In a world racing toward smarter machines, empathy speakers and authors Rob Volpe and Maria Ross get curious in this limited subseries about what only humans can feel, do, and be — and why that’s our greatest competitive advantage. Enjoy this limited subseries here on The Empathy Edge.
Aspiration, Hope, Free Will & the Future-Oriented Mind
Humans don’t just live in the present. We imagine futures that don’t exist yet, then try to build them, and we do it using the same neural machinery that lets us remember our past.
Maria Ross and Rob Volpe explore what psychologist Endel Tulving called mental time travel: the brain’s unique ability to simulate scenarios that haven’t happened using a network that overlaps almost entirely with episodic memory. We can’t dream forward if we can’t look back. Yet, our memories can be unreliable, causing us to build narratives around what actually happened or how it impacted us. Are we the only species who can do this? That sets up the harder question: do we actually choose, or does it just feel like we do?
Finally, we discuss the difference between hope and optimism. When humans are at their best, they describe aspiration, vision, and forward motion, but humans in survival mode, who cannot access hope or aspiration, are equally human. What does that tell us about how fragile, and how earned, this superpower really is?
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
“We don’t just react to the present like many species. We reflect on the past. We imagine the future.” — Maria Ross
Episode References:
- Endel Tulving on mental time travel and episodic memory: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1301195110
- Neuroscience News on the contested legacy of Libet’s free will experiment: neurosciencenews.com/libet-free-will-23756
- Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves
- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
- Finding Your Roots with Roy Wood Jr., “Laughing on the Inside,” Season 7, Episode 10: pbs.org/video/laughing-inside-gble34
- IEQ9 Integrative Enneagram: IEQ9.com
- Harry Pickens leadership work on self-regulation in challenging times and working with AI to build your human capacity: strategicneuroregulation.com
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
- The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
About Maria Ross:
Maria Ross is a speaker, author, empathy strategist, and host of The Empathy Edge podcast, now in its sixth year. She believes cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™, and has spent decades helping leaders balance empathy with accountability to drive better results, stronger teams, and lasting impact. She is the author of four books, including the award-winning The Empathy Dilemma, a Forbes.com contributor on Workplace Empathy, and creator of two LinkedIn Learning empathy courses.
About Rob Volpe:
Rob Volpe is the Founder/CEO of Empathy Activist and the creator of The 5 Steps to Empathy, which he chronicles in his award-winning book Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time. He is a recognized thought leader, speaker, and consultant in the improvement of communication and collaboration in organizations of all sizes in all industries.
Connect with Rob Volpe:
Website: robvolpe.expert
Book: Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rmvolpe
Facebook: facebook.com/EmpathyActivist
Instagram: instagram.com/empathy_activist
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:04
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Welcome back to the Empathy Edge. Hi, everyone. This is episode four of our special subseries. What does it mean to be human? And I am joined today by once again the delightful Rob Volpe, empathy activist, fellow empathy author and speaker, we are both doing the work.
Rob Volpe 01:04
We’re like we’re kind of turning into like the Wonder Twins of empathy.
Maria Ross 01:07
We are. I love that for us,
Rob Volpe 01:10
which isn’t isn’t a bad thing.
Maria Ross 01:11
No, it’s a
Rob Volpe 01:12
lot of fun.
Maria Ross 01:13
I love that I know the reference too from like Wonder Twins Activate
Rob Volpe 01:16
Wonder Twin Powers Activate Shape of, and the girl Jaina always got to be.
Maria Ross 01:24
She was usually an animal.
Rob Volpe 01:26
An animal, and
Maria Ross 01:28
and he was some form of water.
Rob Volpe 01:31
It was Jan and Zaynah.
Maria Ross 01:32
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 01:33
but which was which?
Maria Ross 01:34
Zana, I think, was the woman.
Rob Volpe 01:36
Was the woman, and Jan was the man or boy. The boy, yeah. He was taking on water and ice, and always
Maria Ross 01:43
a form of water, which I didn’t notice that theme for a long time when I was little. But yeah, I was like, oh, he’s either ice or a bucket of water, or he’s like a hose, or yeah, very odd choice of like the particular matter that he was going to turn into.
Rob Volpe 01:58
Yeah, did you dream of having superpowers when you were a kid,
Maria Ross 02:02
I did. I very vividly recall a dream where I was standing at the top of my staircase in my childhood home, and I jumped off it and I flew.
Rob Volpe 02:13
Oh wow! And it was just a dream.
Maria Ross 02:14
And it was well, I think
Rob Volpe 02:16
it or it actually happened, and all of this is a dream,
Maria Ross 02:21
and all of this is a dream. Exactly, exactly. Well, speaking of dreaming, what a good segue, Rob Vol. Thank you. We are talking about dreaming today. We’re going to be talking about aspiration, hope, free will, the future-oriented mind, and is that a marker of being human? Because we don’t just react to the present like many species, right? We reflect on the past. We imagine the future. You could say we worry about the past and we worry about the future. Things that don’t exist, and then we also, for the future-oriented, we try to build them, right? So, is that human? Is that what drives
Rob Volpe 02:57
us? Yes. And as I was having deep conversation with the cats this weekend on this topic.
Maria Ross 03:04
They’re like oracles. I love
Rob Volpe 03:06
it. Like what? Why are you worried about this? Can’t I go back to sleep? The sun is out.
Maria Ross 03:14
Exactly.
Rob Volpe 03:15
Yeah, this one is really fascinating because again, like it’s really hard, I think, and studies have been inconclusive that I’ve come across about other animals. But I did find in humans we do have this ability to think about and ponder the past, which then enables us to explore the future. What it’s called mental time travel.
Maria Ross 03:40
Oh, I love that.
Rob Volpe 03:42
Which psychologist Endel Tulving coined in 1985.
Maria Ross 03:48
Wow,
Rob Volpe 03:49
this temporal thinking of human superpower, mental time travel, and so there. Yeah, it’s like episodic memory, which allows us to go back to fixed points in time in our brain in the past, but then also to project into the future or our imagined future. I would think so.
