Nicholas Christakis, Yale professor and author of Blueprint, recounts his wife’s controversial Halloween email—sparking debate on free speech vs. offense—while defending institutions’ role in fostering accountability over coddling. His book argues cooperation and social bonds drive human success, citing shipwreck survival rates (20/9,000 cases where groups thrived for months) and gene-culture co-evolution, like Bajao free divers or Himalayan settlers adapting to extreme environments. They warn CRISPR’s reckless use could backfire, as seen in the Chinese babies case, and debate AI’s potential to outpace human flaws, though Christakis cautions against underestimating its societal disruption. Ultimately, the conversation frames progress as a balance between harnessing innate strengths and navigating unintended consequences—flaws included. [Automatically generated summary]
Yes, it was a moment when around the country many students were struggling with how to balance conflicting sort of needs.
Conflicting needs.
How, on the one hand, to create an environment in schools where everyone sort of felt welcome.
As we've democratized admissions to our American universities, as I think we should have, people from all walks of life have started moving into these institutions, claiming them for their own, which I think is appropriate.
But at the same time, these institutions had wonderful heritages of commitment to free expression and open debate and reason as a principle for resolving our differences.
And some of those values came into tension.
And so around the country, there was a lot of heat about this.
And I happened to walk into a propeller myself and wound up in some challenging circumstances.
And, you know, it was not the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
But, you know, it was in the top 10 challenging moments I've had in my life, let's say.
I mean, you can tell the story if you want, and then I can correct things.
But here's the thing.
It's my job to be a teacher.
And I have taken responsibility for teaching young people.
And it is the case that many people lost their minds.
I mean, lost their senses.
And the faculty too, incidentally.
I mean, you know, it's one thing to talk about people in their college-aged people, but then, you know, the faculty also didn't necessarily do what they should have done.
But the thing is, is that my commitment, my commitment is to teaching more generally.
And I don't want to be defined by that event.
I don't want that to become the most important thing about me.
Well, I'm glad that you had the courage to do that, though, to stand out there and talk to those kids.
But some of them were clearly.
There's something that happens when people become extremely self-indulgent when they know that they have this platform and they have someone who is in a position of authority and they get to hamstring them in front of the public.
And that's what I felt was going on.
Just my understanding of human nature.
I knew what she was doing.
What she was doing by shouting and screaming, this is our fucking home.
We're supposed to be safe here.
I was like, oh, I see what's going on.
She's throwing up the flag of virtue for all of her friends to see how amazing she was.
So she's putting on a show.
People do that.
It's human nature.
You handled it admirably.
You stood there and you just listened to her and you never yelled back and you never raised your voice and you remained calm.
But that sort of environment where the children, and I want to say children, they're basically adults, but acting like children.
And for folks who don't have a 20-year-old in their life and don't remember what it was like, you're not a fully formed thing yet.
You're filled with chaos.
Yes.
You have emotions and hormones.
And then you're at school and you're probably away from the instructions of your parents for the first time.
And you're cutting loose and trying out new ways of communicating that way.
It's a lot of, it's a mess.
But most people felt horrified watching that, that you were subjected to that when you're being very reasonable.
And also what it all came about was your wife had sent out an email saying like, hey, maybe it should be okay for someone to wear a fucked up Halloween costume.
Maybe it's okay for someone to dress up like crazy horse.
Yeah, well, actually, just to be clear, what Erica was saying in that note was not, this is a very important intellectual distinction.
I think we've lost a lot of nuance in our political lives in general in our country right now, and also in the nuance in the way we think about difficult topics.
So what Erica was saying was not that necessarily the people, she was not taking a position on any particular costumes, like this is okay.
In fact, many of the costumes that would have offended the students would offend her.
What she was saying was that she didn't think the university should be telling students what to wear.
And she was asking the students, do you students, at this age at Yale, do you really want the university to be sending you guidance on what to wear?
Perhaps you should think about that.
You're adults.
You're smart.
You're in an environment that privileges free expression.
Do you really want to grant the power to an institution to tell you how to communicate?
And people then thought that she was saying that she was defending a particular course of action.
What she was saying was, she was saying, do you students really want to surrender that kind of control over your own lives to older adults?
Part of the motivation in Erica writing that note was that many of her students, and in fact, many hundreds of other students, felt infantilized by this policy.
And there had been a big buildup prior to that event, including an article in the New York Times about these Halloween costume policies around the country.
And weren't they kind of ridiculous?
And so there was kind of a ferment where people were saying, wait a minute, do we really need adults to be told in this institution, especially given its commitments to open expression, what to wear?
And keep in mind that there could be many ways in which a costume that offends you might not, I might not know why.
So let's say you had been abused by a priest and you were that one of the rules said you shouldn't mock religion, for example, was one of the provisions.
So a university-wide email went out signed by 13 people saying don't mock people's deeply held faith traditions.
Well, what if, for the sake of argument, you had been abused by a priest and you wanted in Halloween to dress up as a Catholic priest, for example, holding a doll.
And someone else who had a different, who was Catholic, was very deeply offended by that.
Well, who should adjudicate that?
Like, you know, is it the role of the institution to come down and say, yes, you can express yourself this way.
No, you cannot.
And so the argument was, let the young people learn.
Let them sort it out themselves.
Let them learn by talking to each other, expressing themselves, saying, you know, that hurts my feelings.
Here's why it hurts my feelings.
And the other person said, oh, I understand, or I don't understand.
I reject that reason.
And sort of buy into a kind of commitment to free and open expression that actually, I think, ultimately serves the objectives of righteous social progress.
If we really want to do better in our society or in any society, in my view, we have to create an environment where we can talk to each other, grant good faith, listen carefully, make subtle distinctions, and free people up to express what they're thinking so we can have a real marketplace of ideas.
I mean, that's really, I couldn't agree with you more enthusiastically.
That's really, that sounds like the best possible environment for growing up and learning, as long as you have someone to sort of moderate or someone to mediate if things go sideways.
Yes, or I don't think you necessarily need a third-party mediator, but you do need a shared understanding of core liberal principles.
And these principles do include, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of commitment to free and open expression, a commitment to debate, a commitment to reason.
So how are you and I going to come to a better understanding of what is true about the world?
We could fight, right?
And then the stronger person would decide what's right.
We could vote.
It doesn't seem quite right either.
You know, 350 cardinals voted that Galileo was wrong.
That didn't make Galileo wrong.
Or we could use principles of reason and inquiry to try to appreciate the world together, right?
We're looking out at the world and saying, that's confusing.
You know, does the sun, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?
Or that's confusing.
Should a king have monarchy, you know, should a king have ultimate authority in a state?
Or is that not how we want to organize a state?
So we, you and I look at the world and debate and think about, okay, and we exchange reasons and we use evidence and ways of understanding and studying the world.
That, to me, is the only way to truth, actually.
Now, some people will think that religion is a way to truth, right?
They think that the truth is, you know, is God-given, for example.
Now, I am very sympathetic to religious belief systems, but I don't think that's a way to truth.
It's a way to some truths, actually.
It's a way to some wisdom.
But anyway, so that's what our universities and our society, our universities are officially committed to that.
The mottos of our universities are all about free inquiry and pursuit of knowledge.
And our country is committed to that in our Bill of Rights, right?
We have a commitment to free and open expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and so forth.
And those ground rules, then, in my view, make it possible for us to have a better society.
But the thing is, these are like, and I think any kind of extreme ideology.
But the point is, we can learn.
There is some wisdom almost anywhere, right?
And the problem comes from excess expression.
You know, the problem comes from, you know, the problem comes, you know, when we take things to extremes and we get to, you know, private ownership of roads.
Well, yeah, or like assessment of drug purity, for example.
