Stanford Professor REVEALS The Most Important Skill For SUCCESS | Susan Liautaud

this idea that somehow we can program the world to be the way we want it to be it doesn't work that way that's really interesting you know and I think that's one of the reasons why we have these epidemics of mental health issues the younger generation that has grown up with you know cell phones and sort of ability to program I want to watch this program now I want to listen to this song and oh on top of everything else it's free we think that we can make the world the way we want it to be but when it isn't it's creating all sorts of very real human suffering Susan Le welcome to the show thank you so much for having me I'm really delighted to be here I'm really excited to get into this so this is a topic I actually haven't thought a lot about and so getting a chance to read your book and I forced myself so we're going to be talking about ethics but in the context of how to live life well and make good decisions and that really feels like the right framework for what you do and I think the word ethics is going to lead some people astray as like this is finger wagging and judgy judgy but you really go out of your way to say that's not what this is and that shame and blame and all of that actually create ethical problems they don't solve them which I thought was a really Keen Insight so we're going to be talking about how to live life well how to think well about your decision-making but to do that I think we have to get into the framework of like how to do that and so I forced myself to write down cuz I never think of the word ethics but if you said are you an ethical person I would get like oh my god of course like that's really important to me but I had never like stopped to write down what the things are beyond what I'll call my belief system I had stopped to write down sort of my ethical framework and your book really begs that question as you go through so I want to start there what is the framework by which you come to an ethical end point or a North star a way to like know if your decision is adhering to the right set of things so it's a great question um and it's actually a question that I address in my first book The Power of Ethics but I have a framework that applies to any ethical question you could come up with whether it's family or whether it's like I have in the book should you use Spotify for free or whether it's big political questions um and the framework is four words and the first word is principles and as you're saying we all have our sort of set of values or principles they might be things like respect or Integrity or accountability or Compassion or generosity and I certainly don't dictate anybody else's principles um and in fact I work with people and I work with students to sort of think about what are the four or five or six or seven probably not 10 and probably not one um principles that are most important to you and sort of your lens through which you're going to look at anything that comes your way um the second is we have to think about the information we have before us and is that the second word information that's the second word information um and the information um sometimes it's complete sometimes we know that you know our grandmother is a certain age and there are car keys in front of her and she wants to use them uh and we know that she probably doesn't have great eyesight um and other times we don't have the information that we need uh and an example of that would be something like Gene editing you know we think this can be a fantastic opportunity cure cancer in adults but why misused you know how many potential damaging side effects could there be what if it's misused like it was by a rogue Chinese scientist to edit the genes of of twin girls embryos um so information is the second uh the second item and really what we're talking about with information is do you have the information you need to make the decision and if you don't I just say be mindful of the Gap just as you're making a decision just be mindful of the information that you're missing kind of monitor it over time and see if things change see if you can fill that information in before you make a decision or not necessarily because sometimes we just have to make decisions sometimes we just have to decide you know are we going to SpaceX are they going to send that rocket ship up in space they don't have all the information they need you know how do they decide that it's ready um and sometimes the car keys are right in front of us and the grandmother is right in front of us and we're going to have to decide let her drive or don't um right then and there so uh we don't always have the luxury of having all the information we wish we had and also I mean I'm not someone who thinks that anyone myself included will spend all day Bel laboring the ethics of every decision that I make so um depending on the importance of the decision if it's a big Health decision uh or a decision like using 23 and me where we might learn some really challenging things then we're probably going to take some more time gather some more information if it's a decision like am I going to press I agree on the Netflix terms of service my finger is on the button before I even can say the word information right um so we have principles and information and the third is stakeholders um and basically by that I mean anybody or anything affected by your decision and the critical thing in today's world is that we affect so many more people than we might imagine uh with our decisions and in part that's due to technology we post something we don't know where it's going to end up uh for the good or for the ill um but also we just have all this opportunity to reach more people which you're you know you're obviously an expert in um but we need to be mindful of of how many different people uh can be affected by the decisions we make um and then finally consequences uh and the way I look at this is we need to think about the consequences of our decisions now and in the future sort of short medium and long term and very often particularly in the business World um but also in daily life we see people making a decision sort of looking out two or three weeks or a quarter and then they get to the end and they look out to the next quarter and they think that they're being sort of long-term thinkers but in fact we're being serial short-term thinkers if that makes sense we sort of set up little periods little chunks of time for ourselves so the message with consequences is really uh think of multiple time frames don't just think of today or tomorrow um but also again in the interest of efficiency um I always ask what what are the consequences that are important and irreparable so if something's going to happen where somebody's life is going to be lost you may be willing to compromise on a lot of other principles because that's the one thing that you can't let happen um you know an example of that would be I had a question from an NGO once about should we pay bribes to get vaccines into a country o um right that's an interesting question yeah because they're the and and this particular NGO is the only source of life-saving vaccines for children and you know nobody thinks bribery is ethical but you know this was the only way these children were going to get vaccinated and a lot of people were getting very sort of if I may say so high and mighty about the ethics of bribery and finally I looked at them and I said all right let's step back and I always suggest looking at our decisions from the standpoint of the person who will be most adversely affected and then imagining that person is us so I said if it were your child would you care about the bribery and then all of a sudden the bribery was an issue we had to deal with we had to make sure it didn't become a habit right etc etc but you know yeah that's so interesting so what I love about that and that's really where I want to get to at least in the beginning of the conversation is you need something that cuts through the Clutter the noise the debate the back and forth to okay cool this adheres to this principle and now I'm going to move forward so we've got principles information stakeholders consequences and as we look at those it it there there's really not a lot of like Ultra black and white and you talk a lot about edge cases you talk a lot about getting away from binary thinking can be really problematic and but that creates this like where it becomes hard to navigate your way through something so for instance going back to principles do we dictate to people what the principles should be or is it we just know that principles are going to be determined by different people so I think everybody should be able to determine their own principles um but if we're assessing somebody else's decision if we're looking at sort of a scandal in the news for example um we can look at what principles the company for example or the government official claimed to be living by and see well what happened here was it that that they actually were not living by their stated principles and the principles were pretty good or was it actually the principles were not so good so I'll give you an example of each um one example of a company that had really credible principles including safety was Boeing and yet after two tragic crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia the Boeing CEO was still begging um then president Trump to keep planes flying so the company's stated princip were excellent but they just were not living by them uh at that moment and in all the moments that led up to um what drove those crashes conversely um we look at a company like uber back when they were having their big moment of sexual misconduct and changed CEOs and the like and the principles were things like making magic so a little vague a little vague a little hard to hold yourself accountable for making magic or toe stomping what did toe stomping mean not exactly sure I I'm not sure if it meant just like step on all the toes you need to to get where you want to go I don't even that's my get ins because even here at impact Theory we talk a lot about no one has toes so don't worry about stepping on people's toes now I would never say toe stomp because that has like a connotation of aggressively trying to mess somebody else up yeah um so cool I get that um so this is where it starts to get interesting to me and I think to ground this for people so basically what I want to do is walk through how do we actually generate a Northstar so that people can think well through these things because I'm not even thinking necessarily societally I tend to think about the individual and what they can do to make their life better so I want to help discover the process by which you would identify um principles that are going to serve people well that are going to take them in a good direction to get there I think there's at least one thing we need to do but this might be like really nested and somewhat complex and I'll say is the North Star so what is that thing that we should be aiming at I'll give you my example of what a North star is then I would love to hear like if you already have one um if you do great and then I want to find out what is the most pnic question that you've had to deal with where it was maybe even surprisingly controversial so that we can get into the thick of one where it isn't obvious okay so my nor star would be that every body at the individual level should be doing everything they can to reduce human suffering um and I'll even say and uh promote fulfillment so that would be the thing I'm always thinking about that's sort of the Bedrock by which I I judge my own decisions and if