December 27, 2024
As someone who has spent years studying how people learn and grow intellectually, I’ve observed that confidence plays a crucial role in cognitive development.
The way we think about our own intelligence can either limit or expand our potential.
In this article, I’ll share evidence-based insights on developing what cognitive scientists call “cognitive confidence” — the belief in your ability to learn and solve problems effectively.
What You’ll Learn
- Understanding cognitive confidence and why it matters
- How self-belief shapes intellectual growth
- The relationship between passion and learning
- Practical steps to build learning confidence
Video
Watch my interview on Free Game Production
Or watch it here:
Transcript
Luke Jeraci: Foreign. What’s up, beautiful people? Welcome back to the Free Game Productions. I have my friend here, Handsome Dan, Dan Lerman. He’s an intelligence expert. PhD in cognitive science and the world’s top private tutor. He actually. I’m the one that dropped the ball, but he’s gonna teach me and I’m gonna retake my sats at some point. Hell yeah.
Dan Lerman: Hell yeah. Public commitment. Goodness. Now I’m gonna see some follow through. That’s great.
Luke Jeraci: It is a public commitment. So one of the things Dan can do is he can help you increase your intelligence. Yes. How can you help people increase intelligence?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, it’s a really good question and I probably should have prepared specific answer. There are a couple things that come to mind. I think it would be good to ask yourself what intelligence you’re interested in.
Luke Jeraci: Okay. What kind of intelligences are there?
Dan Lerman: Huh. The one that I kind of specialize in is traditional intelligence, the one that is measured by iq. The one that generally is related to. To reading, writing, math and maybe some processing speed in there before we go into that.
Luke Jeraci: Before we go into that what are the other types too?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, there’s a lot. You know, Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind comes to mind. He talks about multiple intelligences, and people love the theory of multiple intelligences. And I think he’s got eight of them in there. I don’t remember them offhand, but there’s like musical and kinesthetic and athletic and I don’t know, if you think about the people that you know of that are gifted in any domain, I think you could call those intelligences.
Luke Jeraci: How do you know the definition of intelligence?
Dan Lerman: Not really. No.
Luke Jeraci: My guess would be it’d be something about like an ability to problem solve or figure something out.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, that feels right. That feels right. I think there’s definitely a comparative element to it. To describe someone as intelligent, they have to be better than most people or like highly intelligent. So that’s maybe something I’d throw in there.
Luke Jeraci: Okay.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. But yeah, let’s take this conversation wherever you want to go. I think I can definitely help people get more intelligent in the classical intelligence realm and make them feel more com. Like, confidence is such a big part of this, Luke. Like, if you feel confident in your brain, which is what I really help people do, your whole world opens up.
Luke Jeraci: So like a self fulfilling prophecy of the mind.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Oh, tremendously big. Part of what I do is help people break through the barriers that they’ve set for themselves. They don’t. They don’t think they’re smart. They’ve gone to Traditional schools. And they’ve been in classrooms where they’re told they’re not that smart. And I help them destroy that belief.
Luke Jeraci: There’s. I wish I could remember the name. I should have remember the name of the study. But there was some researcher that did a study, and they went into. I want to say it was an elementary school, and they told. Let’s just say, hypothetically, those of you that are familiar with it. I’m sorry if I bastardize this a little bit, but they go into. We’ll say kindergarten, and they tell the school that we’ll say 15 of the students are geniuses. And they tell the school that 15 of the students are just imbeciles. And they completely randomized it. The 15 that they told the school were geniuses by the time they graduated were all, like, accelerating at a genius level. And the one that told were imbeciles were all way behind.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. So good. So much from that. First of all, I got to say, you know the word imbecile as well as the word moron. And there’s one other one that might come to me in a second. These are all words that were created by intelligence psychologists so they would measure people on IQ tests back in, like, the early 1900s when these were created. And if you were a standard deviation below the norm, you were an imbecile. If you were two standard deviations below the norm, you were a moron. And I think the third one was idiot. You guys can double check me online. But. So the words imbecile, moron, and idiot were scientific terms like describing people’s intelligence levels. And now we just call everyone an idiot and imbecile and a moron. You know, use that word?
Luke Jeraci: No, no, I used it because that was the word that they use.
Dan Lerman: So good. Yeah, yeah. The other thing that popped up for me, I do, you know, I’ve had. I’ve done well in traditional schools. I’ve got, you know, gotten really good grades, gone to fancy schools, whatever. And I do think one of the thing I think about, like, how that happened, one of the things my parents definitely did was they made me feel like a genius. I don’t know if it was true or not, but they definitely made me feel. Feel that way over and over again. I think they. My mom, I remember her using that word a lot. And I have a daughter now who’s one year old, and my mom is already calling her a genius.
Luke Jeraci: Beautiful.
Dan Lerman: I know. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I mean, it’s like, I don’t know if there’s a term of it. We’ll call it the Kanye west effect.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Where you just.
Dan Lerman: Swagger.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah. You just refuse to believe otherwise.
Dan Lerman: There’s. There’s something there that’s like mon. Like, especially around intelligence. It’s. It’s amazingly powerful to have confidence in your cognitive abilities.
Luke Jeraci: That’s a. I like that term. Confidence in the cognitive abilities.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Cognitive confidence.
Luke Jeraci: Okay, so cognitive confidence is a huge determining factor. Would that be similar to, like, something like self efficacy?
Dan Lerman: Huh.
Luke Jeraci: And by self efficacy, I’m thinking of, like, a business psychology term I learned.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Where it’s your belief and the ability to get it done causes you to get it done.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I think of that in sports all the time.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. I think self efficacy is broader, and cognitive confidence is specifically with, like, your mental abilities. You could have self efficacy that you’re going to run a marathon, it seems like. Right.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah.
Dan Lerman: So I think they’re. They’re related. Maybe cognitive confidence is specifically like, learning or doing things with your mind.
Luke Jeraci: Okay, so how do you help people increase their cognitive confidence?
Dan Lerman: So the main way, like, my. My main business comes from private tutoring. I get flown all over the world to tutor people privately. I charge 12, $50 an hour to do that. And the reason people pay that is because I. I’m able to do this really effectively. And usually there’s a whole range of things. I see. But, like, the average kid nowadays has no cognitive confidence, never reads, loves TikTok, and has no interests, like, no passions. Like, what do you do on weekends? I hang out with my friends. What are you into? Like, maybe sports, but you, like, sometimes, like, nothing but hanging out with my friends. So how do you foster cognitive confidence in someone? The first step is I find out what they love, what they’re passionate about.
Luke Jeraci: I’m gonna write this down for me and Danielle.
Dan Lerman: Hell, yeah. So I don’t know. Can we play with.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah.
Dan Lerman: Can we talk about, like, would you be open to doing something that I would do in a session?
Luke Jeraci: Yeah.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Okay. So, like, typical weekend. Luke, what are you doing.
Luke Jeraci: Saturday? Probably a mushroom ceremony.
Dan Lerman: Nice.
Luke Jeraci: Friday I’m gonna work early. We have our little meetings. After the meeting, I usually run to the gym, and then I come back to the office, try to touch base with with my people, come home, and then smoke, meditate, relax, watch a movie with Danielle, Read Fridays, actually. Like to go to sleep early.
