Why You Should Feel Optimistic About The Future of the World | Nicholas Christakis

[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with Tom I am here with Nicholas Christakis before we started rolling we were speaking Greek it's it is so rare for me to get a chance to speak Greek so thank you for being kind and fighting through my my deep American accent but your senses were chromatically so that was good all right it's a step in the right direction yeah it's interesting because my wife is actually Cypriot so already I'm trying to show to fake a Greek accent and not sound like a super8 which my wife so this is coming from a Cypriot says they're sort of the the country people and already they themselves have an accent so yes it is not easy to be understood and it's really rare here in Los Angeles to find people that speak Greek it's a little bit easier in New York but without getting to loss on that tangent so one thing that I find just really fascinating in life is the notion of how much of us is born and how much of us is made and you sit at that intersection the book blueprint that you wrote about the evolution of culture which I'm not sure you would explain it that simply but I'll round it to that just to get it started what drew you to that notion of how much culture itself evolves and stacks on itself well that's that was certainly one motivation for the book and in fact as you mentioned I try to explain what are the evolutionary origins of our capacity for culture I mean why why are we a cultural animal at all I mean the and so this thing that allows us to be so variable from person to person and from place to place this capacity for variation which we take is so important is actually how to put this exactly is actually fixed so there's this kind of irony that that the very capacity we have to be so different from place to place is actually a capacity that unifies us that all human beings share this capacity for culture and so that one of the ways that if I could just step back even from that just a moment it's it's every animal almost every animal can learn from its environment so an animal you know little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims up to the light it will find food there and that's independent learning where an animal on its own can learn some animals learn socially so for example I see you put your hand in the fire and I learn you know you burn yourself so you've learned independently like the fish swimming you put your another fire you learn that you burn but I can watch you put your hand in the fire and now I get almost as much knowledge fire burns but I paint none of the price my hand isn't burnt or I can watch you eat red berries and you die and I'm like oh my god I'm not going to eat red berries and so that's an incredibly efficient form of learning social learning imitation observation of other members some animals learn socially we do it chimpanzees do it certain other animals species do it can learn socially from watching each other but we do something even more extraordinary is we teach each other things we set out to affirmative ly teach let me show you how to build a fire and that is exceedingly rare we do it again certain other primate species do it elephants do it which is kind of interesting and in certain ways not quite like we do and there's some thinking that certain dolphins species do it as well anyway that capacity for teaching and learning and for accumulating knowledge and spreading it across time and place is what gives us the capacity for culture so it's one of the tensions and irony's in the book and because as your listeners may know there's like the people think of like evolutionary biologists explaining human behavior or evolutionary psychologists explaining it and anthropologists and other people who are interested in in culture as like fighting with each other like and and this group is is interested in universals and what all humans have in common and this group is interested in variation and how every group is different actually you can unify those ideas if you realize that we evolved to have the capacity to be different now what is it so you're a super smart dude you write you said basically a book every 10 years why are you so drawn to this particular thing I've become obsessed with it because I grew up feeling that I was not as smart as the people around me that I was maybe gonna struggle to do the things that I wanted to do in life and that a couple life instances led me to really feel like I was never gonna go anywhere with my life and so that had me sliding towards depression and it was beginning to read about brain science and realizing actually hold on the same called brain plasticity actually when I was first started reading about it it was hotly debated and I just chose to believe that that was going to prove out to be true and so really leaned into that and and my life has changed radically as a result of me putting time and energy into skill acquisition what what has made this such an important obsession for you was it something in the way you were raised was it something you came across well first of all I became obsessed with the topic of this book for other reasons one was to try to make an extended argument about our common humanity and the fact that human beings around the world are there's more that unites us than divides us I saw it going in a problematic direction yeah because I thought for too long scientists and people on the street had been obsessed with the bad part of our nature and the evolution of of selfishness and violence and cruelty and mendacity and and warfare now but but but equally we evolved to be good we didn't just evolve to have these awful qualities we've all to have the capacity for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching which we already discussed and all these wonderful qualities and in fact these wonderful qualities I would argue are more powerful than the negative qualities they had to be otherwise we wouldn't be living socially in the first place in other words if every time I came near you you were violent to me or you filled me with false information about the environment you lied to me or or you you killed me I would be better off not a pro we would all be better off living you know as atomistic independent individuals but that's not what we do we live socially and so the question is how and why did we do that and what forces counteract these negative forces but I actually want to come back to the other thing you said about struggling with one's fate but we can come back to that if you want we can keep going on now I love that tactic but one thing I want to ask you about so I think most people watching this if they have any name recognition with you they will certainly know about the whole thing happened at Yale you were sort of the famous guy at the center of that the what I will call a sense of hysteria and were you already researching this book like here is a guy who is really intrigued by this notion of people are talking way too much about the negativity of what pulls us apart he starts because you're nine minutes an hour difference is everyone is interested people seem to think that what's important about us is is our sexual identity or our ethnicity or our immigration status or our racial background or our socio-economic class or all these differences between people which I don't negate that is to say I recognize that these differences exist but to me that's not what's interesting about human beings what's interesting is what we all have in common and in fact it's the it's the fact that we all have these things in common the fact that we are united in my view by our common humanity that allows us to bridge these divides in other words if you think that your life experience is dictated by your membership in groups you know whether you're a an Eagles fan for example or you know whether you're in the army or in the Navy or all of these distinctions that we make if you if you think that you're your identity in life or your feelings your thoughts are specified by your membership in groups then why on earth do you communicate or talk to me at all in other words you must believe as I do I hope people believe this that that we can we can be we can talk across these divides that you know that we are you know you know united by our common humanity and so so that's a philosophical principle but it's also as I discuss in the book a scientifically grounded set of ideas and yes I started this book in in 2009 and the events the Halloween costume events of 2015 you know reinforce although they were unpleasant very unpleasant events and and I think many people lost their minds I it didn't it didn't degrade my fascination and admiration for our species and affection for our species and so so I rushed to finish the book actually yeah that that is that brings up a few interesting things so one when I think about what I'm trying to do with my life so I'm trying to basically build the next Disney which most people don't see that side of what we're doing because it is so much harder and takes so much more time and I was literally to day asking myself like why am i spending so much time and energy on this it is so stressful it is it asks a lot of me both in terms of my time and energy but my finances like everything this is it's a huge undertaking and the answer that I've always come back to is hi it's the only way that I think I personally meet on bill you