I'm honest judge the decisions of other people so that would be my one thing it's very layered and of course there's more to take into consideration you said it's probably not one principle that it's maybe not 10 but it's not one but if I were going to give a Northstar what am I steering towards it's the uh lowering the amount of human suffering in the world through my own actions and then increasing the odds that somebody will be able to achieve fulfillment what is up my friend you and I are living in a golden era of self-improvement we have books platforms like YouTube courses seminars virtual events Workshops the list really is endless the internet has been so good for people like you and me who want to accomplish greater and greater things in life and now my friend it is about to get even better I've been spending most of this year working on the single most entertaining tool that you're ever going to have around self-improvement and it is called project Kaizen it's a web 3 based game experience that will be unlike anything else you've ever engaged with in your life partly because the technology is new and it's amazing if you're not familiar with blockchain nfts and all of that kaisen is going to be the perfect introduction for you as it is an excellent intersection of entertainment and learning all back by the blockchain we're getting closer and closer to launching this project for you every single day we are working our faces to the Bone to get this thing out there and my friend I want you to experience it so click the link on your screen and head on over to my Discord channel to stay up todate and be one of the first to join me inside of project Kaizen which by the way gets its name from the Japanese term of NeverEnding Improvement all right back to today's episode so I love that um and mine is actually quite similar so what I phras it slightly differently what I say is that ethical decision- making tethers us to our Humanity so we have this massive opportunity if we think about even one or two of the four words that I gave you um or even just stop and think about what our North Star us just the simple fact of pausing and taking a breath and thinking about the impact of our decisions thinking about the consequences is already really huge but I think that ethical decision making tethers us to our Humanity um and that means different things in different circumstances is going to say like it it can mean a moment of it can mean reducing suffering it can mean a moment of kindness it can mean prioritizing human health and well-being above above other things um but it's all about our Humanity it's and I think ethics is really the great connector so by putting human beings and human well-being first that's another way of saying getting rid of suffering um I I think we but I think we have huge opportunity to be able to do that that is untapped agreed okay so if we have roughly the same Northstar now what is um what's the most just difficult ethical question you've ever come against oh my goodness there are so many so um I let me just say you mentioned banishing sort of binary thinking uh I do think there are certain circumstances um where binary thinking is important to maintain and there are not very many of them but they are things like racism sexual misconduct inciting violence um many kinds of phobias um against certain uh certain groups so I do think that for me that's binary that's something we all need to work to try to eradicate um but I think uh one question that's come up a lot in different ways including with the Elon musk's purchase of Twitter but also all over University campuses is pitting Free Speech against uh how we treat each other uh and that's one aspect of human suffering there's a lot of suffering from the way we treat each other there's a lot of suffering from speech that is free but racist or dangerous um now there are limitations on Free Speech in different environments where I'm seeing a lot of it is in academic institutions but it's in daily life and it's on Twitter and it's this battle of you know who gets to decide where the boundaries are between my right to free speech and indeed the value of free speech in terms of creating a diverse Society in terms of furthering Democratic uh Society in terms of our own right to express ourselves um versus kind of harm that can be done with speech so that's it's just a really really difficult problem and because it's on social media I think it affects all of us uh and it's at a scale that is just you know it's it's Global it's at a scale that it's just unfathomable and unprecedented okay so this is perfect um before we dive into this I will say that I don't consider myself to have any particular wisdom around free speech so I have no doubt that I will um throw out ideas or questions that I any of us do it's an incable problem so as long as people understand that I I'm certainly not in this conversation in any way shape or form trying to say that I have thought through this or that I think I have the answers only that what I hope to do in this conversation is um practice myself how to Think Through incredibly hard problems and so whenever somebody asks me a question if I don't know the answer what I always say is well let me walk you through how I think about it and so that way it's like hey I I don't have like there are some things um for instance I feel very confident if you're asking me about mindset or how to go from not being an entrepreneur to being an entrepreneur what do you have to learn like all of those things I have a high degree of confidence that I have answers that are useful MH meaning that they are efficacious that if you have a goal if you take my advice it will actually move you towards that goal so uh but in free speech I don't have that so I just haven't I don't know anybody who does I think we're all kind of mucking around in complexity here amazing so perfect for us to explore so now we have our Northstar um what I want to get into is what ends up making this such a difficult conversation and what do we put in place to navigate this well so number one for me anyway is going to be um what what I was just talking about so what's going to reduce human suffering what's going to lift people's ability to achieve fulfillment at the individual level because that's how I think and and I think that way because I think it is the right way that was air quotes for anybody just listening uh the right way to do it uh with full humility of recognizing to your point in the book you say you know a lot of times we think we know something but do we really know and so being super thoughtful about that so I air quote that to to express to self reflect to my own self that I need to stay humble there um but I think that's the right way to approach things right defined as it will move you towards your goal and my goal being the North Star so we have like a nice there's at least internal logic to what I'm presenting um so I'm going to add that second element though to what I think people have have to do as I think through a hard problem is uh if I were going to give three things to it so one I have that norstar two I'm super paranoid about whether or not I'm right so I completely distrust myself uh and I think that's wise so I have enough confidence to move forward but enough humility to know I've been wrong so many times in my life that no matter how right I feel that I need to be open and seeking disconfirming evidence and then the third thing that I would use in finding sort of the the the again right decision meaning that it moves me towards my goal is data that is showing me that I'm actually moving towards my goal and I feel like that is something that is often missed in these grander conversations and I don't know if you'd agree with this but I feel like certainly in America we're getting more more polarized and pulling away from each other and trying to find data so we can see is this actually working or not like we have a stated goal which should have a metric tied to it and are we actually getting closer to it um does that feel like the right setup to attack the problem of free speech or am I missing something so I agree with all of that and I would just add so I certainly agree that we have to approach these problems with a hefty dose of humility um I think one of the things that's really complicated about the Free Speech question is that we're sort of living the free speech question by having discussions about about it um and I think we need to uh one other thing I would add is that when we look at a really complex problem like this to your point about you know how we tackle complex problems we we should look at the parts and try to parir it down a little bit and the parts that for me at least are not complicated are uh things like where where do we go binary for sure where should you know where do I think there could be broad agreement instead of the two extremes you described um one is um inciting violence somebody saying you know everybody you know go out and kill 10 people um any kind of inciting violence should be you know that that shouldn't be an issue in terms of in terms of free speech um where do you draw the line there so this is so the whole idea of the Overton window I don't know do you want to explain to people what the Overton window is go for it okay so Overton window is what is acceptable to talk about so one of the ways that that the mob I will say again I'm sort of air quoting that but the now that social media makes it possible for there to be a mob no matter where you are if you're on the platform the way that the mob in intentionally or otherwise um tries to influence Free Speech we'll say because they can't stop it but they can certainly influence it until we get into like censorship by the platform so the platforms can very much uh put hard limits based on Shadow Banning and things like that around the overt window but the over to window is the things that are acceptable to talk about um so for here's a great example of something that I'm super grateful is outside of the Overton window uh hey um we should you know to our doctor friend in China like hey there are people that cuz if I remember right from the real story it was he was trying to make the twins uh more resilient to HIV exactly and so hey I'm going to make this real quick Gene modification to HIV and we're good right and that that falls into sort of eugenics territory and has this like knock on effect of like unknown things now that particular example isn't necessarily Eugenics but like it it to me is a little too close to like that where some things are okay and other things just have to be eradicated now I'm actually a huge proporn of Gene editing we can get into the messiness of that later but like that would be an example of where we're all just like no like you can't Gene edit the germ line just it's completely off the table we're not going to discuss it nope nope nope um so that would be an example of something it's outside the pale of what we consider um okay to child pornography is something we've all agreed on you know so yeah no I was just going to say there there aren't many of those things but we at least need to start with okay where do we have agreement or or you know at least by enlarge agreement um and things that are as you say Beyond The Pale but the point that you raised about the instant mob is critical because it's why we don't have a sense today of where to draw the line and certainly after what we saw on January 6th the Insurrection I mean we it's very hard because all of a sudden you know one statement on social media millions of people around the planet uh can respond to it and indeed what did we see with this tragic shooting in Buffalo the