In this episode, Joe Biden sits down with his good friend and former student, Nicholas Pizzi, to discuss the controversial Halloween costume incident at Yale, and how he handled the aftermath of the incident. Joe also talks about his own experience with a woman wearing a gay costume and yelling at a group of students, and the lessons he learned about how to handle the situation. Joe Biden is a professor of psychology at the Berklee College of Education and the director of the Yale Safe Schools Program. He is also the author of the book and is the host of the TV show on HBO's Hard Knocks. He is married to Jamie Biden and they have a daughter, a son, a daughter-in-law, and a stepson, who are all college students. Joe and Nicholas discuss how they became friends, how they met, and what it was like being a teacher in the late 90s and early 2000s. They also talk about the Yale costume incident and how Joe handled a woman who dressed up as a gay man in a costume and yelled at a bunch of students in a public school. And they talk about what it's like to be a teacher and a parent in the early 20s and how to deal with the pressures of being a public figure in the 21st century. What do you think of Halloween costumes? What would you do if you were a gay student in a gay school? What kind of costume do you would you wear to Halloween? How would you dress like a gay person in a rainbow? Do you have a rainbow in your Halloween costume? Will it work? Would you wear a rainbow at a rainbow on Halloween night? And what would you tell your parents think about it? Does it work with a gay friend in a Halloween costume at a party? Should you wear it like that? Why do you like it or not? Is it a good idea to be gay or a straight person? Can you be a good teacher? ? How much money you should be allowed to buy a rainbow, or a rainbow what do you have in your closet? All of these things? and so much more? We ll answer these questions and more, and more on this episode of in this episode featuring Joe Biden's interview with Joe Biden! Thanks for listening to Joe Biden and his answers to these questions, and much more!
00:02:49.000Well, let me help out here because you're being so nice about the whole thing.
00:02:55.000So people know what we're talking about.
00:02:57.000There was an incident that was captured on someone's cell phone where you were standing there.
00:03:02.000It was an hour of footage, five or six different angles, so a clip went viral.
00:03:06.000But I want to emphasize that there were many people filming that day, and an hour or more of the two or three hours I was out there is available.
00:03:14.000Well, I'm glad that you had the courage to do that, though, to stand out there and talk to those kids.
00:03:23.000There's something that happens when people become extremely self-indulgent when they know that they have this platform and they have someone who is in a position of authority and they get to hamstring them in front of the public.
00:03:59.000You stood there and you just listened to her and you never yelled back and you never raised your voice and you remained calm, but That sort of environment where the children, and I want to say children,
00:04:15.000they're basically adults, but acting like children.
00:04:19.000People that age, you know, can fight in wars and lose their lives.
00:04:23.000And so I think it's a difficult challenge because on the one hand, it's right and appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions.
00:04:31.000Certainly if you're 20 years old, you're an adult.
00:05:18.000But most people felt horrified watching that, that you were subjected to that when you're being very reasonable.
00:05:24.000And also, what it all came about was your wife had sent out an email saying like, hey, maybe it should be okay for someone to wear a fucked up Halloween costume.
00:05:36.000Maybe it's okay for someone to dress up like Crazy Horse.
00:05:40.000Well, actually, just to be clear, what Erika was saying in that note was not – this is a very important intellectual distinction.
00:05:47.000I think we've lost a lot of nuance in our political lives in general in our country right now and also in the nuance in the way we think about difficult topics.
00:05:56.000So what Erika was saying was not that necessarily the – she was not taking a position on any particular costumes like this is okay.
00:06:03.000In fact, many of the costumes that would have offended the students would offend her.
00:07:19.000Part of the motivation in Erica writing that note was that many of her students, and in fact, many hundreds of other students felt infantilized by this policy.
00:07:31.000And there had been a big buildup prior to that event, including an article in the New York Times about these Halloween costume policies around the country.
00:08:05.000And one of the rules said you shouldn't mock religion, for example, was one of the provisions.
00:08:11.000So a university-wide email went out, signed by 13 people, saying, you know, don't mock people's deeply held faith traditions.
00:08:22.000Well, what if, for the sake of argument, you had been abused by a priest and you wanted, at Halloween, to dress up as a Catholic priest, for example, you know, holding a doll?
00:08:32.000And someone else who was Catholic was very deeply offended by that.
00:09:12.000Serves the objectives of righteous social progress.
00:09:14.000If we really want to do better in our society, or in any society, in my view, we have to create an environment where we can talk to each other, grant good faith, listen carefully, make subtle distinctions, and free people up to express what they're thinking so we can have a real marketplace of ideas.
00:09:33.000That's, you know, my commitment or my belief.
00:09:38.000I mean, that's really, I couldn't agree with you more enthusiastically.
00:09:43.000That's really, that sounds like the best possible environment for growing up and learning, as long as you have someone to sort of moderate or someone to mediate if things go sideways.
00:09:56.000Yes, or I don't think you necessarily need a third party mediator, but you do need a shared understanding of core liberal principles.
00:10:06.000And these principles do include, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of commitment to free and open expression, a commitment to debate, a commitment to reason.
00:10:13.000So how are you and I going to come to a better understanding of what is true about the world?
00:10:45.000Should a king have – you know, should a king have ultimate authority in a state?
00:10:49.000Or is that not how we want to organize a state?
00:10:52.000So we – you and I look at the world and debate and think about, okay, and we exchange reasons and we use evidence and ways of understanding and studying the world.
00:11:03.000That, to me, is the only way to truth, actually.
00:11:06.000Now, some people will think that religion is a way to truth, right?
00:11:09.000They think that the truth is God-given, for example.
00:11:12.000Now, I am very sympathetic to religious belief systems, but I don't think that's a way to truth.
00:12:49.000Or even if you went to a communist meeting to find out what it was all about, just to educate yourself.
00:12:55.000Yes, in fact, that's a great example because that, like, right now I see a lot of people being criticized for following online people they disagree with.
00:16:22.000Yeah, or like assessments of drug purity, for example.
00:16:26.000So the very rich could set up a laboratory in their basement so whenever a doctor prescribes a medication, they could see if the drugs are safe and pure.
00:16:34.000The rest of us pay taxes, and we say we're all going to pitch in together, and we're going to have the FDA, and they are going to certify drug purity so that when I go to my pharmacist and buy a drug, the pharmaceutical company isn't killing me by shoddy manufacturing practices.
00:18:38.000I thought, that's a new wrinkle, because the old flat earthers used to think that the water was shown falling off the disk of the earth, you know, like the edge of the earth that was just a disk.
00:18:48.000Now, the new theory that there's an ice wall, actually, it's kind of not falsifiable.
00:18:53.000That is to say, you could get on a cruise and sail to the edge of the earth, and you would find a wall of ice there, Antarctica.
00:20:41.000And they have a theory of how it does that, which is not, it uses, as you say, scientific words, but it's actually not scientifically correct.
00:20:48.000You know, it does this, which then does that, which then does that.
00:20:50.000They lay out a kind of causal chain, which is false.
00:20:53.000And then there's a problem of nuance and perspective because there's so many people that get vaccinated.
00:20:58.000There's hundreds of millions of people in this country, billions of people worldwide, and then there are instances, rare occurrences where people have real issues with vaccinations.
00:21:09.000Well, there are some where they have real issues.
00:21:11.000So, for example, there's some vaccines which are known to cause certain neurological conditions, rarely, one out of a million or one out of a hundred thousand vaccinations.