Maria Ross 04:07
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 04:07
if that is dreaming, and it it’s the thing that allows us to think about when we were a kid and you know a childhood bedroom, or thinking about what we might be like at 80 years old,
Maria Ross 04:21
yeah, and I wonder if it’s again, it’s one of those situations where maybe we don’t know if another species can do this because I will tell you from being a dog owner, I have had dogs that whimper in their sleep, and the joke is like, oh, they’re chasing rabbits, right?
Rob Volpe 04:38
Yeah, but they
Maria Ross 04:39
must be thinking of something, they’re making them. They’re dreaming
Rob Volpe 04:43
totally. And the cats do the same thing. Yeah, whiskers, everything’s twitchy, and they’re like making movements. Like they’re they are doing something, and yeah, it’s like oh, they’re chasing a rabbit in their dreams. Like,
Maria Ross 04:57
although that sounds terrifying, but yeah, well, you. This thing about the episodic memory-I mean-is that the term for the your memory’s ability to isolate events? Is that and then project them into the future, or
Rob Volpe 05:10
it’s yeah? I mean, I think it’s this idea that our memory-we break it down. I’m not going to say ones and zeros, but think about on your computer or up in the cloud, you’ve got all these different documents, Word documents,
Rob Volpe 05:23
and every document is an episode, just like the episodes of this podcast. And you access certain memories and at different times based on whatever is going on, and you’re ruminating. And we, I think, we’re talking about that in an earlier episode as well around consciousness, like this ability to go back and ponder and replay,
Maria Ross 05:45
right?
Rob Volpe 05:45
Which I think all of this is prefrontal cortex, but the consciousness, the fight or flight in that piece, like that you can see where the sort of amygdala and really base genetic origins of man come from and meeting kind of evolution and how we might have evolved because we’re now able to think about record in our brains, go back and think about the past,
Maria Ross 06:16
right,
Rob Volpe 06:17
and something that might have scared us-fight or flight, or flea or fawn-and then think about the future. You know, and basically, it’s where worry comes from. Yeah. Well, I was going to say the
Maria Ross 06:29
dark side of that is like a fixation on it and a compulsion to just live in it, right? Especially if it’s negative.
Rob Volpe 06:36
Okay. So here’s this will be an interesting thought experiment for people and for yourself, and I’m just thinking about it now. How much of would you say? How much time do you spend as you’re thinking of the future? Are you in a state of worry versus a state of aspiration or hope or positive kind of view?
Maria Ross 06:57
I think I’m pretty equally weighted. I actually took, as you know, I got. I’m getting certified to administer the Enneagram, which is a test that focuses you on your instincts and your motivations. And one of the many vectors in this integrative Enneagram is whether you fake good or fake bad, and it’s pessimism and optimism, right? And I tend, I tend to fake good, right? So you can think of it as just like which way you’re geared towards. And so I would say, in answer to your question, I gear towards positive, but it’s depends on what I’m thinking about, and it depends on the stimuli, the the cause of what I’m thinking about. As an example, every parent can relate to this. Your kid does one bad quote-unquote bad thing, right? They disobey a rule, they talk back, they’re mean to someone, and instantly, many parents and psychologists, my therapist, worked with me on this. They call it future tripping, right? Okay,
Rob Volpe 07:56
yeah. You
Maria Ross 07:56
You parlay that one experience into they’re going to be psychopath, convicted of murder, and they’re going to be doing all because I let them do this one thing, right? Right, right. So I would say when it comes to parenting, I’m very much geared towards worry. When it comes to everything else, mostly because I’m responsible for another human being, right?
Rob Volpe 08:14
Yes.
Maria Ross 08:15
But when it comes to everything else, I’m pretty, pretty dreamy, pretty positive. Like,
Rob Volpe 08:19
yeah, I
Maria Ross 08:20
don’t see myself, you know, homeless in the future, you know, without anyone to love me or anything like that. So I would say, short answer, it depends.
Rob Volpe 08:30
And are some of the enneagrams more likely to be positive than negative, or is it no? That has nothing to do
Maria Ross 08:37
with type. Yeah, that has to do more with just your personality profile within this integrative enneagram assessment,
Rob Volpe 08:44
okay, and
Maria Ross 08:45
so it’s very granular.
Rob Volpe 08:46
Yeah, so it could be
Maria Ross 08:47
any, but there are certain types that are that lean into nostalgia more than others, and I I need to look into those more. But
Rob Volpe 08:55
interesting, episodic episodic memories of their past.
Maria Ross 08:59
Yeah, yeah, I’m very nostalgic. Actually, I actually I remember a lot. I remember I have memories from when I was three or four.
Rob Volpe 09:08
Really? Okay. Yes, I can go back that far, but I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older, the number of those memories are less. But there are a few key, like kind of core memories from, I think my parents clocked it at like three, three and a half years old, like a Christmas or something,
Maria Ross 09:29
something seminal, yeah,
Rob Volpe 09:30
yeah, that I really remember. And I don’t know, you know, I’ve always been curious: is it because our brain just can’t like reach its capacity, is like get rid of it, or it just goes way back into some you know deep storage unit that you could probably go find, and maybe that’s where you need the aid of someone.
Maria Ross 09:51
Yeah. Well, and they also say that your memories are not to be trusted either because they morph and shape over time in you repeating the stories. And how you remember things, and how so you actually actually memory is not very
Rob Volpe 10:05
reliable.
Maria Ross 10:06
Reliable.
Rob Volpe 10:06
It is not a it is not a reliable narrator.
Maria Ross 10:09
No, it’s not.