can influence culture like when I think about what are the things that really are going to determine the way that somebody thinks so my core thesis is right now your zip code determines it is more predictive of your future success in your IQ I find that like really troubling so what are the things that make your zip code so powerful it's going to be obviously the the way that the culture around you thinks that becomes the most problematic thing to put the finger on it and so I thought okay what are ways that I can influence that I can't change who your parents are I can't change who your friends are but I can change the way or I can change the ideas that get embedded in pop culture and because my background is storytelling I went to film school that was my obsession learning the language of story I just thought okay I have a passion for this I love it I understand it could it really have a meaningful impact on that is that part of why you wanted to get this book out is to change the conversation that's going on yes in part I wanted to get people focused on again what we have in common two aspects of that first of all our common humanity in the sense that we what we share in common but second when you hear the term our common humanity you typically think about good things I mean there's also bad parts of our common humanity but but we think about good things and I and I want people to be thinking that way I want you know like everyone most adults have had this experience of traveling to another place it could be another town or another state or another country and when you first go especially if you go to a far away place when you first get there you think oh my goodness this is so different people are dressed differently and they worship different gods and they smell differently and they eat different foods and their cities their language is different and you know everything is so different you think and then you spend some time there and you see that oh my goodness these people are just like me they they laugh at jokes they spend time with their families they have friends which they derive satisfaction from they cooperate with each other to achieve collective objectives there are all these fundamentally human things that we do as an animal because ironically ironically these most human things of us about us actually we can identify them in part because they're so animalistic because they evolved in our biology and one of the arguments for instance I make in the book is that if we can share the capacity for friendship with elephants because elephants also have friends they evolved independently from us to have friendships and elephants social networks look just like our social networks even though the last common ancestor we had with elephants about 90 million years ago didn't have social networks so the elephants independently by something known as convergent evolution just like those famous examples of the of the armadillos and the pangolins you know that independently come to look similar you know with but completely independently they have all these capacities so but you can involve not just physical traits to look similar you can evolve behavior so elephants and we independently evolved friendship and so one of the ironies is if we look at elephants and say oh my goodness elephants have friends too if we share this trait in common with elephants then we can share it with each other do you see that video of the elephant that I think pretty recent an elephant was friends with a dog the dog died and the elephant carried the dog back a mile and a half after being attacked by coyotes to lay it down outside the house and like show signs of continual mourning over the loss of that dog dude I thought that is fascinating I have not seen that video but the ability of elephants to feel grief which I also discuss in the book blueprint has been long known by indigenous people in Africa and long observed by scientists as well and it's a very it's a very interesting property and we we know that elephants can express something that looks just like grief and us and so why did elephants apparently independently evolved this capacity for grief well the capacity for grief is the flipside of the capacity to be attached to individual people so you might be sad if you see that a stranger has died but you won't grieve the death of that stranger if a person you know an identifiable unique individual dies you feel grief and so this capacity for grief evolved I believe and I argue in the book in parallel with the capacity to express individual identity so what do I mean by that why for instance I'll back up if I could why why do all of our faces look different I mean why don't we all just have a face that looks the same for for your kidneys to do their job all human kidneys to do their job properly should work the same physiologically they should be the same but for faces to do their job they should look different and what is the job of your face the job of your face is to communicate this is me not someone else you're trying to communicate your individual identity and not only that not only do we does and and this the genetics of this have recently been worked out or partially worked out like how our face has come all of our faces to be different we don't only have the capacity to signal our uniqueness we also have the capacity to recognize our uniqueness a large part of our brain is devoted to being able to look out at a crowd of people and uniquely identify every one of them even we can look out at people we've never met before and say these two are siblings so we can discern a connection between them by looking at their faces telephone I have that that same gas ability yes yes yes interesting so yes so elephants have identity and incidentally so do dolphins and and and of course many primates so they are unique individuals now the reason for the evolution of this capacity to signal and detect individual identity is that paradoxically it's because we live socially if if you're gonna live socially you need to have a way of tracking who have you had sex with where you cooperated with no seriously who is your offspring like you want to feed your child not someone else's child so you need to be able to tell the difference among all of these other people who do you owe a favor to who can you call on for support if you are in a battle so all of these qualities rely on these social qualities rely on our capacity to signal our individual identity and then comes with that the capacity for grief so you mourn when when Suzy or Tommy dies you don't mourn when some unnamed person dies because they are unique to you and you have a connection to them so so this is grief anyway so I'm not surprised at all about that they and also elephants into the incidentally of another fascinating trait is they seem to hate animals that eat carrion so they shoo away if they find a dead animal on the savanna and they're vultures there they will run at the vultures inch or the hyenas and they will chase them away they they really don't like those kinds of animals they apparently think they're awful and they have been known to help humans in distress so they can tell the difference an elephant can tell the difference between a human that is sick and a human that is not and help a human that is sick incidentally dolphins have been known to do this you know to their famous stories going back thousands of years many many documented in modern times some of this is discussed in the book - where dolphins will rescue drowning sailors and and take them along distance to shore dude I used to ever watch that show flipper yeah a little bit yeah I loved that surprise that that whole notion of it you know the dolphin being there to help people out like that is how I grew up thinking about dolphins is that they had very human-like traits the ability to understand the stress the willingness to rescue somebody pretty interesting I didn't know that about elephants especially when they're so notorious for I would assume if they detect that you are a threat that they are so devastatingly vicious is the word I would have used before you said that that they can that they'll go on the attack with humans aren't they one of the number one killers of humans in terms of animals ancestrally there was no conflict between before we developed serious weapons we there were group hunts for Mastodon and elephant predecessors a long time ago so we occasionally would hunt we have large groups to people that's dangerous for us to hunt an elephant was not an easy thing but there was no like intrinsic conflict between our ancestor and given the ivory trade and given the conversion of land to agriculture the elephants and humans come into conflict and an unarmed human of course is nothing against an elephant and you see occasionally in India you know people go running when they see an elephant I mean it's not a joke and but they're peaceful I mean they don't intrinsically attack us not at all and but they sometimes engage in cooperating or this goes back to our discussion of culture so elephants will teach each other how to raid human crops and they know for example to do the raid on on nights when there's a new moon and they and they and they and yes and they and they have special knowledge about which crops are appealing and where they are located which they remember and transmit so they'll form parties to go like hunting parties to go on a dark night and then to get