governor of New York said it was a quote Feeding Frenzy I mean she talked about and I talk about in a lot of my work the contagion and basically you know it changes uh the question completely if you're talking about somebody standing on a soap box in Central Park saying you know let's light the theater on fire versus somebody posting something on social media and even the Supreme Court hasn't quite figured out what to do with that yet um but it does change the what is sort of an immediate threat what is clear and present danger um to use sort of legal terminology what is you know it's very different when you have um as you say when you have social media make you know creating an instant mob yeah so okay so just to put all the pieces on the table so we have the Overton window there's going to be some things that you can talk about some things that you can't um figuring out where the edges of that are going to be ex extremely difficult and as we build our framework to figure that out what like where do you fall on the over 10 window like should everything be discussable like even as I was giving the example of the um the doctor editing the gene for HIV I actually want them to be able to talk about it I want them to be able to do it so I sort of gave a terrible example of the overt window which would be something we shouldn't even discuss and so so so if we're removing um inciting violence you've got Elon Musk saying I'm just going to follow the law of the land so the will of the people if people want less Free Speech then they will vote for it so in each jurisdiction it doesn't look like the Twitter Sal is going to go through but when it did look like it was going to go through he was sort of publicly pontificating about how he would handle it uh that was his solution um do we need a solution so given my framework work the only thing I come back to is and this is a piece that I haven't put on the table yet is as I was mapping out sort of how I go about things um I sort of clung to that the the concept that I think the founding fathers of this country is where it came from I check me if I'm incorrect about that but the idea of my rights end where somebody else's rights begin and so that notion feels important to put on the table so um if we're looking at free speech through that lens so inciting not being able to incite violence seems to be a response to the idea of my rights end where yours begin so if I'm doing something that triggers something that's going to take away your rights then I can't do that um but short of that being able to think well through the problem it feels like using my uh definitions it feels like the Overton window should not necessarily I I I would say infinite up to that point point of again taking somebody else's rights away um but that isn't I don't think that's universally agreed upon so it's a so all of this is very tricky but if we look at first of all um in terms of defining the problem or tackling the problem what are the big pieces of this problem one big piece of the problem is that corporations have outsized influence on how speech is distributed and so that's it's Twitter it's Facebook and Beyond uh and that's something that we didn't we've never had before so that's a huge issue um and the second is that technology makes things virulently contagious so it's not one racist remark in somebody's living room not that that's acceptable at least to me but it's something that will instantaneously um you know get fired around the world and potentially you know tweeted and retweeted or liked or however however that's happening so the danger level on both s on on on ious um angles on what violence is on what racism is is is as you've said is a whole other level so that's another piece of the problem we have to solve then we have to solve the problem of who gets to decide where we're drawing the lines who gets to decide about the overed window who gets to decide um you know other than again in the very clear areas like child pornography um who gets to decide um and a lot of it is coming back to these companies are deciding but you know is that right um and so these are that's why these problems are so intractable and then the fourth is to come back to uh your point about my rights and your rights it doesn't really work um in this context because um you know we had an example of that with covid and maske wearing and you know my own view is that you don't have a right to expose somebody else to illness you have a right to make choices about where you wear a mask if you're the only person who's going to be affected you know walking around a park or something but my own view is we don't have a right to to expose someone else to co anymore than we have a right to run a red light or to drive drunk or you know any other sort of behavior that would put someone else can I can I zoom in on that because this is where the stuff starts to get so hard for me so um people because I was going to translate those words into because when you said we don't have the right to expose somebody else to illness I don't think people would agree with that you don't have the right to expose them to an illness that is believed to be serious that I think you'd get a lot more people on board okay the problem is that some people are going to say that Co isn't that serious and so and now like if we really want to get complicated Co is way more serious for somebody that has underlying conditions so if you are um obese for instance your risk factors go through the roof so now it's like okay well for some people it really may not be a big deal for other people it is devastating super dangerous so we have one of my um teammates here at impact Theory they they can't get vaccinated because are in the high allergy group so they've been told not to take the vaccine like they would love to they can't so they've effectively not left their house for 2 and a half years I mean emotionally devastating emotionally terrible yeah yeah so this is not a person like trying to draw a line in the sand and and be up about it like they're just they would love to but they can't and so they're at ultra high risk so now they wouldn't want to be exposed so but how now do we come to an agreement where you've got def defans become so not only how you define your principles is a question but how you define whether this is a serious illness or not cuz for however many eons we've all exposed each other to colds never been a big deal if you saw somebody sneeze in public you might give them a sideways glance you know during cold season but you wouldn't be like now people like run up and scream at you I never saw that before so it's like we've got moods shifting I think based on the perceived seriousness of the illness but not everybody's on board with that so how do we navate I think you raise a really great point which is that we're not going to get everybody on board with any of this um now one of the things about covid is that we need to start with the science wherever the science is and you know the science has evolved and the messaging that we've gotten from the CDC and from The Who and and these you know and medical leaders has shifted as the science has shifted with Co we need to start with the science um and then people will have different sort of risk reward calculations as you've said yourself you've given some great examples uh and institutions will have different risk reward calculations so for example I teach at Stanford spring term and we all wear masks in class and there are plenty of students who think that's ridiculous and there are plenty of students who would wear a mask even if it wasn't now it's strongly recommended um but even when it was required so so I'm not sure we're going to get to everybody agreeing on things I would hope we could at least agree that we need to acknowledge what the science says and then our different risk reward calculations might be different um the free speech is is you know a whole other dimension of sensitivity um and then what we have in the balance also just the importance of a diversity of ideas when we look at other parts of the world where you know there's Rising authoritarianism what's that about it's a lot about controlling the narrative it's a lot about one person saying you know your speech anywhere is censored or this is what happened and not giving people access to other views about what happened whether it's history or whether it's what happened this morning um and we certainly are seeing that in Russia we're seeing that uh with Victor orbon we're seeing that in you know in Victor Orban um uh in Hungary uh I don't know anything about it sad report something bad I take it is happening well he's basically an authoritarian figure great yeah that's going to look bad as a transcript but just for anybody reading somehow I don't mean literally great that's terrible yeah um no but just to say that that you know Rising authoritarianism is a lot about controlling The Narrative and so um all of the democratic ideals that you know most of us hold to be important and that you know in other countries people strive for uh and they give us the rights that you're talking about and the freedoms you're talking about uh free speech is incredibly important and at the same time we are also at record levels of speech that is just abor um it's just a really really complicated problem now I think the the the one aspect of this that uh comes up a lot is cancel culture and I don't know if you have a view on on cancel culture I do I have a a blunt force trauma view on cancel culture it's not nuanced nobody should take what I say as policy but the way that I look at that is it's coming from it started in a beautiful place and it the the divide that I see happening now is I think based in what I call directives that are embedded in the human mind From Evolution I think Evolution realized realized this is obviously not the blind watchmaker to use Richard Dawkins term but the to anthropomorphize it you've got Evolution realizing that you need a bifurcated strategy in which the the best result comes from the friction between two different ways of viewing the world and in a two-party system it basically as far as I know and again I'm not a scholar on this but I've looked at it closely enough this feels roughly accurate uh two- party systems are always going to break down along the following lines you're going to have one group is the you have to be compassionate and you no man left behind right like we're going to make sure that everybody gets taken care of and then on the other side you have personal responsibility and if you look at this from an evolutionary lens you understand why this would be useful as a social creature you need to take care of the other people in tribe because they strength in numbers and so if you're not tribe Centric if you're not thinking about the whole you're going to get picked off you'll value isolation you won't think about it your dust uh yeah I was going to go into the prehistoric documentary by Apple TV is absolutely incredible uh anyway but if you get isolated you're in real trouble but on the other hand you will get um there's a guy named Dan arieli who wrote a book called predictively irrational he goes into all the weird things that humans do and one of them is that we will lie and take advantage to the point where it doesn't Force us to change our opinion of ourselves which I think is a really Keen Insight in human nature keight so you've got the freeloader problem so if you're over here we've got to take care of everybody there will be a subset of people that are like word you'll take care of me so I'm not going to do anything so that has to be balanced out by people like hold on hold on hold on like