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Author: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

  • Is AI creative?

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    What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence?
    That’s a fundamental, perhaps unanswerable question.
    Is it also an obsolete one?
    The question now seems to be,
    what is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence?
    Creativity feels innately human.
    But what if it’s not?
    How are we to know?
    Philosophers, artists, and scientists are already debating whether the art
    and the writing generated by mid-journey and chat GPT
    are examples of machines being creative.
    But should the focus be on the output, the art that’s generated,
    or the input, the inspiration,
    and all the work and toiling that goes into making it?
    And what about the other, smaller ways in which we use our creativity?
    Like in a prank on a friend or in a note to a loved one.
    Does the value of those communications change if AI creates them?
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
    Today’s guest is writer and essayist Megan O’Giblin.
    She’s the author of the book “God, Human, Animal, Machine.”
    Technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning.
    She’s also a previous guest of The Gray Area,
    and if you enjoy this conversation,
    and of course you will, I’ll add a link to our last one in the show notes.
    Megan is terrific, and she’s been thinking about the human relationship
    with technology for a long time.
    And her book made a really strong case that the more our existence
    intertwines with the tools we create,
    the more those tools shape our understanding of who and what we are.
    So as we kick off this series about creativity,
    I could think of no better person to discuss how machines are changing
    our understanding of creativity and forcing us to reflect
    on what it really means to be creative.
    Megan O’Giblin, welcome back to the show.
    Thanks so much for having me.
    So we’ve talked before.
    You know what, I’m just going to go ahead and say we’re friends.
    I hope that’s okay.
    Yes.
    So your work spans a pretty wide range of themes and questions connected
    to the relationship between humans and computers.
    What I wanted to talk with you today is about this relationship
    or how to look at that relationship through the lens of creativity.
    And you once asked a computer scientist what he thought creativity meant.
    And he told you, well, that’s easy.
    It’s just randomness.
    What do you make of that view of creativity?
    How would you correct or add to it?
    I mean, there’s a way in which it was seemed first like a convincing answer, right?
    And I think that there is something, a relationship between creativity
    and randomness in the sense that it’s something that is non-deterministic.
    It’s something that surprises you, surprises the person looking at the art.
    It surprises the artist often.
    And, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re thinking,
    you know, it’s no coincidence that a computer scientist came up with this definition.
    Because if you’re thinking about creativity or what we call creativity
    in large language models, for example, you can play around
    if you’ve ever sort of played around with like the temperature gauges of an LLM.
    You can basically turn up the temperature and turn up the amount of randomness
    in the output that you get.
    So, you know, if you ask ChatGBT, for example,
    to give you a list of animals at a low temperature,
    it’ll say something very basic like a dog, a cat, a horse or something.
    And if you turn up the temperature, it’ll give you more unusual responses,
    more statistically unlikely responses like an ant eater.
    Or if you turn it way up, it’ll make up an animal like a whizzledy woo
    or some sort of Susie and creature that doesn’t exist.
    So, there is some element of randomness there.
    I’m inclined to think that it’s not, I mean, obviously it’s not just randomness
    because we also appreciate order, creativity and meaning.
    And I think, you know, I’ve noticed this sort of folk theory,
    I’ll call it that, of creativity that crops up in a lot of a lot of conversations
    about human creativity, which I tend to call like the modular theory of creativity.
    And it’s basically this idea that all works of art can be broken down
    into these little modules or building blocks.
    And that creativity is really just the ability to recombine, you know,
    take two things that have never been put together before and combine them
    in a new way and create something new.
    And, you know, I think that’s like a great explanation of how a lot of gen AI works.
    You know, you can ask a chatbot to write a poem about Elon Musk and the style of Dr. Seuss.
    And yeah, those two things have never been put together before.
    And it seems very creative.
    My intuition, I guess, as a human is that our form of creativity
    is a lot more complex than that, that it really has to do with filtering
    everything you’ve ever experienced as a human artist, right?
    All of your influences, which are unique to each person.
    Everybody has sort of a unique data set that they’re working with.
    And filtering that through your lived experience in the world.
    For me, the things that I appreciate in art have a lot to do with vision,
    with point of view, with the sense that you’re seeing something that’s been,
    you know, filtered through an autobiography, through a life story.
    And I think it’s really difficult to talk about how that’s happening,
    you know, in AI models.
    Yeah, I mean, we have these large language models,
    things like chat GPT and mid-journey or pick your favorite poison.
    And they produce language, but they do it without anything that I’d call
    consciousness. And consciousness is something that’s notoriously hard
    to define, but let’s just define it as the sensation of being an agent in the world.
    LLMs don’t have that.
    But is there any way in which you could call what they’re doing creative?
    Or do we need some other word for it?
    I think the difficult thing is that, you know, creativity is a concept that is,
    I think, like all human concepts, like intrinsically anthropocentric,
    that we created the term creativity to describe what we do as humans.
    And we have this bad habit as humans of changing the definition of words
    to sort of suit our opinion of ourselves, especially when, you know,
    machine’s turn out to be able to do tasks that we previously thought were limited
    to humans. I’m thinking about, you know, we saw this with chess, for example,
    that was for a long time considered the height of human intelligence was being
    able to play chess. And, you know, the moment that deep blue beat the human
    champion of chess, the New York Times interviewed a bunch of philosophers
    and computer scientists who were at that event.
    And I think it was Douglas Hofstetter who said, oh, my God,
    I thought that chess required thought.
    Now I know that it doesn’t.
    And it’s hard not to sense that something similar is happening with creativity,
    that a lot of the elements that we didn’t understand about it.
    I think it was easy to see it as somewhat mystical, you know,
    we talk about inspiration, which has this sort of like almost metaphysical
    or divine undertones to it.
    And now that we see a lot of that work done by automated processes,
    it becomes more difficult to say what creativity really is.
    And I think there’s already an effort, and I sense it myself too,
    this like effort to sort of cordon off this more special island of human
    exceptionalism and say, no, what I’m doing is actually different.
    And for me, consciousness and intent, it’s really hard to talk about those
    things apart from creativity.
    But I also doubt, you know, I think that there’s definitely like a little bit
    of defensiveness on my part in defending those qualities because they are
    something that machines don’t have.
    Well, I think that’s what I like about you.
    That we’re both on team human that way.
    You know, I mean, even it’s such a slippery distinction, computation
    and thought, what’s the difference?
    You know, and you run into the same problem when you’re trying to think
    about art and creativity and what is and isn’t art.
    You made a comment about two modernist writers that you admire,
    James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, right?
    And what made them genuinely creative artists was that they created a form
    of consciousness that felt new.
    And they were able to do that because they were people experiencing a new
    and different world and express what it was like to live in this new world.
    And that’s not something a machine programmed to just recombine everything
    humans have already written can do, right?
    I mean, that seems to be a line here.
    It’s something that current machines can’t do because they’re disembodied.
    Yeah.
    I’m very cautious against saying a machine will never do something,
    especially given all the advances we’ve seen in recent years.
    But certainly, I think the thing that I value and things like Woolf or Joyce
    or, you know, someone like Borges, who’s doing really interesting
    experimental work in the 1950s that felt totally sui generis,
    is that it is something to do with capturing a way of being in the world
    that hasn’t been experienced before, you know?
    And I think it’s easy to see this in modernism and postmodernism
    because history was changing so much during those periods.
    And the human experience was changing, right?
    And you had to have been a person embodied in a political and a cultural context
    and, you know, living that reality in order to capture what that felt like.
    So it’s an interesting thought experiment.
    You know, if we move into sort of embodied cognition of some kind of AI,
    I had a body and, you know, without walking around in the world,
    had sort of sensory access completely to the world in the same way we do.
    Would it be able to capture that also in ways that feel new?
    Possibly.
    But that’s not the models that we have right now.
    You could ask ChatGPT to produce a hundred novels in the style of Hemingway or whatever.
    And I guess it would do it.
    But what creative value does that have?
    Like, certainly the human prompting the AI isn’t an artist.
    But, you know, is the thing ChatGPT spits out a piece of art?
    Or is it something else?
    I think it’s something else, but I also have a hard time explaining why.
    I think that a lot of generative AI operates in this very kind of top-down approach to creativity,
    which is that, you know, you have an idea, you have an inspiration of some kind.
    You have a story you want to tell, and you put all of that into the model as a prompt,
    and it does the grunt work, just basically enacts your will.
    When I think about, like, the truly most creative moments in my experience writing,
    it often happens the other way around from the bottom up.
    Like, I often start writing something and I don’t know anything about what it’s going to be.
    I don’t know the form.
    I don’t know the style.
    I don’t know, you know, what I’m going to argue if it’s an essay.
    I just have, like, a sentence in my head or an image.
    And I start with that, and all of those sort of larger features,
    the things that you’re supposed to put into the prompt,
    kind of grow out of that experience of making really small particular choices,
    almost like those are emergent features of the creative process.
    And I teach writing.
    And the thing I often tell my students is you really have to fight,
    especially during the early stages of a process to not know too much,
    because you’re logical, like the left side of your brain or whatever,
    is always going to be trying to get ahead of the process
    or sort of impose something familiar or something known onto what you’re doing.
    And it’s going to be less interesting than if you work in a more associative way,
    because then your unconscious is entering into the picture.
    So to me, like the idea of using generative AI to enact a concept,
    it’s really almost a backwards way of thinking about how I think about art.
    I think when humans interact with those models,
    you’re dealing with something that’s basically competing with your own unconscious, right?
    Which is where those unexpected connections come from.
    [MUSIC]
    Do you think a machine or an AI could ever really communicate
    in the way we understand that phenomenon?
    I don’t even think a machine can think for the reasons we’ve already explained,
    but they certainly process information.
    But are they capable of communication
    in the way that humans are to each other?
    The thing that I value about human communication,
    and I’ll include in that art,
    I read a lot of memoir and first person writing because I want access to another mind.
    There’s things that you can say in an essay or a book
    that you can’t say just in normal social conversations just because the form permits you to.
    I love reading because I love seeing the way that other people see the world.
    Obviously, there’s people who are able to do that in a way that’s very artistic,
    that has beautiful syntax and images, and that’s part of communication, obviously.
    But really the most important thing to me that we often take for granted
    is this background knowledge that what I’m reading on the page has come from another mind
    that had the desire to communicate something, right?
    And so, when people ask, “Oh, do you think that an AI could create
    the next best American novel, the great American novel,”
    we’re talking a lot in those hypotheticals about technical skill.
    And to me, I think even if it was on the sentence level or even on the level of concepts and ideas,
    something that we would consider virtuoso, if it came a sort of an example of human genius,
    just the fact that it came from a machine I think changes the way that we experience it.
    I think that when I’m reading something online, for example,
    and I start to suspect that it was generated by AI, it changes the way I’m reading,
    there’s always that larger context of how we experience things,
    and intent and consciousness is a big part of it.
    You know, it’s a remarkable thing if you think about just how recently
    we took it for granted that any text that you encounter was composed by a human being, right?
    Even if it was a ghost writer or an administrative assistant or something,
    even if it didn’t come from the person that it purported to come from,
    there was a human consciousness behind it.
    And that has been completely, you know, language has been detached from thought,
    from human thought, just in the past few years.
    And I can’t help but think that’s going to fundamentally change how we think about language
    and how much we value language.
    For better or worse?
    For worse, absolutely.
    Yeah.
    This possibility that the ease with which we can produce language,
    I mean, or we could talk about images too, but language is a little bit more immediate to me,
    that that will actually devalue language the way that a currency becomes devalued through inflation,
    that if we become so used to reading in terms of lowering our expectations,
    there’s a lot of, I think, hypothetical questions about,
    “Oh, can, you know, will AI ever produce something that’s recognized as great art?”
    My response is always like, it doesn’t have to, to totally upend the industry.
    It’s like, it’s good at producing things that are good enough.
    Yeah.
    And I notice this, especially like when I see visual art that’s been created by AI,
    I’m much more impressed because it’s a field I don’t know as much about.
    And then I’ll talk to friends of mine who are artists, you know, who will say like,
    “Oh, that’s actually, you know, not that impressive to me.
    It seems kind of generic or derivative.”
    And, you know, I think about the type of work that, not even future, but just current,
    AI models are able to produce.
    They could very easily, I think, soon dominate the bestseller list, you know.
    And to some people who are really devoted to the craft of writing, you know,
    it might seem derivative or familiar, but that’s still not going to,
    I mean, it could still change the industry in really profound ways.
    There is something about the intentionality behind artistic creations
    that really matters to us.
    And, you know, it’s not like when I consume a piece of art, I’m asking myself,
    you know, how long did it take to make this?
    But I know subconsciously there was a lot of thought and energy put into it,
    that there was a creator with experiences and feelings that I can relate to
    who’s communicating something in a way.
    They couldn’t if they weren’t a fellow human being sharing this common human experience.
    And that matters, you know?
    It’s a feature, not a bug, as our beloved tech bros like to say.
    I think that effort that we have to put into making things is part of what gives it meaning,
    both for the person who’s producing it, right?
    Like the actual sacrifices and the difficulty of making something
    is what makes it feel really satisfying when you finally get it right.
    And it’s also, yeah, for the person experiencing it, right?
    I think about this a lot, even with things that we might not consider, you know, works of genius.
    But things like ways in which everyday people were creative for many years, you know,
    like I think about my grandfather used to write occasional poetry.
    So he would make up very simple, kind of funny poems for different occasions,
    for birthdays or anniversaries that he wrote himself.
    And he didn’t have a college education, but he was creative.
    And the poems are very creative.
    In many ways, they had simple rhyme schemes.
    They were personalized for the person or for the occasion.
    And, you know, that was a way for him to express his creativity.
    And that’s precisely the kind of thing that an LLM could do very well, right?
    Write a simple poem, you know, put it in the prompt to sort of you want it to be about,
    come up with a rhyme scheme.
    And I think about, like, what is the effect of somebody today listening to something like that,
    you know, sort of personalized poem and not knowing if it was actually created by the person
    or if it was just produced through a prompt.
    I think that really does change how you experience something like that.
    Do you think that maybe AI will make just radically new kinds of art possible?
    Maybe we can’t imagine what that will be.
    But maybe it’ll be awesome and I’ll look dumb in retrospect for saying it would be terrible.
    Yeah, I mean, any of us who are daring to speak about this topic right now really are putting ourselves out there
    for risking looking stupid in two years or five years down the road.
    But I will say it is true that AI is often called an alien form of intelligence
    and the fact that it reasons very differently than we do.
    It doesn’t intuitively understand what’s relevant in a data set the way that we do
    because we’ve evolved together to sort of value the same things.
    So, you know, you see this in something like the famous case of AlphaGo
    where this algorithm one beat the human champion of Go, Chinese board game,
    by making a move that basically no human would ever make.
    That’s how it was described by a lot of former Go champions,
    that it was a completely unhuman move.
    And I try to think about what that would look like in art, you know,
    because if you think about like if art and creativity is always this sort of tension between
    novelty and something that is new or innovated
    versus the lineage of a tradition in the form that you’re working in.
    Like, is there a space in which something could be sort of an alien move
    but still strike us as meaningful, I guess, is the question?
    I don’t know. Yeah, I would grant that it’s entirely possible that
    in the future AI will create art that’s maybe more beautiful and profound
    than anything we could create or even imagine.
    But being the product of an alien intelligence,
    what could it possibly mean to us?
    You know, I always think about that line from
    Victor Stein, the philosopher, he said, if a lion could speak,
    we wouldn’t be able to understand what it says.
    And we wouldn’t be able to understand because we don’t inhabit the world of lions.
    We don’t know what it’s like to be a lion.
    We don’t share a way of life with lions.
    So how could we possibly understand what they’re saying?
    And I think there’s, I think that’s true of this too.
    I really don’t think we fully appreciate how different a truly
    inorganic intelligence must be from us.
    You mentioned the word embodied earlier.
    I mean, our embodiedness is so essential to what and who we are,
    that shared experience, that shared vulnerability.
    It’s the whole basis of mutual understanding and even ethics, really.
    And meaning is this thing we create together as humans sharing a common way of life.
    And I have to believe that we’re going to lose so much of that
    in a world where we’re mostly consuming products created by machines.
    Maybe that as much as anything is what scares the shit out of me.
    Yeah. I mean, I’ve felt it myself.
    I feel lately, and maybe this is just being a writer too,
    but that I live a lot in my head and I live a lot in, you know,
    I think being a writer is in some sense,
    you’re always living in this virtual world of language
    that is sort of adjacent to the real world.
    But I think when you’re also spending 10 hours a day
    in front of a computer screen and interacting, you know,
    in your everyday life and work and everything with other people virtually,
    you definitely become detached in a very strange way
    and a very subtle way from your body.
    And, you know, I think about the role of the body.
    The body is so closely connected to what we call the unconscious.
    And I don’t mean that in any sort of like, you know,
    Jungian psychoanalytic sense, just like the unconscious intelligence,
    all the things that our body does that we don’t pay attention to in any given day.
    And there’s a reason why I think writers often say, oh, I got my best idea when I was out in a walk,
    right, that there’s something that happens when you’re actually interacting
    in the world that makes connections in your mind.
    And I don’t know how that happens,
    but it’s something that I think is important.
    It’s important to creativity.
    Well, there’s also something that happens when you go out in the world
    and interact with other human beings.
    Yes.
    We have all these fantastical sci-fi dystopian scenarios,
    but I tend to think our actual dystopian future will be much sadder and much more boring.
    You know, it’s not terminators fighting humans in the street.
    It’s a world rendered flat and sterile by technology
    where humans have offloaded all the thinking and awkwardness and imperfections
    and sincerity that have made the human experience so messy and awesome.
    Do you remember that controversy over the Google Gemini commercial
    and Gemini is Google’s competitor with OpenAI’s chat GPT?
    So just so the audience knows what I’m talking about,
    the commercial is it’s a young girl who wants to write a fan letter.
    I’ve always thought she was following in my footsteps.
    Hey, go get her, baby.
    But lately she’s been looking up to someone else.
    To her hero who’s an Olympic gold medalist sprinter or something like that.
    And then her dad says,
    She wants to show Sydney some love and I’m pretty good with words,
    but this has to be just right.
    So Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is.
    And so he’s just going to let the AI write it for them.
    And it’s horrifying.
    People were like, it did not go the way Google thought it would,
    but it’s horrifying to me because it shows that AI isn’t just coming for our art and
    entertainment.
    It’s not just going to be, I don’t know, writing sitcoms or I don’t know,
    maybe doing podcasts.
    It’s going to supplant sincere, authentic human to human communication.
    It’s going to automate our emotional lives.
    And I don’t know what to call that potential world other than a machine world populated
    by machine like people and maybe eventually just machine people.
    And that’s a world I desperately, desperately want to avoid.
    Yeah.
    Gosh, it was.
    Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.
    No, no, no, no.
    I have been thinking about that and it’s funny.
    I haven’t actually seen that, but I’ve read about it in which.
    Oh God, it’s so bad.
    So there’s, it reminded me of a couple things.
    The first is, you know, my, my husband teaches freshman English in college.
    And he once sort of saw one of his students or no, one of his students told him about
    this story about how she was looking over her shoulder and seeing in class one of her friends
    who was chatting with somebody pretend sort of a potential romantic partner, I guess,
    and was taking his texts and copying it and putting it into chat GPT and saying respond to
    this and then copying the output and putting it back into the text message.
    And the student who oversaw this was, was like this, you know, person on the other end of the
    line is basically chatting with a chat bot, but they don’t know what they think they’re
    talking to a human being.
    And yeah, I think about all those ways in which you think, you know, I think that the thing that’s
    really insidious is like, we don’t know if we’re talking to a human or not oftentimes.
    And one of the, I was, you know, for a long time wrote a advice column for Wired Magazine where
    people could write in questions about technology in their everyday life.
    And one of the questions I got very shortly after chat GPT was released was somebody who
    was going to be the best man in their friend’s wedding.
    And he said, can I use chat GPT ethically, you know, to do a best man speech for me.
    And, you know, which I like, there’s cases of people doing this, the people who use it to
    write their wedding vows.
    And my response in my first instinct was like, well, you’re robbing yourself of the ability to
    actually try to put into words what you are feeling for your friend and what that relationship
    means to you. And it’s not as though those feelings just exist in you already.
    You know, I think anyone who’s, who’s written something very personal like this,
    you realize that you actually like start to feel the emotions as you’re putting it into
    language and trying to articulate it.
    And, you know, I think about the same thing with this hypothetical like fan letter that the girl
    is writing in the commercial, right?
    It’s like you’re stealing from your child the opportunity to actually try to
    access her emotions through language.
    To be a human being.
    Yes, yeah.
    I mean, I think one of the most profound things digital tech has done to the human mind is
    it has conditioned us to expect instant gratification and to not tolerate boredom or
    patience.
    And so, you know, you’ll hear some artists making the case that, you know, AI will be this great
    collaborative creative tool for humans.
    But I think it’ll just encourage us to think less, do less, feel less and rely on technology
    to do living for us.
    And again, I can imagine that world, but I don’t want to live in it, you know, and,
    but maybe it’s kind of a troubling thought, but maybe humanity is more pliable than we think.
    I definitely think that humans are more flexible than we think and that there it is certain that
    where we will evolve alongside this technology and find new forms of expression.
    That doesn’t mean that it’s always for the good.
    There’s tendency to go back and say like, oh, people said the same thing about photography.
    You know, when that came out that that wasn’t real art.
    People said the same thing about television, you know, if you go back and read like in the,
    you know, 80s and 90s, just all of these sort of writers who are just ranting against how
    television is the end of humanity and what’s making us passive.
    And nobody likes to be reactionary, obviously.
    But it’s also true that like there was truth to those objections, right?
    Like as television made my life better overall, I don’t know that it has.
    And so I think that the thing that I worry about is that in the effort to not seem like
    a Luddite or whatever, we’re actually slowly sort of anesthetizing ourselves towards these
    changes that are happening to the human experience and that are happening very quickly in this case.
    This is a big question, but I’m comfortable asking you because of your
    theological background. Do you think we have any real sense of the spiritual impact of AI?
    Are you talking about spiritual in terms of like actual, like the way people practice spiritual
    traditions and religion or just sort of like the human,
    all of it? It’s a paradox in some way, right? Because I think technologies are rooted in very
    anti-spiritual in the sense that it’s usually very reductive and materialist
    understanding of human nature. But with every new technological development,
    I think there’s also been this tendency to sort of spiritualize it or think of it in superstitious
    ways. I think about like the emergence of photography during the Civil War and how people
    believed that you could see dead people in the background or the idea that radio could sort of
    transmit voices from the spiritual world. So I think that it’s not as though technology is
    going to rob us of a spiritual life. I do think that technological progress competes in some ways
    as a form of transcendence with the type of transcendence that spiritual and religious
    traditions talk about in the sense that it is a way to push beyond our current existence
    and to sort of get in touch with something that’s bigger than the human, which I think is a very
    deep human instinct is to try to get in touch with something that’s bigger than us. And I think
    that there’s a trace of that in the effort to build AI, this idea that we’re going to create
    something that is going to be able to see the world from a higher perspective and that’s going
    to be able to sort of give our lives meaning in a new way. And I think that if you look at most
    spiritual traditions and wisdom literature from around the world, it’s usually involves this
    paradox where like if you want to transcend yourself, you also have to acknowledge your
    limitations. You have to acknowledge that the ego is illusion. You have to admit that you’re
    center. You have to sort of humble yourself in order to access that higher reality. And I think
    technology is a sort of transcendence without the work and the suffering that that entails
    for us in a more spiritual sense. Yeah, I think that’s right. And what I’m always
    thinking about in these sorts of conversations is this long term question of what we are as human
    beings, what we’re doing to ourselves and what we’re evolving into. I mean, Nietzsche love this
    distinction between being versus becoming. Humanity is not some fixed thing. We’re not a static
    being like everything in nature. We’re in this process of becoming. So what are we becoming?
    I think as it stands, we’re becoming more like our machines. And I think that’s bad.
    Yeah, there’s at some point, I think a threshold that’s crossed, right, where I mean, and where is
    that if we’re for becoming something, we’ve already been becoming something different,
    I think with the technologies that we’re using right now. And is there some hard line where we’ll
    become like post human or another species? I don’t know. My instinct is to think that
    there’s going to be more pushback against that future. As we approach it, then it might seem
    right now in the abstract. I think that it’s difficult to articulate exactly what we value
    about the human experience until we are confronted with technologies that are threatening it in some
    way. And I think that a lot of the some of the really great writing and the conversations that
    are happening right now are about, let’s try to actually put into words what we value about being
    human. And I think there’s a way in which that these technologies might actually help clarify
    that conversation in a way that we haven’t been forced to articulate it before. And to think
    about like, what are our values? And how can we create technology that is actually going to serve
    those values as opposed to making us the subjects of what these machines happen to be good at doing?
    Well, this was a pleasure. Yeah, it was great. Megan Ogiblin, thanks so much for doing this.
    And if you are listening and you have not read Megan’s book, God, Human, Animal, Machine,
    Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, don’t be ridiculous. Go buy it and read it.
    It’s great. Megan, thanks. You’re the best. Thanks so much, Sean.
    All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I definitely did. Megan really is one of my
    favorite writers and thinkers. And honestly, these are just the questions that get me out of bed in
    the morning. This is the kind of stuff I live to talk about. And if you’re listening to the show,
    I guess you do too, or I hope you do. Anyway, I really want to know what you think of the episode.
    Did you like it? Could I have done something better? I don’t know. Just if you have a thought,
    send it to me. You can drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com. And once you’re finished with that,
    go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Beth
    Morrissey. Today’s episode was engineered by Erika Huang, fact-checked by Anouk Dusso, edited by Jorge
    Just, and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music. New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
    Listen and subscribe. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership
    program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show,
    let us know.
    [BLANK_AUDIO]

    What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? Creativity feels innately human, but is it? Can a machine be creative? Are we still being creative if we use machines to assist in our creative output?

    To help answer those questions, Sean speaks with Meghan O’Gieblyn, the author of the book “God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning.” She and Sean discuss how the rise of AI is forcing us to reflect on what it means to be a creative being and whether our relationship to the written word has already been changed forever.

    This is the first conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

    Guest: Meghan O’Gieblyn (https://www.meghanogieblyn.com/)

    References:

    God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Anchor; 2021)

    Being human in the age of AI. The Gray Area. (Vox Media; 2023) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-human-in-the-age-of-ai/id1081584611?i=1000612148857

    Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

  • Happiness isn’t the goal

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    If you could decide whether to be optimistic
    or pessimistic all the time, which would you choose?
    I think most of us would choose to be optimistic.
    I mean, why not?
    Who doesn’t want to feel good about the future?
    But we all know it’s not that easy.
    We can’t always control how we feel.
    If we could, everyone would feel great all the time.
    Still, it’s worth asking why being optimistic
    can be so difficult sometimes,
    especially when there are plenty of reasons to be.
    If you’re like me, it often seems as though
    your own mind is at war with itself.
    Does it have to be that way though?
    Or is it possible that we’re just wired to worry?
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
    (upbeat music)
    Today’s guest is Paul Blum.
    He’s a professor at the University of Toronto
    and the author of several great books,
    including Psych, The Story of the Human Mind,
    and The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering,
    and The Search for Meaning.
    I’m not dropping any official rankings here,
    but Paul is one of my favorite psychologists
    to read and talk to.
    His books are fun, enlightening,
    and full of practical wisdom.
    So when we decided to do this series on optimism,
    he was one of the first people I thought of.
    I had a great conversation a few weeks ago
    with another psychologist, Jamil Zaki,
    about the temptations of cynicism and how to overcome them.
    The episode is called Why Cynicism is Bad for You.
    I hope you’ll listen to it if you haven’t already,
    because it’s a really good companion
    to today’s conversation with Paul.
    In this one, we zoom out a little further
    to talk about the nature of our minds,
    what he’s come to learn about optimism,
    and what any of it has to do with whether or not
    we’re happy.
    Paul Bloom, welcome to the gray area.
    – Good to talk to you again, Sean.
    – You know, I hesitate to start out this way,
    but I’m a little disappointed in you.
    – Go ahead.
    – You have a lovely newsletter called Small Potatoes.
    You recently had a post about your favorite podcast,
    and we weren’t on it.
    Kater, explain yourself.
    – You know, you write these things
    and you know you’re gonna miss somebody,
    and then I hear from you and I missed you.
    I am sorry.
    The odd thing is, this is one of my favorite podcasts.
    Maybe if you go back to the newsletter
    and you go back to it,
    you will find that there has been a stealth edit.
    – All right, let’s get into this,
    and I’ll start with a hardball.
    Optimism, overrated or underrated?
    – Oh, I like the sort of Tyler Cowan vibe he got here.
    – Overrated, the whole question of optimism, pessimism,
    is kinda stupid.
    If optimism means you think things are gonna be better off
    than they are in pessimism,
    is that you think things are gonna be worse off?
    Isn’t the rational thing to be realist?
    So, overrated.
    I think we should try to see things as they really are.
    And on the same token,
    I don’t think we should be pessimists either.
    We should just try to be accurate.
    – Wait, do you think realism and optimism
    are mutually exclusive?
    Can’t you be both?
    – Well, I guess it depends what you mean by optimism.
    If what you mean by optimism is seeing the world
    in a good way in a positive light,
    in cases where the world actually is good
    and is positive, sure, then I believe in optimism.
    But I always thought it means,
    to some extent, rose-tinted lenses,
    seeing things as a little bit more positive,
    trying to see the bright side of things.
    And we should try to see things as they are.
    – Do you think of optimism as an attitude
    or an orientation or something closer to a life strategy?
    – Yeah, it’s a good question.
    I mean, what I’m talking about now
    is if it’s a way of assessing the odds.
    Do you assess them as bright?
    In cases of uncertainty, and it’s always uncertain,
    you go for use and things are gonna be good
    and things are gonna be bad.
    And I’m saying, we should just try to accuracy.
    There is a sort of attitude issue
    where optimism could be defended,
    where you get the odds right.
    But optimism says, hey, let’s give it a shot.
    Let’s not weigh the negatives.
    Let’s not be so loss averse.
    Let’s try to focus, let’s try to take a shot.
    And so not worry too much about failure.
    It can be under some circumstances, rational.
    – I think about something like religious faith.
    And we have pretty good evidence
    that religious people are actually happier.
    Now, there may be lots of reasons for that.
    That’s a separate conversation,
    but it seems to be a pretty consistent finding.
    So there is this tangible benefit to faith,
    completely independent of whether it’s true or not.
    And maybe optimism is kind of like that.
    – It’s interesting, it’s an interesting analogy.
    And so you might challenge what I said before
    and say, oh, wait, under circumstances in life
    where there is a payoff to being wrong
    in a certain systematic way to overestimate your chances.
    Suppose I’m back to my teenage years
    and I’m trying to approach women, go ask them out on dates
    and I have a realistic assessment.
    Honestly, the odds are not good for me,
    but I inflate the odds.
    And because I inflate the odds, it motivates me
    to approach people and to talk to them and so on.
    And I develop a relationship.
    Maybe nobody would open up a business or a restaurant
    or try for an academic job
    if they had a realistic assessment of the odds.
    So yeah, I could see it playing some role.
    At the same time though, for each example
    I’m giving of this sort, you could come back
    with an example of how an over-optimistic perspective
    could lead you into all sorts of trouble.
    – Yeah, that’s fair.
    I’m just an N of one, but I have to say in my experience
    I have not found that there’s a positive relationship
    between being realistic and being happy.
    So I don’t know, make of that what you will.
    – I think if you looked at your life,
    you would find that getting things right
    often leads to happiness or leads to more happiness
    than alternative.
    – Yeah, I don’t know.
    I found that I’m often right when I least want to be.
    (laughs)
    But maybe that’s just me, that could just be me.
    – Fair enough.
    – It’s interesting when you think about happiness
    which is obviously related to optimism in some ways.
    And I know there’s research showing
    that happiness over the course of someone’s life
    takes the form of a U-shaped curve
    where you’re most happy at the beginning
    and the end of life.
    And then there’s this big dip in the middle
    which we call the midlife crisis.
    Is there a similar finding on optimism and pessimism?
    Do we tend to get more or less optimistic
    or pessimistic as we age?
    Or do we just have no idea?
    – I have no idea.
    Maybe there’s some people who know.
    I mean, the U-shaped curve is interesting.
    When it was originally discovered,
    people said, well, that’s United States or our culture,
    but it seems to replicate across all sorts of cultures
    and all sorts of times.
    And it’s actually really surprising.
    You would expect to be happiest when you’re young
    and then there’s all sorts of decline,
    physical decline, cognitive decline,
    even financial decline should bring you down.
    But weirdly, when people hit their mid-50s,
    there’s often this curve upwards.
    And maybe this connects to optimism,
    but one analysis of this is that your priorities change.
    You’re no longer fully in the status game.
    This is sort of zero-sum battle
    for mating opportunities and money and power.
    And you step back more towards,
    I think, David Brooks calls some sort of eulogy virtues
    where I don’t have good relationships with people.
    I’ll develop fulfilling hobbies and so on.
    And maybe you’re more optimistic
    because then your goals are more realistic.
    If my goal is to have my next book at number one,
    a New York Times bestseller,
    well, it’s nice to be optimistic,
    but there’s a bit of frustration probably built into this.
    On the other hand, if my goal is to spend some nice time
    with my wife during crossword puzzles and talking,
    well, you know, things get calibrated properly.
    – Maybe the best case for being optimistic
    is that it’s socially desirable that people like to be around
    good vibes and positive attitudes.
    And obviously the reverse is just as true.
    People don’t like– – I think that’s definitely true.
    There’s what psychologists call the Lake Wobegon effect.
    – What is that?
    – It’s from Garrison Keeler.
    I’m gonna mangle the line.
    But Garrison Keeler talks about Lake Wobegon
    and says something where all the boys and girls
    are above average.
    And the idea is kind of just called the above average effect.
    So you ask people, how good a driver are you?
    You ask people how good they are as lovers, as friends.
    How funny are they?
    How good students are they?
    How are good professors are they?
    And the main findings,
    just about everybody thinks they’re above average.
    And there’s all different theories of why that happens.
    One connects to something you said before,
    which is kind of feedback.
    So if I give a talk and most people hate it,
    but some people come up to me and say, “Hey man, good talk.”
    And I say, “I gave a good talk.”
    Because in a polite world, the feedback is often positive.
    But anyway, there does seem to be
    this general kind of rosy glow effect.
    – Even these terms, optimism and pessimism,
    they’re very fuzzy categories.
    Do you think they’re useful as a psychologist?
    – I mean, just talking you and me right now,
    I think that they’re too fuzzy to be useful.
    Plainly, we came in with somewhat different ideas
    of what optimism is.
    You saw it more as an attitude towards life,
    to motivation.
    I was thinking it was a way to assess the situation.
    So I think we need, as so often with psychology,
    we need to kind of be clear what we talk about
    and use terms properly.
    I think optimism folds in too many things
    to be a useful term.
    – Well, you famously made the case against empathy.
    – Yeah, and I got in so much trouble there
    because people said, well, empathy just means goodness.
    How come you’re against goodness?
    And I was used to determine it in a different way,
    but yeah, exactly.
    And I try to be careful what I mean, but…
    – Yeah, I mean, I ask in part, ’cause I wonder
    if you would also make a case for pessimism.
    I mean, let me ask that differently.
    – You sound like my agent.
    – Yeah, we’re trying to move merch here.
    I think what I’m really asking is,
    do you take pessimism seriously as a philosophical position?
    Or do you think it’s just a mistake?
    – I think it’s a mistake.
    It involves seeing the world differently than it does.
    And I think it’s a mistake we’re sometimes vulnerable to.
    So I’m very persuaded by Stephen Pinker’s claims
    that the world is in many ways getting better.
    And Pinker points out that it’s a very unnatural belief
    the world is getting better.
    And this is in part because we have a negativity bias
    when we see the world.
    I saw the Trump-Harris debate,
    and there’s a lot to be said about that.
    But Trump’s view of the world is so unremittingly negative
    as to how terrible it is.
    The country’s falling apart, we’re being laughed at.
    We’re not gonna be around in a few years and so on.
    And I think this resonates to a lot of people.
    Not for a sinister reason.
    They just see, this is accurate.
    – But what’s the appeal of that?
    What is it satisfying?
    – There’s different ways of thinking about it.
    One way is it doesn’t satisfy an edge at all.
    It’s just because of the way we absorb information.
    So I hear about a terrible murder in Toronto,
    and I say, oh my God, the city’s full of murders.
    But I don’t hear about old people who aren’t murdered.
    So there’s this negativity bias news
    just gives me this wrong impression
    even if it doesn’t fulfill a purpose.
    But I actually think that some extent it does
    fulfill a purpose and at least some people.
    I think among other things, there’s kind of,
    I’m gonna try this out.
    I’m sort of thinking of, but I’ve always felt this,
    which is some people are excited by the idea
    that things are horrible, things are chaotic.
    These are the end of days.
    It makes you feel important that you’re in the middle
    of this enormous historic decline
    that we have about five years before AI makes us slaves.
    Before climate change turns us into a hellhole,
    before the fascist like Trump or a socialist like Harris
    turn us into a third world country.
    And there’s some excitement to that.
    Can you feel that in your soul?
    You hear this, do you feel a little shiver of, huh?
    – I don’t know if I feel a shiver,
    but it does seem right.
    And sometimes it reminds me a little bit of the way
    I think about conspiracy theories sometimes.
    I always wonder, what is the appeal of that?
    What is it doing psychologically for people?
    And in some sense, for me, the answer is,
    well, you might look at the world and think it’s broken
    or unfair or inexplicable.
    And there’s something empowering about having
    an explanation for that that justifies your contempt
    for a world that you feel divorced from
    in some fundamental way.
    I don’t know if pessimism or the negativity bias
    is operating in a similar way.
    – That’s interesting.
    The alternative to the idea that a world is run
    by conspiracies is that we live in an uncaring world
    where people are just serving their own interests
    and the interests of those they love and so on.
    And maybe we’re feeling screwed,
    but nobody’s trying to screw us.
    Just things are just grinding away.
    The conspiracy theory says that in some way
    there’s a structure to the world.
    It almost connects to religion.
    It’s not, these things are not accidents.
    There’s deeper interest and deeper desires going on.
    And maybe even if we think the conspiracies are evil,
    there’s a comfort to that.
    – Yeah, I think shit happens.
    It’s just not a satisfactory explanation for people.
    So they need a story with good guys and bad guys
    and a beginning and an end and it all sort of hangs together.
    – I did research a while ago
    of a brilliant graduate student, Kony Manerjee,
    on the notion that everything happens for a reason.
    It’s a slogan I hate with all my heart.
    But it turned out we assess people’s beliefs.
    We asked them, for instance, about their beliefs
    about everyday life.
    We asked them about special events, good events,
    like birth of a child, bad events,
    like death of a loved one.
    And we asked them, did they believe things happen
    for a reason?
    And we found that religious people believe it very much.
    But even atheists who said, I’d say there’s no such thing
    as God, yeah, but things happen for a reason.
    There’s karma, there’s structure, there’s justice.
    And a conspiracy theory may not be the kind of reason
    you want, it makes you happy.
    It’s not people improving your life,
    but it’s still a reason.
    – Yeah, I think for a lot of people,
    the only thing that’s truly intolerable
    is not having a reason.
    – That’s right.
    And I don’t know about you,
    my own metacrysical idea is that that sad truth is correct.
    Realists about morality, I think there’s right and wrong.
    I think that there’s meaning to be had in life.
    But the universe itself is a cold and uncaring place.
    And so is American politics.
    There’s not this deep state orchestrating at all.
    There’s not this, it’s just a whole lot of shit happens.
    – I’m realizing that maybe shit happens
    is the closest thing we have
    to a grand unified theory of the world.
    – It’s a great truth and it’s a very difficult truth.
    And maybe one of the reasons why religion is reassuring
    and conspiracy theories are reassuring.
    And even a sort of pessimism could be reassuring
    is it says there’s design here, there’s structure here.
    You know, my life might not be very interesting,
    but at least I’m in the end of days.
    That’s something exciting.
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
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    (gentle music)
    (gentle music)
    – You know, I’ll ask,
    and I should say I’m just gonna assume
    that this is not a question
    for which there is a definitive scientific answer.
    It’s maybe speculation more than anything else.
    Do you think people are just
    constitutionally wired to be one or the other?
    Or that maybe it’s more complicated,
    environmental factors, and all this other stuff.
    But I mean, I just,
    I wonder if you think people are born
    more optimistic or more pessimistic,
    and maybe by extension,
    is it something we can change if we want?
    – So whenever somebody asks you,
    you know, there’s two alternatives.
    One is, is it really simple and kind of dumb,
    or is it more complicated and subtle and rich?
    I kind of see which answer you’re kind of pointing me towards.
    And I will actually give you the predicted answer.
    – I’m not pointing you anywhere, sir.
    – No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
    – I’m just asking questions.
    – You are just, you are leading me.
    You are leading me to say the truth,
    which is I would imagine one’s optimism
    and pessimism has to do a lot with all sorts of things.
    It has to do with the culture that they’re in,
    which tells you to some extent how to see the world.
    It has to do with their individual life experiences.
    If you live the life of extraordinary good fortune
    at every spot, you know, of course you can be optimistic,
    but it’s just fits the data.
    And many people live terrible lives,
    and I’m sure they’re pessimistic because they’re not dumb.
    They say up to now it sucked.
    Why not?
    Why not assume that induction is right
    and it’ll suck in the future?
    I will, however, say it’s probably also
    just by some heritable part of it.
    Just because, you know, the first law of behavioral genetics,
    which admits of no exception,
    is that every psychological trait is somewhat heritable.
    Meaning that if I took your biological mother
    and biological father, and then I asked them each,
    are you an optimist or pessimist?
    Are you a cynic?
    How do you think?
    You have a lot of hope.
    And then I asked you, your answers would correlate
    even if you had never met them.
    – This to me leads to something else
    I wanted to talk to you about, which is children.
    – Yeah.
    – And for people who don’t know,
    I mean, you’ve done a lot of work on child psychology,
    and that intersects with this conversation
    and interesting ways for me.
    Let me start this way.
    Do you think children are capable of being optimistic
    or pessimistic?
    – Yeah, I think they are.
    I mean, there are children and there are children.
    So I’m not sure you could sensibly ask this
    about a 10 month old.
    There’s a certain point where children
    probably don’t in some way reflect upon the future.
    And so the question doesn’t make much sense.
    But you talk about, you know, four and five year olds,
    three, four and five year olds running around,
    I think they can have attitudes about the world
    where we could talk about as pessimism and optimism,
    even cynicism, the way we’re talking about it.
    And the answer, and there’s a fair amount of studies
    on this seems to be they’re really optimistic.
    They’re really positive.
    They are positive about their own abilities,
    tending to overstate what they can do,
    what their futures will be like.
    They’re optimistic about the abilities
    of the people they know and they care about.
    Christy Lockhart, who’s my colleague at Yale,
    did a study where she asked kids what would happen.
    And these are kids who, like four year olds, whatever,
    what happens when someone gets their finger chopped off?
    What would he be like as an adult?
    And they often say, “It’ll grow back.”
    They have this weird folk view that limbs grow back,
    that we recover, we heal.
    So kids are pretty hardcore optimists.
    There’s such a thing as childhood depression,
    but it’s rare, it’s very rare,
    and doesn’t happen quite young.
    Kids tend to be, I think, somewhat naturally cheerful.
    – Yeah, I mean, I can’t imagine a seven year old nihilist.
    It doesn’t even make sense, right?
    Now, is that just a failure of my imagination?
    And if I’m right, if a six or seven year old nihilist
    is just not a thing that happens in the world,
    there must be some reason for that, right?
    They’re psychologically incapable of it.
    And if they are, what’s that reason?
    – That’s a good question.
    I also can’t think of a seven year old moral skeptic
    or a seven year old skeptic in general.
    So, you know, adult philosophers and adult non-philosophers
    often come to certain conclusions about the world.
    They might think, “Oh my God, there’s no morality,
    “there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose.
    “Everyone else is just a zombie.”
    And all these views adults come to have.
    Putting aside whether they’re true,
    and I think none of them are true, they’re not natural.
    It’s very natural to see the world imbued with meaning,
    with morality, with hope, I’d say,
    with promise of different sorts.
    And I think kids see the world that way.
    And it’s only as a result of education and contemplation
    so when you can kind of look, turn things around
    and develop these sort of unusual philosophical views.
    – And look, seven year olds
    may not be virtue, ethicists or whatever,
    but they do have very strong moral intuitions, right?
    – Absolutely.
    And I think they’re properly seen as moral realists.
    If they’re really mad because they were treated unfair,
    and you say, “Yeah, but if you were in a different time
    “and place, this wouldn’t be unfair.”
    But can you look at it like you’re an idiot.
    This is unfair, period.
    It’s unfair like grass is green,
    like it’s warm outside, it’s a fact.
    And I think the kids get it right, actually.
    I think some sort of moral realism is right.
    But we had these evolved systems that give rise
    to feelings, gut feelings of right and wrong and so on.
    And they’re fully engaged by the time the kid is about seven.
    And then it’s only as adults, we could say,
    “Oh, you know, what murder is wrong in our culture.”
    And then the adults come to some sort of crazy,
    more relativist view.
    But whatever you think about that,
    it’s not something kids will do.
    – Yeah, I learned about the default mode network
    when I was reporting on psychedelic therapy.
    And for people who don’t know,
    this is basically the part of the brain that comes online
    when you’re thinking about yourself.
    And this part of the brain isn’t fully developed
    until at some point later in childhood.
    And so my thinking was that in order to be optimistic
    or pessimistic, you have to cross some threshold
    of self-consciousness to the point where you’re able,
    where there is a voice in your head
    telling yourself stories about yourself
    and the future and the past and that sort of thing.
    And that until you make that transition categories
    like optimism or pessimism or nihilism or whatever,
    don’t really make much sense.
    But you’re the psychologist.
    – No, I think that’s right.
    Although I do think that at the ages
    we’re talking about children have a notion of themselves.
    They know they’ll persist over time.
    They know they have a history.
    On the other hand,
    there’s some really nice psychological research
    suggesting really interesting differences
    between kids and adults.
    And some of this work is done by my wife,
    Christina Starmans, who’s a psychologist
    who also studies kids.
    So here’s some findings from her lab
    and other labs have it too.
    You ask kids, a five-year-old, six-year-old,
    when you grow up, are you gonna be the same size
    as you are gonna be taller?
    ‘Cause I’ll be taller.
    And you ask a bunch of questions
    and they understand your body’s wage.
    And there’s other people’s body’s wage.
    But then you ask about your psychological choices.
    So you say stuff like, do you like to drink coffee?
    Oh, coffee’s gross.
    When you’re an adult, we like to drink coffee.
    And I’ll say, no, it’s gross.
    Would you like to kiss people?
    Oh, it’s disgusting.
    When you’re an adult, you like to kiss people.
    Now, if you ask them these questions
    about somebody else, one of their friends, say, yeah,
    when he gets older, he’ll like to kiss people
    and drink coffee.
    But for themselves, they can’t get around the fact
    that coffee is gross and kissing is gross
    and playing with Legos wonderfully fun and so on.
    And they think they’ll stay this way forever.
    Yeah, that’s interesting.
    You’re a parent, right?
    Yeah, two kids, old adults now.
    How old are they?
    They’re 26 and 28.
    So has observing them grow up?
    Changed how you think about optimism and human happiness
    and what it means and how to do it
    and what it doesn’t mean?
    Yeah, probably not.
    It’s just alarming how little I’ve learned
    from watching movies.
    Really?
    Not even a little bit?
    You know, you get anecdotes in some of my books.
    Oh, this kid, he did this, he did that.
    I gotta say, this is something I’ll say about my kids.
    And I don’t want to talk too much
    about their prior consent, but something they taught me
    and they didn’t have to do my kids to teach me this.
    They could have been somebody else
    but I know them extremely well.
    Is that they’re two very different guys.
    They’re very different styles of interacting with the world.
    They have different homies.
    They have different likes and dislikes.
    And they are both extremely happy.
    They’re both living very fulfilling lives.
    And it reminded me that there’s more
    than one way to do this, right?
    And that was useful to know.
    It also says, and this is something in your distant future
    which is there’s a real joy in having adult children.
    It’s something that’s so strange.
    There’s this kid, you changed their diapers,
    you exude them when they were crying.
    You rocked them to sleep.
    And there they are and they’re this big,
    big hairy guy who could easily take you in a fight.
    And you’ve got to treat them nice
    because there’s their people now
    and they don’t have to listen to you.
    But there’s a huge amount of delight in that.
    – For me, one of the really the great privileges
    of being a parent is watching this little person
    move through the world with fresh eyes and a fresh mind
    and have come to really appreciate
    that instinctive wisdom that children have.
    It’s a kind of wisdom that we lose when we become adults,
    when we fall into habits and routines
    and that sense of wonder disappears.
    – Oh, I like that.
    I’ve never been so into the sort of wisdom of kids stuff.
    I think kids are just often as ignorant as they seem
    and often prejudice and simple and unfair.
    But the one edge kids have over us,
    you perfectly summarize which is they see the world fresh.
    It also, by the way, since you ping me on empathy a bit,
    I’ll say something in favor of empathy.
    So my objections to empathy have to do
    with its role in moral decisions.
    But empathy is often great.
    And Adam Smith gives a good example of this.
    Taking empathy is putting yourself in another person’s shoes
    and feeling what they feel.
    One of the great joys of having kids
    is that it allows you sometimes,
    it sounds like you’ve been doing this,
    to see the world fresh, to see the world realized,
    to see fireworks, which you’ve seen a million times before,
    for the first time over again.
    To taste ice cream for the first time through them.
    And that’s that rocks, that’s terrific.
    – Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask you
    what you think we have to learn from children
    about how to be happy, but maybe that’s the answer.
    – Sort of beginner’s mind stuff.
    – Yeah, yeah.
    – Yeah, it’s something we get angry them for.
    But I think there’s a reason why
    we don’t walk around with beginners in mind
    because you don’t wanna be sitting down,
    drink a cup of coffee and stare at the coffee and smell.
    Oh my God, I’m gonna taste it all anew.
    We never do stuff.
    There’s a logic behind the fact that we automate.
    We become used to things, we habituate.
    Because you don’t wanna drive home from work
    as if you were the first time in a car again.
    You wanna be able to do things automatically.
    And the cost of that is you give up
    this beautiful beginner’s mind.
    But I don’t think we should or could retain it.
    – Yeah, I can see that it’s not entirely practical
    to be that immersed in the present
    that it’s definitely a luxury of being cared for
    and not having responsibilities or a job
    or a mortgage, that kind of thing.
    But it sounds like you think I’m being too romantic
    about kids.
    I mean, look, they do shit their pants.
    – You wanna go back to shitting your pants, Sean.
    – No, I do not wanna go back to shitting my pants,
    but I would love to have more.
    I don’t know what the right balance is,
    but I would love to have more of that beginner’s mind.
    I mean, look, I’ve stared at a pine cone
    for three hours before,
    but I took a lot of mushrooms to do that.
    I can’t, I couldn’t.
    And again, that’s not practical either,
    but that sense of awe at something so simple like that
    is possible when you’re–
    – No, I get that, I agree with that.
    And it’s actually a part of my life,
    which I don’t think I have anywhere near enough of,
    I mean, after this conversation,
    I’m gonna go find some mushrooms.
    But I think that in everyday life,
    you give up too much to always find yourself
    in beginner’s mind.
    But I do feel that loss.
    – I guess that’s sort of come to think of self-consciousness
    as a bit of a paradox.
    I mean, on the one hand, it is a gift in lots of ways,
    but it does seem also to be a machine for unhappiness,
    all that ruminating and self-reflection
    and the anxieties and the neuroses and the pathologies.
    I mean, I don’t know,
    you think I’m throwing too much shade
    on self-consciousness here?
    I mean–
    – No, I think that there are tragic dilemmas.
    To be an intelligent, conscious, self-conscious,
    capable adult involves falling yourself
    into a situation where there’s a lot of suffering,
    a lot of doubt, a lot of concern,
    where you lose beginner’s mind,
    where you question yourself.
    And that’s just a trade-off.
    I think it’s inevitable.
    I think it’s great to be a kid,
    but there’s a lot of bad things
    and it’s great to be an adult,
    but there’s a lot of bad things
    and you’re just kind of stuck with these traders.
    I mean, you talk about another mystery, take podcasts.
    So when I go from place to place,
    I always have headphones on.
    I’m listening to a podcast.
    Always your podcast, by the way,
    but I’m listening to podcasts.
    And a friend of mine, I was saying,
    I’ll go downstairs to the kitchen to get a snack
    and I’ll put on my headphones.
    I could listen to podcasts on the way downstairs
    so I’m not to waste valuable time.
    A friend of mine gave me a really hard time.
    I said, “Dude, leave your phone at home,
    walk through, experience the world as it is.”
    And I could see the pluses behind that,
    but then I’d miss out on a great podcast.
    There’s trade-offs.
    – Always trade-offs.
    You’re making me think.
    Have you read Nietzsche’s “Human, All Too Human”?
    – I have very, very little Nietzsche.
    – No, what would I have learned?
    – I don’t know a lot, but there’s a line.
    I may mess this up, but it’s something like,
    the first sign that an animal has become human
    is that it is no longer dedicated to its momentary comfort,
    but rather to its enduring comfort.
    – Oh, I like that.
    – He, look, that guy packs a lot into a sentence.
    – He’s an aphorism guy, like an aphorism machine.
    – Yeah, but it sort of speaks to this,
    that in that transition from consciousness to self-consciousness,
    one of the tolls you pay is that you sort of,
    you get robbed of the joy of just living in the moment,
    living in your body and all these other sorts of pathologies
    we’re talking about become possible.
    And that is just, I guess you said it, trade-offs.
    That’s the trade-off.
    – And you describe this as a cost of self-consciousness,
    and it is, but it’s also a cost of morality.
    I mean, were you a father, for instance?
    I don’t think you could be a good father
    if you didn’t think about your kid,
    if you didn’t worry about your kid.
    If you didn’t, in these perfect moments of solitude
    and so on and say, hey, how’s the kid doing?
    And, you know, and as he had his shots,
    and is he on his way to becoming educated,
    is he healthy, is he changed, is he, dah, dah, dah, dah,
    and all of these things.
    And so the more we have human connections
    and love and moral obligations,
    the more we’re stretched outside of our body
    and just worry about shit all the time.
    And this is actually, you know,
    the one Christopher Hitchens joke I remember is,
    did you hear about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner?
    It has no attachments.
    And this is in some way both, you know,
    you phrase it as a strength or weakness of Buddhism,
    but the strict doctrine renounces special attachments.
    And what if you don’t wanna renounce special attachments?
    – It feels like I’m kind of making the case
    against our brains here,
    that they do not seem to be wired to make us happy.
    That just does not seem to be a goal.
    – That is God’s truth.
    That is, you know, Evolution 101 is that natural selection
    that our winnie in process that gave us our brains,
    we have does not care one bit about our happiness.
    It cares about building machines that survive and reproduce.
    And happiness exists, I think to put it crudely,
    as part of a feedback system saying you’re doing well,
    you fall in love, you have an orgasm,
    you fill your belly, you get some status, you feel good.
    And that’s Evolution’s thumbs up, do more of that.
    But it also falls in and there we get consciousness
    and intelligence and so on
    to what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill,
    which is soon a happiness will fade,
    because evolution doesn’t want you taking victory laps
    and everything, it wants you doing more stuff.
    Accumulate more food, build a bigger shelter,
    protect your family.
    And so it drives us endlessly.
    I’ve talked to Robert right about this,
    I think he views Buddhism as an anti-Darwin thing.
    We’ve evolved this way, let’s fight it.
    Let’s renounce our evolved capacity, our evolved desires.
    Utilitarianism, a lot of moral views are saying,
    “Evolution gave us these biases, let’s fight it.”
    And there’s a lot to be said about that.
    But yeah, you are sick and tired of the brains
    that Darwin has given us.
    And there’s a lot to be annoyed by it.
    – You know the stand up comic Pete Holmes?
    – I’ve seen him, yeah.
    – I saw this great bit of his the other day
    where he was just, I don’t remember what he said exactly,
    but it was something like, he’s like,
    you know, if you think about it,
    our brains are unbelievable assholes.
    They have all the ingredients they need to make us happy.
    The dopamine and the serotonin, all that stuff.
    But they’re constantly making you feel like shit, right?
    We’re supposed to be the commanders-in-chief of our brains,
    but we’re just helpless passengers.
    – Nice. – It kind of sucks.
    – It’s a deep point.
    And it’s because the system is not our friend.
    The system is not evolved to sort of follow our conscious will.
    I think just pursuing something else we talked about,
    there’s a sweet spot of anxiety.
    People who have too much anxiety
    and go to shrinks and psychologists
    and they take drugs and they try to meditate
    and they suffer and they try to fix that.
    If you have too much anxiety,
    if you have too little anxiety,
    you end up in prison or dead, you don’t worry enough.
    And so bad things happen to you.
    You’re fearless, it’s not so good.
    So some sort of anxiety, which is very rarely pleasant,
    is just part of our package.
    And so some sort of sadness and self-consciousness,
    doubt, worry.
    – If our brain does anything that reflects it,
    there has to be some evolutionary reason for it, right?
    It may be maladapted to that moment.
    – Yeah, that’s right, or to this world.
    If somebody mocks me on Twitter and I fall into a rage,
    even though he’s an anonymous rando,
    but my mind hasn’t evolved to deal with anonymous rando,
    it’s evolved to deal with people
    that I would bump into day after day after day.
    – Right, so this strong instinct we have to care
    about what other people think of us made a lot of sense
    when you lived in tribes of 30 or 40 people,
    that was high-stakes stuff to be ostracized.
    But to care about what other people think
    in a world of Twitter.
    – Yes.
    – Where 10,000 anonymous bots can tell you
    what a piece of shit you are, that’s, boy, that’s not,
    there’s a bit of a disjunction there.
    – And this is the Pete Holmes point,
    which is knowing that doesn’t make it go away.
    If there’s a big bag of M&Ms downstairs
    and I’m really hungry, I know that my body has evolved
    to try to absorb a normal amount of sugar
    ’cause in the world I involved in,
    I was constantly at a risk of dying of starvation.
    I’m not in a risk now, so just put down the sugar,
    but it doesn’t make my hunger stop.
    It doesn’t make my shame, my anger, my jealousy stop,
    knowing that it’s a poor fit for my world right now.
    To the extent our conversation is having a theme,
    it’s gone surprisingly dark,
    which is that we’ve evolved these minds
    that have evolved through,
    I don’t know what a trigger warning or something on it,
    but that have evolved through natural selection,
    and now it has left us utterly screwed.
    We’ve lost our balance,
    and we’ve certainly lost our beginner’s mind
    that we have a brief period of as children.
    – You know what the best part is?
    – Yeah.
    – This conversation is part of a series about optimism.
    – Oh.
    (gentle music)
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    (upbeat music)
    – Let’s do a little rapid fire and see where it goes.
    First question.
    Do most of us really know what makes us happy?
    I think we all think we do, but do we?
    – No, no.
    We have, as psychologists, some understanding
    of what makes people happy,
    and it’s not what people think makes them happy.
    So many people think, including me a lot of days,
    like I wanna make more money and I’ll make me happy.
    And it’s not totally wrong.
    There’s a correlation in money and happiness.
    But basically, the shortest answer to what makes us happy
    is social contact with people.
    And I’m kind of an introvert.
    And I feel like sometimes I avoid
    so I find uncomfortable, but there’s so much evidence
    that social contact is such a core to happiness
    and relationships.
    There was a nice study, a nice big review came out
    by this guy, Dunnigan Folk and Liz Dunn.
    And they reviewed all of the research
    on people’s attempts to make them happy,
    what works and what doesn’t.
    And the most robust experiments.
    And it’s kind of surprising.
    Volunteering doesn’t make you happy,
    but giving strangers money makes you happy.
    Why?
    Oh, I don’t know, ’cause it’s a subtle difference, right?
    And I recommend people like read the literature
    and just look at, there’s some interesting findings.
    But don’t listen to people who just kind of say,
    oh, here’s what I think.
    Look at the studies, ’cause the studies are surprising.
    Is it a mistake to think of happiness as the goal of life?
    Yes.
    Or even a primary goal of life?
    It’s a good goal, everybody wants to be happy.
    Everybody wants to just even zoom it in more.
    Everybody likes pleasure.
    It’s a hot day, drink some cool water,
    have an extra slice of pie.
    That’s great.
    But no, I think, this is not science now.
    This is just my own view,
    but I think meaningful pursuits are an important part of life.
    Being good, it’s the data over whether you raising a child,
    of the age of your child, whether it makes you happy,
    it’s by no means clear that it does on average.
    Particularly in the United States,
    and there are many studies find that
    in the alternative world where you didn’t have a kid,
    you’d actually be happier.
    Doesn’t we ask you how happier, you’d actually be happier.
    But it’d be ridiculous for me to say,
    therefore you’ve probably made a mistake.
    What you would say, and what I would say,
    having raised kids is, it wasn’t not a happiness
    in some simple dumb sense, it’s fulfillment, it’s love.
    It’s a feeling of doing something meaningful and important.
    What’s another meaningful pursuit
    other than having children?
    – There’s a line from Freud,
    which apparently was misattributed, but it works,
    which is what matters in life is love and work.
    And under love, I put under broad ambit of relationships,
    raising kids, having a partner you care for,
    taking care of somebody who needs care.
    And for work, I put projects.
    And it could be a project actually at work
    where they send the forms to the IRS and everything.
    But it could also just be,
    it could be somebody setting up a podcast
    and working hard at it.
    I think love and work are the two things that really matter.
    – So if I asked you what you think
    people should maximize in life, you would say meaning?
    – Yeah. – Meaningful pursuits?
    – Meaningful pursuits and relationships.
    And I would also say to some extent, if you do that,
    maybe happiness will follow.
    One of the findings in happiness literature
    is that you ask people how much do you work to become happy?
    And then you get their answer and ask them how happy are you?
    The answers are negatively correlated.
    The pursuit of happiness is a miserable pursuit.
    It’s like probably trying to be really good at kissing
    gets in the way of being good at kissing.
    Sometimes focusing on things makes this thing harder to get.
    So make sleep is a good example of that.
    So don’t try to be happy.
    Instead, try to maximize meaning and relationships.
    And then, and don’t even think about this ever,
    but maybe I’ll make you happy.
    – How do you distinguish happiness from satisfaction?
    – Again, we’re entering sort of terminology things,
    but I would say sort of happiness is some narrower sense,
    involving sort of hedonic aspects
    like pleasure, smiling, feeling good.
    Well, satisfaction could be deeper.
    So again, raising a kid are taking care of a loved one who’s sick.
    You could say, this is satisfying.
    I’m doing good stuff.
    I’m making the world a better place.
    I’m proud of myself.
    Even I’m not smiling very much.
    Even though I don’t, you know, this is hard.
    I probably have more fun playing pickleball or getting high,
    but that wouldn’t be satisfying.
    That’d just be fun.
    – How much of life is about what we choose
    to pay attention to?
    I mean, I sort of always believed on some level
    that we’ve become what we pay attention to.
    And if you want to be optimistic,
    there are plenty of reasons to justify it.
    If you want to be pessimistic,
    you know where to look to justify it.
    Does it really just come down to what you choose
    to pay attention to in the end?
    – I think it probably comes down to an enormous extent
    on what you pay attention to.
    There’s this line, I think with Shakespeare,
    there’s nothing neither good nor bad,
    but thinking makes it so.
    It’s how you see the world.
    But how much we can choose is a dicey question.
    If we could choose, then we’d all be happy.
    We’d say, “I’m looking on the bright side of things.”
    And boom, we’d be happy, plainly, that doesn’t work.
    If I’m feeling terrible pain in my leg,
    terrible chronic pain, and you used to say,
    “Well, Paul, don’t focus on it.”
    Well, the thing about pain is it calls to your attention.
    The thing about having a child you’re worried about
    or a career that’s failing is you can’t just
    switch off your focus, and maybe you shouldn’t,
    even if you could.
    So I kind of agree with the part that how you see the world,
    what you focus on, this is a great lesson of stoicism.
    I think it’s right.
    It has an enormous effect on your life.
    But getting control over that is easier said than done.
    – I have all these years of study in the mind
    and thinking about the happiness and meaning
    and what makes a good life.
    Made you any happier, any more optimistic?
    Do you think it’s had any noticeable effect?
    Do you think you’ve been changed at all by it,
    or do you think you would be exactly what you are now,
    whether or not you became a psychologist or not?
    – I think at the margins in certain ways,
    I picked up things through studying the mind
    that has made my own life better.
    – Like what?
    – Well, for instance, I’m very convinced of the power
    in both the short term and the long term
    of social contact and social connections.
    So if I’m really down, my temptation is
    to lie in bed, flip up my laptop,
    and watch YouTube videos for four hours or something,
    or just sit and sulk.
    But I know that if I could reach out,
    get one of my kids on Zoom, grab one of my friends
    for a beer, it will cheer me up.
    And I don’t always succeed in doing it,
    but I know that solitude and just grumping will not work.
    I’m better off doing other things.
    I’ve learned through psychology,
    this is actually not my own,
    far, very far from my own work,
    I’ve learned about the idea of flow states,
    and that’s, I read this book by,
    she sent me an I about flow,
    where he says that, you know,
    people aren’t happy doing the thing.
    This goes back to what you were saying actually,
    which is people think they love vacations,
    but they don’t tend to love vacations.
    They just spend a lot of time sitting by the beach,
    feeling kind of bored and anxious,
    what people get a lot out of is flow states
    where they’re really into a project,
    they’re really focused and zoomed in.
    And I realize that’s particularly true for me.
    So, you know, when I travel on vacation,
    I bring my laptop and I could spend a couple of hours
    in the morning writing, and that’s actually often,
    I love that.
    I’m maybe not supposed to love it, but I love it.
    – I have to ask, because this is a series on optimism,
    if you had to make a pitch for being optimistic,
    what do you got?
    – I would go for the self-fulfilling prophecy.
    I would go for this fact that, you know,
    it’s easier to make a pitch for being things right,
    being irrational and all that stuff,
    but I would say that that in some way,
    the person who thinks their odds are better
    than they are paradoxically ends up doing better.
    And this also connects with your conversation
    with Jamil Zaki, which is interactions
    of other people.
    Suppose it actually turns out, as a matter of fact,
    that 50% of people in this situation can be trusted.
    But suppose I go into the world thinking it’s 80%.
    You might think, well, I’m gonna get really screwed,
    but maybe by going at people, trusting them,
    taking a shot at them, I transform some
    of the non-trust worthy 50%, and it works out for me.
    So, optimism, and in fact, one of the things
    that works in the happiness intervention literature
    is something they call acting happy,
    which is, they say, and part of the experiment,
    you’re thinking that, well, put on a happy face, smile,
    talk to people in a cheerful tone.
    Now, if you’re depressed, you just say, go die.
    What’s the worthless, ugly advice?
    But weirdly, acting positive makes people positive
    towards you, and it can again be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    – Yeah, I’d also say, believing that the world can be better
    is a precondition for creating that world,
    and pessimism seems, just on purely strategic grounds,
    to undercut the motivation to do anything, really.
    It’s pure passivity, and that just seems
    like a poor strategy.
    – That’s right.
    I think that even if it’s a long shot
    that you could make the world a better place,
    maybe, I’ll raise this, maybe the person
    who isn’t smart enough to know it’s a long shot, tries,
    and if you get enough people trying, you’ll get success,
    where if everyone else, everyone is realistic
    and say, listen, it’s not worth it, you get favor.
    – Well, Paul, what can I say?
    We may not be one of your favorite pods,
    but you’re one of my favorite guests.
    – This is always fun, Sean.
    – Paul Bloom, everyone, this has been great.
    You know it’s always a joy to have you on stuff.
    – Thanks again, thanks for having me.
    (upbeat music)
    – All right, that was great.
    I had a lot of fun.
    I hope you also had a lot of fun.
    As always, I wanna know what you think of the episode,
    so go ahead and drop us a line at the grayarea@box.com,
    and once you’re finished with that,
    go ahead and rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
    This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
    and Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just,
    engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Anouk Dusso,
    and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music.
    New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays,
    listen and subscribe.
    This show is part of Vox,
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    Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that?

    We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He offers his thoughts on optimism and pessimism and walks Sean Illing through the differences between what we think makes us happy versus what actually does.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

    Guest: Paul Bloom (@paulbloom), psychologist, author and writer of the Substack Small Potatoes

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  • A message from Sean

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    – Hello, everyone, this is Sean.
    A couple of weeks ago,
    we put out an episode with Yuval Harari about AI.
    Now, typically, I record these conversations remotely
    in my little office in Mississippi
    where I can close my eyes and really listen to the guests.
    But this time around,
    Harari and I both happened to be in New York City,
    so we decided to record the interview in person
    on video in a studio.
    If you’ve ever wondered if I’m a real person
    asking real questions in real time,
    then wonder no more.
    We’ve put the video up on the Vox YouTube channel,
    youtube.com/vox.
    It’s the same conversation as you heard on the podcast,
    but now you can look at us instead of the walls
    or whatever you look at when you listen to me.
    And if you like it or hate it, let us know.
    Maybe we’ll do more in the future,
    or maybe this is your only chance.
    Anyway, check it out.
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    [BLANK_AUDIO]

    Sean Illing has a special message for all you listeners: Look at me!

    We’ve made our first-ever video episode. See Sean in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Watch it with your friends and family and your friend’s families and their family friends. It’s on YouTube right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhx1sdX2bow

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  • What if we get climate change right?

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    Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile.
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    If I asked you to tell me the one issue
    that makes you feel the most pessimistic,
    what would it be?
    I feel pretty confident saying
    that the most popular response,
    certainly one of the most popular responses,
    would be climate change.
    But is climate despair really as tempting
    and reasonable as it seems?
    The problem isn’t imaginary.
    Climate change is real and terrifying.
    But even if it’s as bad as the worst predictions suggest,
    do we gain anything by resigning ourselves to that fate?
    What effect might our despair have
    on our ability to act in the present?
    More to the point,
    is our fatalism undercutting our capacity
    to tackle this problem?
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
    Today’s guest is Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson.
    She’s a marine biologist,
    a co-founder of the nonprofit Think Tank Urban Ocean Lab,
    and the author of a new book called
    What If We Get It Right?
    It’s a curated series of essays and poetry
    and conversations with a wide range of people
    who are all in their own ways
    trying to build a better future.
    It’s not a blindly optimistic book.
    The point is not that everything is fine.
    The point is that we have to act
    as though the future is a place we want to live in.
    According to Johnson,
    there are already many concrete climate solutions.
    If we were motivated by a belief in a better tomorrow,
    not a worse one,
    we would implement more of those solutions
    and find new ones.
    So if you’re someone looking for inspiration
    or reasons to feel hopeful,
    or even better for guidance on what to do and where to start,
    this book and this conversation with Ayanna is for you.
    Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, welcome to the show.
    – Thank you, it’s great to be here.
    – You’re actually a marine biologist,
    which I think is a standard top five dream job for kids.
    Super common dream job, like many five to 10 year olds
    are very into marine biology as a life path.
    – Was marine biology your gateway to environmentalism?
    Is that why you do this work?
    – I just was a kid who loved nature,
    which is honestly not very unique.
    How many kids like bugs and fireflies
    and shooting stars and octopuses and autumn leaves
    and all the rest of it.
    I was just like, this all seems very cool.
    And that innate curiosity,
    that biophilia as EO Wilson calls it,
    the magnificent entomologist,
    is just part of who we are as humans.
    It’s normal to love the world.
    It’s less common to make that your job.
    But of course, once you fall in love with nature
    with one ecosystem or a few specific species
    and you find out that they’re threatened,
    you’re like, wait a second, what are we doing about this?
    Is there a grown up who’s already on top of this?
    Is this not sorted?
    Seems like we should protect forests
    and coral reefs and all the rest.
    It’s funny, my mom was cleaning out the closet
    and found these old school papers.
    And apparently I was writing the same essays
    since I was like 10 about nature being great
    and how we should protect it.
    So it wasn’t always gonna be the ocean.
    I wanted to become a park ranger at one point
    or an environmental lawyer.
    But yeah, the ocean seemed like it needed more advocates
    at the particular moment
    I was thinking about graduate school.
    – You open your book by saying that anytime you tell people
    that you do climate work, they invariably ask,
    and I’m quoting, how fucked are we?
    – Yeah.
    – Well, Ayanna, how fucked are we?
    (laughing)
    Well, we’re pretty fucked,
    but there’s a lot we could do
    to have a better possible future.
    And I think it’s important to always hold
    both of those things together.
    We have already changed the climate.
    We are already seeing the intense heat waves
    and floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes.
    All of that is already supercharged
    by our changed climate,
    but there’s still so much we can do.
    We basically have the solutions we need.
    We’re just being really slow at deploying them,
    at implementing them, right?
    We already know how to transition to renewable energy
    and stop spewing fossil fuels.
    We know how to protect and restore ecosystems
    that are absorbing all this carbon.
    We know how to green buildings, insulate buildings,
    shift to better public transit, improve our food system.
    Like the solutions are all right there.
    So as you know, this book has a reality check chapter
    where I lay out all the bad news,
    but that’s like three pages.
    And then the rest of the book is like,
    okay, what are we gonna do about it?
    – There’s no point anymore
    in talking about how to solve
    the problem of climate change, right?
    I mean, that ship has sailed.
    It’s all about adaptation now.
    – Yeah, I mean, the climate has already changed.
    There’s not a time machine back
    to before we put a completely mind-boggling amount
    of excess carbon into the atmosphere.
    Whether and how well we address the climate crisis
    determines the outcomes of life on earth
    for all eight million species
    and whether hundreds of millions of people live or die.
    And how well we all can live.
    So even though perfection is not an option,
    there’s such a wide range of possible futures.
    And we just need to make sure
    we get the best possible one.
    – Well, that seems like an important point, right?
    This is really about degrees of suffering
    and the consequences of specific choices we make
    or won’t make as it might be, right?
    The difference between temperature spikes of two
    and four degrees is the difference
    between lots of people living and dying, right?
    – Yeah, I mean, it’s easier for me to think about it
    in terms of the human body running a fever,
    ’cause we can think of one or two degrees
    as not that big a deal.
    But the difference between you having a fever of 100
    and 102 or 103 is a huge difference.
    And that’s the level of sensitivity to temperature
    that all species and ecosystems have.
    If we can prevent a half a degree of warming
    or a degree of warming,
    that actually makes a big difference.
    It’s worth the effort.
    – People like to use different words
    to describe the project ahead of us.
    Words like sustainability or revolution.
    You like to use the word transformation.
    Why is that a better way to frame this?
    – There’s two words that I pair together
    and there are possibility and transformation.
    And I think possibilities
    for what we’ve just been talking about, right?
    This wide spectrum of possible futures.
    I’m not an optimist.
    I’m not particularly hopeful given human history.
    We don’t have a great track record
    of addressing collectively major challenges that we face.
    There’s some important exceptions to that,
    like dealing with the ozone hole
    through the Montreal Protocol, et cetera.
    But this sense of possibility really drives me
    because the future is not yet written.
    Like what if we just wrote a better one
    than the trajectory that we’re on?
    So pairing this possibility with transformation
    and transformation is a word I’ve gravitated towards
    because it indicates the scale of change
    similar to revolution that you mentioned,
    revolution sort of implies a more tumultuous,
    violent, upheaval kind of thing. – Scary.
    – Yeah, maybe it’s not that great in the process of it.
    But transformation is, I don’t know,
    maybe it’s slightly more poetic in some way,
    but it’s how do we reshape and reimagine
    how we live on this planet and with each other?
    And to me, that’s a question about design and culture
    and society and economy and politics, right?
    It’s about the context within which
    we’re making all these more technical decisions.
    And I don’t know,
    I can get excited about possibility and transformation.
    Like what kind of future do we want to create together?
    And in this book, there’s a whole bunch of
    what if questions that I find really captivating.
    And one of them is what if climate adaptation is beautiful?
    And that I think about in a pair with
    what if we act as if we love the future?
    – Yeah, I love that.
    – And there’s just so much, I don’t know,
    I’m like wiggling my fingers around sort of like gesturing,
    like possibility, like excitement, sparkles, like what if?
    I just feel like we need to be asking more big questions
    of ourselves and each other in this moment
    because we’re at this inflection point in human history.
    We either like get our shit together or we don’t.
    And obviously I would like us to at least try.
    – But you don’t like the word sustainable, right?
    You feel like that’s setting the bar too low?
    – I mean, it’s sort of just an everywhere word.
    Now it’s useful, but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning.
    It’s very general.
    And the sort of analog use that I’ve heard
    is if someone asked you how your marriage was going
    and you were like, eh, it’s sustainable.
    It’s like, okay, well, don’t wanna trade lives with you.
    Doesn’t sound terribly romantic.
    So yes, I would say we should set a higher bar
    than sustainability, especially given that
    we’ve already degraded nature so much
    that I don’t wanna just sustain what we have.
    I want to protect and restore.
    – So what if to use your phrase just now,
    what if climate adaptation is beautiful?
    What then?
    Is it rainbows and sunshine we have to look forward to?
    – Well, I think we will always have rainbows and sunshine.
    That’s the good news.
    But one of the, I’m just gonna flip to this page.
    There’s a section called If We Build It
    about architecture and design and technology.
    So imagine if we were just deliberate
    about building things that were aesthetically pleasing
    and durable and could be deconstructed
    and reuse the parts instead of demolishing things, right?
    There’s so many, you know,
    and what materials are we choosing?
    There’s so many choices that we’re making
    that are shaping our societal trajectory.
    And like every day we are building a piece of the future,
    something that will be here in 10 years
    or a century or more.
    So let’s just be really thoughtful about all that
    and make it nice.
    Like some cities and towns are now passing
    essentially deconstruction ordinances
    that say you have to take apart buildings
    instead of demolishing them.
    Instead of just pulverizing everything
    and sending it to the landfill, you have to take it apart.
    So the pieces can be reused like Legos,
    which seems obvious almost.
    Like why wouldn’t we always have been doing that, right?
    The way that people are reusing old barns to make
    like reclaimed wood floors and wall panels and whatever.
    We should be doing that with all parts
    of building materials that we can.
    – So big picture-wise, are you encouraged
    by the direction of the climate movement
    as it stands at the moment?
    What are your major concerns?
    – My primary concern is that we’re just not moving fast enough.
    Given that we have basically all the solutions that we need,
    it’s just incredibly frustrating
    how politics is holding us back.
    I mean, in this country, we have a division
    between the two major parties
    about whether climate change exists
    and whether it’s something we should address,
    which is just so retrograde.
    I don’t even know where to start.
    And it’s especially frustrating
    because most Republican politicians
    are literally just pretending they don’t think it exists.
    Like they’re fully aware that climate science is real,
    but it’s untenable politically for them to admit that.
    And that’s a huge part of why we’re in this mess,
    as well as the fact that the fossil fuel lobby
    is ridiculously powerful in this country.
    And you know, so many politicians are bought
    and paid for in one way or another,
    even though that’s not very many jobs.
    And then you have the banking sector,
    which is funding all these fossil fuel corporations
    to continue expanding their extraction and infrastructure.
    You have, since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015,
    60 banks have provided $6.9 trillion
    in financing to fossil fuel companies,
    but the top four US banks alone,
    JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America
    have provided almost $1.5 trillion
    to finance fossil fuel companies.
    So yeah, if you have your money in any of those banks,
    I would move your retirement savings, et cetera,
    to a place that does not make the problem worse.
    And there’s analysis showing that the impact
    of you moving your money out of fossil fuels
    is a bigger impact than any amount of, you know,
    eating only plants and only walking and biking could do,
    because it is that bad to be investing
    in the expansion of fossil fuels.
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    What would be the difference
    between a Harris administration
    and another Trump administration?
    What are the stakes on the climate front?
    – The stakes are sky high.
    There are actually graphs projecting the difference
    in greenhouse gas emissions between the two,
    and it’s really remarkable.
    Because you have, on one hand,
    Vice President Harris who was the deciding vote
    in passing the Inflation Reduction Act,
    which was the largest ever investment
    in climate solutions in world history.
    This Biden-Harris administration
    has created the American Climate Corps,
    which is putting tens of thousands of young people
    to work implementing climate solutions
    from reducing wildfire risk,
    to installing solar panels, to replanting wetlands.
    We have a loan program office in the Department of Energy
    that has hundreds of billions of dollars
    that they’re giving out to businesses
    that are figuring out this renewable energy transition.
    All of that could be completely wiped out,
    essentially on day one of a Trump administration.
    You have in Trump a candidate
    who has offered two fossil fuel executives
    that if they donate a billion dollars
    to his presidential campaign,
    he will basically do their bidding
    once he gets into the White House.
    That is how stark a difference this is.
    – Yeah, you have a podcast episode
    called “How Much Does a President Matter?”
    And I guess the answer is a lot.
    – A lot, I mean, but at the same time,
    a president can only do so much without Congress, right?
    So making sure you have,
    we’re electing politicians for Senate and the House
    that get it, that actually are going to do something
    on climate is also critical.
    But the president is staffing all the federal agencies,
    the Environmental Protection Agency,
    and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
    and NASA and the Department of Energy,
    and the Department of Interior
    that are all making these decisions about permitting
    for fossil fuels or offshore renewable wind energy, right?
    But I’ll also give a shout out to local politics
    because it is at the city council level,
    it is at the public utility commissions,
    it is at the school boards where we’re deciding,
    are we teaching our children about
    what we can do about climate change?
    Are we investing in municipal composting?
    Composting makes a really big difference
    ’cause rotting food in landfills
    emits tons of methane, a super potent greenhouse gas.
    Are we building out bike lanes
    and all of this public transit infrastructure
    that we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels?
    All of these local decisions really matter too.
    So for those who are sort of overwhelmed
    with what’s happening at the presidential level,
    it is absolutely worth your effort
    to think about local elections
    and how you can support climate leaders down ballot.
    – I initially wanted to ask you
    what gives you the most hope right now,
    but then I got to the part of the book, were you right?
    And I’m quoting again, fuck hope, what’s the strategy?
    Do you feel like we, the royal we actually do
    have a clear concrete strategy for that better future?
    Because the path to the shitty future is crystal clear.
    It is just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
    – And this is where I think media, Hollywood, music,
    art, culture makers broadly really need to dive in with us
    because I cannot literally show you
    what the future could look like.
    I can talk about it, I can write about it,
    I can interview people about it.
    I can, as I did for this book, commission art about it.
    But I feel like if it’s possible to go through our day-to-day
    and not encounter anything about climate,
    which it currently is, I mean, for example,
    less than 1% of the minutes
    on major TV news stations are about climate.
    And that’s actually gone down.
    I think it was 1.3% in 2022
    and now it’s down to 0.9% in 2023, right?
    So we’re going in the wrong direction.
    If this is not part of our day-to-day exposure,
    then it’s just always on the back burner.
    There’s always something more important.
    And we’re thinking about climate as something separate
    from our other concerns.
    Whereas it’s actually just the context
    within which everything else right now is playing out.
    So there’s a chapter in the book
    called “I Dream of Climate Rom-Coms”
    where I interview producer Franklin Leonard,
    founder of “The Blacklist” out in Hollywood,
    and Adam McKay, filmmaker, writer, director
    about the role of Hollywood in this.
    Because basically to date,
    Hollywood has just shown us the apocalypse,
    the fire and brimstone, the day after tomorrow kind of stuff.
    And there are very few examples
    of not like utopian rose-colored glasses stuff,
    but like literally, what if we just used the solutions
    we had and projected that forward?
    What would that look like?
    – I always loved Nietzsche’s idea
    that we have art in order not to die of the truth.
    And you can interpret that in different ways, I guess.
    But for me, it means that the job of art
    isn’t to hold up a mirror and tell us what is.
    I mean, we have science for that.
    Great art points to what could be before it is.
    And man, do we need more of that?
    – Yes, yes, yes, we need so much more of that.
    Anyone who’s listening, who can create art,
    who can help us see the way forward,
    we absolutely need you.
    – Can we just say at this point
    that the clean energy transition is inevitable?
    Don’t know what the timeline is exactly,
    but clean energy is the future full stop.
    It’s a question of how long it takes.
    – Yeah, and that transformation is already well underway.
    Despite all the lobbying efforts
    from the fossil fuel industry, et cetera,
    because at this point it just makes economic sense.
    The reason that Iowa and Texas
    are leading the country in wind energy
    is not because they’re a bunch of hippies,
    it’s because it’s profitable and they’re good jobs
    and people are excited about having those industries there.
    – Solar and wind, I mean, these are now
    the cheapest forms of energy on the planet.
    – I mean, photons, catch ’em, use ’em.
    Why not, yeah.
    The thing I think people do not talk about enough
    when we’re talking about electricity
    is that regardless of the source,
    we absolutely also need to focus on energy conservation.
    This is not about just like willy-nilly
    running a lot of electrical stuff all the time
    because now we have solar panels
    because it takes energy to make solar panels,
    it takes raw materials to make solar panels,
    we still want to rein all that in
    and live more lightly on the planet.
    So I would just put in a plug for energy conservation
    being an estimated like 30 to 50% of the solution.
    We will need to build a lot less renewables
    if we are just more frugal with our electricity.
    – And what about carbon capture technologies?
    I feel like all of our optimistic scenarios
    include an assumption that we’re going to get
    increasingly better and more efficient
    at removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
    Is that a safe assumption?
    – Well, we’re really bad at it now,
    so I’m sure we’ll get better at it.
    – Okay, are we gonna get better enough?
    Maybe what I’m asking.
    – I have no idea.
    – Because we have to, right?
    This has to be part of the solution
    or part of the strategy.
    – I mean, the first interview in the book
    is with Dr. Kate Marvel,
    who’s a NASA client scientist who says,
    “Sure, great, we should pursue carbon capture and storage.”
    But it’s important to note there
    that this is not like a get out of jail free car
    where we can keep burning fossil fuels
    and just catch it back.
    It takes a lot of energy to do carbon capture.
    So we basically need to focus that effort
    only on taking out carbon that is already in the atmosphere.
    We can’t just use that as an excuse to not change our ways.
    So I think, again, that brings us back to energy conservation
    and the shift to renewables being fundamental.
    And if we figure out carbon capture, that’s a bonus.
    But also, we need to give a lot more credit to the OG,
    the original gangster of carbon capture,
    which is photosynthesis and plants
    and protect and restore ecosystems.
    Forests, wetlands, mangroves, all of that
    are a critical piece of this too.
    And we just absolutely do not give enough credit to nature,
    which by some estimates is 30 or 40%
    of the solution we need if we are restoring ecosystems.
    – You know, I’ve had conversations
    with people like Andreas Maum.
    He was a guest on the pod.
    He says, which sounds bad on the surface,
    but is actually encouraging.
    And I think you were hinting at this earlier.
    We don’t have a science problem.
    We don’t have a knowledge problem.
    We know everything we need to know
    to do what we need to do.
    And there are already viable alternatives
    to move us in that direction.
    What we have is a political economy problem.
    Certain financial interests are invested
    in locking us in this paradigm.
    This is obviously a big obstacle,
    but at least we know what the problem is.
    If we lack the knowledge or the technologies,
    there’s not much we can do about that, but we know.
    And if we’ve learned anything about markets,
    is that they’ll move in the direction of profit.
    So maybe we can’t change the economic system,
    but we do understand its incentive structure
    and we can work within that.
    So we’re gonna have to find a way
    to make non-fossil fuel energy sources cheaper
    and more efficient and lucrative.
    So just tell me that’s the case.
    Tell me there’s a shit ton of money
    to be made in green energy,
    because if there is, that’s good news.
    There is a shit ton of money to be made in green energy.
    I can say that unequivocally.
    I think this is probably a McKinsey study
    that found getting to net zero,
    net zero greenhouse gas emissions
    is a more than $12 trillion business opportunity.
    And in 2023, 1.8 trillion was invested
    in the clean energy transition, which was a new record.
    It’s worth saying also that also in 2023,
    over a trillion dollar was invested
    in additional fossil fuel,
    but renewables are ahead as a global investment amount.
    And also last year, for the second year in a row,
    banks generated more revenue
    from environmentally friendly investing,
    about $3 billion, than they did
    from fossil fuel investing, which is 2.7.
    I think those are still too close,
    but yes, the economics are absolutely turning
    in favor of clean energy, which is great,
    because we would need to do it anyway,
    but it’s certainly easier
    when the balance sheet is in your favor.
    – Yeah, and look, I bring all this up
    not to make the overly simple point
    that capitalism is bad.
    I mean, I think it’s a little more complicated than that.
    And even if you believe that,
    it’s not helpful to leave it there.
    – Well, even if you believe in pure free market capitalism,
    I mean, I think the free market folks
    need to just acknowledge that the market is not free.
    So right now we have a completely insane amount
    of subsidies still going to fossil fuels.
    And if we just reformed fossil fuel subsidies
    and put a price on pollution,
    which is all this greenhouse gas stuff,
    we could generate trillions of dollars
    in government revenues,
    which could be used to address the climate crisis, right?
    So subsidizing all the bad stuff is not a free market.
    We haven’t been giving renewables a fair chance at this.
    The game has been rigged
    for the continuation of fossil fuels.
    All those lobbying dollars have really paid off.
    And so we’re now just starting to see that shift a bit,
    which is evening the playing field.
    And guess who wins when it’s a fair fight?
    Photons is the answer.
    Wind, the stuff that’s free and just out there
    and we can just catch it.
    So, okay, okay.
    So wait a minute, I can’t quite tell
    if you agree with me or not in the big picture sense, right?
    Do you actually agree that we can work within capitalism,
    we can use the internal logic of capitalism
    to get on the right path here?
    No, I do.
    And I think we must.
    We do not have time to completely take apart
    and put back together a new economic system
    within the next decade,
    which is when we need to basically make this huge leap
    in addressing the climate crisis.
    So yeah, what I’m saying is that already renewables
    make economic sense.
    Already green buildings and the shift
    to electric transportation, et cetera,
    are making economic sense.
    So if we can just stop subsidizing fossil fuels
    within our existing capitalist system,
    we could just stop giving extra bonus money
    to people who are massively polluting the planet
    and destroying things for life on earth
    that would help things go even faster.
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    You say the best thing we can do
    when confronting an existential crisis
    is imagine what could be on the other side.
    What’s the most realistic best-case scenario for you?
    – Big picture.
    – Yeah.
    – The dream for me when I think about getting it right
    really starts with nature,
    starts with putting photosynthesis on the pedestal
    it deserves.
    And thinking about, you know,
    how we are shifting our food system,
    how we are shifting transportation,
    how, I mean, I imagine like all of Gen Z
    just refusing to work for the fossil fuel industry, right?
    Or as Jane Fonda says, like, you know,
    don’t sleep with anyone who works in fossil fuels.
    Just like ice out that whole sector.
    Just turn all of that into something
    that’s really unappealing.
    I imagine a future where our homes are not drafty
    ’cause they’re well insulated, right?
    Where we don’t have traffic in cities and on highways
    because we have much better transportation.
    We have high-speed rail.
    I mean, for the love of God,
    can we get like some fast trains in America?
    Sort of embarrassing that we don’t have that.
    Where we have just delicious local foods,
    where we have restored coastal ecosystems
    that are buffering us from the impacts of climate change,
    where we actually have fewer deaths jobs
    because more of us are out in the world doing this stuff,
    which is so gratifying.
    And where we can actually just slow down
    and enjoy life a bit more
    because we have our shit together
    and because culture has caught up
    with this climate reality
    and the status quo and what is aspirational have changed.
    I mean, it’s worth a shot, no?
    – Oh, yeah, no, I’m just gathering my thoughts
    and I’m also trying to summon all the hopefulness
    that I can.
    – Well, here’s the thing.
    You don’t actually need to be hopeful.
    I’m not hopeful.
    I think that hope is insufficient even if we have it.
    We need a plan.
    We need to each find our role to play in climate solutions.
    One of the major things that I sort of encourage people to do
    is think really specifically about what you can do,
    not the generic list of like march, protest, donate,
    spread the word, lower your individual carbon footprint,
    which is all good and well to do and I do it.
    But if you and I and teachers and doctors and farmers
    and project managers and web designers
    were all doing exactly the same thing,
    that would be a total waste.
    So instead of thinking about hope,
    whether you have it or not,
    it doesn’t really matter, just do something
    and you’ll feel good regardless of the outcome
    because you will have contributed to making things
    slightly better than they would otherwise have been.
    And if we each do that, it sounds corny,
    but it is factually accurate that all that stuff adds up.
    And if you need a place to start,
    I offer this concept of a climate action Venn diagram,
    which is three circles, sort of a simplified version
    of the Japanese concept of Ikigai for finding your purpose,
    which is one circle is what are you good at?
    So what are your skills, resources, networks,
    like what can you specifically bring to the table?
    What is the work that needs doing is the second circle.
    What are the climate and justice solutions
    you wanna work on because there are hundreds of them.
    And the third circle is what brings you joy
    or satisfaction, right?
    Like what gets you out of bed in the morning
    and how can we each find our way to the sweet spot
    in the center of that Venn diagram
    and just live there for as many minutes
    of our lives as we can.
    – Well, to do this, one thing we clearly have to do
    is make people feel emotionally the stakes of this
    without also pushing them into quietism or despair.
    And so the question is, how do we do that?
    I mean, I have to say there’s a reality here that sucks,
    but it’s true and maybe this has changed
    marginally in one direction or the other,
    but poll after poll that I’ve seen shows
    that a lot of Americans simply don’t care
    about climate change that much or they might care,
    but it’s nowhere near the top of their list of priorities,
    which is why politically it just doesn’t move the needle
    and that makes it difficult for legislators
    to deal with the problem.
    I mean, I’ve lived in Louisiana for a decade
    and the coast there is disappearing.
    Cultures and ways of life and towns and communities
    are disappearing and still a lot of people in that state
    refuse to connect the dots.
    So how do we help them do that?
    How do we make them feel this?
    – First, I think it’s important to acknowledge
    that the majority of Americans are concerned
    about climate change and would like our government
    to do more about it.
    We hear so much about climate deniers
    that we think it’s like half the country,
    it’s like 12%.
    So–
    – Yeah, just because I tried to correct that
    and say that they just, it’s not that they don’t care,
    but they just care about many other things before.
    – Absolutely, and so I think what you’re referring to
    is the sort of pulling on political priorities.
    Like what determines who you’re voting for?
    Like what is that ranking?
    And climate rarely breaks the top five or 10 issues
    when you’re thinking about jobs, economy,
    housing, wars, all of this other stuff, right?
    And I get that.
    We have these day-to-day concerns that are critical
    to our quality of life, to our well-being,
    and I don’t fault people for ranking those higher,
    but I do fault us for not understanding
    that those are connected to climate change
    in some very significant ways.
    There’s an incredible organization
    called Environmental Voter Project,
    and this is what they do.
    There are something like 10 million Americans
    who actually have environment
    as their number one issue politically,
    and they are already registered to vote,
    and they simply do not go to the polls.
    Can you imagine if we had another 10 million climate voters
    who were voting in every election,
    and then politicians were like,
    “Oh shit, I guess there’s a whole demographic
    “that cares about this that’s very active politically.
    “We’re gonna have to earn their votes.”
    That would absolutely change the game,
    and so all of their work on turning out
    environmental voters is making a very big difference.
    So for those who are like,
    “Ah, climate and politics, it’s like such a mess.”
    I would say join me in volunteering
    with Environmental Voter Project,
    helping to get people who care engaged
    and having their voices heard,
    because once we have a larger constituency
    of active climate voters, that will shift the politics.
    And the politics follows culture,
    so it’s not politicians that are leading the way.
    They are followers, so the more of us speak up
    about this as a political priority for us,
    the faster we’ll get these changes that we need.
    – Do you have thoughts about how we can convince skeptics
    or even just outright deniers
    that this work must be done?
    Do we even need to engage with skeptics and deniers?
    Is that fruitless or is it necessary?
    – I personally am not out there
    on Al Gore’s internet debating climate deniers.
    I just, it’s not my jam.
    But again, that’s a small portion of Americans.
    It’s an even smaller portion of the global population.
    And so where I focus my effort is for the people
    who already care, who are already concerned,
    to saying we need you.
    We need you working on solutions.
    Welcome, roll up your sleeves.
    We’ll help you find ways to plug in
    and do something that’s useful.
    And to circle back to our point earlier,
    which is the economics of a lot of these climate solutions
    are just really favorable.
    So we don’t actually need to debate
    whether greenhouse gases,
    being spewed by burning fossil fuels
    and blanketing the planet and warming it
    is a thing that’s happening, even though it’s very clear.
    It’s been for 50 years, that’s what’s happening.
    We just need to say, hey, who wants a good job
    in engineering and manufacturing?
    Like let’s build some more battery,
    wind, solar, plants and installation.
    And so the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act
    are mostly being experienced in red states
    that are getting all this manufacturing capacity,
    all these green jobs,
    even though all of their representatives
    voted against that funding.
    So I think with that shift,
    with those benefits going to politically conservative areas
    where climate denial is higher,
    we may start to see an even more rapid
    and strong embrace of climate solutions
    even without talking about climate change.
    We do not actually have to agree on the problem
    to collaborate on the solutions.
    And so that we have in our favor.
    – You seem very angsty and nervous and concerned
    and I appreciate it. – My therapy appointment
    is in two weeks, I don’t.
    – I’m not your therapist,
    but there is like a whole burgeoning sector actually
    of climate therapy because climate anxiety is a real thing
    and people are understandably grappling with it, right?
    The prospect of life on earth ceasing to exist
    in the way that we have always known it
    is freaking terrifying.
    But I think, and there’s sort of like this term
    like climate sad boys that those of us working
    are like the climate sad boys are back and again,
    here come the doomers like always asking us how bad it is.
    – All right, hold on, all right.
    Look, I’m also trying to speak to the angst
    of people listening as well.
    – I hear it and I feel it often.
    I don’t want to minimize it,
    but I think the more we just focus on possibility
    and what we can each do and just acknowledge
    that we as individuals cannot control
    the future of life on earth,
    but we can do our part and kind of like,
    I don’t worry about it day to day.
    I spend very little time thinking about the problems
    because that doesn’t actually change what I need to do.
    I need to do my work at Urban Ocean Lab,
    this policy think tank for the future of coastal cities
    that I co-founded.
    We need to help cities adapt to sea level rise
    and build out offshore renewable energy
    and restore and protect the coastal ecosystems
    that will help buffer the impacts of storms.
    Like that’s how I spend my days.
    And so my days are full of creativity and problem solving,
    great collaborations and like punctuated
    with moments of delight and tiny victories.
    And what more could we expect out of life?
    I think to me, that’s enough to just do my part.
    – Something we’ve seen in recent years
    are climate activists blocking traffic,
    throwing paint on artworks and museums.
    I think that’s stupid on purely strategic grounds,
    but I do wonder how you think about the role
    of activism and protest
    and how that can be most beneficial.
    I mean, I think Bill McKibbin said to you
    in your interview with him that he doesn’t think
    there’s any scenario where we don’t have to march
    in the streets and that seems probably right to me,
    but is that how you feel?
    – Bill McKibbin is a wise man.
    I definitely agree.
    I mean, we have to voice our objection
    to things that make no freaking sense.
    We have to voice our objection to continuing
    to subsidize fossil fuel companies with our dollars.
    We have to voice our objection
    to people who deny climate change, calling the shots.
    Some of the more extreme forms of protest,
    if we’re honest, make people like me seem more reasonable.
    And I’m grateful for it, right?
    Those works of art that had soup thrown at them are fine.
    They were covered with glass, they were wiped off,
    everything’s fine.
    So I think we need to just, for one,
    keep things in perspective,
    but also if we’re acknowledging
    that the future of human life on this planet,
    the quality of life for our species
    is literally being determined by what we do
    in the next decade,
    then is throwing soup at a painting
    really the worst thing we can imagine?
    Is it the most effective messaging?
    Well, I think we could have done better.
    I think there’s obviously much better
    climate communication that can be layered on top of protest,
    but I absolutely see a value for protest
    and it opens the door to a lot of policy conversations.
    And that is the role to shift the overton window
    to make politicians and executives feel
    like they have to do more and faster
    by just exerting that social pressure
    and removing the social license to operate,
    to say we are watching you,
    we are voting at the ballot box
    and we are voting with our dollars
    and we will name and shame the bad actors
    and welcome you onto the side of climate solutions
    whenever you’re ready.
    – Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson,
    thank you for outing me as a climate sad boy.
    (laughing)
    – And honestly, seriously,
    I do feel better after conversations like this.
    I do feel better after reading your book.
    – All right, there we go.
    Fill in your Venn diagram and get to work.
    – Thanks for existing and thanks for coming in.
    – Thanks for having me.
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    – All right, thanks for hanging out with me
    for another episode.
    I hope you enjoyed it.
    As always, you can tell me what you think of the episode.
    You can drop us a line at the grayarea@vox.com.
    I read those emails, so keep them coming
    and please rate, review whenever you get a chance.
    This episode was produced by Travis Larchuck
    and Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just,
    engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Anouk Dussot,
    and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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    Climate change has become synonymous with doomsday, as though everyone is waiting for the worst to happen. But what is this mindset doing to us? Is climate anxiety keeping us from confronting the challenge? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson thinks so. In part two of our “Reasons to Be Cheerful” series, she talks to Sean Illing about her new book, What If We Get It Right? and makes the case that our best chance for survival is acting as though the future is a place in which we want to live.