Rob Volpe 10:11
As a researcher, I experience that a lot doing qualitative research, and you know, coming out of the field, you talk to a dozen, two dozen people, and oh my God! It was so amazing. I remember when this person said that. Yeah. Then you have to go, you know, and the client debrief. Oh yeah, this boom, huge big stuff. Change the business. Go in that direction. And then you go back to find the quote in the transcript, and you’re like, “Wait, where is it? Yeah. Wait a minute. One of us said that, not the respondent like 100% summarized it for them or something yeah
Maria Ross 10:45
yeah well and it is
Rob Volpe 10:46
that unreliable narrator and our bias gets this is totally off topic to dreaming but our bias really gets in the way I recently had Claude analyze transcripts of somebody from the Navigating to New Normal study, so this is somebody I’ve been talking to for six years, and a new moderator is going to take over those conversations. And I wanted to present sort of the the analysis of this individual’s journey and tips for the next moderator, and I fed all of it into Claude. And as I see that respondent, she tends to be far right Trump supporter, and homeschooling and anti-vax and like a lot of different things. When I had Claude summarize the transcripts and paint the journey, did not bring up political affiliation or any of those pieces, and really more represented her decision making, which is much more libertarian in values. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, wow! I’ve really painted this broad brushstroke over this individual. I applied bias
Maria Ross 11:59
that I had,
Rob Volpe 12:00
and then stereotypes. Oh, she’s a homeschooler, therefore this. And I know her quite well because we’ve been talking for six years now. But AI did not capture any of those labels that I was actually putting on her.
Maria Ross 12:14
Well, and that’s like the interesting discussion of human versus AI is that in its best version, AI should be doing that for
Rob Volpe 12:23
us. Yeah,
Maria Ross 12:24
that it would be great to have a thought partner that could do that for us because it is such a human trait to have bias, inject your own perspective, have your stereotypes based on your own values and needs and your own experiences. Right. So while all of those add to the texture and the flavor of us being human beings walking through the world, it can also be detrimental to our connections with other people. And wouldn’t it be great if we could rely on AI to be that unbiased? Which you know we talked about in the past. We can’t because it’s being populated by human beings,
Rob Volpe 13:03
exactly. And it would have been fascinating to have had AI come back to me and said, “So, how did you view this person? Because you know, like, and really engaged to help me understand,
Maria Ross 13:15
interrogate you in a way. Yeah, like, yeah,
Rob Volpe 13:17
where were those thoughts coming from? Because I’m actually not seeing that, which maybe as we get into a more intelligent AI, it would do that.
Maria Ross 13:26
Well, it’s interesting because I the work of Harry Pickens, who’s in a community that I’m part of called Samudra, he’s done work around the prompts you can use to help your AI help you tap into your humanity, so getting getting your interactions with AI to be more thought provoking for you versus giving you answers. So, as an example, if you put that summary into AI, it’s show me everything I missed or tell me another interpretation of what this could be, so that you’re actually critically thinking along with AI supporting you in doing that, and we don’t do enough of that because we’re like, “Oh, AI gave me the answer,
Rob Volpe 14:07
right, right, and then you’re just off to the races without exploring yourself. So I want to bring us in back into that thought experiment and the enneagrams. So I like you. I tend to be more on the positive, and which is probably why we’re wonder twins of empathy. But there’s, and we should link to your friend Harry. Was this
Maria Ross 14:32
Harry Pickens? Oh, for sure. Yeah, let’s let’s
Rob Volpe 14:35
share that in the show notes for people. I’m an Enneagram Seven, which is the adventurer, I think, and something my therapist has always.
Maria Ross 14:46
enthusiastic visionary.
Rob Volpe 14:47
The enthusiastic visionary
Maria Ross 14:49
You’re the big thinker. Yes,
Rob Volpe 14:51
yes, exactly.
Maria Ross 14:52
Speaking of dreaming for this episode, yes, right.
Rob Volpe 14:54
And my my psychologist, my therapist, Greg, he. Is trained in the enneagram and well versed in it, and so we’ve brought that into therapy. And I’m a for anybody that really wants to know, I’m a seven with an eight wing. But as we’ve talked about being a seven, it’s like I tend not to dwell on the negative for too long. It’s an uncomfortable place for sevens to be, so we’ll process our way through it, apparently. Right, right. To get back to the good, because we’re the visionary, the adventurer. We want the positive kind of experiences. I think.
Maria Ross 15:31
Yeah, and I think you know. Let’s and to circle us back to this episode. I think that that is such a uniquely human thing. I mean, we look at things in such nuanced ways. We look at the future and we reflect on the past in such nuanced ways. And you know that role of memory, but also that role of hope of that our future is changeable. And we talked about this. Time is malleable, right? When we love what we’re doing, what do we say? Oh my God, time flies! Right when we hate what we’re doing, we’re like, Oh my God, that was interminable. Like that lasted forever. Right,
Rob Volpe 16:11
right.
Maria Ross 16:12
I don’t know that other species do that. I think that is a very uniquely human thing of like our ability to look at time in a different way and look at the future in a way that it’s not unless you are a fatalist, right? Where everything is predestined for you.
Rob Volpe 16:28
True,
Maria Ross 16:29
we have this very human trait of we can impact our future. We could even we I would submit that we even have a trait of trying to control our past. To your point earlier about the narratives we give our past.
Rob Volpe 16:44
Yeah,
Maria Ross 16:45
that if we don’t like it, we’re gonna, you know, like I treated that, you know, partner horribly. No, actually, what happened was they did all these wrongs to me, right? So we have that ability, and I just want to throw in here because this was an answer that we had in our survey. My 12-year-old, when I asked him just off the cuff, “What do you think it means to be human? At first, he just wanted me to shut up about it, and then he was like, “I don’t know, free will.”
Rob Volpe 17:12
Yeah,
Maria Ross 17:12
and I was like, “Ah, okay, that’s interesting. Tell me more. And then he he didn’t really tell me more. He’s just like, “We can just decide what to do? Like nobody’s controlling us.”
Rob Volpe 17:23
Well, and it’s you know thinking about time and our relationship to time. I was kind of like, what are tasks that animal, other species deal with where they might be like, this is taking forever,
Maria Ross 17:38
collecting the nuts for winter. I don’t know.
Rob Volpe 17:41
I know, or the the lion out on the savanna makes the kill. I was like, wow, this is going finally having such a great time. But the interminable wait,
Maria Ross 17:51
yeah.
