Nicholas Christakis

00:00the gay folks took over the rainbow four three two well at work today Jamie yes hello Nicholas Hey Joe how are you man great to meet you it's really good to meet you too I became aware of you like many people did with the infamous Halloween costume incident at Yale where explain that for people who don't know what happened because it was I'm kind of a crazy scene it went national yes it was a moment when around the country many students were struggling with how to balance conflicting sort of needs that conflicting needs how on the one hand to create an environment in schools where people everyone sort of felt welcomed as we've democratized admissions to our American universities as I think we should have people from all walks of life have started moving into these institutions claiming them for their own which i think is appropriate but at the same time these institutions had

01:05wonderful Heritage's of commitment to free expression and open debate and and reason as a principle for resolving our differences and and some of those values came into tension and so around the country there was a lot of heat about this and I happened to walk into a propellor myself and and wound up in some challenging circumstances and you know I it was not it was not the worst thing that's ever happened to me but you know it was Sid in the top ten challenging moments I've had in my life let's say yeah that's a very lawyer like way of describing exactly what happened I you know I you know I struggle I mean you can tell the story if you want and then I could correct things but here's the thing is it's my job to be a teacher and I have taken responsibility for teaching young people and it is the case that many people lost their their minds I mean lost their senses and and and the

02:12faculty to incidentally I mean you know there's one thing to talk about people in there in college-age people but then you know the faculty also didn't necessarily do what they should have done but um but the the thing is is that you know my commitment it my commitment is to is to teaching more generally and I don't want to be defined by that event I don't want that to become the most important thing about me you know I have this book or this book that we're gonna talk about that is an important thing in my life instantiate smile use it talks about what I think is important about the world so so I'm trying to be balanced about it just it's one thing that happened I did my best it's in the past let me let me help out here because you're being so nice about the whole thing so people know what we're talking about there was an incident that was captured on someone's

03:00cell phone where you people it was an hour of yeah it's five or six different angles so a clip went viral but 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 as available but well I'm glad that you had the courage to do that though to stand out there and talk to those kids but some of them were clearly there'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 hamstrung them in front of the public and that's what I felt was going on just my understanding of human nature I knew what she was doing what she was doing by shouting and screaming this is our home you know I will you know we're supposed to be safe here I was like oh I see what's going on

03:49she's throwing up the flag of virtue for all of her friends to see how amazing she was so she's putting on a show people do that it's it's it's human nature you handled it admirably you stood there and you you just listened to her and you never yelled back and you never raise your voice and you remain calm but that sort of environment where the children and I want to set children they're basically adults but acting like children this is one of the ironies that the people that age you know can fight in wars and lose their lives and so I think it's a it's a difficult challenge because the one hand it's right and appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions certainly if you're 20 years old you're an adult you're still growing you're still changing you're still learning I'm not the same man I was when I was 20 but you have to be responsible for your behavior yeah and so I don't

04:44think you get a total pass either it's hard you do not get a total pass and you know for folks who don't have a 20 year old in their life and don't remember what it was like you know you're not a fully formed thing yet you're you're filled with chaos emotions and hormones and yes and then you're at school and you're probably away from the instructions of your parents for the first time and you know you're cutting loose and trying out new new ways of communicating that way it's it's a lot of it's a mess but most people felt horrified watching that that you were subjected to that when you're being very reasonable and 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 you know maybe it's okay to for someone to dress up like Crazy Horse yeah well well actually just

05:42to be clear what Erica was saying in that note was not this is very important intellectual distinction I think we've we've lost a lot of nuance in our political lives in general in our country right now and also in the in the nuance in the way we think about difficult topics so what Erica was saying was not that necessarily the people she was not taking a position on any particular costumes like this is OK in fact many of the costumes that would have offended the students would offend her what she was saying was that she didn't think the university should be telling students what to wear right she and she was asking the students do you students really at this age at Yale do you really want the university to be sending you guidance on what to wear perhaps you should think about that you're adults you're smart you're in an environment that privileges free

06:28expression do you really want to grant the power to an institution to tell you how to communicate yeah and people then thought that she was saying that that she was defending a particular course of action what she was saying was you she was saying do you students really want to surrender that kind of control over your own lives to older adults and apparently many students did actually they wanted they did so I don't believe they did I think they wanted absolute enforcement of what they thought to be wrong or right yes yes I think that's right so they they they they though the Manny but not all of the students I mean let's be let's also be very clear and in part of the motivation in in Erika writing that note was that many many of her students in fact many hundreds of other students felt infantilized by this policy and there had been a big build-up prior to that

07:33event including an article in The New York Times about these Halloween costume policies around the country and weren't they kind of ridiculous and so there was a there was a kind of a ferment where people were saying wait a minute do we really need adults to be told in this institution especially given its commitments to open expression what to wear and keep in mind that there could be many ways in which a costume that offends you might not might I might not know why so let's say you'd been abused by a priest and you were that one of the the rules said you shouldn't amok religion for example was what one of the one of the provisions so so a university-wide email went out signed by 13 people saying you know don't don't don't mock people's deeply-held faith traditions well what if for the sake of argument you had been a abused by a priest and you wanted Halloween to dress

08:27up as a Catholic priest for example you know holding a doll and someone else who had a different who was Catholic was very deeply offended by that well who should adjudicate that like you know do is it the role of the the institution to come down and say yes you can express yourself this way no you cannot and so the argument was let the young people learn let them sort it out themselves let them learn by talking to each other expressing themselves saying you know that hurts my feelings here's why it hurts my feelings and the other person said oh I understand or I don't understand I reject that reason and and sort of buy into a kind of commitment to free and open expression that actually I think ultimately serves the objectives of righteous social progress if 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

09:21other grant good faith listen carefully make subtle distinctions and and free people up to express what they're thinking so we can have a real marketplace of ideas that's you know my commitment or my belief well that's a wonderful belief I love it I mean that's really I couldn't agree with you more more enthusiastically that'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 yes or I don't think you necessarily need a third-party mediator but you do need a shared understanding of core liberal principles and 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 so how are you and I going to come to a better understanding of what is true about the

10:17world we could fight right and then the stronger person would decide what's right we could vote it doesn't seem quite right either you know a 350 Cardinals voted that Galileo was wrong that didn't make Galileo wrong or we could use principles of Reason an inquiry to try to appreciate the world together right we're looking out at the world and saying that's confusing you know does the Sun does the earth revolve around the Sun or does the Sun revolve around the earth or that's confusing should a king have monarch you know should a king have ultimate authority in a state or is that not how we want to organize a state so 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 that to me is the only way to truth actually now some people will think that religion

11:08a way to truth right they think that the truth is you knows God given for example now I am very sympathetic to religious belief systems but I don't think that's the way to truth it's a way to some truths actually it's a way to some some wisdom but anyway so that's what our universities in our society our universities are officially committed to that the models of our universities are all about free inquiry and pursuit of knowledge and our country is committed to that in our bill of rights right we have a commitment to free and open expression freedom of assembly freedom of religion and so forth and and those ground rules that in my view make it possible for us to have a better society and and there's more I think well I'm sure we will get into it no I'm sure we will again I couldn't agree with you more yes yeah I just think we need more reasonable conversations and screaming

11:57and less shouting people down and less mob action I yes yes the mob action is very weird because I don't remember it well from the like from the Vietnam War protests to what's going on today there was this long gap where you didn't hear about universities shutting down speech yes this is fairly new this is within the last half decade or so well let's not yeah yes yes I mean they're always there there's always an undercurrent of tension about this at universities and in our society at large I mean let's not forget the McCarthy era where you had the right wing was you know really interested in shutting down communists like if you were a professor or an artist who had far left political views you were screwed yes and that's what's wrong or even if you'd want went to a communist meeting yes find out what it was all about yes just to educate yourself yes in fact that's a great

12:56example because that's like right now I see a lot of people being criticized for following online people they disagree with yes which is nuts great yeah so I just because I follow someone doesn't mean I agree with what they're saying I'm interested to learn what are they saying I'm friends with people I can agree yes I am friends with so many people I don't agree with I have a friend I have I have friends across a political spectrum from I don't have any monarchists among my friends who are monarchies but I have friends for the far right too far left I have a friend who really believes he's so libertarian he thinks there should be private ownership of roads whoa yeah that means these are Joe's yeah I think that's ridiculous and we debate but he you know must be white yeah my what my wife says she just once like to meet a poor libertarian libertarian yes No

13:49yeah that's a ridiculous position I think so private Rosie the out yeah okay but so here's the thing but okay how are we gonna persuade this man that he's he also thinks somewhat less controversially it's harder decision he also thinks that you you shouldn't be you should be able to sell your but your organs you know we should have a market in kidneys that you you know you right now while you're alive yeah you can give away one of your kidneys no but yeah you can and we allow you to give it away but we don't allow you to sell it wasn't there an instance Jaime that you were telling me about about a young guy who sold his kidney to get an iPhone was another kind in another country yes yes and wound up having an infection and lost his second kidney as well yes and then would need to be undone yes these things yeah and these things yeah these things are happening there but in the

14:38United States it's prohibited you can't do that you also can't sell your blood in the United States there's a reason for that yes and that's a good reason a good public health reason yeah because people who want to sell their blood are usually up correct and so it's not a safe the blood supply is safer in countries where you work entirely Yantra ristic lee doing it exactly yes but the kidney is a harder case anyway he believes that he he he anyways I love debating him and I learned from him like recently he said to me and I and I think I have a better answer he said he doesn't understand why blackmail is illegal anarchists anarchists and libertarians all of them need their asses kicked they really do exactly but and I think any kind of extreme ideology but the point is we can learn there is some wisdom almost anywhere right and and the problem comes from excess expression

15:34you know the the problem comes from you know there's just there there the problem comes you know when we take things to extremes and we get to you know private ownership of roads yeah anyway and by the way if you're an anarchist or a libertarian I'm kidding I'm just joking around but it is it's a position that I always feel like to be remedied with psychedelic drugs it could be yes really feeling that almost always could be like I get you know I just I get where they're coming from I understand personal responsibility the idea that the free market should decide get all that but we already accept that there's some things that we agree on that we should all chip into pain for feeling like roads yeah or like assessment entities well you are like assessment of drug purity for example so the very rich could set up a laboratory in their basement so whenever a doctor

16:30prescribes a medication they could see if the drugs are safe yeah and pure yes the rest of us pay taxes now we say we're all gonna pitch in together and we're gonna have the FDA and they are going to certify drug purity so that when I go to my pharmacist and buy a drug you know the pharmaceutical company isn't killing me by shoddy manufacturing practices yes so I think that's right we get together and as a free society and we we do these things we we want a non corrupt judiciary right yes we don't want people to be able to bribe judges sure exactly yeah so there are certain foundational elements of our civilization of our society which are crucial to our well-being and one of them is the capacity to openly debate ideas and to expose ourselves to ideas across the gamut and I'm not just talking about political ideas talking about scientific ideas yes so how are we going to win the

17:21battle against anti-vaxxers like how are we going to persuade people who believe that vaccines kill people for which there's no scientific evidence that they're wrong we could imprison them like that's force we could vote which is sort of what we're doing we're saying okay well you're a minority group who believes these things so we're not going to allow you to control policy or we could try to win the battle of ideas and persuade them ultimately that's the only path that's to in my view that gets us to where we want yeah and just an honest assessment of the actual data like what we really know and understanding how these scientists come to these conclusions but the problem is these echo chambers where people get involved online that magnify all of these beliefs and you get radicalized I mean I've seen true people get involved in these Facebook groups