So the very rich could set up a laboratory in their basement so whenever a doctor prescribes a medication, they could see if the drugs are safe and pure.
The rest of us pay taxes.
And we say we're all going to pitch in together and we're going to have the FDA and they are going to certify drug purity so that when I go to my pharmacist and buy a drug, the pharmaceutical company isn't killing me by shoddy manufacturing practices.
So I think that's right.
We get together as a free society and we do these things.
I thought that's a new wrinkle because the old flat earthers used to think that the water was shown falling off the disk of the earth, you know, like the edge of the earth.
It was just a disk.
Now the new theory that there's an ice wall actually is kind of not falsifiable.
That is to say, you could get on a cruise and sail to the edge of the earth and you would find a wall of ice there.
Antarctica.
So you think, ah, it's flat.
In other words, they have redefined their theory to make it so that you can't disprove it.
So, for example, there's some vaccines which are known to cause certain neurological conditions, rarely, one out of a million or one out of 100,000 vaccinations.
More commonly is a situation in which you have vaccination is so common, everyone is getting vaccinated.
And often that occurs nearer to an occurrence of some other rare condition.
And people associate the two.
They think, oh, because of the vaccine this happened.
And at the time in my lab, we were doing research on friendship.
We were doing research on why people have friends.
It's actually, it's not difficult to provide an account for why we have sex with each other.
Many animals, most animals are, well, I don't know if it's most, but animals either reproduce sexually or asexually.
And most animals, I'm trying to remember now what the relative proportion is.
Anyway, I'm going to say most.
Most animals reproduce sexually.
And it's not hard to provide an account for how sex originated, why we reproduce sexually.
It's not hard to provide an account for why we are choosy in our mates or why we are careful in who we have sex with.
But human beings don't just mate with each other.
We befriend each other.
We form long-term, non-reproductive unions to other individuals to whom we're not related.
Why?
That's very rare in the animal kingdom.
Very few creatures do this.
We do it, certain other primates, elephants, certain whales, and that's mostly it.
So the question is, why?
So I became very interested in my lab and trying to understand the deep origins of friendship.
Why would natural selection have equipped us with this capacity?
And that set the stage then for an exploring all kinds of other things in our lives, like why we love each other, for example.
Why do we, why do we, when we have sex with a person, we tend to become attached to them.
We develop emotional sentiment about them.
That's not an essential to having sex, yet we do that.
And then I became interested in other kinds of good things, like not just love and friendship, but cooperation and teaching.
Teaching is another crazy thing.
We take it for granted that we teach each other.
But think about this.
Most animals are able to learn.
So a little fish in the ocean learns that if it swims to the light, it finds more food there.
So the fish then learns to be tropic, to move towards the light.
That's individual learning.
Some animals develop what's called social learning.
Social learning is really efficient.
So if I put my hand in the fire, I learn that I burned myself, I pull my hand out, I've learned something.
I paid a price and I learned something.
I could observe you putting your hand in the fire.
You pay all the price, but I gain most of the knowledge.
It's almost as good I learned, oh, people, you shouldn't put your hand in the fire.
I saw that Joe put his hand in the fire.
So social learning is super efficient, learning from others.
But we take it to an even further level.
We don't just passively observe other animals of our own species and learn from them.
We teach each other.
That is very rare in the animal kingdom where one animal sets out to teach another animal something.
So the book is about the evolutionary origins of a good society.
It's also a kind of response, a kind of pushback to a long tradition in the sciences of attention to the bad parts of our nature.
You know, scientists, in my view, have for too long been looking at the origins of murder and tribalism and selfishness and mendacity.
But I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves because we have also evolved to love and to befriend each other and to be kind to each other and to cooperate and to teach each other and all these good things.
This must have been the case that the benefits of a connected life outweighed the costs.
We would not be living socially if my exposure to you harmed me unmet.
In other words, if I came near you and you were violent to me, you killed me, or you gave me misinformation, you told me lies about the world, then my connection to you would ultimately harm me.
I should be better off living as an isolated animal.
So animals that come together to live socially, the benefits of that must outweigh the costs.
My living, us living as a group.
So all this attention to the ways in which our interactions are bad, that we kill each other, that we steal from each other, that we lie to each other, that we have tribalism and all of these traits, which we do.
Every century is replete with horrors.
I'm not like Panglos.
Like, I don't think like Pollyanna, like, oh, everything's great.
That's not me.
But what is me is a kind of optimistic focus on the good parts of human nature and the recognition that those good parts must in toto overwhelm the bad parts.
The argument, and that's discussed in the book, the way we have achieved the kind of social conquest of the earth, the way our species has spread out to occupy every niche, which is also very rare.
Most animals live in one, you know, grizzlies live in this part of the world.
They don't live in Amazonia.
And, you know, polar bears live in this part of the world.
They don't live in Arizona, etc.
But our species lives everywhere.
And the way we have come to be able to do that is by the capacity to have culture, to teach and learn from each other, to accumulate knowledge.
So in the book, I talk about lots of this famous set of stories called the Lost European Explorer Files, about how European explorers are lost, they lose their supplies, they wind up dying, but they're in an environment in which other people thrive and survive because they have learned how to live there.
So we've spread out around the world.
And then there's a chapter in the book at the beginning about shipwrecks.
Yeah, so I have this, I have this, so what I'd like to do is, what I try to set out to do in the beginning of the book is I say, look, it's clear that our genes shape the structure and function of our bodies.
It is increasingly clear that our genes also shape the structure and function of our minds, our behaviors, whether you're risk averse, how intelligent you are, whether you have wander lust.
These properties are properties that depend in part on your genes.
But it's also clear to me, and that's what the book argues, is that our genes shape not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but also the structure and function of our societies.
And to really prove that, what we would need is something known as the forbidden experiment.
And the forbidden experiment is an experiment in which we took a group of babies who had never been taught anything, who were acultural, had no culture, and stranded them on an island and left them on their own to see what kind of society they would make when they grew up.
You know, how would they organize themselves socially?
Is there kind of an innate society that human beings are pre-wired to make in an essence?
Now, obviously, that's unethical and cruel, but actually monarchs for thousands of years have contemplated this experiment.
So Herodotus writes about how one of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs wanted to know what kind of language would, what was a natural language we had in us that we would speak if we were not taught a language.
So this pharaoh, it is said, took two babies and gave them to a mute shepherd to raise to see how did the children speak when they grew up.
And Emperor Achbart attempted this.
There was a couple of European kings that attempted this.
Obviously, we can't actually do this.
So what I do in the book is I look at a series of other approximations of that.
And one chapter is devoted to looking at shipwrecks, groups of men typically, but sometimes men and women, who between 1500 and 1900, there were 9,000 shipwrecks.
Many more thousands of ships were lost at sea.
And in 20 of those cases, we found 20 cases where at least 19 people were stranded for at least two months.
And, you know, there's a kind of, well, here's one crew I can tell you about, but here's a map of the shipwrecks.
Like these are the all over the world where they occurred and when they occurred and how many people there were.
And so then I got all the original accounts from the sailors, from the people on the wrecks, and all contemporary archaeological excavations of those wrecks where they had been excavated, and try to understand what kind of society did these isolated crews actually wind up making.
And there were some amazing stories that I found in there.
Most of those crews were eventually – in fact, all of those crews had at least one survivor because if they had all died, then I wouldn't be able to know about them.
But there's a one famous case in which these sailors were stranded near Australia, I think somewhere in the Pacific, and they managed to catch a big petrel, one of those huge birds, you know, like a condor.
And they put a little note in a little tiny bottle and they tied it to its feet.
And this petrel flew thousands of miles and landed in Australia and was found with a note indicating where the stranded sailors were.