yes I get it but you need to also take responsibility for yourself work hard contribute now either of those devolve into tyranny in either direction like if you let just people trying to be compassionate go this way you have the gulg archipelago for anybody listening that hasn't read that read it it will terrify the out of you and then over here on the other side you devolve into the Nazis so it's like hey we're going towards Madness in either direction it is the friction between those two things that makes magic so my wife and I for instance we very much look at the world differently we share a lot of values which is how we're able to stay together but we also are really different which is why we have a high functioning marriage and a high functioning business so we need that friction now what I have learned is that when the sides value the friction and they realize oh I actually wouldn't thrive on my own I feel really strongly about my side but I would not thrive on my own then all is well when one side though goes no no no I'm right and they are the enemy and they are a problem and that's all I hear right now so it feels like we're just getting yanked in either direction so cancel culture is born of this idea of my side is right the other side is not just wrong but they're other deserve to exist exactly now you get into a dark dark place so where I come out on Council culture is that there really is language and there really are actions that just shouldn't be that really are just abor but I think we should be canceling that language and those actions and not canceling people interesting so once you cancel because you believe in Redemption well well um let me put it in like in pure ethics terms or at least like pra my practical ethics terms when you cancel someone you've basically another way of saying that is you've just G taken away all incentive for them to try to improve all incentive why should anybody try to improve if no matter what they do you've decided they don't deserve to exist these are facts right so I believe in ethical resilience and Recovery I don't know that I'd call it Redemption because it's hard work to your earlier point it's tell the truth take your part of the responsibility and then make a plan so that it doesn't happen again well if you've canceled somebody they're not going to bother to do any of that um and the other thing is coming back to your humility point which I wholeheartedly share you know we all make mistakes we all have errors in judgment we're all we all look at something we said and think of oh my God how could I have said that um and in fact in my Stanford classes I tell everyone because the topics are so sensitive I basically say at the beginning of the term everyone's going to say something they're going to regret so if you need to correct and I have too many hands in the air and I don't get to you just like wave your hand wildly and say sorry I need to do a correction and I will make a point of calling on you and let you do a correction and we're all going to give each other benefit of the doubt um but cancel culture is a way of saying I'm you don't deserve to exist as a human being uh that's so hardcore that's so hardcore and I think it that you know but I certainly think there's a lot of language that doesn't deserve to exist and a lot of you know and a lot of behavior that should never exist um so so I hope we can get away from canceling people and get to cancelling language and behavior um and hope you know but but like you like you optimistic I'm I'm an Ethics optimist so I'm fundamentally um you know high energy High optimism very pro-innovation so uh yeah I'm I'm I'm optimistic but it's a difficult time it's a difficult time that's that is a very gentle way to say say where I was headed so I am optimistic for two reasons one by Nature I'm optimistic and two I think that um mood follows action so if I focus on all the ways that everything is going wrong I'm just going to get more and more and more pessimistic if I focus on all the ways we can get things to go right then I'm at least going to keep trying so I don't want to give up but Ray Delia really summed up my belief so he wrote a book called uh principles for dealing with a changing World Order nobody has spent more money if I remember right he spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out sort of global movements he's used AI he's built the largest um hedge fund in the world so this is a person whose job depends on his ability to read sort of how society's change over time so that he knows where to invest and where not to invest and 18 months ago he writes a book and he says I put the US's chance of going into Civil War at 30% I interview him 18 months after he wrote it and I said where do you think our chance of civil war is now and he said I put it at 40% that's terrifying that is terrifying so the person who spent more money than anybody else looking at this uh has more incentive to get this right than anybody else is telling you that we're moving in the wrong direction and that's how it feels to me that we're moving in the wrong direction now I love that he still got us below 50% so that I'm going to cling to that as The Optimist um but I really feel like we're moving in the wrong direction and so as a as an entrepreneur I think a lot about the idea of how you unwind something so you have to be able to test so I believe in what I call the physics of progress the physics of progress is just the um scientific method recontextualized for business so it's hypothesis test your hypothesis look honestly at the data refine your hypothesis try again so I'm always looking at that well whatever I try it's not going to work all the way and so I need the ability to fail to some extent sometimes catastrophically other times just a little bit to learn to refine to try again and as I'm looking at the problem through that lens of like oh okay like how do we begin to unwind because I feel like culturally we're all making a mistake we're we're doing things that increase the division from the way social media algorithms work to the way that we're defining the Overton window to the way that we're othering people that hold different views than us it's been going on for a very very very very long time long before we got into social media but turbocharged by social media turbocharged in the extreme so now we have something where I don't see the way out I'm not saying there isn't one I'm just saying I with my limited brain and Viewpoint I don't see the path out knowing what I know about human brains other than massive suffering so normally what happens and unfortunately this is exactly what Ray Delio is talking about is hey guys I've just looked at the last 5,000 years of recorded history and I'm telling you that we move in a six phase cycle and nobody stays in what's phase three I think is prosperity nobody stays in phase three very long and it's just human nature and I think the exact way he said it is there's only a certain number of personality types and that's why history repeats itself because it's just humans react to each other based on these whatever 19 personality types and that's it and you're just going to keep coming back around and so again I say this with my optimistic hat on but ah with my limited brain I don't see how we back out of this because the only way that I see is for people to want to reconnect to want to see the other person as like they're a full-fledged human being acting in good faith and they just believe something different than me and I need to relish the friction between our worldviews so I certainly agree with you um that we're not headed in a great Direction right now in a lot of ways and some have to do with laws that are being adopted across the us just to speak to the US for a moment I mean Ukraine is certainly tragic um I think I read in an oped in the New York Times this morning that there have been 243 mass shootings in the US since the beginning of 2022 that's insane yeah I think I could get now that number could be wrong I could be remembering it wrong from my breakfast I'm guessing you're directionally correct um but it's pretty insane uh and that is a more us specific problem um but there are a lot of ways in which we're going in the wrong direction um and I certainly don't have all the answers and I certainly don't have Ray Doo's perspective or budget or analysis and I think and I find it fascinating but I have to say I I do believe that we will see the importance of connecting um in fact I say in my first book that ethics is the great connector just stopping and thinking about our decisions even on a daily basis even how we interact with family members um and I think we're going to have to think about lots of different contributors to a solution and not one um and we're going to have to stop and think can you give me some of those like if we were just going to march to your drum beat which I'm sure is not a responsibility you want but let's say that you have it and that we're going to follow definitely don't think I should be telling anybody what to do but yeah so in in that caveat what are your sort of best practices on this real issue we're we're headed towards massive division how do we get back together so one thing is to take a deep breath and really listen to what other people are telling us I talk a lot about effective listening as a critical pillar of Ethics um listening to what people are really telling us not what we want to hear not what we expect to hear not what we think they should be telling us in all kinds of ways starting with medical Diagnostics all the way to people that we think have entirely different points of view what is it that is driving that point of view what are they really telling us is it really about that one issue or is it really about a context that we're not fully understanding sort of it's a it's back to sort of where's the problem that we're trying to solve so I think that's one thing I think the second is um is this really seemingly simple kind of pressing pause and saying what I'm about to do what is the worst impact that could have and if it were me if it were my child would I still do it and even if we still proceed sometimes you know selfishly so put it that way I I really think that it just this sense of just thinking about the consequences of what we say and do on someone else um is really uh is really important one place we've seen and I don't know if if you've had any of this experience but a bit of an Awakening in that respect is around um uh racism and a lot of the great writing that has come to the for about racism and about how a lot of us you know think of course we're not racist of course we you know don't hold views like that of course we don't speak in race in what we consider to be racist ways but one of the things that many of us and I put you know my hand up first recognize we all have a lot of work to do we all come with unconscious biases nobody is free from unconscious biases and so just that awareness I think has been taking hold uh more broadly in recent years um thanks to a whole range of different writers and just thanks to what's gone on in society what is up my friend Tom billu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10 if your answer is anything less than a 10 I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you all right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary this out so this goes back to um what I was saying about efficacy so on race again I do not have wisdom around race but I have concerns that if we look at the data that we're getting more polarized around race now than we were before like man I didn't used to think about race at all and meaning I like I completely subscribe