病 我们给他们各种测试 然后我们把他们放在电脑上 我接下来要说的 会在最后一段时回答 所以我们将让他们在电脑上玩游戏 我们告诉他们，改变你正在玩的游戏 每隔15分钟或如此 这是确保他们会查看电脑旁边的时间表 时间表是改装的，但他们不知道 所以对3/4的人，时间表是实时的2倍快 对3/4的人，是实时的1/2快 对3/4的人，是实时的 大多数人会假设 血液糖分水平会跟随实时的

• 1:04:04Ellen Langer?

  时间表和时间表有什么不同 我们的假设，被证实了 是血液糖分水平会跟随时间表 现在，我们和睡眠实验室中的人也做了一样 他们睡觉，我们改变时间表 所以他们认为他们睡得更多 或者他们实际上睡得更少 或者睡眠量 认知和行为功能似乎跟随时间表

• 1:04:29Ellen Langer?

  And this is also relevant to a larger thing than if we talk about fatigue. So fatigue is largely a psychological construct.

• 1:04:38Rich Roll?

  As an athlete, this is really fascinating.

• 1:04:41Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, but people believe that the body is such, and if you don't do your weights and build yourself, you know, you're gonna peter out. That's all there is to it. Now, you know, the more mindful I get over time now, the more animated. But so, the first thing we do is I give people, I ask people to do jumping jacks, simple, very simple study to start. Do 100 jumping jacks, tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 70. We have another group, do 200 jumping jacks, tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 140. Then we have many of these sorts of things. Now, I say to my class, how far is it humanly possible to run? These are smart kids. They know the marathon is

• 1:05:21Ellen Langer?

  26 miles. They know I wouldn't ask the question if the answer were 26, so they start guessing. It becomes like an auction. 28, 30, 35. No one ever goes beyond 50. Whoever says 50, everybody groans, right? Impossible. Then I play a video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's a video of the Tariamora.

• 1:05:42Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:05:43Ellen Langer?

  A tribe that lives in Copper Canyon, Mexico.

• 1:05:46Rich Roll?

  I have the author of Born to Run here.

• 1:05:47Ellen Langer?

  Oh, okay, there you go. These people can run 200 miles without stopping. Now, to my mind, the difference between those who can run, I can't, I haven't, not that I can't, but I've never run five miles. The difference between, let's just say, 26 and 200, metaphorically, is the difference, I'm saying, between what we think we can control now and what we actually can control, and maybe beyond. That we're nowhere near living the lives that we could live, and to go back to what you're saying about language, all our language conspires against us, saying we make a little progress and we think that's

• 1:06:29Ellen Langer?

  the end. You know, I was thinking today about another thing, I don't know if it's the medical world, I don't know who to blame for this, but that as soon as you take people, we have people who can remember lots. And we call them super memories, and super tasters, and super whatever, making it as if that's a closed category that the rest of us can't get into. Rather than that it's on a continuum and these people do it a little better. And you know, and so maybe we can proceed in the same way. And I believe that any category where you have a super is something available to all of us.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  That's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time. I love it. And, and I got a new video you're gonna wanna show your class. Cause we had a guy in here the other day who ran 450 miles.

• 1:07:22Ellen Langer?

  Oh wow, yeah, I have to see that.

• 1:07:23Rich Roll?

  200 ain't nothing anymore.

• 1:07:25Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, so that's incredible. But you know, to tell these videos, the other thing, did we talk about piano stairs?

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:07:30Ellen Langer?

  Okay, so, one thing that people have to understand, so when I say, you wanna be mindful all the time. You see from my, the way I am now, mindfulness is energy begetting. Mindfulness is the way you are when you're having fun. So, these people, I think Scandinavia, let's say Sweden. You know, turns out, I didn't know this, then subways all over the world are the same. You have an escalator and you have stairs. And all over the world, everybody is taking the escalator. The random athlete like you will run up the stairs, the young boy up the stairs. Now, what they do, they lay down a piano keys on the stairs. So it actually makes noise. Do, do, do.

• 1:08:10Ellen Langer?

  Now, in almost no time, everybody takes the stairs because it's fun. And what I say to my students is, why do you have to wait for someone to put the keyboard down there? You can do this in your mind, it's like do, do, do, you know, whatever. Everything can be made to be fun. And the world has taught us quite the contrary. You're not supposed to have fun at work. So you have work versus play.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  Studying is hard, college is hard, all of these things.

• 1:08:39Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, and it all keeps people in place and it's not a good place to be kept.