But the point is that we have to have it, for me to be able to describe what happened, we needed at least one survivor.
And often there were many cases where everyone survived.
I mean, there was one pair of cases that was amazing to me.
In 1846, in the South Auckland Islands, just north of Antarctica, south of New Zealand, the Grafton was wrecked on the southern part of the island.
I can't remember how big the island was.
It's in the book.
Maybe let's say 90 miles long or something, or 20 miles long.
I think it's 20 miles long.
On the southern part of the island, five men are wrecked on the Grafton.
And on the northern part of the island, the Inverco wrecks, 19 men are wrecked on the Inverco.
All the Grafton crew survives.
And both crews were on the island at the same time.
They never encountered each other.
They're struggling for survival.
It's like an experiment, like who's going to win?
I'm tempted to say Fear Factor.
Yeah.
And the question is, who's going to survive and how and why?
Everyone on the Grafton crew survives, and 16 of the 19 men on the Inverco crew die.
There's also cannibalism in that crew.
So it's a very different outcome for various reasons.
So anyway, so the point is that in the book, I start with a series of stories about how people come together to attempt to make new civilizations.
I use the example of unintentional communities with shipwrecks.
I look then at intentional communities like communes and kibbutz in Israel and 1970s communes in the United States, 19th century communes in the United States.
Actually, going back to Roman times, there have always been groups of people who've said, society's fucked up.
I'm going to go and we're going to make it again.
We're going to start afresh.
I look at settlements in Antarctica of scientists.
I look at the Pitcairn, the mutiny on the bounty.
I look at the Shackleton expedition.
Many, many cases of stranded, isolated groups of people trying to make a new social order.
And then I also use data from experiments we do in my lab.
We have this software where tens of thousands of people have come and played these games.
We can create these temporary artificial societies of real people where people come and spend an hour or two and we with this godlike way can engineer the society.
We can have a lot of inequality or little inequality or various other features.
And then we can observe what happens.
And I look at all of that data, all those stories, and say, look, there is a deep and fundamental way that no matter what, human beings make a society.
They're underlying fundamental principles about society, which are as innate as the fact that you have two kidneys, you know, most people, almost everyone, or your pancreas makes insulin.
You look around the world, and the example I give is that, yes, there's huge cultural variation around the world.
Just like you said, totalitarian societies, people have different foods, and they have different ways of dressing, and there's enormous cultural variation.
And it's marvelous and interesting and obvious to anybody.
But I think we're missing the forest from the trees.
To me, this is like you and I are sitting on a plane and we look at a hill that's 300 feet and 900 feet and we say those are very different hills.
But actually, if we took a step back, we would see that we were on a plateau and one was a mountain that was 10,300 feet and another was a mountain that was 10,900 feet.
And actually there are these much more deep and fundamental plate tectonic forces that are creating these two mountains that are very similar, but we are just focused on the superficial top.
So the argument in the book is that everywhere in the world, people have friendship.
People love their partners.
People cooperate.
People teach each other.
These are fundamental common principles shared by everyone, even though there's also a lot of variation.
So totalitarian states apply huge cultural pressure to suppress this innate tendency.
It's like religious, you need a lot of belief in God to suppress your innate desire to have sex, right?
So you can have a belief system that's very powerful that kind of prevents you, squashes what would otherwise be a kind of inescapable inclination you have.
So totalitarian regimes, and this is discussed in the book too, they are very threatened by the institution of the family.
They're threatened.
You need to owe your loyalty to the state, not to your family, not to your friends.
And so they have a series of institutions that, you know, everyone is comrade.
Everyone gets called comrade, for example.
Or a lot of times, well, I don't know if I want to speak at the state level.
Let me take it down a notch to communes.
So if you think about communes, if you're going to make a commune of people and you want them to feel real loyalty to the commune, one way you can do that is you want to reduce the commitment people have to their partners, let's say, their mates.
And in order to do that, you can go to one of two extremes.
Either you can prohibit sex, like the shakers, and you say, okay, no one's going to have sex with anyone because we're all in a commune and we all love each other and we're not going to have special love for particular people.
Or you could go to the other extreme and you can have polyamory.
Say, everyone's going to have sex with everyone else.
Once again, you see, that subverts the special relationship that people might form with particular individuals.
And so both of those strategies, even though they're opposite, are attempting to do the same thing, which is to break down real relationships, face-to-face relationships between individuals, so that you can have a commitment to this higher group.
And that's what totalitarian states also face the same dilemma.
And that's also why, incidentally, a lot of those states try to reduce gender differences, right?
Like, you know, the Mao jacket, the men and women all were wearing the similar kind of attire, for instance, because they want to have people see themselves as interchangeable and not as individuals and relationships not be particular.
No, I mean, not even just to make arguments, just to compare, because that is essentially like, in particular, the Ragnish cult in Oregon, the Wild, Wild West, our Wild, Wild Country documentary on Netflix.
Well, I'm always fascinated by people that are unhappy with the current state of affairs.
They don't like the way society feels to them.
They don't feel like they belong and they want to try somewhere else.
I mean, and what's really interesting to me is the last time someone did this as a country, as far as I know, is the United States.
There really is.
I mean, it's also very unique that this is one of the weirdest countries in the world in terms of our ability to freely express ourselves and more guns.
Well, the thing about America is like the American experiment is about the fact that anyone can be an American.
My parents immigrated from Greece.
I was raised in this country.
To be an American means to buy into a certain set of principles like the Bill of Rights.
And many other countries are very xenophobic.
You can't become a Japanese.
You can't be nationalized in Japan.
I mean, you can, but it's extremely difficult and rare.
So it's a very homogeneous country.
Switzerland is another country.
It's very difficult to become Swiss.
You can't be nationalized as a Swiss city.
I mean, you can, but it's extremely difficult and rare.
But the United States, you know, we say you are an American.
If you from all the whole world, you're welcome.
Bring us your tired.
The famous saying on the foot on the I forgot the saying, it's very poetic on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty.
You're wretched.
You're forlorn, whatever it is.
And you can come to these shores and make your life anew.
And all you need to do to be an American is to buy into a commitment to constitutional governance, democratic rule, Bill of Rights, and these principles.
Now, we should note that there were millions of people that were brought as slaves involuntarily to these shores.
We don't always realize our best virtues.
We allow people to come, but like the Irish and treat them as second-class citizens or the Italians or the Greeks even.
We don't always do that.
But the idea that you're putting on the table, which I think is correct, is that you can be an American.
This is a special, unusual experiment.
You can't reinvent yourself quite that way, to my knowledge, in any other colony or country.
And I think like you were saying with your libertarian friend and someone who may be an anarchist or whatever, there's room for all these weird opinions.
They might not be correct, and they will all be represented as just gigantic soup of human beings that's 300 plus million.
I think our size contributes to or makes a kind of heterogeneity of ideas more easy.
You know, if we were a tiny country, although even in small democracies, you know, like you go to European countries that are tiny, Spain, for example, I mean, it's not tiny, but it's tiny compared to us.
You know, there's a lot of difference of beliefs from far left to far right.
But I think the key aspect which you were talking about earlier, which again you're highlighting, which I agree with, is that we want an environment in which people can, the ground rules are clear.
So, you know, you can't, there's no physical contact allowed, right?
So we draw a bright line distinction between words and deeds.
So I completely reject the idea that words are violent.
Yeah, totally.
I totally reject that.
And because we have different words for it.
They're two different things.
Totally different.
So ground rules are, you know, I can't touch you, but I can speak.
Other ground rules are that we are committed to open expression.
A good ground rule would be that we grant positive intent.
We grant good intent.
That is to say, I try to put what you're saying in the most favorable light.
First, I think about it.
I say, okay, now wait a minute.
What is he saying?
What does he mean by that?