Dan Lerman: Okay, cool. That’s pretty good. I’m hearing a lot in there. And you, you’re way more active and accomplished than a lot of the, you know, 16 year olds I work with. But let’s, let’s do go with mushrooms. Okay. You’re interested in mushrooms?
Luke Jeraci: Yep.
Dan Lerman: Have you read about them at all?
Luke Jeraci: Yes.
Dan Lerman: What have you read?
Luke Jeraci: A bunch of academic research in the, the ama, a bunch of medical research and then really it’s all kind of. And then some actually like history, like esoteric religious books. And there’s a book called Psychedelic Gospels which is super cool. I actually have it upstairs. Yeah, I have so much books on them and I like reading about them so that if I speak to somebody who thinks of it the way that it’s been portrayed in the media, I’m able to factually explain my positions. They’re not going to understand my experiential experience. Like, right. Like, hey, I connected with God at a different. Like, how do you explain that? But I can be like, hey, you know, it actually improves your hearing, your senses, your brain speed, your neurons. It smooths out your brain and helps get rid of depressing thoughts. The fmris have shown. So I like to use like that type of stuff.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. And how much are you getting paid to do this type of research work? Reading.
Luke Jeraci: Nothing.
Dan Lerman: Zero. Good. Okay, great. You’re an amazing, like finished product of what someone look looks like after they work with me. If it goes well, you know, you, your cognitive confidence with mushrooms is very high. Like if an article came out, you’d read it, you’d learn about it. Sick. Most kids I work with, they’re like blank slates. They’re like, I want to go into business. Have you ever read anything about business? Well, I know you have, but they’re kind of like, no. And they feel ashamed about it. So I get them into what they’re. They’re, you know, connected to what fuels them and I can’t give that to them. We go in whatever different direction they want to go in and then I get them reading great stuff, like mind expanding stuff, stuff that’s challenging, complex ideas in that arena. And then little by little, they build towards what you are, which is an incredibly confident learner. Like, it’s. You’re exactly what I’m aiming for.
Luke Jeraci: Confidence is definitely not something I lack.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Maybe I should call you in and have you talk to some of my kids. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I thought, you know, ideally I’m trying to transform people into confident learners in whatever they love. A big part of that is getting them reading. I’m a big believer in reading. Almost everyone I work with is not a big reader and I have to like go into the weeds, show them Text and tell them exactly what should be going through their mind to enjoy reading and do it effectively.
Luke Jeraci: Okay. So I’m an avid reader, actually. Dan runs a book club. That’s awesome. I’m trying to get him to make it like a public thing. So hopefully you guys see Learning with Lerman soon.
Dan Lerman: Learning with Lerman.
Luke Jeraci: On a side note, we’ll pretend I’m not an avid reader and we haven’t done this. Let’s say I want to read a book about physics and how the world is a byproduct of consciousness.
Dan Lerman: Cool.
Luke Jeraci: How would I. How would you get me to go into it? And then would you do book reviews? How would you, how would you go about that?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I mean, I’ve read a lot of stuff, so I have a lot of introductory articles. I gotta say it’s pretty rare that I get a 16 or 17 year old who’s like really interested in physics. But what I’d probably do is go like run a Google Scholar search, like run an academic article, search for something cool or find. I really like the New York Review of books. They’re like 10 page articles that high brow and challenging. And we’d read it together.
Luke Jeraci: The New York Review of Books.
Dan Lerman: New York Review of Books. Yeah. So yeah, like any article that’s like three to 10 pages, that’s kind of where we’d start. My. One of my favorites that I think you would love actually. Do you know David Foster Wallace is. Or was.
Luke Jeraci: I know the name, but I don’t know why.
Dan Lerman: Famous book called Infinite Jest. And he’s kind of this unbelievable modern writer. He actually committed suicide about 10 years ago and he wrote this article called Consider the Lobster. And I love starting people on that because you can get this article online. The first page you think it’s about this lobster festival in Maine. This like hokey obese lobster festival in Maine. You’re like, what the hell’s going on here? Why am I reading this? And by the end, it’s not what you expect. And a lot of times people read this article with me and they’re like, this is the first thing I’ve ever read that I’ve liked. And then that opens up a can of wor. You know, like they start reading things and start liking it and they get smarter, they get more confident. Their test scores usually go up as a byproduct. So that’s generally how it works.
Luke Jeraci: I, I heard Jim Rohn, who’s one of my favorites, he spoke about maybe Zig Ziglar actually, but they spoke about how improved vocabulary correlates completely with improved finances. Like, in all these different things. Do you go into vocabulary a lot?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I don’t drill vocabulary, but it’s a byproduct of reading good stuff. So, like, when I keep my skip saying, like, you got to read good stuff, like, I love Harry Potter. I don’t think reading Harry Potter is going to make you smarter. Like, you’ll have a blast.
Luke Jeraci: Shots fired. Daniel.
Dan Lerman: I’m so sorry, Danielle. That’s why I avoided eye contact. The look she’s given me, I’m so, so it’s a blast. But one of the things I think it makes something like mind expanding when you read it is the vocabulary and the complexity of ideas. So one of the oldest psychological tests in the world is a vocabulary test. If you give someone like 10 vocabulary words, and if you see. If you see how many of the 10 they know, it’s not perfectly correlated to intelligence, but it’s a good predictor of how quote, unquote, intelligent someone is. So that’s why the SAT back when we were taking it had vocabulary words. They were like those analogies. I don’t know if you remember those. Those are no longer on the test. But vocabulary is tested in kind of more subtle ways. So, yes, vocabulary is part of being intelligent. Yes. Reading will make your vocabulary go through the roof. I personally think drilling index cards, it’s kind of boring and a waste of time, in my opinion.
Luke Jeraci: Do you. Do you touch on etymology at all? I love etymology.
Dan Lerman: I’ve actually developed a love of etymology. Can we. Do you have a favorite word?
Luke Jeraci: The first word that pops my mind is paradox.
Dan Lerman: Okay. Do you know the etymology? No, I don’t know if I do either. I. My favorite word is callipygian. Do you know that word?
Luke Jeraci: No.
Dan Lerman: Callipidian. The prefix cali, like, beautiful, like cali. The name cali from Greek and pidgeon means buttocks. So callipygian means having a nicely shaped ass.
Luke Jeraci: Nice.
Dan Lerman: Isn’t that nice that there’s a word for that?
Luke Jeraci: Dude, I love it. I love. I love just going back and seeing what the original meaning was and how it shaped over time.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: You have an example, the word create.
Dan Lerman: Oh, yeah. Oh, tell me about that.
Luke Jeraci: So it goes to crayer or create. In. In Latin, I’m probably pronouncing it wrong, but in. In Spanish, it’s still C R E A R. And that means to think, to believe, to create. In Spanish. Sick, right? And you remove the r and you put te and you have create. But it’s interesting, Right? So first you have to think it, and you have to believe it. Then you can create it.
Dan Lerman: Sick. I love that. I’m. I teach a class on creativity at Columbia, and I. I am gonna use that on day one. That’s day one.
Luke Jeraci: That’s cool. Yeah, dude, that’s so cool. I’d love to take that class with Professor Lerman. And then another one is manifest, and it’s like Manny and festival.