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  • Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence

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    There’s over 500,000 small businesses in B.C. and no two are alike.
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    I sell dog socks online.
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    Conditions apply.
    In 2018, Madison Smith told the county attorney she’d been raped by a classmate.
    But he told her he couldn’t charge him with rape.
    Then she found out Kansas is one of only six states where citizens
    can petition to convene their own grand jury.
    Having to tell over 300 strangers about what happened to me seemed so scary.
    I’m Phoebe Judge.
    This is Criminal.
    Listen to our episode “The Petition Wherever You Get Your Podcasts.”
    There’s a common belief in almost every age.
    And it goes something like this.
    More information leads to more truth, and more truth leads to more wisdom.
    That definitely sounds right.
    It’s hard to imagine being wise without knowing what’s true.
    But the notion that individuals and societies will become more truthful and more wise as
    they gain more information and more power is just empirically wrong.
    This may seem like an academic point, but it’s much more than that.
    If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and
    more openness will create a better world.
    The reality is more complicated.
    It has never been easier to know more about the world than it is right now, and it has
    never been easier to share that knowledge than it is right now.
    But I don’t think you can look at the state of things and conclude that this has been
    a victory for truth and wisdom.
    What are we to make of that?
    More information might not be the solution, but neither is more ignorance.
    So what should we do if we want a better and wiser world?
    How should we approach the enormous amount of information we’re collecting?
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
    Today’s guest is Yuval Noah Harari.
    He’s a historian and best-selling author of several books, including his 2014 mega-hit
    Sapiens.
    His latest is called Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age
    to AI.
    Like all of Harari’s books, this one covers a ton of ground, but it manages to do it in
    a digestible way.
    And it makes two big arguments that seem very important to me, and I think they also get
    us closer to answering some of those questions I just posed.
    The first argument is that every system that matters in our world is essentially the result
    of an information network, from currency to religions to nation-states to artificial intelligence.
    It all works because there’s a chain of people and machines and institutions collecting and
    sharing information.
    The second argument is that although we gain a tremendous amount of power by building these
    networks of cooperation, the way most of them are constructed makes them more likely than
    not to produce bad outcomes.
    And since our power as a species is growing thanks to our technology, the potential consequences
    of this are increasingly catastrophic.
    I invited Harari on the show to explore some of these ideas, and we focus on the most significant
    information network in the history of the world, artificial intelligence, and why he
    thinks the choices we make in the coming years will matter so much.
    Normally, our episodes are close to an hour long, and that was the plan with Harari, but
    I was so engrossed in this conversation that we just kept going, and I think you’ll be
    glad that we did.
    You’ve all know Harari.
    Welcome to the show.
    Thank you.
    It’s good to be here in person.
    Likewise.
    All of your books have a big macro historical story to tell, whether it’s about technology
    or data or the power of fiction.
    This one’s about information networks.
    What’s the story you want to tell here?
    The basic question that the book explores is, if humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?
    We are definitely the smartest animal on the planet.
    We can build airplanes and planes and atom bombs and computers and so forth, and at the
    same time, we are on the verge of destroying ourselves, our civilization, and much of the
    ecological system.
    It seems like this big paradox that if we know so much about the world, and you know
    about distant galaxies, and about DNA, and subatomic particles, why are we doing so many
    self-destructive things?
    The basic answer you get from a lot of mythology and theology is that there is something wrong
    in human nature, and therefore we must rely on some outside souls, like a god or whatever,
    to save us from ourselves.
    And I think that’s the wrong answer, and it’s a dangerous answer, because it makes people
    advocate responsibility.
    And I think that the real answer is that there is nothing wrong with human nature.
    The problem is with our information.
    Most humans are good people, they are not self-destructive, but if you give good people
    bad information, they make bad decisions.
    And what we see through history is that, yes, we become better and better at accumulating
    massive amounts of information, but the information isn’t getting better.
    Modern societies are as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusions and psychosis,
    if you think about Stalinism and Nazism in the 20th century, so they’re extremely sophisticated
    societies in terms of technology and economics and so forth.
    And yet their view of the world was really delusional.
    And this is what the book explores, is why is it that the quality of our information
    is not improving over time, and maybe the main answer that the book gives to this is
    that there is a misconception about what information does.
    Too many people, especially in places like Silicon Valley, they think that information
    is about truth, that information is truth, that if you accumulate a lot of information,
    you will know a lot of things about the world.
    But most information is junk.
    Information isn’t truth.
    The main thing that information does is to connect, to connect a lot of people into a
    society, a religion, a corporation, an army.
    And the easiest way to connect lots of people is not with the truth.
    The easiest way to connect people is with fantasies and mythologies and delusions and
    so forth.
    And this is why, yes, we have now the most sophisticated information technology in history
    and we are on the verge of destroying ourselves.
    You call that this idea that more information will lead to more truth and more wisdom, the
    semi-official ideology of the computer age.
    What is wrong with that assumption?
    Why is that not the case?
    Why is it not true that more information makes us less blinkered and more wise?
    Because most information isn’t truth.
    Most information isn’t facts.
    The truth is a rare and costly kind of information.
    If you want to write a story about anything, I don’t know, the Roman Empire, if you want
    to write a truthful account, you need to invest a lot of time and energy and money
    in research and in fact-checking and that’s difficult.
    If on the other hand you just invent some fiction, that’s very easy.
    It’s cheap.
    Fiction is much, much cheaper than the truth.
    The other thing is that the truth tends to be complicated because reality is complicated.
    And people often don’t like complicated stories.
    They want simple stories.
    So in a free market of information, the market will be flooded by fiction and fantasy and
    delusion and the truth will be crowded out.
    Do you think we overstate the role of truth in human life?
    Do you think it’s a mistake also to assume that people really care about the truth deep
    down?
    No.
    Vice versa.
    For this age, which is a recurring problem in history, is a very cynical view of humanity
    which discounts truth and focuses on power.
    This is something that you see again and again in history and you see it on both the right
    and the left.
    You see it with Marxists and now you see it with populists.
    This is something that Donald Trump and Karl Marx agree on, that the only reality is power,
    that humans are only interested in power, that any human interaction is a power struggle.
    So in any situation, the question to ask is, who are the winners and who are the losers?
    Somebody is telling you something, a journalist, a scientist, a politician, whoever.
    You don’t ask is it true or not.
    You ask whose interests are served, whose privileges are being defended.
    You think about it as a power struggle and this is a very cynical and destructive view
    of the world and it’s also wrong because, yes, humans are interested in power but not
    only in power.
    If you look at yourself, I guess most individuals, if they will examine themselves, they will
    acknowledge, yes, I want some measure of power in certain areas of life but that’s not the
    only thing I want.
    I also have a deep yearning, an authentic, honest yearning to know the truth about myself,
    about life in general, about the world and this is a very deep human need because you
    can never really be happy if you don’t know the truth about yourself.
    You can be very, very powerful and ignorance is strength in many cases in life but it’s
    not the way to real happiness and satisfaction and you see it.
    You look at figures like Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu who I know from Israel,
    they are people obsessed with power and they are extremely powerful individuals and they
    are not particularly happy individuals.
    Well, part of the case you make in the book is that what these networks do is they privilege
    order over truth.
    Why is that?
    They privilege order over truth, what do we gain by that?
    Clearly we gain something or we wouldn’t do it.
    Yes, when this goes back to the issue of power, that there is a struggle for power in the
    world, this is true.
    Even though humans are interested in various things, when you come to build big networks
    of cooperation, whether it’s armies or states or economic operations, there is a struggle
    for power.
    In this struggle, truth is important to some extent but order is more important and I think
    this is the most fundamental mistake of the naive view of information which prevails in
    places like Silicon Valley, that people think that in the market of ideas, in the market
    of information, if one society is delusional and another society is committed to the facts,
    then the facts will empower you, you will know more about the world, you will be able
    to produce more powerful weapons so you will win.
    So adhering to the truth is a winning strategy even in terms of power.
    And this is a mistake because if you think for instance about producing an atom bomb,
    to produce an atom bomb you do need to know some facts about the world, about physics.
    If you ignore the facts of physics, your bomb will not explode.
    But to build an atom bomb, you need something else, you need order because a single physicist
    who knows nuclear physics well cannot build an atom bomb.
    You need millions of people to cooperate with you, you need miners to mine uranium, you
    need engineers and builders to build the reactor, you need farmers to grow potatoes and rice
    so all the engineers and physicists will have something to eat.
    And how do you get these millions of people to cooperate on this project?
    And if you just tell them facts about physics, this wouldn’t motivate anybody.
    What do they need?
    A story?
    They need a story.
    And it’s easier to motivate them with a fictional story than with the truth.
    And it’s the people who master these mythologies and theologies and ideologies who give the
    orders to the nuclear physicists in the end.
    But when you want to build an ideology that will inspire millions of people, a commitment
    to the facts is not so important.
    You can ignore the facts and still your ideology will explode in a big bang.
    And this is why over and over again throughout history, we see that there is, it’s not that
    our information networks become better and better at understanding the facts of the world.
    Yes, there is a process that we learn more about the world, but at the same time we also
    learn how to construct more effective mythologies and ideologies and the way to do it is not
    necessarily by adhering to the facts.
    So the way we would typically analyze a catastrophic movement like Stalinism or Nazism, you can
    look at it as an ideological phenomenon.
    You can look at it in materialist terms, but you think you actually understand something
    about the way a movement like that works by looking at it primarily as an information
    network propelled by exceptionally delusional ideas, but an information network nevertheless.
    What do we gain analytically by looking at a movement like that as an information network
    as opposed to any of those other things I mentioned?
    We tend to think about democracy and totalitarianism as different ethical movements.
    They are committed to different ethical ideas.
    And this is true, of course, to some extent.
    But underneath it, you see a different structure of an information network.
    Information flows differently in a totalitarian regime like the Stalinist Soviet Union and
    in a democratic system.
    Totalitarianism, dictatorships more generally, they are a centralized information system.
    All the information flows to one center where all the decisions are being made.
    And it also lacks any self-correcting mechanisms.
    There are no mechanisms that if Stalin makes a mistake, there is some mechanism that can
    identify and correct that mistake.
    Democracy on the other hand, it’s a distributed information system, and not all the information
    flows to the center because in a democracy, it’s not that the government elected by the
    majority makes all the decisions.
    No, the ideal is that you give as much autonomy to various individuals, organizations, communities,
    private businesses, and so forth.
    Only certain decisions must be made centrally.
    Like whether to go to war or make peace, you cannot let every community make its own mind.
    So this is made centrally.
    But even in these cases, where the information flows to the center, where the decisions are
    being made, you have self-correcting mechanisms that can identify and correct mistakes.
    The most obvious mechanism is elections, that every few years, you try something, and if
    it doesn’t work, if we think it’s not bringing good results, we can correct it by replacing
    them with another party or another politician after a couple of years, which you can’t do
    in a dictatorship.
    In a dictatorship, you can’t say, “Oh, we made a mistake.
    Let’s try somebody else.
    Let’s try something else.”
    So this is the essential difference between the way that information functions in a dictatorship
    and in a democracy.
    So do you think of information networks as a bit of a double-edged sword?
    On the one hand, they make mass cooperation possible, but on the other hand, if they’re
    poorly designed, they engineer reliably catastrophic outcomes.
    Yeah, and mass cooperation means enormous power, but it can be used for good or ill.
    You can use it to create a healthcare system that takes care of the medical problems of
    entire populations, and you can use it to create a police state that surveys and punishes
    the entire population.
    It can be done with the same type of … It’s basically both for a healthcare system and
    for a secret police, you need to amass enormous amounts of information and to analyze it.
    What kind of information?
    What do you do with it?
    That’s a different question, but the key thing is to understand history, not just in terms
    of ideologies and political ideas, but in terms of the underlying flow and structure of information.
    If we go back, let’s say, 5,000 years ago to one of the first crucial information revolutions,
    to understand how information technology shapes history.
    Think about the invention of writing.
    The invention of writing in technological terms, it’s extremely simple.
    In ancient Mesopotamia, people discovered that you can take clay tablets, and clay is
    basically just mud.
    You take mud, and you take a stick, and you imprint certain signs in the mud, and you
    get a written document, and you can write all kinds of things there.
    The technology is extremely simple.
    Of course, the key is finding the right code, but the technology itself, you just need mud
    and a stick, but it had an enormous impact on the shape of human societies.
    How does it work?
    Let’s think about something like ownership.
    What does it mean to own something?
    Like you own a field.
    What does it mean that I own a field?
    This field is mine.
    Before writing, if you live in a small Mesopotamian village like 7,000 years ago, it means that
    your neighbors agree that this is your field.
    Ownership is a communal affair.
    You have a field that means that your neighbors don’t bring their goats there and don’t pick
    fruits there without your permission.
    So ownership is a community affair.
    This limits your autonomy and power as an individual.
    You can’t sell your field to somebody else without the agreement of the community because
    ownership is a matter of communal agreement.
    And similarly, it’s very difficult for a distant authority, like a king living in the
    capital city hundreds of kilometers away, to know who owns what and to live by taxes.
    Because how can the king know who owns each field in hundreds of remote villages?
    It’s impossible.
    Then writing came along and changed the meaning of ownership.
    Now, owning a field means that there is a piece of dry mud with certain signs on it,
    which says that this field is mine, a document.
    And this decreases the power of the local community and empowers on the one side individuals
    and on the other side the king.
    So the fact that ownership is now this dry piece of mud, I can take this dry piece of
    mud and give it to you in exchange for a herd of goats.
    And I don’t care and you don’t care what the neighbors say because ownership now is this
    document.
    And this means that now I have greater power over my property.
    But it also means that now the king in the distant capital, he can know who owns what
    in the entire kingdom because he collects all these dry pieces of mud in something called
    an archive and he builds a centralized bureaucracy.
    And the bureaucrat sitting in the capital city can know who owns which fields in distant
    villages just by looking at these dry pieces of mud and he can start livi taxes.
    So what we see with the invention of writing, again, it’s a complex mechanism.
    It’s not one-sided.
    The community becomes less important.
    Individual rights, property rights, they become more important, but also centralized authority.
    And this is the moment in history which we see the rise of central authoritarian systems.
    Kingdoms and then empires ruled by kings and tyrants and emperors.
    It was not possible without these dry pieces of mud.
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    The newest revolutionary technology is AI, which I think, in the long run, will probably
    be more transformative than even–
    Than mud.
    And writing, and maybe everything else when it’s all said and done.
    But what makes AI for you a fundamentally different kind of information network?
    And what is it about that uniqueness that concerns you?
    So let’s start maybe with a story.
    So we were in ancient most of Potamia, what is today Iraq, 5,000 years ago.
    Now let’s move to a neighboring country, Iran, today.
    Like a scene today on the street in Isfahan or Tehran.
    In Iran, they have what is known as the hijab laws, that women, when they go in public,
    they must cover their hair.
    And this goes back to the humanist revolution in 1979.
    But for many years, the Iranian regime had difficulty imposing the hijab laws on a relatively
    unwilling population.
    Because to make sure that each woman when she goes out in the street or drives her car
    is wearing a hijab, you need to place a policeman on every street, and you don’t have so many
    policemen.
    And then it also causes a lot of friction, because the policeman needs to arrest the
    woman and there could be shouting and there could be altercations, it’s a lot of friction.
    And then AI came along.
    And what happens today in Iran is that you don’t need these kind of morality police on
    every street and intersection.
    You have cameras, millions and millions of cameras, with facial recognition software,
    which automatically identify a woman, it can identify even the name of the woman, who drives
    in her car.
    She’s in her own private car with the windows shut.
    And still the camera can identify that you are driving now in a public sphere with your
    hair uncovered.
    And the AI can immediately also pull out your personal details, your phone numbers,
    and send you an SMS message that you have just violated the hijab law.
    You must stop your car.
    Your car is impounded.
    And this happens every day.
    It’s not a science fiction Hollywoodian scenario of some dystopian future in 100 years.
    It’s a reality right now.
    This is just the beginning too.
    And this is just the beginning.
    The AI revolutionizes almost everything it touches, including surveillance.
    Previously, totalitarian regimes, they were limited by the need to rely on human agents.
    If you are Stalin or Khomeini or Hitler, and you want to follow every citizen 24 hours
    a day, you can’t.
    Because again, if you are Stalin and you have 200 million citizens in the Soviet Union,
    how do you get 400 million KGB agents to follow everybody?
    Not enough agents.
    And even if you have all these agents, who’s going to analyze all the data they accumulate?
    So even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, privacy was still the default for most of the day.
    But this is over because AIs can fulfill these tasks.
    You can follow with cameras and drones and smartphones and computers.
    You can follow everybody all the time and analyze the oceans of data this produces to
    monitor and to police a population.
    And this is just one example.
    The key thing is that AI is not a tool.
    It is an agent.
    It’s an active agent.
    It can make decisions by itself.
    It can even create new ideas by itself.
    When we produce AI, we are not just producing more tools like printing presses or atom bombs
    or spaceships.
    We are creating new types of non-human agents.
    And it’s not like a Hollywoodian scenario that you have one big supercomputer that now
    tries to take over the world.
    No.
    We need to think about it as millions and millions of AI agents, AI bureaucrats, AI
    soldiers, AI policemen, AI bank managers and school managers and so forth that constantly
    watch us and make decisions about us.
    Well, to go back to the point you were making earlier about how rudimentary a technology
    like writing was or even the printing press or television or radio.
    By comparison, AI is infinitely more complicated.
    And for that reason, unpredictable.
    I mean, can we even imagine?
    Can we even anticipate where this might go?
    When you consider how transformative writing was, do we have any inkling of how transformative
    and how uprooting this might be?
    No, because the very nature of AI is that it is unpredictable.
    If humans can predict everything it’s going to do, it is not an AI.
    You know, there is a lot of hype nowadays about AI.
    So people, especially when they want to sell you something, they paste the label AI on everything.
    Like this is AI water and this is AI air and this is an AI table and so forth.
    So what is AI?
    AI is something, a machine that can learn and change by itself.
    It is initially created by humans, but what humans give it is the ability to learn and
    change by itself.
    So uncontrollable by definition.
    It’s therefore exactly uncontrollable by definition.
    If you can predict and control everything it will do down the line, it’s not an AI.
    It’s just an automatic machine, which we’ve had for decades and generations.
    Why do we keep doing this?
    Why do human beings keep building things that we do not understand?
    Where does this drive to summon forces that we can’t control come from?
    I mean, maybe this is the stuff of religion, but you’re here, so I’m asking.
    Yeah.
    Now, first of all, it should be said that there is enormous positive potential in AI.
    My job as a historian and a philosopher is to talk mainly about the dangers because you
    hear so much about the positive potential from the entrepreneurs and the business people
    who develop it.
    But yes, it should be very clear that there is enormous positive potential.
    AI can create the best healthcare system in history, the best education system in history,
    this ability to understand human beings and to come up with ideas that we didn’t think
    about.
    It is potentially good.
    Like it can invent new kinds of medicines that no human doctor ever thought about.
    So there is this attraction.
    And we also have now this arms race situation when the people who develop the technology,
    they understand many of the dangers.
    They understand them better than almost anybody else.
    But they are caught in this arms race that they say, “I know it’s dangerous, but if
    I slow down and my competitor, either the other corporation or the other country, if
    they don’t slow down, they keep going as fast as they can, and I slow down, I will be left
    behind and they will win the race, and then they will control the world and will be able
    to decide what to do with AI.
    And I’m a good guy.
    I’m aware of the dangers.
    So it’s good if I win.
    And then I can take responsible decisions what to do with this technology.”
    And this is a story everybody tells themselves.
    Elon Musk says it, and Sam Altman says it, the United States says it, China says it.
    Everybody says that we know it’s dangerous, but we can’t slow down because the other side
    won’t slow down.
    You said earlier, sapiens are the smartest and stupidest of all the animals.
    Maybe it’s just a law of nature that intelligence and self-destruction at a certain level just
    go hand in hand.
    Maybe we’re living through that.
    On one level, intelligence creates power and lots of animals can do self-destructive things,
    but if you’re a rat or you’re a raccoon and you do something self-destructive, the damage
    will be limited.
    Rats don’t have labor camps and atomic bombs.
    Yeah.
    But when we’re talking about AI, we tend to talk about the political and economic impacts.
    But in the book, you also touch on the potential cultural and even spiritual impacts of this
    technology, that a world of AI is going to give rise to new identities, new ways of being
    in the world.
    And that might unleash all kinds of competition over not just how to organize society, but
    what it means to be in the world as a human being.
    I mean, can we even begin to imagine the direction that might go?
    Not really, because until today, all of human culture was created by human minds.
    We live inside culture, everything that happens to us, we experience it through the mediation
    of cultural products, mythologies, ideologies, artifacts, songs, plays, TV series, we live
    cocooned inside this cultural universe.
    And until today, everything, all the tools, all the poems, all the TV series, all the
    mythologies, they are the product of organic human minds.
    And now, increasingly, they will be the product of inorganic AI intelligences, alien intelligences.
    Again, AI, the acronym AI, traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but it should
    actually stand for alien intelligence, alien, not in the sense that coming from outer space.
    Alien in the sense that it’s very, very different from the way that humans think and make decisions.
    Because it’s not organic.
    To give you a concrete example, one of the key moments in the AI revolution, or by the
    eight years ago, the aha moment for a lot of governments and militaries around the world,
    was when AlphaGo defeated Lisa Dole in a gold tournament.
    Now, gold is a bold strategy, like chess, but much more complicated, invented in ancient
    China, and it has been considered, not only in China, also in Korea, in Japan, one of
    the basic arts that every civilized person should know.
    If you’re a Chinese gentleman in the Middle Ages, you know calligraphy, and you know to
    play some music, and you know how to play Go.
    Entire philosophies developed around the game, which was seen as a mirror for life and for
    politics.
    And then, an AI program, AlphaGo, in 2016, taught itself how to play Go.
    And it defeated, it crushed, the human world champion.
    But what is most interesting is the way it did it.
    It deployed a strategy, which when it first played it, all the experts said, “What is
    this nonsense?
    Nobody plays Go like that!”
    And it turned out to be brilliant.
    Tens of millions of humans played this game, and now we know that they explored only a
    very small part of the landscape of Go.
    If you imagine all the ways to play Go as a kind of geography, a planet.
    So humans were stuck on one island, and they thought this is the whole planet of Go.
    And then AI came along, and within a few weeks, it discovered new continents.
    And now also humans play Go very differently than they played it before 2016.
    Now you can say this is not important, this is just, you know, a game.
    But the same thing is likely to happen in more and more fields.
    If you think about finance, so finance is also an art.
    The entire financial structure that we know is based on the human imagination.
    The history of finance is the history of humans inventing financial devices.
    Money is a financial device.
    Bonds, stocks, ETFs, CDOs, all these strange things that humans invent.
    This is a product of human ingenuity.
    And now AI comes along and starts inventing new financial devices that no human being
    ever thought about, ever imagined.
    So again, we were stuck on a small financial island, and now it’s getting bigger and bigger.
    And what happens, for instance, if finance becomes so complicated because of these new
    creations of AI, that no human being is able to understand finance anymore.
    I mean, even today, how many people really understand the financial system?
    Less than one percent.
    In 10 years, the number of people who understand the financial system could be exactly zero.
    Because, you know, the financial system is the ideal playground for AI.
    Because it’s a world of pure information and mathematics.
    AI has difficulty still dealing with the physical world outside.
    This is why every year they tell us, Elon Musk tells us, “Next year you will have fully
    autonomous cars on the road.”
    And it doesn’t happen.
    Why?
    Because to drive a car, you need to interact with the physical world and the messy world
    of traffic in New York with all the construction and pedestrian and whatever.
    Very difficult.
    Finance, much easy.
    Just numbers.
    And what happens?
    If in this informational realm where AI is a native and we are the aliens, we are the
    immigrants, it creates such sophisticated financial devices and mechanisms that nobody
    understands.
    If a handful of banks could produce 2008, what could AI do?
    Exactly.
    2008 originally was because of these new financial devices like CDOs, collateral debt obligations,
    but a few wizards in Wall Street invented.
    Nobody understood them and not the regulators, so they’re not regulated properly.
    For a couple of years, everything seemed okay, at least some people were making billions
    out of them, and then everything collapsed.
    The same thing can happen on a much, much larger scale as AI takes over finance.
    So when you look at the world now and project out into the future, is that what you see?
    Societies becoming trapped in these incredibly powerful, but very poorly designed information
    networks, and I say AI is poorly designed precisely because it doesn’t really have
    any course correct mechanisms.
    It’s up to us.
    It’s not deterministic.
    It’s not inevitable.
    We need to be much more careful and thoughtful about how we design these things.
    Again, understanding that they are not tools, they are agents, and therefore down the road
    are very likely to get out of our control if we are not careful about them.
    And it’s not that you have a single supercomputer that tries to take over the world.
    You have these millions of AI bureaucrats in schools, in factories, everywhere making
    decisions about us in ways that we do not understand.
    Democracy is to a large extent about accountability.
    Accountability depends on the ability to understand decisions.
    If more and more of the decisions in society, like you apply to a bank to get a loan, and
    the bank tells you no, and you ask why not, and the bank says we don’t know.
    The algorithm went over all the data and decided not to give you a loan, and we just trust
    our algorithm.
    This to a large extent is the end of democracy.
    You can still have elections and choose whichever human you want, but if humans are no longer
    able to understand these basic decisions about their lives, why didn’t you give me a loan,
    then there is no longer accountability.
    You say we still have control over these things, but for how long?
    What is that threshold?
    What is the event horizon?
    Will we even know it when we cross it?
    Nobody knows for sure.
    It’s moving faster than I think almost anybody expected.
    Could be three years, could be five years, could be 10 years, but I don’t think that
    much more than that.
    That’s not much.
    Again, think about it in a cosmic perspective.
    We are the product as human beings of four billion years of organic evolution.
    Organic evolution, as far as we know, began on planet Earth four billion years ago with
    these tiny microorganisms, and it took billions of years for the evolution of multicellular
    organisms and reptiles and mammals and apes and humans.
    Digital evolution, non-organic evolution is millions of times faster than organic evolution.
    We are now at the beginning of a new evolutionary process that might last thousands and even
    millions of years.
    The AIs we know today in 2024, Chajipiti and all that, they are just the amoebas of the
    AI evolutionary process.
    They are just the amoebas.
    That’s not very comforting.
    How would AITREX look like?
    The thing is that AITREX is not billions of years in the future, maybe it’s just 20 years
    in the future.
    Because, again, another key thing about, we are now like the big struggle on planet Earth
    right now, is that after four billion years of organic life, we now have a new kind of
    entity, agent on the planet, which is inorganic.
    And inorganic entities, they don’t live by cycles like us.
    We live day and night, winter and summer, growth and decay.
    Sometimes we are active, sometimes we need to sleep.
    AIs don’t need to sleep.
    They are always on, they are tireless, they are relentless, and they increasingly control
    the world.
    Now a big question is, as organic beings who need to rest sometimes, what happens when
    we are controlled by agents who never need to rest?
    Even Stalin’s KGB agents, they needed to sleep sometime.
    The police cameras in Iran, they never sleep.
    If you think about the news cycle, if you think about the market, Wall Street.
    And a curious thing, an important fact about Wall Street, Wall Street is not always on.
    It’s open Mondays to Fridays, 9.30 in the morning to four o’clock in the afternoon.
    If a new war in the Middle East erupts at five minutes past four on a Friday, Wall Street
    will be able to react only on Monday morning because it’s off for the weekend.
    And this is a good thing because organic entities need to rest.
    Now what happens when the markets are taken over, are run by tireless, relentless AIs?
    What happens to human bankers, to human investors?
    They also need to be on all the time.
    What happens to human politicians, to journalists who need to be on all the time?
    If you keep an organic entity on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies.
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    You’ve been thinking and writing about AI for several years now.
    My sense is that you’ve become more, not less worried about where we’re going.
    Am I reading you right?
    Yes, because it’s accelerating.
    When I published “Homo Deus” in 2016, all this sounded like this abstract philosophical
    musings about something that might happen generations or centuries in the future.
    And now it’s extremely urgent.
    And again, I don’t think it can be said enough.
    You also talk to a lot of people who work in Silicon Valley, people who work on AI.
    This is the consensus view among them as well.
    They are keenly aware how combustible this is, but they can’t help but continue on,
    which says something about the insanity and the power of our systems.
    There are two very, very strong motivations there.
    On the one hand, they are very concerned, but they are concerned that the bad guys will
    get there first.
    Like they naturally see themselves as the good guys and they say, “This is coming.”
    The biggest thing, not just in human history, the biggest thing in evolution since the beginning
    of life is coming.
    Who do you want to be in control?
    Do you want Putin to be in control or do you want me, a good guy, to be in control?
    So obviously we need to move faster to beat them.
    And then there is, of course, the other attraction that this is the biggest thing maybe since
    the beginning of life.
    If you think about the timeline of the universe, as far as we know it today, so you have the
    Big Bang 13 billion years ago, then nothing much happens until four billion years ago
    life emerges on planet Earth, the next big thing.
    And then for four billion years, nothing much happens.
    It’s all the same organic stuff.
    So you have amoebas and you have dinosaurs and you have homo sapiens, but it’s the same
    basic organic stuff.
    And then you have Elon Musk or Sam Altman or every is going to be.
    And the start of a new evolutionary process of inorganic lifeforms that could spread very
    quickly from planet Earth to colonize Mars and Jupiter and other galaxies.
    Because again, as organic entities, it will be very, very difficult for us to live planet
    Earth.
    But for AI, much, much easier.
    So if ever an earthly civilization is going to colonize the galaxy, it will not be a human
    or an organic civilization.
    It’s likely to be an inorganic civilization and to think that I can be the person who
    kind of stouts the whole thing.
    So this God complex, I think it’s very, very also prevalent, not just in Silicon Valley,
    also in China and other places where this technology is being developed.
    And this is an explosive mix.
    A question you ask in the book is whether democracies are compatible with these 21st
    century information networks.
    What’s your answer?
    Depends on our decisions.
    What do you mean?
    First of all, we need to realize that information technology is not something on the side that
    you have democracy.
    And then on the side, you have information technology.
    No, information technology is the foundation of democracy.
    Democracy is built on top of the flow of information.
    For most of history, there was no possibility of creating large-scale democratic structures
    because the information technology was missing.
    Democracy, as we said, is basically a conversation between a lot of people.
    And in a small tribe or a small city-state thousands of years ago, you could get the
    entire population, a large percentage of the population, let’s say, of ancient Athens,
    in city square to decide whether to go to war with Sparta or not.
    It was technically feasible to hold a conversation.
    But there was no way that millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers could talk
    to each other.
    You hold the conversation in real time.
    Therefore, you have not a single example of a large-scale democracy in the pre-modern
    world.
    All the examples are very small scale.
    Large-scale democracy becomes possible only after the rise of newspaper and telegraph
    and radio and television.
    And now you can have a conversation between millions of people spread over a large territory.
    So democracy is built on top of information technology.
    Every time there is a big change in information technology, there is an earthquake in democracy
    which is built on top of it.
    And this is what we are experiencing right now with social media algorithms and so forth.
    It doesn’t mean it’s the end of democracy.
    The question is, will democracy adapt?
    And adaptation means regulation.
    Well, that’s the problem, right?
    As the technology gets more and more powerful, the lag time shrinks.
    The time you have for that adaptation also shrinks.
    I’m not sure we have enough time in this case.
    Well, we’ll just have to do our best, but we have to try.
    And I don’t see that we are trying hard enough.
    You know, again, this kind of prevalent mood in places like Silicon Valley is that this
    is not the time to slow down or to regulate.
    We can do it later, but we can’t.
    The first thing they teach you when you learn how to drive a car is to press the brakes.
    Only afterwards, they teach you how to press the fuel pedal, the accelerator.
    And we are now learning how to drive AI.
    And they teach us only how to press the accelerator.
    Are we learning how to drive AI, or is AI learning how to drive us?
    That’s actually more accurate.
    But we are still, for a few more years, we are still in the driver’s seat.
    It still did not out of our control.
    Do you think these technologies, and I’m including social media and smartphones here, have enabled
    a level of group or herd or mass hysteria that maybe wasn’t possible before these technologies?
    It was always possible, and I’ll give you an example.
    Or at greater scales, I should say.
    It’s important to understand what is different, because conspiracy theories and mass hysteria,
    they are not new.
    When print was invented, or print was brought to Europe in the 15th century, the result
    was not a scientific revolution.
    It was a wave of wars of religions and witch hunts, and because most of the information
    spread by the printing press was junk information and conspiracy theories and fake news and
    so forth.
    If you think about the Soviet Union in the 20th century, so one of the biggest conspiracy
    theories and most remarkable conspiracy theories in the 20th century was the doctor’s plot.
    Soviet Union, early 1950s, the regime comes up with a conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors
    in the service of a Zionist imperialist conspiracy against the glorious Soviet Union are murdering
    Soviet leaders, using their power as doctors to murder Soviet leaders.
    This conspiracy theory is spread by the organs of the government, the newspapers, the radios,
    and then it gets amplified.
    It merges with age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and people start believing that Jewish
    doctors are murdering not just Soviet leaders, they are murdering babies and children in
    hospitals.
    This is the old blood libel against Jews, and then it gets bigger, and people think they
    are murdering everybody, like the Jewish doctors are trying to murder all Soviet citizens,
    and because a large percentage of Soviet doctors were Jews, the final iteration of
    this conspiracy theory, that’s 1952, 1953, is that doctors in general, there is a conspiracy
    of doctors to kill the whole Soviet population to destroy the Soviet Union.
    This is the famous doctor’s plot.
    Now this sounds insane, but an entire country was gripped by hysteria that the doctors
    are trying to kill us.
    Now then came the real twist.
    Stalin had a stroke in, I think it was May, 1953, and his bodyguards enter after a couple
    of hours.
    He doesn’t show up for lunch, for dinner, what’s happening?
    So they eventually, hesitatingly, enter his dacha, and he’s lying on the floor unconscious.
    He had a stroke.
    What to do?
    Now usually there is a doctor around, Stalin’s personal physician, but his personal physician
    was at that very moment being tortured in the basement of the Lubyanka prison because
    they suspected that he was part of the doctor’s plot.
    So what do we do?
    Do we call a doctor?
    So they call the Politburo members, and you have all these big shots, big wigs, Beria,
    and Melankov, and Khrushchev, they come to the dacha.
    What do we do?
    So eventually the danger passes because Stalin dies.
    And this is one of the most sophisticated societies in human history, and it is gripped by this
    mass hysteria that doctors are trying to kill everybody.
    So this is not something, when you look at the conspiracy theories today, they still have
    a way to go.
    So it’s not that the 2010s or the 2020s is the first time that people had this problem
    with conspiracy theories, but the mechanism is different.
    In the 1950s, it was initially driven by the decisions of human apparatchiks.
    The bureaucrats in the Communist Party now is driven by non-human algorithms.
    Now the algorithm drops it on your uncle’s Facebook feed.
    That’s different.
    And again, the algorithms, they don’t care.
    I mean, they don’t even understand the content of the conspiracy theory.
    They only know one thing.
    They were given a goal, engagement, user engagement, and they discover by trial and error on millions
    of human guinea pigs, that if you show somebody a hate field conspiracy theory, it catches
    their attention and they stay longer on the platform and they tell all their friends.
    The new thing now is that this is not being done to us by human ideologues in the Communist
    Party.
    It’s being done by non-human agents.
    So in the more immediate term, what do you think are the greatest threats to democratic
    societies in particular?
    Is it the misinformation?
    Is it the lack of privacy?
    Is it the emergence of increasingly sophisticated algorithms that understand us better than
    we understand ourselves?
    Is it all the above?
    How would you triage those threats?
    I would focus on two problems, one very old, one quite new.
    The new problem is that we are seeing the democratic conversation collapsing all over
    the world.
    Again, democracy is basically a conversation.
    And what we see now in the US, in Israel, in Brazil, all over the world, the conversation
    collapses in the sense that people can no longer listen to each other.
    They can’t agree on the most basic facts.
    They can’t have a reason to debate anymore.
    And you cannot have a democracy if you cannot have a reason to debate between the citizens.
    And in every country, they give it these unique explanations.
    In the US, they will explain to you the unique situation of American society and politics
    and the legacy of slavery and so forth and racism.
    But then you go to Brazil, and they have their own explanations there.
    And you go to Israel, and they have their explanations.
    If it’s happening at the same time all over the world, it cannot be the result of these
    specific causes.
    It must be a universal cause.
    And the universal cause is the technology.
    Again, democracy is built on top of information technology.
    We now have this immense revolution in information technology.
    There is an earthquake in democracy.
    We need to figure it out.
    And nobody knows for sure what is happening.
    But I would ask Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and all these people, you are the experts on
    information technology, put everything else aside and explain to us what is happening.
    It doesn’t matter if you support the Democrats or the Republicans or whatever.
    Everybody can agree that the conversation is collapsing.
    Explain to us, why is it that we have the most sophisticated information technology
    in history that you created and we can’t talk with each other anymore?
    What’s happening?
    You’ve been in rooms with some of these people.
    Did you ask them that question?
    What did they say?
    They evade the question.
    They try to shift responsibility to somebody else.
    Oh, we have just a platform.
    It’s the users.
    It’s the government.
    It’s this.
    It’s that.
    But this is what we need them to explain to.
    You’re the experts.
    Tell us what is happening.
    Because I think it’s the one thing that Democrats and Republicans, for instance, in the US can
    still agree on is that the conversation is collapsing.
    So that’s the new thing.
    The other danger to democracy is what happens if you give so much power to this small group
    of people or to one person, and they use this power not to pursue certain specific policies,
    but to pursue power, that they use the power of government then to destroy democracy itself,
    to destroy the checks and balances.
    They use democracy to gain power and then use their power to destroy democracy.
    We’ve seen it again and again in history.
    Now recently in Venezuela, Chavez originally came to power in a free and fair elections.
    But then his movement used the power of the government to destroy the democratic checks
    and balances, free courts, free media.
    Currently they appointed their own people to the elections committee, and now they have
    elections.
    They lost big time at Duro, but they claim they won because they control all the levels
    of power.
    So you can’t get rid of them.
    And we saw the same thing happening in Russia with Putin, and this is not new.
    This goes back to ancient Greece, that how do you make sure that you don’t elect to power
    people who then focus on perpetuating their power?
    There’s no safeguard for that.
    That’s a built-in feature of democracy.
    That’s a built-in feature.
    It contains the seeds of its own destruction, always has, always will.
    Yeah.
    So again, what we see in mature democracies, like the United States, is the realization
    that we cannot have just one safety mechanism.
    We need several different self-correcting mechanisms, because if you have just one mechanism,
    like elections, this will not be enough, because the government can use all its force to rig
    the elections.
    So you must have additional safety mechanisms, additional self-correcting mechanisms, like
    a free media, like independent courts.
    And what you see with the rise of these new authoritarian figures, like Shaves and Maduro
    in Venezuela, like Putin, like Netanyahu, is that once they get to power, they systematically
    go after these safety mechanisms, these self-correcting mechanisms.
    They destroy the independence of the courts.
    They fill the courts with their own loyalists.
    They destroy the independence of media outlets.
    They make the media the mouthpiece of the government.
    And step by step, they destroy all these other mechanisms.
    And then they don’t need to abolish the elections.
    If you destroyed all the other safety measures, it’s very good for a dictator to actually keep
    elections as a kind of dictatorial ceremony in which the dictator proves that he enjoys
    the support of the people.
    They always win these kind of absurd majorities, like 70%, 80%, 99%.
    So you still have elections.
    You have elections in North Korea.
    Like every four or five years, like clockwork, there are elections in North Korea, and you
    have hundreds of new delegates and newer representatives of the North Korean people.
    And it’s just a ritual in a totalitarian regime.
    Of course, those are sham elections, but there’s also no law of political nature that says
    a democratic public cannot vote itself out of existence.
    That’s happened before.
    It’ll happen again.
    And it seems much more likely to happen if you have a population drunk on algorithmic
    news feeds.
    Yeah.
    And because democracy is a conversation, the key issue is what are the main issues people
    talking about?
    It’s even before the answers.
    It’s what are the things people talk about?
    Do they talk about climate change or immigration?
    Do they talk about AI or gun control or abortion rights?
    What do they talk about?
    Very often in political strategies, the key thing people say is to change the conversation.
    We need to make people stop talking about this.
    We have a problem in this area, so we don’t want people to even think about this.
    Let’s talk about something else.
    And today, the kingmakers in this arena are no longer humans.
    They are the algorithms.
    They decide what are the main issues of the day because they are so good at capturing
    human attention.
    Again, they experimented on billions of human guinea pigs over the last 10 or 15 years,
    and they became very, very good at knowing how to press our emotional buttons and capturing
    our attention.
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    Do you think AI will ultimately tilt the balance of power in favor of democratic societies
    or more totalitarian societies?
    I know it’s hard to say, but what’s your best guess?
    Again, it depends on our decisions.
    The worst case scenario is neither because, you know, human dictators also have big problems
    with AI.
    We don’t have to talk about it because in democratic societies, we are obsessed with
    our own problems.
    In dictatorial societies, you can’t talk about anything that the regime don’t want you to
    talk about.
    But actually, dictators have their own problems with AI because it’s an uncontrollable agent.
    And throughout history, the most scary thing for a human dictator is a subordinate which
    becomes too powerful and that you don’t know how to control.
    If you look, say, at the Roman Empire, not a single Roman emperor was ever toppled by
    a democratic revolution, not a single one.
    But many of them were assassinated or deposed or became the puppets of their own subordinates,
    a powerful general or provincial governor or their brother or their wife or somebody
    else in their family.
    This is the greatest fear of every dictator and dictators run the country based on terror,
    on fear.
    Now, how do you terrorize and AI?
    And how do you make sure that it will remain under your control instead of learning to
    control you?
    So I’ll give two scenarios which really bother dictators, one simple, one much more complex.
    So think about Russia today.
    In Russia today, it is a crime to call the war in Ukraine a war.
    According to Russian law, what is happening in with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is
    a special military operation, a special military operation.
    And if you say that this is a war, we can go to prison.
    Now, humans in Russia, they have learned the hard way not to say that it’s a war and not
    to criticize the Putin regime in any other way.
    But what happens with chatbots on the Russian internet?
    Even if the regime vets and even produces itself an AI bot, the thing about AI, as we
    talked earlier, is that AI can learn and change by itself.
    So even if Putin’s engineers create a kind of regime AI, and then it starts interacting
    with people on the Russian internet and observing what is happening, it can reach its own conclusions.
    And if it starts telling people, actually, it’s a war, I’ve checked in the dictionary
    what a war is, and this seems pretty much like a war.
    What do you do?
    You can’t send the chatbot to a gulag.
    You can’t beat up its family.
    Your old weapons of terror, they don’t work on AI.
    So this is the small problem.
    The big problem is what happens if the AI starts to manipulate the dictator himself.
    Taking power in a democracy is very complicated because democracy is complicated.
    Let’s say 5, 10 years in the future, and AI learns how to manipulate the US president.
    It still has to deal with a Senate filibuster.
    Just the fact that it knows how to manipulate the president doesn’t help it, with the Senate
    or the state governors or the Supreme Court, there are so many things to deal with.
    But in a place like Russia or North Korea, an AI that wants to take control, it needs
    to learn how to manipulate a single extremely paranoid and unselfaware individual.
    It’s quite easy.
    So if you think about what, you have all these Hollywoodian scenarios of AI taking control
    of the world.
    And usually, these AIs, they break out of some laboratory of a crazy scientist somewhere.
    The weakest links in the shield of humanity against AI is not the mad scientists.
    It’s the dictators.
    If the AI learns to manipulate a single paranoid individual, it can gain power in a dictatorial
    regime which perhaps have nuclear weapons and all these other capabilities.
    So AI is not all good news, even for human dictators.
    This is not making me feel better about the future, Nubal, I have to say.
    What are some of the things you think democracies can do, should do, to protect themselves in
    the world of AI?
    So one thing is to hold corporations responsible for the actions of their algorithms.
    Not for the actions of the users, but for the actions of their algorithms.
    If the Facebook algorithm is spreading a hate-filled conspiracy theory, Facebook should be liable
    for it.
    If Facebook says, “But we didn’t create the conspiracy theory, it’s some user who created
    it and we don’t want to censor them,” then we tell them, “We don’t ask you to censor
    them.
    We don’t ask you not to spread it.”
    This is not a new thing.
    You think about, I don’t know, the New York Times.
    So we expect the editor of the New York Times, when they decide what to put at the top of
    the front page, to make sure that they are not spreading unreliable information.
    If somebody comes to them with a conspiracy theory, they don’t tell that person, “Oh,
    you’re censored.
    You’re not allowed to say these things.”
    They say, “Okay, but there is not enough evidence to support it, so with all due respect,
    you’re free to go on saying this, but we are not putting it on the front page of the New
    York Times.”
    And it should be the same with Facebook and with Twitter.
    And they tell us, “But how can we know whether something is reliable or not?”
    Well, this is your job.
    If you run a media company, your job is not just to pursue user engagement, but to act
    responsibly to develop mechanisms to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable
    information and only to spread what you have good reason to think is reliable information.
    It has been done before.
    You are not the first people in history who have this responsibility to tell the difference
    between reliable and unreliable information.
    It’s been done before by newspaper editors, by scientists, by judges.
    So you can learn from their experience.
    And if you are unable to do it, you are in the wrong line of business.
    So that’s one thing.
    Hold them responsible for the actions of their algorithms.
    The other thing is to ban the bots from the conversations.
    AI should not take part in human conversations unless it identifies as an AI.
    We can imagine democracy as a group of people standing in a circle and talking with each
    other.
    And suddenly a group of robots enter the circle and start talking very loudly and with a lot
    of passion.
    And you don’t know who are the robots and who are the humans.
    This is what is happening right now all over the world.
    And this is why the conversation is collapsing.
    And there is a simple antidote.
    The robots are not welcome into the circle of conversation unless they identify as bots.
    There is a place, a room, let’s say for an AI doctor that gives me advice about medicine
    on condition that it identifies itself, I’m an AI.
    Similarly, if you go on Twitter and you see that a certain story goes viral, there is a
    lot of traffic there.
    You also become interested, oh, what is this new story everybody’s talking about?
    Who is everybody?
    If this story is actually being pushed by bots, then it’s not humans.
    They shouldn’t be in the conversation.
    Again, deciding what are the most important topics of the day.
    This is an extremely, extremely important issue in a democracy, in any human society.
    Bots should not have this ability, this right to determine to us what is the trending now
    stories in the conversation.
    And again, if the tech giants tell us, oh, but this infringes freedom of speech, it doesn’t.
    Because bots don’t have freedom of speech.
    Freedom of speech is a human right which would be reserved for humans, not for bots.
    For me, the most important political question has always been, how do we build institutions?
    How do we build information networks that are wiser than we are?
    Clearly in principle, that can be done.
    Do you think we have the capacity to do that?
    Yes, because we’ve done it many times through history.
    And I like the fact that you focus on institutions.
    Because again and again throughout history, the conclusion was that the answer will not
    come from technology by itself.
    The answer will not come from some genius individuals, from some charismatic leader.
    You need good institutions.
    And again, it’s boring.
    We tend to focus on our attention on these kind of charismatic leaders that they will
    bring us the answer.
    And institutions are these big bureaucratic structures that we find it difficult to connect
    with.
    But the answer comes from them.
    And if you think about something like the sewage system, it’s not heroic, but it saves
    our life every day.
    In big cities, throughout history, you always had this issue of epidemics.
    Lots of people together with all their garbage and all their sewage, this is paradise for
    germs.
    And throughout history, you constantly had to bring new blood from the villages because
    the population of the city was always in decline.
    People were dying in droves.
    And a turning point, one turning point, came in the middle of the 19th century when there
    was a cholera epidemic in London.
    And hundreds of people were dying of cholera.
    And you had a bureaucratically-minded doctor, John Snow, who tried to understand what is
    happening, the different theories about what is causing cholera.
    And the main theory was that something was bad in the air.
    But John Snow suspected the water.
    And he started making these long-boring lists of all the people who contracted cholera in
    London, and where did they get the drinking water from?
    And through these long-boring lists, he pinpointed the epicenter of the cholera outbreak to a
    single pump in, I think it was Broad Street in Soho in London.
    And it was later discovered that somebody dug this well about one meter away from a
    cesspit full of sewage.
    And the sewage water just sipped into the drinking water.
    And this caused the cholera outbreak.
    And this was one of the main milestones in the idea of developing a modern sewage system.
    And the modern sewage system, among other things—again, it’s a bureaucracy—and it demands that
    you fill forms.
    If you build a cesspit or dig a well today in London, you need to fill so many forms to
    make sure that there is enough distance between the cesspit and the drinking water well.
    And for me, when people talk about the deep state, this is the deep state.
    The deep state of the sewage system that runs under our houses and streets and towns and
    takes away our waste—you know, you go to the toilet, you do what you do, you flush
    the water.
    Where does it go?
    It goes into the deep state.
    And this deep, subterranean state of all these pipes and whatever, it takes our waste and
    very carefully separates it from the drinking water so that we don’t get cholera.
    And you don’t see many kind of TV dramas about the sewage system and about the people
    who manage it.
    If there is a leakage somewhere, some bureaucrat needs to send the plumbers and pay them.
    And this is what makes modern life possible.
    Without this, you would not have New York and you would not have London or any of the
    other big cities.
    And we figured it out in the 19th century with sewage and I hope that we could also
    figure it out in the 21st century with algorithms.
    This book really gave me a lot to think about.
    I’m still thinking about it.
    And I think everyone should read it for themselves.
    Once again, it’s called Nexus, a Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age
    to AI.
    You’ve all know a Harari.
    This was a pleasure.
    Thank you.
    Thanks.
    All right, well, as you know, I really love that conversation.
    I hope you did too.
    You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
    I read all those emails and keep them coming.
    And as always, please rate, review, subscribe.
    That stuff really helps the show.
    This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just,
    engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Anouk Dousseau, and Alex O’Vrington wrote
    our theme music.
    Special thanks this week to Matthew Heffron, Chris Shirtleff, and Shira Tarlo.
    New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays.
    Listen and subscribe.
    Rate, review, rinse, repeat.
    The show is part of Vox, support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
    Visit vox.com/members to sign up.
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    Humans are good learners and teachers, constantly gathering information, archiving, and sharing knowledge. So why, after building the most sophisticated information technology in history, are we on the verge of destroying ourselves? We know more than ever before. But are we any wiser? Bestselling author of Sapiens and historian Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so.

