Fan Favorite: Susan Liautaud on The Science of Decision-Making Made Simple

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What's up, my friends? I am super excited to share today's episode with you. And I know that all of you, if I were to ask, you would, of course, say that you're an ethical person. But not many of us, certainly myself included, think about the ethics of our day-to-day decisions. The framework of ethics that we're about to share with you is going to challenge how you think through some really difficult questions, which I think is critically important, which is why you are not going to want to miss this episode.

Anyone can use these strategies to make better decisions and all of us will benefit from adopting even just one of these pillars. And if you like this episode with Susan Leato, please be sure to rate and review the podcast. That really is the best way to support us and get the word out about the show. Now, on to the episode with Susan Leato. Susan Leato, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really delighted to be here. I'm really excited to get into this. So this is a topic I actually haven't thought a lot about and so getting a chance to read your book and I forced myself, so we're going to be talking about ethics, but in the context of how to live life well and make good decisions.

And that really feels like the right framework for what you do. And I think the word ethics is going to lead some people astray as like, oh, this is finger wagging and judgey, judgey. But you really go out of your way to say that's not what this is and that shame and blame and all of that actually create ethical problems. They don't solve them. So that was a really keen insight. So we're going to be talking about how to live life well, how to think well about your decision making.

But to do that, I think we have to get into the framework of how to do that. And so I forced myself to write down, because I never think of the word ethics. But if you said, are you an ethical person, I would get like, oh my god, of course. That's really important to me. But I had never stopped to write down what the things are beyond what I'll call my belief system. I hadn't stopped to write down my ethical framework.

And your book really begs that question as you go through. So I want to start there. What is the framework by which you come to an ethical endpoint or a North Star, a way to like know if your decision is adhering to the right set of things?

So it's a great question. And it's actually a question that I address in my first book, The Power of Ethics. But I have a framework that applies to any ethical question you could come up with, whether it's family or whether it's like I have in the book, should you use Spotify for free or whether it's big political questions. And the framework is four words.

And the first word is principles. And as you're saying, we all have our sort of set of values or principles. They might be things like respect or integrity or accountability or compassion or generosity. And I certainly don't dictate anybody else's principles.

And in fact, I work with people and I work with students to sort of think about what are the four or five or six or seven, probably not 10 and probably not one, principles that are most important to you and sort of your lens through which you're going to look at anything that comes your way. The second is we have to think about the information we have before us. Is that the second word? That's the second word, information.

And the information, sometimes it's complete. Sometimes we know that, you know, our grandmother is a certain age and there are car keys in front of her and she wants to use them. And we know that she probably doesn't have great eyesight. And other times we don't have the information that we need. And an example of that would be something like gene editing.

We think this can be a fantastic opportunity, cure cancer in adults, but wow, misused. How many potential damaging side effects could there be? What if it's misused like it was by a rogue Chinese scientist to edit the genes of twin girls embryos? Information is the second item. Really, what we're talking about with information is do you have the information you need to make the decision?

And if you don't, I just say be mindful of the gap. Just as you're making a decision, just be mindful of the information that you're missing. Kind of monitor it over time and see if things change. See if you can fill that information in. Before you make a decision or say a choice. Not necessarily, because sometimes we just have to make decisions. Sometimes we just have to decide, you know, are we going to SpaceX? Are they going to send that rocket ship up in space? They don't have all the information they need. You know, how do they decide that it's ready?

And sometimes the car keys are right in front of us and the grandmother is right in front of us and we're gonna have to decide, let her drive or don't, right then and there. So we don't always have the luxury of having all the information we wish we had. And also, I mean, I'm not someone who thinks that anyone, myself included, will spend all day belaboring the ethics of every decision that I make.

So depending on the importance of the decision, if it's a big health decision or a decision like using 23andMe where we might learn some really challenging things, then we're probably going to take some more time, gather some more information. If it's a decision like am I going to press I agree on the Netflix terms of service?

my fingers on the button before I even can say the word information. So we have principles and information and the third is stakeholders and basically by that I mean anybody or anything affected by your decision. And the critical thing in today's world is that we affect so many more people than we might imagine

with our decisions and in part that student technology we post something we don't know where it's going to end up for the good or for the ill but also we just have all this opportunity to reach more people which you're you know you're obviously an expert in but we need to be mindful of how many different people can be affected by the decisions we make

And then finally, consequences. And the way I look at this is we need to think about the consequences of our decisions now and in the future, sort of short, medium and long term. And very often, particularly in the business world, but also in daily life. We see people making a decision, sort of looking out two or three weeks or a quarter. And then they get to the end and they look out to the next quarter.

And they think that they're being sort of long-term thinkers, but in fact, we're being serial short-term thinkers, if that makes sense. We sort of set up little periods, little chunks of time for ourselves. So the message with consequences is really think of multiple timeframes. Don't just think of today or tomorrow. But also, again, in the interest of efficiency, I always ask, what are the consequences that are important and irreparable?

So if something's going to happen where somebody's life is going to be lost, you may be willing to compromise on a lot of other principles because that's the one thing that you can't let happen. You know, an example of that would be I had a question from an NGO once about

should we pay bribes to get vaccines into a country? That's an interesting question. And this particular NGO is the only source of life-saving vaccines for children. And nobody thinks bribery is ethical.

But you know, this was the only way these children were going to get vaccinated. And a lot of people were getting very sort of, if I may say so, high and mighty about the ethics of bribery. And finally, I looked at them and I said, all right, let's step back. And I always suggest looking at our decisions from the standpoint of the person who will be most adversely affected. And then imagining that person is us. So I said, if it were your child, would you care about the bribery? And then all of a sudden,

the bribery was an issue we had to deal with. We had to make sure it didn't become a habit, et cetera, et cetera, but, you know. Yeah, that's so interesting. So what I love about that, and that's really where I wanna get to, at least in the beginning of the conversation, is you need something that cuts through the clutter, the noise, the debate, the back and forth to, okay, cool, this adheres to this principle and now I'm gonna move forward. So we've got principles, information, stakeholders, consequences,

And as we look at those, there's really not a lot of ultra black and white, and you talk a lot about edge cases, you talk a lot about getting away from binary thinking, which can be really problematic. But that creates this where it becomes hard to navigate your way through something. So for instance, going back to principles,

Do we dictate to people what the principles should be? Or is it we just know that principles are going to be determined by different people? So I think everybody should be able to determine their own principles. But if we're assessing somebody else's decision, if we're looking at sort of a scandal in the news, for example, we can look at what principles the company, for example, or the government official claimed to be living by.