• 1:08:44Rich Roll?

  Framing. This is, this is something you did with the chambermaid study as well. Like, is it work or is it exercise?

• 1:08:51Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, first thing that was interesting, we take these chambermaids and we ask them how much exercise they get. This was surprising to me. Cause these women, all they're doing is exercising all day long. But they don't think they do exercise. Because to them, exercise, according to the surgeon general, is what you do after work. So for those who sit in a desk all day long, they're not really exercising. It's when they go to the gym afterwards. Okay, so. Now, imagine, we didn't do this, but those who exercise, the chambermaids are exercising, should be healthier than socioeconomically equivalent people who are not exercising. But they're not.

• 1:09:36Ellen Langer?

  Okay, so, what we do, very simple study, we take the chambermaids, divide them into two groups, and one group, we just teach them. Do you know your work is exercise? Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, sweeping is like... Okay, so, all we've done is change their minds from not realizing their work was exercise to seeing that their work is exercise. We took lots of measures to start. When the study is over, we want to find out, is she working any harder, expending any more energy, even this gnome? Are they eating any differently? Those who see it as exercise, no differences. Nevertheless, those who now see their work as exercise, we get, they lost weight, a

• 1:10:18Ellen Langer?

  change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down.

• 1:10:23Rich Roll?

  And the control group, no change in the other group. It's so crazy.

• 1:10:28Ellen Langer?

  Now, it's interesting, but, you know, let's talk about mindlessness, that when I give these findings, I could just say they lost weight. But doesn't it have more of a scientific heft when I say there was a change in body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio?

• 1:10:43Rich Roll?

  And how is, how are these results received by your colleagues?

• 1:10:47Ellen Langer?

  Oh, you know, the people in the world love it because now they can see themselves as exercising and, and losing weight without, you know, exerting more energy. You know what, Mark Twain, I'll get to the question if I remember it, Mark Twain said about exercise?

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:11:03Ellen Langer?

  Sad, you'll hate it. He said, "Every time the urge to exercise comes over me, I know if I just sit still for a moment, it'll pass."

• 1:11:11Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, what if you just sat down and imagined yourself exercising?

• 1:11:16Ellen Langer?

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  Or tried to visualize, or experience what it feels like to be, you know, fatigued from exerting yourself?

• 1:11:23Ellen Langer?

  Your imagination is far, far more powerful than most people believe. There are studies by others of people who are flexing, you know, their muscles, and that imagined versus real. And the outcome is basically the same. Imagine the exercise.

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  That's a hard one to believe.

• 1:11:44Ellen Langer?

  Well, it's not mine, so I don't care if you believe it or not. But to go back to the question, you know, what are people's responses to my work? The people who hate it, or whatever, don't come to me, so I don't know. And I think that, you know, I've been in the field for so long that, you know, I think that people assume that it's true.

• 1:12:06Rich Roll?

  When we think of placebos, we think of, you know, the sugar pill, or the, you know, capsule that we're given, that we're either told or not told, you know, is a medication or not. But placebo is actually a much broader concept.

• 1:12:22Ellen Langer?

  It's an expectation, and our expectations control our behavior in ways that we're not aware of. A simple example: most people have used the Snelling eye chart to see your vision. And this whole thing is so remarkable to me that people buy this. You look at letters that make no sense in a doctor's office, which is necessarily stressful for so many people, and the doctor gives you a number, and you see, that's the way you see? It wouldn't occur to me.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  I just did that, like, two weeks ago.

• 1:12:53Ellen Langer?

  Okay, and I see you're wearing glasses, okay.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  I've worn them my whole life, though. Then I started to feel bad about it.

• 1:12:59Ellen Langer?

  I don't want you to feel bad about it, but we have remedies. Anyway, so, you know, I look at this chart, and, you know, we've agreed implicitly that I'm bizarre. And when I see the eye chart, I don't see it the way other people see it, I think, if they think anything. I see it as, this is a setup. The letters are getting progressively smaller, which is leading me to expect not to be able to see. So, we come up with a different eye chart, where now the letters get progressively larger, creating a different expectation. Now the expectation is, soon I will be able to see. And what happens is that people can see what they couldn't see before. One more expectation study.

• 1:13:41Ellen Langer?

  Most people assume, when you get two-thirds of the way down the eye chart, you're gonna have trouble seeing it. What we did was, we took the original eye chart, we... Just took the bottom two thirds.

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  Right, you don't need those big letters anyway.