    This week Sean Illing talks with Harari, author of a mind-bending new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, about how the information systems that shape our world often sow the seeds of destruction, and why the current AI revolution is just the beginning of a brand-new evolutionary process that might leave us all behind.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

    Guest: Yuval Noah Harari (@harari_yuval)

    Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

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  • Why cynicism is bad for you

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    We all know someone.
    Maybe it’s a friend, a coworker, a family member,
    who always manages to be the voice of doom.
    The person who always knows
    that something is pointless or won’t succeed or can’t happen.
    If no one immediately springs to mind,
    I regret to inform you that it’s possible
    that you’re this person in someone else’s life.
    And if that’s the case,
    what I want to say to you is stop it.
    (gentle music)
    Stop being so damn cynical, it’s annoying,
    and it doesn’t help you or anyone else.
    That’s what I want to say, but it’s not so easy.
    Synicism is everywhere.
    In fact, you can make the case that cynicism
    is becoming a default setting for people in our society.
    But why?
    Why are so many of us cynical?
    And does it make any sense to be this way?
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
    (gentle music)
    (camera clicking)
    Today’s guest is Jamil Zaki.
    He’s a psychologist at Stanford
    and the author of Hope for Cynics.
    When I read his book,
    I was struck by how Zaki explores
    the consequences of cynicism,
    both for cynical individuals and cynical societies.
    And he explains why cynicism is so destructive to both.
    But he also punctures the conventional wisdom
    that says cynicism is a reasonable response to the world.
    It turns out that just isn’t true,
    though it’s very easy to believe it is.
    As someone who battles cynicism in my own life,
    this was a book I needed to read,
    and I invited Zaki on the show to talk about it.
    Jamil Zaki, welcome to the show.
    I’m thrilled to be here.
    I should say this one’s pretty personal for me.
    A lot of these episodes are personal for me,
    as anyone listening knows.
    I’ve battled cynicism most of my adult life, I still do.
    And if it’s possible for me to be less cynical,
    I want that, and I know plenty of people listening
    feel the same way.
    Anyway, that’s just part of my motivation
    for having you here, and I don’t know,
    it felt worth saying at the top, so there it is.
    – I appreciate that, and I wanna join you in that.
    I mean, in psychology, we say research is me-search,
    that you study things not just because they’re interesting,
    but because they have been personally meaningful
    and important to you in your life.
    And that’s certainly true of me.
    I started this project because I was drowning in cynicism
    and wanted to see what it was doing to me.
    And if I could overcome it in my own life,
    and the more I did research,
    the more I realized I was not alone,
    and that a lot of us are in that exact situation.
    – Have you always been that way?
    – For me, it’s really an early life origin story
    for my cynicism.
    I’m an only child and my parents are from different cultures
    and had a long and acrimonious divorce.
    So my sort of early life was,
    you wouldn’t really describe me
    as the most securely attached child, probably, and-
    – Yeah, I can relate.
    – Yeah, I should say my parents’ wonderful
    and loving people who were doing their very best.
    But just the chaos in that home and in our relationships
    left me with this embedded sense
    that it’s kind of not that easy to count on people
    and that in order for people to be there for me,
    I kind of had to be entertaining or interesting
    or smart in some way.
    And that led to really two very different experiences.
    One was an outward positivity.
    I ended up studying kindness and empathy
    and all these good features of human nature.
    And I think of myself as hopefully
    a relatively friendly person.
    So on the outside, I sort of projected
    this anti-cynicism, I suppose.
    But internally, I did doubt people a lot.
    Suspicion comes more naturally to me than trust.
    And so there’s been, for as long as I can remember,
    this split between what I’m trying to give to people
    on the one hand and what I expect of them on the other hand.
    And I’m not alone here.
    Research suggests that people
    who are insecurely attached in early childhood
    do have a harder time trusting friends,
    relationship partners, family.
    – Yeah, that can relate to a lot of that.
    Well, I think everyone listening will have a vague idea
    of what it means to be cynical.
    I think we all certainly know
    what a cynical person looks and sounds like.
    But what’s a more precise way of thinking about cynicism?
    Give me a proper definition.
    – Really important question.
    And especially for your listeners,
    I think it’s important to separate ancient cynicism
    from modern cynicism.
    So when I talk about cynicism and when psychologists do,
    we are not talking about the philosophical school
    led by Antisthenes and Diogenes,
    but rather about a general theory
    that people have about humanity.
    The idea that overall and at our core,
    people are selfish, greedy and dishonest.
    Now that’s not to say that a cynical person would be shocked
    if they witnessed somebody donating to charity
    or helping a stranger, right?
    But they might question the person’s motives.
    They might say, ah, they’re probably in it for a tax break
    or maybe they’re trying to look good.
    Cynicism is not a theory about human action.
    It’s a theory about human motives
    that ultimately we are self-interested beings.
    And because of that,
    we can’t be trusted to truly have
    each other’s best interests in mind.
    – And the worst and best part about that approach
    is how unfalsifiable it is, right?
    I mean, how can you disprove
    or prove someone’s motivations?
    It’s purely a choice to believe that.
    – And because it’s unfalsifiable and ineffable in a way,
    you know, you’re looking for mens rea,
    you’re looking for the inside of somebody else’s mind,
    which is, you know, by definition inaccessible.
    It means that cynical people and here I don’t,
    I’m not trying to name call, I’m including myself,
    can upload evidence in asymmetric ways.
    We can discount and explain away people’s kindness.
    And then when people act in ways
    that are selfish or greedy or dishonest,
    have an aha moment where we say,
    you’ve now revealed your true colors.
    And that’s what you see in the psychology of cynicism
    that really this sort of like a starting premise
    that people have that changes or filters
    the way that they take in evidence about other people
    leading to vast amounts of confirmation bias.
    – So how do you know you’re a cynic
    and not just what we might call an old fashioned realist?
    – This is a great question.
    And one that, you know, a lot of people
    since I’ve started working on this topic, right?
    To me or tell me, you know, you are calling us cynics
    but we’re realists.
    Cynicism is really just understanding
    what people are really like.
    I think it was George Bernard Shaw
    who said the characteristic of accurate observation
    is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it,
    right?
    So there’s an old stereo.
    I mean, it’s clever.
    I have to give it to him.
    There’s this stereotype that cynicism is the same as realism.
    In fact, even non-cynics believe this.
    If you survey people and describe a cynic
    and a non-cynic to them and say, who’s smarter?
    70% of people think that cynics are smarter
    and 85% of them think that cynics are socially smarter
    that they’ll pick up on who’s lying
    versus telling the truth, for instance.
    The fact is that we’re wrong on both counts.
    Cynics actually turn out to do less well
    on cognitive tests than non-cynics
    and have a harder time picking out liars from truth tellers.
    And that I think points to a disjunction
    between what we think realism is and what it actually is.
    That was actually something that surprised me a little
    in the book and maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me.
    Maybe it surprised me because I’m riddled
    with all these biases that you’re talking about.
    But I mean, speaking of Georges,
    there’s another George you quote in the book on this point.
    It’s George Carlin.
    And you had that great line, scratch any cynic
    and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.
    Now that’s funny, obviously, and clever,
    but it’s wrong, I guess.
    And it was useful to see you dispel that in the book.
    There are so many myths that we carry around about cynicism.
    And I think that we’ve in a way glamorized it
    in our culture as realism,
    as a sort of hard fought wisdom.
    It feels hard earned.
    It feels as though you’ve gained it from experience.
    There’s this sense that if you are contemptuous,
    if you are judgmental, it’s because you’ve been here before.
    But again, I wanna return to this distinction
    between cynical thinking and realism
    because it turns out that again,
    if we have a blanket assumption about people,
    it turns out that we’re not being very realistic about them
    because we take in information in biased ways
    and we draw biased conclusions.
    That’s why cynics are bad at detecting liars
    because they assume liars are everywhere.
    So stop actually paying attention to cues
    that could help them understand who they can trust
    and who they can’t.
    In the book, I talk about skepticism
    as an alternative to cynicism.
    And again, I’m here, I’m not talking about
    the ancient philosophical school of skepticism,
    but a modern psychological definition,
    which is a hunger for evidence,
    a desire to think not like a lawyer, but like a scientist.
    And it turns out that if anything is realistic,
    in my opinion, it’s skepticism.
    It’s trying to dispense with preconceived ideas
    about what people are like and let the evidence come to us.
    – If you put a gun to my head and ask me to tell you
    the difference between skepticism and cynicism,
    I’m not sure I could do it.
    I think I use those words interchangeably
    or at least I have, but maybe it would be helpful
    to draw that distinction out a little bit.
    What is the difference between those two things?
    – It’s super important.
    And I think a lot of people use the terms interchangeably.
    And I think we should stop
    because they are not just different from one another,
    but one can be used to fight the other.
    So if cynicism is a theory,
    what theories do is they structure
    our perception of the world
    and often bias our perception of the world.
    If you think that things are a certain way,
    you will pay lots of attention to any information
    that accords with that perspective
    and ignore or discount evidence that doesn’t.
    So you end up through your worldview
    finding confirmation for it
    and doubling, tripling, quadrupling down.
    Skepticism really doesn’t allow for that.
    A true skeptic is open to evidence
    whether or not that evidence matches their preconceived ideas
    and they’re willing in fact to update
    even relatively basic assumptions that they have
    if the evidence comes in on the other side.
    In my corner of the world, we talk about Bayesians,
    people who update their prior beliefs
    based on new information.
    And I think of skeptics as more like Bayesians
    as actually being willing to learn
    even when that learning is uncomfortable
    and clashes with what they thought before.
    Do we know what makes people cynical?
    Is it a personality thing?
    Is it a genetic thing?
    Is it a neurochemical thing?
    Do any of us choose to be cynical in any meaningful sense?
    Well, cynicism is relatively stable across people’s lives
    in the absence of any intervention, right?
    So if you’re cynical, now it’s likely
    that you’ll stay that way
    if you don’t do anything about it.
    There is some heritable components to cynicism.
    So identical twins are slightly closer in their cynicism
    than fraternal twins, for instance.
    But the genetic and heritable component seems pretty small.
    So then there’s the other fascinating thing you ask,
    do we choose cynicism?
    I don’t know, Sean, if we choose it
    or if it chooses us based on our experiences.
    And I guess I would describe those experiences
    at a couple of different levels.
    The first is our personal experiences,
    especially our negative personal experiences,
    the disappointments that George Carlin was talking about.
    But there’s a second level here as well,
    which is the structures around us.
    So environments that are really competitive, for instance,
    are more likely to increase people’s cynicism
    and environments that are cooperative
    tend to decrease cynicism.
    And that’s a level of flexibility that I think is faster.
    Our childhoods affect us for many years,
    but your situational cynicism can change very quickly.
    If you are at a high stakes poker table,
    there’s absolutely no reason
    for you to trust the people around you.
    But if you’re among a set of neighbors
    that you have longstanding, warm relationships with,
    there’s lots of reasons to trust.
    – Yeah, I mean, I think the reason I’m asking
    what makes us cynical is I have this experience
    of many experiences of thinking cynically
    or speaking cynically, and there’s a part of me
    in real time that knows it’s unhelpful
    that doesn’t want to think that way or speak that way.
    And yet I still do it.
    And so when that happens enough, you start to wonder,
    well, shit, is this just my constitution?
    Is this just my brain?
    Or do I have freedom to do otherwise?
    Can I actually change?
    And I think the answer has to be yes, right?
    I mean, it just has to be.
    You wouldn’t write the book if it wasn’t yes.
    – Yes, I mean, the answer is yes.
    I do want to just commend your introspection here, Shawn.
    You know, I feel like you’re a 2.0 level cynic.
    I think that the first–
    – That’s the nicest thing
    anyone has ever said to me on the show.
    Thank you.
    – What, I mean, the first level is
    being cynical and believing your cynicism, right?
    That’s the kind of more sneering,
    even sometimes superior attitude that a cynic might have
    where they’re making fun of gullible rubs
    who don’t think everybody is on the take.
    The second level is to say, wait a minute,
    this is kind of hurting me.
    And it does.
    I mean, cynicism is terrible for our health
    and relationships and communities.
    And to say, well, can I do something about it?
    And, but to get to your question, yeah, the answer is yes.
    In fact, I would say that the central
    and most profound insight from the last 100 years
    of neuroscience and psychology
    is that people change more than we realized
    and more than psychologists and neuroscientists
    realize we change at a physiological level,
    at the level of our intelligence and our personalities.
    And we can change on purpose too.
    The thing is that people don’t generally make long-term attempts
    to change their cynicism on its own.
    What they typically do is they feel depressed
    and anxious and lonely,
    in part because of their cynical attitudes.
    And they go, for instance, to therapy
    to deal with those issues.
    But it turns out that if you look under the hood
    of, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy,
    a lot of it is a treatment for our cynical views
    about ourselves and about each other.
    I have always been interested
    in the relationship between beliefs and behavior.
    You see this a lot in the debates
    between atheists and religious people
    where atheists obsess over empirical truth claims
    in a way that blinds them to the power of belief
    and how believing in something
    can create a kind of motive force
    that is its own justification.
    And that seems relevant to this conversation
    about cynicism.
    And you may have alluded to this a minute ago,
    but you wrote something in the book.
    You said, “Cynics land in a negative feedback loop.
    Their assumptions limit their opportunities,
    which darken their assumptions even further.”
    What is the point you’re trying to make there?
    I think you summed it up beautifully.
    Our beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies
    because they structure how we interact with the world
    and what we do in the world
    structures how it responds to us.
    In the case of cynicism,
    if you believe that people are untrustworthy,
    you will treat them that way.
    And there’s lots of evidence
    that generally more cynical people
    compared to less cynical people
    do things like micromanage their friends and family
    and monitor people, spy on them in various ways
    because they’re trying to defend themselves
    against a selfish world.
    I call these preemptive strikes.
    But more often than not,
    in an attempt to keep ourselves safe,
    we actually just offend other people
    and even harm them.
    And people are a deeply reciprocal species.
    So if we treat people as though they are selfish,
    two things happen.
    One, they become cynical of us.
    They don’t trust us
    and they’re less likely to connect deeply with us.
    But two, we bring out the worst in them.
    There’s evidence that when people mistrust others
    in economic games and in personal relationships,
    the people that they don’t trust
    actually are more likely to betray them
    because they feel the relationship is already broken.
    So cynics often end up treating people poorly,
    being treated poorly,
    and then confirming that they were right
    about people all along.
    It’s this kind of toxic cycle of assumption,
    confirmation, and then reinforcement.
    – So it’s actually true
    that people tend to become what we think they are.
    That always seemed like a bit of a cliche,
    but there’s actually a real profound truth in that.
    – Oh yeah, and I think this is something that we neglect a lot.
    In fact, my friend and the great psychologist,
    Vanessa Bonds at Cornell has a bunch of work
    on what she calls influence neglect,
    that people A, affect each other
    and affect who other people become
    in really important ways,
    and B, we have no idea that we’re doing that.
    So there’s this sense that we assume
    that the way that somebody acts around us
    reflects who they really are.
    We underestimate how much the situation affects them,
    and then we underestimate as well
    how much we are a part of that situation.
    And I think we should own or can own more often,
    and with more intentionality,
    how much power we have in shaping the people around us
    and try to use that power in a positive way
    instead of a cynical one.
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    – So cynicism is connected to certain beliefs,
    certain assumptions we make about the world.
    But I think it’s also true that we’re not really the authors
    of our beliefs and values and the way we think we are.
    These things are largely products
    of our culture and environment,
    which is a long way of asking.
    Do you think our culture, and by our, I mean,
    American culture, ’cause that’s where we are,
    do you think our culture engineers cynicism?
    – I do, and I think it’s doing so more now than it used to.
    – What do you mean?
    – Well, cynicism is on the rise.
    In 1972, about half of Americans believed
    most people can be trusted.
    And by 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans.
    We’re experiencing a massive drop in faith in one another
    and in our institutions.
    And with that comes a rise in cynicism.
    So I think not only are we engineering cynics,
    but we’re doing so more efficiently now
    than we were in the past.
    – I’ve never really liked theories of human nature
    because often the embedded assumption there is that
    there’s this fixed thing called human nature.
    And that that is what we are always and everywhere.
    And I tend to think we’re a lot more plastic than that.
    So when I see those statements that you have in the book
    on the, you know, the arduous cynic tests, you know,
    like, do you agree that most people dislike helping others?
    Do you agree most people are honest,
    chiefly through the fear of getting caught?
    You know, that kind of thing.
    I’d probably circle disagree,
    but I also think a lot of people do behave that way,
    but it’s not because of some inherent wickedness.
    I think it’s because we’ve built a world
    that breeds these beliefs and behaviors.
    And I mean, I guess it’s also true
    that some people just suck,
    but you get the point I’m making.
    – Of course, yeah.
    And I think that I too find general questions
    about human goodness or badness unanswerable,
    but I do think that it matters when our answers change
    for all the reasons that we’re talking about, right?
    I mean, we are less and less discounting people’s
    negative actions in the way that you just did.
    You just applied a very generous framework.
    You said, well, when somebody does harm,
    when they act in a way that I don’t like,
    there’s so many reasons that could be.
    It’s not because they’re awful to their core,
    but I do think that there are situations
    and cultural structures that flatten
    our representations of each other
    and make us more likely to use black and white thinking
    really unequal places in times,
    economically unequal places in times,
    tend to lead to less trust
    and more of this black and white thinking.
    And I think our media too has been driving
    a really two dimensional version of humanity
    and making people more mistrustful
    and suspicious of one another.
    – That relationship you just mentioned
    between high levels of inequality
    and higher rates of cynicism
    was a little surprising to me too,
    but I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising to me
    because of that, the sort of competitive dog eat dog
    individualistic culture that breeds, right?
    I mean, you should expect more people to be more cynical
    in that kind of world.
    – I did some research on the Gilded Age for the book
    and it’s interesting to see how people with great wealth
    defended inequality at that time
    using the premises and the ideals of social Darwinism.
    The idea was, hey, it’s okay for robber barons
    to control vast amounts of resources
    because people are red in tooth and claw
    just like every other animal.
    We are born to fight one another
    and to look out only for our personal interests.
    And so it’s really silly and naive
    to even try to fight that at all.
    So we should have an absolutely free
    and unfettered market where a few people can dominate.
    It’s almost, is a morality
    in some very unequal cultures or settings
    that people are that way.
    You know, this idea of Homo economicus
    has been really leveraged to both justify
    and to increase inequality over time.
    – Are Americans unusually cynical?
    How does our cynicism level stack up against peer nations?
    – We’re relatively in the middle of the pack there.
    So again, inequality is a great metric.
    There are a few other things that correlate
    with cynicism across countries,
    but really if you were to use one metric
    as a predictor of cynicism,
    you would want inequality.
    So, and there are of course nations
    that are much more unequal than the US
    and those are also much more mistrustful.
    A nation like Brazil for instance, right?
    So if a third of Americans believe
    that most people can be trusted,
    the same question when asked in Brazil,
    I believe you get something around 6% of people
    answering affirmatively that most people can be trusted.
    And there are other very unequal nations
    with similar single digit responses to that question.
    – You may not know this off the top of your head,
    but what’s the least cynical society that you know of?
    And why?
    – That’s actually, it’s a really interesting question.
    I think it’s the same as these sort of
    global happiness surveys.
    You see a lot of the Nordic countries coming in
    as very trusting and who knows why?
    I mean, they’re economically equal,
    strong social safety net,
    also relatively sometimes culturally more homogenous.
    So there could be an in-group sort of trust there as well,
    but that’s generally similar to happiness.
    You see a lot of the top ranking countries pooling
    in that section of the world.
    – I should ask, how do we make these determinations
    about cynicism levels in a society?
    Is it just self-reported surveys?
    Is it that simple?
    Or is there more sophisticated techniques
    for making these judgments about how cynical
    either individuals or societies are?
    – In psychology, many of us still think
    that the best way to find out about people
    is to ask them about themselves.
    And there are questionnaires that any of your listeners
    can take to assess their cynicism.
    The most famous is what’s known as
    the Cook Medley Hostility Scale.
    It was developed in the 1950s and it asks people questions
    like do you agree or disagree that most people
    are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught?
    Or that people generally don’t like helping each other?
    And I know that these questions
    can seem really broad in general,
    but the fact is that they do track a bunch of outcomes
    in people’s behavior and in their lives.
    If you wanna go further though,
    you can also test people’s at least levels of trust
    in a bunch of different ways.
    One that’s very famous is an economic game
    known as the trust game where one person decides
    how much money they want to send to an internet stranger,
    an anonymous person who they’ll never meet,
    whatever they send is tripled.
    And then the second player can choose
    how much of that money they want to send back to the first.
    So both people can do better economically
    if the first one trusts and the second one is trustworthy.
    And so you can assess somebody’s willingness
    to be vulnerable, their belief,
    their faith in that other person.
    And I suppose in people,
    because this is a random representative of the species,
    you can assess their trust by how much they choose to send.
    Disease is a strong word,
    but is it helpful to think of cynicism
    as a psychological disease or is that too strong?
    It certainly has some qualities
    that we would associate with disease.
    It harms our physical health.
    Cynics suffer from more heart disease.
    They’re more likely to die earlier than non-cynics.
    So to the extent that disease is life negative,
    that fits the bill.
    And it also comes to us unbidden,
    just like a virus might.
    We catch it from our environment
    and we often experience it unwillingly.
    At least you and I do, Sean.
    We yearn to get rid of it,
    which is another thing that many people who are sick want.
    I don’t wanna sort of stretch the metaphor too far,
    but I think that those aspects of illness
    are notable and shared with a cynical worldview.
    I guess there are several variables at play here,
    but what’s the causal mechanism here?
    Why do cynical people live shorter lives?
    Why do they have more heart problems?
    Is it as simple as happy, hopeful people
    or healthier, less stressed out people
    and therefore they live longer?
    Yes, and I think there’s a mechanism here that matters,
    which is social contact.
    There’s decades of science now that demonstrate
    that one of the most nourishing things for us psychologically
    is connection to other people.
    So folks who feel connected,
    who feel like they have community,
    like they can depend on others,
    experience much less stress physiologically,
    they sleep better, their cellular aging is slower
    than people who feel lonely.
    And cynical people who can’t trust others
    or feel that they can’t,
    who are unwilling to be vulnerable and open up,
    it’s almost like they can’t metabolize
    the calories of social life.
    And so they end up psychologically malnourished,
    which is toxic at many different levels.
    So again, if social contact is salutary,
    if it helps us retain our health in all these ways,
    then we need to allow ourselves to be accessible
    in order for that to work and cynics just don’t.
    And it’s a really tragic thing
    because I think like you and I,
    a lot of cynics don’t want to feel this way,
    but we experience life as more dangerous
    if you think that people are untrustworthy
    and think, “Wow, gosh, I need to stay safe.
    I need to not take a chance on people.”
    But actually by not taking chances on people,
    we are taking larger long-term risks with our wellbeing
    and missing out on lots of opportunities.
    The problem is that those missed opportunities are invisible,
    whereas the betrayals that we’ve suffered in the past
    are highly visible and palpable.
    And so again, we might learn too well from disappointment
    and not well enough for missed opportunities.
    – We’re also in the midst of this loneliness epidemic,
    which you write about in the book.
    I mean, that does not portend well for our future
    on this front, does it?
    – No, I don’t think it does.
    And we have research at Stanford
    that finds that cynical perceptions
    might contribute to loneliness.
    So we asked thousands of students on campus
    two types of questions,
    one about themselves and one about their average peer.
    So for instance, how empathic are you
    and how empathic do you think the average Stanford student is?
    How much do you like helping people who are struggling
    and how much do you think the average Stanford student does?
    And over and over again, we discovered two Stanford’s.
    One was made up of real undergraduates
    who are extraordinarily friendly, warm, and compassionate.
    And the other one was made up of the students
    in students’ imagination.
    Students believed that their average peer
    was more prickly and callous
    and disinterested in connection than they really were.
    That’s a false perception, but it changed.
    As we’re talking about, Sean,
    these beliefs changed people’s actions.
    Students who believed that their average peer
    was less friendly were less likely to open up,
    confide in new acquaintances,
    strike up conversations with strangers,
    and that left them less connected over the long term.
    So here again, we see a direct kind of self-fulfilling prophecy
    between the world that we see,
    the people that we imagine around us,
    and then the lives that we build in those communities.
    – So what’s true here, right?
    So these students said they were empathetic
    and wanted connection, but their peers didn’t.
    So are they misjudging or misreporting themselves
    or their friends?
    Who’s wrong about whom?
    Or is everybody wrong about everybody?
    This is, of course, a huge and great question.
    Are people enhancing their perception of themselves?
    Are they unfairly negative
    in their perceptions of others or both?
    It’s hard to know,
    but we did conduct some follow-up experiments at Stanford
    where we asked people to have conversations.
    We brought them together into conversations with strangers
    who were also undergraduates at the university,
    and we asked them,
    what do you think this conversation will be like?
    How empathic do you think this person
    who you have never met will be?
    How kind, how open-minded, et cetera?
    And then we had them actually go through the conversations
    and report back.
    And what we found is that people underestimated each other
    such that they reported having been wrong
    about the other person, if that makes sense.
    They thought they underestimated
    how empathic the person would be.
    And after the conversation, in essence, told us,
    well, shoot, I was wrong about that.
    That person was awesome.
    Many of them actually became friends afterwards.
    So that, to us, indicates that a good chunk
    of what’s going on here
    is actually underestimates of other people.
    And there’s other evidence for this as well.
    In the book, I talk about an experiment
    that was conducted in Toronto
    where people left wallets all around the city
    that had some money inside them and an ID
    so that if a good Samaritan wanted to return them,
    they could.
    People in Toronto were surveyed
    and asked what percentage of these wallets
    do you think will come back?
    And the average response was 25%.
    And in fact, 80% of them came back.
    Likewise, in trust games, people vastly underestimate
    how much money people will return.
    There’s dozens of examples like this
    where, yes, we might be self-enhancing as well,
    but there’s a lot of evidence that we are in concrete ways
    underestimating the warmth, kindness,
    and open-mindedness of other people.
    – So you’re telling me hell, in fact, isn’t other people?
    – That’s not true.
    – Sartre was wrong.
    I think hell is what we think people are
    more than it’s what they actually are.
    And this is one place where I think the science
    of cynicism diving into this world
    actually made me far less cynical
    because I realized that a lot of our cynical perceptions
    are just wrong and that there is enormous opportunity
    at so many levels in terms of our health, relationships,
    social movements, civic life.
    There are so many opportunities for us to improve things
    if we can simply awaken to who other people really are
    and just notice more effectively
    as opposed to relying on our cynical assumptions
    as powerful as they may be.
    – So do you find evidence for that?
    Do you find that when people’s negative expectations
    of the world collide with reality
    and are proven incorrect, do they learn from that?
    Do they change and become less cynical
    or do we tend to kind of fall back into our default mode?
    – It depends on how well we are willing to learn
    and how closely we are willing to pay attention
    to those experiences.
    Again, I wanna go back to one of the domains
    in which long-term change is most studied,
    which is cognitive behavioral therapy, right?
    CBT often applies skepticism as an antidote to cynicism.
    A person with social anxiety will go to therapy
    and say, “I think all my friends hate me.”
    And the therapist won’t say, “Tell me about your mother.”
    They’ll say, “Wait a minute, let’s interrogate that claim.”
    What evidence do you have that everybody hates you?
    Has people told you they hate you?
    Has anybody ever said they liked you?
    And they force the person to do a fair
    and at least as well as they can unbiased accounting
    of the evidence that they have.
    Typically, when we suffer from depression and anxiety,
    we don’t have evidence to back up our black and white claims.
    So then a therapist will say,
    “Okay, we’ll go get some evidence.
    Treat your life a little bit more like an experiment.”
    This is actually in CBT called behavioral experiments.
    Ask 10 people to go to the movies with you,
    10 people who you know.
    If all 10 of them say no and give no reasons why,
    maybe they really do hate you. (laughs)
    But if anybody says yes,
    try and keep up with that information.
    Try to really internalize that information.
    And this is one of the most successful forms of therapy
    for depression and anxiety.
    And again, I think that’s because it overwrites
    some of our assumptions through careful attention to
    and collection of better data.
    – Yeah, I actually started therapy recently myself
    and one of the strategies my therapist recommended was,
    you know, when something goes wrong
    and the first instinct of my mind is to say,
    “Oh, yeah, well, here’s more evidence
    of the global conspiracy to fuck up Sean’s day,” right?
    Everything’s like, you know,
    which is so narcissistic and deluded, right?
    But that’s where your mind can go
    and you just start getting angry at everyone and everything
    to just pause, take a beat and just reframe that story
    just a little bit so that you’re not at the center
    of the cosmos and everyone’s not out to get you.
    And it actually does work.
    It actually does work.
    – Oh man, I mean, when I’m in a bad mood
    or burnt out or gloomy, I’ll go ahead
    and take the weather personally, you know?
    – Yeah.
    – The amount that we can extrapolate and overclaim
    that the world is out to get us is just astonishing.
    And it’s really just a deeply human response,
    but we don’t have to swallow it whole.
    We can choose to be more interrogative.
    We can choose to be more skeptical.
    And I do think it has long-term impacts.
    I mean, I think that this is something that we can apply
    in our own ways to our cynical thinking.
    I did something because I tend to be more introverted
    than I sometimes want to be.
    I tend to shy away from conversations,
    probably miss a lot of opportunities because of that.
    So as an experiment of my own,
    did this thing I call encounter counting,
    where on a trip that I took about a year ago,
    I committed to trying to talk with every person
    where there seemed to be an opportunity
    for a conversation, which was so cringe.
    I mean, I was terrified.
    I was sure that these would be awkward
    and horrible conversations,
    but I committed not just to trying them,
    but to making predictions about what they would be like.
    And then writing down, really like taking careful accounting
    of what they were actually like.
    And I found every single time
    that conversations with strangers exceeded my expectation.
    And now that could happen to any of us,
    but we allow those positive experiences too often
    to just float into the landfill of lost memories.
    And we remember with exquisite detail,
    the conversations that went poorly,
    even if they’re in the minority.
    So by forcing myself to fully account
    for all of my social experiences
    over this kind of weekend long period,
    I was able to rebalance my sense of,
    well, how often do these things go well
    and how often do they go poorly?
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    (upbeat music)
    Something else that I found interesting in your book
    was the claim that cynicism isn’t just
    a psychological plague or illness.
    It’s also a political problem.
    You write that cynicism is not a radical worldview.
    It’s a tool of the status quo.
    Why do you think of cynicism as a tool of the status quo?
    I think this is something that runs countered
    to a lot of people’s stereotypes yet again.
    And this is where I think it’s just so valuable
    to compare what we think of cynicism to the reality.
    Lots of people have told me,
    man, you’re writing a book about hope
    that is so privileged.
    Of course you, as a professor at a fancy university,
    you can afford to have hope and look on the bright side.
    You’re ignoring real problems.
    You’re engaged in toxic positivity.
    And the idea here is that cynicism is almost moral
    that cynics point out problems
    and therefore they are change makers.
    And the first half of that equation is right.
    I mean, cynics are very aware of major social problems
    as we all should be.
    But the second half is incorrect.
    It turns out that cynics view our social problems
    as a reflection of who we really are.
    And if you think that a broken system
    in whatever way you think it’s broken
    reflects our broken nature,
    then there’s really nothing you can do about it.
    Cynics turn out to take part less in civic life.
    They’re less likely to vote,
    protest, sign petitions, you name it.
    And so really cynicism does turn out to be very useful
    for the status quo
    because it’s almost a sort of dark complacency.
    If you don’t think things can change for the better,
    you don’t try.
    And people who are happy with how things are
    don’t need to contend with you,
    even if you disagree with them.
    Hope by contrast, this belief that things could improve
    is part of the psychological cocktail
    that drives activists and drives social change.
    – It’s interesting that in this whole conversation,
    the word optimism hasn’t come up.
    And optimism isn’t in your book title,
    but the word hope is,
    and that’s pretty close to optimism.
    – So the mission of optimism is by design for me?
    – Why?
    – Well, I actually think hope and optimism
    are more different than most of us realize.
    – Oh, how so?
    – Well, optimism, as psychologists understand it,
    is the expectation that the future will turn out well.
    And that’s a very healthy and positive feeling
    so long as you’re right.
    But there’s two problems with it.
    One, if you think that things
    are just going to turn out well,
    you don’t have to do anything.
    Optimism can be somewhat complacent as an emotion.
    The second is that if things don’t turn out well,
    the disappointment is real and fierce.
    And in fact, I think that optimism can be a fragile sense.
    I think George Carlin might have better said,
    scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed optimist.
    Because if you think things are just gonna turn out groovy
    and they don’t,
    that can shatter your expectations very quickly.
    Hope is not the expectation that things will turn out well.
    It’s the belief that the future could turn out well.
    It’s a sensibility that involves a lot of uncertainty.
    And in that uncertainty, a couple of things happen.
    One, we are hardier.
    We know that nothing is guaranteed
    and we can bounce back
    if things don’t turn out the way that we want.
    Two, and probably more importantly,
    in hope and in the uncertainty of hope,
    there’s room for our actions to matter.
    So where optimism can be complacent,
    hope is fierce and practical and drives us to do.
    There’s all sorts of evidence that hope
    is especially powerful for people facing adversity,
    people with chronic illness,
    students in lower socioeconomic status schools
    and people in social movements like activists.
    So I think of hope as much more useful
    and much more robust.
    I try to encourage it much more than optimism.
    What’s your practical advice for people
    who are cynical or who have cynical instincts
    and want to overcome them?
    Where do you start?
    The first, I think we’ve covered pretty well.
    It’s a shift in our mindset
    to be skeptical of our cynicism,
    to fact check our cynical conclusions.
    And also, I would add to that,
    to be more aware of our power.
    In our lab, we taught people
    something called a reciprocity mindset.
    We said, “Hey, when you trust somebody,
    “you don’t just learn about them, you change them.”
    The same way that cynical, self-fulfilling prophecies
    bring out the worst in people,
    when you put faith in people, they know and they step up.
    This is actually true.
    This is something that economists call earned trust.
    But we found that when we taught people about earned trust,
    they were more willing to trust others.
    And when they trusted, other people became more trustworthy.
    So I think that mindset shifts that you can use
    include applying skepticism to your cynicism
    and then being aware of your influence.
    Then I think behavioral experiments that we can try
    include things like encounter counting,
    what I did include things from CBT.
    But another that I would recommend
    is just trying to take more leaps of faith on people.
    I think we’re too risk averse in our social lives.
    We focus too much on what could go wrong
    and not enough on the relationships we could build.
    I think that taking small and calculated chances
    on other people is a really powerful way
    of rebalancing our risk portfolio,
    opening ourselves up to other people
    and also giving them the gift
    of the chance to show us who they really are.
    I love that.
    And there is a kind of safety in cynicism.
    If you don’t trust people, you won’t get hurt.
    If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed.
    That’s all true.
    But the opportunity cost of living like that is so high,
    intolerably high without trust.
    There is no real love or friendship
    and without a belief that things can be better.
    There’s no chance of progress.
    That’s just sort of the arithmetic of life.
    Nothing risk, nothing gain, all that.
    And when you remind yourself of that,
    cynicism does seem a little stupid and unwise.
    So I think you’ve persuaded me of that.
    – Well, I’m glad and it might be unwise,
    but it’s again, it’s understandable.
    – What else are you trying to learn
    about all of this?
    Like what haven’t you figured out yet?
    Where’s the gray area of this research for you?
    What are the big lingering questions for you?
    – We’ve talked about CBT and about long-term change
    in experiences related to cynicism,
    like depression and anxiety,
    but there is no major clinical trial
    of an anti-cynicism intervention.
    And I really want that to happen.
    I’d like to take part in that.
    What would that entail?
    What would that look like?
    – At Stanford, we tried a miniature version of this.
    We just showed students the data about themselves.
    So there were two steps in what we did.
    One, we kind of ran an ad campaign
    where the target audience was Stanford undergraduates
    and the product was also Stanford undergraduates.
    We picked a certain number of experimental dorms
    and we plastered them with posters
    presenting real responses that students’ peers had given.
    So for instance, did you know that 95% of people
    on this campus say that they would like to help
    their peers who are struggling?
    85% of people here want to meet new students
    who they haven’t gotten to know yet.
    We also teamed up with this class called Frosh 101,
    which most first-year students take
    and gave students in those dorms
    a chance to guess what the data were
    and then we showed them what the data were
    and then we asked them,
    what are some examples that you’ve seen
    of friendly or supportive people at Stanford?
    All this sort of social psychological intervention
    that really just amounts to telling people the truth.
    I want to be abundantly clear about that.
    A lot of anti-synicism work
    is not pointing people only to good things.
    It’s telling them the truth.
    It’s giving them real data.
    And we found that students who were in those dorms,
    basically felt less cynical about their peers.
    They perceived them as more empathic and kinder.
    They took more social risks
    and they also made more friends over the long term.
    So I really think an anti-synicism intervention
    at a large scale would begin at least
    with giving people better information
    and then would follow on that
    with chances for them to act on that information.
    It would be like CBT for the world.
    Maybe that sounds grandiose,
    but I think that it’s ironic that we only turn
    to rigorous systematic thinking about our own lives
    when we’re suffering from depression and anxiety.
    I think that we could use that type of thinking
    in all manner of situation,
    whether we’re moving to a new town
    and trying to make new friends
    or try to reconnect with our uncle
    who posts too much on Facebook.
    There’s a lot of times, a lot of situations
    where those tools of rigorous skepticism
    could be so powerful.
    So maybe all of that and then dropping psilocybin
    and the water supply and then we’re all cooking.
    I’m kidding, Stanford professor, Jamil Zakhi,
    does not endorse that policy.
    Neither does Vox for that matter.
    I’m just kidding.
    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
    Couldn’t hurt, couldn’t hurt, Sean.
    (upbeat music)
    Once again, the book is called Hope for Cinex,
    the surprising science of human goodness.
    Jamil, Zakhi, thanks so much for doing this.
    It was a pleasure.
    This has been delightful.
    Thank you so much, Sean.
    (upbeat music)
    Okay, listeners, professor Zakhi has given you an assignment.
    Pick a cynical belief and put it to the test.
    If you think everyone hates you,
    ask 10 friends to the movies.
    That’s an example he gave, but it could be anything.
    Whatever it is you think sucks about people,
    makes you feel like you can’t rely on them
    or they don’t care about you.
    Design a small experiment to test it
    and then write down the response, see what you find.
    And if it’s different than what you expected,
    then, and this is the crucial part, go to your phone.
    Make a voicemail saying who you are,
    why you think you’re a cynic,
    and what you did to test that theory.
    Send it to us at thegrayarea@vox.com
    with a cynic test in the subject.
    And if it takes you six months to do that test, that’s fine.
    We’ll still be here.
    I’m hopeful, at least, about that.
    This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk,
    edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
    fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
    and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
    New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays,
    listen and subscribe.
    The show is part of VOX,
    support VOX’s journalism by joining
    our membership program today.
    Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    Support for The Gray Area comes from Mint Mobile.
    You can get three months of service
    for just 15 bucks a month by switching to Mint Mobile.
    And that includes high-speed 5G data
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    (upbeat music)