to the idea and now this is like considered p uh I'm a total like Martin Luther King Jr guy uh or Nelson Mandela guy and I just think oh my God like Nelson Mandela may be the most inspiring person I've ever encountered in history like when I hear his story I am I am knocked to my knees with recognition that I'm not strong enough to do what he did and that's not me being humble that is me just knowing myself well enough like 27 years in prison I certainly I I couldn't come close yeah so just did something that I I am not uh emotionally equipped to pull off and but his whole thing was he comes out of prison and says no I want the the very people that were part of my incarceration I want them to be on my security detail and knew that this is about Unity about bringing people together right Martin Luther King I Have a Dream that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin and that's be being considered P right like that's a a naive way to look at the problem and so I'm like oh man like I don't know like this doesn't feel like we're headed in a unification Direction it feels like we're getting now pulled even more violently apart I think on that one I certainly I certainly wouldn't disagree that we're being pulled apart but I do think that there's a recognition for example that we all bring unconscious bias to the table as a factor of evolution or you think there's something else just a fact of the way we see the world that we can all benefit from having many different voices around the table and hiring uh many different voices around the table and determining you know back to sort of Twitter like what is tolerable speech and what isn't um and that we all sort of see the world through a lens you know I'm a white woman I see you know by definition I don't see the world the way somebody who grew up in a different context or um you know who brings different um characteristics to the problem you know I don't see the I I don't necessarily I want to differentiate between and again this I am thank you all for letting me explore ideas that I don't think that I have wisdom in and literally just thinking through this in real time but that I think we need to draw a distinction between racism and frame of reference so you're definitely as a white person growing up in a white majority country you're going to have a very different frame of reference in somebody growing up in that same country who is not that race but to me like as somebody who's traveled to Japan quite a bit it's a real different story to be a white person in Japan where they are maybe not even with cruel intention but Japan and again this is like my favorite country I love being there it's so amazing but I wouldn't move there because they just don't necessarily love foreigners and so while I love the culture that they've created is absolutely amazing um as somebody obsessed with robots in anime uh I'm I am aware enough to know that getting business done for me as an outsider whether that's because I'm white or that I just didn't grow up in Japan they're not loving it so the my frame of reference in Japan would be very very different because there I would be not in the majority right so um frame of reference going to be wildly different but I would say that to we have to keep I think it is wise because my goal again is to lower human suffering to raise people's ability to or likelihood maybe I should say of reaching fulfillment uh is that racism to me is thinking less of a group because of immutable characteristics and that to me is very different than being able to in fact I think about this a fair amount because we create um fictional characters and so as we create those fictional characters like my wife will make a good point hey you guys need to make sure that you get women uh looking at that project you're creating a woman like and she comes at it from the lens of you want to make sure that it's appealing to other women not that she's worried necessarily about offending people but just like hey if you want women to actually be jazzed about that character have women look at it don't just have a bunch of guys uh same thing from uh um ethnicity standpoint it's like you want to represent it well so you want to make sure that you have somebody who understands that living that lifestyle what that means how they come across so you want that Viewpoint that opinion but missing something there to me isn't racism it's just frame of reference all I'm all I'm saying is that I think that we've come to a point in recent years where we're better at saying um we all have unconscious bias and it's not just about race we all have unconscious bias of all kinds and we all benefit from diverse views so the Abraham Lincoln uh Team of Rivals Team of Rivals you know uh and and we need to sort of do more of that certainly people in Washington need to do more of that leaders of all kinds need to do more of that but I think do we get to that from the sort of visual diversity or do we get to that by what Lincoln was actually doing which is people who think differently than me people who think I'm wrong essentially on a lot of things giving me a different opinion because what I worry about is we have a team that's visually different men women every ethnicity but we all come from going back to that idea that you you get this inh division From Evolution which is you're either on the compassionate or the personal responsibility side if you get all people on personal responsibility I would say you don't have diversity of thought even if you have diversity diversity of thought is essential lots of different kinds of diversity um are essential different ages can be essential different you know gender identities can be essential but diversity of thought is is absolutely critical um and and so I wouldn't say it's either or I'd say it's sort of all of the above um but absolutely I I do not believe that there are diverse boards diverse companies or NOS or other organizations um that don't have diversity of thought and somehow that just seems to get left out of the conversation including the conversations about quotas and women on boards and all this kind of thing but I think diversity of thought absolutely and even among friends I have a question in the book about you know would you be friends with somebody who has really different points of view um from you on on any serious issue and where I really started to this um and this comes from spending a lot of time every year living in London is brexit I had never seen some a political issue tear families apart like brexit tore families apart there were families who were not speaking to each other close families you know husbands and wives and children and parents and who are not speaking to each other over their point of view about brexit and then we saw the 2016 election and we saw the same thing here I had never seen people so torn apart friendships in particular fraying over political issues and that's where I started to really uh think about this issue of you know diversity of thought and also as you know not othering people and also are we at a point though where some of the thought is so abor that we really are going to draw a line that we really are going to say you know what I don't need to be friends with you or I just can't have that kind of thing around me because and where for me it started to happen was where we get to the point where people just don't can't tell the truth about really fundamental things where they are willing to believe that uh something that is proven scientifically or statistically to be true they are denying facts because at that point we start to say well if you're going to deny facts about whether an election happened or you're going to not deny facts about co uh um scientific facts um then what where what's where's truth in relationship what what are you going to not tell me the truth about in our personal relationship so I think it became very complicated for people and I think it still is because of the polarization you mentioned do you worry at all that the person isn't lying that instead it's something far more terrifying to me which is that they can look at the data and because they so believe in their world viw that they just see what matches their world viw they're not even trying to cram it into their worldview I completely uh agree that this is a huge huge problem a huge danger beyond that there's well there are a couple parts to it one is just the spread of misinformation so people in information packaged in ways that looks like scientific truth or that looks like it's coming from Authority and so people well-meaning people who are not really trying to make the world fit into their worldview are still being um misled and so good faith people are being misled and in part by just the volume you know the normalization of some of the uh misstatements out there um and the spreading of it all so that's one danger but the other thing is you're right I mean we we I very much worry that people will take facts and and here in my air quotes interpret them uh in a way that sort of Suits the way they want the world to be um and that it's incredibly serious and you know in general there's a there's a phenomenon that I wouldn't put in that really serious camp but that is happening among um the younger generation that has grown up with you know cell phones and sort of ability to program I want to watch this program now I want to listen to this song and oh on top of everything else it's free um this idea that somehow we can program the world to be the way we want it to be it doesn't work that way that's really interesting you know and I think that's one of the reasons why we have these epidemics of Mental Health issues and I'm no mental health expert but I do follow the statistics and I'm very much sort of in the arena so to speak in academic institutions and also looking at teenagers um high schools Etc and we are really in a moment where not only do we think incorrectly in my view that we can make the world the way we want it to be but when it isn't it's creating all sorts of very real human suffering back to your point uh and I think that is really dangerous um and I remember I had I need more on this so this is really intriguing so we can't make the world in our own image and the inability to do that is what causes the suffering or the delusion that you can and so they're trying and they're not getting anywhere like where what's the real CR kind of both to be honest but I had the privilege of interviewing sir Solon rushd um on my ethics incubator platform and we talked a lot about truth and it was sort of ironic that a fiction writer um you know had so many insights on truth and in fact his written have to go into hiding he did Cal or something him yeah there was a it was one with one of his um earlier books um give people context because I don't know a lot about his story but the little bit I know is like whoa so he is an extraordinary award-winning um author um and he's W uh twice the man Booker prize which is a very famous literary prize he writes fiction mostly although recently he's done a a book on Truth um and there was uh basically threats against his life uh at one point uh early in his career for one of his Works um basically around a presentation or what was interpreted as a presentation um around uh aspects of of Islam um that were considered extremely disrespectful and he was you know in in potential physical danger he's an extraordinary thinker an extraordinary writer and he described in something that's going to sound fairly straightforward um he was at a book event for one of his books and he said that one of the audience members was arguing with him about something uh a matter of clear fact and