• 1:13:56Ellen Langer?

  Two thirds of the way down there are much smaller letters than on the original, but they're both occurring in the same place, right? Two thirds of the way down. And again, people saw what they couldn't see before.

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  You also did this study with pilots.

• 1:14:10Ellen Langer?

  Yes.

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  Fighter pilots.

• 1:14:12Ellen Langer?

  Yeah. They, you know, there are different variations on the same thing that if you believe you can, then all of the things that prevent you from doing whatever it is are eliminated. Pilots are seen to have excellent vision. So what we do, we put people, we test their vision. We put them in pilot uniforms. We have them go into a flight simulator. Have you ever been to flights? It's very real. There's an oncoming plane and we want them to read a very small set of letters that was taken from the IHR on that oncoming plane. When they're pilots, they can see it.

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  And the ones that were in the control group who were told the simulator was broken.

• 1:14:54Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Rich Roll?

  They were unable.

• 1:14:55Ellen Langer?

  They had to simulate everything.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  They didn't score a lot.

• 1:14:57Ellen Langer?

  Yeah. You know, I mean, if you had trouble doing something and I had you put on an outfit of Superman, okay, you know, so you see yourself, I think you would be able to lift more weight. If you were Einstein, you know, I have people because they think that I'm less afraid than they with certain things. So if they have to go into fighting with a waiter or somebody, employer, they pretend that they're me. That's, it's fine, you know, but I, you know, I believe I can sing. If you saw me, not saw me, but heard me in the shower and when I'm being Maria Callas or Barbra Streisand, I get a lot of notes.

• 1:15:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:43Ellen Langer?

  Right? But it's me, right? It's, they're not there. You know, so I think that we, we all, that we, not all, but many of us tend to underestimate our abilities. And so some of these studies just sort of free us from whatever is holding us back.

• 1:16:00Rich Roll?

  It's very encouraging and empowering to understand that.

• 1:16:06Rich Roll?

  You know, belief can drive better outcomes for ourselves. And if we can get to a place of, you know, disabusing ourselves of all the assumptions that we make about how things work and don't work and what our limits are. For somebody who's watching or listening to this, who's saying, "Well, that's great, and that's super entertaining to hear that." But like, how do I begin to, you know, construct my version of this?

• 1:16:26Ellen Langer?

  We already said that if you take on the assumption, by the assumption that everything is uncertain, there's a way that you naturally approach things more mindfully. But if you take any explanation, you know, if you have children and they ask you a question, don't answer it with a single answer. Answer it with multiple answers. Answer it with answers, then take those answers and show how, gee, you know, these are negatives, even though they seem positive and vice versa. Just open everything up, and it will all happen naturally. The other, in a more mundane way, that most people are stressed, most of the time. That stress means that they're making predictions about things that can't be predicted.

• 1:17:10Ellen Langer?

  And they're oblivious to the fact that they're in charge of their experience of that. So, think of the things you were scared of in the past. And how did it turn out? It almost always turns out fine. So, going forward, you don't have to be so afraid.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  Well, anything you worry about, it either doesn't happen, which means that was a waste of energy and time, or if it does happen, it happened, and there was no reason worrying about all, you know, all that time that you wasted worrying about it before it happened.

• 1:17:41Ellen Langer?

  That's the main, you know, thing that... So, there are people who, I wrote about this, I think it might even be in the book, about defensive pessimism. And some people, so you have people like me who are, you know, clearly optimistic. But everybody thinks that they're realistic, right? I don't think that I'm thinking positive, but deep down, I know it's negative. This is the way it is. And the negative person is not being negative. They're being, this is the way they experience the world. But defensive pessimism is basically the idea that what you should do is hope for the best, but expect the worst. Okay, now, that would be fine if the world existed independent of human presence,

• 1:18:24Ellen Langer?

  where you could actually count things without influencing them. That if you're expecting the worst, you're gonna see the worst. And if you're gonna see the worst, it's going to have a very different effect on you. And that the alternative is to see the best. You know, that if you're worried, I wrote this for people at school worried about being COVID. And that worrying about COVID is only making you weaker, should you have to deal with COVID. What you need to do is develop a plan at the time. So, it was, okay, I'm gonna wear a mask, I'm going to wash my hands. Okay, and I'm, you know, gonna stay away from people who are coughing in my face.

• 1:19:07Ellen Langer?