18:11these anti-vaccine Facebook groups or you know all sorts of different things I mean that's how these Flat Earth people get going yes they start listening only to people that are involved in this circle they don't have a greater understanding of the science involved and you just see I just online their set a cruise to the flat or cruise for a flat earth right now if you saw it to the ice wall yeah the ice walk that's a new wrinkle because the mold 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 it was just a disk now the new theory that there's an ice wall actually it's kind of not falsifiable that is to say you you could get on a cruise and sail to the edge of the earth and you would find a wall of ice there so you Antarctica so you think ha it's flat in other words they they have

19:03redefined their theory to to make it so that you can't disprove it mmm right you don't get to an edge there's no edge there's an ice wall as what they're saying now and are you aware of hashtag space is fake no I'm not I understand they're not expose myself that that's space there's a bunch of people that believe that space is fake okay it's not real but there's no real space and that there's like lights up there Oh in that this is some sort of a plan by Satan um it's a lot of it's very biblical it's really interesting a lot of the Flat Earth stuff is very biblical that's it has to do with the firmament oh and they use descriptions and depictions from the Bible oh yeah it's super bizarre and what's really bizarre is when you listen to the YouTube videos or these discussions that are done by people that use words that are real they string them together correctly they have like full

20:02sentences they appear to be articulate it's very confusing if you're a dummy if you let you listen to those you go wow this guy's making a lot of sense he's not but it sounds like he's making a lot of sense because he's using all these words that are correctly used there's no arms he's saying it articulately there's like everything seems like like a sentence this man is exposing he's exposing the reality but it's not it's just nonsense yes and if you don't know any better and that's all you listen to that's where your head will go the same with the anti-vaccination so much sense like oh my god it's giving everybody all sorts of ailments yes you're on this page and they have a theory of how it does that which is not its uses as you say scientific words but it's actually not scientifically correct right you know it does this which then does that which then does that they lay

20:50out a kind of causal chain yeah it's just false and then there's a problem of nuance and perspective because there's so many people that get vaccinated there's hundreds of millions of people in this country billions of people worldwide and then there are instances rare or cases where people have real issues with vaccinations well there are some where they have real issues so for example there's some vaccines which are known to cause certain neurological conditions rarely one out of a million or 100,000 vaccinations more 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 yes and people associate the two they say oh because of the vaccine this happened no it's a coincidence either or yes there's both in the and there's also you know if it's one out of

21:39a million you have 300 million exactly you have three million yeah you know I mean 1 million people with an issue is a big deal right with 300 million people yes you you easily could have 300 really big cases yes you know 300 cases where something died from vaccines and then you bring those in front of people and say oh my god and then there's this one in this one this one and there's 298 more and you're like holy yes all these people are dying from vaccines yes as you know it doesn't feel good if it's your child but when we look at the greater perspective of humanity and you say we'll listen you don't want to bring back smallpox you don't want your child to get measles babies can get measles when they can't even be vaccinated for it this is one of the reasons why we need to vaccinate children to make sure they don't get measles yes a serious problem yes and a serious problem that

22:30scientists have labored for untold yeah aids a triumph of our civilization that we can actually stop these diseases yes and save children's lives I had a woman yesterday who is an expert she's a medical historian an expert in Victorian era surgery Lindsay Fitzharris and she wrote this great book called the butchering art and in it there's all these images she shoot one of them she brought up of what smallpox actually looks like get it it's horrible yes it just covers people's bodies you've eradicated this like it's not a full and you guys from it yes it's actually gone yes we don't mean it's credible yes um but that's obviously neither here nor there so this book blueprint the evolutionary origins of a good society when did you start this about nine or ten years ago hmm and I at the time in my lab we were doing research on friendship we were doing research on on

23:28why people have friends it's actually it's not it's not difficult to provide an account for why we have sex with each other many animals most animals are well I don't know if it's most but animals either reproduce sexually or a sexually and most animals I try to remember now what the relative proportion is anyway mamasay most most animals reproduce sexually and it's not hard to provide an account for how for why we why sex originated why we reproduce sexually it's not hard to provide an account for why we are choosy in our mates or why we are careful in who we have sex with but human beings don't just mate with each other we befriend each other we form long-term non reproductive unions to other individuals to whom we're not related why that's very rare in the animal kingdom very few creatures do this we do it certain other primates elephants certain whales and that's mostly it so the

24:26question is why so I became very interested in my lab trying to understand the deep origins of friendship why would natural selection have equipped us with this capacity and that's at the stage then for an exploring all kinds of other things in our lives like why we love each other for example why do we why do we when we have sex with a person we tend to become attached to them we develop emotional sentiment about them that's not an essential to having sex yet we do that and then I became interested in other kinds of good things like not as just love and friendship but cooperation and teaching teaching is another crazy thing we take it for granted that we teach each other but think about this most animals are able to learn so a little fish in the ocean learns that if it swims to the light it finds more food there so the fish then learns to be tropic to move towards the light

25:19that's individual learning some animals develop what's called social learning social learning is really efficient so if I put my hand in the fire I learned that I burned myself I pull my hand out I've learned something I paid a price and I learned something I could observe you putting your hand in the fire you pay all the price but I gain most of the knowledge it's almost as good I learn all people you shouldn't put your hand in the fire saw that Joe movies and in the fire so social learning is super efficient learning from others but we take it to an even further level we don't just passively observe other other animals of our own species and learn from them we teach each other that is very rare in the animal kingdom where one animal sets out to teach another animal something so the book is is is about the evolutionary origins of a good Society it's also a kind of response to

26:13kind of push back to a long tradition in the sciences of attention to the bad parts of our nature you know the scientists in my view have for too long been looking at the origins of murder and tribalism and selfishness and mendacity but but 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 all these good things and I'll shut up and please don't no and and here's the thing here's this sort of one way to think about this this must have been the case that the benefits of a connected life outweighed the costs we would not be living socially if my exposure to you harmed me unmet 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 then my

27:17connection to you would ultimately harm me that I should be better off living as an isolated animal so animals that come together to live socially the benefits of that must outweigh the costs my living us living as a group so 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 every century's replete with horrors I'm not like Pangloss like I don't think like you know Pollyanna like oh everything's great That's not me but what is me is a kind of optimistic focus on the good parts of our of human nature and the recognition that those good parts must in toto overwhelm the bad parts well they certainly have to there's so many human beings I mean obvious that this is working yes we have propagated where everywhere on

28:12every single patch of land that's occupiable in fact you're exactly right in the 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 is as spread out to occupy every niche which is also very rare most animals live in one you know Grizzlies live in in this part of the world they don't live in Amazonia and you know polar bears live in this part of the world they don't live in in Arizona etc so so 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 so in the book I talk about lots of this a famous set of stories called the lost year explorer files about how European explorers are lost they lose their supplies they wind up dying and but they're in an environment in which other

29:07people thrive and survive because they have learned to how to live there so we've spread out around the world and then though there's a chapter in the book at the beginning about shipwrecks so so I have this should I go on chap yeah so I have this I have this so so what I'd like to do is what I try to set out to do in the beginning of the book as I say look it's clear that our genes shape the structure and function of our bodies it is increasingly clear that our genes also straight shape the structure and function of our minds our behaviors whether you're risk averse how intelligent you are whether you have wanderlust these properties are properties that depend in part on your genes but it's also clear to me and that's what the book argues is that our genes shape not just a structure and function of our bodies not just a structure and function of our minds but

30:02also the structure and function of our societies and to really prove that what we would need is something known as the forbidden experiment and the forbidden experiment is an experiment in which we took a group of babies who had never been taught anything who are a cultural had no culture and stranded them on an island and left them on their own to see what kind of society they would make when they grew up you know how would they organize themselves socially is there kind of an innate Society that human beings are pre-wired to make in an essence now obviously that's unethical and cruel but actually monarchs for thousands of years have contemplated this experiment so Herodotus writes in 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

30:51so 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 and and and and the emperor akbar attempted this there was a couple of European kings that attempted this obviously we can't actually do this so what I do in the book is look at a series of other approximations of that and 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 many more thousands of ships were lost at sea and in 20 of those cases we found 20 cases where at least 19 people were stranded for at least two months and uh you know here's that there's a kind of um here's a map of the well here's one crew I can tell you about but here's a map of the of the shipwrecks like these are that Wow all over the world where they occurred

31:47and when they occurred and how many people there were and and 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 and try to understand what kind of society did these isolated crews actually wind up making and there was some amazing stories that were that I found in there so they stayed for at least two months how many of them actually established a real civilization how many well they didn't forever no no one was stuck forever most of those crews were eventually in fact all of those crews had at least one survivor because if they had all died then I wouldn't be able to know about there's a one famous case in which these sailors were stranded in near Australia I think somewhere in the Pacific and they managed to catch a big petrol one

32:40of those huge birds that you know like a condor and and they they they put a little note in a little tiny bottle and they tied it to its feet and this petrol flew thousands of miles and landed in Australia and was found with a note indicating where the Isis stranded sailors were well and a ship was sent to go find the men and it got there but they had all died they were all gone so they used this this this bird so she ate the bird well no they didn't eat the bird they push it off no I think if you had that choice you would communicate rather than eat Joe I think yes yeah for a little bit well yes but they starve to death then we don't know nobody knows but the point is that we have to have it for me to be able to describe what happened we needed at least one survivor and often there were many cases where everyone survived I mean there was one pair of cases that

33:38I was amazing to me in 1846 in South Auckland Islands just north of Antarctica south of New Zealand the the Grafton was wrecked on the southern part of the island the camera bruh how big island was it's in the book I maybe let's say 90 miles long or something or 20 miles long if he's 20 miles long on the southern part of the island five men are wrecked on the Grafton and on the northern part of the island the invar Co wrecks 19 men are wrecked on the invar Co all the Grafton crew survives the in both people both crews were on the island at the same time they never encountered each other they're struggling for survival it's like an like an experiment like who's gonna win tempted to say Fear Factor yeah and and and the question is who's gonna survive and how and why everyone on the Grafton crew survives and 16 of the 19 men on the on the invar Co crew die

34:38there's also cannibalism in that crew so it's a it's a very it's a very different outcome for various reasons so anyway so that the point is that in the book I start with a series of stories about how people come together to make attempt to make new civilizations I use the example of unintentional communities with a with shipwrecks I have I looked in at intentional communities like communes and and kibbutz is in Israel and 1970s communes in the United States and 19th century communes in the United States actually going back to Roman times there have always been groups of people who said societies up I'm gonna go and we're gonna make it again you know we're gonna start afresh I look at settlements in Antarctica of scientists I look at the Pitcairn you know the mutiny on the bounty I look at the Shackleton expedition many many cases of stranded isolated groups of

35:34people trying to make a new social order and then I also used data from experiments we do in my lab we have this software where tens of thousands of people have come and played these games we we can create these temporary artificial societies of real people where people come and spend an hour or two and we with his godlike way can engineer the society we can have a lot of inequality or little inequality or various other features and then we can observe what happens and 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 make a society their underlying fundamental principles about society which are as innate as the fact that you have two kidneys you know most people almost everyone or your pancreas makes insulin but they're very different all throughout the world right I mean there's totalitarian society I know

36:34those know so here's the point no yes so here's what here's the argument you look around the world and the way the example I give is that yes there's huge cultural variation around the world just like you said to tell Turin Society stirs 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 but I think we're missing the force from the trees to 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 but actually if we took a step back we would see that we're on we were on a plateau and one was a mountain that was ten thousand three hundred feet and another was a mountain that was ten thousand nine hundred feet and actually there there are these much more deep and