Dan Lerman: Festival. And what’s Manny?
Luke Jeraci: Shoot. What is it like? I always think of man as, like, I can’t even think now, but it’s like man with your hands.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Like manicure. That makes sense. Oh, yeah. With your hands. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I don’t know that one for sure. I pull my phone out and look at it up the etymology, but I know fest, like the festival. Like Festivus.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So the way I think of it is like, you’re creating happily, and often when you manifest, it’s. There’s an energy.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: In order to. Like, my opinion, it’s like the real manifesting is there’s a. A belief and efficacy to it. And it’s like your belief or that festival that. That high energy is what helps create the manifestation.
Dan Lerman: I love it. Yeah. That’s a great one. What a cool word.
Luke Jeraci: And then last week, and I was just. We were just a. Remarks this thing, and Violona Marcus, her thing we were speaking about magic was. She was like, magic is real to the degree that you believe it.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And I think that that’s such a powerful reality. So, like, the word. So there’s a famous Bible verse in the New Testament, like, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And I reference this all the time on this particular podcast, but the word repent is written as metanoia, which is like, change your way of thinking.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Alter your perception. Thinking about thinking. So in other words, alter your thinking. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. They see, but they don’t see. They hear, but they don’t hear.
Dan Lerman: So it’s like, in some ways, like an alternate to paranoia, which is like thinking of, like, you’re kind of negative in your head. Meta noi would be like freeing yourself.
Luke Jeraci: The opposite of paranoid would be pronoia.
Dan Lerman: Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And metanoia is kind of like thinking.
Luke Jeraci: About thinking, but it’s the way that they interpret it is like, altered because meta is like the thing of itself.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: But metanoia would be like altered perception.
Dan Lerman: Love it. Cool. We’re Deep in the words here.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah. Do hope.
Dan Lerman: I find myself thinking about words more often in my. In my old age than. Than I used to.
Luke Jeraci: Do you think primarily in words, or what’s your thought? My process. My word or my thought process is probably like 90% or more in words.
Dan Lerman: In words, I think I’m. More images. I told you, you don’t think in.
Luke Jeraci: Images unless it’s like, a vision. No.
Dan Lerman: What about when you’re reading something? Are you. What’s going through your mind?
Luke Jeraci: No. And I thought everybody thought the way I did until grad school.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And honestly, because of words, I was reading about an autistic guy, John Elder Robinson, who made, like, the first electric guitar and stuff, and he has a book called Look Into My Eyes or Look At Me In My Eyes. And when I was reading that, I had. I went to Paris right after, and the way they say, nice to meet you is Ashante.
Dan Lerman: Ashante.
Luke Jeraci: Which is. You’re enchanted. Yeah. And I was like, oh, my God, it’s so much nicer than nice to meet you. And then that got me going down this whole rabbit hole. And in it, I read the autistic book on. Or the book on autism. And then I watched Temple about. Temple Grandin.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And I realized that she doesn’t think in words. She completely thought in pictures. And it blew my fucking mind. And I emailed a proposal to a cognitive professor at Sergius University, and it was basically like a way to maybe help autistic people communicate better would be help them program their mind to think more in words. But it’s funny that you think primarily in images and you’re so articulate and you write books and.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, you know, like Cognitive Science 101. Have you heard of the World Memory Championships?
Luke Jeraci: I’ve heard of them. I’m unfamiliar.
Dan Lerman: It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s like the Olympics for the mind. And this guy named Josh Foer wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein, which I love. I highly recommend. He was a journalist that became a memory athlete. And there’s some tricks you can use to improve your memory right away. And one of them is thinking in images. Have you heard of the term memory palace?
Luke Jeraci: Is that where you create, like, a house? Yeah, I’m relatively familiar, but yeah.
Dan Lerman: The very basic example is, let’s say you want to memorize the first however many digits of PI, like visualize your childhood home. And on the door is a three. And then you open the door, and then on the left you see, like, a wooden table. And there’s a 14. And then you go forward from that table, and there’s a 15. And then you look to the right, and there’s a tiger. And there’s like, a nine, six, two on the tiger. And I’m probably breaking some of the rules and not, you know, but whatever. So you go and see the door, and what do you remember? What’s on the door?
Luke Jeraci: A3.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. And then the first table on the left.
Luke Jeraci: I’m just gonna say 1. I wasn’t.
Dan Lerman: It was a 1. 4. You close your eyes. I thought you were doing it. Yeah. So if you actually go through that exercise and visualize it, you can memorize, like, thousands of digits of PI. I was.
Luke Jeraci: What was funny is I closed my eyes and was trying to picture my house, and I, like.
Dan Lerman: You got caught up in the house?
Luke Jeraci: No. I realized even that is hard for me.
Dan Lerman: It’s hard for you? Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Which is weird because I have a really good memory.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. You know, people have different minds. Like, this is one trick that generally seems to work, like, to actually visualize something. And if anyone’s listening and they’re like, I don’t really read much, but I’d like to read the number one tip I give is to tap into this. This muscle. And again, this might not work for you.
Luke Jeraci: No, no. It’s something I’m sure I could develop.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. You know, if you’re reading something, you really want to be having an experience. I like to start with poetry, actually. I sometimes do articles. I sometimes read short poems with my students. One that I’m loving lately is called A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman. It’s about feeling alone in the universe. It’s really cool. Two paragraphs, and you can have a profound experience reading these two paragraphs if you visualize and personalize it and make it about your life. So a lot. I think a lot of people don’t like reading because they haven’t been taught to enjoy it. And the visualizing and tying it to your own life, those are two cognitive tools that I teach that let people enjoy the experience.
Luke Jeraci: That’s pretty awesome. My. What happens to me visualizations, which is funny, too, because obviously I’m a huge believer in sacred plants and entheogens. So that’s a really cool etymology. Entheogen is, like, the real term for psychedelic. We’ve now stopped using the word, but it’s enthusias, the God within.
Dan Lerman: God within? Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So, like, mushrooms, ayahuasca, stuff like that are classified as entheogenic plants on those I don’t really get visuals.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I get inner knowings.
Dan Lerman: Sick.
Luke Jeraci: But like a lot of people get visuals and I think it probably has to do with the way that you think your way, your messages primarily come in. But I would like to learn how to do that more because I’m sure that would help me with meditation.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. A couple things to like strengthen that idea that there is a strong visual muscle in your brain. When did we learn to speak as a species? I don’t actually know the answer to that question, but call it million years ago, a couple million years ago. And we’ve been evolving for billions of years. So 99.9% of our brain evolution is non verbal. The verbal evolution is really pretty recent. On top of that, I have a one year old daughter who doesn’t speak, but man, she’s definitely conscious and she’s thinking and putting ideas together. Watch it happen. So there’s certainly something to your consciousness that’s really strong, that’s non verbal.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah. And again, what’s interesting is when I do get some profound visions, they seem so important to me because I don’t normally think that way.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So it’s like the laws of power, basically a basic rule of economics. The law of scarcity.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So it becomes more valuable to me.
Dan Lerman: Because it doesn’t happen.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah. But I would love to be able to think more visually.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I’m sure you could.
Luke Jeraci: I’m sure I could. I’m gonna, I’m gonna.