And see, well, what happened here? Was it that they actually were not living by their stated principles and the principles were pretty good? Or was it actually the principles were not so good? So I'll give you an example of each. One example of a company that had really credible principles, including safety, was Boeing.

And yet, after two tragic crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, the Boeing CEO was still begging then President Trump to keep planes flying. So the company's stated principles were excellent, but they just were not living by them at that moment and in all the moments that led up to what drove those crashes.

Conversely, we look at a company like Uber back when they were having their big moment of sexual misconduct and changed CEOs and the like. And the principles were things like making magic. So a little vague, a little vague, a little hard to hold yourself accountable for making magic or toe stomping was another one.

What did toe stomping mean? I'm not exactly sure. I'm not sure if it meant just like step on all the toes you need to to get where you want to go. That's my gut instinct. Because even here at Impact Theory, we talk a lot about no one has toes. So don't worry about stepping on people's toes. Now, I would never say toe stomp because that has like a connotation of aggressively trying to mess somebody else up. So cool. I get that.

So this is where it starts to get interesting to me and I think to ground this for people. So basically what I want to do is walk through how do we actually generate a North Star so that people can think well through these things because I'm not even thinking necessarily societally. I tend to think about the individual and what they can do to make their life better. So I want to help discover the process by which you would identify

principles that are going to serve people well, that are going to take them in a good direction to get there. I think there's at least one thing we need to do, but this might be like really nested and somewhat complex. And I'll say is the north star. So what is that thing that we should be aiming at? I'll give you my example.

of what a North Star is, then I would love to hear, like if you already have one, if you do great, and then I wanna find out what is the most persnickety question that you've had to deal with where it was maybe even surprisingly controversial so that we can get into the thick of one where it isn't obvious. So my North Star would be that everybody at the individual level should be doing everything they can to reduce human suffering,

And I'll even say, and promote fulfillment. So that would be the thing I'm always thinking about. That's sort of the bedrock by which I judge my own decisions. And if I'm honest, judge the decisions of other people.

So that would be my one thing. It's very layered. And of course, there's more to take into consideration. You said is probably not one principle that it's maybe not 10, but it's not one. But if I were going to give a North Star, what am I steering towards? It's the lowering the amount of human suffering in the world through my own actions and then increasing the odds that somebody will be able to achieve fulfillment.

So I love that. And mine is actually quite similar. So what I phrase this slightly differently, what I say is that ethical decision-making tethers us to our humanity. So we have this massive opportunity. If we think about even one or two of the four words that I gave you, or even just stop and think about what our North Star is, just this simple fact of pausing and taking a breath

And thinking about the impact of our decisions, thinking about the consequences is already really huge. But I think that ethical decision-making tethers us to our humanity. And that means different things in different circumstances. It can mean a moment of, it can mean reducing suffering. It can mean a moment of kindness. It can mean prioritizing human health and well-being above other things. But it's all about our humanity. And I think ethics is really the great connector.

So by putting human beings and human well-being first, that's another way of saying getting rid of suffering. I think we have huge opportunity to be able to do that that is untapped. Let's take a break from the show to talk about something I'm all too familiar with.

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I've got a personal invite for you guys to join me, Tom Build You Live, on my Twitch stream, where I play the video game that I'm building, Project Kaizen, and Talk Mindset. So when you join the stream, you are getting more than just gameplay, you're getting practical insights into how to shape your mind if you want to achieve something extraordinary in life.

This is more than entertainment. It is systematic growth through gaming. You'll be joining a community focused on having fun playing games together as a community and talking about mindset and the strategies for real success. Each stream is high energy gameplay mixed with real conversations around mindset and success. You can ask me about business mindset. The game itself, we are here to talk about all of the entertainment focus things that we're doing here at Impact Theory.

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Agreed. Okay. So if we have roughly the same North star, now what is, um, what's the most just difficult ethical question you've ever come against?

Oh my goodness, there are so many. So let me just say, you mentioned banishing sort of binary thinking. I do think there are certain circumstances where binary thinking is important to maintain. And there are not very many of them, but they are things like racism, sexual misconduct, inciting violence, many kinds of phobias against certain groups.

So I do think that for me, that's binary. That's something we all need to work to try to eradicate. But I think one question that's come up a lot in different ways, including with the Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, but also all over university campuses, is pitting free speech against how we treat each other. And that's one aspect of human suffering. There's a lot of suffering from the way we treat each other. There's a lot of suffering from speech that is free.

but racist or dangerous. Now there are limitations on free speech in different environments where I'm seeing a lot of it as an academic institutions but it's in daily life and it's on Twitter and it's this battle of you know who gets to decide where the boundaries are between my right to free speech and indeed the value of free speech

in terms of creating a diverse society, in terms of furthering democratic society, in terms of our own right to express ourselves, versus kind of harm that can be done with speech. So it's just a really, really difficult problem. And because it's on social media, I think it affects all of us. And it's at a scale that is just, you know, it's global. It's at a scale that's just unfathomable and unprecedented.

Okay, so this is perfect. Before we dive into this, I will say that I don't consider myself to have any particular wisdom around free speech, so I have no doubt that I will throw out ideas or questions that will inevitably- I don't think any of us do. It's an intractable problem. So as long as people understand that I'm certainly not in this conversation in any way, shape or form, trying to say that I have thought through this or that I think I have the answers, only that what I hope to do in this conversation is

practice myself, how to think through incredibly hard problems. And so whenever somebody asks me a question, if I don't know the answer, what I always say is, well, let me walk you through how I think about it. And so that way it's like, Hey, I don't have like there are some things. For instance, I feel very confident if you're asking me about mindset, or how to go from not being an entrepreneur to being an entrepreneur, what do you have to learn? Like all of those things, I have a high degree of confidence that I have answers that are useful.

meaning that they are efficacious, that if you have a goal, if you take my advice, it will actually move you towards that goal. So, but in free speech, I don't have that. So I just haven't. I don't know if anybody who does. I think we're all kind of mucking around in complexity here. Amazing. So perfect for us to explore. So now we have our North Star.