37:22fundamental plate tectonic forces that are creating these two mountains that are very similar but we are just focused on the superficial top so the argument in the book is that everywhere in the world people have friendship people love their partners people cooperate people teach each other these are fundamental common principles shared by everyone even though there's also a lot of variation even in a place like North Korea yes now North Korea that state so totalitarian states apply huge cultural pressure to suppress this innate tendency it's like it's like religious you need a lot of belief in God to suppress your innate desire to have sex right so 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 so totalitarian regimes and this is discussed in the

38:19book too they are very threatened by the institution of the family they're threatened you need to owe your loyalty to the state not to your family not to your friends and so they have a series of institutions that you know everyone is comrade everyone gets called comrade for example or or there's a lot of a lot of times well I won't I don't know if I want to speak at the state level let me let me take it down a notch two communes so if you think about communes if you're gonna 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 they're their mates in in order to do that you can go to one of two extremes either you can prohibit sex like the Shakers and you say okay no one's gonna have sex with anyone because we're all in a commune and we all love each other and

39:14we're not gonna have special love for particular people or you could go to the other extreme and you can have polyamory say everyone's gonna have sex with everyone else once again you see that subverts the special relationship that people might form with particular individuals and 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 and 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 they like you know the mile jacket the men and women all were wearing the symbol similar kind of attire for instance because they want to have people see themselves as interchangeable and

40:02not as individuals and relationships not be particular did you study cults a little bit not a lot there's some 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 no I mean not even just to make arguments just to compare because that is essentially like in particularly the Rajneesh called organ the wild wild west or wild wild country documentary on Netflix did you see that no I haven't it's fantastic they essentially took over an entire town and started bussing in homeless people to vote oh I read about that I know about this yes it's really quite amazing yes and what they did was really weird you know I mean for there's moments in the documentary you're like wow maybe they're onto something and then of course it goes completely sideways they want a poisoning people and chaos mm-hmm but I

40:56am absolutely fascinated by those types of environments where people do decide they're going to branch off from regular they don't they're unsatisfied with regular civilization they're gonna all move to some location yes that's it that's a primitive and ancient impulse like I was saying people have been doing that for since time immemorial it's how America got started yes yes yes screw this you know I'm going over there to start again but again and again when people do that they keep expressing some of these fundamental beliefs it's yes yes it's like saying yes anyway go on no please no no I don't have anything to add I mean I just was reinforcing what you said but yes that's right well I'm always fascinated by people that are unhappy with the current state of affairs they don't like the way society feels to them they don't feel like they belong and they want to try

41:45somewhere else I mean and what was really interesting to me is the last time someone did this as a country as far as I know is the United States there really is this but I 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 well we have more guns well well the thing about America that's like the American experiment would have is about the fact that anyone can be an American my parents immigrated from Greece I was raised in this country you know I to be an American means to buy into a certain set of principles like the Bill of Rights and many other countries are very xenophobic you know you you can't become a Japanese it's you can't become you can't be nationalized in Japan you can but it's extremely difficult in rare so it's a very homogeneous a country Switzerland is

42:35another country it's very difficult to become Swiss you can't be nationalized as a Swiss I mean you can but it's extremely difficult in rare so um but the United States you know we we say you are an American if you from all the whole world you're welcome bring us your tired your you know the famous saying on the foot on them you're I forgot the saying it's very poetic on the bottom of the of the Statue of Liberty your wretched your your forlorn whatever it is and you can come to this these shores and make your life anew and 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 now we should note that there were millions of people that were brought as slaves involuntarily to these shores we don't always realize our best virtues we you know allow people to come but

43:28like the Irish and treat them as second-class citizens or the Italians or the Greeks even you know we we don't always do that but but the idea that you're putting on the table which I think is correct is that you can be an American this is a special unusual experiment you can't reinvent yourself quite that way and to my knowledge in any other colony or country it's why it's one of the weirdest things that this is a country where anti-immigrant sentiments are running rampant yes one of the entire foundation the country is based on immigration yes the only way people got here if you're not a Native American yes it was taken from the Native Americans and everyone since then is an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant that's current in the Native Americans yes yeah that's crazy yes the whole thing's crazy yes it's it's just and it's such a unique environment for expression means really

44:19no other country that has as free expression even the Brits don't that's right and Canada certainly doesn't correct and they're our neighbors yes it's a it's just it's a very unusual thing and this unusual thing is the most recent incarnation of country yes yes I think that's right and I think there are you know then this ties in with a whole set of ideas about American exceptionalism you know are we how different are we what is the source of our wealth what is the height of our civilization you know I'm I'm I am distressed by some of the direction our country is going in at the moment but I think the you know I think in the long arc of history I think the United States stands for many of the best principles in the world and I'm prepared to defend those principles I am - and I think what you were saying with your libertarian friend and you know someone who may be

45:16an anarchist or whatever though there's there's room for all these weird opinions yes they might not be correct and they will all be representative this just gigantic soup of human beings it's 300 plus million yes it's just it the idea that America is like white nationalists in charlottesville this is wrong with America no it's wrong with America is volume you know you're gonna have certain ridiculous ideas and all ideas that are amplified in this volume is incredible mass of humans yes I think with a large I think that's right I think our size contributes to or makes a kind of heterogeneity of ideas more easy you know if we were tiny country although even in small democracies you know like you go to European countries that are tiny Spain for example I mean it's not tiny but its tiny compared to us you know there's a lot of difference of beliefs from far left to far right

46:13but I think I think the key aspect which you're 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 so you know you can't there's no physical contact allowed right so we draw a bright line distinction between words and deeds so I completely reject the idea that words are violent violent yeah totally yeah I totally reject that and and because we have different words for it they're two different things two wholly different we so grounders are you know I can't touch you but I can speak other ground rules are that we are committed to open expression a good ground rule would be that we grant positive intent we grant good intent that is to say I try to put what you're saying in the most favorable light first I think about it I say okay no wait a minute what is he saying what does he

47:01mean by that he meant now you may be an idiot a person may be an idiot they may be vile they may be violent they may be wrong you know all of those things are also possible but that's not the first go-to so anyway if we set those ground rules I think I believe strongly that in the marketplace of ideas truth will out and and righteousness will out that's that's what I think maybe I'm wrong maybe in fact what we need is a benevolent dictator who you know comes down and tells us all what to think and do but that's not the world I want to live in yeah the benevolent dictator idea is what does that come from like why is it just because it's that's really been the only way the society is actually functioned for most of the I think fantasize right I mean Plato talks about this I mean people look around and they think situation is not so great I really wish it was a strong man that

47:51would come down and fix it yes this is the inclination towards Trump I think in some part yes trumpism is a little bit about this fantasy that that we will you know that that the way out is to have a kind of imposition from above and I think that's very dangerous actually and this if we were talking about earlier in college campuses it's the same principle right like the idea that Big Daddy is gonna come down and tell us what to do and fix the situation I think is undemocratic in the end but they daddy has to follow the rules these children want I mean this is part of the issue with the idea of you know words equal violence I mean this is not a well thought through idea and this is an idea that is worldly words lead to violence sure words can be painful yes they can hurt your feelings yes they can be unpleasant all of that is true but words are different than violence they

48:46just are and so I think we need to you know and in fact as John heightened and Greg lukianov argue we actually might want to create there are other reason to draw the distinction between words and violence and to cultivate an appreciation for that distinction and that is by allowing people to speak we may actually reduce violence because we can identify who has these crazy ideas yeah we know who so if you're if if if I believe that someone hates people like me and I create an environment in which we allow him to say he hates people like me I think it's horrible that he hates people like me I'm not defending that he hates people like me but we might now know who he is Yeah right as I stay away from him ya know so so that's their argument that luciana fanhype make that that actually this is a potentially additional additional benefit of creating a free and open marketplace of ideas is we

49:44identify where the crazy is you know here all these people were talking about the anti-vaxxers I'd like to know who are the people that hold these beliefs because as a public health expert and I was a hospice doctor for many years I took care of patients for a long time anyway I was very am still interested in a lot of our projects around the world are public health projects in order to be able to lead people to wisdom you have to know where where is the ignorance right well if it's secret you don't know it right so that's another benefit of a lot fostering this climate of open expression yeah and the the solution to these bad ideas is for someone to come up and give a better idea yes someone to debate or to explain what's wrong with it and to do it in a reasonable manner when people start shouting and screaming and pulling fire alarms like it's just this sigh the idea

50:35of silencing people from speaking that somehow no this is gonna help this is uh this is also part of deep platforming yes people call for deep deep plan no I think that's wrong even based on just reasonable people with differing opinions no it's it's wrong it's crazy there's a Tatchell Peter Tatchell there's a a gay rights activist in in England who you know went to prison for his rights was been imprisoned in foreign countries for defending gay rights and he was D platformed in England a couple of years ago know here's the problem with D platforming so first of all it is totally right and appropriate to protest so if someone is speaking something you don't want I will strongly defend protest stand outside yell and scream hold banners up whatever you can't interfere with the right of the speaker to express themselves first point but even more important the reason we don't

51:27want that it's not so much because we're interested in the right of the speaker it's because we're interested in the rights of the listeners the people who are want to listen to that person have a right to listen to that person in a free society so when we prevent them the harm we're causing is not it's not that I'm silencing you I'm I am interfering with the ability of all the people who want to hear you to hear you it's their rights that matter too so if we the deep platforming it's not about oh so-and-so was unable to speak at such in such a place it's the fact that all the people that wanted to hear so-and-so were deprived of their opportunity to do so so I think the answer two words we do not like the answer to speech we do not like is more speech yeah it's not silencing yeah and there's also the ah the obvious situation you put someone in when you do attempt to silence them you

52:19put them under duress and their message changes you you make someone more combative and yes 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 I mean I'm not a political scientist and I followed that literature a little bit I think there is a strong argument that that is one of the factors that contributed to Trump's success let's keep in mind however that the majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton and and he's a majority of Americans didn't vote correct but of the people who voted yes that's right it's another whole problem but 63 or so million I mean about 3 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for for Donald Trump nationally so so I forgot how we got onto him what were you saying I we're talking about people wanting to silence people oh yeah

53:14so one of the things correct miss yeah and the rebounding of that is reinforcing of someone who comes along jump who's the polar opposite of that yes I would agree with that and I think that that's an you know that sort of is a variant of the argument we were discussing earlier which is that you one of the advantages of creating a free and open society is that you allow you know live and let live and then you don't you don't you you tend to you avoid creating kind of suppressed animosities or you can help to avoid it yeah business open communication is so critical and it's also critical to have reasonable polite conversation like people can oppose each other in forming their idea but you should be able to express how and why you oppose that idea without it being this sort of personal yes vendetta yes I agree with that I mean you know I think we have to accept that there will be

54:07people will get angry I mean that's part of having an open society and I think we need to get a person yes 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 but I do agree with you completely that ideally we would have a kind of civilized conversation that allowed us to learn and to grow and I think ultimately that's as we've been saying is better for our society as well well I think we should acknowledge that people are going to be upset but we should also applaud people for not being upset I think there's a there's a higher value to people being able to communicate reasonably yes no I don't think that that's reinforced enough and I don't think that's appreciated enough okay I don't get any disagreement for me on that I just think we this is something that we can do yeah and we can

55:02get better at it well I think it's like martial arts training you know I think that the self-discipline is not an easy thing Joe and like anything else worth doing in life like basically anything worth doing takes effort it's tempting the the 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 it's a natural inclination to want to silence your opponents but it's wrong it and it's harmful and it's actually harmful to you to do that so so so I think we need to have an educational system that cultivates 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 so so but I so I guess what I'm saying it's it's it does require some training it doesn't come naturally unfortunately you know but it should be