00:21:19.000More commonly is the situation in which you have vaccination is so common, everyone is getting vaccinated, and often that occurs near to an occurrence of some other rare condition, and people associate the two.
00:21:31.000They think, oh, because of the vaccine this happened.
00:21:37.000And there's also, you know, if it's one out of a million and you have 300 million people, you have 3 million.
00:21:42.000You know, I mean, 1 million people with an issue is a big deal.
00:21:47.000With 300 million people, you easily could have 300 really big cases.
00:21:56.000You know, 300 cases where people have died from vaccines, and then you bring those in front of people and say, oh my god, and then there's this one, and this one, and this one, and there's 298 more, and you're like, holy shit!
00:22:07.000All these people are dying from vaccines?
00:22:09.000You know, it doesn't feel good if it's your child, but when we look at the greater perspective of humanity...
00:22:40.000I had a woman yesterday who is an expert.
00:22:42.000She's a medical historian, an expert in Victorian-era surgery, Lindsay Fitzharris, and she wrote this great book called The Butchering Art.
00:26:32.000But I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves because we have also evolved to love and to befriend each other and to be kind to each other and to cooperate and to teach each other and all these good things.
00:26:49.000Here's the sort of one way to think about this.
00:26:53.000This must have been the case that the benefits of a connected life outweighed the costs.
00:27:00.000We would not be living socially and If my exposure to you harmed me on net, in other words, if I came near you and you were violent to me, you killed me, or you gave me misinformation, you told me lies about the world,
00:27:16.000then my connection to you would ultimately harm me, that I should be better off living as an isolated animal.
00:27:22.000So animals that come together to live socially, the benefits of that must outweigh the costs.
00:27:29.000So all this attention to the ways in which our interactions are bad, that we kill each other, that we steal from each other, that we lie to each other, that we have tribalism and all of these traits, which we do.
00:27:40.000Every century is replete with horrors.
00:27:49.000But what is me is a kind of optimistic focus on the good parts of human nature and the recognition that those good parts must in toto overwhelm the bad parts.
00:28:17.000The argument, and that's discussed in the book, the way we have achieved the kind of social conquest of the earth… The way our species is spread out to occupy every niche, which is also very rare.
00:28:29.000Most animals live in one – grizzlies live in this part of the world.
00:28:34.000And polar bears live in this part of the world.
00:28:36.000They don't live in Arizona, et cetera.
00:28:41.000So – but our species lives everywhere and the way we have come to be able to do that is by the capacity to have culture, to teach and learn from each other, to accumulate knowledge.
00:28:51.000So in the book, I talk about lots of this famous set of stories called the Lost European Explorer Files about how European explorers are lost.
00:29:02.000They wind up dying and – But they're in an environment in which other people thrive and survive because they have learned how to live there.
00:29:23.000So I have this – so what I'd like to do is – what I try to set out to do in the beginning of the book is I say, look, it's clear that our genes shape the structure and function of our bodies.
00:29:37.000It is increasingly clear that our genes also shape the structure and function of our minds, our behaviors, whether you're risk-averse, how intelligent you are, whether you have wanderlust.
00:29:50.000These properties are properties that depend in part on your genes.
00:29:54.000But it's also clear to me, and that's what the book argues, is that our genes shape not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but also the structure and function of our societies.
00:30:05.000And to really prove that, what we would need is something known as the forbidden experiment.
00:30:11.000And the forbidden experiment is an experiment in which we took a group of babies.
00:30:22.000How would they organize themselves socially?
00:30:27.000Is there kind of an innate society that human beings are pre-wired to make in an essence?
00:30:33.000Now obviously that's unethical and cruel, but actually monarchs for thousands of years have contemplated this experiment.
00:30:41.000So Herodotus writes about how one of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs wanted to know what kind of language would – what was a natural language we had in us that we would speak if we were not taught a language.
00:30:52.000So this pharaoh, it is said, took two babies and gave them to a mute shepherd to raise to see how did the children speak when they grew up.
00:31:08.000So what I do in the book is I look at a series of other approximations of that.
00:31:13.000And one chapter is devoted to looking at shipwrecks, groups of men typically, but sometimes men and women, who between 1500 and 1900, there were 9,000 shipwrecks.
00:31:45.000All over the world where they occurred and when they occurred and how many people there were.
00:31:51.000And so then I got all the original accounts from the sailors, from the people on the wrecks, and all contemporary archaeological excavations of those wrecks where they had been excavated and tried to understand what kind of society did these isolated crews actually wind up making.
00:32:10.000And there were some amazing stories that I found in there.
00:32:15.000So, they stayed for at least two months.
00:32:17.000How many of them actually established a real civilization?
00:32:33.000In which these sailors were stranded near Australia, I think somewhere in the Pacific, and they managed to catch a big petrel, one of those huge birds, like a condor.
00:32:43.000And they put a little note in a little tiny bottle and they tied it to its feet.
00:32:50.000And this petrel flew thousands of miles and landed in Australia and was found!
00:33:27.000But the point is that for me to be able to describe what happened, we needed at least one survivor.
00:33:32.000And often, there were many cases where everyone survived.
00:33:36.000I mean, there was one pair of cases that was amazing to me.
00:33:42.000In 1846, in South Auckland Islands, just north of Antarctica, south of New Zealand, the Grafton was wrecked on the southern part of the island.
00:33:51.000I can't remember how big the island was.
00:35:43.000Tens of thousands of people have come and played these games.
00:35:45.000We can create these temporary artificial societies of real people where people come and spend an hour or two, and we, with this godlike way, can engineer the society.
00:35:55.000We can have a lot of inequality or little inequality or various other features, and then we can observe what happens.
00:36:02.000And I look at all of that data, all those stories, and say, look, there is a deep and fundamental way that no matter what, human beings Yeah,
00:36:40.000You look around the world and the way – the example I give is that, yes, there's huge cultural variation around the world.
00:36:46.000Just like you said, totalitarian societies, there's – people have different foods and they have different ways of dressing and there's enormous cultural variation and it's marvelous and interesting and obvious to anybody.
00:36:57.000But I think we're missing the forest from the trees.
00:36:59.000To me, this is like you and I are sitting on a plane and we look at a hill that's 300 feet and 900 feet and we say those are very different hills.
00:37:08.000But actually, if we took a step back, we would see that we were on a plateau, and one was a mountain that was 10,300 feet, and another was a mountain that was 10,900 feet.
00:37:19.000And actually, there are these much more deep and fundamental plate tectonic forces that are creating these two mountains that are very similar, but we are just focused on the superficial top.
00:37:30.000So the argument in the book is that everywhere in the world, people have friendship.
00:37:50.000So totalitarian states apply huge cultural pressure to suppress this innate tendency.
00:37:57.000It's like religious, you need a lot of belief in God to suppress your innate desire to have sex, right?
00:38:05.000So you can have a belief system that's very powerful, that kind of prevents you, squashes what would otherwise be a kind of inescapable inclination you have.
00:38:17.000So totalitarian regimes, and this is discussed in the book too, They are very threatened by the institution of the family.
00:38:24.000You need to owe your loyalty to the state, not to your family, not to your friends.
00:38:31.000And so they have a series of institutions that, you know, everyone is comrade.
00:38:34.000Everyone gets called comrade, for example.
00:38:38.000Or a lot of times – well, I don't know if I want to speak at the state level.
00:38:43.000Let me take it down a notch to communes.
00:38:46.000So if you think about communes, if you're going to make a commune of people and you want them to feel real loyalty to the commune, one way you can do that is you want to reduce the commitment people have to their partners, let's say,
00:39:04.000And in order to do that, you can go to one of two extremes.