he finally looked at the person and said you know it's not because you know you want the world to be flat that it's flat the world doesn't need you to believe it's round for it to be round and I think you know that basically sums it up and I think it's it's really we are though at this point where um many people particularly in younger generation that have grown up with so much control so much access and again free access um it's created this idea that everything should be the way they want we're seeing a little bit of it in terms of return to work that every everybody should be able to do exactly what they want um and it is creating enormous enormous amounts of stress yeah this is uh man this is this is fascinating getting into how people navigate the world how they build up their frame of reference so this like if I were going to have uh something on my Tombstone that summed up what I was trying to do it would be you're having a biological experience and the reason I want people to understand that is once you understand uh how the wiring of your brain play certain tricks on you creates these sort of cognitive Illusions in the way that we have visual optical illusions you get cognitive Illusions and that once you understand how the brain works then you can better sort of insert yourself in there for instance one of the things that I remind myself uh of all the time is that emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect so the emotion that makes you feel like that other person has no right to even exist as a human being that's the emotion that's connecting dots that really aren't there and if you can see past that stuff you can start to tease out things like frame of reference and as I Tred to really Define what is a frame of reference and you know how does it hold people back um I began to realize that people start believing things that they mistake for objective truth but is actually just a belief uh that they I'll give you an example failing makes me a failure forever and they don't really think about it they just think that oh if you fail then you're a failure um so to them it's a recognition of objective truth but it has just catastrophic effects in their life so if somebody has the frame of reference that the world ought to be this way uh and it's not and that's a problem and burn it down until we get that world and there's no sort of inserting themselves into well there's cause and effect there no Utopia only trade-offs which are also beliefs by the way um then you get real problems how do you begin to like walk people out of this so one of the things that um cancel culture and your failure example have in common is that they're dead ends and another one that is going to sound very different but that is equally a dead end is perfectionism and this epidemic of perfectionism we have and that's kind of the flip side of your failure example um and I tell people that perfectionism is one of the greatest risks to ethics that we have and the reason is that you know it's not an achievable goal in my view it's also not a laudable goal but when people are given perfectionist standards or when people give themselves perfectionist standards and I don't care if it's unrealistic sales targets or GPA you know grades um or physical appearance uh there's only two possible paths one is you try and try and try and you still never make it and that's where mental health consequences come in and that's where you know kind of distorted interaction with the world comes in or you cheat and you still don't really achieve it but that's where that's why it's an ethical problem because at some point when people are given impossible targets or give themselves impossible targets they cheat and there's all manner of cheating some of it seems pretty minor it might be on a dating app you're going to kind of fudge your age or your question like I write about in the book there was this guy who in the Netherlands who wanted to I think it was in the Netherlands who wanted to have a court declare that he was considerably younger because he felt air quotes again considerably younger and his doctor said that his biological age was considerably younger but factually he was born on a particular day and even though I'm not much of a mathematician I can calculate the number between that date and today and it was you know much greater than the number he wanted the Court to declare and the court said we're having none of this right fact chronological fact has a real value in society but that's another aspect of you know I want to kind of fudge I don't really like my reality so I'll put out there on the app and some of that's harmless and just good fun um but then some of it is you know all kinds of cheating that goes on in in the corporate world or all kinds of uh cutting corners of safety because targets for building a bridge or building a school can't be met Financial targets deadlines so safety um shortcuts I mean it comes up in all kinds of ways so perfectionism is another one of those dead ends and dead ends are not good from an ethic standpoint no doubt how do we begin to give people what they need to sort of navigate that kind of complexity so you've got the pillars that you talk about you've got the four words that we started all of this with um do you have like guiding questions ask yourself so you do have one for sure which is imagine the person who's most adversely affected now imagine that's you would you still do it um but are there like certain rules that you would put in place like because what I what I would love to see and I don't know if this is possible but it it probably could get us 80 or 90% of the way there where meaning sort of all of the things that we're going to encounter on a very frequent basis would be handled by the following set of criteria um you know we talked in the beginning about our North Stars but obviously we're going to have to break that out into either questions we can ask or Milestones that we can check um so I mean there the two that I would say are the one that you mentioned and also what I said about consequences what are the consequences over time going to be and are they really important and really irreparable and if not irreparable go ahead and give it a shot uh if not irreparable then you know you might weigh things differently um but there aren't going to be especially in today's world there aren't going to be sort of a set of rules like you know you know if it's dark green go to door number one and then if you're in door number one and you see the sunshine go to you know go to door number two I mean there aren't going to be rules like that in these questions it's going to be about our deciding do you ever find yourself tempted to create that rule book like have you done that thought experiment and that's how you know it doesn't work or yeah I know it doesn't work because we're in a situation where too many of our principles conflict okay where we have free speech you know against protection against uh violence and racism and things like that where we have you know individual uh freedom to decide whether or not to wear a mask and to decide that you know for somebody as you said different degrees of seriousness for covid versus protecting I mean that we're just constantly finding ourselves in these situations of conflicting principles uh and so it's not there aren't going to be sort of perfect answers and I think we just need to get to the point where being thoughtful stopping and thinking what does that look like to the person most adversely affected is the single most important rule I can suggest and the and the um important and irreparable that's where you're going to get to the vaccines and the children that's where you're going to get to the fact where you're going to say you know what it seems like briberies you know an obvious no no but you know if it's going to cost children their lives really are we really not going to at least consider I'm not saying that there's a right answer for everybody but I mean are we at least not going to consider that we might want to look at this problem differently yeah one of the questions that I wanted to ask you that feels tied to what you're saying there is would you ever make an unethical by your own definition decision if it would if making the ethical choice would kill one of your children I love this question because it is so when you talk about emotion I cannot imagine and I want to say as I'm answering this honoring the parents from this tragic shooting this week Jesus I cannot imagine what it is to lose a child I mean my heart goes out to anybody who has lost a child under any circumstances so I make no pretense of saying that I would be sure about how I would behave if that's what were at stake or anybody else's child I mean any human life at risk but I think when it comes you know to our own children I think that I just can't imagine anything worse is that a yes doctor yeah it's a yes yeah for me I mean for sure right yeah and I'm not saying it makes me a good person I'm just saying I would do it yeah and oh and by the way um I'm not um interested so much in sort of categorizing you know people or things is ethical or unethical or good or not good I think we're just trying to make the best decisions we can um the most Humane decisions we can and as you say eliminate the most suffering um but yeah I mean anytime human life is at stake I'm sorry I don't stand on ceremony and if I had to answer the question that I raised about the vaccines and the children and the bribery I don't have a problem uh with the bribery but I know know that there will be consequences that I will have to mitigate so I will have to make sure that uh it doesn't become a habit that there isn't the contagion that I've spoken about that it isn't that the Port Authorities say oh they paid $100 today so next time we'll we'll just raise the price you there are lots of things I would do to try to mitigate the risks of of that un of the lack of ethics of that decision of the of the in fact illegal decision but there's no question that when human life is at stake that for me there's nothing more important and certainly nothing more irreparable yeah and I don't know that there is something way worse when it's kids oh like that that exacerbates things a lot so you bring up a really interesting idea and this is what I was trying to get to with efficacy so every decision has consequences do you know Thomas Soul no I do not oh man I find him so intriguing so brilliant Economist oh I have to go read yes he he's incredible and he has that quote that I said earlier which I suppose I should have said this is straight out of Thomas Soul's mouth there's no Utopia only trade-offs and so getting people to understand in that scenario for instance that it's not like paying that bribe and saving those kids is the Utopia it's better maybe than the alternative because I think most of us would say that it's far better to save those lives you know it's a bird in the hand like because yes there might actually be Downstream consequences that I'm not thinking of that I can't predict oh God like I've tried to Think Through could this have like these you talked earlier about consequences make sure you're thinking out as far as you can and not three weeks you know like as far out as you can possibly imagine um but you know you're doing your best but recognizing it as a trade-off recognizing that we're not going to be able to achieve the Utopia that's one thing that always scares me like reading the goog archipelago for those who don't know is written by a guy named soldier niton who was taken into the Russian Googs system basically and his punchline is that it starts with a few little lies to get along it starts