Rob Volpe 17:52
I don’t know. I wonder if there’s even any sort of awareness of that. Like, I’m, I don’t know, dog out. Where can they be bored?
Maria Ross 18:00
That’s what I was just going to say. That’s where we. What is I? I never say the word right. Anthropomorphize.
Rob Volpe 18:06
Anthropomorphize. Thank you. Yeah.
Maria Ross 18:08
Animals through Disney films, right, or other animated films, and like that’s even from. I’m thinking of The Lion King, where Simba was like, couldn’t wait to grow up, couldn’t wait to be an adult. He was impatient,
Rob Volpe 18:20
right? And it was like
Maria Ross 18:21
it’s taking forever for me to get to be the king, right? For me to be in charge, for me to get to do what I want. But I don’t know. I mean, I’m not an animal behaviorist, but I don’t believe that they think that way. No,
Rob Volpe 18:33
I think that’s allowing like Maslow’s hierarchy to get applied to, which is, you know, hierarchy of needs, and the base ones are survival, and shelter, and food, and security, which I think is probably universal to all animals or all species, all life. And then it gets all the way up to self actualization, self awareness, realization. That’s a very human kind of construct and problem,
Maria Ross 19:01
right? Where I want to become a better version of myself,
Rob Volpe 19:05
right? I don’t. My and maybe my cats are. One of our cat sitters once said that our cats are living their best life, so maybe they have self. Maybe they’re already.
Maria Ross 19:14
That’s what I was going to say. Many cat lovers would tell you cats are already self actualized. They are living their
Rob Volpe 19:20
best life.
Maria Ross 19:21
We’re perfect. Yes, we have no more to learn.
Rob Volpe 19:24
Feed me.
Maria Ross 19:26
Oh man!
Rob Volpe 19:29
So you know, it is fascinating because we do anthropomorphize, and we’ve referenced this now. I think in almost every single episode, and we have no idea. You know, we’re we’re we’re projecting onto animals. One of the things that I found when I was researching for this episode that was really interesting was this idea about decisions that we make and the origin of action and how. So I’m. I’ll probably mispronounce his name. I apologize. Benjamin Libey, L-I-B-E-T, had an experiment in 1983 where he found that unconscious brain activity leading up to unconscious decisions. Let’s say, like I just was doing this, like finger rotation. If anybody’s watching, for listeners, I’m kind of moving my two index fingers around each other, that that began approximately half a second before I consciously felt like I just had made that decision to move. So the brain’s deciding before I actually do, and then so the brain. It sounds like from what I’m interpreting this, brain is thinking about the things to do. The conscious mind might actually block or veto it, but there’s this idea that free will, like you’re not initiating a voluntary act, like you can always control your actions. So you may not the way the way I had this summarized for me. Thank you, my friend Claude. We may not launch a decision, but we can cancel it. So freedom, true freedom, which is important to people, isn’t actually the origin of action, but the governance is kind of the thought that was put forward with that.
Maria Ross 21:23
I find that fascinating, and I’m going to challenge a little bit because I think that’s true of every species. I think you know the species that goes out to hunt and goes to a particular place, hears a sound or sees a movement, and thinks about is this safe, and they may say yes or no, and they may proceed or they may not. So I feel like that’s true for every species: is that thought precedes action, unless it’s an instinct, unless it’s a reflex, for example, like you know the doctor hitting your knee. You don’t think about that; it just
Rob Volpe 21:57
completely happens. I mean, I know the times I’ve been out hunting on the savanna with my lion friends. There’s there there is. I mean, when you when just even watch a nature video or something on TikTok or whatever, there is like you know alertness. You know they’re listening, they’re thinking, maybe seeing something, they’re making a decision,
Maria Ross 22:22
right?
Rob Volpe 22:22
Anthropomorphizing, you can see their brain, the wheels turning, turning, yeah,
Maria Ross 22:26
uh huh.
Rob Volpe 22:27
But they are making a decision on how to act and what to actually do. So I think there, that may be some base kind of brain muscle control behavior or something. It
Maria Ross 22:41
could be, and it couldn’t, because if it was that instinctual, then you wouldn’t have evolution. You wouldn’t have some that make the wrong decision, and then some that make the right decision and decide not to. You know what I’m saying? There’s got to be a level of savviness there. I mean, and we’ve both been pet owners. Like, to be completely candid, some of my pets have been smarter than others, and you just kind of know, right? Like it’s just I think there is an element of there’s got to be some calculation or weighing of options that goes on in the brains of other species before they act, and also I think this is where it kind of ties back to what we’re talking about. Do they envision what’s there? Right, like we have the ability to hope and dream, and also like you said, think negatively into the future. Here’s an example: I was walking my dog in the dark the other night, and I’ve been watching way too many Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns. I’m following along with my friend Elisa Camahort Page, who’s doing a whole rewatch of it and analysis because she’s a huge Buffy fan.
Rob Volpe 23:47
How far into? I had never
Maria Ross 23:48
seen it before, so I am. I am wait
Rob Volpe 23:51
wait wait wait wait wait back. I
Maria Ross 23:52
know no. I have never seen Buffy the. I never watched that show. Was did you
Rob Volpe 23:56
now? Did you start with the original movie?
Maria Ross 23:58
No, I just dove right into the series. Yeah, I jumped in the series, but point being, I’ve been watching a lot of that lately, and I’m also scared of the dark. So there’s that. So I’m walking my dog, and I hear this. What it sounds like a growling at one through one of the houses, and it was like either a growling or it was a motorcycle revving in the distance. I couldn’t tell, but my mind, given the inputs, was imagining the worst. I was like, “This is like the whole. It’s a demon
Rob Volpe 24:27
from the hellmouth that’s just come up. 100% is like behind the sofa.
Maria Ross 24:31
It was a demon, and then I keep walking, and then I hear it again at the same equidistance as, and now further down the street. So I’m like, okay, and so my projection of interpreting that stimulus, right, was made of imagination. It was made of me envisioning someone coming to run out to get me, or some creature, or some demon, right? I’m circling this back to what you said because I wonder in the savanna when they hear the noise. Or to do the thing, what do they have the ability, like humans do, of imagining what’s behind the black box? What because they don’t see it, they might be hearing it or seeing glimpses of it. Do they imagine the worst case scenario and then run, or is like you said, is it a little bit more like no, that’s a danger sign. I don’t have to think about what it is. I’m just going to run.