55:57reinforced yes we and I think there's a way to do that and there's a way to appreciate that and there's a way to call that out when you see it and just I think the world needs more of it and if we can figure out a way to do that we will find that we our differences are not nearly as egregious they're not nearly as disgusting well I think that well 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 and anyone who's travelled even to a different state has had this experience and yet actually once you get to know the people you see that they're very human they're like us they love their partners and they hang out with their friends and they work together to build a civilization and a society and they

56:41have schools and they teach and they learn and they do all of these basic things that are a fundamental part of our common humanity and and this is what I talk about in blueprint at length you know like I I you know I just I think it's I think there's a kind of there's a kind of flawed Beauty to the world that captivates me and it's a little bit on the there's a systemic tradition in in in Japan and a philosophy called wabi-sabi do you know Bobby what wabi-sabi is know probably know about it but you mean I know the word so I've heard it yeah do you know like how like the Western aesthetic for pottery is like these perfectly symmetrical beautifully glazed you know pots but there's a tradition in Japan of slightly imperfect pots you know like a cracked pot or a pot that's slightly misshapen is very difficult to masters to make these pots and it's it's it's called

57:33wabi-sabi and it's about it's about how imperfections a kind of beauty of imperfection a kind of flawed beauty like a hot girl with a gap in her teeth yes I suppose that was yes I suppose that could be an example of that or you know Elle Macpherson you know famously had that little uh was it her I forgot which was the famous model that had offered Sidney Crawford yeah had that famous mole on her face at Glaxo it's a flawed beauty so so here's the point it's not hard to look around the world and see the violence and the murder in the warfare and the incompetent leadership and all of these awful things about our species but we're really a unbelievable species actually who do amazing things when you compare us to other species and there's a kind of flawed Beauty to us and I think that it's it's wrong to be seduced to the dark side you know it's wrong to like only focus on those on the bad

58:34stuff I also think it's a kind of moral and philosophical laziness right if we allow ourselves to just think that oh the you know people are awful it kind of relieves us of any duty to be good and to work to make the world better it's a kind of you know surrender to the dark side I think that's wrong and the book shows exactly how and why that's wrong and and how we how natural selection has shaped all these wonderful qualities which are shared the world over so you go to the foreign country you're initially perplexed by their crazy practices and then slowly but surely you find our common humanity hmm and I anyway I find that a it's pleasing at least to me that perspective you know that's one of the cool things about travel right you broaden your perspective and your understanding of what it means to be a person and go to these different environments and try

59:23self - yeah yeah they're different and they're different foods or different art and they're different architecture and you go this is also possible - yes people can live like this yes and you even begin to see why they live like that you know like you initially you go to Greece and you have resin flavored wine you have it at Sina and you wondering why would these crazy Greeks put pine resin in their ruining perfectly good white wine and then after a while you start to say hey actually it's pretty good you know this is not a crazy thing after all and the acquired Kaiser in Britain and there yes you know the first time the first time I had scotch whiskey I didn't know what I thought about it and now I love whiskey right it's an acquired taste so the first time you drink something like that you think you know yes they put resin they put pine resin in their white

60:09wine and they chill it I should have brought you some maybe it's not an acquired taste what's not oh so kool-aid it's delicious from the beginning yeah yes yes I'll have to convince anybody yes that's right that's right some things that's right some things are just good right out of the bog is good yes it is just good yeah I mean I don't recommend you drink it all the time it's full of sugar it's terrible for you but damn that stuff guys guys it's like it's like it's like fried foods you know yeah just yummy a lot of them yeah french fries yes I mean come on man salt and ketchup yeah like that one how does it unlike that no I'm uh I'm not sure about what I should mention but anyway I love pops fried chicken I do as well I love it so bad it's awful if my wife is unlikely to listen to this full podcast so or I'll skip over this part so she doesn't hear this part but and my sister will be

61:05listening probably and so she will laugh when she gets to this part because whenever I see Popeyes I just pull over and indulge myself and then I terrible terrible tapas is good yeah I know what if you really want to indulge and you like chicken Roscoe's no you don't know no I don't Roscoe's chicken and waffles oh I try to we try to don't you make that hour and a half wait on the same place Sunday Jan well of course on the same plate what are you a communist yeah man it's it's a Eurasian - hell yeah and butter yeah I mean the cheese fries on there yes perfectly it's delicious from another planet so don't I I make maple syrup I live in Vermont and I make maple syrup I tap my own trees and wow what a freak I have I have a yacht except giving people a hard time for waffles and chicken again show me the colonel has it now the Colonel's a liar that's not even the

62:10colonel no the Colonel's nor MacDonald one colonel yes Norm Macdonald very like promotion or something that yes is nonsense yeah but they do on top of the chicken yeah that chicken and why that waffles and chicken tastes like cat litter compared to rasca it's also sweet chick la he could try to get this out of here so odd stuff go off Roscoe's okay so we get the Greens to the collard greens yeah that's fine damn good that's fine but that's a waste of maple syrup take it from a man who makes it to put a chick is good I'm sorry it's nas place I get it I love it I've been there it's great Roscoe's okay was an hour and a half wait on a Sunday okay how long you in town for just a day maybe I'll be back though I'll be right after the show maybe I'll go there on cowards okay man it's good all right maybe I'll try that it's so good it's also one of those places been there forever we used to get

63:11it I found out about it from 19 1994 when I was doing news radio 95 ish I guess you been in LA since you left the Massachusetts no I went to New York for a couple years then I moved out here I moved out here in 94 okay so been here a long time yeah and when I was on Newsradio they got it for like you could order lunch and someone ordered Roscoe's I became addicted I was like what is this like waffles and it was just like yeah waffles and chicken there it looks that's that'sthat's doesn't look as good as it looks when you're there when you're there and you smell it it's damn good you're doing a Roscoe's commercial here that's an incredible man that's an incredible combination of items it's so good and afterwards you better have nothing to do coma son anyway um how do we get to that how you made little syrup stories no oh yeah I'm going to yes different country different

64:04countries and opening your mind so you resin yeah so you are counteracting my resin flavored white wine with maple syrup sir well I'm a giant fan of spicy food I love spicy foods I really really enjoyed Thailand I've really enjoyed their style of cooking and their kind of hands and you're one of those people who eats those schofield units on the on the hot peppers like you know like how hot you know no I just like spice it's not hot like habanero I like I like pretty spicy compared to the average person but I have friends that put me to shame yeah like I have a buddy of mine from that I used to do Fear Factor with my friend Tommy Hirsch gosh I have two Tommy and now we ice to eat I hate chili with him I couldn't keep up right yes how hard he yell I'm like this is crazy yes I think people just have a different inherent like it's almost like built into their bodies both I think yeah it's

64:59both some people are better able to like some are faster runners than others yeah but it's also training so you get to you eat a lot you slowly work your way up to being able to tolerate and like those really super hot peppers I I find it a very unpleasant I have a friend just like you who really is into it like really seeks out the hotness yeah I also think it's a little bit like addiction like you tolerate like like as you get used to like the less hot stuff now you need more and more stuff in order to get the same high exactly some people think it's a high by the way but there's a little high to it some people say that I I mean I again it's not for me I cook meat with jalapenos I slice it up and I'll have like a piece of the meat with the jalapenos to get especially elk with jalapeno sensational yes why this is so good yes yeah but my kids always make

65:45fun of me because I'm bald so my my whole head is covered with sweat you're so gross how old are your kids the youngest ones are 8 and 10 and you have you have how many three I have three all daughters all daughters two year old a 10 year old and Nate you'll live longer yeah with daughters if you know if you if you plot a dad's survival on the y-axis and fraction of female children on the x-axis survival is slightly longer for men who have higher fraction of daughters I think it's because boys drive you to your grave his are so goddamn crazy there's lots of theories as to why it happens but I think and that is in fact one of them it's framed a bit more scientifically well that's the basic theory my ten-year-old is a maniac my ten-year-old daughter and I just imagine if she was a boy I'd be terrified that she knows just lighting things on fire blowing up

66:36buildings yes yeah boys are a problem that can be but I mean I think yeah I mean I think you know I think it's I think that well I mean we could get onto the whole gender issue I'm not sure we want to but I think boys are responsible let's talk about chimpanzees it's easier okay male chimps do most of the violence about 95% of the violence and murders are committed by male chimpanzees and most of the victims are males and you know I think it's there's no doubt that biology plays a very important role in male proclivity to violence for example sure so let's say our trouble yeah so boys can be a problem that way yeah and I think the many ways in which a society are of cultural traits that we invent their purpose is to shape and guide those tendencies to violence to kind of mitigate them so we don't just need again going back to the books herbs or we don't just need we don't just use

67:40culture for that purpose there there's an argument in the book that we humans have have domesticated ourselves so if you look at if you compare dogs to wolves and domesticated cats to wild cats from which they descended or a guinea pigs to the wild guinea pigs from which they descended or or horses to to the wild horses to which they sand if you again and again you compare these couplets these pairs you find that the domesticated version of these animals that are much more Placid much more peaceful they also tend to have floppy ears they have piebald fur so guinea pigs and dogs and cows all have splotchy black white and brown fur why is that the animals from which they evolved didn't have those that kind of splotchiness so and they become much more peaceful if you compare human beings and but they had a those animals were domesticated by humans like I deliberately allowed the

68:37reproduction of this member of the and not that member because this member was was was nicer and so across time we evolved more a domesticated version of the ancestral species so we get you know we get my miniature dachshund from a wolf like the wound like the kind of things that were photographed out in your studio here crazy transition now if you look at humans and you compare us to to the Viet nan to our ancestors or to other primates for all the world it looks like we have been domesticated we are more peaceful and Placid we have sex outside non-reproductive sex is another thing so these domesticated animals will have sex even when it's not time to reproduce we we we our tails we don't have tails anymore but our tails have get shortened there all these features that we have these these behavioral qualities and these physical properties that we have are we get a feminization

69:40of our faces our jaws become smaller like if you look at you compare these domesticated animals to their non-domesticated ancestors the domesticate versions are less violent so we lose a lot of the traits that physical and and psychological traits associated with violence but there was no one that domesticated us so the theory is the question is how how did that happen and one of the theories that's discussed in in in blueprint and that's advanced by other scientists this is not my work is that we self domesticated and that what happened over the century lenio over millions of years is that weaker individuals in our groups when one individual became too autocratic and too violent and too powerful they banded together and kill that guy and so over time we were killing the more violent members of our species leading out those people and therefore the gene pool changed across

70:37time and we self domesticated we are more peaceful today than we would have been because we domesticated ourselves and this is one of the arguments that's also made to help explain the origins of goodness actually and the origins of cooperation because that's take a few good Hansel to kill the bad person that's running everything that's evil correct yeah it's exactly right recreational sex does occur in bonobos which is really weird isn't it yeah they're so similar to regular chimps yes but they're not the same species they also have homosexual sex they use sex to make up you know so uh it's yeah there are very licentiousness and and and and bonobos are felt to be a self domesticated chimpanzee so this is similar so bonobos are two chimps as as let's say dogs are the wolves and but there was the dogs we domesticated the bonobos self domesticated is the theory do they know