What I want to get into is what ends up making this such a difficult conversation and what do we put in place to navigate this well? So number one for me anyway is going to be what I was just talking about. So what's going to reduce human suffering? What's going to lift people's ability to achieve fulfillment at the individual level? Because that's how I think.

And I think that way, because I think it is the right way, that was air quotes for anybody just listening, the right way to do it, with full humility of recognizing to your point in the book, you say, you know, a lot of times we think we know something, but do we really know?

And so being super thoughtful about that. So I air quote that to express, to self reflect to my own self that I need to stay humble there. But I think that's the right way to approach things. Right defined as it will move you towards your goal and my goal being the North Star. So we have like a nice, there's at least internal logic to what I'm presenting.

So I'm going to add that second element, though, to what I think people have to do as they think through a hard problem is if I were going to give three things to it. So one, I have that North Star. Two, I'm super paranoid about whether or not I'm right. So I completely distrust myself.

And I think that's wise. So I have enough confidence to move forward, but enough humility to know I've been wrong so many times in my life that no matter how right I feel that I need to be open and seeking disconfirming evidence. And then the third thing that I would use in finding sort of the, again, right decision, meaning that it moves me towards my goal is data that is showing me that I'm actually moving towards my goal.

And I feel like that is something that is often missed in these grander conversations. And I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I feel like certainly in America, we're getting more and more polarized and pulling away from each other and trying to find data. So we can see is this actually working or not? Like we have a stated goal, which should have a metric tied to it. And are we actually getting closer to it? Does that feel like the right setup to attack the problem of free speech or am I missing something?

So I agree with all of that. And I would just add, so I certainly agree that we have to approach these problems with a hefty dose of humility. I think one of the things that's really complicated about the free speech question is that we're sort of living the free speech question by having discussions about it.

And I think we need to, one other thing I would add is that when we look at a really complex problem like this to your point about, you know, how do we tackle complex problems, we should look at the parts and try to pare it down a little bit. And the parts that for me at least are not complicated.

are things like, where do we go binary for sure? Where do I think there could be broad agreement instead of the two extremes you described? One is inciting violence. Somebody saying, everybody go out and kill 10 people. Any kind of inciting violence should be, that shouldn't be an issue in terms of free speech.

Where do you draw the line there? So the whole idea of the Overton window. I don't know. Do you want to explain to people what the Overton window is? Go for it. Overton window is what is acceptable to talk about. One of the ways that the mob, I will say, again, I'm sort of air quoting that, but now that social media makes it possible for there to be a mob, no matter where you are, if you're on the platform,

The way that the mob, intentionally or otherwise, tries to influence free speech, we'll say, because they can't stop it, but they can certainly influence it until we get into censorship by the platforms so the platforms can very much put hard limits based on shadow banning and things like that around the Overton window. But the Overton window is the things that are acceptable to talk about.

So here's a great example of something that I'm super grateful is outside of the Overton window. Hey, we should, you know, to our doctor friend in China, like, hey, there are people that, because if I remember right from the real story, it was he was trying to make the twins more resilient to HIV. Exactly.

And so, hey, I'm gonna make this real quick gene modification to HIV and we're good, right? And that, that falls into sort of eugenics territory and has this like knock on effect of like unknown things. Now that particular example is necessarily eugenics, but like it to me is a little too close to like that where some things are okay and other things just have to be eradicated. Now I'm actually a huge proponent of gene editing. We can get into the messiness of that later.

But like, that would be an example of where we're all just like, no, like you can't gene edit the germline just it's completely off the table. We're not going to discuss it. No, no, no. So that would be an example of something. It's outside the pale of what we consider. Okay. Child pornography is something we've all agreed on, you know.

So, yeah. No, it's just going to say, there aren't many of those things, but we at least need to start with, okay, where do we have agreement, or at least by and large agreement, and things that are, as you say, beyond the pale. But the point that you raised about the instant mob is critical, because it's why we don't have a sense today of where to draw the line, and certainly, afterward, what we saw on January 6th, the insurrection. I mean, it's very hard, because all of a sudden,

you know, one statement on social media, millions of people around the planet can respond to it. And indeed, what did we see with this tragic shooting in Buffalo? The governor of New York said it was a, quote, feeding frenzy. I mean, she talked about, and I talk about in a lot of my work, the contagion. And basically, you know, it changes the question completely if you're talking about somebody standing on a soapbox in Central Park saying, you know, let's light the theater on fire.

versus somebody posting something on social media. And even the Supreme Court hasn't quite figured out what to do with that yet. But it does change the, what is sort of an immediate threat? What is clear and present danger to use sort of legal terminology? What is, you know, it's very different when you have, as you say, when you have social media creating an instant mob.

yeah so okay so just to put all the pieces on the table so we have the overton window there's going to be some things that you can talk about some things that you can't um figuring out where the edges of that are going to be extremely difficult and

As we build our framework to figure that out, where do you fall on the Overton window? Should everything be discussed? Even as I was giving the example of the doctor editing the gene for HIV, I actually want them to be able to talk about it. I don't want them to be able to do it. I gave a terrible example of the Overton window, which would be something we shouldn't even discuss.

So if we're removing inciting violence, you've got Elon Musk saying, I'm just going to follow the law of the land. So the will of the people, if people want less free speech, then they will vote for it. So in each jurisdiction, it doesn't look like the Twitter sales going to go through. But when it did look like it was going to go through, he was sort of publicly pontificating about how he would handle it. That was his solution.

Do we need a solution? So given my framework, the only thing I come back to is, and this is a piece that I haven't put on the table yet, is as I was mapping out sort of how I go about things, I sort of clung to the concept that I think the Founding Fathers of this country is where it came from. Check me if I'm incorrect about that. But the idea of my rights end where somebody else's rights begin.

And so that notion feels important to put on the table. So if we're looking at free speech through that lens, so not being able to incite violence seems to be a response to the idea of my rights end where yours begins. So if I'm doing something that triggers something that's going to take away your rights, then I can't do that.

But short of that, being able to think well through the problem, it feels like, using my definitions, it feels like the Overton window should, not necessarily, I would say infinite up to that point of again, taking somebody else's rights away. But that isn't, I don't think that's universally agreed upon.