Rob Volpe 25:23
Yeah. We as
Maria Ross 25:24
humans create a whole story when we and our imaginations go into overdrive,
Rob Volpe 25:30
and we don’t have the same sense of smell. True animals, so they might be able to. Can you smell danger?
Maria Ross 25:38
I think they can.
Rob Volpe 25:39
I think they can. Yeah. Yeah. But I’m just
Maria Ross 25:42
wondering if the mental process is the same as for humans, where we’re we we’re constructing a like scenarios and we’re envisioning them in our mind’s eye.
Rob Volpe 25:51
Right, that’s interesting. I mean, it is which is
Maria Ross 25:54
related to dreaming. You know what I mean? Like creating pictures in your mind, but
Rob Volpe 25:57
right, yeah. But where we have like a buffet in front of us at the supermarket. What are we gonna have for dinner? There’s so many choices.
Maria Ross 26:04
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 26:05
my friends on the Savannah are like, “Look, gazelle dinner. Let’s go.
Maria Ross 26:11
They’re not imagining how it’s gonna look on a plate with a side of parsley and mashed mashed potatoes. What type
Rob Volpe 26:17
of sauce goes well with this today? The blood sauce. That’s it.
Maria Ross 26:22
I’m glad you said that because that kind of drives us into this idea of imagination and invention, and like the ability to create something that doesn’t exist. That is like the whole engine behind human ingenuity.
Rob Volpe 26:36
Yes, is that don’t we need to be able to have that? I think that gets into the episodic memory also enabled that, like the vision, the past, the present, and the future state
Maria Ross 26:47
to
Rob Volpe 26:47
help unlock that.
Maria Ross 26:49
But if you’ve never seen it before, like Steve Jobs and the iPod,
Rob Volpe 26:54
yes,
Maria Ross 26:55
you could argue it was kind of like a mini Walkman, right? Like you could argue there was something that happened before that, but like something completely different that doesn’t exist. Humans have the ability to number one imagine that, fine tune it in their minds, and then turn it into action to create it. Right, and I would add another layer of our humanness: the ability to sell that vision to other humans,
Rob Volpe 27:23
to persuade,
Maria Ross 27:24
to persuade, and get other people to help them build
Rob Volpe 27:27
it. Yeah, yeah. So on the Steve Jobs piece, and this may be, it shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just true. What’s interesting with Steve Jobs, Scott Alloway was just talking about this the other day, which is what planted it into my episodic memory that I accessed just now. But he was talking, I think, was on the Pivot podcast that when you looked at Apple, what Apple’s done really well, or Steve Jobs would do well, there were already music players that were out there that were digital, that were already smartphones. Yeah, they did it better, so they were the second player to market. But and they often within innovation we talk about first mover advantage, but the first mover is the one that’s getting all the dings, is getting it wrong, or like has to you know they’ve made the mistake.
Maria Ross 28:16
They’re making the mistakes.
Rob Volpe 28:17
They’re making the mistakes where the second person to market is able to go. Okay, how do I make this better? Right. Make something that people really want, and that’s you know. And Apple is so great with design and user interface and experience that they’re able to take it to that next kind of level. And then it’s because that’s then the one that breaks through, or it gets more of the adoption curve, they get all the accolades.
Maria Ross 28:46
Well, and is that so? Two things come to mind on that. Number one is the accusations against Edison for stealing other people’s ideas, but also let’s go. Let’s take that analogy and kind of frame it in the conversation. Who was the very first human to think of a portable device player, right? And that’s where I get into like what is unique to us as humans that we have versus AI right now, anyway. That was like I envision this thing that doesn’t even exist yet.
Rob Volpe 29:18
Yeah. Well,
Maria Ross 29:19
and here’s what it could do, or here’s how it could solve that problem.
Rob Volpe 29:23
Are we talking about like boomboxes, like as the first portable music? I mean, way back. I mean, there were like four portable record players. You know that I don’t know. I don’t know how they were powered, like batteries, I suppose. But there were portable record players. Well, I had when I was when
Maria Ross 29:39
I was a little little kid. I had like a little record player in a case. Yeah, it had a cord. You plugged it in, but I could take it. I couldn’t listen to it until I got to a place to plug it in. That was the missing part.
Rob Volpe 29:52
But it was still portable. But it was still portable. Nobody was able to innovate and go, “Oh, we just need a battery case. What if we could listen to it
Maria Ross 29:58
while we were moving it? Yeah.
Rob Volpe 30:00
Exactly. Oh, what if there were instead of these records that have to stay perfectly flat? What if there were cassette tapes? What if there were? Yeah.
Maria Ross 30:08
Well, so that kind of brings us around again, which is like, is that uniquely human that we look at things and we’re like, what if that could be better? How could we improve that? How could that solve a different problem?
Rob Volpe 30:19
Considering my cats have been unsuccessful bringing anything to market that they’ve invented, I would have to say yes, it is uniquely human. But I think that problem, even as I think about like problem solving,
Maria Ross 30:34
yeah,
Rob Volpe 30:34
and how much we’re able to problem solve, and I Jurassic Park was on TV recently, as it often is, and so sure I’ll watch it. And you know, like the Velociraptors figure out how to work a door handle, which isn’t-I don’t know-my cats, if they were just a little taller, they could figure it out. Like the ones with the lever handle.
Maria Ross 30:58
Yeah. Well, mice do that in lab experiments of getting to the cheese, right? Yeah, they’ve had where they figure out there’s a certain trigger to open the door, and they get the cheese. Like they figure out a way to solve the problem,
Rob Volpe 31:08
right? But they haven’t figured out how to make their own cheese.