00:39:07.000Either you can prohibit sex, like the shakers, and you say, okay, no one's going to have sex with anyone because we're all in a commune and we all love each other and we're not going to have special love for particular people.
00:39:18.000Or you could go to the other extreme and you can have polyamory.
00:39:20.000Say, everyone's going to have sex with everyone else.
00:39:23.000Once again, you see, that subverts the special relationship that people might form with particular individuals.
00:39:29.000And so both of those strategies, even though they're opposite, are attempting to do the same thing, which is to break down real relationships, face-to-face relationships between individuals, so that you can have a commitment to this higher group.
00:39:41.000And that's what totalitarian states also face the same dilemma, and that's also why, incidentally, a lot of those states try to reduce gender differences, right?
00:39:51.000Like, you know, the Mao jacket, the men and women all were wearing the similar kind of attire, for instance, and Because they want to have people see themselves as interchangeable and not as individuals and relationships not be particular.
00:40:13.000I talk a little bit in the book about cults, but I don't really need to get to cults in order to make the arguments that I'm making.
00:40:18.000No, I mean, not even just to make arguments, just to compare, because that is essentially like, in particular, the Ragnish cult in Oregon, the Wild Wild West, or Wild Wild Country documentary on Netflix.
00:41:54.000I mean, it's also very unique that this is one of the weirdest countries in the world in terms of our ability to freely express ourselves and we have more guns.
00:42:04.000Well, the thing about America, the American experiment is about the fact that anyone can be an American.
00:42:39.000I mean, you can, but it's extremely difficult and rare.
00:42:41.000So – but the United States, you know, we say you are an American.
00:42:45.000If you – from all the whole world, you're welcome.
00:42:48.000Bring us your tired, your – you know, the famous saying on the foot on the – I forgot the saying.
00:42:54.000It's very poetic on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty.
00:42:58.000You're wretched, you're forlorn, whatever it is.
00:43:02.000And you can come to these shores and make your life anew and all you need to do to be an American is to buy into a commitment to constitutional governance, democratic rule, bill of rights and these principles.
00:43:17.000We should note that there were millions of people that were brought as slaves involuntarily to these shores.
00:43:22.000We don't always realize our best virtues.
00:43:26.000We allow people to come like the Irish and treat them as second-class citizens or the Italians or the Greeks even.
00:43:35.000But the idea that you're putting on the table, which I think is correct, is that – You can be an American.
00:43:41.000This is a special, unusual experiment.
00:43:43.000You can't reinvent yourself quite that way, to my knowledge, in any other colony or country.
00:43:49.000It's one of the weirdest things that this is a country where anti-immigrant sentiments are running rampant when the entire foundation of the country is based on immigration.
00:43:59.000That's the only way people got here if you're not a Native American.
00:45:11.000And I think, like you were saying with your libertarian friend and, you know, someone who may be an anarchist or whatever, there's – There's room for all these weird opinions.
00:45:41.000You know, you're going to have certain ridiculous ideas and awful ideas that are amplified in this volume that is an incredible mass of humans.
00:45:51.000Yes, I think a large – I think that's right.
00:45:53.000I think our size contributes to or makes a kind of heterogeneity of ideas more easy.
00:46:00.000You know, if we were a tiny country, although even in small democracies, you know, like you go to European countries that are tiny, Spain, for example.
00:46:07.000I mean, it's not tiny, but it's tiny compared to us.
00:46:10.000You know, there's a lot of difference of beliefs from far left to far right.
00:46:14.000But I think the key aspect which you were talking about earlier, which again you're highlighting, which I agree with, is that we want an environment in which people can – the ground rules are clear.
00:46:23.000So, you know, you can't – there's no physical contact allowed, right?
00:46:27.000So we draw a bright line distinction between words and deeds.
00:46:31.000So I completely reject the idea that words are violent.
00:47:12.000So anyway, if we set those ground rules, I think, I believe strongly that in the marketplace of ideas, truth will out and righteousness will out.
00:48:47.000And so I think we need to, you know, and in fact...
00:48:50.000As John Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue, we actually might want to create other reasons to draw the distinction between words and violence and to cultivate an appreciation for that distinction, and that is by allowing people to speak,
00:49:07.000we may actually reduce violence because we can identify who has these crazy ideas.
00:49:14.000So if I believe that someone hates people like me, Yeah.
00:49:36.000So that's their argument that Lukianov and Haidt make, that actually this is a potentially additional benefit of creating a free and open marketplace of ideas, is we identify where the crazy is.
00:49:46.000You know, here are all these people who are talking about the anti-vaxxers.
00:49:48.000I'd like to know who are the people that hold these beliefs, because as a public health expert...
00:50:22.000Someone to debate or to explain what's wrong with it, and to do it in a reasonable manner.
00:50:28.000When people start shouting and screaming and pulling fire alarms, the idea of silencing people from speaking, that somehow this is going to help, this is also part of deplatforming.
00:50:45.000Even based on just reasonable people with differing opinions.
00:50:49.000Peter Tatchell is a gay rights activist in England who went to prison for his rights, been imprisoned in foreign countries for defending gay rights, and he was deplatformed in England a couple of years ago.
00:51:04.000No, here's the problem with deplatforming.
00:51:06.000So first of all, it is totally right and appropriate to protest.
00:51:11.000So if someone is speaking something you don't want, I will strongly defend protest.
00:51:15.000Stand outside, yell and scream, hold banners up, whatever.
00:51:20.000You can't interfere with the right of the speaker to express themselves, first point.
00:51:24.000But even more important, the reason we don't want that is not so much because we're interested in the right of the speaker.
00:51:32.000It's because we're interested in the rights of the listeners.
00:51:35.000The people who want to listen to that person have a right to listen to that person in a free society.
00:51:47.000I am interfering with the ability of all the people who want to hear you to hear you.
00:52:24.000And this has often been the argument for why Trump became president in the first place, that people were tired of the argument on the other side.
00:53:09.000We were talking about people wanting to silence people, the forcing of political correctness, and the rebounding of that is the reinforcing of someone who comes along like Trump.
00:53:23.000And I think that that's another, you know, that sort of is a variant of the argument we were discussing earlier, which is that one of the advantages of creating a free and open society is that you allow, you know, live and let live.
00:53:34.000And then you don't, you tend to, you avoid creating kind of suppressed animosities or you can help to avoid it.
00:53:42.000Yeah, this open communication is so critical, and it's also critical to have reasonable, polite conversation.
00:53:51.000Like, people can oppose each other in their idea, but you should be able to express how and why you oppose that idea without it being this sort of personal vendetta.
00:54:05.000I mean, you know, I think we have to accept that there will be – people will get angry.
00:54:09.000I mean, that's part of having an open society, and I think we need to accept – It's part of being a person.
00:54:13.000Yes, and I think we need to accept that some people – not everyone will – Will engage in discourse the way you and I might want to engage in that discourse.
00:54:23.000But I do agree with you completely that ideally we would have a kind of civilized conversation that allowed us to learn and to grow.
00:54:31.000And I think ultimately that, as we've been saying, is better for our society as well.
00:54:35.000Well, I think we should acknowledge that people are going to be upset, but we should also applaud people for not being upset.
00:54:43.000I think there's a higher value to people being able to communicate reasonably.
00:55:16.000The go-to strategy that many people have, so I think it's important to note that free speech is difficult and it's not an easy thing.