Dan Lerman: Powerful brain man.
Luke Jeraci: I’m gonna get in touch with you on that.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So let’s say, let’s say I were to hire you for that. Why would I pay 12, 50 an hour to hire you for that?
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Or is that’s not.
Dan Lerman: I don’t know. Well, the value, I don’t know. Imagine most of the people I work with have a ton of money and you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 grand is a drop in the bucket for them. And imagine you have a kid who’s probably 15, 16, 17 years old, a little bit lost and not confident in their mind.
Luke Jeraci: Right. There’s no price you can put on that.
Dan Lerman: It’s like, yeah, I’ve had parents call me crying tears of joy because their kid brought a Kurt Vonnegut book to the beach. And I’m not one to say whether that’s valuable to you or not. I’m telling you, you have a two month wait list. I make a lot of money doing this. It is valuable to a lot of people to have their kids awaken intellectually.
Luke Jeraci: That’s that’s so awesome. Do you have any favorite success stories?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I do. I’d say my top story that I think about most, it was the most. It was one of the most challenging people I’ve ever worked with. And I won’t use real names here, but it was a 10th grade girl at an elite, very famous New York City private school. Private school that a lot of celebrities send their kids to. And she was in 10th grade and I met with her for the first time. Her parents told me she was dyslexic. And I asked her to read this New York Times article out loud. And she couldn’t get through more than five words without choking up. And she eventually started crying. She couldn’t read the article out loud and it was not a hard article.
Luke Jeraci: Could she read?
Dan Lerman: She could read. She says she could kind of read. Her ACT score was a 16 out of 36. I think that’s like 5th percentile or something like that. So it’s really low. And the thing that I saw in her that gave me faith we could, we could have a good result like at the end of the day was she was incredibly driven, really wanted to be a great reader. A lot of her classmates were great readers. She was not. And she really wanted to go to a good university. And I didn’t give her that drive. She came to me with the drive. So we worked for a year and a half. Her ACT score went up from a 16 to a 35, which is 99th percentile. Near perfect score. And there were a lot of tough conversations, a lot of tears on both sides throughout. But we busted through huge, like self defeating belief that she could not read because someone told her she was dyslexic. And we had a lot of time to make up for, you know, she was 15 and basically had never read a book.
Luke Jeraci: That’s so crazy. So she went from bottom 5% to top 1.
Dan Lerman: Top 1%? Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: How long did that take?
Dan Lerman: A year and a half.
Luke Jeraci: That’s gonna be worth every penny to the parents.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I mean, it was expensive, but they were very, very happy. We were all happy. We went out to dinner, we celebrated, we cried, we laughed, we drank some really good wine. It was great and I loved it. It was an amazing transformational experience. So I usually don’t work with people for that long. It’s usually two to six months, depending on where people are starting. But that was. I loved that one. I poured my soul into that one. And towards the end of it, I actually stopped charging them because I, you know, they paid me enough money, and I felt really committed to seeing it through.
Luke Jeraci: What school did she end up going to?
Dan Lerman: What college did she go to?
Luke Jeraci: She went to Brown, so, like, a really good school.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, she went to Brown, which I think was good. She was very, very creative thinker, very outside the box. And we got her reading and, yeah, I think it helped.
Luke Jeraci: I saw something recently as well. A NASA scientist did a research and children. 98% of children start off classified as geniuses, and then they would go back in and they would check on the children, and each year it would be dramatically less. And by the time they graduated high school, 2% were classified as geniuses.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, you know my thinking. I actually just taught a class on this yesterday. We did a creativity class. We covered. Who did we cover? We talked about Maslow and Rogers.
Luke Jeraci: Do you remember who did that?
Dan Lerman: No, I don’t remember who did that. But there’s. There’s a lot of, like, business, like, similar stuff that does things. Like it takes kindergarteners and asks them to make towers out of marshmallows and toothpicks. And the kindergartners are, like, way more creative and faster than the MBA students who are, like, at Harvard Business School or whatever. You know, I think it’s because kids spend a lot of time putting toothpicks and marshmallows together, and it’s not something that’s, like, challenging. So I think a lot of that research asks kids to do kid, like, tasks. And I think I don’t want to. I don’t love the idea of, like, you were smarter when you were a kid. Society has ruined you. You know, do that same research with, like, making a business plan, and those kindergartners don’t know what to do. So I like the idea that there is this inner creative genius in you. I think the idea that you were better than has to be taken with a grain of salt. And like, specifically that body of research, I’ve never seen anything where a kid is doing a complex task and performing it better than an adult.
Luke Jeraci: I mean, that. That kind of ties into, like, in physics, like the uncertainty principle and Schrodinger’s cat. So, like, Schrodinger’s cat, like, everything is all things until it’s observed. Yeah. How would. And then with the uncertainty principle, like, the observer always affects things. So with that being said, how is intelligence measured? Like, how would that. Because obviously the way it’s measured affects what it is.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Oh, such a cool connection. I don’t know that I’m gonna Be able to answer the quantum physics part of.
Luke Jeraci: Don’t worry about it.
Dan Lerman: But no, I. Dude, I’m actually reading a book that talks about Schrodinger right now. And it’s just so cool, and I love it. What’s it called? It’s by Benjamin Labatut. And what happens when you cease to understand the world. That’s the name of the book. Sick. It’s like a hundred pages. Really cool.
Luke Jeraci: I’ve, like, six books written down.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I know. I read a lot. I read like five or six books at once. So if you’re doing that, don’t. No shame, no guilt. How do we measure intelligence? Is something I can definitely answer. And, dude, it’s fascinating to me. And this is like, I’m so passionate about this. Do you know it’s on an IQ.
Luke Jeraci: Test, I don’t think I’ve ever taken one.
Dan Lerman: Most people, I think, like, probably nine out of every 10 people I speak to.
Luke Jeraci: And IQ stands for. Not to cut you off, but Intelligence quotient.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, that’s it. Intelligence.
Luke Jeraci: What does quotient mean?
Dan Lerman: A quote. Quotient comes from the, like, divisibility. The word quotient means you’re, like, comparing yourself to other people. You’re dividing your ability by the average ability in a population.
Luke Jeraci: So that’s kind of what you said in the beginning, where intelligence is comparative.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. IQ can’t exist unless you compare it to something else. It just can’t. Right.
Luke Jeraci: That’s interesting.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. And an average IQ. Do you know what number is an average IQ?
Luke Jeraci: No. 100.
Dan Lerman: It’s 100. Yeah. And it’s rescaled to be 100 so that the population is rescaled to be 100 every once in a while.
Luke Jeraci: So to have geniuses, we gotta have dummies.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. There’s got to be a spread. It’s like to have tall people, we have to have short people.
Luke Jeraci: Very interesting. The polarity of it has to exist.
Dan Lerman: Otherwise the. You know, everyone’s the same height.
Luke Jeraci: Right.
Dan Lerman: One cool fact I’ll throw in there, it’s called the Flynn Effect. It’s. There’s this researcher, James Flynn, who’s in New Zealand. He studies IQ generationally and each generation, generation by generation. This is really surprising to a lot of people. IQ goes up by 5 to 10 points. So we. Our generation is smarter than the last generation, which is smarter than the last generation, so on and so forth, since IQ tests were invented in the early 1900s.