71:35why or how well the theory is that they did it like we were saying by weeding out killing the more of a ggressive members it was what we know must have happened is that the nicer guys must have been able to have more offspring so the gene pool changed over time because of the differential success of the of the of the nicer guys now people have looked at this even in human societies they've looked for instance there's a study I talked about in the book of different pathways to reproductive success amongst it's Amani which is a group in Amazonia and other societies are similar so you can either be like big and strong or you can be charismatic and have useful knowledge in both ways you have more children hmm so there are these competing ways in our species of enhancing your reproductive fitness are you aware of Sapolsky x' work as baboons uh-huh that's a fascinating case right

72:34because they were studying baboons in Africa that would eat from human garbage and a bunch of them got sick and died and it turns out that the most violent and ruthless of them got sick and died and they changed the entire culture of the baboon tribe I don't know that story interesting one little star rooming each other and being kind to each other oh my god yeah that's it there was an accidental it was an accident it lasted for generations yes and when he returned to study them he found that they were still this different kind of yeah I'm doing a shitty job I'm sure of explaining it but I know I work yes he's very impressive and I know though I am now that you're reminding me I'm a little familiar with that particular study I didn't know that it started with garbage however that yeah it was a coincidental extermination of the more violent members of the troop

73:30yes yeah so they were removed from the gene pool and changed the entire culture to the point where generations later they were still using this more peaceful ways of oh yeah yeah yeah more kind well it didn't just change the culture it may have changed the culture but it appears we're arguing that to have changed the gene pool right yes like an evolutionary pressure that's been applied so you have you know big dogs and small dogs you don't allow the big ones to reproduce you just reproduce the small ones yeah you get small dogs in the end well I've had dogs my whole life and one of the things that you do - I've right now have a golden retriever we have a yeah we have a white plat yeah yeah yellow lab and I've had a bunch of different dogs I've had Mastiffs and pit bulls and German Shepherds no small we have a dachshund - you don't have small - my oldest daughter has a tiny Chihuahua

74:17it's a piece I'm sorry no he's the best mark all the time though now he doesn't bark that much he brought us a little bit but he's really smart he's actually a mutt he's Chihuahua and Australian Shepherd but he's like that big he's the best but 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 like yeah it's a good example of my Mastiff who passed away this year he came from this guy who bred dogs for films and for police training and he was the most calm most chilled out dog I've ever had in my life he was just a giant dog he's 140 pounds but he you could have him take him anywhere and trust him with a baby and he was a clue like everything was like totally heat but this guy purposely any time a dog any aggression towards people or any aggression towards dogs he wouldn't let

75:14him breathe so how can anyone not know here are the stories like that or no stories like that and not then also think that genes play a role in human behavior oh they do you have children yes you realize that when you have children you see like okay this is not I didn't do this this is this comes from me yes there's certain traits that my children have that I watch and I go okay this is not this isn't teach them yes they just are this way they were born this we've got my fucked-up brain you know there's something in there they're not seeing like they don't see how crazy I am it turns about how hard are working things and how obsessive I get with things they're just doing and it's very weird it's very weird because you see yo oh okay well how much of this 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 about half and

76:04half I would say mmm overall on average across traits how much do you think gets passed down through genetics in terms of inclinations like like the nutrition yes about half on average so for example about half the very you know how religious you are or how risk-averse you are like I can I can about half the variation and how if you look at a group of people and some are more risk-averse than others about 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 so you know there's a kind of an anus to many of our qualities and you can shape them you know for example you can't you couldn't make me a musician unfortunately I have almost no musical talent I can dance I think I mean I think others would even say that I can do that but so it's not just like I think I can dance but I can't but I have no musical ability

76:55whatsoever I would say I'm tone-deaf and and you know I can appreciate music I like I mean but I can't produce it there's no way you could train me I don't think to be a musician but so some of it is inborn and some of it is is is taught for all of these qualities yes it's a fascinating thing to watch it emerge from a child isn't it yes as a parent you see where it comes from although we have adopted like I my mother had three biological children and I have two adopted siblings that come from actually a multiracial family I have a black sister and a Chinese brother and my mother was an incredible human being she died when I was 25 she was 47 and we have been foster parents my wife and I and so and might we have lots of adopted kids in the extended family in addition to biological kids and so you can see you can see the play of genes you can see the extent to which the the kind of

77:50the inherited traits that these people that we all have and you see the shaping by how you're raised and you know so both are important and this is incidentally why if you ever have any one it's not it's not nature or nurture it's both yeah always almost in every single trait actually well that's the case of so many things in this life we want everything to be by an area yes it's it's nuts yeah it's a total we were talking earlier it's a total loss of nuance and an inability to see any gray and and and some people think and I think that's what you were talking about yes some people think that we are hard-wired to like dichotomies to see you know male and female and and up and down and good and evil and left and right and to simplify the world by finding it and that we like it that it soothing to us to think that the world can be divided into two categories but in fact many

78:45times not always like up and down is sort of clear right but many times it can't they're shades of grey and it's harder that's harder to live in the grey yes I completely agree and that's why I've always been opposed I mean I get I think it's incredibly foolish to deny that but people find comfort in denying yes they find comfort in mean tribal yes find comfort in them yeah us versus them yes is the classic yes yes yes it's it's a it's a simplified view of the world and it's it's foolish and dangerous actually yeah now sometimes you're at war with an enemy you know it's me or him and or us or them there are circumstances in which it's a difference of ival yes your level in that mode yes but but you know but I think the kind of worldview which we are good they are evil as that we've been saying in different kind of ways in different parts of our conversation is I

79:44think foolish and wrong and ultimately self injurious actually yeah so we used to have you know you've done martial arts I spend years training in Shotokan Karate a very traditional Japanese style which I loved I'm sure you've had the same thing you actually are grateful for Europe to your opponent you mount your opponent you say thank you to your opponent right sure opponent is necessary for you to learn oh yeah I mean this is the whole point not just your opponent training partners you want people to be able to beat you yes yes you get better that's exactly right so um so this is you know I think that the kind of that aspect of that kind of training is is a life lesson as well right the capacity to see that and the same happens with ideas how do my ideas get better how do I discover in my laboratory new knowledge I discover it against opposition right someone says

80:36you're wrong about that it's not true and I'm like oh yeah let me prove it to you here's what I'm gonna 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 yeah or not you go back to your lab and you're like oh they were right yeah you know we were wrong so that's the way you uncover truth right it's the way you get to more perfection it's the kind of yin and yang Ashley so so so yes I think that I think that this this this this the simplification of the world to think of you know I'm good and you're evil is really misunderstands that many not all but in many circumstances that misunderstands what's happening and 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

81:33and debate and battle yeah needing to triumph and even though you desire to be correct you have to understand when you are not and you have to appreciate someone who shows you that you are incorrect because they are allowing you to grow you're not a finished product there's no way you can be yes I think that's why I like arguing with people at agree with because that's when I learned more stuff right if I talk to people I agree with I don't learn as much so you get together with that private roads dude that dude and some other students I have solidness I just came from his house and he also he's crazy but anyway he'll laugh he will listen to this and he'll be laughing right does he do for a living he's a fitness ear goddamn that's cliche yes exactly is hilarious so it is hilarious yeah pro-gun mercenary yeah I saw that coming they got really funny the I was

82:32gonna say something to you about you arguing with people you disagree yeah hold on I lost the train of thought I had said before we talked about my friend you learn from them anyway I lost the train there but no worries yeah so yeah I mean that's 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 that's nuts yeah they think that you you're you're doing a disservice by providing a platform that's not that cop that's phrase they keep saying yeah platform yeah I'm a platform no I think you have power which you should use wisely I have power I should use like we all have some power in some parts of our lives and I think it is okay to say you have some power you do you know you have lots of millions of listeners people respect you lots of people about presidents CEOs

83:23they're people of power but the idea that by talking to someone you are somehow abusing that power that's that's crazy to me in fact quite the opposite I think that you are shining bright light of day on to ideas let people discuss them let lets it's also quite schizophrenic this I mean have you ever seen when the 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 yes so you know Hitler yes you've ever seen those yes that's it's really similar in the same sort of a way yes it's it's this weird sort of a thing where you're not allowed to even commune or be in contact with someone who is in this opposeth it's it's very childlike yes this this perspective and it's very binary my friend in your Susie's friend yes I would agree with that and it's a

84:18it's a really common thing today that you you're seeing people are trying to reinforce this idea and push it on other folks well I think one thing you know like I think I think that like we were talking about I think that exposing ourselves to a breadth of ideas to people we disagree with I you know I think and and creating an environment in which people can express themselves you know it is good you're not gonna get any arguments from me against on that yeah at that point no um 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 and express something in a way that makes you reconsider your own ideas you hold sacred I mean I'll give you an example when I when I met my wife thirty years ago I wasn't pro-death penalty but I was I would say I was having neutral to the death penalty I would be like you

85:15know Ted Bundy the state can put him to death and I had all the kind of conventional reasons or I didn't really care he's a vile person he killed all these people he tortured them if the families will get any relief whatever that's fine I 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 I have for years been advocating there the racializing the police brutality is vile and and abhorrent and must be firmly resisted I think that I think the the the prosecutorial misconduct away people are prosecutors lie and put people in prison you know there have been many many cases of people on death row who are innocent that should offend our conscience so even back then I had some concerns about the death penalty because I because I I recognized that you know we can't be

86:10perfect we're gonna convict some innocent people and also let some guilty people go free that's not as bad as killing the putting to death the innocent but they're both so I had that concern about the death penalty but otherwise I was like it's okay my opinions have totally changed I'm completely opposed to the death penalty now for many reasons not just the statistical reason but also I think it's immoral I don't think the state should put it out I think we can rip deprive you of Liberty I think we can make sure you're not a threat to society we can lock you up for the rest of your life but I think we the state should not be taking people's lives in that way there's something extraordinarily strange about locking someone up it's very strange well we we have a car serial state I mean you know we lock up a higher we have is we are fraction of people incarcerated I think is the same as

86:56Stalinist Russia and we have very long prison sentences which are nuts you don't need them for deterrence actually for nonviolent drug specially for none of all nonviolent offenses should have much shorter prison we should have more we should have higher certainty of punishment a higher fraction of people who have actually commit a crime should be punished but I think we should we could cut in half or less the the duration of the census I 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 whereas now we have a system where most are not convicted like this Jesse Smollett thing which is just ridiculous in the news yes and and which therefore so they and only a tiny fraction are convicted and but they're given huge long sentences it's like they're paying the cents for

87:42everyone that didn't yes it does make any sense and it's expensive it ties up our prison system I should I'm gonna go to tell you another story it's wrong so as a situation a few years ago when there's a very famous director and writer by the name of David Simon who I consider a friend he did the wire he was a showrunner for a bunch of other very famous wonderful TV programs he started his career actually as a reporter in in Baltimore he was a beat reporter and then went on to become a writer did the wire and so forth and 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 could find common ground with your political opponents and that you need to listen to them and talk to them in order to define that ground if and so he told the following

88:37story he said I just came back from Camp David where there was a meeting about how to reduce incarceration in our society and 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 and then they said well why did you go how could you associate yourself with those evil people and he said look he said the the Conservatives want to reduce incarceration because it's expensive the Liberals want to reduce incarceration because it's unjust and the libertarians want to reduce incarceration because the state shouldn't be depriving people of liberty and I can find common ground with these people and reduce incarceration why would I not talk to them and the students didn't seem to understand that they were like they couldn't get it