with not wanting to make waves because they're coming after your neighbor and not you and it's like H do you really want to raise you know your head it's you know um the government saying hey this is all working really well but you know people are actually starving to death in the Ukraine and you're just like nod and smile yeah yeah yeah it's fine and he said and then that ends with they do show up on your door one day and you do end up spending I forget how long he spent in the G it was a long time and the Googs are you know just brutal and people dying left right and Center you're being tortured I mean it's crazy and it's more or less him screaming for it's a long book hundreds of pages and recognizing that you get to that because people really believe in something like they really want to do something good and when they lose sight of the fact that there is no Utopia there are only trade-offs they ignore the trade-offs because they think that it leads to a Utopia and it's one of those like if I could just get there's two things I always want people to do one please start distrusting yourself a little more absolutely like that's huge that's a variation on the theme of humility yes and a variation on the theme of Team of Rivals and I mean it just it cuts to everything we've been talking about yep and then to your point about A Team of Rivals the whole point of a Team of Rivals is that you recognize you won't be able to Think Through the problem well enough because of your own blind spots your own frame of reference and so you need somebody from the outside that sees things totally differently than you that will give you that opinion but you have to be emotionally resilient because it always hurts when somebody points out that you were being foolish that's never fun but really powerful if you're willing to do it and that's the second thing which is so if one is distrusting yourself the second one is looking at is this actually working and so looking at this idea of tradeoffs like I thought it would give me this result it didn't it gave me a different result I know I'm never going to get perfect anyway is this the trade-off that I'm really willing to make if we could get I think and again you know I distrust myself so I don't know this is right but this feels like a thing that people should really be looking at so I think the distrust ourselves is in a positive way um which is to say not in a way way that is that undermines self-confidence not in a way that undermines um willingness to try and take risks um but just the sense that like none of us can know everything there's so much you've talked about today um that I know nothing about Neuroscience I mean I have I try to read but I you know I'm in no way shape or form a neuroscientist uh who can really understand the biology of the brain and the implications for the chemistry of the brain and the implications of that for for all of this um but I think tradeoffs you know Utopia is another form of perfectionism so it's not something I've ever strived for and it's not something that I think is healthy for anybody to be trying to aim for but tradeoffs that's the world we're in we're making choices all the time and um one of the things I'm trying to show with the book is that it doesn't need to be exhausting it can be fun I mean a lot of the questions in the book our conversations they're just ways to connect and they're ways to sort of do the Team of Rivals without having a big structure it's just you know chat about a few questions while you're waiting in line for coffee or with children or with you know work colleagues it's really an sort of an informal way to connect and an informal way to sort of say oh yeah I didn't think about it that way um and the emotional resilience I mean the way you put it I'm really sensitive to you know you have to be emotionally resilient I would respectfully say easier said than done yeah right it's really hard it's when these things hit our emotions it's really hard and as you pointed out earlier such an important point you made that a lot of times what we're willing to accept as truth is Tainted by our emotions or driven by our emotions something may be presented to us as factually true but we just don't want it in our you know our world view we don't that's not the way we want the world to be and somehow we convince ourselves that it's not true uh or that even if it is true we can still do what we want to do so I think all of this is incredibly important yep it doesn't matter what you look at it matters what you see I remember I had this argument one time with my business partner and it was there was this one employee that he really didn't like and another employee that he really liked and we had been going back and forth because I was like Hey that guy that you like I'm not sure that he's has the aptitude that you think he has and so I ended up being in a situation with both of them and employee a who my partner really liked um and that I had concerns about made a pretty catastrophic error and employee B who my partner did not not like uh saved the day and when I came back and told him the story I said man employee B really saved that moment and he was like I knew it I knew employee B was a problem and I was like no employee B saved it and he was like I know man I knew that he was going to end up making a mistake oh wow and I was like whoa I'm like hey repeat it back to me employee B save the day and he was like oh my God he was like whoa he was like I was so sure he was going to be the problem I literally couldn't hear what you were saying and so it was neat cuz he could he finally on the third one was like and so he himself saw in real time like how easy it is when you are just convinced that something is going to be one way even though you're looking at the very thing you're seeing it with your own eyes you see something completely differently and I've had that illusion happened before for me um where I'm expecting something to happen and for a second my brain sees it and then you're like wait no oh my God that's not at all what is literally before me that's exactly why I say we really need all of us we my hand up first uh we need to be really focused on are we listening to what people are really telling us and not to use your word expect not what we expect to hear or what you know we think somebody should be feeling uh and this comes up all over the place I interviewed young doctors um sort of residents in a hospital and you know they'll say but they'll have sort of a ser series of um symptoms in their mind and so they're doing this thing where they think they've already made up their mind that it's X disease and the person before them is saying but I also have this and I also have that and no actually I don't really have that and they're not they're not listening and they're also not to your earlier Point looking at the potential frame of reference influence of the individual so for example a um a patient from another country who's in a US Hospital who might bring cultural uh sort of frame of reference but also ways of expressing themselves about illness um ways of you know what they will or will not say with family members around some of you know certain cultures like family members around in medical situations and in these doctors were just you know time and again it's like I heard AB c and d and therefore the diagnosis is X and it's um you know and sometimes it might be X but it might also be Y and Z and sometimes it's not X at all but it's exactly what you're saying it's we're so con vinced of what we you know what we should be hearing yeah it's bananas I want to get into some of the fun fun put in quotes cuz the first one from your book uh because the first one is is terrifying but um I find the answer very interesting so if you're um Mom let's say had dementia like very developed dementia and her sister was dead but she was um curious when is my sister coming to visit would you cuz truth and transparency are two things you talk about in the book A Lot would you tell her the truth knowing you're going to have to say it every single time she asks because she'll forget again so I have to say two things before I dig into the answer one is that my heart goes out to anybody who is dealing with any form of Dementia in any way yes it is it's a tragic illness and uh thankfully there's a lot of research in the works but it's not as advanced as we would all hope that it is um and the second is that I am not a medical expert um although I did speak with a number of medical experts um when I was thinking about this question and I also and I did speak with a number of people who are actually dealing with it and what a lot of them said uh was truth over and over again it's relived over and over again the tragic part of it the harm the hurt uh and for a lot of people there's nothing that they can do with that truth because the person is gone it's not like it's going to change a decision that they could make for themselves um while they're in various degrees of ability to make decisions for themselves and so that I thought was a really important point for everyone to think about and again I don't tell people what the right answer is I'm just trying to open a window to to to give you know give some thoughts and to share some thoughts in and from my research but um I thought that was a really important point you know suffering and also to what end would you be insisting on a truth and then back to the being Humane is there something else you can do if telling the truth isn't really going to help well maybe that's something else is surrounding the person with other people who are going to provide them love and companionship so that that loss um is I don't want to say mitigated um but that there's there are other sources of love and companionship um to try to help compensate yeah as somebody so my wife's grandmother passed away I mean I think technically cancer is what took her life but she had like fullblown dementia at the end um and yeah just for sanity's sake it was people stopped telling her you know when she would ask about somebody that had passed away they just they're not here right now they'll come back another time and to the point about have a North star and let that guide you like in terms of limiting human suffering hers and everybody else everybody else's exactly it was just like oh my God it's just so much easier cuz you you test that you know she's at the store she's coming tomorrow whatever and it's was like oh okay word and she was fine right and doesn't remember asking about it the next day anyway so there's no sense of like oh you said yesterday she was coming today what the hell like what's going nope it just like oh tomorrow cool tomorrow cool and uh yeah that that to me is where it really is you you're basically cobbling together a framework of strategies that will work in to the letter sort of in one case but then you have to be more deaf in another case which is why having that Northstar of what you're trying to do reduce suffering um for me making sure the individual has sort of control of their Destiny long as it's not infringing on other people um becomes an important framework that allows you to do your best right you're never going to have a perfect answer no that's right and I think the way you describe it is really helpful and is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the book which is we can connect with each other over these questions um and when you said it was fine you didn't mean it was fine because you know we can just go do unethical things and it's fine because we were given a pass in difficult circumstances you meant I think if I may you meant that it was fine because there had been a lot of