00:55:24.000It's a natural inclination to want to silence your opponents.
00:55:28.000But it's wrong, and it's harmful, and it's actually harmful to you to do that.
00:55:33.000So I think we need to have an educational system that cultivates that, that cultivates the capacity to tolerate an idea that you don't like, to think about that idea, and then to respond to that idea.
00:55:49.000So I guess what I'm saying is it does require some training.
00:55:54.000It doesn't come naturally, unfortunately.
00:56:07.000And if we can figure out a way to do that, we will find that our differences are not nearly as egregious.
00:56:14.000They're not nearly as disgusting as we like to think they are.
00:56:17.000Well, that's exactly what I argued Blueprint, that there's such, you know, like, you know, when you go to a foreign country, initially, you're overwhelmed by the different food and the different smells and the different architecture.
00:56:26.000And anyone who's traveled even to a different state has had this experience.
00:56:30.000And yet, actually, once you get to know the people, you see that they're very human.
00:56:35.000They love their partners and they Hang out with their friends and they work together to build a civilization and a society and they have schools and they teach and they learn and they do all of these basic things that are a fundamental part of our common humanity.
00:56:48.000And this is what I talk about in Blueprint at Length.
00:56:51.000You know, like I just – I think it's – I think there's a kind of flawed beauty to the world that captivates me.
00:57:03.000And it's a little bit on the – there's this aesthetic tradition in Japan and a philosophy called wabi-sabi.
00:58:05.000It's not hard to look around the world and see the violence and the murder and the warfare and the incompetent leadership and all of these awful things about our species.
00:58:15.000But we're really a fucking unbelievable species, actually, who do amazing things when you compare us to other species.
00:58:22.000And there's a kind of flawed beauty to us.
00:58:24.000And I think that it's wrong to be seduced to the dark side, you know?
00:58:30.000It's wrong to like only focus on the bad stuff.
00:58:34.000I also think it's a kind of moral and philosophical laziness, right?
00:58:37.000If we allow ourselves to just think that, oh, you know, people are awful – It kind of relieves us of any duty to be good and to work to make the world better.
00:58:48.000It's a kind of, you know, surrender to the dark side.
00:58:52.000And the book shows exactly how and why that's wrong and how natural selection has shaped all these wonderful qualities which are shared the world over.
00:59:01.000So you go to the foreign country, you're initially perplexed by their crazy practices, and then slowly but surely you find our common humanity.
01:00:58.000My wife is unlikely to listen to this full podcast, or I'll skip over this part so she doesn't hear this part, but...
01:01:04.000And my sister will be listening, probably, and so she will laugh when she gets to this part because whenever I see a Popeye's, I just pull over and indulge myself.
01:05:43.000Yeah, but my kids always make fun of me because I'm bald, so my whole head is covered with sweat, and they come over and wipe my head, and they're like, look at you, you're so gross!
01:06:05.000If you plot dad's survival on the y-axis and fraction of female children on the x-axis, survival is slightly longer for men who have a higher fraction of daughters as children.
01:06:16.000I think it's because boys drive you to your fucking grave because they're so goddamn crazy.
01:06:20.000There's lots of theories as to why it happens, and that is, in fact, one of them.
01:06:24.000It's framed a bit more scientifically than that.
01:06:29.000My 10-year-old daughter's – and I just imagine if she was a boy, I'd be terrified that she'd be just lighting things on fire and blowing up buildings.
01:07:21.000And I think the many ways in which society, our cultural traits that we invent, their purpose is to shape and guide those tendencies to violence to kind of mitigate them.
01:07:34.000But we don't just need – again, going back to the book, we don't just need – we don't just use culture for that purpose.
01:07:42.000There's an argument in the book that we humans have domesticated ourselves.
01:07:46.000So – If you look at – if you compare dogs to wolves and domesticated cats to wild cats from which they descended or guinea pigs to the wild guinea pigs from which they descended or horses to – the wild horses to which they descended.
01:09:00.000Now, if you look at humans and you compare us to our ancestors or to other primates, for all the world it looks like we have been domesticated.
01:09:42.000Like if you look at, you compare these domesticated animals to their non-domesticated ancestors, the domesticated versions are less violent.
01:09:50.000So we lose a lot of the traits that physical and psychological traits associated with violence.
01:09:57.000But there was no one that domesticated us.
01:09:58.000So the theory is, the question is, how?
01:10:01.000And one of the theories that's discussed in Blueprint, and that's advanced by other scientists, this is not my work, is that we self-domesticated.
01:10:10.000And that what happened over the millennia, Over millions of years, is that weaker individuals in our groups, when one individual became too autocratic and too violent and too powerful,
01:10:25.000they banded together and killed that guy.
01:10:28.000And so, over time, we were killing the more violent members of our species, weeding out those people.
01:10:35.000And therefore, the gene pool changed across time and we self-domesticated.
01:10:40.000We are more peaceful today than we would have been because we domesticated ourselves.
01:10:46.000And this is one of the arguments that's also made to help explain the origins of goodness, actually.
01:10:51.000And the origins of cooperation, because it would take a few good people to kill the bad person that's running everything that's evil.
01:11:37.000Well, the theory is that they did it, like we were saying, by weeding out, killing the more aggressive members.
01:11:42.000What we know must have happened is that the nicer guys must have been able to have more offspring.
01:11:48.000So the gene pool changed over time because of the differential success of the nicer guys.
01:11:55.000Now, people have looked at this even in human societies.
01:11:57.000They've looked, for instance, there's a study I talk about in the book of different pathways to reproductive success amongst the Tsimani, which is a group in Amazonia, And other societies are similar.
01:12:10.000So you can either be like big and strong, Or you can be charismatic and have useful knowledge.
01:14:31.000But my point being is that you can see, if you get a dog from a breeder, you really can see how they can cultivate certain types of behavior.
01:14:42.000Like a good example of my Mastiff who passed away this year.
01:15:52.000It's very weird because you see, you go, oh, well, okay, well, how much of this shit that's in me is, well, how much of me is me deciding to be this person, and how much of me has no choice?
01:16:03.000About half and half, I would say, overall, on average, across traits.
01:16:07.000How much do you think gets passed down through genetics in terms of inclinations, like the nature?
01:16:18.000So, for example, about half the – you know, how religious you are or how risk-averse you are.
01:16:23.000Like I can – about half the variation in how – if you look at a group of people and some are more risk-averse than others, about half of that has to do with their genes and half has to do with how they were raised or what environments they grew up in.
01:16:36.000So, you know, there's a kind of innateness to many of our qualities, and you can shape them.
01:16:41.000You know, for example, you couldn't make me a musician, unfortunately.
01:18:15.000We were talking earlier, it's a total loss of nuance and an inability to see any gray.
01:18:21.000And some people think, and I think that's what you were talking about, some people think that we are hardwired to like dichotomies.
01:18:30.000To see, you know, male and female and up and down and good and evil and left and right and to simplify the world by finding out that we like it, that it's soothing to us to think that the world can be divided into two categories.
01:18:44.000But in fact, many times, not always, like up and down is sort of clear, but many times it can't.
01:19:33.000But I think a kind of worldview which says we are good, they are evil, as we've been saying in different kind of ways in different parts of our conversation, is I think foolish and wrong and ultimately self-injurious actually.
01:19:49.000So – We used to have – I know you've done martial arts.
01:19:52.000I spent years training in Shotokan karate, a very traditional Japanese style, which I loved.
01:20:38.000And I'm like, oh yeah, let me prove it to you.