    There’s a certain glamor to cynicism. As a culture, we’ve turned cynicism into a symbol of hard-earned wisdom, assuming that those who are cynical are the only ones with the courage to tell us the truth and prepare us for an uncertain future. Psychologist Jamil Zaki challenges that assumption.

    In part one of The Gray Area’s new three-part series, “Reasons to be Cheerful,” Sean Illing asks Jamil Zaki about why cynicism is everywhere, especially if it makes no sense to be this way — and what we, as individuals, can do to challenge our own cynical tendencies.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

    Guest: Jamil Zaki (@zakijam) psychologist at Stanford University and author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness

    Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

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    Human beings have always chased after
    what we might call transcendence.
    We’re searching for some higher meaning,
    a way to connect with something beyond ourselves.
    Things like truth and beauty and yes, even the divine.
    For much of our history, religion, for better or worse,
    has been the locus of so much of this seeking.
    But the world, certainly the Western world,
    is becoming less religious.
    For a lot of humanist types,
    this has been something like a tragedy.
    The decline of religion meant that the language
    of spirituality also faded away
    because these things were bound up with each other.
    And a consequence of this has been a loss
    of the sense of the sacred in human life.
    But does it have to be that way?
    Can we still speak of the sacred
    in our modern secular world?
    And if we can, what does that look like?
    I’m Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area.
    My guest today is Jennifer Michael Hecht.
    She’s a poet and historian,
    which are two titles you don’t often see next to each other.
    But as we’ll talk about, she sees a lot of overlap
    between these disciplines.
    She’s written original poetry
    and has chronicled the histories of weighty ideas
    like doubt, the soul, and suicide.
    Jennifer’s book is called The Wonder Paradox,
    embracing the weirdness of existence
    and the poetry of our lives.
    In it, she tries to give new life
    to many things associated with religion,
    like prayer and ritual and sanctity.
    But instead, she grounds them in the non-religious world,
    the secular world.
    Jennifer’s readers have pegged her as an atheist
    and they’re not exactly wrong.
    But as she explained to me, it’s a bit more complicated.
    – I came to this book already,
    a sort of minor famous atheist.
    I had written a book called Doubt, A History,
    A History of Religious Doubt and Atheism
    all over the world throughout time, which came out in 2003.
    And I started to be invited all over the place
    to groups I didn’t know existed to talk about atheism.
    What was so fascinating about writing a history of atheism
    was that the people who were atheists
    didn’t just say, I’m an atheist.
    They came up with other ways of living,
    other ways of understanding what life is for
    and what meaning is.
    So I was already sort of on that track
    that I was talking about philosophical and historical
    things, but with an emotional component.
    And my audiences really gave rise to this new book
    by being sort of fascinated by the fact
    that there could be an atheist
    who was not rejecting ritual
    and who was not rejecting what I’ve come to call
    the poetry of life.
    But yeah, with this book, I’m really mostly saying to people,
    go ahead and do the rituals you’re already doing.
    We can be the interfaithless,
    which I made up sort of as a joke,
    but I couldn’t throw out because we believe in the inter.
    We believe in the connection between us.
    And we can all do some of the rituals that we feel like
    because we grew up with them.
    But I would say to add a poem
    because you need that moment of sort of graceful,
    introspection, a moment to just be quiet if nothing else,
    to just give them the tiniest bit more meaning
    by thinking about it that way.
    – I definitely want to get into all that,
    but can I ask a little bit more about you?
    – Yeah, sure.
    – I’m very fascinated by your background.
    You’re both a historian, as you were just describing.
    And you’re also a poet.
    How does that happen?
    I don’t often see historian and poet in the same bio.
    – I suppose there’s a bunch of ways to tell the story,
    but the main thing is that my father
    as a first generation college goer
    somewhat bumbled into a PhD in physics
    and really just suggesting that his three children
    also become professors.
    So I went to Columbia,
    they kept saying they were gonna hire a cultural historian.
    I was gonna study sort of the history of poetry.
    I didn’t know anything.
    I was a child and it just seemed like a more rigorous
    or engaged or sort of total way of studying literature
    by studying the history that it hangs on.
    And I fell in with the historians of science
    when I went to Columbia.
    So yeah, I became a cultural historian
    with a specialty in the history of science
    and then migrated over more to the history of science,
    which is a kind of poetry of itself.
    Rather than a body of knowledge,
    the history of science is somewhat about
    searching for metaphors that can help you to understand
    why science is so different in different periods of time.
    And to kind of, when you can begin
    to get a gut sense of that,
    you can start to dismantle some of the nonsense
    from the truth because some of it’s just cultural
    and it’s gonna fall away.
    You know, we are in a very strange situation
    just as being conscious meat.
    – Oh yeah.
    – Just that’s weird.
    Now throw in mortality and ambition.
    Oh great, I’ve got both ambition and mortality.
    So I wanna do great things and I’m gonna die
    and I don’t know when.
    The whole thing is a mess of paradoxes.
    I mean, there’s so many paradoxes
    that have grown up evolutionarily
    between the human experience
    and the environment and situation that we’re in.
    And that’s what poetry is.
    – So your dad is an atheist physicist.
    Your mom was pretty religious.
    – Correct.
    – Was that a source of tension in your house?
    – Yeah, it was a source of tension in the house
    but I would say there was enough
    of all sorts of things going on.
    I’m not sure it was primary
    ’cause my dad did sort of let my mom run the kids thing.
    But I believed until I had a moment when I was 12 years old
    and had one of those moments that I talked to people
    and read memoirs, lots of people have a moment
    in adolescence where because of a certain slant of light,
    a certain shimmering moment,
    a certain fall of crystal along your eyesight
    and you suddenly notice that you’ve taken an awful lot
    for granted, that you could be a being anywhere,
    any place with all sorts of different concerns.
    And the fact that you were born into this family,
    this house, this country is all so arbitrary.
    And I suppose because my father was already an atheist,
    it was a little bit easier perhaps for a 12 year old
    to get all the way to, I don’t believe any of this.
    And it was painful.
    And I tell the story in the introduction of the book.
    I was in a junior high school library
    standing in front of a poetry shelf
    expecting no help whatsoever.
    But at least I look back and say,
    well, I knew where to go, right?
    And I opened up this book that was explicitly poetry
    for depressed teenagers.
    And I was not moved by anything
    and out wafted this little piece of paper,
    a little glossy piece of paper excised from some magazine
    or something with vigorous use of a blue ballpoint pen.
    And it was this paragraph by Raina Maria Rilke
    that says to live the questions.
    Live the questions now as if they are books
    written in some foreign tongue
    that you do not now understand.
    You could not now be given the answers to the questions.
    You have to live them to understand.
    And then if you just live the questions
    and forget about the answers,
    you may some distant day live your way into the answers.
    And this, this cured me so profoundly
    because it was the company,
    the friendship of being reached across time,
    but also just the idea,
    oh, you can live the questions.
    And love them, right?
    Learn to love them.
    Love the questions and let them be who you are.
    Not the emptiness of the non-answer.
    And then you find yourself.
    Sometimes perspective can change
    and your brain can explode.
    I fell in love with that.
    I wanted that.
    And poetry is where I go for that.
    – This new book of yours is so damn interesting.
    How would you describe this book
    and what you’re trying to do with it?
    – The Wonder Paradox,
    it’s all about if you don’t have God,
    what else do you lose when you lose religion?
    And the interesting thing is we come in the United States
    from such a Protestant Christian perspective,
    even an American Protestant Christian perspective.
    So that when I say, what do we lose?
    The first thing we might think is the afterlife
    or someone to ask for favors when we’re in real trouble
    or someone to believe has a morality explanation
    for all this suffering, right?
    Those are some big things.
    Well, not all religions have those things.
    Most religions do not have an afterlife.
    And you know, Jews don’t make a very big deal of heaven.
    And that was my background.
    But the idea that we would live on
    in some kind of positive way
    was definitely part of what I believed.
    So the book is really about each of these losses,
    but I don’t only go to Christianity to say,
    well, what did we used to get?
    I really wanted to present people with a reminder
    of the different ways that human beings have figured out
    to make ourselves feel better.
    So many of them have ended up in the bowl we call religion.
    And I’m saying we can’t lose all this stuff.
    – Yeah, I grew up in the deep South,
    very Christian culture.
    My family was Catholic, but not in any serious way.
    The Catholicism never stuck.
    For me, I immediately found it suspect
    and drifted into atheism quite naturally.
    – Fascinating.
    – But as I’ve gotten older,
    I have come to think of religion differently,
    certainly God differently.
    I guess I’m an agnostic at the moment.
    I’m still not a fan of organized religion.
    And I still think the church is an all too human institution.
    But like you, I see so much more in religion
    than dogmas and the holy books.
    And I appreciate how seriously you take it
    because I think it deserves to be taken seriously.
    – Sure.
    I mean, we organize our emotional lives,
    which are very complicated and we don’t know,
    I mean, we know the smallest portion of what’s going on
    in terms of our social interactions
    and how as a group we’re held together.
    I always use the metaphor in my mind of meerkats
    and how if you just took one into a lab
    and started doing experiments on it,
    you would not know much about what you would know
    if you put a camera on the whole colony.
    And I think we think of ourselves as individuals
    in a way that is, I don’t think we have a clue
    how much we’re holding each other together.
    I think it’s much more like meerkats, you know?
    And we also have the benefit of a tremendous amount
    of language and it’s still hard to reach each other.
    But most of this stuff, especially, I suppose,
    in the capitalist country has to get shunted off
    into a special place and that special place
    has been called religion.
    And I guess I’m asking people what happens
    if we call our special place in that sense, poetry,
    joining it with real poetry, poems, short-lined things,
    but also just thinking poetically about love and art
    and meaning because I don’t see how, look,
    if you believe in a God and you place meaning in this God
    and then don’t ask many more questions, yes,
    if you then lose God, you lose meaning
    and you’re in trouble.
    But it’s not at all what most religions do.
    Most religions don’t have a fella upstairs
    who holds all meaning.
    You know, justice we have a problem with,
    but meaning really, we have more than enough.
    The feeling of meaning is sufficient
    to the definition of meaning, it is.
    – Yeah.
    Well, this new book is very much about how religion
    has traditionally carved out these spaces in our lives
    for reflection and transcendence and connection.
    And religion just doesn’t have the kind of purchase
    on our lives that it once did.
    And that means we have to think harder and more
    about creating these spaces in a secular world.
    But I do wanna ask if you think
    we have really lost something when we moved into,
    I don’t wanna say a post-religious world
    because we’ll never live in a post-religious world,
    but a world in which religion has receded
    as a dominant guiding force in our lives.
    – And you’re asking if we’ve lost something?
    – Yeah, if you think we really have lost something
    that is not retrievable.
    No, I think that we have everything we started with,
    we just don’t notice, I really do.
    I can’t imagine what God could have taken with him
    since he wasn’t here.
    We always found what life is
    and what makes it worth living by getting together
    by community, ritual, meditation,
    by times alone, thinking deeply.
    And again, I’ll say that in a sort of capitalist country,
    we define anything that’s doing that stuff as religion,
    especially when we don’t know the language
    of the people we’re talking about,
    we just define it as religion.
    And as a historian, I see these reverberating
    all over society through history,
    say the idea of liturgy.
    That word doesn’t start in Christianity,
    the word starts in ancient Greece,
    and it was about the social celebrations
    that large landowners were responsible
    for putting on on a yearly basis.
    So liturgy starts outside the church,
    then comes to the church and it can come out again.
    And to some degree, it’s a matter of almost self-respect.
    – The great power of religion
    has always been more social than personal, in my opinion.
    I don’t think we need religion to know how to be good.
    That has always been the stupidest,
    the absolute stupidest critique of atheism.
    – I’m with you on that.
    But the power of religion
    to not just provide a shared moral order,
    but also the physical spaces to come together
    and affirm those beliefs,
    like a secular liberal world
    in which the individual is sovereign,
    where the individual is left to her own lights.
    – Yes, I will agree with you right away
    that as long as there’s some kind of continuum
    between community and individualism,
    if I’m gonna choose individualism, which I am,
    so the question is then,
    do I lose some of that good feeling of community?
    Yes.
    But what I’m suggesting is that
    without much change in behavior,
    we can notice that those of us who don’t believe in God
    or don’t believe in a certain kind of God,
    we do all sorts of different things for our,
    well, what the religious would call soul,
    but what I would call an emotional
    and intellectually fulfilling life, we go to museums.
    Those museums are temples of reflection.
    We send our kids to school and in many cases,
    they put their hands on their hearts
    and they say a chant about how we’re all together
    and then a song plays and they sing along to some degree.
    We have many places in society where we have figured out
    that people feel good when they say something together,
    especially when they say something positive together
    and they try together.
    And when something terrible happens,
    we know to come together to grieve.
    I live in New York City.
    You can sort of always figure out
    where people might be mourning.
    If something really sad is happening, someone has died,
    you can go to certain landmarks
    and expect there’ll be other people grieving there.
    When Lou Reed died, there was a grand piano
    in Washington Square Park
    and someone was playing Perfect Day.
    I didn’t know that was gonna happen, I just walked there.
    And what I’m saying is that in the cities,
    it’s a very human-based, art-based kind of way
    that we make our lives sacred,
    communally sacred and privately sacred.
    When you live more in the country,
    you have access to a whole different kind of temple, right?
    Which in many ways works better.
    I mean, the shock of sickness and death
    that happens in the city
    because you just think everything’s supposed to work.
    But in this country, you see death is work.
    Death is how this thing works.
    This thing is just the life-death machine
    and you don’t get as shocked and as appalled.
    What do religions that don’t have an afterlife do about death?
    They look in another direction.
    They concentrate their attention in another direction.
    I know I have an awful lot to say,
    but I really felt that I was reading
    what people were already doing
    and seeing it as more profound than they seemed to see it was.
    And I wanted to show,
    no, this is amazing.
    Take the assist.
    Let that into your heart.
    And if other people are passing around a poem,
    that doesn’t mean, oh, that’s a cliche, that’s cheap.
    No, that means that’s cultural liturgy.
    Grab on and hold on.
    And this can give you some peace.
    (upbeat music)
    – So what’s the power of religious rituals?
    Is it the tradition?
    Is it the symbolism?
    Or is it really the belief in God?
    I’ll ask Jennifer after a quick break.
    (upbeat music)
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    you’re in. Shopify.com/box. Again, I grew up in the South and I moved back here a few years ago.
    And I know people who don’t read the Bible, who don’t take any of it seriously, who don’t even go
    to church, but they still feel compelled to participate in these symbolic rituals like
    communion or getting your child baptized or whatever. I guess I have mixed feelings about it,
    but I also get it. And it sounds like a lot of other people, you included, also get it. And
    that’s the part of religion we have to take seriously if we’re going to think about what
    secular equivalents might look like. Right. I think my own practice is relatively minimal.
    I like to check in with the holidays. My husband was raised Catholic and we sort of decided in
    the beginning we were raising the children Jewish. Really, we just sort of do the holidays. And for
    me, it’s very light. I’m not saying, oh, because I believe in ritual, I’m going to go sit in a
    pew for hours. I don’t. I don’t want to. But many people do. And maybe at some point in my life,
    I will want to. My point is really that when you start to be able to take a little of the
    political heat out of this question, you realize that there are things that one rejects in a kind
    of state of fear. Right. I don’t want to give a credit to the religious. I don’t want them
    to have a point because I said that this aspect of religion might be okay. Well,
    what if we can move away from that a little? I mean, I’m glad there are hard line nail-spitting
    atheists out there. I don’t want them all to be me, but there could be one me. The story I tell in
    the introduction of the book, which was really what set me out on this, my very first doubt talk,
    a very pregnant couple came up to me at the signing and I was expecting a question on history or
    philosophy, which was mostly what I talked about. But I also made it clear what I think. And so they
    came up and they wanted to have a brisk. They knew the baby was going to be a boy. Since then,
    I’ve had many people ask me the baptism question too. And what they’re asking is, may I, you know,
    they asked me, can we do this? Would it be a betrayal of our parents’ faith to do this? Would
    it be a hypocritical act? And also would it be a breaking of faith with our true beliefs,
    which are atheism? But I could tell they wanted to have the party. So I said, Mazel tov, have the
    party. Have the damn party. But then as they were walking away, they were almost at the door,
    and I shout out, but add some Whitman. You know, when they turn around and look at me,
    and so I tell them this Whitman line, there’s a part in Leaves of Grass where he actually writes
    the word “question.” Oh, me, so much myself, despising so much, you know, and talking about how
    life is so hard and we’re all toiling and working in the pain and the hypocrisy and the lying.
    What is it all? Is there any point in it? And then he writes the word “answer.” And the answer is
    that you exist, that we exist and identity. I love that and identity. It’s not just that we exist,
    but identity, what an extraordinary thing to be part of, to be accidentally part of.
    And then he says that the powerful play may go on, and you may contribute a verse.
    It’s two lines. I had to give it a little context, right? But I’m shouting at a cross of room. Other
    people are waiting in line, and they turn around in the whole room, and I feel that room, that room
    needed those words. And I later really thought about that, that I had been to many ceremonies
    in my life. And if a priest says over two people, “I love, God is going to keep you together,”
    I’m sitting out there thinking, “Jesus, I hope something else is going to be,” because they
    don’t believe in God and I know it. The point I just want to make is I’ve been to ceremonies where
    someone adds a poem and suddenly the room changes and everybody feels okay about death or birth or
    marriage. Well, let me ask you about how poetry does that. Yeah. Look, human beings have a deep
    desire for transcendence, for meaning, for some connection to something beyond ourselves. And the
    question is, do we need to look to the supernatural for any of these things? And the answer to that,
    for you and for me, is clearly no. So what is it about great poetry or great art and literature
    that allows us to connect with these deep human needs? Well, one answer is they speak directly
    to it. They talk about death and life and birth. And the truth is, in our normal conversation,
    we don’t talk about these things very much. All of art is where we engage in these questions
    without necessarily having the supernatural. But poetry is one where it’s condensed speech.
    It’s very much like prayer. And I mean that in terms of the prayers that have been around so long
    that they stayed because they’re beautiful or fun to say. You know, prayers change with every
    generation, every 100 years or so. Religions change all the time. It’s those little pieces of
    speech that we call poetry that can kind of slot into where we might have called religious meditation
    or prayer. This is really a tiny recipe. They mention the infinitesimal and the gigantic in
    terms of size and time. Just those two things are enough to rattle the human mind. Just noticing
    that parrots live longer than us can rattle the human mind. Wait, parrots live longer than us?
    I think so, yeah, I think. Or in any case, there are birds that live 130 years.
    Okay. I don’t know how I feel about that. I know. It’s disturbing. It seems odd if anything could
    manage to keep going. But there are turtles that are hundreds of years old. Why the turtle and why
    not I? It’s a reasonable question. Why indeed? You know, there’s that line. And I’m so sorry,
    I don’t even remember who wrote it or who said it. But it’s something to the effect of the success
    of poetry depends on the failure of language. Oh, that’s good, yeah. I love what that’s getting
    at or what I think it’s getting at. And I’ll tell you what I think it’s getting at. You,
    the poet, will tell me what it’s actually getting at. I think the point there is that
    conventional speech, it can only say so much. But poetry plays a different game with language.
    It uses language to point beyond language to try to say what’s actually not sayable,
    because we don’t have the words for it. And in that way, it touches something beyond what’s
    comprehensible. Right. I mean, poetry has certain tricks that it uses. One aspect of a trick, say,
    is the fact that we can read sense in a single line and also the sentence that the line is part of.
    Poets are doing that, thinking about what their individual lines mean and how they mean if you
    read them as a grammatical sentence. That means that you can say several different things at once,
    each of your lines making certain kinds of claims, while the sentence that includes them
    is making a different kind of claim. Why is that so important? Because of the ambivalence of the
    human experience. We almost never feel only one way. We also almost never feel that other people’s
    words fully contain our experience. And so when words attempt to contain our experience,
    but include some strangeness, some spaces in understanding, we, the reader, bring that part.
    I think that’s true of all art. But yeah, with poetry in particular, it has to get up and talk.
    Right. You can sit in a lab and make beings all day long, these little poems you make,
    but one of them every once in a while stands up and says hello, to be or not to be. It doesn’t
    fall apart. We’re never going to forget to be or not to be. It’s too good. I don’t know how that
    works. But sometimes you put words together and they are stuck forever. And most of the time,
    we babble away and nothing sticks. But when poetry sticks, it sticks forever. And there’s
    something very special about language that can hold together like that even across time.
    I wish I could stick together words like that. I’ve tried to write poetry and I can’t do it.
    There’s just, my mind cannot help but go back into that sort of logical mode where it’s trying to
    make sense of things. It’s trying to order things in such a way. And it’s just not the
    poetical mindset, right? I’m resigned to just enjoying other people.
    You can think a little bit in terms of wit, people who are charming and witty and make jokes.
    What are they doing in their minds? They’re kind of, I always think of it as a sort of a tumbler.
    Somebody said something. Is there something funny around that? I just tumble it around,
    look for it. Yeah, that or nope, nothing, keep moving. Somebody else said something funny,
    keep moving. That little tumble, tumble, tumble. That’s the action of poetry for me. I sit,
    I wait for something true to come out of my mouth, which can be forever, just anything that
    doesn’t feel like a blatant falsehood. And I go from there and you come up with nothing a lot of
    the time. But every once in a while, you come up with something that lives. What I’ve suggested for
    people with this book is you should pick out 12 occasions in your life, either holidays or human
    needs, pick out the poem in advance, put it in a booklet, and you can go to it. You’ll then know
    that if somebody dies, you have a poem for that. I believe that people who read a great deal of
    poetry already have this in their heads. And I ask people to take those 12 poems from world poetry
    if they can. If we all take from that, A, it’s a cultural bond. It makes us stretch outside
    race, gender, class, time. It obliterates all of that. It gets right to somebody else’s heart,
    but it also makes it so that we might choose poems that match. And if you and I turn out to
    have the same poem for grief, it’s going to be a bond. What I’m trying to do is imagine a world
    where we do have a prayer book, but it’s each our own, but we don’t have to write it. It’s
    already there. The great poetry is already there. The great rituals are already there. We just
    snap them together. What’s your favorite ritual in your life? What do you find yourself turning
    to the most? And does poetry play a part in that? Or is it something altogether different?
    I mean, you seem to have an appreciation for what rituals do for us. So I assume
    ritual is a part of your life as well. And I’m just asking, what’s your kind of go-to ritual?
    Well, like I said, I do enjoy taking part of the rituals that everybody else is doing.
    I mean, one way to answer a question is Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’ve always
    loved dressing up my kids. We all put a lot into it. We decorate the house. My husband puts the,
    you know, we happen to live in a neighborhood that likes Halloween. We’re in Brooklyn in a
    neighborhood that does Halloween a lot. There are neighborhoods that do Christmas. And
    I’ve definitely gotten in a car with somebody who wanted to go look at the lights. And I enjoy that
    a lot. We light the menorah all the way through. Hanukkah is not the most important of Jewish
    holidays, but we like that feeling of being in the holidays with the rest of the country,
    the rest of the world, really. I like New Year’s because the whole world celebrates it.
    So for me, personally, if I look out the back windows in my apartment, there’s trees
    and a little yard. And I feed the birds because I like the cardinals and the blue jays.
    So I like watching the birds. And I do read poetry or recite poetry in my mind. And looking
    out the front, I get to watch people walk by. There’s something about people watching. It
    doesn’t do it for everyone, but for a lot of people, it’s a real entertainment and a real
    meditation. Where I live, they’re not dressed up in crazy costumes, but there’s certainly going
    to be interesting things happening going by. I’m on a side street in Brooklyn.
    And if you look out the window for a little, you know, five minutes, you see some interesting
    humanity. We’re going to take one last short break. But when we come back, I’ll ask Jennifer
    if there are still reasons to pray if you’re not a believer.
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    Do you ever pray? Do I pray?
    Yeah, ever. Let’s see. I’m gonna say no. I really have no sense of up
    at all and there’s nobody up there. Yeah, but okay, I’m glad you said that because I do pray
    sometimes. I started doing that not too long ago and it’s not because I think there’s someone
    listening. Right, right. It’s not that. Okay, then I do that. I talk out loud.
    It’s almost like a meditation. Yes. And this is what I’ve come to appreciate about prayer
    as a practice. I’ll just, I try to sit down and I just quietly say to myself sometimes
    allow the things I’m grateful for in my life, my family, my health, that I have rewarding
    work on and on and on. And it’s just a space for me to just affirm these things and it doesn’t
    require any deity. No one has to be listening on the other end of the line for that to be useful.
    And that’s how I came to think a little bit differently about prayer.
    But I am curious. You said that you think in terms of agnosticism now,
    you have a sense that, first let me say, I think that there’s a gray area.
    Nice. I think there’s a gray area where poetic people have a choice of saying,
    I believe in God and all I think of as God is love. I cannot tell you how many religious people
    have told me that they believe in nothing supernatural, but they like the idea that
    God is love and for them, they believe in God. And they can see that I believe the same things
    they do, but I don’t care to use that language because I think it’s important to be precise.
    And the word God has no precise meaning. So if God is love, then I believe in love,
    but I don’t want to use that crazy other word, which means every single thing in the world
    and nothing. But I really think it’s important to think this thing through. We’re alive for a
    short amount of time. I always say, look, if we were the only things on the planet, I would say,
    I don’t know what consciousness is. I have no reason to guess whether it comes from some divine
    thing, whether it exists afterwards. But there are ants and there are wallabies and there are so
    many conscious creatures on this planet. And if I look at an ant, does an ant have a consciousness?
    Yeah. Do I think that it needed a divine one or that it will exist afterwards? Ridiculous.
    So I just can’t help thinking of anything else as a kind of unnecessary delusion.
    We got used to a strange religion that liked the idea of a guy who listens.
    And I think that the abyss is just having stared at heaven too long. It’s just an
    after effect. It’s a hangover. Wait, so what were you going to ask me? Were you going to ask
    why I’m an agnostic? I did ask you if you were an agnostic and you said that you prayed. Tell me
    more. Why am I identified as an agnostic? I don’t think that has anything to do with prayer. The
    prayer is really just a practice. The agnostic part, I don’t want to go too much into it. I’ll
    just put it this way. I’ve had some experiences later in life that have made me a little more
    alive to the strangeness of the world. Yes, sure. And so I guess I’m a little more uncertain
    about what’s possible. Sure. Or maybe more awakened to the possibility of possibility,
    if that makes any sense. I just don’t know. I am fairly confident that if there is such a thing as
    God, I don’t have any faith in one of my fellow mammals as some kind of exclusive vehicle for
    communicating what that God wants me to do or who I should be naked with or whatever, right?
    But also farther, if God is in charge of morality, I call bullshit. How can I stand in front of this
    great being and be satisfied that babies suffer and die for nothing? I find it offensive, the idea
    that some being could reconcile all this suffering. I find it ridiculous and offensive. I’m not saying
    that you said it, but I’m saying that we have to think through what we’re saying. And again,
    I’ll say that I feel like I’m more describing what I see as happening now than prescribing anything.
    But what I see is a whole bunch of human beings making moves towards a non-supernatural kind of
    poetic way of being that I don’t think helps us to call a non-supernatural religion, especially
    because I’m saying, you know, don’t change anything. All these people already do these little holidays
    that they like to do, but they don’t remember that if you believe in a real religion that’s alive,
    then on the day that, well, say, we’re in Lent right now, okay? If you truly believe in Catholicism,
    you have a way of cleaning yourself and starting new that is connected to all your other beliefs.
    And that’s all I’m trying to say is that a lot of us have ways where we’ve already figured out how
    to reach for the poetic, how to be grateful, how to have those moments. And I’m just saying, hey,
    doesn’t it look like we actually have something here? Maybe if we think about it like that and
    remember that probably the most important part is community, probably the most important part
    is remembering the humanity of other people, then we might survive, you know? You and I are perfectly
    aligned on all of that. And isn’t it funny that like some of the titles that we use, the title
    sounds like we might have different beliefs, but then you dig down, consciousness is so strange.
    I always say consciousness is weirder than virgin birth by far. Virgin birth, come on,
    you got a couple of cells reproducing on their own, they manage it without a sperm once, big deal.
    But the meat thinks and wrote all of the symphonies, what, out of nothing, out of slime? So we live in
    an absolutely ridiculous situation, absurd and poetic, and we pretend it isn’t all the time.
    And art and poetry is just dipping our heads into noticing, yes, this is bizarre.
    No, look, I’m a Camus scholar, so I’m here for embracing the absurdity.
    I wanted to ask you what your favorite poem is, and I’m told by my trusted producer or colleague
    that you came prepared with a poem that you might read for us.
    Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of favorites and they’re always coming to me.
    Here’s a pretty short poem, and it’s one of the most famous Spanish language poems,
    I’m reading an English translation, it’s known all over the world, and it’s by Antonio Machado.
    Traveler, there is no road. Traveler, your footprints are the only road and nothing else.
    Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. As you walk, you make the road,
    and turning to look back, you see a path that will never be traveled again.
    Traveler, there is no path, only a foam trail on the sea.
    I don’t want to ruin that poem by, oh, were you still reading?
    No, I just, I remember someone said once that the silence after a Bach piece is also by Bach.
    I would love that. I’m like, yeah, the silence after the Machado poems also by Machado.
    So I leave a little quiet. No, I was just going to say, I was sitting
    with that listening. I don’t want to ruin it by asking you to explain it.
    No, I don’t mind. I believe in explaining poems. Yeah.
    Well then, how does that one land for you? What’s going on there?
    Well, I think that so many people love it because of the word traveler.
    Traveler is always at the beginning of sentences in this poem, so it’s at the beginning of lines,
    it’s always capitalized. It’s always like, we’re talking to you. I’ll tell you that I happen to
    believe the poets are, especially when they sound like they’re bossing you around or telling you
    what’s true. They’re talking to themselves. They’re just trying to remember something they
    figured out, which once you have that in your head, sometimes it lowers one’s resistance
    when you realize this person’s just trying to remember. And I talked to you before about line
    breaks. He’ll say, you know, look back and you’ll see a path, line break, that never can be traveled
    again. I mean, there is no path. And that’s what he does throughout it. He gives you a little bit
    of a sense that you have left footprints. There is a little bit of foam after a boat travels.
    It’s not like we make no dent. I also like to say that poetry, unlike prose, doesn’t end on truth.
    It’ll throw some truth up and then have a turn that tries something else and then try a different
    kind of truth. It doesn’t mean that whatever they land on is what they’re absolutely, you know,
    whatever is suggested that isn’t negated entirely is in there. And so he is saying we are travelers.
    And he is saying that our sense that we’re supposed to be going in certain ways is illusory.
    There is no path, which means there is no other path. You’re not doing it wrong.
    As a matter of fact, your experience is the universe. As far as you’re concerned,
    the universe cohere around your consciousness as you were born. And as you experience the world,
    your life is the path. Can anyone else follow you? Yes and no. The suggestion of footsteps,
    the suggestion of the wake of the sea. But what’s the largest thing that reaches us?
    Even bigger than the footsteps or the wake of the sea is the poem. The poem, which made it through
    decades and decades and decades and at least one language to get to me, to shift my perspective.
    The first thing that you learn from poems always is the reminder that there’s another human being
    out there, that there’s another heart beating out there trying to say something true. And then
    whatever it is that they say, which in this case is, you know, relax, whatever you’re doing is right
    in this particular universe. Have you ever read Bertrand Russell’s
    A Free Band’s Worship? I have read a great deal of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t put my finger on
    whether I’ve read that one. It’s maybe my favorite piece of writing, period. Yeah. You inspired me to
    read it last night and I did. And there’s a passage that I remember how it hit me the first time I
    read it and I read it again last night and it almost makes me teary-eyed. Can I read it to you?
    Please. All right, here we go. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight,
    seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them,
    in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path,
    to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection.
    Let us not weigh, in grudging scales, their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their needs,
    of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses that make the misery of their lives.
    Let us remember that they are fellow-suffers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as
    ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when they’re good and they’re evil, have become eternal
    by the immortality of the past. Be it ours to feel that where they suffered, where they failed,
    no deed of ours was the cause. But wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts,
    we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
    Now, that’s not quite poetry, but it is.
    Yeah, it is. It’s gorgeous. I find such comfort and inspiration in it every time I read it.
    There’s no false salvation. There’s no retreat into illusion. It’s just an acknowledgement
    that the world rolls on without any thought or concern for a particular mammal on an unimportant
    rock in a remote solar system. But there’s so much poetry in the acceptance of all that and in
    this call to solidarity and love. And this may be a morbid thing to say, but I’ve had the thought
    more than once that if anyone was going to read anything at my funeral, I want it to be that.
    Yeah, I love it. I suppose that it is close to poetry, but that what might make it not
    what poetry is, is that it faces joy so strongly. Because in real life, it’s so very hard to be
    kind even for what, 20, 25 minutes? I mean, it is hard. Don’t get me wrong. We all screw up.
    I just like texts that include that this is the goal and it’s basically impossible. Like,
    I want that acknowledged that having the goal of being kind and recognizing the humanity of other
    people is the whole ball of acts, the whole thing. As a matter of fact, along with Levinas,
    I don’t know if you’ve read him. Oh, yeah. I’m not sure we exist outside of relation.
    I’m a very solitary person, but I understand all that solitude as in relation with all the
    words I’ve read and all the people I’ve known to perhaps a profound level, to perhaps a level
    where there is no thinking or being outside of relation. So, I mean, this is where I allow
    myself to sound slightly what I wouldn’t call your description of agnosticism a dip into woo,
    nor would I describe what I’m trying to say here a dip into woo, but others might, which is
    just looking at what we’ve learned about the brain and what we’ve learned about the forest
    and the fungus and the mother trees. It is abundantly clear that we don’t know what’s going
    on here. What’s amazing is that unlike the meerkats and the forest with the fungus,
    not only are we connected in ways we can’t imagine, but we’re also connected in this way,
    this really unbelievably straightforward way where we move our mouths and actually hear each other.
    It’s unbelievable that we have so much that makes us one, and yet we feel so separate,
    but nothing feels as good as helping other people. It’s so hard to get ourselves to do,
    but everything you just read, the point is when you need help, go help somebody else.
    When you need existential help, go help someone else with their existential help,
    and you perk right up. I don’t know how it works, but you perk right up.
    In the end, what would you say is the greatest reward of a life filled with poetry? I don’t
    want to say benefit because I don’t want to reduce poetry to that kind of economic calculus,
    but apart from just the beauty of great literature and great poetry, what do you
    hope people can most gain from engagement with it?
    I guess a kind of freedom. I think when you’re not trying to believe something you don’t believe
    or trying to hide from a very scary dark thought, you get to live a bigger life and be less scared,
    be able to connect to people and do the things you want to do to be a whole human being.
    So many people are either trying to block out the idea that the world’s about to end,
    which it really isn’t. It’s about to go through some terrible stuff, but it’s not about to end,
    and we’re overselling that. You cannot have a retirement plan that is the apocalypse.
    The apocalypse is not going to be there and destroy everything. You are going to have to figure it out,
    and the sun is not going to expand and eat the earth in billions of years or too much to think of.
    It’s as good as not happening. The world is permanent. It’s here, and you’re part of it,
    and you can take part in it. If you can bear just dropping all the things you think are holding you
    up, you’ll notice you don’t fall. We’re holding each other up. It doesn’t mean nothing. What it means
    is bigger than you. We make our own meaning to a degree. Mostly we join the meaning of the people
    around us, and we figure that out. And it’s a much more rewarding kind of life. I think it’s
    even harder to believe something you don’t believe because you think you need to believe it.
    So either the people who are blocking out the abyss or the people who have put up a fake floor
    over the abyss, I think they’re both going to feel a whole lot better if they just walk away
    from the abyss. It’s not there. It’s an after effect. A lot of this stuff is an after effect
    of the fact that we’re living in a time of profound change with religion. But individually,
    I think we’re doing a great job. It just takes a little recontextualizing. That’s really it.
    We’re already doing it. Just a little more intention leads to, in my personal experience,
    emotional freedom. The book is called The Wonder Paradox, embracing the weirdness of
    existence and the poetry of our lives. Jennifer, this was an absolute joy. Thanks for being here.
    Thank you. I loved it. I really enjoyed it so much. Thanks.
    I know you hear me say this a lot, but I really loved this conversation.
    I’m not exactly a believer, but I have a deep appreciation for these sorts of questions,
    and I wish other secular-minded people took them more seriously, like Jennifer does.
    But let me know what you think. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
    And if you appreciated this episode, share it with the aspiring poets in your life.
    This episode was originally produced by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall, and it was engineered by
    Patrick Boyd. The Gray Area is edited by Jorge Just, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
    New episodes drop Mondays, listen, and subscribe. This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s
    journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
    [MUSIC]
    Support for this episode comes from LinkedIn. If you’re in sales, you know cold calling is
    stressful, especially when all that effort isn’t even leading to sales. It might be
    time to take a more informed approach. The new LinkedIn sales navigator uses data to provide
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    at linkedin.com/trial. That’s linkedin.com/trial for a 60-day free trial. Let LinkedIn’s sales
    navigator help you sell like a superstar today. On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival
    will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone,
    Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Rao Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders
    and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global
    Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizens.org/vox.

    Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose book The Wonder Paradox asks: If we don’t have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion accesses meaning — through things like prayer, ceremony, and ritual — and Jennifer speaks on the ways that poetry can play similar roles in a secular way. They also discuss some of the “tricks” that poets use, share favorite poems, and explore what it would mean to “live the questions” — and even learn to love them — without having the answers.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

    Guest: Jennifer Michael Hecht (@Freudeinstein), poet, historian; author

    References: 

     

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  • The jazz musician’s guide to the universe

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    (upbeat music)
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    will gather thousands of people
    who took action to end extreme poverty.
    Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa,
    Jelly Roll, and Rao Alejandro,
    as they take the stage with world leaders and activists
    to defeat poverty, defend the planet,
    and demand equity.
    Download the Global Citizen app today
    and earn your spot at the festival.
    Learn more at globalsitizen.org/box.
    – What if everything in the universe,
    the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the people?
    What if all of it is the result of pressure waves,
    patterns of vibrations from the beginning of everything?
    And what if those vibrations, those changes in pressure,
    are actually sound waves?
    Wouldn’t that mean that everything in the universe
    begins and ends with music?
    Maybe that’s a silly question,
    a bit of bad poetry that’s not worth reciting.
    But what if it’s not?
    String theory, the multiverse, quantum mechanics,
    all of these ideas come from scientists
    who are trying to understand the origins of the universe
    in the nature of reality.
    It’s all mathy and heady in a way that I don’t understand.
    And sure, I don’t have a STEM PhD,
    but it seems to me that somewhere
    at the frontier of theoretical physics,
    all the equations and observations and proofs,
    it all kind of collapses into poetry and metaphor and art,
    into philosophy.
    I’m Sean Elling and this is The Gray Area.
    Today’s guest is Stefan Alexander.
    He’s a professor of physics at Brown University
    and the author of two terrific books,
    The Jazz of Physics and Fear of a Black Universe.
    I have always loved the scientists
    who go out of their way to engage the public,
    people like Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall.
    They don’t just talk to the public,
    they translate the science into stories.
    They use colorful analogies.
    They find the poetry in the data.
    Alexander is this type of scientist.
    One big reason for that, I suspect,
    is that he’s a theoretical physicist
    who’s also a world-class jazz musician.
    (upbeat jazz music)
    And his musical sensibilities influence both his research
    and the sort of language he uses to communicate it.
    But on top of that, for a person whose head lives
    in a world of abstractions,
    Alexander is a pragmatist who’s up front
    about how hard it is for physicists like him
    to really explore their wildest ideas,
    especially when the research is dependent on grants
    and the whims of funders.
    So I was excited to invite him on the show
    to talk about music and physics
    and how he’s trying to make sense of the universe.
    (upbeat jazz music)
    – Stefan Alexander, welcome to the show.
    – It’s a real honor and pleasure to be here.
    – I appreciate that.
    I’m really excited to have you.
    Something I have heard people say,
    people who are either in physics or adjacent to physics,
    certainly people who know more about physics
    than I do, which is anyone who knows anything about physics.
    But I have heard them say that physics is stuck
    right now as a science.
    Is that true?
    What are those people seeing and maybe just as importantly,
    what are they not seeing?
    – I think what people are seeing is that
    there’s been a great tradition and pathway
    that has been successful.
    You had quantum mechanics and you had a relativity,
    in this case, special relativity,
    and there was an attempt to unite them
    because there were physical regimes
    where you needed to describe, say,
    a quantum mechanical particle
    moving at relative at six speeds.
    And so that unification was successful.
    That became the bedrock of particle physics,
    like what we call a standard model, that theory.
    So that logical progression has been successful.
    And I think that physicists have been very successful
    over the last century.
    And there’s no reason to expect that direction to stop.
    And I think that we must continue moving in that direction.
    And when I talk about fear in my book,
    Fear of a Black Universe,
    we’re talking about how do we confront the legacy
    and the contributions that has been made
    and what’s the strategy for getting to a new ground
    or maybe making new breakthroughs.
    I myself, I’m a researcher in theoretical physics
    and honestly, there are days when I’m like,
    I have no idea what direction to go in.
    – Tell me more.
    – Well, a lot of what we do in physics,
    especially in the profession itself,
    we have to go through peer review, we write papers,
    we submit our results to journals,
    it gets reviewed anonymously by our colleagues.
    And we also have to apply for grants.
    We have to apply for money to support our research,
    to support our students.
    And if you deviate from what’s expected,
    deviate from the judgments that’s made about
    what the right directions are and what the trends are
    and what it means to do good physics.
    So there are judgments about,
    well, if you work in this field,
    then you actually know what you’re talking about.
    And if you don’t work in, you work in a different field,
    you don’t really understand what we’re doing.
    Therefore, we should not take you seriously.
    Maybe if you work in a different field,
    you try new things out that deviates from the status quo,
    there might be penalties waiting for you.
    The same way penalties can await if you deviate
    from a social order, right?
    So part of the fear is that if you’re a young person
    and you’re trying to break new ground,
    there’s a warning which is wait till after you get tenure
    to work on those kinds of problems
    and think about things in that new way.
    – Part of what makes you unique
    is your musical background.
    (upbeat music)
    To an outsider, it might seem like
    there’s some kind of tension,
    between being a scientist and a jazz musician,
    or at least that these are very unrelated activities.
    But the point of your book is to say
    that that’s not the case, right?
    That actually this kind of bounded thinking
    is part of what’s holding science back.
    – Yeah, I would definitely be of a different physicist
    without my music and a different musician
    without my physics.
    And some examples of that would be
    when I’m working on any kind of theory
    or calculation or idea that I have an idea
    and I’m pursuing it.
    There are times where you might get so enamored
    about your idea, you might fall in love with the idea,
    get attached to it.
    And months would go by,
    but you just don’t want to give up on the idea.
    It’s important to know when to pivot
    and when to give up.
    And I find that being a jazz musician,
    it’s all about embracing in real time, pivoting.
    If you might play a wrong note
    and you have to make something of that,
    or you might find a phrase that you think
    sounds very good in the middle of an improvisation,
    but you have to move in a new direction now.
    And I think that this idea of like,
    that as a jazz musician, the improvisational side
    teaches you how to just move on to new ideas
    and not get too attached to ideas,
    but also how to commit to something.
    I mean, in my jazz practice,
    my practice as a musician has been a lifelong process
    of refining my technique and refining my theory
    and put myself out there and playing with other people
    and learning how to play in a band and all that stuff.
    And that discipline, that practice,
    it plays a big role also in my practice as a physicist.
    So they go back and forth here.
    – Your day job is physics,
    but I mean, how serious is your music career?
    I mean, do you tour, are you in a band?
    Do you just sort of play on the side at clubs
    when you get a chance?
    I mean, how big a role does it play in your life?
    – At different times of my life,
    it’s played anywhere from very,
    like every other night I’m playing out at some club
    with a quartet to maybe once a semester I’ll play.
    So it depends.
    But these days here, I do have a band.
    I’m very fortunate to be playing with Will Calhoun,
    who’s a drummer for the band Living Color.
    And Melvin Gibbs, the bassist,
    played with the Rollins band and others, Harry Tubman.
    So I’ve been very fortunate to play with those fellows.
    We have a band called God Particle.
    – I love it.
    I love it.
    – So, and we’ll play a few concerts,
    larger scale concerts a few times a year.
    So yeah, it differs from time to time.
    I’ll jump in a session and sit in for a few songs.
    And a lot of what I do these days
    is I’m just happy to go home and work on some new material
    and shed some new scales.
    – Didn’t Einstein say that his best ideas came to him
    while playing his violin?
    Or am I just making that up?
    – I do recall reading Einstein saying something like that.
    Yeah, I mean, one thing for sure that I have confirmed
    about his relationship with music and the science
    is that there have been times where I,
    if I get stuck on something or my brain is just overload
    and I just pick up my horn
    and I’ll just start playing through some things.
    And I find it to be very helpful.
    I find that things like it or not happening offline
    in terms of how I’m doing my physics,
    like the art of physics and exploring those connections.
    – There is a question you ask in your previous book,
    The Jazz of Physics, that I wanna put to you now.
    And I’m just gonna quote,
    “If the structure of the universe is a result
    “of a pattern of vibration, what causes the vibration?”
    Now, let’s give everyone a second to hit their bongs.
    And then you gotta answer that for me.
    I don’t know what it means, but I love the question
    and I’m dying to know the answer.
    – I think our most direct experience of this
    is music and sound.
    (upbeat music)
    A musical tone is basically a vibrational pattern
    of airwaves that comes out of our ears
    and our body responds to that.
    Obviously, there’s a whole mechanism of how that happens.
    But a sound wave, like for example,
    notice that you can hear a sound in a swimming pool.
    So you can actually hear a sound in water, right?
    You can hear a sound, obviously, in air.
    And that’s because the medium is vibrating, right?
    The medium can vibrate, well, what is vibrating?
    What is vibrating, actually, is the fact that
    any type of medium, like water,
    can actually undergo a change in pressure.
    If you push against the wall, you’re exerting pressure,
    which is a force that distributes itself
    over a region of space, right?
    So it turns out that sound is nothing more
    than a pressure wave.
    Basically, our direct experience of vibrations
    and the way that I talk about it is through music.
    And it turns out that in the early universe,
    the metaphor here goes pretty close to sound.
    So we have this picture of a universe
    that’s been expanding for billions of years,
    which meant that if you ran the clock backwards,
    the universe, you can imagine it contracting
    and being very small, hot and dense.
    So in the early universe, you have a hot, dense soup of energy.
    And that past universe is devoid of structures,
    devoid of galaxies and stars, planets and people.
    It’s just all energy.
    So the question that we ask in physics
    is how is that past universe,
    how does that evolve in the universe,
    come to create the structure that we see today,
    the stars, the galaxies, the planet, the people?
    And what we know from observations from satellites
    is that in the early universe,
    we see vibrational patterns of this soup of energy.
    The soup of energy is basically, we call it radiation.
    The universe is filled in a hot quantum soup
    of radiation and fundamental particles.
    And the wave-like motion actually set up sound wave.
    So the physics of the early universe,
    those vibrations are actually sound waves,
    very similar to the sound waves
    that are passing through in air.
    And those sound waves that are vibrating
    in the early universe carry energy.
    And that is the onset, basically.
    Those energetic waves are the onset
    of the formation of the first structures in the universe,
    such as stars, which eventually all cluster together,
    become galaxies.
    So it’s in that sense that, you know,
    that metaphor with sound is, you know,
    I would say pretty exact in the early universe.
    Well, what does it mean to say, as you do,
    that the universe is like an instrument that plays itself?
    Well, the metaphor is that, you know,
    if you think about like an instrument,
    for example, like a drum.
    The surface of the drum undergoes vibration.
    And, you know, obviously the vibration in the drum
    basically sends out, you know, sound waves.
    Similarly, the universe in its past,
    which is very small,
    has some type of vibrating system.
    Then the question is, what is the hand
    that hits the universe if you want to use this analogy?
    But since our definition of the universe
    is that there’s nothing outside of the universe,
    whatever sets off that vibration,
    it’s some entity that’s of the universe that’s doing that.
    And the status quo right now in our field,
    the field of cosmology,
    is that there’s something called the inflaton field, right?
    The inflaton is the name of a field.
    And so for the listeners out there,
    what is a field?
    We need to understand them, what a field is.
    And we are in direct contact with fields
    anytime you play with a magnet.
    So if you take two magnets,
    notice that a magnet can exert a force in another magnet
    without the magnets actually touching each other.
    And so the thing that’s actually transmitting
    the force between two magnets
    in between at the empty space is a magnetic field.
    It seems to be invisible, but it acts over space, right?
    And so the idea is that in the early universe,
    there’s a similar type of field.
    It’s not a magnetic field, it’s an inflaton field.
    And this field is playing two roles actually.
    One role is to make the universe expand very rapidly, right?
    Which is the thing that’s igniting
    the expansion of the universe.
    But the inflaton field is actually known as a quantum field.
    So there’s something quantum about this inflaton field.
    And guess what’s quantum about it?
    The field can vibrate in a discrete fashion.
    So, you know, when you think about vibrations, right?
    You think about like a wave that’s going up and down,
    it’s an ocean wave going up and down.
    And you can imagine seeing all different types
    of wave patterns, right?
    But these wave patterns are more like notes.
    Like if I play A, B, C, D, G,
    these are discrete notes, right?
    They only occur in steps.
    And so the analogy now is that you can think about
    the quantum fluctuation of the inflaton field
    as basically discrete notes of this inflaton field.
    This is a metaphor, but actually the metaphor
    goes very, very almost in a one-to-one correspondence.
    So that’s the idea.
    Now, I mean, again, that’s a paradigm.
    Then you can say, well, okay,
    where does the inflaton field come from?
    Well, it’s its nature, right?
    And these are all good questions that we’re asking.
    But the real answer is that we don’t know yet.
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    (upbeat music)
    – It’s interesting to me to think about this
    in the context of the so-called fine-tuning argument,
    this idea that the fundamental laws of our universe
    are perfectly arranged.
    So as to make life possible.
    And if they were tuned like a guitar,
    even slightly differently, life wouldn’t exist.
    Or to put it differently, the instrument
    that is the universe wouldn’t play.
    First of all, is that true?
    And if it is, what does that tell us
    about the nature of the universe
    that it’s held together so precariously?
    – Yeah, it might tell us one of a few things.
    I mean, first of all, when we use the word fine-tune,
    the way I like to think about this is,
    imagine when you listen to a nice stereo system
    and you have, well, back in the days
    where we had equalizers
    that we can manually shift up and down.
    They said, “Well, I want a little bit more treble.
    And I want a little bit more bass.”
    Think about now the universe as an equalizer,
    meaning that how much treble, how much bass controls now
    some of the fundamental properties
    of subatomic particles or the forces, right?
    That’s needed to make a star burn, right?
    Which we know, to have life,
    the star has to burn at a given rate.
    We don’t want our sun to burn out too quick, right?
    If our sun will just burn its fuel in one second,
    then good luck with any seasons here under it, right?
    So the sun has to burn at the right rate
    for billions of years to sustain life on earth.
    But it turns out that actually the rate in which the sun
    actually does thermonuclear conversion
    depends very sensitively on these equalizers,
    these parameters that take how strong the force may be
    or how weak it may be.
    And it does appear that when we look at our theories
    that describe those forces,
    that those knobs that dictate
    how the various forces are controlled
    are very finely tuned to certain values
    that don’t seem to be explained very nicely
    by the theories themselves.
    So it seems that the theories themselves
    cannot explain the determination
    of those finely tuned parameters.
    And as a result, we’re seeking new ideas out there.
    And there has been new ideas.
    One idea is called the anthropic principle,
    which is basically saying that the universe
    actually is finely tuned,
    such that we can be around to observe it.
    So the anthropic principle is a statement
    that the laws of physics
    are such that if they were any different
    than the form that they currently have,
    there would be no life.
    And therefore there would be no universe
    for life to actually observe.
    It’s almost circular in the sense that
    the universe exists such that it can create life.
    And if there were no life, the universe would not exist.
    – Yeah, I recall that Steven Weinberg quote,
    where else could we be except on a planet
    that can sustain life?
    – Right, there’s something circular about it.
    Then you can say, well, how does the universe do that?
    And so ideas out there could be
    that maybe there are many, many universes.
    We live in one of such many universes
    where the universe, as it replicates itself,
    it gets to try out like a jazz improvisation, maybe.
    Think about in a jazz improvisation,
    you get to try out a new solo every time
    the form of the song repeats itself.
    The idea is that the universe gets to try out new parameters
    until it hits the jackpot.
    – So is this- – And the jackpot is us.
    – Just to jump in there a little bit,
    is what you’re describing there
    what people call the multiverse theory?
    – Yes, that’s what people call the multiverse theory.
    – Do you buy that?
    And if you do, you’re gonna have to explain it
    in terms of lowly country podcaster
    like me can understand, ’cause I don’t get it.
    I mean, I guess I get it conceptually,
    but it’s a little mind blowing to Ponder.
    – Yeah, so 24 years ago when people in my field
    were talking about the multiverse,
    I was a research scientist trying to build my career
    and they eventually try to get a job.
    And when I wanted the leaders in the field,
    I went to him and said, how do we do physics now?
    I mean, because the idea of the multiverse
    is that you have to not rely on doing calculations
    in your theory to make a prediction.
    You posit that there are just many universes out there
    and there’s some random chance.
    You know, let me just use that word very loosely,
    a random chance that the universe replicates itself.
    So to have a multiverse, you need a mechanism
    for the universe to basically replicate
    to produce new so-called baby universes.
    And one picture you might wanna have
    in terms of an analogy is like blown bubbles.
    So if you have a bubble maker or whatever
    and you blown bubbles, you can create many bubbles.
    And if you think about every universe as some bubble
    that basically nucleates and gets created,
    and inside of every bubble is an environment
    that you can call a universe.
    But in different bubbles, bubbly baby universes,
    the universe actually takes on different values
    for the forces.
    And when those values happen to be the right values
    to produce life, to produce stars,
    to produce all the things that we see,
    that’s the idea of how the multiverse
    can actually maybe create our universe.
    But when I went to the senior person, he said,
    well, you know, I mean, basically it was like tough luck,
    you know, this is where the field is at.
    And it was very difficult at that time
    to see how I can make a life for myself
    as a physicist, as a theorist.
    And I think that back then I was not a fan of the multiverse
    because I found it very difficult to do research
    in that field.
    – But why weren’t you a fan back then?
    – Yeah, but truthfully speaking,
    because it was aesthetically not pleasing to me.
    And it just goes to show you how aesthetics,
    like affect what types of research you choose to pursue.
    Simply put, it was aesthetically not pleasing to me.
    – Well, what’s not aesthetically appealing to you?
    Is it because it’s not elegant and simplistic?
    Is it because it almost seems like it takes
    a picture of the universe we don’t quite understand
    and then smuggles in like a new concept
    to sort of explain it all away.
    – The aesthetic side of this is coming from
    that when we, usually what we see in physics
    is some unity, some ways in which one problem
    you may be trying to solve would be connected
    to something else.
    And by not considering that something else
    or not seeing that other thing,
    you would not be able to solve the problem.
    So the idea here would be like, well,
    maybe the fact that the laws that we see
    seem to be fine too, and it’s telling us something
    very deep, and it’s so deep
    that it just simply just can’t be this multi-verse idea.
    The same way the advent of quantum mechanics
    had something profoundly deep about the world.
    And so it’s more about this ambition
    that we’re looking for something profound
    and so deep that we have not been
    clever enough to figure it out.
    – I think part of the reason I was asking it,
    it sort of surprised me to hear you say
    it wasn’t aesthetically appealing to you,
    because I guess my intuition with that,
    the multi-verse would be the kind of theory
    a jazz musician in particular would find appealing.
    If the universe plays jazz, then it does kind of seem
    like the multi-verse is the kind of world we might get.
    It feels very improvisational.
    (upbeat music)
    – You know, jazz for me plays a couple of different roles.
    One of the metaphors that I have developed
    and that’s even turned into a little music collaboration
    with my friend and collaborator, Donald Harrison,
    who’s an NEA jazz master,
    one of the great jazz musicians of our time,
    is that it’s the metaphor of applying
    a more improvisational logic
    to interpreting some aspects of quantum mechanics,
    so that the idea that a quantum particle
    is not doing some probabilistic dance,
    but it’s improvising.
    (upbeat music)
    – See, that’s really interesting to me.
    I mean, I’ve heard you talk about Donald Harrison before.
    He’s a very well-known jazz musician from New Orleans,
    actually, really close to my home.
    And you talk about how he wrote to you
    about his quantum theory of music,
    and he said, “Yeah, I don’t play the chord changes.
    “It’s like quantum mechanics.
    “I don’t play in the changes.
    “I play through the changes.”
    I don’t know what that means, but it sounds extremely cool.
    So what does that mean?
    And is it as cool as it sounds?
    – It is cooler than it sounds.
    In traditional jazz repertoire,
    we are given a structure of a jazz song,
    meaning that as a song unfolds in time,
    there’s a structure, there’s a form.
    What I mean by that is that
    there’s some type of rhythmic structure,
    and that rhythmic structure repeats itself,
    and then there’s a harmonic structure as well.
    So there’s melody, there’s harmony, and there’s rhythm.
    And the improviser should improvise some line,
    musical line, musically meaningful line,
    as that structure unfolds.
    And so one thing that we’re challenged to do
    is what we call play within the chord changes.
    As the chords change, we’re supposed to weave a melody
    through those chord changes, and that’s the name of the game,
    how one does that and the practice of doing that,
    and there are all these different strategies,
    maybe, of how to do that.
    And what Donnie Harrison, who is a master in like,
    he knows all the traditional ways
    of playing through those changes,
    but the beautiful thing about a person like Donald
    is that that’s not enough.
    He is engaged in his own research,
    just like a scientist is, to figure out new ways,
    new strategies of playing a jazz solo over those changes.
    And he, in his own self-study of quantum mechanics,
    and then, of course, in our follow-up conversations,
    he found a lot of interesting ideas
    in terms of how quantum mechanical things
    like a quantum particle may actually occupy
    a certain energy level over time
    and how a jazz pattern could be improvised.
    And so this idea of getting from point A to point B
    in a musical improvisation,
    Donald Harrison intuited that the way a quantum particle
    actually moves through space to get from point A to point B
    according to say Richard Feynman,
    which is that the particle must consider all possible paths
    as it goes from point A to point B.
    That an improvised line, I’m now quoting Donald,
    there’s just infinite possibilities presented,
    and that an improvised line, basically,
    is a consideration of all those, you know,
    it’s closer to quantum physics
    than the way jazz may be traditionally taught,
    and these strategies are traditionally taught.
    Another interesting insight into that is Sonny Rollins.
    When I interviewed Sonny Rollins in my first book,
    you know, the legendary sax player,
    he said to me, you know, I practice,
    I practice a lot, I’ve practiced a lot throughout my life,
    but it’s very important that when I’m playing
    that I’m not thinking at all.
    (upbeat jazz music)
    Yeah, look, it’s worth saying,
    the universe isn’t exactly a jazz composition,
    but the idea that it has some kind of
    like functionally musical quality,
    that’s a pretty old idea.
    I mean, the Pythagoreans thought the universe
    was fundamentally musical, right?
    I mean, even Kepler borrowed this idea from them.
    And I wish that when I was a younger person growing up,
    that was something I was taught at the outset,
    like when we think about our science and art curriculum
    and say high school or even before that,
    I wish that my science teachers
    or my music teachers were aware,
    I’m sure about whether they were aware of it or not,
    that’s why I wrote this book,
    to make people aware of it,
    that the birth of Western science started simultaneously
    with music and physics in this case.
    When I say physics, I mean astronomy,
    but when the Pythagoreans and Pythagoras as a legend has,
    came up with this idea that the cosmos,
    and I believe that that word was created
    to actually deal with that which has order in the universe,
    which in this case had to do with the planetary motions,
    that the reason why the planets were moving
    in the way they were had to do with music of the spheres.
    And moving 2000s, years or so into the future,
    that Kepler relied on this Pythagorean idea
    of musical spheres to actually figure out
    the elliptical orbits of the planets.
    And in fact, he wrote down musical notes first
    for these planets before writing those equations down,
    that those equations came in part from a musical analogy.
    So that there’s always been historically,
    this intimate connection between music and the universe,
    music and astrophysics and physics.
    (upbeat music)
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    (gentle music)
    – I’m curious if you have a favorite philosopher.
    It seems to me that if you’re doing theoretical physics,
    and you’re trying to understand
    the origins of the universe,
    you reach a certain point at the frontier
    where it almost, just out of necessity,
    collapses into poetry and metaphor.
    Because we just don’t know,
    and we can’t empirically wrap our arms around it.
    So I guess what I’m really asking is,
    where’s the boundary here
    when you’re doing big grand theoretical physics
    between science and philosophy?
    – Well, I think the connecting link to that is mathematics.
    And like, because as you know,
    there’s a very deep connection
    between mathematics and philosophy,
    like mathematical logic and very abstract things,
    category theory, and there’s a lot of set theory.
    There’s all this way in which math
    and philosophy and physicists,
    the language you speak and the tool we use,
    a big part of our tool kit is mathematics.
    But of course, physics is not just mathematics.
    Physics is physics and it deals with the physical world.
    So physics is also the ideas.
    And physics is created by humans.
    And we’d love to think that maybe the creations
    and physical laws are independent of us creating them.
    But that’s another philosophical discussion.
    But one philosopher, it’s really funny.
    I did a lot, I almost majored in philosophy,
    and I did over the years.
    I tried to do a lot of reading and philosophy.
    And one philosopher that I was influenced by
    was Schopenhauer.
    – Yeah, he was also obsessed with music.
    – Oh, that I didn’t even know, I didn’t know that.
    It turns out Schopenhauer was influential
    on one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
    Irwin Schrodinger.
    But it’s funny, as I was thinking about this,
    I read a lot of philosophers,
    and I can’t remember anything that I read.
    But I just remember that those things were influential.
    I’ve also read a lot of, I mean,
    definitely a lot of Vedic philosophy
    and Eastern philosophy as well.
    I found that, and again, that’s nothing new.
    I mean, Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg,
    I mean, a lot of the founders of Albert Einstein
    were very much influenced
    by both Western and Eastern philosophy.
    – Yeah, it’s just so interesting to me,
    this semi-permeable border between philosophy and science.
    I mean, even in your, I have your book in front of me
    right now, I was reading some of it this morning.
    And, you know, in the 14th chapter,
    I mean, you ask a question like, now I’m quoting,
    “For many years, I tried to get my mind around the question.
    What can exist if time ceases to exist?”
    That feels like a philosophy question,
    as much or even more than a scientific question.
    But maybe I’m just seeing that as a philosopher
    and not as a scientist.
    – It is a philosophy question.
    And I think that it’s useful for physicists
    to see what philosophers have come up with
    in terms of that question, because I do find it,
    like at the end of the day, like a good physicist for me
    is you have your skillset, you have your chops,
    whatever they may be.
    I mean, obviously the more the merrier.
    And then of course, you’re trying to come up with ideas
    for yourself and part of why you have students
    or, you know, younger people to talk to
    is that you hope in those conversations
    that something may come out where it might lead
    to a new idea.
    So we’re kind of always, I think,
    a good physicist should fish for ideas
    and that you should like cast a wide net
    and then consider ideas.
    And then obviously you get to try it
    like a landscape of different ideas
    and hopefully something works.
    That’s one strategy.
    I mean, you know, some people are good enough
    where they can just hit the jackpot
    and find the idea and it works.
    Or some people may just maybe find the answer
    by calculating their way to the answer.
    These are all different strategies.
    And I don’t wanna leave too many stones on turn
    in terms of finding new sources of ideas.
    And I think like philosophy, music, you know,
    I love, I mean, I love talking to late people
    about my physics and my research
    because I sometimes find that they might say something
    that may knock me out of the way my pattern of thought
    and that could be useful.
    – I will say this, you know,
    the just talking about ideas on the frontiers, you know,
    the physics of consciousness is a fascinating one for me.
    I mean, we seem to have no idea how this immaterial thing
    we call consciousness emerges from physical matter
    from our brain.
    Hell, we still don’t even have a good definition
    of consciousness.
    I mean, is this even a fruitful space for physics
    at the moment?
    Or is this just forever the domain of metaphysicians
    and theologians and philosophers?
    – I think it definitely is a deep,
    okay, you know, thinking about that you have different fields,
    you have different categories of fields
    and with those things come academic and intellectual silos
    that you have to figure out how to,
    if you’re serious about working
    in something like that, you know,
    how to collaborate with people
    and how to break through given those silos.
    I mean, that’s those things, those realities are there.
    So for me, writing a book
    where I’m just, I did talk a little bit
    about consciousness and the fear of a black universe
    at the end, I gave myself permission
    and I was honest about that this is pure speculation and,
    and I was, but I would say yes.
    I mean, I think at the heart of it, for me,
    since our experience of consciousness is that we, you know,
    we are housed in a physical body and we have a brain
    and somehow we know that different states
    of consciousness seems to be influenced by this,
    but this piece of matter between our head
    and our nervous system that clearly there is some link
    between this internal experience we call consciousness
    and the matter, but the question of course is,
    what is the interplay between matter
    and the organization of say,
    and the complexity of neurons
    and the emergence of consciousness?
    I think for me, where the rubber hits the road
    is that one way into this is,
    well, the mystery of consciousness, right?
    Could be also connected to the mystery of matter.
    So in other words, at the level where we understand
    how neurons fire and neural networks and all that stuff,
    it could be that where consciousness is happening
    is not only, it’s not to say it’s either or,
    in the epiphenomenon of the complexity of neurons, right?
    Consciousness seems to be running on a hardware
    and the hardware is not just neurons, but matter,
    but there are things about matter
    that we still don’t understand.
    And so the question of,
    I think where physics could come in and may be useful
    is to maybe find that way of connecting
    the mystery of consciousness
    to actually the mystery of matter itself.
    I mean, the stuff about, you know,
    applying quantum physics to the world at our scale,
    you know, the world beyond just, you know,
    subatomic particles, that’s where you get a lot of woo-woo.
    And the impression I’ve always received
    from serious scientists is that there’s,
    down that road is a lot of bullshit.
    You know, you have a lot of new agey type people
    will look at some of the spookiness of quantum physics,
    you know, something like, you know, superposition
    that particles can be in different positions
    in space and time simultaneously.
    And somehow if that were true,
    then I guess human beings could also be
    in multiple places at multiple times simultaneously,
    which seems to cut against our experience of reality.
    But I don’t know.
    I mean, am I being too dismissive
    by calling all of that woo-woo?
    Or do you think there’s some there, there?
    – Look, there’s definitely woo-woo out there.
    And usually when I hear that term,
    it means usually the same way, like, you know,
    if some people say you’re not playing jazz the right way,
    you’re not playing within our tradition,
    you haven’t done the work,
    or you have an idea,
    but you didn’t even realize that this has been considered
    before and it’s wrong for these other reasons.
    So maybe it speaks to a certain naivety.
    And all of that is fine to criticize.
    Our job is to poke holes in things.
    So that’s part of it.
    And you know, I tell my students and myself
    that we have to embrace that.
    Now, having said that,
    I think that when I say the wave functioning universe
    and quantum mechanics, I’m talking about new things.
    I’m not talking about quantum mechanics as we know it now.
    But again, quantum mechanics itself
    and research at the foundations of quantum mechanics
    will require us to understand something new
    about quantum mechanics.
    And it’s in that place that trying to ask
    whether or not there’s something quantum mechanical
    about our entire universe is a research question.
    So I like to summarize it with a quote from Albert Einstein,
    which is, if we knew what we were talking about,
    we wouldn’t call it research.
    But again, just like we talk about jazz and physics,
    like the name of the game is, you know,
    is that we try to get our chops together.
    We’re always in a continual path to refining our skillset
    and mastering what’s currently understood.
    And we try our best to keep an open mind
    to break new ground.
    – So would you say you feel good about the future of physics
    and where the science is going?
    – Well, you know, I do feel good about it
    because there’s some, I think extraordinary young people
    that are coming on the scene
    that I have gotten to work with and know.
    And I think that they’re able to do things
    and, you know, their minds are much faster
    and sharper than mine now.
    And I think that I’m, you know,
    I feel optimistic about their ability
    to take the baton and move forward.
    There is just so much that we don’t understand.
    And I think that this thing that’s all surprising me
    is that just when we think something is impossible to solve,
    for some weird reason,
    we’ve been able to make advances in physics.
    So I expect that to happen, even though,
    as I’m saying all this and I look at, you know,
    when I’m done talking with you,
    I’m gonna go back to my work with my resource group.
    I have no clue how to move forward on some days.
    I am definitely at a stage right now
    where I’m finding that I feel,
    I myself feel very stuck in my physics.
    And in terms of breaking new ground in my own research.
    – Boy, that’s a, do you have a few more minutes
    ’cause I would really love to know what…
    – Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have time.
    I would just love to know why you feel stuck
    and what that means.
    I mean, I mean, you do theoretical physics, obviously.
    Cosmology, I mean, these are big, big, big questions
    you’re wrestling with, but why do you feel stuck?
    What does that even mean?
    – You know, when I first started from physics,
    I think I had this idea that maybe I will, you know,
    find some breakthrough in the field or something like that.
    And now I’m like, I’m just happy to publish a paper
    and make a tiny little contribution
    to a tiny little problem.
    But you know, one of my mentors, Leon Cooper,
    always encouraged me, I mean, Leon won a Nobel Prize.
    He always encouraged me to think big
    and to never be afraid of asking the biggest questions.
    And you know, I have tried to do that.
    So there’s, you know, I think that ambition
    of trying to ask the biggest questions
    is sometimes I don’t even know what question to ask.
    – Yeah.
    – But that’s part of the process.
    And that’s where I’m at now.
    And also, I think part of it is to find jobs for your students
    and find ways where they themselves can have careers.
    And there’s sometimes I put a lot of pressure on myself
    of like, I need to find things that they can work on
    or where they can actually, you know, have a career,
    get a job or get a postdoc, right?
    So those things come into play as well.
    And also, if I actually shake things up too much,
    or I do things that go too much against the grain,
    then that could actually jeopardize my students
    from actually getting a job.
    Because they’ll say, oh, he’s a student of this guy
    who is like doing all these things
    that we don’t think should be done.
    So there’s some of that going on as well too.
    – Well, whatever you do, don’t stop playing jazz.
    Keep doing that.
    Keep making music.
    – Well, of course, you know, the big fantasy
    is that in the middle of a jazz solo, the idea comes to me.
    But that’s more of a pipe dream, you know,
    because I’ll get to write a third book.
    (laughing)
    – I love it.
    You know what?
    I’m gonna moonwalk out of here on that note.
    There’s just so much here
    and I could barely scratch the surface.
    So I will say, once again, the title of the book
    is “Fear of a Black Universe,”
    an outsider’s guide to the future of physics.
    Stefan Alexander, this was a genuine pleasure.
    Thank you.
    – Thanks for having me.
    (soft music)
    (upbeat music)
    – All right, that was fun.
    A little jazz, a little physics.
    What else could you ask for?
    (upbeat music)
    We don’t usually use so much music in our episodes,
    but it felt right this time.
    Every song, but one came from Stefan’s most recent album,
    “Spontaneous Fruit.”
    There’s also one track from his EP, “True to Sell.”
    We’ll put those links in our show notes.
    As always, we wanna know what you think of the episode.
    You can drop us a line at the gray area at box.com.
    I read those emails, keep ’em coming.
    And if you can’t do that, rate, review, subscribe.
    All that stuff really helps.
    This episode was produced by Travis Larchuck,
    edited by Jorge Just, engineer by Christian Ayala,
    fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
    and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music.
    And a special thanks to Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers.
    (upbeat music)
    , (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    (upbeat music)
    [BLANK_AUDIO]