you know the desired food of course the humans don't like this so because you know the elephants will trash the whole field but um no it's quite remarkable what they can do anyway that's discussed in the book - one of the things that um I I want to go deeper into is is grief man like grief is who that is a crazy part of the human experience and when you see footage of somebody throwing themselves on a casket and wailing and you know so intimately that sense of just devastating loss like I'm never going to be able to go on from this even having the concept of dying from a broken heart is is pretty intense that that whole thing man about humans is is [ __ ] crazy and what we will do to avoid it how far we will go when we're in the grips of it yeah it's pretty intense if you've never yeah if you've never had grief first of all I was a hospice doctor for many years so I took care of people who were dying and I've personally experienced grief my mother died when I was 25 she'd been sick my whole childhood is that part of why you became a hospice doctor yeah of course of course it's another whole log story we'd go on that tangent if you want in fact I already I'm remembering two tangents ago I eventually I might circle back to you but but um no I think that's that feeling it's a very physical feeling like your your chest aches and and and you want to you want to UM hurt yourself you know pull out your hair and why the [ __ ] is that that's so true I have literally never put that into a thought before why on earth do we do that we we don't know without self-injury covering yourself with ash not eating it's a very complicated thing and and and and the thing is typically human beings don't experience grief very often that's why it's so distinctive it's not like just bad sadness it's a different feeling and while most people have are familiar with sadness and you know anger and depression and you know human beings have these feelings grief is a rare emotion in part again because it's tied to particular people and also too permanent so for example right now during the corona virus pandemic incidentally I'm writing another book about this called Apollo's arrow that's coming out in October but um that's faster time for you I'm impressed yes I very unexpectedly decided to do it but there's a lot of grief related to this not just because people have lost their lives and when you and I are speaking about a hundred thousand Americans have lost their lives that means probably about a million Americans know that those people and are grieving and probably 10 million Americans are aware of someone who has died but as the pandemic claims more and more lives more and more people will either know someone who died and be grieving that person or be aware let us say know personally not in other words I'm making a distinction between you're intimate with someone your family member a close friend versus oh I know this person and all my goodness they died so that's gonna change in our society over the coming year or two as the pandemic becomes continues and and grief is gonna be part of it but we don't just have grief for the loss of life we also have grief for the loss of our way of life right there's a sense in which some things have been permanently lost people who graduated from high school and college this spring did not have commencements people have lost their jobs people have lost their careers they've lost the opportunities to get have a wedding you know like they had wanted planned a wedding and these are non-trivial losses and sometimes you can think of these as eliciting grief because one of the qualities of grief is that the you it's focused on something distinctive and something that is basically permanently gone right like that's why you feel grief that it'll never come back and so I think there's gonna be a lot of grief as part of this pandemic as well man I'd I'd love to know if you have insights into when I think about grief I there the the the wailing the chest pounding the hair-pulling there when I I literally sit here and think about what that feels like there is this need to move to do something to know like if there's some association between movement or aggression the the it feels like to your notion of permanence it feels like I I so cannot deal with the fact that this is permanent that I need to to change the state of something else I need to change my own state like the the notion there was this book I read in high school the breakers or something like that was about people who wanted to destroy and tear things down and I remember reading it going I [ __ ] get this like I get the impulse you have to break something too but I don't know that it's it I didn't resonate with it in the sense of I want to watch it burn I resonated with it in the sense of like changing its state like just dramatically getting your hands in it breaking it there is something freakishly cathartic about that and I don't know if there's you know back to my central obsession with you and your work is 50% you're born with and 50% is changeable and it feels like that collision of something in your subconscious is like coughing up into your conscious mind and the only way to deal with it is through movement which obviously as a species we've been I mean some say that we have a brain specifically for movement well first of all generally in grief it's not a period of movement so usually people when they grieve stay home they might stay in bed their their emotions become their motions become slowed don't you should do you think that we pass through though a more a violent phase of that in the beginning that certainly is my experience you know it's possible so yes so there's a rage component too often at the imminent loss so often people for example if their if their loved one is sick and dying they will feel a kind of rage about that and and and and you also incidentally see that a lot when people you know when people engage in mass killings in our society it's often because they feel hopeless and they want to burn at all you know which is a kind of you know extreme manifestation of what we're discussing but but generally after the death of the person most people do not but not to say everyone but most people in my experience the grieving is a kind of period of subdued expenditure of effort and many religions of course for example in Judaism you sit Shiva for instance in Islam there's a lot of traditions about how you wash the body and rituals funeral rituals and so forth and Christianity of course the same so there are many Hinduism Buddhism there are all these religions have have rituals that also partly are directed at at supporting the person who's suffering and grieving but also reconnecting them to the broader society because you know a tie has been cut so there's a lot of visitation and and at an attention for example in chimpanzees when when when one chimpanzees loved one dies other chimpanzees will come and groom the grieving chimp more and there'll be more you know social engagement in an attempt to reconnect a person to their to their and and and incidentally there been some there's been some observations in chimps about body washing like like like mothers of chimps that babies that die will tenderly prepare the body of their baby the same thing has been seen incidentally in killer whales where mother killer whales will try to carry the body of their dead offspring for a long time and move it to the surface to breathe and so forth so maybe you see a black fish yes I did oh good lord the part where they the guy is recount and he seems like a tough nut the tough nut grizzled guy talking about you know back in the 70s or whatever when they captured him and they were showing the footage and he was she breaks down crying talking about how the whales were screaming and they wouldn't leave as they were harvesting young and I was like oh God like that is yes yes that's an excellent example that's exactly right and old whalers would do awful things I mean they were whalers but you know and we you know in the intervening centuries we've come progressively to be more humane about animals I think is terrific and incidentally more humane about each other to as many people have argued over the last couple hundred years generally speaking the the moral sphere has widened you know it used to be just us and now more and more groups count as being important which is good eventually including animals the Whalers would do things like like a kill the young calves or injured the young calves so that it would draw other animals together and there's one awful story I can't remember if I put it in the book and I don't remember where I got it but these the orcas are very smart and they were being printed there was a pod of orcas and they were being predator with harpoons in a boat like a modern humans not into it hunters and uh and the orcas seem to form a plan where the the females and the children went down one branch of a river and the male's tried to draw the humans away from their how to put it there women [ __ ] you know and young unbelievable like they clearly know you know so yeah I mean it's it's it's you know these are these these these other animals these sentient social intelligent long-lived all of those qualities go together animals are very similar to us in these same fundamental ways ironically that define our common humanity I don't know we got we just got just one grief and I forgot how we got on down this tangent well