Now, you may be an idiot.
A person may be an idiot.
They may be vile.
They may be violent.
They may be wrong.
All of those things are also possible.
But that's not the first go-to.
So anyway, if we set those ground rules, I think I believe strongly that in the marketplace of ideas, truth will out and righteousness will out.
That's what I think.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe, in fact, what we need is a benevolent dictator who comes down and tells us all what to think and do.
I think in some part, yes, Trumpism is a little bit about this fantasy that we will, you know, that the way out is to have a kind of imposition from above.
And I think that's very dangerous, actually.
And we were talking about earlier in college campuses.
It's the same principle, right?
Like the idea that Big Daddy is going to come down and tell us what to do and fix the situation, I think is undemocratic in the end.
And so I think we need to, you know, and in fact, as John Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue, we actually might want to create other reasons to draw the distinction between words and violence and to cultivate an appreciation for that distinction.
And I think that's And that is by allowing people to speak, we may actually reduce violence because we can identify who has these crazy ideas.
We know who.
So if I believe that someone hates people like me, and I create an environment in which we allow him to say he hates people like me, I think it's horrible that he hates people like me.
I'm not defending that he hates people like me, but we might now know who he is.
So that's their argument that Lukianoff and Height make, that actually this is a potentially additional benefit of creating a free and open marketplace of ideas, is we identify where the crazy is.
You know, here are all these people.
We're talking about the anti-vaxxers.
I'd like to know who are the people that hold these beliefs because as a public health expert, And I was a hospice doctor for many years.
I took care of patients for a long time anyway.
I was very, I am still interested in a lot of our projects around the world are public health projects.
In order to be able to lead people to wisdom, you have to know where is the ignorance.
Well, if it's secret, you don't know it.
So that's another benefit of fostering this climate of open expression.
Yeah, and the solution to these bad ideas is for someone to come up and give a better idea.
Yes.
Someone to debate or to explain what's wrong with it and to do it in a reasonable manner.
When people start shouting and screaming and pulling fire alarms, like it's the idea of silencing people from speaking, that somehow or another this is going to help.
There's Peter Tatchell is a gay rights activist in England who went to prison for his rights, been imprisoned in foreign countries for defending gay rights, and he was deplatformed in England a couple of years ago.
No, here's the problem with deplatforming.
So first of all, it is totally right and appropriate to protest.
So if someone is speaking something you don't want, I will strongly defend protest.
Stand outside, yell and scream, hold banners up, whatever.
You can't interfere with the right of the speaker to express themselves, first point.
But even more important, the reason we don't want that is not so much because we're interested in the right of the speaker.
It's because we're interested in the rights of the listeners.
The people who want to listen to that person have a right to listen to that person in a free society.
So when we prevent them, the harm we're causing is not that I'm silencing you.
I am interfering with the ability of all the people who want to hear you to hear you.
It's their rights that matter too.
So if we, the deplatforming, it's not about, oh, so-and-so was unable to speak at such and such a place.
It's the fact that all the people that wanted to hear so-and-so were deprived of their opportunity to do so.
So I think the answer to words we do not like, the answer to speech we do not like, is more speech.
We were talking about people wanting to silence people.
Oh, yeah, so one of the political correctness and the rebounding of that is the reinforcing of someone who comes along like Trump, who's the polar opposite of that.
And I think that that's another, you know, that sort of is a variant of the argument we were discussing earlier, which is that one of the advantages of creating a free and open society is that you allow, you know, live and let live.
And then you tend to avoid creating kind of suppressed animosities, or you can help to avoid it.
And it's also critical to have reasonable, polite conversation.
Like people can oppose each other in their idea, but you should be able to express how and why you oppose that idea without it being this sort of personal vendetta.
I think that self-discipline is not an easy thing, Joe.
And like anything else worth doing in life, like basically anything worth doing takes effort.
It's tempting.
The go-to strategy that many people have.
So I think it's important to note that free speech is difficult and it's not an easy thing.
It's a natural inclination to want to silence your opponents.
But it's wrong.
And it's harmful.
And it's actually harmful to you to do that.
So I think we need to have an educational system that cultivates that, that cultivates the capacity to tolerate an idea that you don't like, to think about that idea, and then to respond to that idea.
So I guess what I'm saying is it does require some training.
Well, that's exactly what I argue at Blueprint, that there's such, you know, like, you know, when you go to a foreign country, initially you're overwhelmed by the different food and the different smells and the different architecture.
And anyone who's traveled even to a different state has had this experience.
And yet, actually, once you get to know the people, you see that they're very human.
They're like us.
They love their partners and they hang out with their friends and they work together to build a civilization and a society.
And they have schools and they teach and they learn and they do all of these basic things that are a fundamental part of our common humanity.
And this is what I talk about in Blueprint at Length.
I think there's a kind of flawed beauty to the world that captivates me.
And it's a little bit on the, there's this aesthetic tradition in Japan and a philosophy called wabi-sabi.
Or, you know, Elle MacPherson famously had that little – was it her?
I forgot which was the famous model that had – Sidney Crawford, yeah, had that famous mole on her face.
So it's a flawed beauty.
So here's the point.
It's not hard to look around the world and see the violence and the murder and the warfare and the incompetent leadership and all of these awful things about our species.
But we're really a fucking unbelievable species, actually, who do amazing things when you compare us to other species.
And there's a kind of flawed beauty to us.
And I think that it's wrong to be seduced to the dark side.
It's wrong to only focus on the best stuff.
I also think it's a kind of moral and philosophical laziness, right?
If we allow ourselves to just think that, oh, people are awful, it kind of relieves us of any duty to be good and to work to make the world better.
It's a kind of surrender to the dark side.
I think that's wrong.
And the book shows exactly how and why that's wrong and how natural selection has shaped all these wonderful qualities, which are shared the world over.
So you go to the foreign country, you're initially perplexed by their crazy practices, and then slowly but surely you find our common humanity.
And anyway, I find that it's pleasing, at least to me, that perspective.
And my wife is unlikely to listen to this full podcast, or I'll skip over this part so she doesn't hear this part.
And my sister will be listening probably, and so she will laugh when she gets to this part because whenever I see a Popeyes, I just pull over and indulge myself.
If you plot dad's survival on the Y-axis and fraction of female children on the X-axis, survival is slightly longer for men who have a higher fraction of daughters.
And I think the many ways in which society, our cultural traits that we invent, their purpose is to shape and guide those tendencies to violence to kind of mitigate them.
But we don't just need, again, going back to the book, Serbs.
We don't just need, we don't just use culture for that purpose.
There's an argument in the book that we humans have domesticated ourselves.
So if you look at, if you compare dogs to wolves and domesticated cats to wild cats from which they descended, or guinea pigs to the wild guinea pigs from which they descended, or horses to the wild horses to which they descended.
Again and again, you compare these couplets, these pairs, you find that the domesticated version of these animals are much more placid, much more peaceful.
They also tend to have floppy ears.
They have piebald fur.
So guinea pigs and dogs and cows all have splotchy black, white, and brown fur.
Why is that?
The animals from which they evolved didn't have those kind of splotchiness.
So and they become much more peaceful.
If you compare human beings, but they had a those animals were domesticated by humans.
Like I deliberately allowed the reproduction of this member of the litter and not that member because this member was nicer.
And so across time, we evolve a more domesticated version of the ancestral species.
So we get, you know, we get my miniature dachshund from a wolf, like the one, like the kind of things that were photographed out in your studio here.
Crazy transition.
Now, if you look at humans and you compare us to our ancestors or to other primates, for all the world, it looks like we have been domesticated.
We are more peaceful and placid.
We have sex outside non-reproductive sex is another thing.
So these domesticated animals will have sex even when it's not time to reproduce.