    How is the origin of our universe like an improvised saxophone solo? This week, Sean Illing talks to Stephon Alexander, a theoretical physicist and world-class jazz musician. Alexander is the author of The Jazz of Physics and his most recent book, Fear of a Black Universe. This episode features music by Stephon Alexander throughout, from his latest 2024 album Spontaneous Fruit and his 2017 EP True to Self.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

    Guest: Stephon Alexander (@stephstem), theoretical physicist, Brown University

    Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

    Be the first to hear new episodes of The Gray Area by following us in your favorite podcast app. Links here: https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area

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  • Revisiting the “father of capitalism”

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    Capitalism can feel all-encompassing.
    The free market, the division of labor,
    the mysterious, invisible hand.
    If you live in a capitalist society long enough,
    you stop seeing this system for what it is.
    An invention.
    And one that sprung out of a very different context.
    Adam Smith was an 18th century Scottish philosopher
    and he wrote the landmark 1776 book The Wealth of Nations,
    which you’ve almost certainly heard of.
    But this work was a lot more nuanced
    than the sloganized tropes that you might know from it.
    At the heart of Smith’s capitalist vision
    was his criticism of a different system, mercantilism,
    which felt like the all-encompassing
    economic system of his day.
    (gentle music)
    In fact, Smith, the so-called father of capitalism,
    really thought of himself as a moral philosopher first.
    And he thought of his 1759 book,
    Theory of Moral Sentiments, as his real magnum opus.
    So why do we remember Adam Smith
    as some kind of capitalist champion?
    I’m Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area.
    My guest today is Glory Lu.
    She’s a lecturer at Harvard
    and the author of Adam Smith’s America,
    how a Scottish philosopher became
    an icon of American capitalism.
    Lu tells the story behind the story of Smith.
    Her book is, of course, about Smith’s ideas,
    but it’s really about how his legacy has been used
    and abused in America for all kinds of political
    and ideological reasons.
    Her work is part of a broader effort
    to revisit Smith in light of all this revisionism.
    I didn’t realize how much I actually dug Smith
    until I read Lu’s book back in January of 2023,
    which is when we originally dropped this episode.
    But we had a great conversation
    and I wanted to share it with you again.
    Glory Lu, welcome to the show.
    – Thanks so much for having me.
    – Okay, Adam Smith, let’s talk about him.
    – What do you want to know?
    – Okay, so Adam Smith cast a very large shadow
    in our intellectual history
    and so many people think they know what he was about,
    the father of capitalism.
    But I assume you wrote this book,
    in part because you think the reality
    is a little more complicated than that,
    than the story we have of Smith, is that fair?
    – That’s totally fair.
    As a political theorist and intellectual historian,
    I know Smith as this Scottish Enlightenment figure
    who wrote a book on moral philosophy,
    who had planned a book on law and government,
    who had also written about the arts,
    has an essay on the history of astronomy,
    and he also happened to write The Wealth of Nations,
    which was published in 1776, right?
    That very fateful year that we associate
    with the American Revolution.
    But Smith is so much more than being the father
    of free market economics.
    And I was really bothered by this gap
    between the popular caricatures of Smith on the one hand
    and the reality, like you said, is way more complicated.
    And there are two ways to go about solving that puzzle.
    One is to say, I’m gonna myth bust.
    I’m going to show people who the real Adam Smith is.
    And this is what people in my field do
    as Smith scholars and political theory
    and in history and many other fields
    as they try to recover.
    What they consider is a really authentic view
    of Adam Smith and what his original intentions were.
    But then the other version of how to kind of explain
    that gap is to tell a history of why do we got the Smith
    that we got?
    And that’s what I decided to do in this book
    ’cause that hadn’t been done yet.
    – Was there something about Smith, his ideas or his life
    that appealed to you very early on?
    Or did you decide to study him and write this book
    because you thought that all the competing interpretations
    of him revealed something important
    and maybe overlooked about the American story?
    – So I was actually drawn to Smith
    because of the recent scholarship.
    And when I say recent, I mean kind of circa
    when I was in graduate school, you know, 2010
    as a master’s student and then starting my PhD in 2012.
    And the scholarship on Smith at that point
    had really done this remarkable recovery of Smith
    as this, we’ll call it a moral critic of capitalism.
    They’re really looking at Smith’s ideas about poverty
    and Smith’s ideas about inequality.
    Smith on kind of the political economy of progressive ideas.
    And I was really drawn to that because I think
    maybe it’s obvious in the book, but I don’t know if it is
    but like my own personal politics drew me
    to those kinds of ideas, right?
    Like what does the father of capitalism have to say
    about why inequality might or might not be a problem?
    Or what does the father of capitalism say about poverty
    and what kind of problem it is?
    So I was really drawn to Smith because I thought
    that he might be a resource for thinking
    about these kinds of problems in our own times.
    And I was really surprised to learn
    that there was just a very different side of Smith
    that I had not learned when I was an undergrad.
    But I also got the sense that these readings of Smith
    as a kind of reworked progressive thinker
    who cared deeply about moral corruption
    and what commercial society does to our morals
    also seemed a bit too contemporary.
    There was something that really struck me as like
    this is really so lively, like is that the right Smith
    was my question.
    And I thought, oh, you know, of course he’s not
    just the Chicago style economist,
    but is he a social Democrat is kind of the blunt way
    to put it.
    And because I was so puzzled by these like
    dueling visions of Smith, I think that’s why I decided
    to kind of go back to the drawing board and say,
    well, how did we get these different versions of Smith?
    And why do they do so much work for us?
    We will get there.
    I do want to help establish a kind of picture
    of what he was actually about in the minds of listeners
    before we get to maybe, you know, how he was distorted.
    – Yeah, yeah.
    – He’s clearly best known, perhaps not justly,
    but he is best known for the wealth of nations,
    his big opus on political economy,
    which interestingly enough came out in 1776.
    I also didn’t know that.
    What did he think he was doing in that book?
    What was his project?
    So Smith is trying to inform the world.
    And for him, that means the world of people in power
    and people with access to power and people who are
    in a position to be thinking about national wealth.
    He’s trying to inform that world about a new way
    of thinking about political economy.
    And I’m going to break that term down.
    For Smith, political economy is part of the branch
    of the science of the legislature or statesmanship.
    It really is about kind of the craft of doing politics
    and about statecraft.
    And you have to understand where national wealth comes from,
    how it’s produced, how it flows,
    different interest groups competing for power,
    managing national banks,
    what to do when there’s a kind of coinage crisis.
    These are all issues of national importance of Smith’s time.
    And so what he does in the wealth of nations is say,
    look, right now there’s this dominant view
    in the mercantile system that national wealth is measured
    in gold and silver coin, right?
    How much coin can the country hoard?
    And that counts as national wealth.
    And on that view of things,
    you want to export more than you import.
    And to do that, companies need to kind of lobby the government
    for these exclusive privileges in order to get monopolistic
    or really, really, really competitive advantages
    to dominate a market so that they can bring back gold
    and silver and also make sure
    that they don’t have any competition.
    That’s the mercantile system.
    That’s the world Smith is living in.
    And I think one of the best examples of that inaction
    is the British East India Company, right?
    Probably the most notorious corporate power,
    if you want to call it that, during Smith’s time.
    And you mentioned 1776, the Boston Tea Party,
    those are chests of tea
    that are from the British East India Company
    because they had recently gotten this monopoly privilege
    for kind of tea growing and harvesting in India.
    So in Smith’s time, this idea of national wealth
    is one that he thinks is really distorted.
    And he opens the wealth of nations
    by trying to show people that national wealth
    actually comes from the product of human labor.
    And he starts off with these incredible illustrations
    of really ordinary objects and how they’re produced
    and how the division of labor,
    like actual humans doing actual work,
    is the source of national wealth.
    And once you reorient yourself
    towards that view of national wealth,
    the questions about how to manage it
    and how to build a state and how to govern it
    in a way that is productive as well as fair
    and doesn’t allow one class of wealthy elite
    to oppress the other,
    that’s what he’s trying to get people to realize.
    – I do think the way a lot of people judge still
    the success of an economy is by looking at
    how much profit it creates or how much wealth it creates.
    But that does not seem to be the central metric for a Smith.
    I mean, did he think it was more important
    to maximize profit or human welfare?
    Now I know a conservative might hear that question
    and say that’s a false choice, right?
    That perhaps maximizing profits is ultimately
    the most reliable way to maximize human welfare.
    I would disagree with that,
    but I don’t wanna go too far into the weeds on that.
    We’ll just stick to Smith and what he believed here.
    – So for Smith, a good measure of national wealth
    was how readily available, how plentiful,
    and how cheap and how accessible basic necessities are.
    So he really cared about whether you have enough food
    to live on and to survive.
    Not just survive, but actually live a meaningful life.
    And he also says that there are certain kinds of goods
    that we might consider superfluous
    or maybe more than basic, like a linen shirt.
    But he says that if in our society,
    a person who doesn’t have a linen shirt
    cannot go about in public life
    without facing shame and ridicule,
    that’s a basic necessity.
    And people should be able to access these basic necessities
    cheaply and plentifully.
    And that, when the kind of lowest members of society
    have cheap and ready and plentiful access to basic goods
    so that they not only can survive,
    but also live in public life without fear of shame
    or ridicule, that is when a nation is prosperous.
    – So I guess it is to Smith’s credit,
    at least in my estimation,
    that he thought it was a mistake
    to measure national wealth just in money, right?
    That you should look at the productive power of labor.
    And if I’m hearing it correctly,
    I didn’t misunderstand him, right?
    The way I read that was the quality of life
    for the people who make up a society
    is really the ultimate measure,
    not necessarily just how much money they have.
    – Yeah, yeah.
    So this conception of economics that we have today
    is very different than what Smith is doing.
    Political economy is about actual human beings.
    And what he does so well in “The Wealth of Nations”
    is show that political economy first starts
    with economic life.
    Like how do people actually experience exchange
    and the benefits of exchange?
    How do people actually reap the benefits
    of the division of labor?
    He’s talking about real humans with real jobs
    and real tangible outcomes.
    And it also talks about political economy
    as kind of the rules and institutions that we build
    that shape an economy that meets these needs.
    So it’s not just this kind of abstract science
    of wealth creation or profit maximization.
    Far from that, if you look at the structure
    of “The Wealth of Nations,”
    it’s very different than your classic textbook
    in “Intruder Micro- or Macro-Economics” today.
    It’s deeply historical.
    It’s very polemical at times.
    And it’s very tangible and very human.
    (gentle music)
    – Coming up after the break,
    Glory and I discussed Smith’s views on human nature
    and how they influenced his ideas about capitalism.
    (gentle music)
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    – Can we understand the wealth of nations,
    his most famous book,
    without understanding his first book,
    “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,”
    which I think was published in 1759?
    – I’m gonna give a hot take answer
    as somebody who is a professional Smith scholar,
    I guess in some sense.
    So I’m gonna say yes and no.
    – Let’s start with the no answer.
    I think you will not understand Smith as a thinker
    unless you read the theory of moral sentiments
    and the wealth of nations together.
    And if you wanna go the extra mile,
    reading his essay on the history of astronomy,
    which is the kind of intellectual history
    of modern science and the lectures on jurisprudence
    to understand how he thought about doing politics
    and the nature of politics.
    You just will miss out so much
    on what makes Smith a distinctive thinker,
    spanning all these realms of human life,
    from morality to political economy to political science.
    Can you read the wealth of nations
    without reading the theory of moral sentiments?
    I think you can.
    Are you gonna miss out on some of the richness
    and the textual interconnections
    between the theory of moral sentiments
    and the wealth of nations?
    Yes, but, and this is where maybe I’m gonna diverge
    from some of my colleagues,
    the wealth of nations and the theory of moral sentiments
    are asking two distinct questions.
    That doesn’t mean they’re not related in some capacity,
    but they are two distinct questions, right?
    In the wealth of nations, he’s asking,
    what makes some nations wealthy
    and what makes other nations poor?
    What are the kind of foundational behaviors
    and institutions that make up economic life?
    That’s a very distinct set of questions
    from the ones he’s trying to answer
    in the theory of moral sentiments,
    which is about what are the origins of morality?
    Are human beings by nature selfish or altruistic
    and is morality grounded in reason or in sentiment?
    Now, I’m far from somebody who’s going to say
    the books are totally unrelated.
    There’s an Adam Smith problem.
    He changes mind that is not at all what I’m saying,
    but what I am saying is that
    if you are interested in Smith’s answer
    to the questions he outlines in the wealth of nations,
    you can read the wealth of nations
    and you’ll have a kind of rich answer,
    even within that one book.
    But you’re gonna miss out on kind of the wealth of ideas
    from the rest of Smith’s corpus
    if you think that that’s the only thing
    that defines Adam Smith as a thinker.
    – Why was the concept of sympathy so important
    to Smith’s moral philosophy?
    And how might that intersect
    with the way he thought about a healthy capitalist economy?
    – Sympathy is the linchpin of Smith’s moral theory.
    So sympathy is the mechanism
    by which we try to understand other people,
    see their motivations and see ourselves through them.
    So if I want to understand what you’re going through,
    I am kind of imaginatively projecting myself
    into your position, right?
    I’m putting myself in your shoes.
    And that mechanism, that sympathetic mechanism
    is a sentimental one.
    It’s kind of based in our sentiments
    rather than our capacity for reason.
    And that’s what enables us to make these moral judgments,
    these evaluations about my motivations,
    about my behavior and my actions.
    And that’s absolutely critical for Smith.
    How might that relate to the wealth of nations, right?
    So this is where I’m complicating my answer
    to your last question,
    which is that human behavior
    is not just one motivation or another.
    We are not always motivated by sympathy.
    We’re also not always motivated by self-interest,
    where these kind of complex
    but reasonably stable creatures, we’re curious.
    We want to know what motivates other people.
    We want our behavior to be approved by others,
    which is why I’m not going to just like walk into your store
    if you’re a candy shop owner
    and steal a bunch of candy,
    because I know that that would be disapproved, right?
    And then I would be that woman that is known
    for robbing a candy store.
    At the same time, you can also see
    that you don’t want me to get away with that behavior either,
    not only because it’s not the right thing to do
    from the standpoint of morality,
    but because maybe there is some long-term reason
    grounded in your own self-interest,
    why you don’t want to be seen as the shop
    that kind of condones theft.
    And that might be appealing to your self-interest.
    All of that is to say that Smith thinks
    that human nature is a collection
    of these like very stable and very predictable motivations.
    Sympathy, a desire to be seen by others
    and to be known and approved of by others,
    as well as our interest in preserving ourselves
    and fulfilling our own self-interest.
    And those things go together, right?
    It’s like, because I know through sympathy
    that you also care about yourself,
    that’s what makes self-interest work.
    It’s delimited in that sense.
    – Well, I think this is part of what I like about him.
    He doesn’t seem to think that human beings
    are inherently good or inherently bad
    or inherently anything, by that you mean fix in some way.
    To say that we’re motivated by self-interest is not,
    not to say that we’re motivated by self-interest exclusively,
    but there are a lot of people who take it that way
    and he does not seem to believe that.
    – And also to be super clear,
    to say that we’re motivated by self-interest
    is not at all saying that we’re motivated by greed.
    – Yes, I’m so glad that you said that
    because you know, one of the problems for me is that
    people will declare that such and such is true
    about human nature, you know, that we’re selfish, say.
    And then they’ll point to the success of capitalism
    as evidence of that selfish nature.
    Now, I won’t say that capitalism is entirely
    like wrong about human beings,
    but I would say that we build systems that cultivate
    and incentivize certain impulses,
    and then we look back and conclude
    that those impulses pre-existed those systems.
    I bet they’re just like natural laws or something.
    There’s a more complicated feedback loop going on, you know?
    – Yeah, and I think Smith is very keenly aware
    of that tendency.
    I often say to students, you know,
    when you’re reading the wealth of nations
    and also reading the theory of moral sentiments,
    notice where Smith sort of like hedges
    or where he’s about to give a warning.
    Also be really, really aware that when you think
    he’s stating his position,
    he may in fact be reconstructing somebody else’s position
    only to subvert it in the next sentence.
    So Smith is one of these incredibly balanced,
    careful thinkers who really wants to understand
    the contingencies of institutions that we create
    and to not take that as like the end all be all
    for all time.
    And I think that’s why he spends so much time,
    if you read book three and book four
    and book five of the wealth of nations,
    there’s like really in the weeds history of modern Europe
    and also like central Asia of different taxation regimes
    in, I can’t remember, you know, like 17th century France
    or different feudal property rights regimes
    because he’s so thoughtful about
    why did this make sense for these people at that time?
    And now what does that say about our assumptions
    about human behavior?
    What does that say about our assumptions
    about what guarantees liberty?
    He’s very, very careful.
    – This is a good segue into what Americans have done
    to Smith, how we’ve interpreted him.
    I don’t think you say this explicitly in the book,
    but do you think American interpreters over the years
    have bastardized Smith or weaponized him in ways
    that might make him unrecognizable to himself
    if he were alive today, which he most certainly is not.
    – I certainly think that Americans have weaponized Smith
    and that trend of weaponization stretches back
    much farther than I think people realize.
    Smith had already become this mascot, if you will,
    like a political mascot for free trade.
    When I say free trade, I really mean like
    free international trade in the mid 19th century.
    So that process of kind of like sloganizing,
    canonizing, weaponizing has a very, very long history.
    And that’s part of what I try to show in my book
    is that there is this trend,
    there is this tendency to want to weaponize Smith
    for different political positions
    because Smith is seen as so valuable,
    has like lending intellectual legitimacy to arguments
    or saying something about that political position
    that matters.
    Would that be unrecognizable to Smith?
    I think in some senses, yes, certainly.
    I think the kind of like conventional libertarian,
    free market fundamentalist view of Smith
    would be pretty unrecognizable.
    But I think he’d be like, well, I did say something
    sort of along those lines,
    but that was not at all what I was intending to say.
    So I can see where you got that idea from.
    But that was in a chapter about like investing
    in foreign versus domestic industry.
    So that’s interesting.
    And then I think there would be other cases
    where he might recognize the kernel of truth,
    certainly the kind of sloganizing around free trade.
    Like Smith was an advocate for free trade,
    but he also thought that there were certain circumstances,
    infant industry protection or the priorities
    of national defense were more important
    than liberalizing trade.
    So I think that Smith would be more upset
    that people didn’t read him as carefully
    and take him as seriously,
    that they didn’t think the way he did.
    I think he’d be more upset about that
    than he would be about being weaponized.
    The fact that we think of Smith as an economist first
    or even primarily and not as a moral philosopher
    or even a psychologist in some ways
    is already a sign that we haven’t taken him seriously
    or that we’ve misunderstood his real project
    or his broader project.
    – Yeah, absolutely.
    Nicholas Phillipson, one of the great biographers of Smith
    and fantastic scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment
    writes that the like title page of The Wealth of Nations
    or it says the book title and then the name of the author,
    Smith is listed as professor of moral philosophy.
    He’s not listed as the father of economics, Adam Smith.
    He’s recognized in his time as a moral philosopher.
    You know, it’s worth noting that moral philosophy is closer
    to kind of what we might call psychology today.
    And I think that it is important to remember
    moral philosophy is distinct from natural philosophy,
    like natural sciences versus human sciences.
    So that’s what the moral denotes,
    rather than kind of ethical.
    Ethics certainly is part of moral philosophy,
    but moral really just means kind of the world of the human
    as opposed to the world of the physical nature.
    And yes, I do think that Smith saw the project
    in The Wealth of Nations to kind of systematically study
    through observation and then taking these specific examples
    and generalizing outward,
    very much in the same vein that he did his moral philosophy
    to start with human experience,
    to kind of document the moral phenomenology
    of all the different ways in which we experience moral
    encounters and moral judgment,
    and then to draw up principles from there.
    That is the scientific enterprise
    and we don’t see those things connected today,
    but Smith certainly did in his time.
    – So when you say, as you do in the book,
    that Smith’s reception in America is a story about,
    quote, the politics of political economy.
    What does that mean?
    – I think that phrase means two things for me.
    First, I’m really insistent that when we think
    about political economy as a field of inquiry,
    economics as a field of inquiry,
    we need to think about it as not a kind of transcendental,
    a historical mode of inquiry,
    but the very ideas that like central precepts
    and axioms of economics are always product of
    their political and historical and cultural circumstances.
    So that’s the first thing,
    is that economics is historically contingent.
    The language of political economy as it was being invented,
    the very field, the idea that political economy
    was a science is a product of a moment in history.
    So that’s one way of understanding it, yeah.
    – I mean, I would say everything is.
    I mean, I don’t think economics is exceptional,
    or economics is exceptional in that sense.
    – I think that I want to agree,
    and I think you’d be surprised
    that the number of people who wouldn’t agree with that.
    So that’s one thing that I wanted to say.
    The second thing that I mean,
    when I say the politics of political economy,
    is that political economy is a language of authority.
    It has power, politics is about power.
    It’s not just about policy making or agenda setting,
    but it’s about ideology craft.
    And that’s the level of the kind of the politics
    of political economy that I’m interested in.
    Like why does this style of thinking have so much power?
    And as a result of that, or as part of that,
    like why does thinking of Smith as an economist
    have so much power?
    – The Chicago School of Economics plays a big role
    in the story as it should.
    And I really want to talk about that,
    but I should ask first,
    what is the Chicago School
    for whom that doesn’t mean anything?
    And how did they popularize or hijack perhaps,
    if that’s not too strong a word, Adam Smith’s legacy?
    – So I would say in the most generic terms,
    the Chicago School of Economics stands for
    a brand of economics that is very free market oriented
    and associated with the politics of free enterprise,
    deregulation within the economics discipline.
    The Chicago School is more than
    and certainly not limited to a certain politics
    or an ideology, it’s a methodology.
    And it’s the methodology of price theory
    that prices explain allocation.
    Everything can kind of be understood through prices.
    And I should also say that the Chicago School
    is never really just one thing.
    It develops over time,
    it spans different generations of thinkers
    from the Great Depression and onward.
    And it’s quite heterogeneous at the beginning,
    but it becomes the Chicago School.
    I think as we recognize it today,
    associated with that kind of brand of free market economics,
    I would say by the ’60s and ’70s.
    – I was gonna say,
    I feel like there’s a boogeyman term that’s hovering
    and I just want to say it.
    – Yeah, neoliberalism.
    – Yes, people might know the name Milton Friedman, right?
    So these are like sort of the apostles
    of what kind of became neoliberalism, is that right?
    – Yes, that is what many people believe.
    I hesitate to say like, yes, absolutely that’s right,
    because it’s controversial.
    I think maybe that’s what I’m trying to say.
    Yes, and that’s very controversial, right?
    ‘Cause neoliberalism is this boogeyman term.
    It means a lot of different things,
    but I think one very strong condense about neoliberalism
    is just this idea that like markets can be used everywhere
    for all kinds of social and political problems.
    And that version of neoliberalism has,
    as one of its origin points,
    the University of Chicago beginning in like 1946.
    – Was there something in the ether
    at that moment in American history
    that made Smith the perfect patron saint of capitalism,
    or is it just an accident of history
    that a particular group of people
    at a particular moment in time said,
    yeah, this is the dude, this is the guy,
    he’s gonna be the face?
    – There was something in the ether.
    Two of big things happen.
    So first is the Great Depression.
    This is a cataclysmic event.
    It is not a good look to be defending
    free market capitalism after the Great Depression.
    After the Great Depression,
    most economists in America
    were a very, very different kind of schools of thought,
    have a kind of plurality of political positions,
    but for the most part, after the Great Depression,
    nobody’s saying, you know what we need more of?
    Free markets and unregulated capitalism.
    The Great Depression really kind of
    gets people to reorient and say like,
    maybe we should think about managing things
    a little bit more scientifically here.
    And that’s why you get the rise of Keynesian managerialism.
    But then the second thing is the Cold War
    and this kind of fear of central planning,
    central planning in many forms,
    not just Soviet style command economy,
    but this governance by experts
    starts to look a little shady
    in the wake of the Cold War and in those years.
    So those two things combined
    make Chicago a really, really interesting place to study,
    among other schools of thought,
    but they become a locus in American economics
    for reviving the tenets of classical liberalism,
    but really focusing on the economic side of things.
    So like how can we create and sustain a free society
    on the principles of classical liberalism
    in the shadow of both awareness about defending free markets
    that’s hung over from the Great Depression,
    but also a real fear of centralized planning,
    on the other hand.
    And so Chicago becomes like this epicenter
    in the United States for people
    who are pretty sympathetic to free markets,
    but want to do so really sensitively,
    but also with the authority of being economists.
    So that’s what Chicago has going for them.
    They are building a brand of kind of free market advocacy
    that has a scientific mooring in their language of economics
    while also to have this political project in mind.
    That’s why Smith becomes such an important figure for them
    because he has the like authoritative cachet
    as the father of economics,
    but he can also be kind of like politically appropriate
    in the way that they want him to be.
    – Yeah, well, boy, it really does seem like a lot of people
    prefer to read their Smith like they read the Bible,
    which is to say, you know, a la carte.
    They plug out what they like and just ignore the rest
    and you know, yadda yadda yadda.
    What did Smith mean when he coined his most popular phrase,
    the invisible hand?
    And how should we think of it today?
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    – What did Smith actually mean by the,
    this is the phrase, everyone will know,
    even if they don’t know where it came from.
    What did Smith actually mean by the invisible hand?
    Because the Chicago school was very effective
    at cementing this belief that the invisible hand
    of the market is this omnipotent
    and infinitely wise thing.
    And therefore that any bad societal outcomes
    are always the fault of the state.
    They’re always the fault of the state intervening
    in the market.
    And it’s never, never the fault of the unfettered market.
    – So I think the most general explanation
    for what the invisible hand means for Smith
    is this idea that individuals can promote
    the public good or there can be socially beneficial
    consequences of individual actions
    without intention or direction.
    That’s probably the most general understanding
    of what the invisible hand stands for.
    – Which seems right and wise.
    I wouldn’t disagree with that.
    – Sure, not many people disagree with that statement
    that oftentimes my individual actions
    will have spillover effects.
    And sometimes they can without my intention
    or direction have socially beneficial consequences.
    Of course that means that things can also have
    socially harmful consequences as well, right?
    Now, Smith doesn’t exactly outline that use,
    but I just wanted to kind of point out
    that there are unintended consequences
    to individual actions.
    Smith uses the phrase the invisible hand three times,
    once in the theory of moral sentiments,
    once in the wealth of nations,
    and once in his essay on the history of astronomy.
    – That’s remarkable, only three times.
    – Only three times.
    – Given the primacy of that phrase, right?
    How important it is in this course.
    That he barely even used it.
    It wasn’t important to him.
    – No, it’s a kind of passing remark.
    And the other thing to realize
    is that in the wealth of nations where he’s using it,
    he’s talking about how individuals make decisions
    on where to invest their capital.
    Do I invest my capital domestically
    or in a foreign nation?
    And Smith says, well, like people tend to prefer
    to invest closer to home
    because they have a better sense of the laws
    and the norms and kind of a sense of trust
    in their own local environment.
    So he invests closer to home
    and one of the unintended effects of that
    is that maybe that ends up generating
    a lot more productivity in the home market.
    So Smith is actually using that phrase to illustrate
    like how people think through their decisions
    of foreign investment,
    preferring domestic industry to foreign industry.
    He ends up promoting this phenomenon
    that was no part of his intention.
    Okay, so that’s a pretty like bland idea, right?
    As you said, it’s like, that seems fine.
    What did the Chicago school do with it?
    Or kind of more specifically,
    what did Milton Friedman do with it?
    Milton Friedman calls the invisible hand
    the insight that created scientific economics.
    I’m probably not quoting that directly,
    but he says, you know, this is Smith’s key insight.
    This is Smith’s flash of genius.
    And what Friedman does is kind of reinvent
    the invisible hand as the miracle of free markets.
    This is how free markets work.
    And what’s really genius about what Friedman does
    is that it has both a kind of scientific component.
    He uses price theory to really back this up.
    This is the magic of the price mechanism.
    So there is this sheen of scientific objectivity.
    This must be true.
    But then it also becomes a political statement
    that because this is how the price mechanism works,
    because this is how the miracle of free markets work,
    we should prefer free markets to government intervention.
    Only markets can really enshrine
    and protect individual economic freedom,
    not the government.
    So that’s how the invisible hand
    really becomes politicized, right?
    It becomes to stand for the virtues of the free market
    and the vices of government,
    rather than just this kind of social theory
    of unintended consequences.
    – You know, again, I’m no Smith scholar,
    but the idea that the market
    is some kind of unerring divine force
    does not seem to be even close to what Smith believed,
    but it’s perhaps a testament to Friedman’s brilliance
    and rhetorical genius that he was able to make that case.
    And there’s just no question,
    whatever you think about Milton Friedman,
    that he was very smart and gifted.
    – He was really gifted at that rhetorical power.
    He found a phrase, he found an explanation
    and he found an image that worked really, really well.
    And it’s all over “Free to Choose,”
    you know, both the written book as well as the TV show.
    He uses it in all the columns that he writes.
    And it really worked, you know,
    “Free to Choose,” he wanted to call it the invisible hand.
    – Yeah.
    Backing away from Friedman’s Smith,
    I wanna ask you about Smith’s Smith.
    – Yeah.
    – I wanna ask you about Smith himself.
    What he believed, I mean, did Smith think
    that the pursuit of wealth degraded us as individuals?
    Did he see money as a corruptive force?
    Not necessarily like an always
    and everywhere terrible evil thing,
    but did he see wealth and money as a corruptive force?
    The way that many critics or skeptics of capitalism do.
    – It’s a really good question.
    I’m gonna try and answer it in a kind of,
    hopefully as non-obnoxious of a way as possible.
    – Oh, no, give me the obnoxious.
    – So it’s a really good question.
    Smith did not see wealth as inherently corrupting.
    He doesn’t think that merely pursuing wealth
    is both morally degrading and degrading in other ways.
    He did see wealth as a new form of political authority.
    So this is where things get interesting.
    So in the wealth of nations,
    as well as in the noctures on jurisprudence,
    Smith says that political authority
    comes from four different sources.
    Distant age is passed.
    People chose their chieftains and their leaders based on age.
    The most senior person would be the leader of the tribe
    or the clan.
    Maybe they chose their leader based on physical
    or kind of mental capabilities.
    People with the biggest brains
    or people who are the strongest.
    So capacities, age, these are sources of authority.
    What’s interesting about the modern era
    is that two new sources of political authority emerge.
    Wealth and birth or family.
    And wealth is a particularly interesting source
    of political authority
    because it’s not like physical, right?
    It’s not attached to you as a person.
    And especially in kind of advanced societies.
    He says in the kind of advanced age
    or in like civilized and opulent countries.
    Wealth has the potential to be a very like insidious
    source of power.
    And that’s where I think,
    if you wanna use the term corruption,
    this is where I think we can start to think
    about using that term.
    I don’t wanna go straight down that road
    and just say like, wealth becomes a source of corruption.
    But he says that these advanced societies
    become very prone to corruption
    because wealth becomes a new source of power.
    And it allows people who are previously
    political outsiders to suddenly become insiders.
    And this is kind of the foundation of his critique
    of the British East India Company.
    You have this elite company of wealthy merchants
    whose claim to power is the fact
    that they are wealthy merchants
    and they work with lawmakers to bend the law
    to rig markets in their favor.
    And that is kind of where the connection between wealth.
    And I would say that’s a form of political corruption
    that Smith was very worried about in modern societies.
    – I think of capitalism not just as an economic system.
    I think of it as a morality really and to itself.
    Or it becomes a morality
    without any serious ethical or spiritual counterbalances.
    I mean, ultimately it is a form of life
    in which consumerism and material self-interest
    are the highest pursuits.
    And Smith, again, unless I am misappropriating him
    as some of the people we’ve talked about have,
    he seemed to get that that is true,
    which is why he thought a healthy moral culture
    was perhaps a precondition
    for a healthy productive capitalist economy.
    – I think that’s a really, really common interpretation
    of Smith and this kind of connection
    between the theory of moral sentiments, right?
    Does it provide the kind of moral foundation
    for the commercial flourishing
    that he outlines in The Wealth of Nations?
    And again, because I gave you that timeline of like,
    here at The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
    here at The Wealth of Nations,
    he goes back to The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
    And that alone gives us reason
    to believe that like Smith cared deeply
    about both the moral consequences
    of the kind of transformations
    that he was seeing at the socio-economic level
    to kind of go back to the moral work that he was working on.
    Now, again, I might be in the minority here,
    but I don’t think that The Theory of Moral Sentiments
    is like the moral template for capitalism.
    I don’t think that.
    And maybe I’m not really in the minority here,
    but I think because that temptation
    to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
    especially that chapter,
    the one that I just got like the universal corruption
    of our moral sentiments coming from this tendency
    to admire wealth and to neglect the poor,
    I think because that has just attracted so much attention
    and it just seems so unavoidable
    to want to think that Smith is speaking to us right now,
    but we have to remember at the end of the day,
    like Smith is writing a work of 18th century
    moral sentimentalism and he’s like responding to Hume
    and he’s responding to Mandaville.
    He’s not writing The Theory of Moral Sentiments to say,
    and you know, and these are my ethics of capitalism.
    That said, and this goes back to one of the earlier questions
    that you asked me,
    there is a relationship between the two books.
    And I think it’s how Smith observed the human world.
    – Yeah, you know, I think if you approach Smith
    honestly and openly,
    you just have to accept that there are many sides of him.
    And I don’t think that makes himself contradictory.
    I think it makes him complicated, you know,
    like a Nietzsche, a friend of the show.
    You know, his complexity leads him vulnerable
    to a lot of different interpretations.
    And I guess in the end,
    when I was reading your book and just listening to you now,
    I wonder how much faith he had in people.
    A lot of libertarians, for instance,
    who just accept that people are greedy and selfish
    and we need a society that makes use of those drives.
    But part of the appeal of Smith to me,
    or at least the version of Smith I’m getting from you,
    is that that just doesn’t seem to be how he looked
    at the world or people, that maybe I’m just projecting.
    – I think it’s really hard to say
    whether Smith would be really optimistic
    or really pessimistic about our current situation, right?
    You know, on the one hand,
    he might say, hey, where are the forms of state capture
    whereby elite interest groups might be trying to kind of like
    take control of the economy in ways that are
    disproportionately benefiting the wealthy and privileged
    at the expense of the poor.
    But was he optimistic that we could change that?
    I don’t know.
    That’s what put Smith in the gray area
    as this podcast is called.
    He also didn’t have much faith in politicians
    to do the right thing.
    That doesn’t make him a libertarian,
    but he was very skeptical of ordinary politicians
    to kind of like not get swayed by the wrong ideas
    or not become victims of their own ideology
    and own ideas of like how things should run.
    He was deeply skeptical of certain forms
    of concentrated power.
    So like on the one hand, he’s saying,
    here’s how you can see the problem differently.
    And once you see the problem,
    you’ll be able to maybe fix it.
    But on the other hand, he’s like, oh, I’m not so sure.
    People aren’t so great at this all the time.
    – You said, you know, the show is called the gray area.
    And it’s really not a performative shtick for me.
    Like I really sincerely value uncertainty and doubt
    as deeply underrated intellectual virtues.
    You know, like the world is so complicated
    and no one really has their arms around it.
    And Smith strikes me as someone
    with a lot of intellectual integrity
    and not just a really brilliant ideologue
    looking to make the world fit into his conceptual box.
    And I think a lot of people who have made use of him
    have done precisely that.
    And I hope if nothing else,
    we may have poked a few holes in that.
    Certainly your book does.
    And I hope people read it for that reason and many others.
    – Well, thanks.
    That’s a great pitch for my book.
    – Okay, the book is again, Adam Smith’s America.
    How a Scottish philosopher became
    an icon of American capitalism.
    Glory Lou, this is great.
    Thanks so much for coming in and having this chat with me.
    – Thanks again for having me, Sean.
    (upbeat music)
    – All right, tell me what you think of that episode.
    Did you like Adam Smith?
    You want some more Adam Smith?
    Did we talk enough Adam Smith?
    Let me know.
    You can drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com.
    I read those emails, please keep them coming.
    And if you don’t have time for all that,
    just rate, review, subscribe.
    This episode was originally produced
    by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall
    and engineered by Patrick Boyd.
    The gray area is edited by Jorge Just
    and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
    New episodes dropped Mondays, listen and subscribe.
    This show is part of Vox,
    support Vox’s journalism
    by joining our membership program today.
    Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
    (upbeat music)
    you
    [BLANK_AUDIO]

    Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” but as Liu points out in her book, his legacy has been misappropriated — especially in America. They discuss his original intentions and what we can take away from his work today.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

    Guest: Glory Liu (@miss_glory), author; lecturer, Harvard University

    References:

    Works by Adam Smith:

    Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

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  • Breaking our family patterns