Luke Jeraci: But that could go back to what’s being measured. Are we making it easier no, it’s.
Dan Lerman: No, no, no. Same test. Same test.
Luke Jeraci: So let’s say, are we teaching? Are we creating a system that gets closer to what we’re measuring and maybe losing creativity and grit and other things?
Dan Lerman: So I think we got to get back to what’s actually on this test, right? This is so cool. It blows my mind. Most people don’t know. So the most common IQ test in the world is called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, W A I S. And there have been five versions of this. So the modern one is called the WAIS5. And to get access to one, you can’t Google it. It’s not on the Internet. Maybe it’s on the dark Web somewhere, but I’ve looked extensively. You cannot get the actual test.
Luke Jeraci: If you’re on the dark Web, you’re probably not looking. Intelligence test.
Dan Lerman: I mean, you never know. But, you know, why does it make sense to not have this test out there? Because if you know the test, you can control your intelligence. You could either game the system and make it seem like you’re highly intelligent or really not intelligent. You can game. The whole business model of this test is the questions have to be protected. But I’m in a PhD program at Columbia, and there’s this testing library where you can actually go and. And look at the test. So I do that every once in a while. I just love the test. And I did it a couple weeks ago. I forget why. I think I was just, like, on campus and had an extra hour, and I opened it up, and here’s some things that are on the test. You can Google and check on Wikipedia, exactly the outline of the test. But one thing, one question on the test. Here’s a question from the actual verified test. Who is the Chancellor of Germany that’s on the test? It’s like a facts test. So one part is called. It’s called, like, general knowledge. I forget the actual term. It’s just facts. It’s just like, what is the capital of France? That’s a question on the test. So this belief that. I really want to shatter this belief. I’m like, kind of on a mission to shatter this belief that people are stuck in their intelligence by showing them by any metric, any metric you can come up with, you can improve it. You know, the Chancellor of Germany at the time the test was created was Angela Merkel. I actually don’t.
Luke Jeraci: I was going to say Merkel.
Dan Lerman: There you go. I don’t know who. It’s someone else now, and I don’t know who it Is so I wouldn’t get that point on the IQ test. The capital of France is Paris, in case. And another section of the test is vocabulary. What does the word.
Luke Jeraci: And that’s something you can improve easily.
Dan Lerman: Oh, my God, totally. Yeah. I have on my phone somewhere the actual questions of the test, but the format is, what does the word empathetic mean? What does the word divergent mean? And you get points if you know what the words mean.
Luke Jeraci: Do you know the etymology of empathetic? I do not. I’m just curious.
Dan Lerman: Pathos is feel, I think. And me is to like. Like ecstasy, step out. So I would guess. My guess is to feel outside of oneself.
Luke Jeraci: So then I wonder why pathetic is pathetic. Because you said it. I was like, huh. Empathetic is good, but pathetic is bad.
Dan Lerman: English is tricky in that sometimes the roots that sound like they’re the roots are not.
Luke Jeraci: Right.
Dan Lerman: So I don’t. I don’t actually know, but I certainly think about that. Another version, another section. They’re like 10 or so sections on this intelligence test. Another section is just math problems. You know, Luke runs 65 laps per day, but today he ran 15% fewer laps. Actually, I think it’s 60 laps per day. Today he ran 15% fewer laps. How many laps did he run?
Luke Jeraci: Would that be nine?
Dan Lerman: Nine fewer laps? Yeah. Yeah. Boy, that was nice, man. So he ran 51 laps. Nine fewer laps. Really good.
Luke Jeraci: I did 10% of 60 and then 5%.
Dan Lerman: Great. And that’s a teachable skill. If you didn’t know that, I could teach that to you in 30 seconds. And now you have that skill. Your IQ literally went up. So I encourage. If you’re interested in intelligence, I would just go. The Wikipedia page for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale will take you through sample questions. Not the actual questions, but sample questions of all them. And you’ll see there are these little subtests that are certainly coachable and maybe shocking to you about, like, you know, what’s actually tested for intelligence.
Luke Jeraci: So how did. Obviously, telling you is a huge thing for you, studying cognitive science. Like, what brought you into the path of cognitive science? Yeah, that’s basically. And you just wrote a book. Yeah, we’ll touch on the book in a moment. But first, why cognitive science and how did you get into it? Because I think I want to go back to school for, like, physics.
Dan Lerman: Sick.
Luke Jeraci: Music theory and psychology.
Dan Lerman: Nice. Yeah, I teach in the psychology department. I don’t know. I’ve always been interested in psychology and my own feelings. I think I, in college, like, started Feeling depressed for the first time and use psychology as a tool to make myself feel better. That’s like the real genesis of it. Why intelligence?
Luke Jeraci: Do you remember what made you feel depressed?
Dan Lerman: I was drinking a lot of alcohol. I was in like this quasi fraternity and I was really heavily invested in beer pong and getting really good at it. I got very good, but I was drinking all the time and lost.
Luke Jeraci: And everything has a cost.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So probably that. And I wasn’t really going to school class much. A whole slew of. Of things. I was not connected to people. So all those things and I.
Luke Jeraci: Does that have a role in depression, not being connected with others?
Dan Lerman: I think it’s tremendously social, I would imagine, and tremendously cognitive. I think those two things are. Are big components of it.
Luke Jeraci: Like, I heard something like, if a baby isn’t touched a lot when it’s born, it’ll, like, have some kind of abnormalities.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And like, people in isolation, like, they wither, kind of wither away and die.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. There’s this amazing body of research in rats called licking, grooming, arched back nursing. And if you measure the amount of time a mother rat spends with her baby rats, licking the rats, grooming them, or arched back nursing, like feeding the rats, the more time she spends doing those things, the better off the rats are, the less kind of depressed or anxious or however they measure rat behavior. So that body of research feels very well established and seems to really apply to humans too.
Luke Jeraci: There’s. They did something too, with. With beans. They put beans in a bag. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Dan Lerman: Like, talking to the beans?
Luke Jeraci: Yes. One, they spoke positively. So I was just speaking my buddy Sean, whole side topic, but he is brilliant and he was talking about this. And when they spoke positive to the beans, no fungus, no nothing healthy beans spoke negative, a lot of like, fungus, and they got kind of like sickly.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And then when they completely ignored the beans, they withered away and decayed.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci:
So like, even negative was better than nothing.
Dan Lerman: So cool. I haven’t. I haven’t read about it, but I’ve spoken to friends about this research, and I think it’s cool. And I think, look, something. I’m real. I’m a researcher now. It’s strange thing to say, but I do research and I’m a published researcher. And I think the power of research is in the story. You know, researchers have to tell stories. And that’s an amazing story. You know, I love that story. If you believe that story and it helps you, great. Go with it. And I think, I hope it’s backed by, like, observation and scientific fact, and that’s what makes it a scientific story. But really, that connection of stories to research is something that I’m. I’m just realizing.