Our tails, we don't have tails anymore, but our tails get shortened.
There are all these features that we have, these behavioral qualities and these physical properties that we have, we get a feminization of our faces.
Our jaws become smaller.
Like if you look at, you compare these domesticated animals to their non-domesticated ancestors, the domesticated version are less violent.
So we lose a lot of the traits that physical and psychological traits associated with violence.
But there was no one that domesticated us.
So the theory is the question is, how?
How did that happen?
And one of the theories that's discussed in Blueprint, and that's advanced by other scientists, this is not my work, is that we self-domesticated.
And that what happened over the century, over the millennia, over millions of years, is that weaker individuals in our groups, when one individual became too autocratic and too violent and too powerful, they banded together and killed that guy.
And so over time, we were killing the more violent members of our species, weeding out those people.
And therefore, the gene pool changed across time, and we self-domesticated.
We are more peaceful today than we would have been because we domesticated ourselves.
And this is one of the arguments that's also made to help explain the origins of goodness, actually.
Well, the theory is that they did it, like we were saying, by weeding out, killing the more aggressive members.
What we know must have happened is that the nicer guys must have been able to have more offspring.
So the gene pool changed over time because of the differential success of the nicer guys.
Now, people have looked at this even in human societies.
They've looked, for instance, there's a study I talk about in the book of different pathways to reproductive success amongst the Tsimani, which is a group in Amazonia.
And other societies are similar.
So you can either be like big and strong, or you can be charismatic and have useful knowledge.
In both ways, you have more children.
So there are these competing ways in our species of enhancing your reproductive fitness.
So, for example, about half the very, you know, how religious you are or how risk-averse you are.
Like, I can, I can, about half the variation in how, if you look at a group of people and some are more risk-averse than others, about half of that has to do with their genes, and half has to do with how they were raised or what environments they grew up in.
So, you know, there's a kind of innateness to many of our qualities, and you can shape them.
You know, for example, you can't, you couldn't make me a musician, unfortunately.
I have almost no musical talent.
I can dance, I think.
I mean, I think others would even say that I can do that.
But it's not just like I think I can dance, but I can't.
But I have no musical ability whatsoever.
I would say I'm tone deaf and I can appreciate music.
But I can't produce it.
There's no way you could train me, I don't think, to be a musician.
But so some of it is inborn, and some of it is taught for all of these qualities.
It's a total, we were talking earlier, it's a total loss of nuance and an inability to see any gray.
And some people think, and I think that's what you were talking about.
Some people think that we are hardwired to like dichotomies, to see, you know, male and female and up and down and good and evil and left and right and to simplify the world by finding out and that we like it.
That it's soothing to us to think that the world can be divided into two categories.
But in fact, many times, not always, like up and down is sort of clear.
But I think a kind of worldview which says we are good, they are evil, as we've been saying in different kinds of ways in different parts of our conversation, is, I think, foolish and wrong and ultimately self-injurious, actually.
So we used to have, I know you've done martial arts.
I spent years training in Shotokan karate, very traditional Japanese style, which I loved.
So this is, you know, I think that aspect of that kind of training is a life lesson as well, right?
The capacity to see that, and the same happens with ideas.
How do my ideas get better?
How do I discover in my laboratory new knowledge?
I discover it against opposition, right?
Someone says, you're wrong about that.
It's not true.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, let me prove it to you.
Here's what I'm going to go back and do more experiments and come back to you with more arguments and more data and show you that actually I'm right about this.
Or not.
You go back to your lab and you're like, oh, shit, they were right.
You know, we were wrong.
So that's the way you uncover truth, right?
It's the way you get to more perfection.
It's the kind of yin and yang, actually.
So yes, I think that this simplification of the world to think of, you know, I'm good and you're evil really misunderstands in many, not all, but in many circumstances, it misunderstands what's happening.
And also it brings back this problem that human beings have always had with ego and this need to be right and that identifying yourself in each individual discussion and debate and battle and needing to triumph.
And even though you desire to be correct, you have to understand when you are not.
And you have to appreciate someone who shows you that you are incorrect because they are allowing you to grow.
So, yeah, I mean, that's another issue that I've faced with this podcast where people get upset at me for having people on that have opinions that they disagree with.
I mean, have you ever seen when a schizophrenic person draws these connections where they have one person and that person met this other person and that person used to work with this other person and that person met Hitler?
Well, I think one thing, you know, like I think that, like we were talking about, I think that exposing ourselves to a breadth of ideas to people we disagree with, you know, I think, and creating an environment in which people can express themselves, you know, is good.
You're not going to get any arguments from me against on that point.
No, and I just think it's better for everybody, like we were talking about before, when you meet someone who can give you a lesson and express something in a way that makes you reconsider your own ideas that you hold sacred.
Especially for all nonviolent offenses should have much shorter prison.
We should have higher certainty of punishment.
A higher fraction of people who have actually committed a crime should be punished.
But I think we could cut in half or less the duration of the sentences.
I think you'll be able to deter criminals from doing things with a three-month sentence if they are very confident that they will be convicted if they're caught.
Whereas now we have a system where most are not convicted, like this Jesse Smollett thing, which is just ridiculous in the news.
So it was a situation a few years ago when there's a very famous director and writer by the name of David Simon, who I consider a friend.
He did The Wire.
He was a showrunner for a bunch of other very famous, wonderful TV programs.
He started his career actually as a reporter in Baltimore.
He was a beat reporter and then went on to become a writer, did The Wire and so forth.
And he told a story actually at Yale to students about how he had just come back from a summit, President Obama was still president, where he was trying to help the students to see that you can find common ground with your political opponents and that you need to listen to them and talk to them in order to find that ground.
And so he told the following story.
He said, I just came back from Camp David where there was a meeting about how to reduce incarceration in our society.
And he said the Koch brothers were there and the students all hissed.
And Newt Gingrich was there and the students all hissed.
And a bunch of liberal people were there and the students were really happy about that.
And then they said, well, why did you go?
How could you associate yourself with those evil people?
And he said, look, he said, the conservatives want to reduce incarceration because it's expensive.
The liberals want to reduce incarceration because it's unjust.
And the libertarians want to reduce incarceration because the state shouldn't be depriving people of liberty.
And I can find common ground with these people and reduce incarceration.
Or, you know, you have these Romeo and Juliet laws, which are not in every state now, thank God.
Alas, they are not in every state.
You know, you have a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.
There have to be exceptions for that kind of sexual practice.
They're exchanging sexually explicit images.
They should not be considered sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
That's nuts.
So, yes, so all of those things.
But the problem is not only do we have a huge fraction of people in prison, we have extremely long prison sentences compared to any European countries for the same crime.
They're not using all the tools within their disposal.
They're not really doing a good attempt at it.
And I just don't think it does anything other than make their life hell for a short period of time, which we're hoping, we hope, deters them from doing future crime.
Well, European standards are about 20 years, actually.
And they're different things.
If you want to deprive them, if your vision is they're being punished for the killing of a life, therefore they've surrendered their life.
It's sort of eye-for-an-eye kind of justice.
They would be the rest of their lives in jail.
And we can debate whether that's reasonable or not.
If you want to provide a public safety reason, people often age out of their violence.
So a lot of men, typically these, we're talking mostly about men who do these things, by the time they're in their 40s or 50s, they're much less violent.
Testosterone declines.
They get older and wiser.
They're not interested in criminal, in that kind of criminal behavior.
Many of them are not.
So that suggests you don't need life sentences for murder.
And I think it also depends.
And we have gradations of murder.
We have the impulsive stuff, the intent matters, the planfulness matters, the depravity matters.
All of these things are factors.
And I don't think we should have a one-size-fits-all incarceration for murder.