even before we leave that one thing I would love to understand why did you stop being a hospice doctor which I I could not fathom doing for even a day so you were about me gonna get in well I am for many reasons some personal some administrative or practical or professional so I I practice as a home hospice physician in Chicago from 1995 I finished my medical training in 1995 when I was about 33 and then I started at the University of Chicago and then I work as a home hospice physician taking care of people on the south side of Chicago home based hospice so I would on Saturday afternoons I would go to people's homes of people who were dying and take care of them and their families as best I could I was part of a hospice called horizon hospice in Chicago even though I was at the University of Chicago Medical Center and then in 2001 I moved to Harvard and then I I worked there as a palliative medicine physician initially on the scale of Medicine Service a hospice service at Mass General Hospital and then I moved to the Mount Auburn Hospital and about 10 years ago now so it would have been what was it exactly it was or maybe 2010 or something like that I I finally stopped seeing patients I did it for a number reasons first of all I had I had taken on some additional responsibilities at Harvard in fact I was the so called master of just like at Yale with a Halloween it's spent at Harvard with greater success I had been the so-called master of one of the houses so called it at Harvard for for four years or so and that was important and heavy duty and so I didn't have time to continue my clinical practice my laboratory was taking off we were doing a lot more science in my lab and it needed my attention and then I had some logistic issues like traveling around the city it was just was spending so much of my time going from place to place oh so that's one of the reasons I gave it up another reason was that um and this will take a minute to explain so when I so when I first started practicing hospice medicine in 1995 there wasn't even a specialty in a board certification yet in hospice care and the care of Americans then as now was abysmal so you may your listeners may not know this but something like half of Americans died in pain we're the richest nation on earth whoa and half of Americans die in pain between 40 and 70 percent then and still and it and and we have other awful things so most of us want to die at home many of us most of us cannot you know I you know many of us have extended hospitalizations before we die which is unnecessary or or or other kinds we have a lot of suffering before we die and so I was you know very angry about this and very concerned about this and I my initial part of my career I did a lot of research about how to improve end-of-life care in our society but I was all practicing hospice physician but in 1995 the Maine patients I was asked to see were patients let's say in their 60s and 70s and 80s who were dying of solid tumors like colon cancer or breast cancer or prostate cancer or lung cancer that was metastatic and you need to understand that most of the time 95% of the pain that we feel is what's called somatic pain when a tissue in our body is affected and the nerves detect the pain and tell our brain this part hurts there's a different kind of pain called neuropathic pain that's when the nerve itself is affected and the nerve is screwed up not the tissue that the nerve is detecting but the nerve itself let's say is being invaded by a tumor it's called neuropathic pain so the patient's I was taking care of in my er in my 30s were older than me they were dying of somatic pain which you can easily treat with morphine and uh and I could help the families and the patients easily and enormous ly so I could go to a patient's bedside things were a mess no one had talked to them about the fact that they were dying no one had prepared the family the patient was in pain I could give them morphine and just sit there and if you gave it intravenously it's unbelievable you just just the morph no it's unbelievable the patient's in agony and they want to die because they're in so much pain and you relieve their pain and I'm like actually not so bad Wow and and I and you feel so powerful and so physician Lee you know you feel like you're doing some good in the world using this very simple drug and of course they're more complicated tricks up your sleeve because often pain is very easy to treat but there are other symptoms believe it or not like constipation or dyspnea shortness of breath is awful at the end of life or itching which is very hard to treat to really affect people a lot and they're miserable from these symptoms and those are harder to treat but anyway so typically I would be taking care of someone much older than me with a somatic pain and with a a family situation that required me to prepare them from like let's say a natural end to a decently long life okay 1995 that's my practice well what happened in the intervening 10 years or 15 years is progressively a lot of these principles got filtered back to other doctors in the hospital so other doctors became better at using morphine prior to 1995 doctors were afraid to use it they didn't know how to use it they thought if they gave the patient a milligram or two of morphine they would die just wrong you know they didn't know they were afraid to talk to patients about death and dying so they would call us to do it because we were the experts so we would just go and basically sit and listen which was you know the skill that's required so but but eventually those skills moved correctly and wonderfully moved to the rest of the medical system pain became a fifth vital sign up until that point we had heart rate temperature respiratory rate and blood pressure were the four vital signs it was a big move in the 1990s to add a fifth one pain so at the foot of your bed the nurse is recording five vital signs now more like how much pain are you in and the idea there was if you ask the patient every day are they in pain they can't tell you it's an eight out of ten three days in a row and you don't do anything about it you know you you have to address it so so all of that stuff filters back so what happened as a result is my personal practice changed and I got older so I went from being 35 to being 45 and now I was being asked to see a 32 year old woman younger than me dying of metastatic ovarian cancer metastatic to her a sacral plexus the nerves at the base of your spine having neuropathic pain which I couldn't easily treat and three small children at home so how can I tell her help her to accept death you know so the caseload became much much much harder honestly and do you talk to somebody like that about death I mean that that is when when I heard that you were a hospice doctor I thought dude you are meeting people at the worst period in their life obviously their family's worst period I mean this is like it would be hard to go home my laughs yes yes well many many professions have that you know police firemen nurses oncology nurses burn burn unit nurses you know people who coroner's you know they're many professions in our life in our society which involve contact with with sadness and pain and and and challenging you know very challenging situations or soldiers for goodness sakes you know who return from battle can have PTSD and so on so so it is difficult but you of course you're human and you are entitled it's your job you know and this is what you signed up for and you then are entitled also to go home and have a normal day and and be pissed off while you wait in line at the post office like anyone else or be happy because you're hugging your kids like anyone else so yes you can compartmentalize and most people do some people do burn out in all the professions I mentioned and many others and then they switch professions you know it's it's too much for them after a while so you said like listening go ahead yeah I was just gonna say you said that listening was a key part of talking to somebody about that is it just that is there a universal thing that people want to talk about is that they just need to to be heard to be with somebody or are there actual things you need to impart know many people want to tell their life story near the end of life this is a very common experience and they want to talk to their families about it and they sometimes they want to talk to their health care providers about it and sometimes it's it interesting I mean there's some law among hospice nurses I don't know maybe I don't know how your reach is and how many hospice nurses are listening to this but if when they hear this they're all going to nod their heads and that you know that often it's it's a bad prognostic sign you know the patients will be not doing so well and then they'll perk up and they'll be very chatty and they'll tell you about their life story and then the next day they die and and you know i I've never seen any formal scientific study of this phenomenon but I certainly have experienced it myself and it's certainly a lure in hospices that often when the person engages in that kind of life review especially if they were failing and then they kind of perk up to do it it's like a sign of death coming so um no I think people first of all people generally like to be heard I mean you know I don't know if you were talking earlier about your Cypriot wife you know oftentimes or I don't know if you've seen that viral video about