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    Hey Deb, what is going on with that McMuffin?
    Oh, it’s a mighty McMuffin.
    Sausage and double the bacon on one McMuffin.
    So you don’t have to choose.
    You should get one.
    It’s perfect for you.
    How so?
    You’re not the decision-making type.
    Oh, I can make decisions.
    Now, should I get it with an iced coffee or a hot one?
    Oh, maybe both.
    Should I order in the app or in person?
    Should I get one hash brown?
    Oh, boy.
    The mighty McMuffin for a limited time
    at participating McDonald’s in Canada.
    Your mom hates it when you leave
    six half-full glasses on your nightstand.
    It’s a good thing mom lives on the other side of the country.
    And it’s an even better thing that you can get
    six Ikea 365 plus glasses for just $9.99.
    So go ahead.
    You can afford to hoard because Ikea is priced for student life.
    Shop everything you need for back-to-school at Ikea today.
    If I told you that the way you grew up,
    your family situation, your environment, all of it,
    had an enormous impact on who you are today,
    you’d probably say, “Well, yeah, obviously.
    “You don’t need a psychology degree to connect those dots.
    “But what if I told you that the way you grew up
    “might be the most significant influence
    “on your romantic relationships as an adult?”
    On some level, this may not be all that surprising either,
    since who we are as individuals
    determines who we are as partners or spouses.
    How could it not?
    Still, even if the basic idea here is clear enough,
    I’m not sure most of us appreciate
    just how much the past influences our present.
    The reality is that so much of our personality,
    how we think, what we expect from other people,
    what we expect from ourselves,
    is shaped very early by the people we are.
    By the people we love and rely on the most.
    So, if you wanna understand why you do what you do,
    or why you often don’t do what you wish you did,
    it helps to look back at your life
    and find the roots of these patterns.
    I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
    (upbeat music)
    My guest today is Vienna Farron.
    She’s a couples’ therapist who’s developed
    a pretty large following on social media,
    and she’s just published her first book
    called “The Origins of You,”
    how breaking family patterns
    can liberate the way we live and love.
    This book is an attempt to force us
    to look closely at our own origin story,
    to reflect on where we came from,
    and how those experiences color who we are
    in our relationships today.
    Farron’s book landed on my desk
    at an interesting moment for me.
    I’m married and have a very young son,
    and like everyone else,
    I’m navigating all the challenges that this entails.
    So this conversation, which we originally dropped
    in March 2023, was an opportunity to explore themes
    that are both personal and universal.
    We’re all trying to be better partners.
    We’re all trying to understand ourselves,
    and hopefully we’re all just trying to do life better,
    whatever that means.
    But I started this conversation by asking Vienna
    to lay out her approach to therapy.
    So my title is “Marriage and Family Therapist.”
    I work with individuals, couples, and families,
    all within the context of relationships
    and really understanding the origin, pain, and wounds
    that we accrue in our childhood.
    So the lens through which I see people and relationships
    is through their family of origin,
    the family system or systems in which they grew up,
    to see that there is a larger system at play
    in every moment, right?
    When we have unwanted patterns in our adult lives,
    we keep getting into the same conflict
    with a partner or a parent.
    We keep choosing emotionally unavailable people to date.
    We’re chronically unhappy at every job that we hold.
    For me, if we can’t create a quick change, right?
    If there’s resistance there, if there’s friction there,
    then that’s a pretty good indicator
    that there’s something unresolved from our past,
    and the place that I like to go is our family.
    I like to understand the template, right?
    That’s our first education on just about everything.
    We obviously get other people in there
    at different points, teachers, coaches, religion, et cetera.
    All of these influences that start
    to shape our belief systems,
    but our family system is the first system
    where that education is handed over to us.
    A lot of times when people come in for individual therapy,
    it’s really easy to just stay focused
    on that one person’s experience,
    the story that they’re sharing.
    And I try to always keep other people in the room,
    even when they’re not there physically.
    We all know that we have complex histories.
    We have a story that is rich,
    and when we can keep that in mind,
    when we’re thinking about relational patterns
    that are breaking down,
    that’s so helpful to remember
    that our partner or our parent or our sibling
    has a lot of context that’s worth understanding.
    – Yeah, I’m glad you said that,
    because I don’t think anyone will be surprised
    to hear that our childhoods,
    our family dynamics growing up,
    influences how we behave as adults.
    But why do you think it’s worth really emphasizing
    not just how that impacts us as individuals,
    but how it impacts our relationships?
    Because maybe it’s the relationships part
    that is perhaps less understood than the individual part.
    – Yeah, right, and I think you’re right,
    that a lot of people can say,
    like, sure, I can connect some of these dots,
    and that makes a lot of rational sense,
    but I am a big believer that the unresolved pain
    from our past comes along with us.
    Our pain is not out to destroy our lives.
    Our pain is not out to ruin us, right?
    Our wounds are tugging at us because they want attention,
    and they find these really clever ways, right?
    Like our internal system is brilliant and super fascinating,
    the ways in which it will bring us back into contact
    with pain that is unresolved.
    And what we know to be true is that relationships
    are the greatest way for that pain
    to play itself out over and over and over again.
    So whether it’s a romantic partnership,
    whether the listeners who have children who know our children
    are such great mirrors for us,
    and they bring us into contact with a lot of that stuff,
    it’s like relationships are where so much of that plays out.
    You know, you have so many people who are like,
    okay, I’m here to understand it,
    but understanding only takes us so far.
    There’s only so much that we can do
    as individuals thinking about,
    and yeah, maybe processing on our own as well,
    but I find that if it’s relationships
    that contributed to our pain,
    then it’s relationships that need to contribute
    to our healing as well.
    And so yeah, why we really need to explore this
    through the context of relationships.
    – I’m curious, what is the first thing,
    if there is a first thing,
    do you want to know about someone’s family history
    when they come to you with relationship problems?
    – There are many things I want to know about.
    Probably one of the first questions is,
    what did you want as a child and not get?
    That’ll bring us right to it.
    You know, even noticing like, oof.
    Yeah, is there like a little bit of feeling sensation
    just hearing that question right now.
    You know, my parents, part of what got me into this work,
    of course, is my own personal story,
    unsurprisingly for all therapists.
    People are like, how did therapists get into this work?
    It’s like, yeah, we’re figuring out
    how to resolve our unresolved pain, right?
    My parents, they went through a nine year divorce process.
    It was the longest divorce at the time for New Jersey.
    It was intense.
    And there was just a lot of high conflict.
    There was a lot of psychological abuse, manipulation,
    gaslighting, paranoia, emotional flooding.
    Like it was not an easy system to grow up in.
    And I’m an only child.
    So as a tiny little human, I was really there on my own.
    And I think my parents obviously did what they could
    and all of my main needs were taken care of.
    But I took on this role of seeing the adults in my life
    crashing and burning around me.
    I believed that there wasn’t room for me to not be okay
    because my perception of them was that they were not okay,
    that not only were they not okay, they were drowning.
    And so I started to fly under the radar.
    I started to pretend like I was fine.
    I was unaffected by things.
    I didn’t want to add any type of stress or burden
    to their already full plates.
    And that role, I took on and I kept it for decades.
    I wasn’t until late in my 20s.
    And it clicked in at one moment in a conversation
    with a friend, just like this needless little girl
    who pretended like she was unaffected by all of the things
    that were going on in her life and in her family
    became a needless woman who was presenting
    as the quote unquote cool girl, right?
    This woman who, yeah, do whatever you want.
    I’m totally fine.
    I’m totally unaffected.
    No worries.
    I was fully boundaryless.
    And that role had come along with me.
    And I was maintaining this position in my relationships.
    You know, I couldn’t speak up in romantic partnerships.
    I couldn’t speak up in friendships.
    I just was pretending that I was so unbothered
    and unaffected by things.
    And it wasn’t until that moment where I could make a pivot
    and actually for the first time say, I’m not okay.
    I am affected by this.
    That might sound so simple,
    but that was a life-changing moment for me
    to let those words actually come out.
    And I share that story because we can sometimes see
    so clearly how our past comes with us.
    But other times it comes in such subtle ways, right?
    Whether we’re recreating and repeating certain patterns
    or whether we’re taking a path of opposition
    where we don’t even see what’s going on.
    And, you know, for me, it is so important
    to not just understand, but to do the processing work
    in order to shift that and find a new path forward.
    – Well, let me just first express some solidarity
    with you as a fellow only child, also from a broken home.
    So I can relate in some ways to that.
    I encountered that question in your book, you know,
    what did you most need as a kid and not kid?
    And boy, that was a big one.
    I thought about the answer to this and it’s huge.
    – Yeah, it points us though to, you know,
    in the book, I talk about five origin wounds.
    And, you know, my answer to that question
    led me to an origin wound that really needed my attention.
    I wanted to know that it was okay for me to not be okay.
    – And that origin wound for you, that’s the divorce.
    – Yeah, so in the beginning of the book, I share a story.
    I was in first grade and that particular weekend
    was supposed to be the three of us.
    And, you know, my dad was watching a Yankees game.
    My mom wanted to go to the beach.
    He didn’t want to go and she invited my grandmother
    to come along with us.
    And, you know, I’m this little girl behind a closed door
    in her bedroom and I hear if you leave, don’t come back.
    And the next thing I know is that my mom’s barreling upstairs
    having me pack a bag and we’re leaving.
    And there’s a lot that happens after that.
    You know, we don’t go home.
    We go to my grandmother’s home, police are involved.
    I’m hiding in a closet, you know,
    instructed to not make a sound.
    Yeah, there’s this rupture that makes me have to split
    my loyalty, like how do I take care of mom and dad?
    How do they both know that I love them?
    And all of a sudden I’m in this position
    where I’m having to choose one over the other.
    And so, you know, that was the catalyst, right?
    That was the rupture that then led
    into the nine year divorce process.
    And, you know, all of that contributes
    to the lack of emotional safety,
    psychological safety as well.
    – So what drew me to your book is this focus on patterns,
    patterns of thought, patterns of behavior.
    Obviously those things are related.
    And how we get stuck in them.
    And one of the greatest frustrations in my life
    at the moment is this feeling of being almost hostage
    to extremely dumb impulses.
    Like I can often see myself doing
    or saying something in real time, often with my wife.
    I know it’s stupid.
    I know it’s kind of productive.
    I know it can only escalate a situation.
    And yet I plow ahead anyway.
    And there’s this maddening feeling
    of knowing what I should do and not doing it.
    Maybe you’d call that self sabotage.
    Maybe you’d call it being a dumb ass.
    I don’t know, like those obviously
    aren’t mutually exclusive.
    What do you tell people when they experience
    some version of this?
    Like when they just can’t quite overcome
    what they know are terrible impulses.
    – Yeah, so self sabotage,
    I’d reframe it as something that is self protective.
    What does it serve to do the thing that you do
    even though you know you ought not do it?
    Like I said before, our systems are brilliant.
    And so we’re constantly working in a way
    to protect ourselves from something.
    Now, unfortunately, a lot of times
    that’s an old operating system, right?
    It’s protecting us from something
    that’s unresolved, unhealed, right?
    As opposed to protecting us in the sense
    that it’s supporting and working us towards our goals
    and our healing and connection.
    I wonder if you and I have some similarities.
    It sounds like maybe you didn’t get too specific with that,
    but it makes me think about a story
    when I was first dating my now husband.
    We were in a conflict,
    no idea what the conflict was about,
    but I remember acutely that I could not stop proving my point.
    And I just kept going.
    I doubled down, I tripled down,
    and I was having this out of body experience
    where I was like, “Vienna, shut up.”
    Just like, “Stop, can you take it back?”
    There was a lot of shame and embarrassment there.
    I was like, I could see this part of me
    that just like needed to be right,
    needed to prove my point,
    and yet I couldn’t stop myself from it.
    And I realized like, okay, what does point proving serve?
    What does the need to be right protect me from?
    And I grew up with a father who was really manipulative.
    He gaslit my mom and he was really quick with his words.
    You know, he was really, really good at it.
    And as a tiny human, I watched this
    and I saw the impact that it had on my mother.
    It was quite literally crazy making.
    And so I started to understand that my need to be right
    was my way of protecting myself.
    That being wrong was quite dangerous for me, right?
    That’s what I had learned, right?
    That being wrong meant that I would be manipulated,
    that I would be taken advantage of, right?
    And so being right was safety for me.
    Proving my point was the way in which I safeguarded myself
    from the things from the past.
    That was such an important revelation for me
    because I needed to understand that,
    okay, yes, as a little girl, that made a lot of sense.
    But if I kept at this, right?
    If I didn’t start to pay attention
    to that unresolved pain of what I saw growing up,
    then I would continue to loop into that.
    And I needed to find a way to process
    and witness that and grieve the pain from the past
    so that I could make a new choice
    in this current relationship, right?
    Because I did not have a partner who was manipulative.
    I have a very honest, kind, loving, open partner.
    And if I did not change that,
    you run the risk of having relationships end, right?
    Like that’s the consequence to all of this.
    – Yeah, well, you know,
    I don’t know where it comes from with being,
    maybe this will come out
    in the context of this conversation.
    For me, it really does feel like this impulse to behave
    in ways I know are unhealthy is so strong
    that it can feel like almost a nervous system sort of thing.
    And I don’t want to accept that
    because I don’t want to rob myself of agency to do otherwise.
    But it really does feel like that sometimes.
    And I don’t know if part of it
    is me almost thriving on conflict, right?
    Where like I’m choosing conflict
    because that almost feels more familiar and safe
    than actually just choosing to interpret a situation
    differently that would push in the opposite direction.
    – Absolutely, right?
    I mean, I think we go in the direction of familiarity,
    but like where does it lead you?
    When you engage in whatever the destructive behavior is,
    where do you get to?
    – With acting that way?
    Escalation.
    – Conflict.
    And then how do you feel
    when you’re in that escalation and conflict?
    – In an almost perverse way,
    I feel almost more comfortable
    because I’m very much at ease when my guard is up.
    Like I’m very comfortable fighting.
    I’m very comfortable arguing.
    I’m very comfortable attacking and deflecting.
    It’s almost a safer space than being vulnerable, right?
    And so I just naturally retreat to that.
    – Yeah, right.
    So, okay, one, where did you learn that from?
    Two, what does that protect you from?
    Three, what story does that wind up
    ultimately supporting for you?
    – You know, the story ultimately ends up supporting
    is that everything is fucked.
    And what I mean by that, right?
    Look, if I was on your therapist couch
    and I kind of am right now and you asked me,
    what’s the one habit or the one part of my personality
    that I most want to change?
    What I would tell you is that I’m a catastrophizer very often.
    And this is something that I,
    how should I put this?
    It’s not great for me or my relationships, right?
    And for anyone unfamiliar with that term,
    like what I mean is there is this instinct
    to almost pre-prepare for disaster
    by not just imagining all the way something could go wrong,
    but actually conjuring reasons to blow it up
    before it goes wrong.
    And so anytime I sniff conflict,
    my mind will immediately go to, oh yeah, of course, right?
    Because things are messed up and we’re broken.
    And of course, this is just validation of all of that.
    And it becomes self-fulfilling.
    And it’s totally delugional often.
    – Well, but you’re describing a hypervigilance, right?
    – What does that mean?
    That sounds right, but-
    – Like the part of you that’s constantly scanning
    and pre-preparing for something to go wrong
    and the inquiry would be, what’s familiar about that?
    When did you have to prepare?
    Why did you need to look out for things going wrong?
    Why did you need to look out for things going south?
    It’s not to put you on the spot,
    but I imagine that there is some history in your life
    where you learned that there’s a need for hypervigilance.
    – And I think fear probably has a lot to do with it.
    Fear of what exactly?
    I can’t say, maybe you would call it a safety wound
    that stems from my being an only child,
    from a broken home with very young parents
    who were trying to figure out how to be parents
    before they were probably ready to be parents.
    And so part of it feels very much like a defense mechanism.
    – Certainly.
    To have young parents who are figuring it out
    often creates an environment
    where a child has to do some figuring out themselves.
    I don’t know if that resonates for you,
    but they don’t necessarily know what to be thinking of next
    or because there’s an immaturity
    that might have been there.
    Then you have to become the observer,
    the hypervigilant one, or just vigilant one to say,
    well, hey, my needs over here,
    or hey, we’ve got to look out for this,
    or hey, what about that if they’re not as attuned or aware?
    Which can happen when we have adults stepping into a role
    that maybe is slightly premature for them.
    It reminds me of this one story
    that I share in the book about Natasha,
    and she’s coming into therapy
    and she’s trying to figure out whether or not
    she should stay in the relationship with Clyde,
    who is this wonderful man,
    but she keeps thinking that the other shoe is going to drop
    and she doesn’t know why.
    And at first she doesn’t want to talk about her family,
    past it all.
    She’s like, no, like I’m here to figure out
    if I should stay with him or not,
    we’re about to get engaged and I need this answer.
    And a little bit into our therapy,
    I learned that when she was a teenager,
    she stumbled upon an email
    that was open on her father’s computer
    and it was between her father and a woman who wasn’t her mother.
    He walks in on her, he sees her crying,
    he says, please don’t tell your mother or sister,
    I promise I’ll cut it off.
    And she holds that secret for him forever.
    It was the first time that she had spoken
    that out loud to anyone, right?
    Was to me in that session, decades later,
    she had absorbed it in such a way
    and then had to go on pretending
    like nothing had ever happened,
    which makes sense as to why she said,
    I have a great family and great childhood,
    that it didn’t strike her
    that the other shoe dropping came from this origin story.
    And she was going through life in her romantic relationships,
    waiting for the other shoe to drop,
    exiting those relationships early for really no reason,
    but just because of the anticipation
    of something could go wrong,
    you cannot trust people even if they present
    like they are phenomenal humans, right?
    And that was such an opener for us
    because it brought us to the part of her
    that needed to process the origin pain,
    that needed to witness this teenager
    who was asked to hold a secret
    who did and what that did to her
    and then to grieve the emotions that were there
    so that she could then choose to be committed
    and move forward with a partner
    who was actually a great fit and really aligned for her.
    And so you can see how sometimes
    when we don’t have that awareness,
    the past unresolved or untouched pain
    can create and maintain these behaviors and these patterns
    and so for you or for anybody who’s listening
    who resonates with this or like, that’s the inquiry.
    – Well, I’m glad you brought up that story.
    It’s about trust, you know, lack of trust
    and that’s a very common problem in relationships
    and it’s easy to understand in certain situations
    like infidelity or something.
    That’s an obvious breach of trust.
    That’s very hard to get back.
    But I think a lack of trust often shows up
    in much quieter, deeper ways for a lot of us
    and that is harder to diagnose
    but every bit is consequential.
    – That’s right.
    – Like for example, like maybe, you know,
    we don’t open ourselves up to someone
    because we’re worried about being judged
    or even more insidious.
    We assume the worst intentions from our partner
    for perhaps lots of reasons that have nothing to do with them
    that predate them.
    But seeing someone through that filter of suspicion
    is such a poison pill for a relationship
    and it does kind of boil down to trust.
    And I guess, you know, if you dig deep enough
    into the source of all of that,
    you end up landing in childhood.
    Not always, but I suspect often.
    – Yeah, right, not always.
    And of course, I recognize that not every wound of ours
    gets created in childhood.
    It’s just the framework that I use when I’m doing my work.
    But yeah, the breach of trust is so brutal
    because we all know that it’s so hard
    to work our way back from it.
    And you’re right.
    We have the big ones, right?
    The obvious ones and infidelity.
    Somebody gambling away your education fund
    or something like that.
    But then we also have the things like parents
    who make promises that they don’t follow through on.
    And it might feel small,
    but that’s something that starts to teach a child
    whether or not they can trust another person
    to follow through on what they’re saying.
    I think when it’s our parents or the adults
    who are in our parental roles,
    who teach us that we are not worthy,
    who communicate to us that we are not a priority
    or that you can’t trust other people
    or that you’re not safe in the world,
    it’s a really hard thing to come back from
    because as kids, we look to our parents,
    to the adults as truth.
    We don’t have the capacity to process properly, right?
    If I’m not worthy in the eyes of my parent,
    then there’s no way that I’m worthy
    in the eyes of anybody else.
    If I can’t trust the people who are supposed to love me,
    protect me, nurture me, guide me,
    then what do you mean I’m supposed to trust other people?
    That’s a real conundrum for a lot of folks.
    (upbeat music)
    – How do you draw the line between self-love
    and self-indulgence?
    I’ll ask Vianna after a short break.
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    (gentle music)
    – You know, I’ll be honest.
    Like one of the things I’ve always found sort of off-putting
    about the world of wellness literature
    is a kind of obsession with self-care and self-fulfillment.
    You know, taken too far.
    I do think that can become self-indulgent
    when often I think what we really need in order to be happy
    is to be less self-involved.
    But I think you make a pretty compelling case
    that the absence of self-love manifest
    in some pretty toxic ways in our relationships.
    And maybe you could just say a bit about that.
    – Yeah, I mean, I think the absence of self-love
    really intersects with these wounds
    when you don’t feel deserving or good enough
    that there were conditions for love, right?
    I needed to perform, be perfect, be a people pleaser,
    be the comic relief, whatever it is in order to get connection,
    attention, love, presence, et cetera, right?
    And maybe I should just name worthiness,
    belonging, prioritization, trust and safety
    are the five wounds that I go over.
    What we’ll see is that those things strip away
    at our confidence.
    They strip away at the self, right?
    This belief that I belong as I am.
    So with a belonging wound,
    a lot of times families have this narrative,
    like this is what it looks like to be a part of this family.
    This is what we believe, this is what we do.
    This is how we show up in the world.
    And some of that is beautiful, right?
    The traditions that we have with a family
    that might be lovely, but other parts of that
    are where we’re asked to trade our authenticity
    for attachment.
    Dr. Gabbler-Matte talks about that being our two lifelines,
    attachment and authenticity.
    But when attachment is threatened,
    a child will trade authenticity in an instant
    in order to survive.
    And so we start to see how all of these things
    strip away from our capacity to hold ourselves
    in high regard, or even just regard,
    to pick ourselves up and believe that we are deserving of,
    to believe that we can just be ourselves
    and that that is enough,
    to believe that we are important in the world,
    to believe that there are people in this world
    who we can trust,
    or to believe that there is care and concern
    for our overall well-being.
    And so self-love to me is not, you know,
    sure you wanna throw in some bubble baths
    and yeah, those are great things for us from time to time.
    But I talk about self-love as the intersection
    of grace and compassion for the self,
    as well as accountability and ownership.
    And we have to see ourselves
    as a part of the human experience,
    but we also need to take accountability and ownership.
    And when we don’t do that, we’re stuck.
    The self-critic is totally turned up, right?
    That inner voice that just has a lot to say
    about who we are and what we’re doing
    and doesn’t seem to have any problems letting us know.
    And so like we stay stuck in that space
    instead of moving to a place of agency,
    like I think you said before, yeah.
    – The question of authenticity about how as children
    we often trade our authenticity for attachment,
    we start contorting ourselves very early.
    I certainly did for way longer than I should have
    for other people because that is the straightest line
    to acceptance, but that strategy does not work in the long run.
    And I think you’re right that it becomes a problem
    in our relationships, right?
    I mean, there are many different versions of this.
    I have my own, did not make this all about me.
    There’s a case in the book.
    It’s the gay man from West Virginia
    who is closeted for years and he moves to New York City
    and finds himself in a relationship with someone
    who’s wrapped up in a party scene
    and he’s playing along, but it’s not really what he wants.
    He wants a quieter life, but he’s stuck performing this role
    because he thinks he has to in order to be accepted
    by his partner and probably by his social circle,
    but no one can maintain that kind of pose forever, right?
    Like we gotta be who we are for the people we love
    or they won’t be able to love us
    and we won’t be able to love ourselves.
    – Yeah, that’s right.
    All of this stuff is the band-aid.
    It can take us to a certain point.
    We can fake it.
    Okay, I’ll be perfect and I can fake it for a little bit
    or yeah, I’ll trade authenticity
    and do what I need to do to fit in.
    Okay, we can fake it for a little bit
    and it might give us the outcome that we want.
    Maybe people give us validation
    or they might give us attention
    or they might want to spend time with us,
    but it ends.
    We cannot keep that up forever.
    And that’s why I say it’s so important for us
    to go into the origin pain.
    So for the man you’re describing,
    he needed to spend time witnessing the pain
    about his family rejecting him.
    There were constraints there.
    His sexuality was something
    that they could not really comprehend from the South,
    very religious family.
    And so there were a lot of constraints there
    and he overheard his mom after he had come out
    to say like, why is he ruining my life?
    You know, those like daggers
    that really, really hurt him and tore him apart.
    And when we just scurry by that, right?
    When we just brute force our way through,
    when we white-knuckle it,
    when we’re just like, okay, I’m just gonna keep on going
    and not try to tend to the pain,
    what winds up happening is we maintain
    that I’m not worthy, that I’m not lovable,
    that I’m not a priority, that I do not fit in,
    that I don’t belong, that I’m not safe,
    that there is nobody to trust in the world.
    Those things just keep circulating
    and maintaining the pain.
    It was so important for people to come back into contact
    with the original pain
    that set all of these patterns in motion.
    – We’re both parents and having a kid
    is such a transformative event in the life of a couple.
    Everyone more or less understands that.
    But do you think we still underestimate
    just how much becoming a parent changes our relationships?
    – Yeah, probably.
    I mean, I think you’re right in theory
    where like, of course it does,
    but until you’re in it,
    you know, we don’t necessarily understand the strain
    that it has on you.
    Obviously, we know that there are such beautiful parts to it,
    such expansive parts,
    and there’s also really hard stuff that presents itself.
    And yeah, I think we probably do underestimate.
    Listen, I’m, and I know you too,
    we’re still in the early part of parenthood.
    I can tell how easy it is for resentment
    to present very early on when you step into parenthood.
    And I don’t know if you experienced that too,
    but I think my husband and I, we have such a great team.
    And that was still there.
    That piece of, are we doing things equally
    and who’s contributing what and, you know,
    how quick it is for resentment to start to creep in.
    And the expectations, you know,
    when we’re doing this type of healing work too,
    seeing yourself as parent and what that brings forward
    for you in terms of your relationship with your own,
    or, you know, thinking back to when you were a tiny human
    and how you want to offer a very different experience
    for them or a similar experience, right?
    If you had a really great one.
    There’s so many layers that start to reveal themselves.
    And until you’re in the thick of it,
    I think it’s hard to fully know
    what’s going to show up there.
    – Yeah, I think it really is true on some level
    that every couple is a story
    that they sort of believe together.
    And that story changes, it has to change.
    And it certainly changes when you become parents, you know,
    and I, again, I can only speak from personal experience,
    but what has happened for us is
    there’s this kind of gradual evolution
    from being friends who sort of share life together.
    And if you’re not very careful,
    what you find yourself becoming is less that
    and more co-managers of a household.
    And all your energy and all your bandwidth
    and all your patience gets used up on this child,
    you know, especially when they’re really young.
    You know, again, we have a three and a half year old.
    And that means there’s nothing left for each other.
    And so you become more reactive and more irritable
    and you start dumping some of those frustrations
    onto each other because there’s nowhere else for it
    to go and that has been one of the hardest things
    to reckon with and try to transcend.
    And there are good days and there are bad days,
    but the bad days are hard.
    – They’re hard.
    And I think it’s interesting too,
    because depending on what type of wounds you might have,
    there’s certain things that might activate us even more.
    So for example, if you’re a parent
    who has a prioritization wound,
    meaning you didn’t feel important growing up,
    maybe you had a parent who was a workaholic
    or maybe there were mental health challenges
    in the family system that took up the space
    or addiction that took up the space.
    If that’s the wound and then you have this third party
    come into the equation and then all of a sudden
    the other partner is spending a lot of time
    with that third party baby.
    And all of that love and connection is going there.
    All of a sudden, even though we can rationalize it
    and say, of course it’s a baby, this is what we do,
    yada, yada, yada, it doesn’t mean
    that the wound isn’t getting activated, right?
    All of a sudden I am deprioritized now.
    Or if we have a worthiness wound,
    and so unless I am showing up as a perfect parent,
    because that’s what I learned,
    that in order to be loved, I needed to be perfect.
    And now here I am in this new role where,
    oh my gosh, I have no idea what I’m doing.
    I feel nervous, I’m a little scared,
    I’m not sure I trust myself, all the things, right?
    Then it activates that peace.
    And so obviously every parent’s journey is different, right?
    And the things that activate us within that space.
    And I’m not just saying in relation to the child,
    within the couple ship too.
    You’ll start to see like,
    what are the things that make me most reactive here?
    Our reactivity, when we have strong reactions,
    it’s a neon sign that directs us back to our wounds.
    I’m pissed that I’m not getting time with my partner.
    I feel like you’re prioritizing our child over me.
    Just noticing what’s showing up
    is gonna remind us and tell us
    where we need to go spend more time.
    – The worthiness wound prompted a bit of tough reflection.
    You know, again, I was an only child.
    There weren’t any siblings around.
    And I think part of the way I responded to that was,
    this feeling of not quite having a tribe, you know,
    and having parents who were young and not always available.
    And so I think the way that ended up manifesting for me
    is I became very sort of chameleonic.
    You know what I mean?
    Like I became very good at trying to fit in.
    – Shapeshifting.
    – Yeah, with as many different people as I could
    in order to, I don’t know, get validation
    or just feel like I was part of a tribe.
    And you do that long enough.
    And eventually you realize,
    oh, I never really actually settled my identity.
    I just kept playing with new ones
    in order to fit with the circumstances
    in which I found myself.
    That was a big revelation for me.
    – And I think when you start your own family
    for the first time, do I belong here?
    Can I be a part of something here?
    Even when it’s partnership, right?
    There’s that sense.
    And then you bring somebody else into the mix
    and you’re like, wow, okay, what I had
    and you’ve got the same equation now.
    Right now your child is an only child.
    And to think about what that reflects back to you
    and what am I creating, but also can I make space
    to feel a part of something here as well?
    Can I receive that or am I finding ways to block that?
    – So if you were someone who is finding themselves stuck
    in some of these patterns of reactivity
    and you want to disrupt that pattern,
    is there any other concrete advice
    you can give people a practice or a tool
    that they can draw on when they find themselves
    slipping into another one of these patterns
    and just kind of doing the same dance over and over again?
    – Mm-hmm, yeah.
    I love the question and I think I said it earlier.
    What does this pattern serve?
    – Do you mean literally like pausing
    and kind of posing the question to yourself?
    – Yeah, and you might not be able to do it in the moment.
    I think a lot of times when we’re hot,
    there’s not a lot of cooling down
    that can happen right away.
    So in a moment of reflection,
    whether that’s a few hours later, the next day,
    the next week, or right now,
    before something even happens, right?
    To notice like, what are the things
    that make me the most reactive?
    What do the patterns in my life,
    the things that I want to change?
    What does this serve?
    Now, we’re gonna say it doesn’t serve anything.
    All it does is cause problems.
    All it does is cause disconnection.
    All it does is cause dysfunction in my relationships.
    But it still serves something.
    And my example that I shared before was
    it served my need to protect myself.
    It served my need that being right
    meant that I was safe.
    And so whatever it is that you’re doing
    that you can’t stand, that you’re trying to change,
    it’s doing something that your system thinks is for you.
    Does that make sense?
    – It does.
    One thing I started doing,
    and you could tell me if this is stupid,
    and I’m working on this,
    but I kind of came to the conclusion,
    all right, look, I can’t quite break these patterns
    in the sense of I can’t quite do exactly what I want to do,
    what I know I should do.
    So until or unless I can do that,
    what I will do is as soon as I can observe that,
    okay, we’re on the brink of an interaction
    going sideways here, and I’m up in my head about it.
    I just said, you know what, I’m just gonna walk away.
    What I’m not gonna do is escalate, right?
    I can’t quite resolve this,
    but I’m gonna just put a bow on this whole exchange,
    walk away, and then we could circle back later,
    but I can see that if I’m gonna keep participating
    in what’s happening here,
    I’m gonna do it in a way
    that’s gonna make this worse, not better.
    So I’m just gonna, that’s it, I’m gonna end it.
    Is that, obviously it’s not a solution
    to any of these fundamental problems, but is it?
    – It’s a pause.
    – I mean, is that better
    than just continuing on with the pattern?
    – Well, remember earlier on in this chat,
    we talked about that it’s not just about us,
    it’s about the other person that is in the equation with us,
    right, that they also have a history,
    that they also have wounds.
    And so, yes, individually, this is a pause
    and probably a pretty good one.
    You know that it’s gonna escalate, that never ends well,
    and so I’d rather not escalate.
    But what we’re missing is whether or not
    you stepping away activates something in the other person.
    And if we don’t talk about that, right,
    if there isn’t an agreement,
    then that’s something that can cause
    a different type of a rupture.
    So for example, if the other person has an abandonment wound,
    or they feel like you stepping away
    doesn’t honor their emotional safety, for example,
    or they feel deprioritized when you say,
    I’m out of here, I’m not gonna keep having this conversation.
    And all of a sudden that activates a prioritization wound,
    right, like that’s what’s so important
    and that’s so relationship specific.
    It’s to say, what’s gonna work for the two of you, right?
    And how do you co-create that
    with the idea and understanding of what’s at play
    so that we can tend to,
    and like care for the other person’s experience
    while also caring for our own.
    So yeah, it sounds like it’s a good pause for you,
    but I would get curious about
    whether it’s a good pause for the other person too.
    Probably not, I’m working on it.
    We’ve got to take one last quick break,
    but when we come back, Vienna’s seen a lot of couples.
    So what do people regret the most
    when they look back on their relationships?
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    – You counsel a lot of couples.
    – Yes.
    – Some of them figure it out and stay together.
    Some of them don’t.
    In your experience, what do you find
    that people regret the most
    when they reflect back on their relationships?
    – Probably that they don’t come to it sooner.
    You know, like that they don’t come to the awareness as sooner.
    – That they don’t start working on the problem sooner.
    You mean?
    – Yeah, ’cause I think what’s important is that
    we’re not so hard and difficult on ourselves.
    Like a lot of times people come in and they’re like,
    I know I’m starting way late.
    And it’s like, no, like you’re, you know,
    we’re stepping into something when we’re ready for it.
    And I think it’s important, again,
    to have that grace and compassion for ourselves
    instead of like, oh, my life or my relationships
    could have been so different 10 years ago.
    And it’s like, sure, you know, that could have been true,
    but here we are, you know,
    that doesn’t really serve anything for us
    to just think that way and blame ourselves.
    But I think that’s one of the things
    that people struggle with is, oh,
    I wish that I had been readyer to confront this sooner
    because the beauty of this work
    is that we gain internal peace.
    It changes our relationships
    and the quality of our relationships, certainly.
    But there is a beautiful internal peace
    that happens when we do this work,
    when people get a taste of that.
    And they’re like, oh, I don’t have to be in suffering
    all the time.
    I understand why that regret can pop up.
    – Every now and then, usually after some kind of stupid fight,
    I’ll imagine, yeah, how would I feel
    if my wife left right now, right?
    We got in this fight and she just got in the car and left.
    And something tragic happened, you know,
    like a car accident or something.
    I mean, my mother passed away about two and a half years ago
    from a car accident very suddenly.
    So that’s still very much on my mind, that possibility.
    And I’m not trying to be dark here or too heavy.
    I’m really not.
    I guess I’m trying to make a point, you know,
    like if that were to happen, what I know more than anything
    I’ve ever known in my whole life
    is that I would never forgive myself
    for having wasted the time we had
    on such ridiculous, trivial nonsense
    that will appear so trivial and ridiculous,
    less than 24 hours later.
    – Yeah, but the trivial stuff is connected to our pain.
    We don’t do stupid shit just because it’s fun.
    You know, we don’t fight about the toothpaste cap
    and the toilet, you know, just these stupid, you know,
    examples that we’ve had for so long, right?
    It’s like no one’s doing that
    because we actually care about that.
    – It’s never about that, right?
    The thing you’re fighting about
    is almost never the thing you’re fighting about.
    – Right, so this trivial surface level stuff
    is connected to legitimate pain that we carry.
    You know, I’ve worked over 20,000 hours,
    individuals, couples, families, and therapy.
    And this is what I have seen over and over and over again.
    My personal life, my professional life,
    it points us to these wounds.
    And when we can tend to those wounds,
    then we can begin to create those changes.
    You know, you said something before about
    the change that you would like to see.
    This is what I want it to look like.
    And I think there’s an inquiry there
    about what would you need to believe
    in order for that to happen?
    – Yeah.
    – What do you need to believe about yourself
    in order for that to actually happen?
    There’s so much that can berth from that place.
    – So if someone’s listening to this,
    or they read your book and discover for themselves,
    yeah, okay, I’ve got a worthiness wound
    or I have a safety wound or whatever the deal is, right?
    They start with a problem they’re having
    and they can trace it back to their history.
    Well, what do they do next?
    What’s the next move?
    Concretely, right?
    Like, okay, you have this knowledge, right?
    But knowing and doing are not the same thing.
    – That’s right.
    – So what’s the next move?
    – So I walk the reader through a four-step process,
    my origin healing practice,
    where the first part is about naming
    and identifying the wound.
    Do not be surprised if you have multiple.
    So you’re naming what wound or wounds
    you resonate with and identify with.
    The second part of the practice is witnessing.
    So yeah, the part of the self, again,
    that just wants to move on, we don’t tend,
    we don’t acknowledge and see ourselves very well.
    And the witnessing step is about that.
    Now, I’m a big believer in witnessing the self.
    I’m also a big believer in having another human
    whom we trust, who loves us,
    somebody we’re safe with, do witnessing as well.
    What’s really important for people to hear
    is that the person or people who contributed
    to the origin wound do not need to participate
    in the witnessing of it now.
    They don’t need to participate
    in the healing of it in any way.
    In fact, I would say probably more times than not,
    I hear people say, “Yeah, my parent just can’t acknowledge it
    “or they’re super defensive or all they do
    “is explain why they did what they did.”
    And people keep going there over and over and over again.
    Well, maybe if I say it this way,
    or maybe if I write them a letter
    instead of speaking it to them,
    or maybe if I’m really kind,
    or maybe if I get really angry,
    like what way will it get through?
    And I think sometimes when we get caught in this space
    of needing the person that we so badly want
    to acknowledge it, to be the person who has to do it,
    we get trapped in this cycle and can’t find a way forward.
    And so oftentimes witnessing the younger self,
    I remember when I was, gosh,
    I must’ve been like seven or eight years old,
    I would find these sneaky ways to pick up the telephone
    and listen in on my parents’ conversations,
    or I’d perched myself at the top of the steps.
    And there was like a little opening
    where I could listen in to the conversation
    that my mom was having on the phone,
    becoming this detective and trying to figure out
    who’s telling the truth or what’s going on.
    I needed that information.
    And I remember the first time
    that I really closed my eyes
    and kind of transported myself as an adult,
    witnessing from afar.
    If you were seeing it on a movie screen,
    it was maybe a few feet away from my seven,
    eight-year-old self perched atop those stairs.
    But I just got there and I was watching her,
    watching her listen in, watching her absorb the fighting,
    all of the conflict, all the anger, the yelling,
    and just seeing her, you know?
    Again, I didn’t have siblings,
    neither of my parents ever remarried.
    There were no step-parents or anybody else.
    There’s just no validation, right?
    And so there was something really important
    about being able to witness what I had gone through
    through my adult, clear lenses today.
    And so that was so important for me to do,
    and it’s been really important for people I work with
    to do that witnessing or to have a loving partner
    do that as well.
    The third part is grieving.
    Oof, people are like, “Oh, I don’t want to.”
    When in doubt, grieve more.
    When stuck, grieve more.
    – But that will sound to a lot of people like wallowing,
    right, what’s the difference?
    ‘Cause wallowing seems unproductive,
    but grieving in the sense you mean it is the opposite.
    – Yeah, right, it’s very intentional.
    This is never about us wallowing, getting stuck,
    being in some type of victim position.
    This is about feeling what needs to be felt.
    And sometimes I think when we have an aversion
    to wallowing or feeling, we’re like,
    “Nope, I don’t need to.
    “I’m just gonna, again,
    “white-knuckle my way through something.”
    And what we find is that grieving is so important
    for us to allow ourselves to come into contact
    with the emotion that is there, what was lost,
    the sadness that is held around
    what those experiences might have been like,
    and to allow ourselves to come into contact with the pain.
    And then the fourth step is pivoting.
    I don’t believe that we pivot
    before we witness and grieve.
    I think that the pivot, which is about,
    I don’t know if you’ve ever done cross-country skiing.
    – I tried, and I took them off after 10 minutes,
    threw them away, and grabbed my snowboard.
    – Yeah, makes sense.
    But you know the idea of, if a track is already laid,
    it’s so much easier.
    I mean, it’s hard anyway,
    but it’s easier than when you are in fresh powder.
    And the pivot is really about,
    okay, I’m jumping off the thing that is so familiar,
    the pattern, right?
    And when I have witnessed and grieved the pause
    between stimulus and response, right?
    There’s more space for us to connect with that.
    We see, we are aware of things,
    and then it’s in that moment
    that we can make a decision about staying in the loop
    or exiting and trying something different.
    – I love that, it’s so important.
    That pause between stimulus and response,
    that is the worst feeling for me.
    And even what you said a second ago about,
    it’s not about feeling yourself to be some kind of victim.
    Like I’m really sensitive to that.
    And I reflect back in,
    I had this problem as a kid,
    and my parents were emotionally available in this way
    and that way and whatever.
    And boy, I don’t want to get trapped in this narrative
    that strips me of my ability to do better, to do otherwise.
    But you still have to reckon with these things.
    You have to face them.
    Again, the cliche, the only way out is through.
    – Right, it is.
    – It is the pathway to our freedom, right?
    And there’s such truth to that.
    And certain cliches are cliches
    ’cause there’s truth to them, right?
    Like the only way out is through.
    And I think when we build up these muscles of awareness
    of what’s happening in this moment
    is not just about this moment.
    What’s happening in this moment is every moment
    that predates this moment
    that is familiar to what’s playing out here.
    When we tend to that pain,
    then pain is like, okay,
    like almost as if you could make pain or your wounds
    a different entity, externalize it,
    put it outside of you for a moment.
    Pain is not out to destroy us.
    They’re not like, I can’t wait to fuck your life.
    You know, it’s like, that’s not what it’s trying to do.
    It’s there to be tended to.
    It wants acknowledgement.
    It wants to be seen.
    It wants to be heard.
    It wants to be honored.
    And that’s not what we do.
    We just try to go on with our lives,
    skip over it, or we don’t tend to it properly.
    And that’s the beauty is that once we do,
    then pain is able to say, okay,
    I don’t need to keep bringing you back into this.
    That’s why we wind up in the same patterns
    over and over again.
    Pain’s like, I have to find clever ways
    to keep bringing you back into contact with this thing.
    So I’m gonna find ways to do that.
    There is something so profound about watching it play out
    and having people care for the pain and remember it.
    You know, like it doesn’t just go out of sight
    and it doesn’t mean that you come to some,
    you know, completion place
    or you never come into contact with the pain again.
    We know that grief is an ongoing thing
    and we will face it every time it presents itself.
    And it’s more that the charge changes, right?
    That the charge lessens.
    And when the charge lessens, we have more control.
    We have more agency as opposed to the pain
    having more control.
    This is an unfair, probably impossible question,
    but I’m gonna ask it anyway
    ’cause I’m annoying like that sometimes.
    Okay.
    How do we know when to walk away from a relationship?
    Yeah, you know, that question in and of itself
    outsources the answer.
    What does that mean?
    You are asking somebody outside of you
    to make that decision.
    And I know that you’re asking this for the general public,
    but I think that that’s what people do, right?
    As they say, how will I know instead of going inwards
    and spending time with all of the parts and the pieces
    that are specific to that individual and that relationship?
    Because how one person knows is entirely different
    than how another person knows.
    And I think a lot of times it’s so hard
    to be responsible for that decision.
    There’s something nice about somebody else telling us
    that like, yeah, well, if they do X, Y, and Z,
    then you should definitely leave
    to actually own the decision based on what is true
    about your life and what’s true about what’s playing out
    in your relationship.
    It’s not a cop out, my answer, it’s not a cop out,
    I promise, but that’s where I would turn somebody
    for us to then begin to have the conversations
    of what is happening in that person’s internal world
    and story.
    – I mean, look, probably if nothing else,
    a relationship is a dynamic between two people,
    but simply doing the work to figure out
    what your problems are, what’s coming from you
    and discerning that from just the shit you’re projecting
    onto your partner is very helpful.
    At least then you can have maybe a clearer view
    of not just what’s wrong, but what’s solvable.
    – Absolutely.
    I get a lot of questions about what if a partner
    doesn’t want to look at their origin wounds
    or they definitely don’t want to talk about their family.
    And in the best case scenario, we have people who do.
    That’s our best case scenario is that people are like,
    give me this book, pull up my sleeves, let’s get into it.
    But we can affect a lot on our own, right?
    You can never make the horse drink from the well.
    You cannot force a person into this space
    and I would not recommend that.
    But what I would recommend is doing your own.
    Sometimes we start living by examples.
    Sometimes we start revealing, oh my gosh,
    I just had this aha and what this revealed to me
    is X, Y and Z.
    Those things can sometimes shift a system
    in pretty significant ways.
    And when you stay on your own path,
    there’s clarity that will come from that.
    – This conversation and the book,
    it really did hit me at an opportune time.
    And I read it very, very closely and took it on board.
    So thanks.
    – Thank you.
    – The book is, once again, the origins of you,
    how breaking family patterns
    can liberate the way we live and love.
    Vienna Farron, thanks so much for being here.
    – Thank you for having me.
    (upbeat music)
    – I told Vienna before we actually started recording
    that I had to be a little personal
    and speak from my own experiences
    because that’s all I know.
    Obviously my experiences are my own
    and we’re all living our own particular circumstances,
    but there are common threads.
    Most of us are trying to navigate relationships.
    A lot of us are trying to be parents.
    A lot of us are struggling with our own
    unhelpful counterproductive patterns.
    And maybe some of this helped.
    As always, tell me what you think of the episode.
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    just rate, review, subscribe.
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    by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall.
    And it was engineered by Patrick Boyd.
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    Sean Illing speaks with marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon, whose book ‘The Origins of You’ aims to help us identify and heal the wounds that originated from our family, which shape our patterns of behavior in relationships and throughout our lives. Sean and Vienna talk about how we can spot and name our “origin wounds,” discuss practical wisdom to help break free from the ways these pains grip us, and Sean directly confronts some real issues from his upbringing and family life.

    Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

    Guest: Vienna Pharaon (@mindfulmft), marriage & family therapist; author

    References: 

     

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