  Now I have a plan, now I'm just going to live my life. Now, if it turns out, if instead of this, you worry about getting COVID, your, you know, stress, as we said many times now, is very bad for your health. And you may get it or not get it. So, you start off, you're doing these things, you can get it or you cannot get it. If you don't get it, as you've said, you've wasted all this time. If you get it, all that time you've spent worrying makes you less able to handle it.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  Right, because the stress and anxiety has impaired your immune system.

• 1:19:41Ellen Langer?

  It's not six of one, half a dozen of the other. People keep thinking that. Glass half full is not the same thing as half empty. If you see it as half empty, you spend your time being thirsty, worrying about where you're gonna get your next glass of water, or whatever the martini, whatever's in the glass.

• 1:19:55Rich Roll?

  Right, and being in the presence of somebody who is so beautifully and eloquently mindful, and practicing, you know, this idea and kind of exuding this sensibility. Is actually contagious.

• 1:20:10Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, we have studies on contagion, but let me tell you that there are times I'm mindless. My response to my being mindless is probably different from your response to your being mindless. When I'm mindless, I say, "Yes, I'm right." It's out there. I mean, I've been studying this, caring about this for 45 years or more. And, you know, and still, there are moments where I do something mindlessly.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  But the more mindful you are, I suspect, the more questions arise and the more uncertainty becomes apparent, because things aren't as they seem, the more you're paying attention.

• 1:20:45Ellen Langer?

  Exactly, exactly. Now, the way it's contagious, there are several ways. The first is that when you're mindful, you tend to be more charismatic. And so people are giving you more attention, more, you know, positive regard. And that allows you to feel better and then to be even more mindful. But if I'm mindful, there's a way, when I'm talking to, let's say, you, you know, usually hiding what you're feeling, or, you know, whatever may be the case, you feel safe. And if you feel safe, then you're going to be more mindful, because it's better, okay? It just leads to all sorts of good outcomes. So that's one thing.

• 1:21:28Ellen Langer?

  Another is that it actually seems, this is wild, to be in the air. So, what do I mean? This is a study we did with meditators, actually. So we have meditators meditating in a room. They leave. Now the participants come, and we give them tests, cognitive tests, memory and things like that. Or, there's no one in the room, and the participants go into the room, taking the same tests.

• 1:21:59Ellen Langer?

  When people had just finished meditating, the participants perform better than in the empty room. Somehow, it's in the air. Now, I make clear that these studies, and the others like them are at the end of the book, you know, with enough disclaimers. You know, I'm just telling you what I found.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:19Ellen Langer?

  I'm not telling you what you have to believe.

• 1:22:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's fucking crazy, but the idea being that there's a residual vibration. They meditate, they leave. There's some energy force in that room that is influencing the test takers.

• 1:22:33Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, the next time we do the study, if there ever is, we should have a fan. So whatever is there.

• 1:22:38Rich Roll?

  It blows out the particles.

• 1:22:39Ellen Langer?

  It blows it out, and then you shouldn't get it. So you'll have meditators.

• 1:22:42Rich Roll?

  Is it waves or is it particles?

• 1:22:43Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:22:44Rich Roll?

  We're going quantum here, right? Yeah, like.

• 1:22:49Ellen Langer?

  But the more, the less crazy, not crazy, but different, are things like with autism. So now, I think another thing that you can pull out of my philosophy of life, if it is a philosophy, is that every group that is diminished in some way probably has some asset that's being overlooked. And so I thought, you know, I don't know anybody autistic. And so this is purely, most of the things that I come up with come from experience. This is just derived.

• 1:23:25Ellen Langer?

  What if kids, if most people are mindless? And if mindlessness is off-putting, which it is, I have other data, you know, where you're interacting with a mindful or a mindless experimenter, and just it's uncomfortable when the person is not there. And we have expressions like the light's on, but nobody's home, to acknowledge that when someone's not there, you know, you don't like being with them. Okay. What if the kid or adult who is autistic is hypersensitive to other people's consciousness? More aware that, and in that regard, that means that if you're mindless, it's going to have a bigger negative effect on me. So what we do is we take autistic kids

• 1:24:10Ellen Langer?

  and we have them interact with adults being mindful or mindless. And when the adults are mindful, the kids are just like, well, the other kids. Another example of that is-

• 1:24:23Rich Roll?

  But the point being, that just abuses the idea that autism is about like an incapacity for emotional intelligence.

• 1:24:31Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, exactly. It speaks to the opposite of that. But I'm not, you know, this is one study, one brief thought. I'm not suggesting that now I'm an expert on autism or that this explains everything. But it'll end up, I think, a piece of the puzzle down the road. But the other study, so there are people who drink a lot.