it's the nail you know like the nail in the woman's head and the guy is just trying to say it's the nail and she just wants to be she just wants to be heard right yes and I mean if that story is very gendered but men are very similar you know you you just want your partner to listen to you you you know it's my wife and I will literally start conversations by saying either I just want to be heard right now or I actually want you to solve it because we found if you don't set that out right at the beginning you are in for a world of hurt yes yes good marriages will involve this capacity either explicitly or implicitly and that's exactly right and oftentimes just five minutes of listening is all your partner needs you know they just want to share with you their problem in a shitty day at work and they just want to tell you about their day and it was awful and there's nothing you can do to fix it and they don't want you to fix it they just want you to know they had a shitty day at work and and then you and you listen to them and then and it's just such a simple thing to do anyway it's a very valuable skill I learned this the importance of listening from a magnificent doctor at the Mount Auburn Hospital when I was at medical school man by the name of Matthew Carmody just an extraordinary human being and a magnificent clinician a master clinician so when I was still in medical school Matthew dr. Carmody taught me about how to do this yeah that the ability to listen I think is already pretty extraordinary and I would imagine that part of being good at that is also being able to give people straight honest talk there's somebody in my life right now who is dying of pancreatic cancer very rapidly talking about from diagnosis he's I would say nearing end of life at this point has is no longer pursuing treatment and I think he was diagnosed like two or three months ago I just post the kickoff of kovat and the just the the rapid bodily changes the dramatic loss of weight is it's really shocking and to know like to try to run the experiments which is where this has been interesting in my own life to try to run the experiment when I'm doing something to think what will I think about this at you know the end of my life is this something that I'm going to regret is not something that I'm going to regret and you begin to realize that there really are like you you might think that oh that won't apply to me but there's so many things that just seem Universal whether it's you know wanting to be heard out or whether it's needing to sort of come to terms with things that you regret it is it's interesting but you need that straight talk to understand what is happening so that you can begin that process like is that something that doctors struggle with is that an important part of the process to just let people know what they can expect well my first book was on this topic it was called Death Foretold prophecy and prognosis and medical care and it was a whole book about prognostication and the formulation of prognosis which is the first problem can the doctors formulate an accurate and reliable prognosis forget about whether they tell anybody and the second are the chances of communication can you are they willing and able to communicate a prognosis and of course many doctors misrepresent the truth they either sugarcoat it and they say everything is fine when it's not or sometimes they do the opposite they do something called hanging crepe they will say the situation is more dire than they think it is because then if the patient does well the patient will think oh my god what a great doctor you know I'm living longer than the doctor predicted which is incidentally this has been discussed for thousands of years in the practice of medicine so um what's the no n approach because I actually get why you well well what I would do I mean I don't know the right approach first of all what I would do is I always at used to ask when I was seeing patients I would ask them I would say something like this and I wouldn't say it as fast or as callously so ordinarily I would say it in a very slower I would sit down at the patient's bedside and I would indicate with my body language I was there for the duration till they were they were done with me it was much then Oh guys I would hold their hands of course so interesting oh goodness yes and III had of course a personal your physician you examine patients all the time and but we're getting weird societally about touch man I am way worried about touching people that I don't know very very well yeah that's a whole other topic but in a professional situation you know where of course you would sit down at the bedside and and it's very normal and human to hold her hand or we often I would be my patients I would have examined them or whatever but um so you communicate with your body language that you're there for the duration and and then I would say something like and I wouldn't say it quite as rapidly or as directly but the gist of it would be something like people vary in their desire for information about what's likely to happen to them some people want a lot of information and some people don't want very much information at all what kind of patient do you think you are and and they might say you know actually doc I don't want to know anything you know percentages do more people want to know or more people most people in our society say yes but it also varies and it's ethnically stratified so there are many many people for example of Hispanic descent or or Asian descent who say talk to my children you know I don't want to discuss that so um so there's a lot of variation there's some variation most people do want to know and then you also have to recognize it's not a one-off thing you know you if you've developed a relationship with a patient you're gonna see them again and there are ideas about what they want to know will have changed and their clinical circumstances will have changed so you can discuss this with them at some future point anyway and then the question is how do you communicate the bad news and there's a magnificent book by Johns Hopkins University Press it's called how to break bad news by a Buckman is the guy's last name can't remember his first name is Robert or Richard right now anyway it's an incredible book and it's actually good in life in general its intended for physicians and nurses on how to break bad news but actually it's just good in life in general if you want to your teenagers want to tell your your father or mother that you crash the car how do you break the bad news there's like good tips in there I'd like how to do this and they're number of Principles one of for example is firing a warning shot so you say you know i i'd like to talk to you about some some some some serious matters or you know I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news so you fire a warning shot you know you don't just deliver the bad news you allocate time like I said earlier you um also it's crucial in the hospice care and caring for patients that what a very important thing is is a commitment to non abandonment so both doctors and patients especially but doctors too one of the reasons they try they don't have these conversations is they're afraid that the doctor the patient the doctor will abandon the patient if the patient is dying let's say they're they're worried that the doctor will just give up on them so I was always very careful to say you know I have this bad news and I would deliver the bad news and and then I would say but I promise I will not abandon you and there's much that we can do to address your condition even if we cannot stop its course so you communicate to the patient non abandonment support there are things you can do empathy sympathy interest right there's lots that's humanly available you know even at the end of life so anyway we're off on multiple tangents now this is old work I used to do a long time ago yeah and I came across Death Foretold when I was doing research on you and I just I find that part of your story so interesting and so Raleigh human and one thing I'm always trying to do when I research somebody is to actually understand them to understand their worldview and just the the hospice thing which is is an act of service so brand like I don't know that that can be overstated I know you may not perceive it that way you actually did it but from the outside like that seems patently true and then when I go into what you're doing from the looking at culture but more importantly having ended up writing that book as a way to try to get us to as a society to focus on the good and not the bad good is even in the title right the evolution of a good society it I can feel you trying to help and be useful which I find particularly interesting very kind of you to say that honestly it's a very kind thing you just said to me thank you it is I think it seems accurate look we've never met before now but it just seems to hold true and everything that I've watched and read about you leads me to that which I find interesting what motivates people to do what they do and to try as hard at the things that they try and this seems like a really interesting period in time for somebody who focuses on the things you focus on when I think about colonizing Mars right you write extensively about shipwrecks which okay that may be one of your unintentional communities but you also talk about commune so you know looking at what's gonna happen in Mars is