If two men are engaged in some sort of a dispute and one winds up killing the other one, that's a big difference between that and someone breaking into your house and killing your daughter.
And I also think even in that, like I really am opposed to these standard ground laws.
I think those are, if you have the opportunity to avoid conflict and to avoid, you are not, I would prefer as a state to require that you walk away, even if it makes you feel embarrassed, than give you the right to kill someone for offending you.
And those videos of the guys that shot the guy on his knees in the parking lot in the, I forgot what state it was, like not long year or two ago.
They got into an altercation in the parking lot.
Like if I have words with someone in a parking lot.
But you know, like I remember when I was doing Shotokan Karate, my sensei, Kazumi Tabara, this was years ago, 30 years ago now, and he told us the following story.
He said there was a sensei in this village in Japan, and the students were coming to the dojo, and there was the best student, you know, and then all the other students, and they were walking through the village, and they passed, they approached a horse that was on the street from the rear.
And it startled the horse, and as the horse reared up and kicked its leg, the best student instantly did a kind of an avoidance, kind of twisted his body and avoided the kick, and the horse's leg went right in front of him.
And all the other students were amazed at his ability.
And they get to the dojo and they tell the sensei, this is my sensei telling me this story, telling all of us this story.
And those students get to the dojo and they tell the sensei the story, marveling at the ability of this master student to deftly avoid the strike.
And the sensei is very angry.
And they don't understand why.
Why is he so angry?
He said, if he were a really good student of mine, he would have walked on the other side of the street.
He would have avoided the horse altogether.
So the real wisdom is to avoid avoidance of conflict in the first place.
There's no reason to seek out conflict.
And so on these standard ground laws, if the choice is either you just avoid the conflict, someone swore at you or called you an asshole or was an unreasonable jerk.
That doesn't give you the right to kill them.
So anyway, I don't know how we got onto this as well.
We are violent, but I keep coming back to what I argue in Blueprint.
You know, we have those tendencies, but equally we have tendencies to be kind and friendly.
And we have to create the environment to foster those.
I have a – there's a sense in which – and I talk about this in the book – there's a sense in which as we create those environments, we actually change ourselves as a species.
There's this set of ideas that's known as gene culture co-evolution.
And the idea is that we create certain kinds of cultural environments – Those kind of cultural environments advantage certain ones of us, making those of us that are born with certain abilities better off, which then leads to those environments being created even more.
Let me give you an example of that.
The most famous example of this is something known as lactase persistence.
So many people, about half the world adults can drink milk.
The other half cannot.
They get lactose intolerant.
Well, why can you drink milk as an adult?
Have you ever thought about that?
Like, why are you capable of drinking milk as an adult?
In our ancestral state, actually up till about 10,000 years ago, only babies could digest milk because only babies had milk.
Babies would suckle at their mother's breast and have milk, and then they'd be weaned, and then they would never drink milk again.
There'd be no milk to drink.
There was therefore no reason for any adult to be able to digest lactose, which is the principal sugar in milk, because there was no lactose in your diet.
You didn't encounter milk.
So human beings were able to digest lactose when they were babies.
They lost that capacity, all human beings.
When they got to about two or three or four or five when they weaned, they no longer were able to digest milk.
So the enzymes in their body were programmed, as it were, to only work when they were infants.
Well, about between 3,000 and 9,000 years ago, in multiple places in Africa and in Europe, human beings suddenly domesticate animals.
We domesticate milk-producing animals like cattle and sheep and goats and camels.
And now all of a sudden there's a supply of milk around us.
Because of our cultural innovation, because of the thing we invented, we created the domestic breeds.
Now we have milk.
Now, therefore, those among us who were mutants, who were born with the ability to have our lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, persist into adulthood, this is known as lactase persistence, those of us who had that would have a survival advantage because we could have another source of calories that the rest of the people in our group couldn't consume.
They couldn't drink milk like we could.
And we had a source of unspoiled water during times of drought.
We could drink milk.
Everyone else had to drink this filthy water that they didn't have access to.
So those among us who had these qualities could reproduce better, survive, had a survival advantage.
It turns out that this has happened several times.
This has been well documented.
The genetics of this has all been worked out several times in the last 3,000 to 9,000 years.
Because of a human cultural product, we have evolved to be a slightly different genetically.
And it doesn't stop with cows.
I think that when we invent cities about over 5,000 years ago, we invent agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
It's debated exactly when we invent cities, but between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, we start having fixed settlements.
Earlier, you and I were talking about population density and having to live with other people, which is not our ancestral state, not packed, not with other people.
We always lived socially.
I think that as we invent cities, people with different kinds of brains are better able to survive in cities.
So now that we've invented cities, we're advantaging people with certain kinds of brains.
And therefore, I think in 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 years, just like the milk example, there'll be different people as a result of something we humans manufactured that we made.
And I could keep giving you examples of this.
In the book, I have another example of a, they're called the sea nomads.
They live in the Philippines.
These are people who don't live on land.
They live on houseboats that sail around the Pacific.
For thousands of years, they've had this lifestyle.
And they die for their food, dive.
So they forage on the seabed.
They are the world's best free divers.
They spend hours per day underwater.
They can hold their breath longer than anyone else.
And they do it nothing except with weights and wooden goggles.
They dive down into the seabed and forage and they hunt.
They hunt underwater with spears.
Okay?
They hunt underwater with spears.
It's mind-boggling.
Wow.
But they have evolved to have different spleens and different oxygen metabolism than you and I. So those among them that could survive the dives fed their families, made more babies, and now we think this happened 2,000 years ago.
They're different.
The ones that couldn't died.
So their invention of a seafaring way of life, their invention of a way of living at sea, the boat technology, the spearfishing technology, the invention of those technologies creates an environment, a cultural environment around them, which modifies natural selection and changes the kind of genes that those people have.
These are discussed in Blueprint, and there are many examples of this.
Yeah, this is an example from, I believe they were talking about it from Alaska, that they did genetic testing on these people and they did different fast circulations.
So think about like when we settled the Tibetan plateau, when human beings settled the Tibetan plateau, there were different challenges up there.
It's cold up there, and there's not a lot of oxygen up there.
Now, we could, genetic evolution is not fast enough.
We didn't become furry.
You know, like one way to cope with the cold is to become furry again.
We didn't do that.
Why?
Because we had clothing.
We had cultural means of coping with this situation.
So for the cold to cope with the cold, we used culture.
There was no cultural means to cope with the low oxygen up there.
They didn't have bottled oxygen 5,000 years ago.
There was no way to produce oxygen.
They didn't have the chemistry to produce oxygen.
So the oxygen to cope with the low oxygen pressure up there, low oxygen tension up there, they evolved genetically.
So the people who live in the Himalayas, they actually have different kinds of hemoglobin compared to you and me, better able to extract oxygen from the environment.
So there are two different challenges that are coped with in different ways.
One is coped with culturally by cultural evolution.
One is coped with genetically, which is much slower with genetic evolution.
And it's the cultural evolution.
It's the cultural traits that natural – so natural selection equips us with a capacity to accumulate knowledge and to teach each other stuff.
And given that rare ability, as we discussed earlier, we're able to spread out across the planet and live in all these dissimilar environments.
We use our cultural ability to dominate the planet, basically.
But having finished the book, I do think that there are, like, I don't in the book, I talk a little bit in the book about implications of these ideas for artificial intelligence, like as we create robots, even as we create sex robots or autonomous vehicles or forms of bots online, how should those bots be programmed so as not to injure our society.
So there are some policy implications I discuss in the book, but I wasn't thinking of this as a prescription, like this is the way to live a good life.
But partly because as I argue in the book, we don't need to affirmatively seek a good life.
We have been endowed by natural selection with the capacity to make a good life full of these qualities.