• 1:24:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Ellen Langer?

  Now, nobody, okay.

• 1:24:52Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, once upon a time, Ellen.

• 1:24:55Ellen Langer?

  But so nobody drinks to hurt their liver. That's the first thing. So when you tell people you have to stop drinking because of these things, again, it's what I was saying before, the behavior makes sense going forward or else people wouldn't do it. I'm mixing and matching 20 different things here. Another way of helping people have a drinking problem is keep a diary. This is attention to symptom variability. Make a column, you know, columns where you're going to note different times of the day. Did you have a drink? Yes or no? Did you want a drink? Yes or no? And you do this even for the course of just a week. You're going to see there are times you didn't drink when you wanted to drink.

• 1:25:39Ellen Langer?

  You're going to see there are times you drank when you didn't want to. And all of a sudden, despite what people argue, shows you that you have some control over your drinking. And then the decision to stop or whatever is much easier to make than make you feel that you're just low down, whatever. People who drink, if I said to you that here's John. John engages, John gets stressed. And when he gets stressed, he does X. And then he's unstressed.

• 1:26:12Ellen Langer?

  There's nothing irrational about that, is it?

• 1:26:15Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:15Ellen Langer?

  So now we put in, he takes a drink, or too many drinks. Alright, so I think that many of the people who have, who are serious heavy drinkers, are extra sensitive to other people's consciousness, just like the autistic person. And that drink is to settle them down. So now we run a study, it's a wine tasting study, and you can drink as much as you want. All we want to know, you believe, is your view of the wine. The experimenter, who's blind to the whole study idea, but the experimenter is mindful or mindless?

• 1:26:56Ellen Langer?

  Well, it turns out, when that experimenter is mindless, you drink more.

• 1:27:01Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. I really like that study and this note, like, I do believe that there is something to the hypersensitivity of the alcoholic or the drug addict, and, you know, somebody who's been in recovery for a long time. And, and I think that sensitivity makes the world kind of a scary or uncertain place. And a coping mechanism is drugs or alcohol or whatever.

• 1:27:29Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, which is not irrational.

• 1:27:32Rich Roll?

  Right, it's a, it's a survival mechanism to reduce anxiety and stress and, and kind of, you know, eradicate that uncomfortable feeling that you have. And we all know, addicts or normal people, whatever, when you go into a room and there's somebody on the other side of the room who you don't know, and you know immediately whether that person is safe or unsafe, like, you can feel that energy. And I think there is this idea that perhaps some people are more sensitive to that than others, and that leads them towards behaviors that are not in their best interest. But, energy is real, like, you know, we all have had those experiences, or we walk into, you know, a room in a house that we've never been in before, and we feel something.

• 1:28:17Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, well, that's what I was trying to capture, but it is still a little woo-woo. When I first wrote the book, the chapter was called "The Woo-Woo Chapter", and to say, "Look, it was, I had an experience that I took out, several of these."

• 1:28:31Rich Roll?

  Your editors are like, "This is too much."

• 1:28:32Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Rich Roll?

  Alright, but you're gonna tell it here.

• 1:28:34Ellen Langer?

  I'm gonna tell you, because... I don't understand it, but it happened. So, I had just gotten back from Japan. And I'm having dinner, and we're talking about, "Let's go someplace." And so, my partner says, "Well, you know, it's too expensive." Now, which is self-silly, because somebody is always paying for these trips. But somehow, we still managed to spend too much money. Okay, where should we go, if we go? And we can't remember the name of the place. At that time, it felt very exotic. Then we remember Kuala Lumpur. Okay, she says, "We can't go because it's too expensive." I say, "Maybe I could get the Harvard Club to pay for it." Now, this was insane.

• 1:29:19Ellen Langer?

  I never had any interaction in my life with any Harvard Club. I don't know what I'm talking about. The next day, I get an invitation to Kuala Lumpur from the Harvard Club of Kuala Lumpur.

• 1:29:34Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:29:36Ellen Langer?

  You know, now, I've had conversation after conversation. This is a long time ago, with statisticians. You know, we'll be very nice to each other, and all of a sudden, they walk away from me. I just want to understand it.

• 1:29:49Rich Roll?

  How do you understand it? What do you make of that?

• 1:29:51Ellen Langer?