Luke Jeraci: I would love to. I know we spoke about it before. I would love to do something with our mushroom church and like, quote, unquote, magic and the power of belief and community. Yeah, we’ll talk off air on that.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, that sounds awesome. Yeah. Maybe we can zoom in. I can. I share a mushroom connection doc. All day. The. I think junior year of college, I read. I was in college, probably 2006 or 2007. There’s a famous study at Johns Hopkins which you probably know, about, where people took mushrooms and basically felt like that incredibly profound experience, like the Good Friday. I think that was it.
Luke Jeraci: There’s a Good Friday experiment.
Dan Lerman: I read about it. It was very revolutionary at the time to read an academic article talking about the positive effects of psychotropic drugs. And I read it and I was in kind of a tough place at the time, and I had a spring break trip planned to Amsterdam and.
Luke Jeraci: Perfect.
Dan Lerman: Perfect. Yeah. With my best friends in the world, my high school friends. And we got to Amsterdam, I was very scared to take mushrooms. I’m pretty nervous about drugs in general and, you know, you could cause a lot of damage if you don’t.
Luke Jeraci: I refer to them as the sacraments or the medicine.
Dan Lerman: Great. Let’s call the medicine. Great. I’ll use a different word. I was scared of the medicine. I didn’t know anything about dosing. It was tough to find. There’s this one site called Arrowid, which you could find out a little bit of info about drugs at the time, but generally they were like, medicine. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Medicine at the time, which is just.
Luke Jeraci: I feel like it just creates such a different great feeling towards it.
Dan Lerman: Totally. Yeah. I would have. I didn’t expect to go down this path with you, so I would have prepared my vocabulary, but we’ll go medicine. So I went to this medicine shop in Amsterdam and on a. You know, I was going to the Van Gogh Museum, and I was like, I’m with my best friends in the world. I’m kind of in a low plate. Let me try it. And I had. And I’m not recommending this because I feel like maybe like it’s better to be around professionals when you’re using the medicine. And I’m not licensed to give advice on that. But my personal story was I had a profoundly incredible experience that made Me feel much better, made me feel less anxious. It made me feel more certain in my career path and I think shaped my views on medicines forever. And interestingly, I didn’t do another medicine until. Until I was probably 25 or 26. So seven years thinking about that one experience and not needing to repeat it. Not having a desire to repeat it.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah, yeah, it’s. There’s an FRIM. They did a study, and I was talking about this last night. They did a placebo group where they did FMRI before. And the brain is a physical structure. When there’s depressing thoughts, it creates a divot. And I’m sure probably familiar with it, like, creates like a divot in the brain, almost like a ski slope. And they did an FRIM, they showed that. And people took ssri, so anti anxiety, like antidepressants, and then they did one with psilocybin, so mushrooms. And they did FMRI as well, the people. And they gave them the dose and they sat with the therapist, both groups. So the SSRI group, they had a small, like, qualitative difference. Like they, you know, they had some differences in how they thought a little bit. No phys. No physiological differences. The group with mushrooms, huge qualitative difference and acceptance and understanding of whatever was causing those thoughts, or at least at a deeper level, physiologically, the brain was repaired.
Dan Lerman: Can we talk about medicines for a little bit? I’m using that term to apply to mushrooms and illicit medicines, ones that are legal, but also SSRIs. And DRI is the ones that are prescribed throughout the country and throughout the world to treat mental.
Luke Jeraci: See that? Those are what I call drugs.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Okay.
Dan Lerman: Got it. All right. Man, it’s hard to please you.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah, yeah. You can call whatever you want.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I’m. I taught a class called Psychopharmacology.
Luke Jeraci: That sounds amazing.
Dan Lerman: And, yeah, it should be called drugs. You know, it’s the academic version of drugs. And I spent some time, you know, when I’m teaching these classes for the first time, I’m learning a ton. I’m, like, really solidifying my thoughts and reading deeply about this stuff. I think the current state of these medicines and drugs, you have to look at the history. You have to look at the history to understand what’s going on and how people view them. And the history really starts with the frontal lobotomy. Do you know what do you know about lobotomies?
Luke Jeraci: When they take out part of your brain, they did it for, like, people that consider you crazy, and it just basically sedates them.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, it was the first, first procedure to treat mental illness. And the frontal lobotomy didn’t actually remove part of the brain. There was an ice pick that went up through the nose, through, I think it’s called the spheroid or the sphygmoid bone. There’s a thin bone and then you get into the brain and the doctor just whips it around. The doctor was named Walter Freeman, and he said he practiced it on ripe peaches. That’s how he practiced it. And then he would do it on humans. It took seven or eight minutes. And sometimes they felt better, other times they died of a hemorrhage. Right. But the demand for this procedure, Luke, was through the roof. Why?
Luke Jeraci: So that means that there’s always been mental health crisis. People just weren’t allowed to talk to it, talk about it.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. And I think that the fact that people wanted a simple answer to a complex question was evident then. It was evident in this pseudoscience called phrenology, where they measured the skull and they’re like, oh my God, you are depressed because your skull is.
Luke Jeraci: And it’s intelligence by the size of the head.
Dan Lerman: And not just intelligence, your whole. They were called faculties, your whole personalities based on your skullship. It’s actually used to justify a lot of racist claims as well. Just totally total nonsense, total pseudoscience. But it was incredibly popular. Walt Whitman wrote a poem where he talks about the great sciences is like chemistry, biology, phrenology. At the time it was considered a real science. And I think throughout history we’ve, you know, people have always struggled mentally at points. It’s part of the human experience. And they want simple answers. They want a seven minute procedure to make me feel better. They want a pill that’s going to make me feel better. And I think what’s being sold currently makes a lot of sense, like an ssri. Here’s a pill that’ll make you feel better. And by the way, it’s expensive and it’ll make a lot of people rich, but certainly it’ll make you feel better. Watch this commercial about. And it’s not new to see people flocking to solutions that don’t necessarily work. Now, I have to say I do believe in psychotropic drugs like SSRIs and antipsychotics in certain situations. If someone’s having a psychotic break and you need to turn it off, like stop them from hallucinating, we have drugs that can do that, antipsychotic drugs, and they’re incredibly valuable and they save people’s lives. I think if people are suicidal. I’ve heard cases where SSRIs have helped people. So I’m not, I would not personally damn them entirely. I just think the line through the roof, like the demand that’s through the roof. I am very skeptical that that’s the best way to treat some of the issues people are dealing with. And I think what you’re getting at, and I fully agree, is that like some of the, like mushrooms, some of the other been around for thousands, if.
Luke Jeraci: Not millions of years, some of the.
Dan Lerman: Other medicines would do as good, if not a better job in way less time. But pharmaceutical companies don’t make money on that. So they haven’t pushed that yet.
Luke Jeraci: So in some of the first cave drawings ever discovered, people around mushrooms sick. Like, like all these different Super Mario World mushrooms. Yeah. Yeah. It’s great. But it’s. I mean, everybody wants to be fed, not everybody wants to learn how to hunt.
Dan Lerman: Bingo.
Luke Jeraci: Right. And. And then everybody wonders why not everybody, but a lot of people then wonder why they’re not being taken care of better. Right. Because they’re not taking care of themselves.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And it’s just one of those sips. I’m. It’s. It seems primarily a human thing. It doesn’t seem like other animals or plants have that.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And it’s interesting that this isn’t new because I keep thinking of it as being new due to society. Like we’ve outsourced our. I’m guilty of it. I don’t know where my food comes from.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Our water.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. It’s a great point.