So all of this is very tricky, but if we look at, first of all, in terms of defining the problem or tackling the problem, what are the big pieces of this problem? One big piece of the problem is that corporations have outsized

influence on how speech is distributed. And so it's Twitter, it's Facebook, and beyond. And that's something that we've never had before. So that's a huge issue. And the second is that technology makes things virulently contagious. So it's not one racist remark in somebody's living room, not that that's acceptable, at least to me, but it's something that will instantaneously

um, you know, get fired around the world and potentially, you know, tweeted and retweeted or liked or however, however that's happening. So the danger level on both side on on on on various angles on what violence is on what racism is is as you've said is a whole other level. So that's another piece of the problem we have to solve.

Then we have to solve the problem of who gets to decide where we're drawing the lines, who gets to decide about the over to window, who gets to decide other than again in the very clear areas like child pornography, who gets to decide. And a lot of it is coming back to these companies are deciding, but is that right? And so that's why these problems are so intractable. And then the fourth is to come back to your point about my rights and your rights.

It doesn't really work in this context because we had an example of that with COVID and mask wearing. And my own view is that you don't have a right to expose somebody else to illness. You have a right to make choices about where you wear a mask if you're the only person who's going to be affected, walking around a park or something.

But my own view is we don't have a right to expose someone else to COVID any more than we have a right to run a red light or to drive drunk or any other sort of behavior that would put someone else into. Can I zoom in on that? Sure. This is where the stuff starts to get so hard for me. So people, because I was going to translate those words into, because when you said we don't have the right to expose somebody else to illness, I don't think people would agree with that.

You don't have the right to expose them to an illness that is believed to be serious. That I think you'd get a lot more people on board. Okay, good point. The problem is that some people are going to say that COVID isn't that serious. And so, and now, like if we really want to get complicated, COVID is way more serious for somebody that has underlying conditions. So if you are obese, for instance, your risk factors go through the roof.

So now it's like, okay, well, for some people, it really may not be a big deal for other people. It is devastating, super dangerous. So we have one of my teammates here at impact theory. They, they can't get vaccinated because they're in the high allergy group. So they've been told not to take the vaccine like they would love to. They can't. So they've effectively not left our house for two and a half years. I mean, emotionally devastating.

Emotionally terrible. Yeah. Yeah, so this is not a person like trying to draw a line in the sand and be uppity about it like they're just they would love to but they can't and So they're at ultra high risk. So now they wouldn't want to be exposed So but how now do we come to an agreement where you've got?

definitions become so not only how you define your principles is a question but how you define whether this is a serious illness or not because for however many eons we've all exposed each other to colds never been a big deal if you saw somebody sneezing public you might give them a sideways glance you know during cold season but you wouldn't be like now people like run up and scream at you i never saw that before so it's like

We've got mood shifting, I think, based on the perceived seriousness of the illness, but not everybody's on board with that. So how do we navigate through that? So I think you raise a really great point, which is that we're not going to get everybody on board with any of this. Now, one of the things about COVID is that we need to start with the science, wherever the science is. And, you know, the science has evolved. And the messaging that we've gotten from the CDC and from the WHO and these, you know, and medical leaders has shifted as the science has shifted.

With COVID, we need to start with the science. And then people will have different sort of risk-reward calculations. As you've said yourself, you've given some great examples. And institutions will have different risk-reward calculations. So, for example, I teach at Stanford Spring term, and we all wear masks in class. And there are plenty of students who think that's ridiculous. And there are plenty of students who would wear a mask, even if it wasn't, now it's strongly recommended. But even when it was required.

So I'm not sure we're going to get to everybody agreeing on things. I would hope we could at least agree that we need to acknowledge what the science says, and then our different risk-reward calculations might be different. The free speech is a whole other dimension of sensitivity. And then what we have in the balance, also just the importance of a diversity of ideas.

When we look at other parts of the world where there's rising authoritarianism, what's that about? It's a lot about controlling the narrative. It's a lot about one person saying, your speech anywhere is censored, or this is what happened and not giving people access to other views about what happened, whether it's history or whether it's what happened this morning. And we certainly are seeing that in Russia. We're seeing that with Victor Orban. We're seeing that in another. In Hungary?

anything about it and something bad I take it is happening like he's basically an authoritarian figure great yeah that's gonna look bad as a transcript that's just for anybody reading somehow I don't mean literally great that's terrible

No, but just to say that rising authoritarianism is a lot about controlling the narrative. And so all of the democratic ideals that most of us hold to be important and that in other countries people strive for, and they give us the rights that you're talking about and the freedoms you're talking about if free speech is incredibly important.

And at the same time, we are also at record levels of speech that is just abhorrent.

It's just a really, really complicated problem. Now, I think the one aspect of this that comes up a lot is cancel culture. And I don't know if you have a view on cancel culture. I do. I have a blunt force trauma view on cancel culture. It's not nuanced. Nobody should take what I say as policy. But the way that I look at that is it's coming from

It started in a beautiful place and the divide that I see happening now is I think based in what I call directives that are embedded in the human mind from evolution. I think evolution realized, realized this is obviously not the blind watchmaker to use Richard Dawkins' term.

But to anthropomorphize it, you've got evolution realizing that you need a bifurcated strategy in which the best result comes from the friction between two different ways of viewing the world. And in a two-party system, basically, as far as I know, and again, I'm not a scholar on this, but I've looked at it closely enough. This feels roughly accurate.

Two-party systems are always going to break down along the following lines. You're going to have one group is that you have to be compassionate and you know man left behind, right? Like we're going to make sure that everybody gets taken care of. And then on the other side, you have personal responsibility. And if you look at this from an evolutionary lens, you understand why this would be useful.

As a social creature, you need to take care of the other people in the tribe because they're strength in numbers. And so if you're not tribe-centric, if you're not thinking about the whole, you're going to get picked off. You'll value isolation. You won't think about it. You're dust. Yeah. I was going to go into the prehistoric documentary by Apple TV. It's absolutely incredible. Anyway, but if you get isolated, you're in real trouble.

But on the other hand, you will get there's a guy named Dan Ariely who wrote a book called Particularly Irrational. He goes into all the weird things that humans do. And one of them is that we will lie and take advantage to the point where it doesn't force us to change our opinion of ourselves, which I think is a really keen insight into nature. It's a really keen insight.

So you've got the freeloader problem. So if you're over here, we've got to take care of everybody. There will be a subset of people that are like, word, you'll take care of me. So I'm not going to do anything. So that has to be balanced out by people like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like, yes, I get it. But you need to also.