  I don't, you know, first, I thought, "I wonder, did I have a sense where I'm picking up things? Or am I putting them out there?" You know, because you can't tell from that experience, right? That if I'm picking it up, so the mail is coming, you know, the Kuala Lumpur, and, you know. I don't know. All I know is that we know so little about the things we think we know, that if we only recognize that, these sorts of phenomenon wouldn't seem outlandish, necessarily wrong from the start.

• 1:30:23Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:30:23Ellen Langer?

  You know, I mean, so, I turn on the television, and I'm watching people in New York. ¿Cómo podría ser? Y puedo dar algunas explicaciones electrónicas, pero realmente no lo entiendo. Y la mayoría de las explicaciones científicas que tenemos son nombrar cosas. Cuando vas a un nivel de análisis en el nombre, es como si entendieras y bajas un nivel. Pero realmente... Cuando me doy cuenta de que no sé eso, entonces mi no saber algo más, no lo sé pero lo acepto, hace que sea más fácil para mí aceptar otras cosas como esta.

• 1:31:03Rich Roll?

  Entonces cuando enciendes la televisión y no es Nueva York, pero es una audiencia congresional sobre UFOs, ¿qué pasa en tu mente?

• 1:31:13Ellen Langer?

  ¿Sabes? Creo que... ¿Qué es lo que significa un UFO? Hay tantos objetos no identificados que... No sé. Sé que no toco una línea dura sobre nada no ser verdad. Solo no sé. Pero también no voy a ponerme a hablar y argumentar que es verdad. No tengo una posición una u otra. Pero la gente tiene grandes posiciones sobre algunas de las cosas de las que estamos hablando. Y dicen: "Es imposible". Y creo que perdemos un montón de tiempo por esa visión.

• 1:31:53Ellen Langer?

  Entonces para mí todo es posible, todo es potencialmente interesante, la vida es divertida.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  Y si todos podíamos tener un nivel de mindfulness del que hablas en tu trabajo y en tus escritos, tenemos la posibilidad de acercarnos a esta utopía consciente que hablas de.

• 1:32:14Ellen Langer?

  Sí, esto fue un teaser. En algún momento voy a escribir el libro sobre la utopía consciente. Mi meta en la vida... En este momento la vida del mundo es vertical. Hay gente como nosotros que está cerca de la cima. Y la gente está ordenada: "No eres tan bueno", "Estás bien", y así sucesivamente. Y creo que es ofensivo. Y quiero tomar la vertical y hacerla horizontal. Que ninguno de nosotros es mejor que... Cuando digo a alguien que no creo que nadie sea mejor que yo...

• 1:32:52Ellen Langer?

  She am modest, but I don't think I'm better than anybody else. You know, there's a different way of understanding how we might be living. And so I wrote this little song for my grandkids. And I was just talking about this earlier today. Actually, I almost sang it. I'm not going to sing it for you. But it says it all. Everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something, everyone can do something else. And it's hard in two minutes to get the full feeling of that. But I'm in the car, the kids are five years old, twins. One of them starts whistling. I say, Theo, you're such a good whistler.

• 1:33:35Ellen Langer?

  The other one says, Grandma L., when Theo was learning how to whistle, I was learning something else. You know, it just seemed to me perfect. So he doesn't have to feel bad that he can't whistle. He doesn't have to feel one down. He doesn't have to compete with his brother.

• 1:33:50Rich Roll?

  There's no scarcity, there's no competition. There's something for everybody. And the world is infinitely abundant.

• 1:33:57Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Rich Roll?

  Everyone doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else.

• 1:34:05Ellen Langer?

  Yes, when I start, I have a little video where I start and I say, I can't sing, but I like singing. Why shouldn't I sing? There are lots of things I can do. And then we break into the little ditty. I don't know, it could be simple minded.

• 1:34:24Rich Roll?

  I think it's rather profound.

• 1:34:26Ellen Langer?

  Because the world that I see that we could be living in, I don't see that there's anything that really prevents us from getting there, except that a whole lot of mindlessness.

• 1:34:40Rich Roll?

  Well, along this continuum on the evolution of consciousness, like where do we currently reside? Where would you like to see us going? And I know that, you know, predictions are not your bag. But we're heading into kind of a

• 1:34:56Ellen Langer?

  No, I think there's been an evolution.

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

  A tricky year. And I do, you know, I am interested in the concept of elevating conscious awareness.

• 1:35:04Ellen Langer?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Ellen Langer?