Maria Ross 31:12
That’s what I’m saying. This is what I’m talking about, right? So, like, we look at it even beyond and go, like, okay, that’s cool. What if we could make our own cheese? That’s the higher level humanity, and I wonder. Like, I guess the big question is: Will AI ever be able to do that? There, in some circles, it is. It’s creating products. It is,
Rob Volpe 31:34
and it’s solving problems. I mean, it’s. I know of companies that are using it to, and they’re stacking a lot of different tools, but they’re using it for innovation. Yeah, to help identify products and services that are maybe unmet needs. I know there, you know, it’s definitely solving some complex math problems that are that we
Maria Ross 31:58
couldn’t do on our own. That’s where it’s a great partner, exactly,
Rob Volpe 32:01
exactly. So, in some ways, it is doing that, and I think the thought is that generative AI is going to be able to do that even more once we get to the general intelligence. I should say, generative AI is what we already have. General intelligence, then watch out.
Maria Ross 32:20
Yeah. Well, you and I, when we were prepping for all these episodes, there was this line that came up in our shared notes, which was, “Let’s go back to the future now. Again, sticking with that, the future-oriented mind may be humanity’s most distinctive gift and its most most fragile one, because it requires memory, prefrontal capacity, a sense of self, emotional investment in outcomes, and enough cognitive bandwidth to lift above the present moment-is that our most distinctive gift, our future orientation? Or for folks like you and me, would we say it’s connection and empathy? Don’t don’t
Rob Volpe 33:00
yeah because. I was actually like, what about our sense of style and our ability to present ourselves, which that ties into the ego. I think
Maria Ross 33:12
that’s like art artistry. Yeah, that’s artistic creativity. Yeah, yeah,
Rob Volpe 33:19
and that might be one. There are probably a few. I mean, I would hope as our we’ve evolved, we have more than one fragile gift. Yeah, more than one distinctive gift. It can also be fragile too.
Maria Ross 33:33
Right, right.
Rob Volpe 33:34
But I think that at the base of it, something to that idea of the future-oriented mind is what’s enabling us to imagine those things. Now we’re so let’s go back to the innovation and think about okay. So this future-oriented mind is what’s enabling us to come up with solutions to problems. Empathy and connection is what is letting us come up with solutions to problems that other people have, because we’re empathizing with their needs and understanding what they may be feeling or going through.
Maria Ross 34:10
Robert, that was a mic drop moment.
Rob Volpe 34:12
I was going to say, can I just drop like? Yes,
Maria Ross 34:15
you’re done. Peace out.
Rob Volpe 34:16
I’m done and see.
Maria Ross 34:18
That is so profound.
Rob Volpe 34:21
And again, it’s the multiple things that our brains are able to do, and empathy shows up in another part of our brain. Then it’s not in the prefrontal cortex. Well, and I’m thinking of species that, if obviously not like mold spores or anything like that, but like when we’re talking about well, I don’t know those mammals, reptiles, amphibians, algae in Washington D.C. are pretty smart. They’re pretty smart. They’re clever,
Maria Ross 34:44
but I’m thinking about if they were to have that capability of the future oriented. You know, I’m thinking about who, which would be the ones that would bring the empathy component, the relational, like I’m not just doing this for me. I’m doing this for others, and. The thing that instantly sprung to mind when you were saying that story was the penguins. The fact that, like, when they have the babies, the eggs, whatever,
Rob Volpe 35:07
the
Maria Ross 35:08
dads nest on the eggs while the moms go look for food, right? In penguin culture,
Rob Volpe 35:14
yes, I’m pretty sure you
Maria Ross 35:15
remember that right from from National Geographic, yeah, or Happy Feet. I can’t remember, but so they’re doing things where they’re planning for the future by working together. I wouldn’t say it’s empathy driving it. It’s a little bit biological instinct. It’s survival. But if you think about well, which would be the other species that could maybe catch up with us? I think of like dolphins. I think of other pack animals that do things together, right? Like dogs, wolves, and I think of penguins. I think of like, oh, maybe if someone just injected that one unique trait of future thinking or imagination in those species, would they be closer to human?
Rob Volpe 35:56
My brain, when you first mentioned that whales, dolphins. dolphins, and octopi, octopus all came to this octopuses. Oh no!
Maria Ross 36:08
Yeah, an octopus,
Rob Volpe 36:10
and one octopus that will save the planet.
Maria Ross 36:14
Larry, we’ll call him Larry. But yeah, but like that’s kind of an interesting thing, right? Like, what if there was? I mean, this is a great sci-fi movie script. What if somebody invented something like broke down the genome for imagination and future orientation and injected it into other species?
Rob Volpe 36:35
What if other species were just on that evolutionary path? And if we were to jump a million years into the future, there are
Maria Ross 36:43
overlords.
Rob Volpe 36:44
Hello, right? There are overlords.
Maria Ross 36:47
Totally,
Rob Volpe 36:48
they are smarter because AI wiped us out.
Maria Ross 36:51
Right, and they rose
Rob Volpe 36:52
up. So, rise of the whales
Maria Ross 36:55
completely
Rob Volpe 36:56
dolphins. Yeah,
Maria Ross 36:58
they’re like, oh, our master plan worked. They’re all gone now.
Rob Volpe 37:04
They thought I was just installing warheads in the. Didn’t dolphins get used during World War?
Maria Ross 37:11
I think something were mining or
Rob Volpe 37:13
something like that in warfare.
Maria Ross 37:15
Them and pigeons, right? Like yeah,
Rob Volpe 37:17
yeah.
Maria Ross 37:18
So let’s go. Let’s circle back around to this idea of free will, because I maybe it doesn’t. I’m not connecting the dots for anyone else listening, but for me, I connect free will with the ability to imagine the future. Because if you don’t have free will, why would you? Why would your species be able to imagine the future? Do you know what I’m saying? So to me, they’re linked. That’s the connection that I see between that.
Rob Volpe 37:43
Well, and and I was talking about LeBay’s work, which I should say is apparently pretty hotly contested in scientific circles.
Maria Ross 37:53
Okay.
Rob Volpe 37:53
If there happens to be a listener that knows more, I would love to hear about that. Why
Maria Ross 37:57
is it hotly contested?