interesting looking at what's going on in AI so yeah I do some of the robotics work in my lab too but but uh we do some work on social robotics and and and what we called um artificial intelligence but the the Mars stuff when I was AI I'm 58 and I thought I would live long enough to see a human on Mars you know when I was a boy I thought I would live to see that it was so important to me and I I don't think I'm gonna live to see it and I'm so sad about it because it's clear we're gonna colonize Mars and I suspect in a hundred years 200 years when we have sort of colonies going it'll be replaying of the new and old world the colonists won't like having to send resources back to the you know to earth and they want independent government and all of that stuff I'm convinced will play itself out I think we will eventually terraform Mars I think it's inevitable there is I mean there's technology to do it you know take time and it's expensive now but we'll get better and better at this and you know initially we'll live in in the bubbles that we construct there and anyway that's all gonna happen eventually but I would love to at least live long enough for people to to you know to witness a human being get getting to Mars and I saw I saw the Martian I've watched it a half dozen times it's and you know with Matt Damon and you know it's it's just it's so deeply moving that movie and imagining him on that surface as the first person he goes everywhere I go I'm the first person ever to have been here you know anyway I thought that movie and the book was magnificent it is a very fascinating thing the whole idea of humans striking out to have that adventurous spirits we got to do that but then understanding and being able to provide oh by the colonies yes so in fact I had in the book but I took it out I the NASA has four years looked at shipwrecks as models for what would happen in an isolated colony and and in fact there been other experiments for example that I discuss in the book the scientists that's winter over on the South Pole small communities of about 30 scientists every year that winter over there so you know how do these people get along and so I discussed the shipwrecks extensively in blueprint and I had a whole section on the colonization of space but I cut it out because the book was already too long maybe I'll publish it one day oh man that would be really interesting and I'd love to know is NASA talking about things like Pitcairn and where I'll say that was a the everything has to do with the exact people that go for sure and your breakdown of Shackleton and I've read the book endurance it's [ __ ] nominal talking about how he that they were gone to like two years or some guys raised the amount of time but he was an extraordinary leader and the men were at an extraordinary spirit and they were able to survive no one died it's unbelievable unbelievable like people when you read the book you like there's no way like when you because you're reading it you know in in a relatively short amount of time so you don't think about the fact that two years is a long [ __ ] time to be wet and to hold like it went cold and not know if you're a better diet yes my favorite my favorite story in the book which I stumbled on is the story of the Grafton in the enrico on the South Auckland island in 1864 so it was almost a perfect natural experiment two shipwrecks on the same time on the same island never encounter each other totally different outcomes so on the southern part the island the grafton Rex five men wash ashore they are they survived for a couple of years and all make it off alive on the in Rico nineteen men wash ashore all but three of them die and they're very different stories and and what they did and how they did it you know was wonderful for me to read and III I was even tempted to write a whole book about just that contrast but I you know I decided to just tell that brief versions of their stories which are amazing even the brief version was really fascinating in terms of so from my own memory of reading Shackleton or endurance how one he was trying to and you talked about this in the book he was giving people an opportunity to teach each other so that one day you'd be hi one minute Lowe the next and so created what you refer to as Oh God mild hierarchy yeah so I the the notion of we need a hierarchy but if it gets too crazy then people revolting and then the other guy was all about every man for himself and it became cannibalistic and as and pretty crazy yes yes Shackleton did lots of things that were very interesting and his men did it wasn't just him he was an extraordinary leader but the men too were you know very good with each other and this notion of setting up schools so a lot of the shipwrecks that did well were were ones in which they set up a school where they taught each other things and as you as you summarized what happens in a school is that today I'm teaching you Norwegian tomorrow you're teaching me algebra so we take turns being pupil and an teacher and so it first of all it stimulates our minds and but more importantly it kind of keeps the hierarchy you know on its toes so I'm not like despotically ruling over you and so many of the successful wrecks and isolated parties had this quality of of teaching which is also connects with the other theme of the book which we opened our conversation with today about teaching so I want to talk about Pitcairn and how it relates to what they're doing in Antarctica so Pitcairn which is the aftermath of mutiny on the bounty right I'm guessing so they end up basically allocating women to the men and it turns into like this whole disaster as some of the women died and so they yes the men are taking women from other men and it devolves into basically all-out water they all hide one man survives they kill each other everyone else dies yes except with all the men die but yes so taking that notion and running with it especially and I'm asking this of somebody knowing that you do work or at least you you understand the world of like sex robots and things like that how I do not do any research on sex robots I have done work on human robot interactions but all right fair enough fair enough you you do work in AI as well right yes I do okay so sort of a inevitable outcome that I have heard you speak on is you know where this goes with sex robots and and what is interesting to me is in how this all comes back to the culture that we end up creating and this moment in history being particularly an interesting moment for culture could end up going we may be approaching a cultural event horizon beyond which we cannot see and we don't know sort of where this is going yeah so bringing it back as NASA or whoever starts thinking about colonies on Mars and looking at what's going on already in Antarctica do they take sexual relations into consideration okay so first of all I don't know I'm sure NASA is discussing and thinking about this if they send because even in the olden days they used to think in a very sort of heterosexist way they would imagine that if they send same-sex parties up they would be no sex but of course you can have sex you could have sex with the same-sex person so that doesn't necessarily solve the problem or the issue of sexual relations so I think an ass I'm sure is considering this and may even send up some couples I'm not privy to their discussions although now that you mentioned and I'm curious what they're thinking is it's probably some government report that one could obtained that if any listener finds or no such report they should email it to me I'm curious to read what what NASA says about sexual relations during space exploration and I note with interest that that the astronaut I think it's Mark Kelly is running for no it's it's his brother I can't remember who's running for a Senate in Arizona right now anyway sex robots let's go back so uh so the issue there the intellectual issue there is we are in the midst of creating as you suggested what I call hybrid systems of humans and machines so what we're doing is is we're creating groups of people into which we've interspersed forms of artificial intelligence like online you can imagine a network of humans and some BOTS and we've done some research on this topic in fact in my lab or in the real world you could imagine humans and a machine like a physical you know humanoid robot for example and we've also done some work with that in my lab in partnership with Brian's Castle Eddie's a lab at Yale he's a robot assist at Yale and what we're interested in is not how do we optimize the AI or the robots to interact with you we're not interested in human robotic dyadic interactions what we're interested instead is how does the addition of robots to a system change human human interactions does the addition of artificial intelligence into our midst change how we treat each other let me give you a couple of examples the simplest one first imagine that you are devising an Alexa device or some kind of a robotic as a digital assistant and you're the manufacturer of this device you probably don't want to make the device require a lot of politeness on the part of its owners for example you you don't have to say excuse me Alexa I'm very sorry to interrupt you you know could you please do me a favor I need to know what the weather is you could just say Alexa weather and the obedient device responds okay now the problem is if I'm only thinking about how you interact with the device this