Luke Jeraci: I didn’t build this house.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: My friend did. But I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. My friend build a house. He built a basement in the room and stuff. I didn’t make this pen notebook. Like literally nothing.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. We just, we know about such a.
Luke Jeraci: Tiny sliver of our universe and, and because so many people are good natured that we can get away with it. But then we. I do too. I’m like, yo, they put poison in the food. And it’s like, well, I don’t care enough to find out how to do it on my own.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So I’m hoping, and I’m hoping to be a part of it, but that there’s going to be a movement of people becoming more sovereign.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I, I think that in particular, as we’ve moved more and more away from the land and into the cities, we get more and more mental imbalances, hormonal imbalances. Like when I was just in the Amazon. Granted super small sample size. Nobody there’s depressed. They have basically nothing. But they built it all. They do their own. It’s just a simple familial life. And they’re so happy and fulfilled. And literally this little eight year old boy tells Danielle, we get rich people here all the time from America in Spanish and they want more and more. And we see them, they get more and more unhappy. And then they tell us that they could tell us how to live. This kid’s like eight.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And he goes and we live in paradise. And he runs up and I swear to God, hugs and kisses a tree. And it was just like.
Dan Lerman: Right, well, yeah, it’s different, you know, Tying us back to what we’re.
Luke Jeraci: Sorry.
Dan Lerman: No, I love it. Interesting. I don’t know how that. I bet that 8 year old boy would not score highly on this intelligence test which our society has created. But isn’t.
Luke Jeraci: Probably not.
Dan Lerman: But.
Luke Jeraci: But dude, he was like a little angel.
Dan Lerman: It was massively intelligent. Like. Yeah, yeah. So cool.
Luke Jeraci: So it’s an interesting thing. So I’m a believer that if something happened, it was supposed to happen.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: That doesn’t mean it has to keep happening. But I believe that the world has been the way it’s been for the last thousand years. So that the western world could come up with some of the technologies and the things we have now. And I believe that there’s gonna be a migration away from cities back towards land. And I think that’s why a lot of these, not a lot, but a couple big name, high worth individuals are buying up a lot of the land. And I think they understand that.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I think cities are gonna fall upon themselves. Right. Like especially with AI and technologies, like if you can get things done more efficiently that cost you less with less problems through technology, unless you do it out of the goodness of your heart. And let’s be honest, that’s not necessarily why you get into business all the time. It’s to make money. Why would you keep hiring people that might be unreliable?
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: And I think people will be moving back to land. Either that or they’ll become like wall. Either like just fat blobs.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah. So like moving back to land with their like robot staff.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like with some of these technologies and stuff is you can have the best of both worlds, but you have to be disciplined enough not to fall for the distractions.
Dan Lerman: What if you want to be around? Like, like really around. I feel like there’s definitely a big part of the human population that just wants to be around people.
Luke Jeraci: I think that’s the draw of cities. I think what’s going to happen is. Right. I’m looking at the best case scenario is. And since I moved to Georgia, what I’ve noticed is I’m thinking of like, I’ll use Dahlonega as an example. Small country town in the mountains, beautiful dope downtown.
Dan Lerman: Dahlonega, Georgia.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah. So where I got married and like Canton, Georgia and stuff. You can be in the middle of nowhere and they have these little town squares where people come to meet.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: But then they live off. And I think that there’s business studies. I forget the term of it. But after 150 people, it’s hard for people to stay connected or feel connected. It becomes like a cannibalistic. It’s not like in a literal but a metaphorical sense, cannibalistic society where they don’t care about each other, they’re eating each other’s like opportunities and things.
Dan Lerman: Okay.
Luke Jeraci: I imagine smaller community because I’m willing to guess you’d feel more connected if you had a hundred person community where you knew everybody evolved.
Dan Lerman: Right.
Luke Jeraci: Granted, that would get annoying. You don’t want everybody in your business. But the reason why honoring your word and stuff like that mattered so much and the reason why it doesn’t matter so much now is before you were in your community, if you’re known as a liar, nobody with you.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: So you had to honor your.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Nowadays you can just move.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: You just.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Have your online community.
Dan Lerman: Create my new Persona.
Luke Jeraci: People just say things that have no intention of doing. Now I think that causes huge levels of distrust and mistrust and I think that caused a lot of anxiety and depression too. People don’t trust themselves.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Yeah. They were definitely outside of my realm of expertise. But as just a thinker, I agree.
Luke Jeraci: Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. Okay. All right. So what are some of the things like you learn? So kind of with cognitive confidence and things like that, how can somebody take that and apply that to their life, their everyday life?
Dan Lerman: I think just getting involved. There’s so much about intelligence that involves participation. You know, you got to participate in culture to know what the word empathy means. Take the, you know, clone Albert Einstein and throw him in the middle of the woods. That person’s not going to be smart. That person’s actually dead. That person’s gonna die. But you know, have them raised in a society that is isolated. They won’t become intelligent in the way you And I are talking about it.
Luke Jeraci: So I think you gotta dive from a technological sense.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. I don’t know, like a participatory sense. Right. To be considered intelligent, first of all, you have to speak the language. You know that you and I learned to speak the language at a high level.
Luke Jeraci: Right, right. So what I’m thinking now is Scott told me a story about when he was in Jamaica. Somebody came up to him, was like, oh, you think you’re intelligent? And then he made like, what do you make?
Dan Lerman: We talking about when he made the.
Luke Jeraci: Door out of the bamboo tree. Yeah. And then some. Some guy takes a bamboo tree and makes a door and was like, you think you’re intelligent? Can you do that?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think he’s using it. He’s talking about a different type of intelligence. Personally. God awful at. I am not a manual person, but you know, this, like, traditional linguistic intelligence, reading cognitive confidence. I’ve got all that. And I think the original question was, like, how.
Luke Jeraci: How can people take cognitive confidence?
Dan Lerman: Take cognitive confidence? Yeah. I think connecting to what they love and diving in from a content perspective, watching videos. I’m a huge believer in reading good stuff in your domain. Reading good stuff in your domain. So if you’re into business or investing and you want to make a lot of money, start with some Warren Buffett essays and then they’re in your brain and they, you know, they say, like, in creativity and genius, you have to kind of master the basics before you make a breakthrough. Think about, like, Picasso’s early work, which was more traditional before he breaks through, you know, so you got to know the canon of whatever field you’re in. If you want to go into business, know what bit like good business people have done, read about that, and then you can get creative and make your breakthrough. So I am not an expert in every field, but I help people. Like, you can take your cognitive confidence, connect it to your passion, find good stuff to read and consume in that field, and you’re participating, you become intelligent, you build your skill.
Luke Jeraci: That made me think of the war of art.
Dan Lerman: Oh, hell yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Where like, you get good not because you’re inspired, but because you keep working until inspiration comes.
Dan Lerman: It takes time. You cannot become intelligent like that. That’s why it’s hard. You know, it takes consistent chipping away at it, showing up and doing the work.
Luke Jeraci: Is there a level of intelligence to grit? Because I think that’s the biggest success factor.