thoughtfulness around it and actually a lot of connection probably among family members or with maybe with doctors and and just stopping and pausing and thinking about the question and doing the best everyone could under the circumstances yeah no doubt um what are some of the the more fun questions that you had pursuing in the book so there were questions things that are that don't have serious consequences um you know in the long term like should you use Spotify for free but I'll tell you the one that seems to really resonate so I gave the book in my recent Stanford class I gave the book to all 65 students and I said all right you're going to each each table groups of six you can spend the next 25 minutes you're going to pick three questions that you're particularly interested in each table of about I want to say there maybe 10 tables um each table chose entirely different questions with one exception the one question where there was overlap was would you read your child's Journal interesting and the London Times also um very kindly did an interview about the book and the excellent journalist um kept asking me about that one question both sort of you know on the record and off the Record you know and then we sort of talked about you know what does that mean for sort of checking your CH your children's social media but I thought that was so interesting that of all the questions that was the one that I around I think four or four of the tables out of six had and all of the other ones were entirely different that is really interesting now I have a hypo I I have a hypothesis why I'd love to hear it well my hypothesis is that it is the most consequential thing so everybody's looking for a way to be better make better decisions whatever and because read the book I know the punchline which is that they were going through something with their kid like they had a real like they had other kids that had diares they didn't want to read those it was like this one kid I have so much friction with them would there be an Insight in the journal that would help me and um knowing that I am never going to discuss this with anybody else so I get it like if people are looking at it from that lens like this is really consequential information it would give me an insight and then of course there's the like humans you're having a biologic experience we're all wired for gossip and so to get that like nugget of information that you're not supposed to have would be incredibly tantalizing so mix the desire to have tantalizing information with its insane usefulness and I can get why people want a pass on that one no absolutely and especially because they give themselves a pass for the very point you raise which is well I'm not using it for gossip I would never dream of sharing it with anybody except perhaps a medical professional who was bound by confiden ity so these questions are not that simple but they are um part of the the goal of the book was also to show that not everything is a big techy question you know we have very real day-to-day questions um through which we can connect with each other uh and they don't all have to be sort of big you know the ethics of Civilian space travel there is one though that I think is super Germaine and falls into that and uh I would be remiss not to ask somebody of your expertise this question so AI is going to have to make decisions in a car as to I'm going to hit something and so somebody has to program me how to choose between a baby an old person and a cliff that will kill the driver so how would you advise them to Think Through problems like the trolley problem oh okay so let me first start by saying I'm not a technologist but I do spend a lot of time thinking about these questions the most important thing in what you just said in my view is that somebody is going to program it and I think there's a question about at what point is somebody programming so that we know that if you get into this brand of car oh it becomes marketing wow I think about that this is what's going to happen and also do you actually do you actually have an obligation of transparency you know we're the X motor company and we have this driverless car just so you know if you're ever in this situation we're going to prioritize The Pedestrian and not you or we're going to okay so I'm wondering about those questions coming down yeah um and I'm not enough of a technologist to know how much with machine learning Etc that we're going to have the cars making their own decisions so to speak but I think um it raises a really important more general question which is at what point are we going to put these things out there and it's not as obvious to me uh as a pro-innovation um ethicist it's not as obvious to me that we should wait as long as sometimes we think we should so I've spoken to people about why are we so squeamish about the ethics of driverless cars and we're not as squeamish about other things um and sometimes people will say well that's because we've created these we didn't necessarily need them so we've created them and you know there's no great rush and my answer to that is to your really important uh frame uh frame of reference point we in the US and especially in state of California we have rule of law by and large we have Road Rules and safe roads and people buy and large abide by the rules and when they don't they're enforced we have good hospitals we have good car repair we have car insurance um for most people but if you look at the risks of Road deaths in some developing countries and I will get this statistic wrong but just for order of magnitude I believe the World Bank published statistics a while ago that was something along the lines of 90% of the deaths from Road accidents happen in developing countries where there are 50% of the world's cars now that is the numbers are going to be wrong and certainly they're going to be out of date but it's just direction right just the idea that we need to be thinking when we think about Innovation and how squeamish we are about different risks or qu like the the question you're raising we need to be thinking about it uh I think from the perspective of other people's needs as well you talk about reducing suffering so if you're sitting in one of those countries where there isn't necessarily the same uh Road Safety roads Road quality isn't as good there isn't Medical Care rule of law is not necessarily enforced boy driverless cars are starting to look very different no doubt um yeah going back to that question that you said about um you're going to have uh sorry it wasn't a question it was something you said in the book about um autonomous weapons and it got me thinking about autonomous cars and autonomous weapons and that uh obviously when a car hits and kills somebody and let's say in fact I think in the book you give the example of somebody's daughter was hit and killed and I was just like oh God like that is so horrendous I can't imagine you get to rage at the driver MH and you get to be angry you know who to be angry with there's a person to point your blame at when it's an autonomous car you're robbed of that and also there's something unnatural about like a machine just killed my you know loved one that I think causes people great distress because I was thinking about let's say that we did uh autonomous weapons um and one goes off inappropriately and kills somebody Innocent but let's say that the overall number of innocent deaths have gone way down people I think are still going to have a hard time with that because again there's no human to push back on something feels super unnatural it feels like um when a human is in control you feel like you can appeal to their humanity and when a machine goes Ary it's like the state coming after you it's so inhuman and faceless and just like there's something really scary about that well there's a reason why a lot of AI codes of ethics and there are there is a proliferation of AI codes of Ethics out there from from different organizations to corporate codes of Ethics around AI there's a whole bunch of them but one thing many of them have in common is sort of a human checkpoint that there need to be sort of you know there needs to be a human being in the mix but another place that this comes out and I don't know if you think this is kind of a similar example but bot therapists what happens if a bot therapist gives really bad advice or fails to recognize someone who's at serious mental health risk or harming themselves is it the this machine or this algorithm or this whatever this thing is whether or not it's in a humanoid format um this app uh or is it the company uh is it the programmer is it The Regulators who haven't adequately looked at this and said look you can only use it for these things and you have to say these things about it like smoking kills on a cigarette package but it's the same kind of thing it's like this machine uh it's it it's very very very difficult because we don't feel like we there's somehow there's comfort as polarized as we are there's comfort in human beings being involved yeah I agree I want to see more technology I want to see it get that good and I think it will um I think there is inevitably going to be early mistakes that cause a lot of backlash and that makes me very sad because it just it is you know what it is but to your point okay imagine the worst case scenar or the person most negatively affected imagine that was me or my loved one it does like slow your rooll a bit there's no question but I yeah I'm very eager to see that happen because in the case of a therapist for instance a therapist like a human I should say can take in something like 13 points of data but your subconscious can take in like 150 so not to mention not everybody has access to a therapist or Financial Resources to pay for a therapist whereas some of these apps are incredibly accessible yep um so you get these robots that can take in just ungodly 700 points a th000 points of data whatever it is so they're just able to read way more so the like for instance robots can already detect skin cancer better than uh human doctor I think it will become very soon that they'll be able to read pet scans better um so that especially because it's just data and repetition machines are going to get insane at that I so favor um diagnostic tools I mean again there's a doctor that is going to interpret them there's a doctor that is going to make a decision about what to do with them so we very much have a human in the mix if it's done right it's not you know a machine is going to diagnose you a machine is going to tell you what to do but when when I see the data on diagnostics on you know Finding skin cancer but it's why would you why would you shut that door I wouldn't yeah I am I am super eager for that stuff it's really really impressive this has been a lot of fun where can people follow you so I have my ethics incubator site um and I'm also on Twitter but only for ethics matters you don't get sucked into drama no I don't get sucked into drama very wise um and um I'm also uh reach out to me on LinkedIn I love it amazing thank you so much oh my God thank you for being here this is wonderful wonderful everybody you need a frame of reference in your life if you want to do well read her books they are extraordinarily interesting they will get you thinking all the right things she doesn't preach it will peque your curiosity give you a framework with which to uh find your own framework if you will it's incredible speaking of things that are incredible if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace we are now hackable animals that we have the technology to decipher what you think what you want to predict human choices to manipulate human desires