might be fine but now I imagine that your children use this device and they learn to be rude and then they go to the playground and they're rude to other children okay so the human human interactions have been modified by the addition of this type of robotic equipment or intelligence into our midst okay so that's a simple example of the idea that I'm discussing with you these hybrid systems of humans and machines how do the human human interactions change as a result of the addition of the machines now the sex robot case is very interesting because experts and that's not me have looked at this topic and have come to different conclusions some people think that the addition of sex robots will degrade human human sexual interactions because they think that once you become accustomed to having sex with a robot you are not going to be able to have enjoyable sex with another human being you know you're gonna be a why do they say that I'm not even saying I disagree by the way but I'm just curious maybe the robot is extremely obedient and you don't need to worry about it feel robot climax is for example you know you're just very selfish when you have sex with a robot and those are not good qualities but doesn't that so that gives me pauses somebody who's outside the world and has really studied this I naturally gravitate towards your opinion which is at a purely biological level 50% the part that you can't change is just you want to be good you want to connect so what I hear in that argument is there is actually a collision between that part of you that wants friendship that longs for connection that hungers for those the the rewards nature has given us for being a social animal right that had to be Pleasant so it feels good is colliding with something else the the desire to be selfish for things to be facile than ever and that that that facile and selfishness is actually winning out over the other side which is there's something rings true about that but is distress yeah I see the connection you're making although that's not where I would have taken the argument as this early and if you'll allow me I'll come back to that in a moment so I just want to finish this first moment please because other people say no the addition of sex high functioning realistic sexual robots into our society will be a good thing because it'll allow people for example to become better lovers they'll practice with a robot and then they'll have better sex with humans or it will allow them to do experiment with things that are prohibited like you know threesomes or same-sex encounter if they you know you you you you want to experiment with the same sex experience but you don't actually want to do with a human maybe you'll try it out with a robot first kind of thing so another you know want to let whatever people might be willing to do things with robots they wouldn't do with humans so there's a group of people and I can't remember if I discuss this in the book or not it was this in blueprint I don't remember maybe I do discuss I've heard you talk and read the book so sometimes I forget what I heard in the book I'm going to speak about suffragette I can't remember either right now but anyway so so I don't know actually how it will work but what I can tell you is that the addition of forms of robotic intelligence into our midst are going to have an effect for better worse or both on human human interactions and it behooves us to think about this and in fact in an article I had in the Atlantic maybe that's where I made this argument I talked about how we might need a new kind of social contract basically with machines like if we're gonna design machines these machines need to obey what I call the social suite in blue in the book blueprint this this corpus of qualities that we evolved to be able to live together we would not want to engineer machines that don't obey those principles it's like it's like you know it's like era like Isaac Asimov's it's like a fourth law you know you don't want robots to do stuff that harms our society you know it's not just that you don't want them to you know harm humans by any act or omission you and you don't just want to teach them to obey humans you actually want them not to harm society by anything they do so anyway that's the whole hybrid systems argument on your point about how this intersects with the other ideas we've been discussing about innate tendencies to good and and bad and selfishness and generosity I mean I think the answer is that you know we have both of those qualities all human beings do and our societies do too and my claim is not that these vices don't exist my claim is merely that the virtues in toto are more powerful than the vices so I haven't done I haven't thought a lot about this so I'll be thinking out loud here definitely punch holes in my thinking if you see them this is we're talking where I come out on this so it seems to me that there a difference between happiness and fulfillment just to give words to it yes I'll define happiness is as amazing but very ephemeral it's temporary so I often refer to that as the bowl of ice cream so a bowl of ice cream is amazing my best friend one of my closest friends I have two best friends his is Dan Gilbert who wrote the book stumbling unhappiness he's a famous psychologist so I the bowl of ice cream in a bowl if there's a bowl of cherries on the cover of his book but anyway go on unfortunately I have allergic reaction to cherries so cherries to me are yes so it's ready right but there are second-order consequences and so just going in on the bowl of ice cream isn't necessarily gonna make you feel good and I would say over time it actually ends up making people feel badly about themselves so then you've got fulfillment on the other side which is often born of suffering and doing difficult things going to the gym everyday not eating a bowl of ice cream like those things will end up making you feel good about yourself serving people like you did in hospice it's like man if at the end of your life you don't look back on that and say [ __ ] I feel so good that I did that like I have served these people and however your mom is intertwined in that if there's some element of I have helped people in a way that she wasn't helped or whatever obviously we haven't discussed that but like that to me it had to have been hard but I have to believe that like in moments of crisis like that's something that you can lean on and say yo I I have done that it's a beautiful thing yes and and and builds part of who you are and how you see yourself and what you value so forth so when I think about the friction in the human-animal between doing what is easy doing what a selfish doing what is quick I get the impulse that I'll call that sort of falls into the happiness bucket but then over here like if if you only live here if you are demanding of your sex robot and your sex robot has no sense of like doing well by culture and society at large it's like that will end up you even if you only ever have sex with your sex robot which I did not expect to go this deep on this conversation but even if you only have sex with your sex robot you won't feel the things that you could feel over on the other side so even though momentarily it makes sense to be selfish and all of that after a while that internal feeling that you have will end up being I think one of isolation and loneliness and all of that because there is no sense of partnership and it ultimately becomes that sense of partnership that's more meaningful so first of all my train of thought I was just trying to look up for a moment because I'm I went to high school with one of the key figures in Westworld the actor who in Westworld which not jeffrey wright oh Jesus yeah you went to college every right I did and he's a wonderful man and I can't believe if he hears this it is ya know easy in yeah yeah so the whole thing in in in West world I forgot how we got onto this now why was I trying to remember we were talking about sex robots I'm saying happiness versus fulfillment so don't just be selfish even with your sex robot yeah but I mean the but I mean that whole film that whole movie that hold a TV program explore some of the themes were discussing not so much or even just a sex robot issue but more generally you know what does it mean to be human and and actually it explores you know in humanity you know how you know I mean they're very deep themes being explored in that movie and I and I think Jeffrey is just a phenomenal actor in general especially though in that but anyway I'm sorry I've lost the the we're getting the part of the conversation where now we're like so many tangents on so many tangents I've had a wonderful conversation with you and it's the range the range is deploying my mind right now but I don't want to end on the topic of sex robots but I can't remember we're talking about a more profound topic what I'm what I'm trying to get to the sex robot to me is is just one sort of thing that shows how we have to think about culture we evolved because we're in this weird moment where we're gonna have a lot of decisions to make whether it's what do we program ai which i think is that's that's what I think we should talk about now because what's interesting to me is you think about robotics and you think about artificial intelligence is you have to give I'll use very layman's terms forgive me I'm sure these are all along but you have to give the AI an impetus you have to give it a desire