89:25that's why they shouldn't be able to vote 25 I mean and so the 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 uhm how did I get it come up with this example we were talking about talking to political enemies was it or something else yes we're talking about people telling you that you shouldn't associate yes these people that have varying opinion about incarceration and imprison senses and so forth so we have a horrible problem in our society with with incarceration a larger fraction of our populace is incarcerated we deprived after you paid your debt to society we often have these these we deprive you of your right to vote which i think is wrong you paid your debt to society you should be able to reenter society that prices yes exactly yes exactly you were in prison for 10 years that's enough you

90:16know now you we want you to feel part of society again we want to welcome you back if we have that vision of justice how about the registered sex offender that's a serious problem especially for crimes you know these crazy cases which offend my conscience I know a guy who got charged as a registered sex offender because he urinated outside yeah that's not caught in the South urinating outside that's not so that's just prosecutorial abuse or you know you have these Romeo and Juliet laws which are not in every state now think they'll last they are not in every state you know you have a 16 year old boy and a 14 year old girl there have to be exceptions for that kind of sexual practice you know they're exchanging sexually explicit images they should not be considered sex offenders for the rest of their lives that's nuts so uh so yes so all of those things so

91:08but the problem is not like we have a huge fraction of people in prison we have extremely long prison sentences compared to any many European countries for the same crime and it's costly it's unjust it's ineffective I think I think we should change the policies on this and maybe we will yeah there's also the idea of reforming them it's it's they're not using all the tools within their disposal they're not really yes you could attempt at it and 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 well they're different there's the justice there's deterrence their safety right like so violent criminals that we put in jail we need to do that I mean to not interested in being killed by somebody who you know could killed someone else she should be in jail for a while

91:5720 years sometime a time murder yeah for murder I think they'd think 20 years is enough well European so European standards are about 20 years actually and there are different things like if you want to deprive them if your 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 you would they would be the rest of their lives since you yes and you know I we can debate whether that's reasonable or not if you if you want to provide a public safety reason people often age out of their violence so a lot of men typically these were talking mostly about men who do these things you know by the time they're in their 40s or 50s they're much less violent testosterone declines they get older and wiser they're not interested in in criminal and that kind of criminal behavior many of them are

92:45not so that does that suggest you don't need life sentences for a murder and I think it also depends and we have four gradations of murder you know we have like the impulsive stuff that intent matters the planned fulness matters that depravity matters all of these things are our factors and I don't think we should have a one-size-fits-all incarceration for murder yes that's my opinion what do you think I think it depends entirely on the circumstances if 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 in your house and killing your daughter yes correct and I also think even in that like I really am opposed to these Stand Your Ground laws I think those are if you have the opportunity to avoid conflict and to avoid you are not you it I would prefer as a state to

93:33require that you walk away even if it makes you feel embarrassed then give you the right to kill someone for offending you and those those videos of the of the guys and that shot the guy on his knees in the in the parking lot in that I forgot what state it was like not long ago or two ago they got into an altercation in the parking lot like if I have words with someone in a partner Sean the guy on his knee yes there was no threat to him and he was he was not prosecuted on the stand your ground argument which is nuts why was the guy on his knees he will I forgot he said don't shoot me or something Jesus so it was it was crazy didn't get prosecuted I don't think so we can look up the fact there were several cases there were several cases like this but 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

94:22following story he said there was a sensei in this village in Japan and the students were coming to the dojo and there was the the the best student you know and then all the other students and they were walking through the village and they passed they approached a horse that was on the street from the rear and it startled the horse and as the horse reared up and kicked its leg the the the best student instantly did a kind of avoidance kind of twisted his body and avoided the kick and the and the and the the horse's leg went right in front of him and all the other students were amazed at his ability and they get to the dojo and they tell the sensei this is my sensei telling me this story telling all of us this story and they those students get to this the dojo and they tell the the sensei the story marveling at the ability of this master student to deftly avoid the strike and the sensei

95:15is very angry and they don't understand why why is he so angry he said if he were a really good student of mine he would have walked on the other side of the street he would have avoided the horse altogether so the real wisdom is to avoid avoidance of conflict in the first place there's no reason to seek out conflict yeah and so on these stand your ground laws you know if the choices either you just avoid the conflict you know someone someone swore at you or called you an or was unreasonable jerk that doesn't give you the right to kill them right so anyway I don't know how we got on to this as well penalty for crimes for murder exactly exactly so different gradations yeah yeah I just don't know how much of a deterrent it is locking people up I just I'm not sure I'm not really sure if that actually stops people from doing things I think it stops some people I think

96:12they're been academic research on this I just don't think there's any real rehabilitation other than personal choice I mean I think the the real rehabilitation comes from someone making a personal choice to never be that person that way again yes for most of them you're you you're being locked up with a bunch of hardened criminals you you that's you're you're competing but you're not suggesting we have a society in which when you commit violent acts we do nothing no I'm not no no no I'm suggesting you're struggling with this is what you're saying yeah the yeah the concept of nuances yes this is this is applied here better than anywhere else I think I got the impression looking at your face a moment ago when I told my sort of sweet sense a Japanese karate story that you didn't agree necessarily no that's a very wise way yeah yeah don't don't be near a horse at once yeah very smart yeah

97:00get out of there I'm a big believer in avoiding conflict yeah I'm the first guy physically not intellectual Cosmo yeah exactly my words and violets are different rice acts very extremely different yeah I mean intellectual conflict that that is actually important and you learn from it yes very rarely do you learn too much right you learn don't do that again that's what you learn from physical conflict through that again just it's just you know what what happens in nature with animals happens with people if you let them get to that level you scratch down to the you know remove that thin film of society and rocks yes there we are violent but I keep coming back to what I argue in blueprint you know we are those tendencies but equally we have tendencies to be kind and and friendly and yes and it's we have to create the environment to uh to foster those I have

97:53a there's a sense in which and I talked about this in the book there's a sense in which as we create those environments we actually change ourselves as a species there's this a set of ideas that's known as gene-culture co-evolution and the idea is that we create certain kinds of cultural environments those kind of cultural environments advantage certain ones of us making those of us that are born with certain abilities better-off which then leads to those environments being created even more let me give you some example of that the most famous example of this is something known as lactase persistence so many people not about half the world can adults can drink milk the other half cannot they get lactose intolerant well why can you drink milk as an adult have you ever thought about that like why why are you capable of drinking milk as an adult in our ancestral state actually up till about

98:47ten thousand years ago only babies could to drink to digest milk because only babies had milk babies would suckle at their mother's breasts and have milk and then they'd be weaned and then they would never drink milk again there'd be no milk to drink there was therefore no reason for any adult to be able to digest lactose which is the principal sugar in milk because there was no dead lactose in your diet he didn't encounter milk so human beings were able to digest lactose when they were babies they lost that capacity all human beings when they got to about two or three or four or five when they weaned they no longer were able to just milk so the enzymes in their body were programmed as it were to only work when they were infants well about between three and nine thousand years ago in multiple places in Africa and in Europe human beings suddenly domesticate

99:32animals we domesticate milk producing animals like cattle and sheep and goats and camels and now all of a sudden there's a supply of milk around us because of our cultural innovation because of the thing we invented we created the domestic breeds now we have milk now therefore those among us who are 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 those of us who had that would have a survival advantage because we could have another source of calories that the rest of the people in our group couldn't consume they couldn't drink milk like we could and we had a source of unspoiled water during times of drought we could drink milk everyone else had to drink this filthy water that they didn't have access to so those among us who had these qualities could

100:21reproduce better survived had a survival advantage it turns out that this has happened several times this is--when well documented the genetics of this has all been worked out several times the last three to nine thousand years because of a human cultural product we have evolved to be a slightly different genetically and it doesn't stop with cows I think that when we invent cities about over 5,000 years ago we so we did we invent agriculture about 10,000 years ago it's debated exactly when we invent cities but between five and ten thousand years ago we start having fixed settlements earlier 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 we always lived as a group socially I think that as we invent cities people with different kinds of brains are better able to survive in

101:09cities so now that we've invented cities where advantaging people with certain kinds of brains and therefore I think in a thousand or two thousand or five thousand years just like the milk example there'll be different people as a result of something we humans manufactured that we made mm-hmm and I could keep giving you examples of this there's a in the book I have an example another example of a they're called the sea nomads that they they live in the Philippines these are people who don't live on land they live on houseboats that sail around the Pacific for thousands of years they've had this lifestyle and they die for their food dive so they forage on the seabed they are the world's best free divers they spend hours per day under water they can hold their breath longer than anyone else and they do it nothing except with weights and wooden goggles they dive

101:58down into the seabed and forage and they hunt they hunt underwater with Spears okay they hunt underwater with Spears it's mind-boggling and but they have evolved to have different spleens and different oxygen metabolism than you and I mmm 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 they're different the ruins that couldn't died so their invention of a seafaring way of life their invention of a way of living at sea the boat technology the the spearfishing technology the invention of those technologies creates an environment a cultural environment around them which modifies natural selection and changes the kind of genes that those people have these are these are discussed in blueprint and they're many examples if I want to see an image of these goggles yeah if you google if

102:57you google that's their little slitted goggles if you google sea nomads goggle you may come up with it and let me give you what are they using for a lens there's no lens well yeah they're little slits so what's the point I didn't look at the technology at that level but let me just my lens then it doesn't protect your eyes I think it I think it it may reduce glare under water you know by having you look through slits it's got some something on I can see it huh well no because they didn't have glass or maybe they take a piece of it well the one this kids holding up it's got something let me see that's an actual no that's a modern she's holding up a wooden diving mask yeah he may have made it from wood but the ancient one yeah this is the Bajau the so if you look at so look at can you find some looking goggle I mean it'll be hard to find maybe no one's put it on and now of

103:52course they have modern technology so they can right they can those are totally mom yes yes but they but they used to have these wooden goggles anyway they're only is that they adopted or adapted rather to this new lifestyle sort of like genetically adapt the Inuit have developed this ability to not get frostbite and to not get numb fingers in cold weather I did not know that example but that would be an example of that yeah this is an example from believe they were talking about it from Alaska that they they did genetic testing on these people and they did different answers yes yes yeah yes that would be another example of just exactly that example I didn't put that one in the book but yes yeah we're incredibly flexible right yes well we have flex two kinds of flexibility so so think about think about like when we settle the Tibetan Plateau when human being settled

104:42the Tibetan Plateau there were different challenges up there it's cold up there and there's not a lot of oxygen up there now we could genetic evolution is not fast enough we didn't become furry you know like one way to cope with a cold is to become furry again we didn't do that why because we had clothing we had cultural means of coping with this situation so for the cold to cope with a cold we used culture there was no cultural means to cope with the low oxygen up there they didn't have bottled oxygen 5000 years ago there was no way to produce oxygen they couldn't they didn't have the chemistry to produce option so the oxygen to cope with a low oxygen tent pressure up there low oxygen tension up there they evolved genetically so the the people who live in the in the Himalayas they actually have different kinds of hemoglobin compared to you and me better able to

105:33extract oxygen from the environment so there are two different challenges that are coped with in different ways one is coped with culturally by cultural evolution one is coped with genetically which is much slower with genetic evolution and it's the cultural evolution as the cultural traits that natural so so natural selection equips us with a capacity to accumulate knowledge and to teach each other stuff and given that rare ability as we discussed earlier we're able to spread out across the planet and live in all these dissimilar environments we use our cultural ability to dominate the planet basically now one you were when you were creating this were you actually thinking of it as a blueprint that someone would follow yes and no I wasn't thinking of it that way but 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