Rob Volpe 37:59
Because of kind of what we were talking about, of like, is this instinct versus a characteristic of being human? Is this, you know, is this really kind of free will? The way all of this is working, and like when you think about where was my brain going with that? While you
Maria Ross 38:18
think of that free will,
Maria Ross 38:20
oh, go ahead.
Rob Volpe 38:20
No, you go ahead. I’ll formulate. Well, no, I was
Maria Ross 38:22
just going to say I still am on the side of that. Your brain is still you deciding the action, so there still is an element of free will. It’s not your brain has not taken control of your body to like go train for that marathon. Like you’re making your brain is making, or even the the example of the your decision to flick a wrist or pull your sleeve up or something,
Rob Volpe 38:45
right?
Maria Ross 38:45
You still are thinking that,
Rob Volpe 38:47
yes.
Maria Ross 38:48
And you could, in many circumstances, human beings could censor that if they needed to. It’s still your. It’s not someone. I guess my point is, it’s not someone else controlling your brain to make that decision before you act,
Rob Volpe 39:01
right.
Maria Ross 39:01
Unless it is a reflex, then you’re not thinking about it at all. It’s just happening,
Rob Volpe 39:06
right?
Maria Ross 39:07
Your knee, right? The little hammer on your nerve,
Rob Volpe 39:09
the hammer on the knee, but that is reflex. That’s reflex because that’s your nerves getting stimulated and right response, and your
Maria Ross 39:17
brain is making the decision to react to it without you getting involved, which is a different thing than I think when you make a decision to go to a certain college or to like
Rob Volpe 39:28
yes decide
Maria Ross 39:29
I’m going to work on this today versus that, or I’m going to eat this for lunch versus that.
Rob Volpe 39:33
So I think what you’re saying is there’s a lot more thought that we put into seemingly reflexive actions, except for things that involve our reflexes, like the hammer on the knee.
Maria Ross 39:46
I think I am saying that.
Rob Volpe 39:47
I would agree with that. So
Maria Ross 39:48
maybe that’s why his his work was controversial, because he’s saying the brain decides before you do. Kinda, kinda depends. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 39:58
yeah, yeah. But back. The idea of free will. So we were watching the movie Tetris last night, which was on Apple TV, and it’s about the history of. Have you seen the movie?
Maria Ross 40:11
No, I have not.
Rob Volpe 40:12
Okay, so it is set in the 80s, and it is about the development and global distribution and conquest of the game Tetris, which you know half a billion copies have been sold. So I’m guessing everybody listening to this podcast is familiar with it, but it was actually developed by a computer programmer in the Soviet Union, and during the era of the Soviet Union communism, and Gorbachev was in power, and the some Westerners were trying to get the rights, and so it’s this whole corporate espionage type thriller with some dark humor, and it was really good, really liked it. But I was thinking about like, okay, well, if you were in a an authoritarian country, a dictatorship, some place like where you just really are beaten down, and you don’t. I mean, you have some free will, but you don’t have true free will, like of hopes and dreams, necessarily. It’s just interesting that man can subjugate that away from other men,
Maria Ross 41:22
well,
Rob Volpe 41:22
other humans. That is
Maria Ross 41:24
interesting. I would say they can and they can’t because we wouldn’t have people like Anne Frank who continued to be optimistic about humanity and the choices they made in terms of you know that it’s trite, but the only thing you can control is your attitude, right?
Rob Volpe 41:40
Deep down, I believe all humans can be good. Nelson Mandela just popped to mind. Some people faced just tragic, horrible circumstances and remained optimistic about humanity.
Maria Ross 41:52
Absolutely, and I and the other thing that comes to mind is I was watching this episode of There’s a Black Historian, or he’s not historian. I think he’s a a commentator. He does this show where he reveals people’s families’ trees to them.
Rob Volpe 42:05
Oh, like yeah, Henry Louis Gates.
Maria Ross 42:07
Henry Louis Gates. Thank you very much. His name was escaping me, and one of the episodes he did, I can’t remember who it was with, but there were slaves in their background, very few generations back, not far enough back, but a few generations back, and I think it was the celebrity. And again, I can’t remember what celebrity, but when I find out after we record, I will put the link in the show notes. Made the statement that what was so moving to them about finding out they were related to slaves is that these people lived in the worst, horrible conditions, right, of being owned by another human being, and they had no choice. They were either going to get killed or they were going to work for this person. And they said, the fact that I’m here shows that even in the worst dire situations, people still have hope because you wouldn’t have children if you thought this was all there was,
Rob Volpe 43:02
I love that.
Maria Ross 43:04
And I was like, I’m getting goosebumps like remembering it too, because I was like, that is so true. That is part of the hopefulness of humanity. Is many people, not everybody, but many people choose to have children, and that in and of itself is an act of hope. That’s in and of itself an act of future thinking.
Rob Volpe 43:22
Yeah, absolutely.
Maria Ross 43:24
And I just thought, wow, that’s so true. That you had the reason there’s so many descendants of slaves is because all of those people made a decision in their horrible circumstance to have hope for the future.
Rob Volpe 43:38
Yeah.
Maria Ross 43:38
Whereas evolutionarily, you would think a species, knowing that that things were
Rob Volpe 43:44
it was so oppressive in the
Maria Ross 43:46
present, might not protrude.
Rob Volpe 43:48
Choose to yeah, might
Maria Ross 43:50
not choose. I don’t know.
Rob Volpe 43:51
So that actually that existential question is partly at the heart of that AI doc that I think I’ve mentioned the AI doc or how I learned to become an apocalyptimist. The filmmaker, he and his wife were pregnant with, I think, their first child, and it was this existential. Like, is this a good time to bring a kid into the world with AI and what’s going on and where it’s all headed and and everything? And and that led to the sort of questioning and and the setup in the movie and and people should watch it. It’s really worthwhile. I think it’s on YouTube even now.
Maria Ross 44:31
Okay,
Rob Volpe 44:32
so we’ll put a link.