Dan Lerman: Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: No matter what intelligence, I’m willing to guess grit is the underlying connection to who makes it to the top.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. I have anecdotally noticed that that’s definitely not measured on IQ tests. There is no grit measure because it.
Luke Jeraci: Takes time to measure.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. You probably have to measure it over weeks, months, years. Right. And the thing with tests in general is they can’t by design, they can’t last more than a couple hours.
Luke Jeraci: You know, it’s just not practical, it’s not economic.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Getting an IQ test, by the way, it’s a one on one experience and it costs somewhere between three and ten thousand dollars. It’s very expensive to get an IQ test.
Luke Jeraci: So what? So it’s probably not. Wouldn’t even be worth it, I was gonna say. But if you could track somebody’s growth, that would probably indicate grit. Right. Like.
Dan Lerman: Like growth on IQ or anything. Yeah. There are some cool studies, like some case studies of people’s IQ dramatically changing and it’s almost always in the negative. Someone, you know, had a brain tumor removed and this part of their intelligence was dramatically affected, but this part wasn’t. It’s actually some of the value of IQ tests. Like if you want to really see, I’m getting this brain tumor removed, what’s going to be affected? Is it going to be my vocabulary? Is it going to be my math ability? Depending on where the brain tumor is, it’s usually something very specific and it’s not all of your cognitive abilities. So there’s a bunch of studies, I’ve read a couple of them where people’s IQ goes down after brain tumor gets removed. There’s a lot that look at. There’s some that look at drug use over the long run, like IQ and marijuana use over the long run. Kind of an interesting study that was done in New Zealand there. So yeah, none of them that I can think of. Luke. Measure grit or even mention grit.
Luke Jeraci: And they measure more for decrease and increase.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I have, I cannot remember ever seeing a published paper on an increase in iq. I actually applied for a grant at Columbia. I was going to take an IQ test three times and try and go up every time. And the hack was going to be. I was going to study the test. I was like, watch. My IQ is going to go from here. It’s going to go up and up and up and they.
Luke Jeraci: Didn’t you get a perfect score on your sat?
Dan Lerman: I did, but that’s not, that’s a little different from iq. It’s a little shorter. It doesn’t include all of the domains. It doesn’t include like the knowledge domain. There’s Some similar stuff. The math is on there, the readings on there.
Luke Jeraci: I have a really interesting idea for you off camera for a resource research project.
Dan Lerman: Okay.
Luke Jeraci: It actually ties into something you brought up to me in the past, but now I have the people I would want in on it.
Dan Lerman: Love it. Can you make it any vaguer for our listeners?
Luke Jeraci: Efficacy, power of belief and magic. Hopefully psychedelics.
Dan Lerman: There you go. Okay, interesting. So you know, taking the SAT on mushrooms, that would be interesting. One of the. I don’t know if this is true or not, but one of the rumors circling around campus when I decided to take mushrooms that first time is that your IQ goes up over 200 when you take mushrooms. That I don’t think has any scientific basis, but that as much of a.
Luke Jeraci: Mushroom lover as I am. That sounds.
Dan Lerman: Sounds dubious. But I want. I would. I wonder what would happen. Would I be able to take an IQ test or an SAT on mushrooms? I think I’d have a tough time like looking at the words not page.
Luke Jeraci: I think it’d be tough having a macro. Like I think you could do maybe a micro dose.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. And. And do just fine.
Luke Jeraci: Probably maybe do better because it does speed up your brain connectivity and stuff that. There is plenty of rumors that it’s huge now in Silicon Valley and. Yeah, microdosing is big in business.
Dan Lerman: I’m noticing it amongst my friends.
Luke Jeraci: It’s a healthy alternative to Adderall.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. A lot of people are on that three day regimen. Like once every three days they microdose acid or mushrooms.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah, people do acid too. I enjoy acid and it’s pretty spiritual to me too. But I just like the natural plant, the mushroom. Right?
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah.
Luke Jeraci: But no knocks on anybody on the entheogens. All right. So we’re kind of right at the end of the flu. Yeah, yeah. So we try to keep it tight. But before we end it, I think somebody who is really interested and improving their intelligence and they’re willing to. How long should they expect it to take? And what are the necessary simplest steps?
Dan Lerman: Yeah. First connect to your passion. Like I don’t. In my experience, forcing yourself to learn economics just because someone tells you you should doesn’t really work. The fuel isn’t there. If you love economics, great. So connect to your passion. Step one. Step two, find a way to participate in the content that people have put together in that field. So you could find great economists or great business people. Read what they’ve written. Reading is a great way of doing it. Consume their video and anything you can do to keep that flame Going join a group. If you’re socially motivated, join a group on Facebook. Find people to tackle this together. And as you increase the amount of stuff you consume, your confidence just grows. You will. You will expand your mind, and I don’t know. I don’t know how it depends. Couple months, you’ll start to feel it, and you’ll start participating in ways you never. You never thought were possible. So let’s say I’m interested in psychology. Read some Freud.
Luke Jeraci: Read some Jordan Peterson.
Dan Lerman: Do I like Jordan Peterson? Yeah, I do like Jordan Peterson. I feel like that’s a contentious thing to say nowadays, but I think he’s.
Luke Jeraci: Which is crazy.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: I don’t think he says anything offensive.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, I just think very direct, and I think he’s got some really good points. I think he’s great. Yeah. So, you know, give. Giving these people who are still alive, giving them a follow on Instagram and consuming their content and, you know, a couple months of consuming their content, and you’re just thinking about it. So I don’t think it’s as complicated as people make it out to be. I think along the way, you got to give yourself props for being like, oh, yeah, like, I am developing that interest, and I am proficient.
Luke Jeraci: Goes back to the beans.
Dan Lerman: It goes back to the beans. Yeah.
Luke Jeraci: Talk positive.
Dan Lerman: Yeah. Yeah. It’s such a powerful thought to be like, I am proficient in this. I am good at this. And that. That kind of fuels it. So at the very least, you can give me a call and I’ll give you a pep talk.
Luke Jeraci: Awesome. Well, that’s gonna be it for. For out of the Cave with Dan Lerman, you know, hopefully. I’m sure you guys learned something. I’m hoping you did. And if not, you got a bunch of book recommendations.
Dan Lerman: Love it.
Luke Jeraci: And keep your eyes open for whenever we get our little research project done.
Dan Lerman: Love it. Luke, thanks so much. What a beautiful, beautiful setup. You’ve got a beautiful home that you’ve built. Feels like we’re in a Persian nightclub here, and it makes me feel awesome.
Luke Jeraci: I’ll get a hookah next time.
Dan Lerman: Yeah, yeah, I was. I was actually asking for one in my. In my rider, but really, really appreciate the opportunity. I could talk to you all day, and I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation.
Luke Jeraci: Yeah, dude, come whenever you come to Atlanta, but we’ll make. We’ll make something, and I’ll be out to la. Oh, and Dan also does comedy, so hopefully you can look him up. Can I find you anywhere?
Dan Lerman: It’s just danlerman.com. That’s my. That’s my tutoring website. I don’t think I published any comedy on there yet. Although that’s a cool idea.
Luke Jeraci: Awesome. We’ll try to put, like, a little link when I send it to Jacob on the bottom and stuff.
Dan Lerman: Love it. Cool.