Take responsibility for yourself, work hard, contribute. Now, either of those devolve into tyranny in either direction. Like if you let just people trying to be compassionate go this way, you have the Gulag Archipelago for anybody listening that hasn't read that, read it, it will terrify the shit out of you. And then over here on the other side, you devolve into the Nazis. So it's like, hey, we're going towards madness in either direction.

It is the friction between those two things that makes magic. So my wife and I, for instance, we very much look at the world differently. We share a lot of values, which is how we're able to stay together. But we also are really different, which is why we have a high functioning marriage and a high functioning business. So we need that friction. Now, what I have learned is that when the sides value the friction and they realize, oh, I actually wouldn't thrive on my own. I feel really strongly about my side.

But I would not thrive on my own, then all is well. When one side though goes, no, no, no, I'm right. And they are the enemy and they are a problem. And that's all I hear right now. So it feels like we're just getting yanked in either direction. So cancel culture is born of this idea of my side is right. The other side is not just wrong, but they're others. Doesn't deserve to exist. Exactly. Now you get into a dark, dark place.

So where I come out on council culture is that there really is language and there really are actions that just shouldn't be, that really are just abhorrents. But I think we should be canceling that language and those actions and not canceling people. Interesting. So once you cancel... Because you believe in redemption?

Well, let me put it in like in pure ethics terms or at least like my practical ethics terms. When you cancel someone, you've basically another way of saying that is you've just taken away all incentive for them to try to improve. All incentive. Why should anybody try to improve if no matter what they do, you've decided they don't deserve to exist? These are facts.

Right. So I believe in ethical resilience and recovery. I don't know that I'd call it redemption because it's hard work to your earlier point. It's tell the truth, take your part of the responsibility, and then make a plan so that it doesn't happen again.

Well, if you've canceled somebody, they're not going to bother to do any of that. And the other thing is coming back to your humility point, which I wholeheartedly share, we all make mistakes. We all have errors in judgment. We all look at something we said and think, oh, my God, how could I have said that? And in fact, in my Stanford classes, I tell everyone, because the topics are so sensitive, I basically say at the beginning of the term, everyone's going to say something they're going to regret.

So if you need to correct, and I have too many hands in the air, and I don't get to you, just like wave your hand wildly and say, sorry, I need to do a correction, and I will make a point of calling on you and let you do a correction. And we're all going to give each other benefit to the doubt. But cancel culture is a way of saying you don't deserve to exist as a human being.

That's so hardcore. That's so hardcore. And I certainly think there's a lot of language that doesn't deserve to exist and a lot of behavior that should never exist. So I hope we can get away from canceling people and get to canceling language and behavior and hope.

But like you said, I'm an ethics optimist. So I'm fundamentally high energy, high optimism, very pro innovation. So yeah, I'm optimistic. But it's a difficult time.

It's a difficult time. That is a very gentle way to say where I was headed. So I am optimistic for two reasons. One, by nature, I'm optimistic. And two, I think that mood follows action. So if I focus on all the ways that everything is going wrong, I'm just going to get more and more and more pessimistic.

If I focus on all the ways we can get things to go right, then I'm at least going to keep trying. So I don't want to give up. But Ray Dalio really summed up my belief. So he wrote a book called Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order. Nobody has spent more money. If I remember right, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out sort of global movements. He's used AI. He's built the largest hedge fund in the world. So this is a person whose job depends on his ability to read.

sort of how societies change over time so that he knows where to invest and where not to invest. And 18 months ago, he writes a book and he says, I put the US's chance of going into civil war at 30%. I interview him 18 months after he wrote it and I said, where do you think our chance of civil war is now? And he said, I put it at 40%. That's terrifying. That is terrifying. So the person who spent more money than anybody else looking at this has more incentive to get this right than anybody else.

is telling you that we're moving in the wrong direction. And that's how it feels to me, that we're moving in the wrong direction. Now, I love that he's still got us below 50%, so that I'm going to cling to that as the optimist. But I really feel like we're moving in the wrong direction. And so as an entrepreneur, I think a lot about the idea of how you unwind something.

So you have to be able to test. So I believe in what I call the physics of progress. The physics of progress is just the scientific method recontextualized for business. So it's hypothesis, test your hypothesis, look honestly at the data, refine your hypothesis, try again. So I'm always looking at that, wow, whatever I try, it's not going to work all the way. And so I need the ability to fail to some extent, sometimes catastrophically, other times just a little bit, to learn, to refine, to try again.

And as I'm looking at the problem through that lens of like, okay, like, how do we begin to unwind? Because I feel like culturally we're all making a mistake. We're doing things that increase the division from the way social media algorithms work to the way that we're defining the Overton window to the way that we're othering people that hold different views than us. And it's been going on for a very, very, very long time long before we got into social media. But turbocharged by social media.

turbocharged in the extreme. So now we have something where I don't see the way out. I'm not saying there isn't one. I'm just saying I with my limited brain and viewpoint. I don't see the path out knowing what I know about human brains other than massive suffering.

So normally what happens and unfortunately this is exactly what Ray Dalio is talking about is, hey guys, I've just looked at the last 5,000 years of recorded history and I'm telling you that we move in a six phase cycle and nobody stays in what's phase three I think is prosperity. Nobody stays in phase three very long and it's just human nature and I think the exact way he said it is there's only a certain number of personality types and that's why

history repeats itself, because it's just humans react to each other based on these whatever 19 personality types. And that's it. And you're just going to keep coming back around. And so again, I say this with my optimistic hat on, but with my limited brain, I don't see how we back out of this because the only way that I see is for people to want to reconnect, to want to see the other person is like, they're a full fledged human being acting in good faith.

and they just believe something different than me, and I need to relish the friction between our worldviews.

So I certainly agree with you that we're not headed in a great direction right now in a lot of ways. And some have to do with laws that are being adopted across the US, just to speak to the US for a moment. I mean, Ukraine is certainly tragic. I think I read in an op-ed in the New York Times this morning that there have been 243 mass shootings in the US since the beginning of 2022. That's insane.

Yeah. I think I could get now that number could be wrong. I could be remembering it wrong from my breakfast room. I'm guessing you're directionally correct. But it's pretty insane. And that is a more US specific problem. But there are a lot of ways in which we're going in the wrong direction. And I certainly don't have all the answers. And I certainly don't have Ray Dalio's perspective or budget or analysis. And I find it fascinating.