Maria Ross 44:33
will.
Rob Volpe 44:34
But that’s another kind of example, and I think something people are questioning. You know, living in quite liberal San Francisco, in the Trump second Trump administration, I think there are just like, oh God, what world are we bringing kids into with, you know, climate change, political polarization, yeah, all the stuff.
Maria Ross 44:54
There’s actually a a whole movement within. I believe it’s, I believe it’s. It’s not Gen Z. It might be Gen Z, younger millennials, about their their active choice not to have children, specifically because of the environmental crisis. I can’t remember what the the mindset is called, but it’s they’re like absolutely not. The world’s going to be burning in a generation or two. Why would I bring children into this?
Rob Volpe 45:21
Which is like a of it is a form of this is not going to be right. But thinking off the top of the head, I’m like, ooh, that’s kind of like generational suicide in a way.
Maria Ross 45:33
Yeah, yeah, because
Rob Volpe 45:34
you’re choosing not to continue. You’re not choosing not to procreate. Therefore, you will not have a subsequent generation who will not have a subsequent generation because they don’t exist, et cetera, et cetera? And there’s nothing wrong with it. And I think there’s also even, you know, I’m childless by choice. I’m in a gay relationship, but we chose not to try to have children, which had nothing to do with it. Had nothing to do with the state of the world at the time that we were even thinking about it, it was more about what was right for us,
Maria Ross 46:05
exactly.
Rob Volpe 46:05
Which I think a lot of couples, straight, gay, queer, whatever, go through.
Rob Volpe 46:10
But it is interesting, just the act of procreating, of having children,
Maria Ross 46:15
yeah, is
Rob Volpe 46:17
that future-oriented state,
Maria Ross 46:20
yeah, and well, and also, what’s motivating it? Is it? Are you being motivated by a sense of hope for the future, or are you being motivated by a narcissistic need to have some, you know, have your DNA living on? Yeah,
Rob Volpe 46:33
there’s that too. There’s there’s oh my
Maria Ross 46:35
gosh, we should we need maybe we need to hold a whole thing on narcissism, but so how do we want to wrap this, Rob? I mean, these are all good questions.
Rob Volpe 46:43
All you know, something that I think was going back to our positivity in that early conversation. One of the things that struck me that came up, which I’m now scrolling through my notes to try to find, was this idea of hope versus optimism.
Maria Ross 47:02
Optimism is passive; things will work out. Hope is active.
Rob Volpe 47:07
I can find a way through it.
Maria Ross 47:08
Yes,
Rob Volpe 47:10
and there. So there’s a book we can share a link to. It’s from 22 years ago now. Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. It’s the name of the book, and she argues hope is not about certainty; it’s about possibility.
Maria Ross 47:23
Yes,
Rob Volpe 47:24
future is genuinely unknown and open, and that means it can be shaped. There’s just it’s infinite possibilities, and hope is resistance to some sort of premature certainty, which I think goes exactly back to what you were just talking about. So that hope is more courageous rather than naive.
Maria Ross 47:44
Yes,
Rob Volpe 47:46
which I think is true. And you know, people that talk about so that that when I first read that, I was like, oh, it’s kind of like you know, people dinging somebody who might be considered a Pollyanna, or you know,
Maria Ross 48:00
or toxic positivity, or something like that. Yeah.
Rob Volpe 48:04
Yes, and no, they’re not. Yeah, they’re being. You know, if if it’s truly hope, then they’re actually dreaming and and believing in what could be, and that’s really powerful.
Maria Ross 48:18
You know, this is kind of a silly example, but the way I’m often hit with admiration for people who have hope despite all the odds being against them is in action movies and thrillers where it’s like one disaster, one like now you know, or like even look at Star Wars, like they’re in a trash compactor. If that were me, I’d be like, we’re done. Like just the the ability of people of it’s in the James Bond films a lot it’s in spy films they’re always getting out of these situations where I’m like I would have given up I would have like how did they find a way how did they grab that one last rope and pull themselves managed to
Rob Volpe 49:01
make that yeah yeah yeah or to that art or yeah art two is going to come up with the secret combination that’s going to stop the most impactor.
Maria Ross 49:10
That’s where I see humans embracing hope more than any other way. It’s like I and I’m constantly faced with it, right? Or if you watch a medical drama and you watch the surgeons trying all these different things to save someone’s life. You know, it’s not that I’m-I’m definitely not a pessimist. Like I would be-I would try everything I could try. But their ability to be resourceful because of hope,
Rob Volpe 49:33
yeah,
Maria Ross 49:33
because of like, no, there’s got to be a way. Like to your point, it’s very active. There’s got to be a way. There’s got to be a way. We got to figure this out.
Rob Volpe 49:40
And in context of that, you know, big evil authoritarian dictatorial empire crushing the souls of everybody else, what is Star Wars? The original Star Wars Episode Four, the revised title in the series of trilogies is A New Hope.
Maria Ross 49:59
So good, so good, Rob. This has been awesome again to be in conversation with you. We don’t have all the answers, everyone. That’s we told you this is about posing the questions and having the discussion. So we would love to hear what you think about humans’ abilities to dream, to time travel, to hope. Is that the piece for you that makes us so uniquely human. We’d love to hear from you. I’m at Instagram at Red Slice Maria.
Rob Volpe 50:28
I’m at Instagram Empathy Underscore Activist.
Maria Ross 50:32
Thank you once again, Rob. This has been fun.
Rob Volpe 50:35
So fun. What’s up next?
Maria Ross 50:37
What’s up next is let’s see. Stay tuned to stay tuned for. Oh, we’re going to be talking about morality, conscience, right and wrong, and if that’s uniquely human ethics, basically, right? So, all the things developing a moral compass, and if AI can even develop a moral compass, we don’t know. We’ll see, but we’ll be bringing in all our juicy empathy work to that one. I’m sure. So
Rob Volpe 51:04
for sure, lots of good stories there.
Maria Ross 51:06
Thanks, Rob, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Empathy Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review, and share with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Stay well and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit theempathyedge.com. There, you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources, book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