01:20:41.000Here's what I'm going to go back and do more experiments and come back to you with more arguments and more data and show you that actually I'm right about this.
01:20:53.000So that's the way you uncover truth, right?
01:20:56.000It's the way you get to more perfection.
01:20:59.000It's the kind of yin and yang, actually.
01:21:02.000So yes, I think that this simplification of the world to think of, you know, I'm good and you're evil, really misunderstands in many,
01:21:18.000not all, but in many circumstances it misunderstands what's happening.
01:21:20.000And also it brings back this problem that human beings have always had with ego and this need to be right and that identifying yourself in each individual discussion and debate and battle and needing to triumph.
01:21:36.000And even though you desire to be correct, you have to understand when you are not.
01:21:40.000And you have to appreciate someone who shows you that you are incorrect because they are allowing you to grow.
01:22:44.000So, yeah, I mean, that's another issue that I've faced with this podcast, where people get upset at me for having people on that have opinions that they disagree with.
01:23:39.000Let's – It's also quite schizophrenic.
01:23:42.000I mean, have you ever seen when a schizophrenic person draws these connections where they have one person and that person met this other person and that person used to work with this other person and that person met Hitler?
01:24:18.000And it's a really common thing today that you're seeing people are trying to reinforce this idea and push it on other folks.
01:24:26.000Well, I think one thing, you know, like I think that – Like we were talking about, I think that exposing ourselves to a breadth of ideas, to people we disagree with, I think – and creating an environment in which people can express themselves is good.
01:24:46.000You're not going to get any arguments from me against on that point.
01:24:49.000No, and I just think it's better for everybody, like we were talking about before, when you meet someone who can give you a lesson and express something in a way that makes you reconsider your own ideas that you hold sacred.
01:25:26.000If the families will get any relief, whatever, that's fine.
01:25:30.000I had some concerns because I was a statistician about conviction of the innocent and I support the Innocence Project and I am very concerned with police brutality.
01:25:39.000I have for years been advocating the racializing of police brutality as vile and abhorrent and must be firmly resisted.
01:25:48.000I think that the prosecutorial misconduct, the way prosecutors lie and put people in prison, there have been many, many cases of people on death row who are innocent.
01:27:18.000I think you'll be able to deter criminals from doing things with a three-month sentence if they are very confident that they will be convicted if they're caught.
01:27:27.000Whereas now we have a system where most are not convicted, like this Jesse Smollett thing, which is just ridiculous in the news.
01:27:34.000And only a tiny fraction are convicted.
01:27:39.000But they're given huge long sentences.
01:27:41.000It's like they're paying the sentence for everyone that didn't – it doesn't make any sense.
01:27:47.000Actually, can I go to tell you another story?
01:27:50.000So there's a situation a few years ago when there's a very famous – Yeah.
01:28:16.000And he told the story actually at Yale to students about how he had just come back from a summit – President Obama was still president – where he was trying to help the students to see that you can find common ground with your political opponents and that you need to listen to them and talk to them in order to find that ground.
01:28:38.000He said – I just came back from Camp David where there was a meeting about how to reduce incarceration in our society.
01:28:46.000And he said the Koch brothers were there and the students all hissed and Newt Gingrich was there and the students all hissed and a bunch of liberal people were there and the students were really happy about that.
01:28:56.000And then they said, well, why did you go?
01:28:57.000How could you associate yourself with those evil people?
01:29:00.000And he said, look, he said, the conservatives want to reduce incarceration because it's expensive.
01:29:06.000The liberals want to reduce incarceration because it's unjust.
01:29:10.000And the libertarians want to reduce incarceration because the state shouldn't be depriving people of liberty.
01:29:15.000And I can find common ground with these people and reduce incarceration.
01:29:30.000I think it should be 25. I mean, and so, I don't know how we got onto this, you know, like talking to you is so much fun because it's like we're all over the place, but how did I come up with this example?
01:29:41.000We were talking about talking to political enemies, was it, or something else?
01:29:50.000And, you know – oh, and no, we were talking about incarceration and prison sentences and so forth.
01:29:54.000So we have a horrible problem in our society with incarceration.
01:29:58.000A larger fraction of our populace is incarcerated.
01:30:01.000We deprive – after you've paid your debt to society, we often have these – we deprive you of your right to vote, which I think is wrong.
01:31:07.000But the problem is not only do we have a huge fraction of people in prison, we have extremely long prison sentences compared to many European countries for the same crime.
01:31:19.000I think we should change the policies on this, and maybe we will.
01:31:24.000There's also the idea of reforming them.
01:31:29.000They're not using all the tools within their disposal.
01:31:32.000They're not really doing a good attempt at it.
01:31:34.000And I just don't think it does anything other than make their life hell for a short period of time, which we're hoping, we hope, deters them from doing future crime.
01:32:04.000Well, European standards are about 20 years, actually, and they're different things.
01:32:12.000Like, if you want to deprive them, if your vision is they're being punished for the killing of a life, therefore they've surrendered their life, it's sort of eye for an eye kind of justice.
01:32:20.000They would be the rest of their lives in jail.
01:32:23.000And we can debate whether that's reasonable or not.
01:32:25.000If you want to provide a public safety reason, people often age out of their violence.
01:32:30.000So a lot of men typically – these were talking mostly about men who do these things – by the time they're in their 40s or 50s, they're much less violent.
01:33:05.000I think it depends entirely on the circumstances.
01:33:08.000If two men are engaged in some sort of a dispute and one winds up killing the other one, that's a big difference between that and someone breaking into your house and killing your daughter.
01:33:19.000And I also think even in that, like I really am opposed to these stand your ground laws.
01:33:24.000I think those are, if you have the opportunity to avoid conflict and to avoid, you are not, I would prefer as a state to require that you walk away from Even if it makes you feel embarrassed, then give you the right to kill someone for offending you.
01:33:41.000And those videos of the guys that shot the guy on his knees in the parking lot in the – I forgot what state it was, like not long ago, a year or two ago, they got into an altercation in the parking lot.
01:33:52.000Like if I have words with someone in a parking lot – Shot a guy on his knees?
01:34:12.000But, you know, like I remember when I was doing Shotokan Karate, My sensei, Kazumi Tabata, this was years ago, 30 years ago now, and he told us the following story.
01:34:23.000He said there was a sensei in this village in Japan and the students were coming to the dojo and there was the best student and then all the other students.
01:34:34.000And they were walking through the village and they approached a horse that was on the street from the rear.
01:34:41.000And it startled the horse and as the horse reared up and kicked its leg, the best student instantly did a kind of avoidance, kind of twisted his body and avoided the kick and the horse's leg went right in front of him and all the other students were amazed at his ability.
01:34:59.000And they get to the dojo and they tell the sensei, this is my sensei telling me this story, telling all of us this story.
01:35:05.000And those students get to the dojo and they tell the sensei the story, marveling at the ability of this master student to deftly avoid the strike.
01:35:14.000And the sensei is very angry and they don't understand why.
01:35:19.000He said if he were a really good student of mine, he would have walked on the other side of the street.
01:35:24.000He would have avoided the horse altogether.
01:35:27.000So, the real wisdom is to avoid avoidance of conflict in the first place.
01:35:31.000There's no reason to seek out conflict.
01:35:34.000And so, on these stand your ground laws, you know, if the choice is either you just avoid the conflict, you know, someone swore at you or called you an asshole or was an unreasonable jerk.
01:35:45.000That doesn't give you the right to kill them.