But I have to say, I do believe that we will see the importance of connecting. In fact, I say in my first book that ethics is the great connector, just stopping and thinking about our decisions, even on a daily basis, even how we interact with family members. And I think we're going to have to think about lots of different contributors to a solution.

and not one. Um, and we're going to have to stop and can you give me some of those? Like if we were just going to march to your drumbeat, which I'm sure is not a responsibility you want, but let's say that you have it and that we're going to follow. What would we think I should be telling anybody what to do? But yeah. So in, in that caveat, what are your sort of best practices on this real issue? We're, we're headed towards massive division. How do we get back together?

So one thing is to take a deep breath and really listen to what other people are telling us. I talk a lot about effective listening as a critical pillar of ethics. Listening to what people are really telling us, not what we want to hear, not what we expect to hear.

not what we think they should be telling us in all kinds of ways, starting with medical diagnostics all the way to people that we think have entirely different points of view. What is it that is driving that point of view? What are they really telling us? Is it really about that one issue or is it really about a context that we're not fully understanding? It's back to sort of where's the problem that we're trying to solve? So I think that's one thing. I think the second is

is this really seemingly simple kind of pressing pause and saying, what I'm about to do, what is the worst impact that could have? And if it were me, if it were my child, would I still do it? And even if we still proceed sometimes selfishly, so put it that way,

I really think that this sense of just thinking about the consequences of what we say and do on someone else is really important. One place we've seen, I don't know if you've had any of this experience, but a bit of an awakening in that respect is around racism.

and a lot of the great writing that has come to the fore about racism and about how a lot of us, you know, think of course we're not racist. Of course we, you know, don't hold views like that. Of course we don't speak in what we consider to be racist ways. But one of the things that many of us, and I put my hand up first,

Recognize we all have a lot of work to do. We all come with unconscious biases. Nobody is free from unconscious biases. And so just that awareness, I think, has been taking hold more broadly in recent years, thanks to a whole range of different writers and just thanks to what's gone on in society.

So this goes back to what I was saying about efficacy. So on race again, I do not have wisdom around race, but I have concerns that if we look at the data that we're getting more polarized around race now than we were before. Like, man, I didn't used to think about race.

at all and meaning I like I completely subscribed to the idea and now this is like considered passé I'm a total like Martin Luther King jr. guy or Nelson Mandela guy and I just think oh my god like Nelson Mandela may be the most inspiring person I've ever encountered in history like when I hear his story I am I am knocked to my knees with recognition that I'm not strong enough to do what he did

And that's not me being humble, that is me just knowing myself well enough, like 27 years in prison. I certainly couldn't come close. So just did something that I am not emotionally equipped to pull off.

But his whole thing was he comes out of prison and says, no, I want the very people that were part of my incarceration. I want them to be on my security detail. And knew that this is about unity, about bringing people together, right? Martin Luther King, I have a dream that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And that's being considered passe, right? Like that's a naive way to look at the problem.

And so I'm like, oh, man, I don't know. This doesn't feel like we're headed in a unification direction. It feels like we're getting now pulled even more violently apart. I think on that one, I certainly wouldn't disagree that we're being pulled apart. But I do think that there's a recognition, for example, that we all bring unconscious bias to the table. As a factor of evolution, or you think there's something in some way? As just a factor of the way we see the world.

that we can all benefit from having many different voices around the table and hiring, many different voices around the table and determining, you know, back to sort of Twitter, like, what is tolerable speech and what isn't, and that we all sort of see the world through a lens, you know, I'm a white woman. I see, you know, by definition, I don't see the world the way somebody who grew up in a different context or, you know, who brings different characteristics to the problem.

You know, I don't see the I don't necessarily want to differentiate between and again this I am thank you all for letting me explore ideas that I don't think that I have wisdom in literally just thinking through this in real time. But that I think we need to draw a distinction between racism and frame of reference.

So you're definitely, as a white person, growing up in a white majority country, you're gonna have a very different frame of reference than somebody growing up in that same country who is not that race. But to me, like as somebody who's traveled to Japan quite a bit, it's a real different story to be a white person in Japan where they are maybe not even with cruel intention,

But Japan, and again, this is like my favorite country. I love being there. It's so amazing. But I wouldn't move there because they just don't necessarily love foreigners. And so while I love the culture that they've created, it's absolutely amazing as somebody obsessed with robots and anime.

I am aware enough to know that getting business done for me as an outsider, whether that's because I'm white or that I just didn't grow up in Japan, they're not loving it. So, my frame of reference in Japan would be very, very different because there I would be not in the majority, right? So, frame of reference, gonna be wildly different.

But I would say that we have to keep, I think it is wise because my goal again is to lower human suffering, to raise people's ability to, or likelihood maybe I should say, of reaching fulfillment.

is that racism to me is thinking less of a group because of immutable characteristics and That to me is very different than being able to in fact I think about this a fair amount because we create fictional characters and

And so as we create those fictional characters, like my wife will make a good point, hey, you guys need to make sure that you get women looking at that project, you're creating a woman, and she comes at it from the lens of you want to make sure that it's appealing to other women, not that she's worried necessarily about offending people, but just like, hey, if you want women to actually be jazzed about that character, have women look at it, don't just have a bunch of guys.

Same thing from a ethnicity standpoint. It's like you want to represent it well, so you want to make sure that you have somebody who understands that living, that lifestyle, what that means, how they come across. So you want that viewpoint, that opinion. But missing something there to me isn't racism. It's just frame of reference.

All I'm saying is that I think that we've come to a point in recent years where we're better at saying we all have unconscious bias, and it's not just about race. We all have unconscious bias of all kinds, and we all benefit from diverse views. So the Abraham Lincoln team of rivals, you know, and we need to sort of do more of that. Certainly people in Washington need to do more of that. Leaders of all kinds need to do more of that. But I think

Do we get to that from the sort of visual diversity or do we get to that by what Lincoln was actually doing, which is people who think differently than me, people who think I'm wrong, essentially, on a lot of things, giving me a different opinion. Because what I worry about is we have a team that's visually different.

men, women, every ethnicity, but we all come from going back to that idea that you get this inherent division from evolution, which is you're either on the compassionate or the personal responsibility side. If you get all people on personal responsibility, I would say you don't have diversity of thought, even if you have diversity is essential. Lots of different kinds of diversity are essential. Different ages can be essential.