So this blueprint is, I want to use the word God-given.
So the person who designs Alexa wants to make your child's experience easy and pleasant.
And as part of the programming of Alexa, because they want to make Alexa the obedient servant of your child, it doesn't require your child to say, please, Alexa, would you play the music for me?
Your child can be as rude as she wants to Alexa, and Alexa will do what she wants.
What you should be concerned about, however, is not your child's interaction with Alexa.
What you should be concerned about is what your child is learning from interacting with Alexa that then she takes to the playground.
So now she's rude to other children.
So Alexa is corroding our social fabric.
Alexa, in this example, is making children rude to each other.
So our concern is not so much, do we make, you know, like Asimov's laws of robotics?
It's not that we want to program the robots so that they don't harm you.
It's true, the first law, we don't want the robot to, through an act of commission or omission, harm or allow a human to come to be harmed.
It's that we're concerned about how the robot in interacting with you might cause you to harm others.
The robot, the robotic intelligence, creates these externalities, these cascade effects.
So in the Alexa example, we might want to regulate the programming of devices that speak to children, not because we want to deprive your daughter of the right to speak how she wants, but because we recognize that that robot is going to cause your daughter to be rude to other people.
All right, but we're using these examples to build the thing.
So let's talk about the sex robots now.
So some people believe that actually the emergence of sex robots, which will surely appear in the next 10 or 20 years, will be a fantastic boon.
They think that people will be able to experiment.
You'll be able to experiment with same-sex relationships, for example, group sex.
You might learn to be a better lover.
So you could practice with the robots and therefore you would be more experienced when you were having sex with a real human.
So you can't get venereal diseases from a sex robot.
You can't hurt their feelings.
So people think that the argument based on ethical grounds is that this would be terrific, that this will be a benefit.
Other people have the opposite opinion.
Other people think that actually having sex with robots, first of all, is symbolically and conceptually vile.
They think that it takes sex and converts it into a kind of literally a machine-like function.
And they furthermore think that it would result in one having a kind of anonymous or impersonal interactions with humans subsequently, that you'll be entrained to, let's say, want an obedient partner, for example.
I don't have a stand on this.
I don't know which way it's going out.
And in a way, I don't have to make a stand on it because what I'm interested in recognizing is that when we talk about allowing people to have sex with sex robots, not allowing that it's going to happen, the focus of our concern should be not what is your experience in your bedroom when you have sex with a sex robot.
Our concern is a state.
Like my interest, I have no stake or control over what you're doing over there.
But my interest is in once you have had that experience, how does that change how you interact with other people?
And there, I think, just like anything else, like you can make all the garbage you want in your house, but if you start polluting the environment, you're harming me.
So now I have a reason for intervening in your activities on your land.
You can't pollute your own land if that pollution runs off onto my land.
And so the similar argument can be made.
Or look at autonomous vehicles.
Here's an example.
Right now we have all roads, almost all roads, have just human drivers.
And in 20 or 30 years, almost all roads will probably have only non-human drivers.
Machines will drive.
And those autonomous vehicles probably can be yoked together.
They can communicate with each other so that you'll have like trains of cars moving in synchrony.
Like each of them will be communicating with the other nearby cars and you'll have laminar flow where all these vehicles are smoothly moving and joining the highway and leaving the highway and communicating on a citywide scale, slowing traffic down miles away because they anticipate with AI that there'll be a jam here if they don't do that.
And I think that'll be actually great.
I'm actually looking forward to autonomy.
I mean, I still like to take my car to a speedway, but drive it itself with stick, which I like.
But in between, we're going to have a world of what I call hybrid systems of human-driven cars and autonomous vehicles coexisting on a plane, on an even plane.
And we need to be worried about that because these autonomous vehicles, when we interact with them, are going to change how we interact with each other.
For example, do we program the autonomous vehicle to drive at a constant steady speed?
If you're the designer of the car, you might say, gee, I don't want this car to crash.
I want the car to drive in a very predictable fashion.
And that's what's best for the occupants of the car.
That's what's going to allow me to sell more vehicles.
But it may be the case that actually when people are in contact with such a vehicle, they get lulled into a false sense of security.
Oh, that vehicle never does anything new.
I don't need to pay so much attention to the car in front of me.
I just drive, you know, at a steady clip.
And then they veer off and they go to a part of the highway where they're just human drivers.
And now, having been lulled into a false sense of security, they cause more collisions.
It's not paying attention.
So that autonomous vehicle has changed how I drive in a way that harms other people.
So maybe the programming of the vehicle should be to occasionally do erratic things, to like suddenly slow down or speed up a little bit, obliging me to stay vigilant and pay attention as I'm interacting with that car, so that then when I go to another part of the highway when I interact with just humans, I have retained that vigilance.
Once again, the lesson here is that it's not just about the one-on-one interaction between the robotic artificial intelligence and the human being.
It's about how the robots affect us.
And in my lab, we do many experiments in social systems where we take a group of people and we drop online, we drop a bot, or in the laboratory, we have a physical robot, and we watch how the presence of the robot doesn't just modify how the human interacts with the robot, but how the humans interact with each other.
So if we put a robot right there looking at us with its third eye, would it change how you and I talk to each other, make us different?
Yeah, porn addictions, when people do, they develop this very impersonal way of communicating with people and they think about sex and the objectification of the opposite sex in a very different reason, a very different way.
If you can have an indistinguishable sex partner that is some incredibly beautiful woman that is a robot and then you would be quite happy to change their spouses for robots.
I wonder if women are going to be as into it as men because I think women desire more emotional intimacy than I think on a scale than men do.
Well, we're also in this weird position genetically where they're doing genetic experiments on humans and with the advent of CRISPR and emerging technologies.
I think if they start cracking them out in China and they start giving birth to eight-foot-tall Supermen with 12-inch dicks, we're going to have a real issue.
So I don't think we're going to start by using these technologies to cure monogenic diseases.
So, you know, like thalassemia, for example.
So diseases or certain immune deficiencies, a disease where a single gene is defective, and those will be the initial targets.
But once we start with that, eventually I think there will be people who will want to genetically engineer other people, their offspring, for example, and modify them in the ways that you suggest.
Maybe not 12-inch dicks, but maybe, you know, ability to run fast or something short.
What's clear from the most recent findings I've seen from that case is that unsurprisingly, as anyone could predict, the technology is not good enough to restrict the mutations to one particular region of the genome.
So there were other changes in the genome in these children that occurred elsewhere rather than the targeted region, which was to increase their immunity to HIV.
Yeah, I'm incredibly interested in this because I love to study history, and I love to study how crazy the world was 4,000, 5,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and what it's going to be like in the future.
I just think our understanding of the consequences of our actions is so different than anybody has ever had before.
We have just such a broader, first of all, we have examples from all over the world now that we can study very closely, which I don't think really was available to that many people up until fairly recently.
But one of the arguments that I make is this is a kind of Steven Pinker argument that you're outlining, which is, you know, with the emergence of, I mean, people are living longer than they ever have on the whole planet, fewer people in starvation.
We have less violence.
I mean, every indicator of human well-being is up.
And it's partly due or largely due in the recent last thousand years to the emergence of the Enlightenment and the philosophy and the science that was guided that emerged about 300 years ago and 200 and some odd years ago and culminating in the present and continuing.
So I think this is not just the kind of so-called Whiggish view of history.
It's not just a progressive sort of fantasy.
I think it's the case that these philosophical and scientific moves that our species made in the last few hundred years has improved our well-being.
However, as we've been discussing today, it's not just historical forces that are tending towards making us better off.
A deeper and more ancient and more powerful force is also at work, which is natural selection.
It's evolutionary and not just historical forces that are relevant to our well-being.