  I think, you know, as you said, I don't have to predict because we can predict. And this one in particular, we can predict. It's a very strange time, but there'll be a lot of good things that come from it. And I think we're in the midst of an evolution in consciousness. And it can only be good. I think some of the stuff with AI, which I don't claim to be an expert on, you know, people just keep finding things to worry about. AI is a tool and it'll help us. I remember years and years ago, I came out of a movie in New York. Neither of those are necessary to tell you for the story, but...

• 1:35:44Ellen Langer?

  And this person wanted me to sign a petition because he felt that VR videos, what are they called?

• 1:35:54Rich Roll?

  Virtual reality.

• 1:35:55Ellen Langer?

  No, no, no. No, VCRs. We're going to put movies out of business. You know, and they were threatened. There's always somebody threatened, but that's also what leads us to progress in many ways. So there'll be that. I think that if AI is able to help take over lots of jobs, that will free people to be more innovative, creative, or mindful in my terms. Once you start paying attention, you can take all that I've said and use it to reform almost everything.

• 1:36:31Rich Roll?

  Infinite applications.

• 1:36:32Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, you know, so for hospitals, hospitals, I don't think have changed in important ways since they were created. And that it seems to me insane, if I may borrow a term from my field, that here is a place that you go into, stressed when you enter it, just as I said with taking the eye test, and you're going there to be healed. You know, there's no reason that hospitals can't be more spa-like. There's no reason that we have very high burnout in the medical profession. And burnout is a function of being mindless. So if the nurses were taught to look for the smaller changes in people, it would actually help their health.

• 1:37:18Ellen Langer?

  People, when I'm mindfully engaged with you, you feel seen.

• 1:37:24Ellen Langer?

  Everybody prospers.

• 1:37:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Ellen Langer?

  So it's a way of making everybody in the organization more mindful. There's no reason, you know, we have washing machines. We don't need to have so much white. There are so many changes, people. We know that social support is really important for people's health. Yet in hospitals, everybody is kept separate.

• 1:37:48Ellen Langer?

  You know, and so on. So I have a list of these, if I constructed the mindful hospital. If I constructed the mindful organization, it would also share, you know, have many differences.

• 1:37:59Rich Roll?

  You're gonna love this. So I was reading this part of the book, which is at the end of the book, this morning,

• 1:38:06Rich Roll?

  sitting in a waiting room at a diagnostics lab down the street here, because I was getting my blood drawn for a blood test. And I'm reading about the mindful hospital and all the like, everything that you just described. And I looked up and took a mindful assessment of my environment. And I was in this waiting room. And there were some people who were like staring at their feet. The walls were peeling, you know, the wallpaper was peeling off the walls. There was a like bulletproof glass window with no, that was sort of opaque and there was no human being behind it, except there was a little sign on it that said, please don't bring firearms in here. And then there was an iPad where you could check in.

• 1:38:50Rich Roll?

  And I literally felt like I was in a room waiting to meet with my parole officer or something. It was the most dispiriting, dystopic, like, like environment. Yeah. Where you're going to, into this room to kind of be vulnerable and have like this procedure done, et cetera. It's a clinic, it's not a doctor's office, but the point remains like. There's a lot of room for improvement here.

• 1:39:14Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, yeah. I had, many years ago, had to go to court. I think I was taking out a restraining order. I don't remember what it was.

• 1:39:23Rich Roll?

  There's probably a good story behind that.

• 1:39:25Ellen Langer?

  Well, no, it's a boring story, but the point is, it was all fixed, in some sense. The person who took me there had all, you know, everything was wired, in some sense. It was, I hadn't done anything. It was, you know, I was on the accusing end. And, you know, being a public speaker for so long, all of this, right? At Harvard, Lofton University, I go into this courthouse to make this request for, and I felt scared.

• 1:39:59Ellen Langer?

  I already had the answer, and I look at these other people, I thought, it's criminal, to borrow a term. You know, that, I think that the way we've constructed so many environments is a way of, again, instantiating the status quo. Keep people in place.

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  Have you had hospital administrators or any healthcare executives approach you as a result of...

• 1:40:22Ellen Langer?

  Well, I haven't had this out there. You know, the book came out in September. This one thing, I was talking with people in China about doing a mindful hospital. I don't know if that'll happen. It's interesting to me, because I have mindful schools that are vastly different from our current schools, and there are people from India and Canada, nobody in the United States. It's out there. It's out there, whether I lead it or somebody else. And it will have an effect. It can't help but.

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  It's pretty cool. I mean, if you just got one up on its feet, and then you could study it, and then you have a test case.

• 1:41:01Ellen Langer?

  You know, it's one of those things where it's a fabulous bet.