Different, you know, gender identities can be essential, but diversity of thought is absolutely critical. And so I wouldn't say it's either or. I'd say it's sort of all of the above, but absolutely. I do not believe that there are diverse boards, diverse companies or NGOs or other organizations that don't have diversity of thought.

And somehow that just seems to get left out of the conversation, including the conversations about quotas and women on boards and all this kind of thing. But I think diversity of thought, absolutely. And even among friends, I have a question in the book about, would you be friends with somebody who has really different points of view from you on any serious issue? And where I really started to see this, and this comes from spending a lot of time every year living in London,

is Brexit. I had never seen a political issue tear families apart, like Brexit, tore families apart. There were families who were not speaking to each other, close families, husbands and wives and children and parents who were not speaking to each other over their point of view about Brexit.

And then we saw the 2016 election and we saw the same thing here. I had never seen people so torn apart friendships in particular, fraying over political issues. And that's where I started to really think about this issue of, you know, diversity of thought and also as, you know, not othering people and also

Are we at a point, though, where some of the thought is so abhorrent that we really are going to draw a line, that we really are going to say, you know what? I don't need to be friends with you, or I just can't have that kind of thing around me. Because, and where for me it started to happen was where we get to the point where people just don't, can't tell the truth about really fundamental things, where they are willing to believe that something that is proven scientifically or statistically to be true

they are denying facts. Because at that point, we start to say, well, if you're going to deny facts about whether an election happened, or you're going to deny facts about COVID, scientific facts, then where's truth in our relationship? What are you going to not tell me the truth about in our personal relationship? So I think it became very complicated for people. And I think it still is because of the polarization you mentioned.

Do you worry at all that the person isn't lying? That instead it's something far more terrifying to me, which is that they can look at the data and because they so believe in their worldview that they just see what matches their worldview. They're not even trying to cram it into their worldview.

I completely agree that this is a huge, huge problem, a huge danger. Beyond that, there's, well, there are a couple of parts to it. One is just the spread of misinformation. So people in information packaged in ways that looks like scientific truth or that looks like it's coming from authority. And so people well-meaning people who are not really trying to make the world fit into their

world view are still being misled. And so good faith people are being misled and in part by just the volume, you know, the normalization of some of the misstatements out there and the spreading of it all. So that's one danger. But the other thing is you're right. I mean, I very much worry

that people will take facts and hear my air quotes, interpret them in a way that sort of suits the way they want the world to be. And it's incredibly serious. And in general, there's a phenomenon that I wouldn't put in that really serious camp, but that is happening among the younger generation that has grown up with

you know cell phones and sort of the ability to program I want to watch this program now I want to listen to this song and on top of everything else it's free this idea that somehow we can program the world to be the way we want it to be it doesn't work that way

That's really interesting. And I think that's one of the reasons why we have these epidemics of mental health issues, and I'm no mental health expert. But I do follow the statistics, and I'm very much sort of in the arena, so to speak, in academic institutions and also looking at teenagers, high schools, et cetera. And we are really in a moment where not only do we think incorrectly, in my view, that we can make the world the way we want it to be, but when it isn't,

It's creating all sorts of very real human suffering back to your point. And I think that is really dangerous. And I remember I had that. I need more on this. So this is really intriguing. So we can't make the world in our own image. And the inability to do that is what causes a suffering.

or the delusion that you can and so they're trying and they're not getting anywhere like where what's the real I think kind of both to be honest but I had the privilege of interviewing Sir Salman Rushdie on my ethics incubator platform and we talked a lot about truth and it was sort of ironic that a fiction writer you know had so many insights on truth and in fact it's enough to go into hiding

He did. Yeah, there was one of his earlier books. Give people context because I don't know a lot about his story, but the little bit I know is like, whoa.

So he is an extraordinary award-winning author. And he's won twice the Man Booker Prize, which is a very famous literary prize. He writes fiction mostly, although recently he's done a book on truth. And there was basically threats against his life at one point early in his career for one of his works.

basically around a presentation or what was interpreted as a presentation around aspects of Islam that were considered extremely disrespectful. And he was in potential physical danger.

He's an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary writer, and he described in something that's going to sound fairly straightforward. He was at a book event for one of his books, and he said that one of the audience members was arguing with him about something, a matter of clear fact. And he finally looked at the person and said, you know, it's not because, you know, you want the world

to be flat, that it's flat. The world doesn't need you to believe it's round for it to be round. And I think, you know, that basically sums it up. And I think it's really, we are, though, at this point where many people, particularly in younger generation, that have grown up with so much control, so much access, and again, free access.

It's created this idea that everything should be the way they want. We're seeing a little bit of it in terms of return to work. That everybody should be able to do exactly what they want. And it is creating enormous, enormous amounts of stress. Yeah, this is a man, this is

This is fascinating. Getting into how people navigate the world, how they build up their frame of reference. So this, like, if I were going to have something on my tombstone that summed up what I was trying to do, it would be you're having a biological experience. And the reason I want people to understand that is once you understand how the wiring of your brain

place certain tricks on you, creates these sort of cognitive illusions in the way that we have visual optical illusions. You get cognitive illusions. And that once you understand how the brain works, then you can better sort of insert yourself in there. For instance, one of the things that I remind myself of all the time is that emotions make dots feel like they connect, that don't actually connect.

So the emotion that makes you feel like that other person has no right to even exist as a human being, that's the emotion. That's connecting dots that really aren't there. And if you can see past that stuff, you can start to tease out things like frame of reference. And as I tried to really define what is a frame of reference and how does it hold people back?

I began to realize that people start believing things, that they mistake for objective truth, but is actually just a belief that they, I'll give you an example. Failing makes me a failure forever. And they don't really think about it, they just think that, oh, if you fail, then you're a failure. So to them, it's a recognition of objective truth, but it has just catastrophic effects in their life.

So if somebody has the frame of reference that the world ought to be this way, and it's not, and that's a problem, and burn it down until we get that world, and there's no sort of inserting themselves into, well, there's cause and effect, there's no utopia-only trade-offs, which are also beliefs, by the way, then you get real problems. How do you begin to, like, walk people out of this? So one of the things that cancel culture and your failure example

Having common is that they're dead ends. And another one that is going to sound very different, but that is equally a dead end is perfectionism. And this epidemic of perfectionism we have, and that's kind of the flip side of your failure example. And I tell people that perfectionism is one of the greatest risks to ethics that we have.