you have to give it a goal there has to be something that it's going to make decisions based on like when you think about humans I'm sure you're aware of this if you destroy the human ability to feel an emotion which of course some people have specific brain damage that leaves them without the ability to feel emotions they cannot make a decision they can sit there and tell you you know if we had fish for lunch like it would be good because you know it's a lean source of protein and I think that's important I've had a lot of beef recently but you know if we have beef it's actually a great source of fat now and they they can't do it because there's no emotion for them to push them in one direction or another so with AI I think ultimately we're gonna have to decide like what are those things by which it makes decisions like what are its goals why not hurt a human right you have to program that into it yeah I mean I think yeah we're far from having that kind of capacity with artificial intelligence don't you see that as an inevitable place where it will get yes yes I think eventually will will be doing that and I have a partnership with a group called them that did this very famous set of experiments called the moral machines project some some listeners may have done you can go to this website and do these little tests where there's a robot driving a car in the car it has to make an ethical choice and you have to help program the robot by expressing your views about what kind of lives should be gained or lost so it's how do we endow these machines with a sign of moral sentiment and and I and I'm blocking on God's name right now too is rawan yatra in' he's a wonderful computer scientist who's now moved from MIT to - to Europe and he's continuing some of this work but anyway so and we had a paper we had a paper in nature called machine behavior a year two ago that sort of laid out some of these ideas like how should machines be programmed to behave and so on anyhow so so but but in getting back to your question we're far from needing to actually address these questions I mean we we you know barely are getting to the point where we can do natural language processing in a really fluid way you know my dictation device when I use this thing to dictate still as ten percent of the words are wrong when I speak to it you know so we're far from if we can't do that simple thing word you know the idea that we're gonna need to endow this my word processing software with a moral chimp is you know we're far from that so I'm not I don't spend too much time thinking about that but I do spend time thinking about in my lab and doing work on how the machines can affect our morality how we treat each other so for example we've done some work on how the addition of what we called uh may I so so what my lab is trying to do is not invent super smart AI to replace human cognition or even now that I'm talking to you some kind of super moral AI that could be like a moral exemplar know what we're doing is is we're developing we're not inventing super smart AI to replace human cognition we're developing what I called uh may I to supplement human interaction the machines don't have to be smart we're smart the machine just have to help us not be bad to each other and we've done many experiments we did another paper in nature in 2017 showing that we could program robots in a very specific way autonomous agents online to help groups of people coordinate their actions and work better together and some of our ideas are useful as well in optimizing communication between humans decreasing racism online how do we get people to use less racist invective how do we optimize how do we how do we optimize the flow of honest information and truthful information online the idea is is that you can you can program these robots or these forms of artificial intelligence to work in simple ways using only local knowledge about the network they're in distributed throughout the network and they act like traffic cops you know they kind of kind of speed up and slow things down just a little and they can kind of change the overall dynamics of the system I'm super curious so I'm gonna push them because I really want to understand it so they I'll give you the example and I'm fortunately I I have to go in just a little bit the the experiment we did one of the experiments actually let me let me pick a more recent experiment so we had a recent experiment we did with Brian's castle at his lab and this was work spearheaded by Maggie treeger in my lab and Sarah SIBO and Brian's lab in this experiment a groups of four were formed three people in one humanoid robot and they were given a task which was to a game to play on tablets which was to lay railroad track and they played 30 rounds of this game and they had to work together to lay track from point A to point B and there were straight parts and curved parts and so on and they would take turns laying a piece of track and we contrived it so that occasionally the robot would make a mistake and we also contrived it so that the human sometimes would have to make a mistake there was no part available to them so that they would have to goof so people would have to take turns being the member of the team that was responsible for the team not succeeding on that round and sometimes it was a robot and sometimes it was a human and then what we did is we experimentally manipulated the robots behavior so that sometimes the robot would be vulnerable the robot would crack a joke or the robot would say something like you know you think that robots are perfect but as you can see I'm terrible at this game you know something like that and what we found when we did that was that the humans started not treating the robot differently like oh no this is a sweet robot let me be nice to it no they started treating each other differently than programming the robot to express vulnerability in its expressions in a challenging situation optimize the communication between the humans and we were able to show for example that the humans were kinder to each other they shared more equally in the conversations they had all these other desirable outcomes that paper was just published like four months ago or three months ago it's like a form of priming your right to connect it to that literature but no I don't think it's priming it's something different it's like modifying the social dynamics by thoughtful programming of these agents and you know it would be like if you're trying to if you're trying to build a physical robot that's helping you move heavy logs you would use principles of you know of fulcrums to position you know the lever action the lever of whatever well if you understand the principles of human interaction then you can position the robot so that it supports you know good functioning by the people we've done many experiments like this we we've done experiments where we've not with robots but other experiments where we've manipulated the structure of human social interactions and maybe I'll end with this so so most people are familiar from high school chemistry of the idea that there leave there more than two but let's consider two forms of carbon and if you take the carbon atoms and assemble them one way into the form of graphite sheets of hexagonal carbon atoms you have graphite which is soft and dark or you could take the same carbon atoms and assemble them a different way in tetrahedrons in the form of diamond and you get Diamond which is hard and clear and there are two key intellectual ideas there first these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms they're properties of the collection of carbon atoms and second which properties you get depends on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other you take the carbon atoms and you connect them one way you get one set of properties take the same carbon atoms and connect them a different way you get a different set of properties and it's the same with human groups we've shown in my lab using experiments that I can take a group of people and I connect them one way and they're mean sons of [ __ ] to each other and selfish and they lie and they don't cooperate or I take the same people and connect them a different way and they're sweet and kind to each other so these properties you see that we think of as individual virtues are actually social virtues whether people cooperate with each other or not is not just about cooperative people it's about cooperative networks these are emergent properties of social systems these are properties that are arise not because of who but because of how we are connected and so there's a tremendous amount of work we do in my lab to try to understand this and in the book blueprint I explained how we evolved to build networks and to build practices that allow us in the end to be very kind to each other and then and so my my essential argument in the book is that the arc of our evolution is long but it bends towards goodness that is the perfect place to end Nikolas how to still bottle bully this was so much fun man thank you thank you for coming on and hopefully we will get to discuss Apollo's arrow in the very near future I'm excited that you've got another one coming out dude everybody watching thank you so much for joining if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care the same things happen over and over again through time for basically the same reasons a lot of these things happen once in a lifetime