106:28implications for of these ideas for for artificial intelligence like as we create robots as even as we create sex robots or autonomous vehicles or forms of BOTS online how should those BOTS be programmed so it's not to injure our society so there are some policy implications I discuss in the book but I wasn't thinking of this as a prescription like this is the way to live a good life but partly because as I as I argue in the book you know we don't need to affirmative lis seek a good life we have been endowed by natural selection with the capacity to make a good life full of these qualities so this blueprint is I want to use the word god-given I doesn't come from God but it's god-given you know it comes from somewhere else it comes from natural selection that we that we do this so I yeah how much time have you put into artificial intelligence along we do a

107:24lot of work in my lab on AI what about sex robots like what rules should they give for sex robots yeah how much could that damage interpersonal relations yes that's a great question that's exactly the right question in my view so our concern with sex robots from a liberty point of view should not in the slightest be whether you enjoy a sex robot it's your business right the environment do what you want I really don't I I see I find I would be hard-pressed to to object the problem is would set well if let's back up from the less provocative it let's come back to sex well let's take a simpler example first let's took let's talk about your children talking to Alexa okay so the person who designs Alexa wants to make your child's experience easy and pleasant and as part of the programming of Alexa because they want to make Alexa the obedient servant of your child

108:13it doesn't require your child to say please Alexa would you you know play the music for me your child can be as rude as she wants to Alexa and Alexa will do what she wants what you should be concerned about however is not your child's interaction with Alexa what you should be concerned about is what your child is learning from interacting with Alexa that then she takes to the playground so now she's rude to other children so Alexa is corroding our social fabric Alexa in this example is making children rude to each other so our concern is not so much do we make and do we make you know like Asimov's laws of robotics do we we it's not that we want to program the robots so that they're don't harm you we'd it'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 it's that we're concerned about how the

109:01robot in interacting with you might cause you to harm others the robot the robotic intelligence creates these externalities these cascade effects so in the Alexa example we might want to regulate the programming of devices that speak to children not because we want to deprive your daughter of the right to speak how she wants but because we recognize that that robot is gonna cause your daughter to be rude to other people is it really do you really think yes what's the weather that that would make usually but surely I think it will contribute so that's a it's an example it's not like I'm not arguing that Alexis should become ornately you think it's so novel to kids that they know it's not a person I don't think it really alright but we're using these examples to build a thing so let's talk about the sex robot okay so some people believe that actually the the emergence

109:55of sex robots which will surely appear in the next 10 or 20 years will will be a fantastic boon they think that you'll people be able to experiment you'll be able to experiment with same-sex relationships for example group sex you 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 so they say that you can't get venereal diseases from a sex robots you can't hurt their feelings so people think that the argument based on ethical grounds is that this would be terrific that this will be a benefit other people have the opposite opinion other people think that actually having sex with robots first of all is symbolically and and conceptually vile they think that you know it did take sex and converts into a kind of a machine literally a machine like you know function and they

110:51furthermore think that it would result in you having one having a kind of anonymous or impersonal interactions with humans subsequently that you'll be entrained you know to let's say want an obedient you know partner for example I don't have a stand on this like I don't know which way it's going out and in a way I don't have to get make a stand on it because what I'm interested in recognizing is that when we talk about having allowing people to have sex with sex robots not allowing their it's gonna happen the focus of our concern should be not what is your experience in your bedroom when you have sex with a sex robot our concern is a state like my interest I have no stake or control over what you're doing over there but my interest is in in once you have had that experience how does that change how you interact with other people right and there I think just like anything else

111:38like you can you can make all the garbage you want in your house but if you start polluting the environment you're harming me so now I have a reason for intervening in your activities on your land you can't pollute your own land if that pollution runs off onto my land hmm and so the similar argument can be made or look at autonomous vehicles here's an example right now we have all roads almost all roads have just human drivers and in twenty or thirty years almost all roads will probably have only non-human drivers machines will drive and those autonomous vehicles probably can be yoked together they can communicate with each other so that you'll have like like trains of cars moving in synchrony like 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

112:28leaving 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 and and I think that'll be actually great I'm actually looking forward to autonomy I mean I still like to take my car to a Speedway but you know drive itself with stick which I like but you know but in between we're gonna have a world of what I call hybrid systems of human driven cars and autonomous vehicles coexisting in an on a plane even plane and we need to be worried about that because these autonomous vehicles when we interact with them are gonna change how we interact with each other for example do we program the autonomous vehicle to drive at a constant steady speed if you're the designer of the car you might say gee I don't want this car to crash I want the car to drive in a very predictable

113:21fashion and that that's what's best for the occupants of the car that's what's gonna allow me to sell more vehicles but 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 oh that vehicle never does anything new I don't need to pay so much attention to the car in front of me I just drive you know at a steady clip and then they veer off and they go to a part of the highway where they're just human drivers and now having been lulled into a false sense of security they cause more collisions they're not paying attention so that autonomous vehicle has changed how I Drive in a way that harms other people so maybe the programming of the vehicle should be to occasionally do erratic things to like suddenly slow down or speed up a little bit obliging me to stay vigilant and pay attention as I'm

114:09interacting with that car so that then when I go to another part of the highway when I interact with just humans I have retained that vigilance once again the lesson here is is that it's not just about the one-on-one interaction between the robotic artificial intelligence and the human being it's about how the robots affect us and 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 doesn't just modify how the human interacts with a robot but how the humans interact with each other so if we put our 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 mmm that's the experiments we're doing well clearly in the sex robot realm that's gonna be a problem I mean

115:02we see the difference between humans that have porn addictions yeah that's a good example porn addictions when people do they develop this very impersonal way of can with people and they they think about sex and the objectification of the opposite sex in a very different reason a very different way it flavors the way you flavors your expectations yes yes and it makes it difficult it can make it difficult for you to have normal sexual relationships it has come to see if if your expectations are are guided by porn and that is going to be radically magnified by some sort of artificial life-form that you create that's indistinguishable yes if you can have an indistinguishable sex partner yeah it is you know some incredibly beautiful woman that is a robot and then you or man let's soar man woman's we're quite happy to change their spouses for robots I wonder if women are gonna be as into

116:01it as men because I think women divide the desire more emotional intimacy I think I mean on on a scale then men do I I think I think the jury's still out on know what what the relative balance between men and women we might be surprised that that will be replaced by given X's societal expectations and women conformed those and yes a lot of men can be sure so it could go both ways I don't I'm not prepared to make a prediction who's gonna be better off in the gender debate with the emergence of sex robots well maybe your way you suggest I don't know well we're also in this realization genetically where they're doing genetic experiments on humans and with the advent of CRISPR yes emerging technology at the book two entirely possible that there's not gonna be any frumpy bodies anymore that that's hundreds of years away but yes yes I think so I wonder I mean I don't know if

117:00it is I think if they start cracking them out in China and they start giving birth to eight foot tall supermen yes twelve inch dicks yes it's gonna have a real issue yes yes we will yes that's the least of it yes jelly entirely possible that in the future they're gonna have that that we're gonna that's likely humans yes I think that is likely the debate is how far in the future so I don't think we're gonna start by using these technologies to cure monogenic diseases so you know like thalassemia for example so a diseases or certain immune deficiencies a disease where a single gene is defective and and those will be the initial targets but 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 modified them in the ways that you suggest maybe not 12-inch dicks but maybe you know

117:53ability to run fast or something sure far smarter I mean yeah isn't that one of these side effects they showed with the genetic manipulation of these Chinese babies to eliminate HIV there that they made him smarter no I don't know if they made them smarter there what's clear from the most recent findings I've seen from that case is that unsurprisingly as anyone could predict the technology is not good enough to restrict the mutations to one particular region of the genome so 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 right and we don't know what those are but those who kill those kids quickly we could make them better in some ways we have no way of knowing yet but I think the conclusion was that it increased their intelligence I don't I think it's

118:40I have not seen those results and I think it would be premature find that it would because they re mature to come to that their babies yeah they're the problem is also sensationalist clickbait which is that's what you want to click you know not just that they do the HIV and they made them smarter it's gonna get like 40 percent more clicks yes versus you know yeah 40 percent that mean that's there's just the the nature of humans right yes just be clear I talked about the CRISPR example in in in blueprint I actually talked about these how these technologies again my lens on it is how these technologies are going to change how we interact with each other and 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 mhm so human being said for a very long time

119:25had been inventing when we invented weapons that was a technology that changed how we interact with each other so we have previously done this kind of thing invented a technology that change how we interact with each other and I'm very interested in in the and discuss some of those implications yeah I'm I'm incredibly interested in this because I I love to study history and I love to study like how crazy the world was four thousand five thousand years ago a thousand years ago yes what it's going to be like in the future I think our understanding of the consequences of our actions are so different than anybody has ever had before we have just such a broader first 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 entirely recently you mean I'm sorry you're saying the examples are more

120:15numerous or a capacity to discern them as higher our capacity to discern them and just our in-depth understanding of these various cultures all over the world like this it's like what do you've been telling you today about these the divers and others we just have so much more data yes and so much more of an understanding than ever before yes I 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 I think there's certainly a lot of terrible things that are wrong in the world today also true but I think that there's less of that and more good that Taylor for know I think that's right and but one of the argument 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

121:04whole planet and fewer people in starvation we have less violence I mean every indicator of human well-being is up yes and it's partly due or largely due in the recent last thousand years to the to the emergence of the Enlightenment and the Phyllis the philosophy and the science that was guided that emerged about 300 years ago and two hundred and some-odd years ago and and culminating in the present and continuing so I think I think this is not just the kind of so-called weakest view of history it's not just a progressive sort of fantasy I 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 however as we've been discussing today it's not just historical forces that are tending towards making us better off a deeper and more ancient and more powerful forces also at work

121:56which is natural selection it's evolutionary and not just historical forces that are relevant to our well-being and we don't just need to look to philosophers to find the path to a good life natural 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 so so yes I totally agree with you we're better off today than we've ever been on average across the world however it's not just that that's contributing to our well being the this natural selection is literally why we are in this state now and why we were hoping this trend will continue yes we will be in this better place 50 years from now 100 years from now well natural selection doesn't work over those timescales so those are historical forces but the point is we are set up for success yes you know we are equipped

122:46with these you know you're given five fingers which make it possible thumb which allows you to manipulate tools so natural selection has given you an opposable thumb culture lets you use a computer do you worry about the circumventing of this natural process by artificial intelligence that artificial intelligence is going to introduce some new incredibly powerful factor into this whole chain of events that by having sex robots and sex or robot workers yes things becoming automated yes this I'm concerned I mean this is I think I'm very concerned about how technology is gonna affect our economy the these again these concerns were not the first generation to face these concerns there was similar concerns with the Industrial Revolution that workers were being put out of work when machines were invented nevertheless work persisted people still had jobs to do there was a disruption

123:41there's no doubt about it I think Google and the information revolution and these types of robotic automation are disruptive they're going to affect how we allocate labor and capital and data in our society there's no doubt about all of that I thought you were alluding to just to check if you were to the debate which I don't know the answer - on whether a I will you know are we gonna face like a terminator type existence where you know the machines rise up and kill us all or not and you know very smart people are on both sides of that debate and I read them all and like I'm like he's right and then they read the guy that has the opposite Peter I'm like no no he's right and then it goes back and forth I don't know who's right what goes back to nuance right yes it is nuance but it's hard to know whether again we're not talking over our lifetimes but over hundreds of years yes you know is

124:30there time a thousand years from now when the human beings will say what the hell were our ancestors doing inventing artificial intelligence they're wiping us out and I don't know the answer to that question well I think there's an issue also with the the concept of artificial like artificial life artificial intelligence it's I think it's going to be life it's just going to be a life that we've created and I don't think it's artificial I just think it's a different kind of life I think that we're thinking of biologically based life of sex yes you know reproduction in terms of the way we've always known it as being the only way that life exists but if we can create something and that something decides to do things it's live on its own yeah it's silicon-based life like why not why why does like I have to be something that only exists through the you know motivation of cells yes