01:35:48.000So, anyway, I don't know how we got onto this as well.
01:36:43.000This is applied here better than anywhere else, I think.
01:36:47.000I got the impression looking at your face a moment ago when I told my sort of sweet sensei Japanese karate story that you didn't agree necessarily.
01:36:54.000No, that's a very wise way of looking at it.
01:36:56.000Yeah, don't be near a fucking horse that wants to kick you.
01:37:26.000It's just, you know, what happens in nature with animals happens with people if you let them get to that level.
01:37:33.000You scratch down to the, you know, remove that thin film of society and let people beat each other with rocks.
01:37:40.000Yes, we are violent, but I keep coming back to what I argue in Blueprint.
01:37:43.000You know, we have those tendencies, but equally we have tendencies to be kind and friendly, and we have to create the environment to foster those.
01:37:52.000I have a, there's a sense in which, and I talk about this in the book, there's a sense in which as we create those environments, We actually change ourselves as a species.
01:38:18.000Making those of us that are born with certain abilities better off, which then leads to those environments being created even more.
01:39:00.000There was therefore no reason for any adult to be able to digest lactose, which is the principal sugar in milk, because there was no lactose in your diet.
01:39:09.000So human beings were able to digest lactose when they were babies.
01:39:13.000They lost that capacity, all human beings.
01:39:15.000When they got to about two or three or four or five when they weaned, they no longer were able to digest milk.
01:39:19.000So the enzymes in their body were programmed, as it were, to only work when they were infants.
01:39:25.000Well, about between three and nine thousand years ago, in multiple places in Africa and in Europe, human beings suddenly domesticate animals.
01:39:33.000We domesticate milk-producing animals like cattle and sheep and goats and camels.
01:39:38.000And now, all of a sudden, there's a supply of milk around us.
01:39:42.000Because of our cultural innovation, because of the thing we invented, we created the domestic breeds, now we have milk.
01:39:50.000Now, therefore, those among us who were mutants, who were born with the ability to have our lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, persist into adulthood – this is known as lactase persistence – Welcome to my show!
01:40:24.000It turns out that this has happened several times.
01:40:42.000I think that when we invent cities about over 5,000 years ago, so we invent agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
01:40:50.000It's debated exactly when we invent cities.
01:40:52.000But between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, we start having fixed settlements.
01:40:55.000Earlier, you and I were talking about population density and having to live with other people, which is not our ancestral state, not packed, not with other people.
01:41:03.000I think that as we invent cities, people with different kinds of brains are better able to survive in cities.
01:41:10.000So now that we've invented cities, we're advantaging people with certain kinds of brains.
01:41:15.000And therefore, I think in 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 years, just like the milk example, there'll be different people as a result of something we humans manufactured that we made.
01:41:25.000And I could keep giving you examples of this.
01:41:27.000There's a – in the book, I have another example of a We're good to go.
01:41:53.000And they do it nothing except with weights and wooden goggles.
01:41:57.000They dive down into the seabed and forage, and they hunt underwater with spears.
01:42:10.000Have evolved to have different spleens and different oxygen metabolism than you and I. So those among them that could survive the dives fed their families, made more babies, and now we think this happened 2,000 years ago.
01:42:27.000So their invention of a seafaring way of life, their invention of a way of living at sea, the boat technology, the spearfishing technology, the The invention of those technologies creates an environment, a cultural environment around them,
01:42:43.000which modifies natural selection and changes the kind of genes that those people have.
01:42:49.000These are discussed in Blueprint, and there are many examples of this.
01:42:52.000I want to see an image of these goggles.
01:42:55.000Yeah, if you Google their little slitted goggles, if you Google Sea Nomad goggle, you may come up with it.
01:43:04.000And let me give you- What are they using for a lens?
01:44:08.000Yes, like the Inuit have developed this ability to not get frostbite and to not get numb fingers in cold weather.
01:44:16.000I did not know that example, but that would be an example of that.
01:44:18.000Yeah, this is an example from, I believe they were talking about it from Alaska, that they did genetic testing on these people and they did different circulation.
01:44:35.000Well, we have two kinds of flexibility.
01:44:37.000So think about like when we settled the Tibetan Plateau, when human beings settled the Tibetan Plateau, there were different challenges up there.
01:44:46.000It's cold up there and there's not a lot of oxygen up there.
01:44:49.000Now, we could – genetic evolution is not fast enough.
01:45:26.000So the people who live in the Himalayas, they actually have different kinds of hemoglobin compared to you and me, better able to extract oxygen from the environment.
01:45:35.000So there are two different challenges that are coped with in different ways.
01:45:39.000One is coped with culturally, by cultural evolution.
01:45:41.000One is coped with genetically, which is much slower, with genetic evolution.
01:45:45.000And it's the cultural evolution, it's the cultural traits that natural – so natural selection equips us with a capacity to accumulate knowledge and to teach each other stuff.
01:45:56.000And given that rare ability, as we discussed earlier, we're able to spread out across the planet and live in all these dissimilar environments.
01:46:04.000We use our cultural ability to dominate the planet, basically.
01:46:08.000Now, when you were creating this, were you actually thinking of it as a blueprint that someone would follow?
01:46:22.000But having finished the book, I do think that there are – like I don't in the book – I talk a little bit in the book about implications for – of these ideas for artificial intelligence.
01:46:32.000Like as we create robots, even as we create sex robots or autonomous vehicles or forms of bots online, how should those bots be programmed so as not to injure our society?
01:46:44.000So there are some policy implications I discuss in the book.
01:46:48.000But I wasn't thinking of this as a prescription, like this is the way to live a good life.
01:46:54.000But partly because, as I argue in the book, we don't need to affirmatively seek a good life.
01:47:01.000We have been endowed by natural selection with the capacity to make a good life.
01:47:59.000Let's talk about your children talking to Alexa.
01:48:02.000So the person who designs Alexa wants to make your child's experience easy and pleasant.
01:48:08.000And as part of the programming of Alexa, because they want to make Alexa the obedient servant of your child, it doesn't require your child to say, please, Alexa, would you play the music for me?
01:48:18.000Your child can be as rude as she wants to Alexa, and Alexa will do what she wants.
01:48:22.000What you should be concerned about, however, is not your child's interaction with Alexa.
01:48:26.000What you should be concerned about is what your child is learning from interacting with Alexa that then she takes to the playground.
01:48:35.000So Alexa is corroding our social fabric.
01:48:37.000Alexa, in this example, is making children rude to each other.
01:48:41.000So our concern is not so much, do we make, you know, like Asimov's laws of robotics, it's not that we want to program the robot so that they don't harm you.
01:48:53.000It's true, the first law, we don't want the robot to, through an act of commission or omission, harm or allow a human to come to be harmed.
01:49:00.000It's that we're concerned about how the robot, in interacting with you, might cause you to harm others.
01:49:09.000So, in the Alexa example, we might want to regulate the programming of devices that speak to children.
01:49:18.000Not because we want to deprive your daughter of the right to speak how she wants, but because we recognize that that robot is going to cause your daughter to be rude to other people.
01:49:39.000It's not like – I'm not arguing that Alexa should become – I think it's so novel to kids that they know it's not a person.
01:49:45.000I don't think it really- All right, but we're using these examples to build the thing.
01:49:48.000So let's talk about the sex robots now.
01:49:50.000So some people believe that actually the emergence of sex robots, which will surely appear in the next 10 or 20 years, will be a fantastic boon.
01:50:02.000They think that- People will be able to experiment.