• 1:41:07Ellen Langer?

  You know, that I just can't imagine that the mindful hospital or the mindful school wouldn't be successful. It almost can't be as bad as things are now.

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Ellen Langer?

  You know, really.

• 1:41:18Rich Roll?

  It's not good.

• 1:41:18Ellen Langer?

  No, I mean, when you think about school, you have the kids who get Ds and Fs. They're, they become our killers or whatever, right? You know, you, you, nobody's letting you think well of yourself. You have to make a reputation some way. The kids who get Bs and Cs, they're average. Who wants to be average? But then you take those of us who get As. Now, we don't know how we got the A. Everybody expects us to get As. We don't know if we're gonna continue to get. It's stressful. Nobody wins.

• 1:41:48Rich Roll?

  Also, you're being evaluated on a, on an irrelevant metric, which is your ability to memorize stuff and take tests.

• 1:41:54Ellen Langer?

  Yes, I mean, it's totally insane. It's also the case that the tests are designed to find what you don't know. Everybody knows something. You know, when I give a test, tell me what you do know. What is it meaning that there's, who decided that this thing that you don't know is so important that you can't pass the course without knowing it? It's ridiculous.

• 1:42:15Rich Roll?

  So if you found yourself, uh...

• 1:42:17Ellen Langer?

  As a teacher, yes. If I found myself teaching, my exams would be different.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I was gonna, I was gonna broaden that. If you woke up and you were the Secretary of Education, or maybe you were the new, um, Surgeon General, and you have this agenda to roll out the mindful hospitals and a reimagination of education, like, you could, you could wave your wand. What does it look like?

• 1:42:39Ellen Langer?

  Oh, I mean, I, I've written about such. Um, you know, the hospital would get an inclination from here. Um, and, um, you know, the mindful school, everything about school now is mindless. You know, the, um, looking for single right answers to things, uh, giving, teaching information in an absolute way. Horses don't eat meat. One and one is two. You know, you can change the content to make it more sophisticated, but it's the same, um, the same idea that doesn't lead you to look more broadly at things, but rather, you know, close, helps you close your mind. So in mindful school, one of the things that we were going to do, and, you know... I can't do all of these things at once.

• 1:43:22Ellen Langer?

  And I say yes to everything because everything is exciting. And that's why none of this gets done. But I would find if somebody wanted to do this, could afford to do this, this would be more interesting to me than the Secretary of Education, or you said, Health, whatever.

• 1:43:41Rich Roll?

  Surgeon General.

• 1:43:42Ellen Langer?

  Surgeon General. Yeah. No, I would like to just be able to do it. And so what I wanted to do was to build the school with it. The building itself is upside down. So everything about it says, this is different. And, you know.

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  There should be some Silicon Valley person who's up for that.

• 1:44:03Ellen Langer?

  If they call me, I'm happy to listen.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  Hopefully, you'll get a call. Your class must be very popular at Harvard. Is it very hard to get into? Is there like a long waiting list? Like, how does that work?

• 1:44:15Ellen Langer?

  No, no, no, no. You know, you have to decide early on. And then, then they petition, and they petition, and they plead.

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  You get letters slid under the door in your office and stuff?

• 1:44:28Ellen Langer?

  Yeah, yeah. I almost always say yes. So I don't know how long I'm going to be teaching this particular class. And I just, I already told people at Harvard that I want it open to everyone. You know, right now, you have to have certain requirements, which you don't really have to have. So that'd be my last hurrah.

• 1:44:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I'd like to come and take it. Does that mean I can come and take it?

• 1:44:52Ellen Langer?

  Yeah. I would like it to.

• 1:44:54Rich Roll?

  You're an absolute delight and an inspiration. This was really fun. Thank you.

• 1:44:58Ellen Langer?

  I've enjoyed it too.

• 1:45:00Rich Roll?

  Your work is really important. It's revelatory. We are in an evolution of consciousness, or perhaps even a war of consciousness. That implies a duality, I don't know. But I think the way in which you address these topics from your lived experience and all these experiments that you've done is really, it's fun. Like, reading your book is fun, and also mind-blowing in many ways. So I encourage everybody to pick it up if you haven't already, The Mindful Body. And will you come and talk to me again sometime?

• 1:45:32Ellen Langer?

  Oh, I would love to.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  This is great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Cheers.

• 1:45:43Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting

• 1:46:27Rich Roll?

  the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel

• 1:47:09Rich Roll?

  Solis. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.