125:24that's very charitable of you and it's people make that claim some people think that you know those machines in the distant future will look back at us as like one stage of evolution that pronated in them that we're I've always said that we are some sort of an electronic caterpillar yes no that it's gonna give birth to a butter is making a cocoon we don't even know yes going that's a great metaphor I have a hard time accepting that because you're a person yes it's against my interests but we're so flawed all these things we've outlined those are go away with artificial intelligence it's a deep philosophical question Joe I mean I think it's inevitable and I think if the single-celled organisms were sitting around wondering what the future would going to be like where are we gonna be replaced will they make antibiotics and kill us yes what's guess they aren't gonna kill us I mean this is

126:13I mean we are so flawed like the great the ocean we do pull the fish out of it if you up the air and commit genocide there's all these things that are real but the artificial life won't have those problems because it won't be emotionally based won't be biologically based it'll just exist that's a really good story we're so flawed why not not we're very we are flawed but we are flawed I think it's beautiful too but I think vultures probably think they're beautiful too that's why they breed with each other well they are beautiful but but the point is I think we have a flaw Judy I'm gonna stick to my principles that we are despite our flaws worth it there is something wonderful about us and I think that wonderful creative quality is the reason why we created artificial life in the first place hmm it's like this this variation we've had that impetus you

127:07know if you look at a lot of the the art whether it's the Egyptian you know the the the pyramids or other kinds of artistic expression we seem to have had a desire to transcend death you know to make things that sure that look like us but weren't alive right forever rightly so I mean I think in that regard I think you're quite right that it's not gonna stop that Tennessee's not gonna stop now you're you're very as I said charitable positive take on the claim and your analogy to single-celled organisms which were 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 gonna have to be thinking about because it's disturbing honestly well 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 I would say oh I see what's going on here yeah yes these dummies are buying

128:01iPhones and new MacBooks because they they know that this is what's going to help the production of newer more superior technologies the more we consume it's also based I think in a lot of ways our insane desire for materialism is fueling this yeah and it could be an inherent property of the human species that it is designed to create this artificial life and that literally is what it's here for and much like an ant is creating an anthill and doesn't exactly have some sort of a future plan you know it's kids and it's 401k plan that what we're doing is like this inherent property of being a human being our curiosity our wanderlust our desire culture things yeah all these things are built-in because if you follow them far enough down the line a hundred years two hundred years it inevitably leads to artificial life yes I think I think that's possible and of course we're not

129:00gonna be alive to test that idea there's some will they would crisper and all this crazy that's coming down come on no there's nothing having the pace of innovation people always have good say if you go back every decade people saying just around the corner just around the corner these things that are take forever they're very hard biological systems are very hard to engineer I don't and you know of course the people who do that kind of work will often I think a lot of them engage in snake oil you know they want to fun there was sure but I think it's entirely possible that there's a 20 year old listening to this pocket will be 150 yes nothing bosibl maybe a lot more than that I think there's I think it's entirely possible that 30 year olds today could be 150 but I think there's you give another 10 years of research you give maybe 10 years more I think

129:44it's entirely well there's no famous bad about this you may know that the ocean ski Alstead bet yeah yes where they bet that about 10 or 20 years ago they bet that there was a person born that then that year who would live to be 150 and on one side you had one guy who said no they they they bet a billion dollars and they endowed it with they opened up a bank account they put in you know they're using compound interest to get to that sum of money and they obliged and nerds yes and they obliged and they have lines they're uh they're bet yes and they and they and they designated the National Academy of Sciences or some entity like that that would that would adjudicate the bet in 150 years mmm and and then they specify the kinds of documentation that might be needed and they allowed for in the future they may be other ways of ascertaining how old someone is and those can be used and

130:35that's the bet so you might be right about that like you know there are humans that live naturally 20 we have that capacity actually here's an interesting idea why do we die at all why is natural selection never given us an immortal species have you ever thought about that yeah yeah I have never reached a conclusion but I always figured you live long enough especially up until recent history only long enough to recognize it was all crazy hustle or philosophical I believe or a scientific answer here's here's one answer for why we're not immortal okay so if you think about it why would natural selection not have created a creature that lived forever right not yet why why should we die yeah okay so here's that one answers it's not known for sure if this is the answer but this is a good answer imagine they're two different kinds of things that can kill you intrinsic

131:31causes and extrinsic causes so 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 because it's impossible to eliminate all extrinsic causes because some people are going to die from accidents it would be if inefficient from the point of view of evolution to evolve to be immortal because we would have all this capacity to be immortal we 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 strong any any quality lactase right we like we talked about earlier you you don't have lactase persistence into adulthood because it's not needed so evolution doesn't waste anything there'd be no reason for that so there'd be no the that would there

132:22would there there would be no reason the argument goes to evolve immortality because inevitably some people would be killed eventually by accidents anyway so unless you can create a world in which there are no accidents there are no extrinsic causes of death it would be if inefficient from an evolutionary point of view to evolve immortality so death the reason we died naturally some people think is that the reason we die naturally is that there are unknown control causes of death in the world like accidents if we could eliminate the unnatural causes so that no where no 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 this is the theory it's crazy idea it is fascinating but do you think that nature had that sort of sort of foresight well it's not a foresight but

133:23that's how natural selection works mmm think about like if I have suddenly magically transformed your body at great expense to make you capable of immortality and then two days where now you're hit by a bus I've wasted all that effort but if you only done to one person you wasted that effort if 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 to die he also have died so everyone eventually would die from these extrinsic causes so a lot well no that's that's that's the assumption in the model yeah if it's not perhaps if if in fact there are no external effect there is a world in which you're never struck by lightning never hit by a bus never a tree branch right then then the theory is that we would have evolved to be immortal so that's almost like the lot the life that

134:09you live you're inevitably going to get killed by extrinsic causes yes if you extend that life to a thousand years then it's absolutely yes yes therefore why bother that's just living in a bubble just terrified of the world davonne rocks we can get yeah but you can't transport you can't take this theory and this model and apply to an individual in an individual life it's about how our species evolved it's not about how you should live your life I mean it's also true I don't think you should live your life afraid I think that's a difficult I think that's a sad life to live a life afraid it takes practice to be unafraid when if you'd be more afraid if you could live a thousand years without an accident you know cuz it's like if you're one of those crazy rock climber dudes like Alex Honnold yeah and he's crazy he's crazy I love him he's told have you talked if you met

134:55him yeah I've had him on a couple times oh my god he's awesome furious you know of course is amygdalas up you know this right he has no fear no he does have fear you're wrong oh really absolutely as fear he just understands his capacity and his ability you think his rash he says I can do this therefore I should not be afraid because I read that his brain and that his his fear centers are different than the rest of us is what I read maybe that's wrong I don't know did he tell you didn't say anything about that no I mean I don't know about that he said basically that the experience he just stays mellow and calm and that if things go wrong it's really bad like like you don't want to be freaking out yes like it's like divers yeah you don't panic when you're underwater and Brian lose your way right there was it consumes oxygen a long amazing story that my friend Donald

135:44Cerrone he's a UFC fighter told about being trapped in a cave and and and watering out when it was running out of oxygen yeah horrible crazy scary story and you have to those guys are all so different either they either they're born that way or they learn to be that way you have to keep calm because when you and I lose our cool and start hyperventilating yeah our oxygen consumption skyrockets right and that's the opposite of what you need to do in that situation it's actually what he talked about yeah you know like trying to stay calm and battling the demons yeah I'm not gonna die like this yes yeah what an incredible story hmm yeah the Alex Honnold thing I hear something yeah I watched the movie it's awesome he got an MRI and they said that was insane yeah his amygdala is different but what did it say how to say it the kids amygdala isn't firing yes okay but isn't

136:33that possible that that's just through development of constant pace also stay calm while you're in life-threatening situations it's possible I would like to see fighter's brains measured in that regard I would like to see soldiers well Special Forces guys yes I think that's right and the guy's a special force guys it's like the capacity to shoot back when you're being shot at give me your calm yes moving positions you know yeah and so forth those are all very important abilities not panicking but and it is also the case that some people for example the most famous study in this regard was a study of London taxi drivers London taxi drivers can go from any point in the city to any other point in the city it's called the knowledge they have a mental map of the whole city and it's freakish it takes years to be able to know how to navigate the city with there are thousands of nay tens of

137:21thousands of street names and they can do it by like dead reckoning they scan this was a paper about ten years ago they brain scan these guys and they had I forgot which region of the brain but they had through learning it has felt modified that region of their brain mmm-hmm so it's possible Holland is like you say that he learned to be this way that his amygdala isn't firing because he trained himself but I Honnold Honnold Honnold I'm sorry Honnold is this way because he learned this way but 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 and he trains as well you have both right good athletes require both innate ability plus training yes and I think Honnold is probably like that he's probably born with an amygdala doesn't fire so much and he's an amazing you

138:13know climber it's purely speculative right like the and also the nature versus nurture would apply to chess players as well I would like to see their brain scan like yeah well Garry Kasparov I know Gary yes I would love to scan yes yeah he's an interesting guy I hit what I'll say the article goes way more into depth tonight well I just showed you about just that sentence she's the doctor who studied him it was specifically looks at people that go in there high stress and look for those kinds of things been doing that since 2005 I guess and she goes it's it's pages long this whole thing about his brain but it is unusual but it also the amount of time think about people that are in high stress high stress is one thing this kid is in a life-threatening absolute fatality situation stake his death every day I know all day I know I mean he lives in a van and just climbs

139:06yes that's what he does it's really fascinating yes it is it is and it's amazing honestly it's amazing so I mean I don't know I'd never met him I admire him very much and I love this like we said at the beginning it's very important to have skills yeah of any kind his skills are amazing admired music musical skills and carpentry skills and martial arts skills and statistical skills and medical Meyer skills you know I think it's and it's worth waiting yeah it's worth cultivating those skills you find out more about yourself through acquiring these skills and knowledge and information and disabilities yes you learn and you also learn about how to acquire skills yes yes I think that's right and I think and I think it's also kind of you also find oftentimes that the the practice of acquiring a skill teaches you other things that can then be used in other

139:54areas yes so even if you like you know like like you make the effort to learn the violin or to learn Chinese for example or whatever you know some effort you that self discipline then can be translated in even to something that you're not so good at but it's still useful to have that that's the me a lot to a Musashi quote the book from the book of five rings once you know the way broadly you see it in all things yes yeah that's very good yeah I remember my mind is flashing back to we're talking about immortality do you remember that scene at it Helms helms deep when in the Lord of the Rings when he's there protecting the you know the the the castle and the elves come and help the humans you know the movie probably know them yeah and IO is I was very sad when these elves were killed because if they hadn't been killed by extrinsic forces they would have lived

140:44locked they would have been immortal so it's like I'd especially sad loss anyway I'd wanted to mention that earlier we were talking about that thing so no what was the saying again you just said about once you know the way broadly you'll see it in all things yes that's right yeah it was just about acquiring excellence in something yeah that you understand what it takes to acquire excellence in something you can apply that to other things as well it's the same process yeah just a different path yes that's right listen Nikolas thank you so much for being here thank you so much I can't wait to read this book I'm going on vacation so I'm gonna read this with me alright and like some of the stories at the beginning that really did so much for every I've been really grateful thanks man thank you so much bye everybody