01:50:06.000You'll be able to experiment with same-sex relationships, for example, group sex.
01:50:11.000You might learn to be a better lover so you could practice with the robots and therefore you'd be more experienced when you were having sex with a real human.
01:50:20.000So you can't get venereal diseases from a sex robot.
01:50:50.000And they furthermore think that it would result in one having a kind of anonymous or impersonal interactions with humans subsequently, that you'll be entrained to, let's say, want an obedient partner, for example.
01:51:06.000I don't know which way it's going out.
01:51:07.000And in a way, I don't have to make a stand on it because what I'm interested in recognizing is that when we talk about allowing people to have sex with sex robots, not allowing that it's going to happen, the focus of our concern should be not what is your experience in your bedroom when you have sex with a sex robot.
01:51:23.000Our concern as a state, like my interest, Right.
01:52:10.000Those autonomous vehicles probably can be yoked together.
01:52:15.000They can communicate with each other so that you'll have like trains of cars moving in synchrony.
01:52:21.000Like each of them will be communicating with the other nearby cars and you'll have laminar flow where all these vehicles are smoothly moving and joining the highway and leaving the highway and communicating on a citywide scale, slowing traffic down miles away because they anticipate with AI that there'll be a jam here if they don't do that.
01:52:37.000And I think that'll be actually great.
01:52:39.000I'm actually looking forward to autonomy.
01:52:41.000I mean, I still like to take my car to a speedway, but, you know, drive itself with stick, which I like.
01:52:46.000But, you know, But in between, we're going to have a world of what I call hybrid systems of human-driven cars and autonomous vehicles coexisting on a plane, on an even plane.
01:53:00.000And we need to be worried about that because these autonomous vehicles, when we interact with them, are going to change how we interact with each other.
01:53:08.000For example, do we program the autonomous vehicle to drive at a constant steady speed?
01:53:14.000If you're the designer of the car, you might say, gee, I don't want this car to crash.
01:53:19.000I want the car to drive in a very predictable fashion, and that's what's best for the occupants of the car.
01:53:24.000That's what's going to allow me to sell more vehicles.
01:53:27.000But it may be the case that actually when people are in contact with such a vehicle, they get lulled into a false sense of security.
01:53:35.000Oh, that vehicle never does anything new.
01:53:37.000I don't need to pay so much attention to the car in front of me.
01:54:16.000Once again, the lesson here is that it's not just about the one-on-one interaction between the robotic artificial intelligence and the human being.
01:54:26.000And in my lab, we do many experiments in social systems where we take a group of people and we drop online, we drop a bot or in the laboratory we have a physical robot and we watch how the presence of the robot affects It doesn't just modify how the human interacts with the robot,
01:54:43.000but how the humans interact with each other.
01:54:45.000So if we put a robot right there, looking at us with its third eye, would we, you know, would it change how you and I talk to each other, make us different?
01:55:08.000Porn addictions, when people develop this very impersonal way of communicating with people, and they think about sex and the objectification of the opposite sex in a very different way.
01:55:21.000It flavors the way you think of- It flavors your expectations, yes.
01:56:40.000Well, we're also in this weird transition genetically where they're doing genetic experiments on humans and with the advent of CRISPR and emerging technologies.
01:57:00.000I think if they start cracking them out in China and they start giving birth to eight-foot-tall supermen with 12-inch dicks, we're going to have a real issue.
01:57:25.000So I don't think we're going to start by using these technologies to cure monogenic diseases.
01:57:31.000So, you know, like thalassemia, for example.
01:57:34.000So diseases or certain immune deficiencies, a disease where a single gene is defective, And those will be the initial targets.
01:57:41.000But once we start with that, eventually I think there will be people who will want to genetically engineer other people, their offspring, for example, and modify them in the ways that you suggest.
01:57:51.000Maybe not 12-inch dicks, but maybe ability to run fast or something else.
01:57:56.000Isn't that one of the side effects they showed with the genetic manipulation of these Chinese babies to eliminate HIV? That they made them smarter?
01:58:05.000No, I don't know if they made them smarter.
01:58:06.000What's clear from the most recent findings I've seen from that case...
01:58:10.000Is that unsurprisingly, as anyone could predict, the technology is not good enough to restrict the mutations to one particular region of the genome.
01:58:20.000So there were other changes in the genome in these children that occurred elsewhere rather than the targeted region, which was to increase their immunity to HIV. And we don't know what those are.
01:58:59.000I mean, that's just the nature of humans, right?
01:59:04.000Just to be clear, I talk about the CRISPR example in Blueprint.
01:59:08.000I actually talk about how these technologies – again, my lens on it is how these technologies are going to change how we interact with each other.
01:59:16.000And it goes back to the example we were talking about at the beginning when we invented cities – That was a technology that changed how we interacted with each other.
01:59:23.000So human beings for a very long time have been inventing – when we invented weapons, that was a technology that changed how we interact with each other.
01:59:31.000So we have previously done this kind of thing.
01:59:33.000We've invented a technology that changed how we interact with each other and I'm very interested in the – Yeah, I'm incredibly interested in this because I love to study history, and I love to study how crazy the world was 4,000,
01:59:49.0005,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and what it's going to be like in the future.
01:59:54.000I just think our understanding of the consequences of our actions are so different than anybody has ever had before.
01:59:59.000We have just such a broader relationship.
02:00:03.000First of all, we have examples from all over the world now that we can study very closely, which I don't think really was available to that many people up until fairly recently.
02:00:13.000You mean, I'm sorry, you're saying the examples are more numerous or our capacity to discern them is higher?
02:00:17.000Our capacity to discern them and just our in-depth understanding of these various cultures all over the world.
02:00:23.000Like what you've been telling me today about the divers and others.
02:00:28.000We just have so much more data and so much more of an understanding than ever before.
02:00:33.000I love the idea that we are – I mean, I believe that this is probably the best time ever to be alive, and I think that it's probably – I think that's true.
02:00:43.000I think there's certainly a lot of terrible things that are wrong in the world today.
02:00:55.000But one of the arguments that I make is, this is a kind of Steven Pinker argument that you're outlining, which is, you know, with the emergence of, I mean, people are living longer than they ever have on the whole planet, fewer people in starvation, we have less violence, I mean, every indicator of human well-being is up.
02:01:12.000And it's partly due or largely due in the recent last thousand years to the emergence of the enlightenment and the philosophy and the science that was guided, that emerged about 300 years ago and 200 and some odd years ago and culminating in the present and continuing.
02:01:29.000So I think this is not just a kind of so-called Whiggish view of history.
02:01:33.000It's not just a progressive sort of fantasy.
02:01:36.000I think it's the case that these philosophical and scientific moves that our species made in the last few hundred years has improved our well-being.
02:01:43.000However, as we've been discussing today, it's not just historical forces that are tending towards making us better off.
02:01:52.000A deeper and more ancient and more powerful force is also at work, which is natural selection.
02:01:58.000It's evolutionary and not just historical forces that are relevant to our well-being.
02:02:02.000And we don't just need to look to philosophers to find the path to a good life.
02:02:08.000Natural selection has equipped us with these capacities for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching and all these good things we've been discussing that also tend to a good life.
02:02:22.000However, it's not just that that's contributing to our well-being.
02:02:26.000This natural selection is literally why we are in this state now and why we were hoping this trend will continue and we will be in this better place 50 years from now, 100 years from now.
02:02:38.000Well, natural selection doesn't work over those timescales, so those are historical forces.