And we don't just need to look to philosophers to find the path to a good life.
Natural selection has equipped us with these capacities for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching and all these good things we've been discussing that also tend to a good life.
So yes, I totally agree with you.
We're better off today than we've ever been on average across the world.
However, it's not just that that's contributing to our well-being.
Well, natural selection doesn't work over those time scales, so those are historical forces.
But the point is we are set up for success.
You know, we are equipped with these, you know, you're given five fingers which make it possible and an opposable thumb, which allows you to manipulate tools.
So natural selection has given you an opposable thumb.
Do you worry about the circumventing of this natural process by artificial intelligence?
That artificial intelligence is going to introduce some new, incredibly powerful factor into this whole chain of events, that by having sex robots and sex or robot workers, things becoming automated.
I'm very concerned about how technology is going to affect our economy.
Again, these concerns were not the first generation to face these concerns.
There were similar concerns with the Industrial Revolution, that workers were being put out of work when machines were invented.
Nevertheless, work persisted.
People still had jobs to do.
There was a disruption.
There's no doubt about it.
I think Google and the information revolution and these types of robotic automation are disruptive.
They're going to affect how we allocate labor and capital and data in our society.
There's no doubt about all of that.
I thought you were alluding to, just to check if you were, to the debate, which I don't know the answer to, on whether AI will, you know, are we going to face like a terminator type existence where, you know, the machines rise up and kill us all or not.
And, you know, very smart people are on both sides of that debate.
And I read them all and like, I'm like, he's right.
And then I read the guy that has the opposite opinion.
Yes, it is nuance, but it's hard to know whether, and again, we're not talking over our lifetimes, right?
Over hundreds of years.
You know, is there a time a thousand years from now when the human beings will say, what the hell were our ancestors doing inventing artificial intelligence?
Well, I think there's an issue also with the concept of artificial, like artificial life, artificial intelligence.
I think it's going to be life.
It's just going to be a life that we've created.
And I don't think it's artificial.
I just think it's a different kind of life.
I think that we're thinking of biologically based life, of sex, reproduction in terms of the way we've always known it as being the only way that life exists.
But if we can create something and that something decides to do things, it's out, live on its own.
Yeah, it's silicone-based life form.
Like, why not?
Why does life have to be something that only exists through the multiplication of cells?
If you look at a lot of the art, whether it's the Egyptian, the pyramids or other kinds of artistic expression, we seem to have had a desire to transcend death, to make things that look like us but weren't alive forever, actually.
So I think in that regard, I think you're quite right that it's not going to stop.
That tendency is not going to stop.
Now, your very, as I said, charitable, positive take on the claim and your analogy to single-celled organisms, which were just, you know, but a fleeting, not a fleeting, they're still there, but a phase in our evolution, you know, is something I'm going to have to be thinking about because it's disturbing, honestly.
These dummies are buying iPhones and new MacBooks because they know that this is what's going to help the production of newer, more superior technologies.
The more we consume, it's also based, I think, in a lot of ways, our insane desire for materialism is fueling this.
And it could be an inherent property of the human species that it is designed to create this artificial life.
And that literally is what it's here for.
And much like an ant is creating an anthill and doesn't exactly have some sort of a future plan for its kids and its 401k plan, that what we're doing is like this inherent property of being a human being.
Our curiosity, our wanderlust, our desire, all these things.
Yeah, all these things are built in because if you follow them far enough down the line, 100 years, 200 years, it inevitably leads to artificial life.
The pace of innovation, people always have been saying, if you go back every decade, people saying just around the corner, just around the corner, these things take forever.
They're very hard.
Biological systems are very hard to engineer.
And, you know, of course, the people who do that kind of work will often, I think a lot of them engage in snake oil.
Yes, where they bet that about 10 or 20 years ago, they bet that there was a person born that year who would live to be 150.
And on one side, you had one guy who said, no, they bet a billion dollars, and they endowed it with, they opened up a bank account, they put in, you know, they're using compound interest to get to that sum of money and they obliged.
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Yes, and they obliged, and they obliged their bet.
I have never reached a conclusion, but I always figured you live long enough, well, especially up until recent history, only long enough to recognize it was all a crazy hustle.
That's a more philosophical, I believe for a scientific answer.
Here's one answer for why we're not immortal.
So if you think about it, why would natural selection not have created a creature that lived forever?
Wouldn't that be it?
Why should we die?
Okay, so here's one answer.
It's not known for sure if this is the answer, but this is a good answer.
Imagine there are two different kinds of things that can kill you, intrinsic causes and extrinsic causes.
So things inside your body that result in you dying, defects, diseases, and so forth, or things outside your body, like accidents, lightning strikes, trees fall, and you just die and so forth.
Because it's impossible to eliminate all extrinsic causes, because some people are going to die from accidents, it would be inefficient from the point of view of evolution to evolve to be immortal.
Because we would have all this capacity to be immortal.
We would have these bodies capable of immortality, which let's say would be evolutionarily demanding, like to evolve anything like an eye or a brain or strong, any quality, lactase, right?
Like we talked about earlier, you don't have lactase persistence into adulthood because it's not needed.
So evolution doesn't waste anything.
There'd be no reason for that.
So there would be no reason, the argument goes, to evolve immortality because inevitably some people would be killed eventually by accidents anyway.
So unless you can create a world in which there are no accidents, there are no extrinsic causes of death, it would be inefficient from an evolutionary point of view to evolve immortality.
So death, the reason we die naturally, some people think, is that the reason we die naturally is that there are unnatural causes of death in the world, like accidents.
If we could eliminate the unnatural causes so that nowhere, no time ever were we ever killed by trees falling or lightning strikes or things like that, then actually over time we would evolve to live indefinitely.
Well, it's not a foresight, but that's how natural selection works.
Think about, like, if I have suddenly magically transformed your body at great expense to make you capable of immortality, and then two days from now you're hit by a bus, I've wasted all that effort.
So everyone eventually would die from these extrinsic causes.
Well, no, that's the assumption in the model.
If it's not, perhaps, if in fact there are no extrinsic, if in fact there is a world in which you're never struck by lightning, never hit by a bus, never a tree branch, then the theory is that we would have evolved to be immortal.
It's an amazing story that my friend Donald Cerroni, he's a UFC fighter, told about being trapped in a cave and running out when it was running out of oxygen.
And the guys, the special forces guys, it's like the capacity to shoot back when you're being shot at, keeping your calm, moving positions, you know, and so forth.
Those are all very important abilities, not panicking.
And it is also the case that some people, for example, the most famous study in this regard was a study of London taxi drivers.
London taxi drivers can go from any point in the city to any other point in the city.
It's called the knowledge.
They have a mental map of the whole city, and it's freakish.
It takes years to be able to know how to navigate the city with the thousands of, tens of thousands of street names, and they can do it by like dead reckoning.
They scanned, this was a paper about 10 years ago, they brain scanned these guys and they had, I forgot which region of the brain, but they had, through learning, it is felt, modify that region of their brain.
So it's possible Holland is like you say, that he learned to be this way, that his amygdala isn't firing because he trained himself, but I have.
Honold, Honold.
I'm sorry.
Honold is this way because he learned this way.
But it's more likely, I think, that he's like Usain Bolt that was born with incredibly high preponderance of fast twitch fibers in his legs so he can run like the wind.
And he trains as well.
You have both, right?
Good athletes require both, innate ability plus training.
And I think, and I think it's also a kind of, you also find oftentimes that the practice of acquiring a skill teaches you other things that can then be used in other areas.
So even if you, like, you know, like you make the effort to learn the violin or to learn Chinese, for example, or whatever, you know, some effort, that self-discipline then can be translated into something that you're not so good at, but it's still useful to have that.