02:02:42.000But the point is we are set up for success.
02:03:56.000I thought you were alluding to, just to check if you were, to the debate, which I don't know the answer to, on whether AI will, you know, are we going to face like a Terminator-type existence where, you know, the machines rise up and kill us all?
02:04:30.000You know, is there a time a thousand years from now when the human beings will say, what the hell were our ancestors doing inventing artificial intelligence?
02:05:55.000All these things we've outlined, all the problems with us, those will go away with artificial intelligence.
02:05:59.000This is a deep philosophical question, Joe.
02:06:02.000I think it's inevitable, and I think if the single-celled organisms are sitting around wondering what the future would be going to be like, Are we going to be replaced?
02:06:08.000Will they make antibiotics that kill us?
02:06:10.000Yes, they are going to make antibiotics that kill us!
02:06:42.000I think it's beautiful, too, but I think vultures probably think they're beautiful, too.
02:06:45.000That's why they breed with each other.
02:06:47.000Well, they are beautiful, but the point is I think we have a flawed beauty.
02:06:50.000I'm going to stick to my principles that we are, despite our flaws, worth it.
02:06:54.000There is something wonderful about us, and I think that wonderful creative quality is the reason why we created artificial life in the first place.
02:07:06.000We've had that impetus, you know, if you look at a lot of the...
02:07:10.000The art, whether it's the Egyptian, you know, the pyramids or other kinds of artistic expression, we seem to have had a desire to transcend death, you know, to make things that looked like us but weren't alive forever,
02:07:33.000Now, your very, as I said, charitable, positive take on On the claim and your analogy to single-celled organisms, which are just, you know, but a fleeting, not a fleeting, they're still there, but a phase in our evolution, you know, is something I'm going to have to be thinking about because it's disturbing,
02:07:50.000Well, it's an objective perspective if I took myself out of the human race, which I really can't, but if I tried to fake it.
02:07:56.000I would say, oh, I see what's going on here.
02:07:58.000These dummies are buying iPhones and new MacBooks because they know that this is what's going to help the production of newer, more superior technology.
02:08:09.000The more we consume, it's also based, I think, in a lot of ways, our insane desire for materialism is fueling this.
02:08:19.000And it could be an inherent property of the human species that it is designed to create this artificial life.
02:08:26.000And that literally is what it's here for.
02:08:29.000And much like an ant is creating an ant hill and doesn't exactly have some sort of a future plan for its kids and its 401k plan, that what we're doing is like this inherent property of being a human being.
02:08:41.000Our curiosity, our wanderlust, our desire, all these things.
02:08:45.000Yeah, all these things are built in because if you follow them far enough down the line, 100 years, 200 years, it inevitably leads to artificial life.
02:09:09.000The pace of innovation, people always have been saying, if you go back every decade, people are saying, just around the corner, just around the corner.
02:09:34.000I think it's entirely possible that 30-year-olds today could be 150. But I think you give another 10 years of research, you give maybe 10 years more, I think it's entirely possible.
02:09:45.000Well, there's a famous bet about this, you may know, the Olshansky-Alstead bet.
02:10:53.000I have never reached a conclusion, but I always figured you live long enough, well, especially up until recent history, only long enough to recognize it was all crazy hustle.
02:11:23.000It's not known for sure if this is the answer, but this is a good answer.
02:11:27.000Imagine there are two different kinds of things that can kill you, intrinsic causes and extrinsic causes.
02:11:33.000So things inside your body that result in you dying, defects, diseases, and so forth, or things outside your body, like accidents, lightning strikes, trees fall and you just die, and so forth.
02:11:46.000Because it's impossible to eliminate all extrinsic causes, because some people are going to die from accidents, it would be inefficient from the point of view of evolution to evolve to be immortal.
02:11:58.000Because we would have all this capacity to be immortal.
02:12:01.000We would have these bodies capable of immortality, which let's say would be evolutionarily demanding, like to evolve anything like an eye or a brain or Any quality, lactase, right?
02:12:11.000Like we talked about earlier, you don't have lactase persistence into adulthood because it's not needed.
02:12:19.000So there would be no reason, the argument goes, to evolve immortality because inevitably some people would be killed eventually by accidents anyway.
02:12:34.000So unless you can create a world in which there are no accidents, there are no extrinsic causes of death, it would be inefficient from an evolutionary point of view to evolve immortality.
02:12:45.000So death, the reason we die naturally, some people think, is that, the reason we die naturally is that there are unnatural causes of death in the world, like accidents.
02:12:57.000If we could eliminate the unnatural causes, So that nowhere, no time ever were we ever killed by trees falling or lightning strikes or things like that, then actually over time we would evolve to live indefinitely.
02:13:18.000It is fascinating, but do you think that nature had that sort of foresight?
02:13:22.000Well, it's not a foresight, but that's how natural selection works.
02:13:24.000Think about, like, if I have suddenly magically transformed your body at great expense to make you capable of immortality, and then two days from now you're hit by a bus.
02:13:36.000But if you've only done it to one person, you've wasted that effort.
02:13:38.000If you did it to other people, you have the potential to create an incredibly wise person with a thousand years of life and experience and education and learning.
02:13:52.000Well, no, that's the assumption in the model.
02:13:55.000If it's not perhaps, if in fact there are no extrinsic, if in fact there is a world in which you're never struck by lightning, never hit by a bus, never a tree branch, Then the theory is that we would have evolved to be immortal.
02:14:07.000So it's almost like the life that you live, you're inevitably going to get killed by extrinsic causes.
02:15:42.000An amazing story that my friend Donald Cerrone, he's a UFC fighter, told about being trapped in a cave and just barely getting out when it was running out of oxygen.
02:16:32.000Okay, but isn't that possible that that's just through development of constant practice of staying calm while you're in life-threatening situations?
02:16:49.000And the guys, the special force guys, it's like the capacity to shoot back when you're being shot at, keeping your calm, moving positions, and so forth.
02:16:58.000Those are all very important abilities, not panicking.
02:17:01.000And it is also the case that some people, for example, the most famous study in this regard was a study of London taxi drivers.
02:17:07.000London taxi drivers can go from any point in the city to any other point in the city.
02:17:12.000They have a mental map of the whole city and it's freakish.
02:17:15.000It takes years to be able to know how to navigate the city with tens of thousands of street names and they can do it by like dead reckoning.
02:17:25.000They scanned – this was a paper about 10 years ago.
02:17:27.000They brain scanned these guys and they had – I forgot which region of the brain but they had through learning – It is felt.
02:17:47.000Honnold is this way because he learned this way.
02:17:48.000But it's more likely I think that he's like Usain Bolt that was born with incredibly high preponderance of fast twitch fibers in his legs so he can run like the wind.
02:19:45.000And I think it's also a kind of – you also find oftentimes that the practice of acquiring a skill – It teaches you other things that can then be used in other areas.
02:19:55.000So even if you – like you make the effort to learn the violin or to learn Chinese, for example, or whatever, some effort, that self-discipline then can be translated into something that you're not so good at, but it's still useful to have that.
02:20:10.000Trevor Burrus That's the Miyamoto Musashi quote from The Book of Five Rings, once you know the way broadly, you see it in all things.
02:20:19.000I remember – my mind is flashing back to what we were talking about immortality.
02:20:23.000Do you remember that scene at Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings when they're protecting the castle and the elves come and help the humans?
02:20:38.000And I was always very sad when these elves were killed, because if they hadn't been killed by extrinsic forces, they would have lived a long time.