And the reason is that, you know, it's not an achievable goal. In my view, it's also not a laudable goal. But when people are given perfectionist standards or when people give themselves perfectionist standards, and I don't care if it's unrealistic sales targets or GPAs, you know, grades or

physical appearance, there's only two possible paths. One is you try and try and try, and you still never make it, and that's where mental health consequences come in, and that's where, you know, kind of distorted interaction with the world comes in, or you cheat.

And you still don't really achieve it. But that's why it's an ethical problem, because at some point when people are given impossible targets or give themselves impossible targets, they cheat. And there's all manner of cheating. Some of it seems pretty minor. It might be on a dating app. You're going to kind of fudge your age or your question like I write about it in the book. There was this guy who in the Netherlands who wanted to, I think it was in the Netherlands, who wanted to have a court declare that he was considerably younger because he felt

air quotes again, considerably younger. And his doctor said that his biological age was considerably younger. But factually, he was born on a particular day. And even though I'm not much of a mathematician, I can calculate the number between that date and today. And it was, you know, much greater than the number he wanted the court to declare. And the court said, we're having none of this, right?

Fact chronological fact has a real value in society, but that's another aspect of you know I want to kind of fudge I don't really like my reality So I'll put out there on the app and some of that's harmless and just good fun But then some of it is you know

all kinds of cheating that goes on in the corporate world or all kinds of cutting corners of safety because targets for building a bridge or building a school can't be met, financial targets, deadlines, so safety shortcuts, I mean it comes up in all kinds of ways. So perfectionism is another one of those dead ends and dead ends are not good from an ethics standpoint. No doubt.

How do we begin to give people what they need to sort of navigate that kind of complexity? So you've got the pillars that you talk about. You've got the four words that we started all of this with. Do you have

like guiding questions, ask yourself, so you do have one for sure, which is imagine the person who's most adversely affected. Now imagine that's you, would you still do it? But are there like certain rules that you would put in place? Like, because what I would love to see, and I don't know if this is possible, but it probably could get us 80 or 90% of the way there where

meaning sort of all of the things that we're gonna encounter on a very frequent basis would be handled by the following set of criteria. We talked in the beginning about our North Stars, but obviously we're gonna have to break that out into either questions we can ask or milestones that we can check.

So, I mean, the two that I was here, the one that you mentioned and also what I said about consequences, what are the consequences over time going to be and are they really important and really irreparable? And if not irreparable, go ahead and give it a shot? If not irreparable, then, you know, you might weigh things differently.

Um, but there aren't going to be, especially in today's world, there aren't going to be sort of a set of rules like, you know, you know, if it's dark green, go to door number one. And then if you're in door number one and you see the sunshine, go to, you know, go to door number two. I mean, there aren't going to be rules like that in these questions. It's going to be about our deciding. You ever find yourself tempted to create that rule book? Like, have you done that thought experiment? And that's how you know it doesn't work or.

Yeah, I know it doesn't work because we're in a situation where too many of our principles conflict.

Okay, where we have free speech, you know, against protection against violence and racism and things like that, where we have, you know, individual freedom to decide whether or not to wear a mask and to decide that, you know, for somebody, as you said, different degrees of seriousness for COVID versus protecting. I mean, we're just constantly finding ourselves in these situations of conflicting principles.

And so there aren't going to be sort of perfect answers. And I think we just need to get to the point where being thoughtful, stopping and thinking, what does that look like to the person most adversely affected is the single most important role I can suggest and the important and irreparable. That's where you're going to get to

the vaccines and the children. That's where you're going to get to the fact where you're going to say, you know what, it seems like bribery is, you know, an obvious no-no. But, you know, if it's going to cost children their lives really, are we really not going to at least consider? I'm not saying that there's a right answer for everybody, but I mean, are we at least not going to consider that we might want to look at this problem differently?

Yeah, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you that feels tied to what you're saying there is, would you ever make an unethical by your own definition decision if it would, if making the ethical choice would kill one of your children? I love this question because it is so when you talk about emotion, I cannot imagine. And I want to say as I'm answering this,

honoring the parents from this tragic shooting. I cannot imagine what it is to lose a child. I mean, my heart goes out to anybody who has lost a child under any circumstances. So I make no pretense of saying that I would be sure about how I would behave if that's what words take.

or anybody else's child. I mean any human life at risk, but I think when it comes to our own children, I think that I just can't imagine anything worse.

Is that a yes? Doctor? Yeah, it's a yes. Yeah, for me, I mean, for sure. All right. Yeah. And I'm not saying it makes me a good person. I'm just saying I would do it. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, I'm not interested so much in sort of categorizing, you know, people or things as ethical or unethical or good or not good. I think we're just trying to make the best decisions we can. The most humane decisions we can. And as you say, eliminate the most suffering. But yeah, I mean, anytime human life is at stake,

I'm sorry, I don't stand on ceremony. And if I had to answer the question that I raised about the vaccines and the children and the bribery, I don't have a problem with the bribery. But I know that there will be consequences that I will have to mitigate. So I will have to make sure.

that it doesn't become a habit, that there isn't the contagion that I've spoken about, that it isn't that the poor authorities say, oh, they paid $100 today, so next time we'll just raise the price. There are lots of things I would do to try to mitigate the risks of that, of the lack of ethics of that decision, of the illegal decision, but there's no question that when human life is at stake, that for me there's nothing more important and certainly nothing more irreparable.

Yeah, and I don't know that there is something way worse when it's kids. Oh, like that that exacerbates things a lot. So you bring up a really interesting idea. And this is what I was trying to get to with efficacy. So every decision has consequences. Do you know Thomas soul? No, I do not. Oh man, I find him so intriguing. So brilliant economist.

Oh, I have to go read. Yes, he is incredible. And he has that quote that I said earlier, which I suppose I should have said, this is straight out of Thomas old's mouth. There's no utopia only trade offs. And so getting people to understand in that scenario, for instance, that it's not like paying that bribe and saving those kids is the utopia.

it's better maybe than the alternative because I think most of us would say that it's far better to save those lives, you know, it's a burden of hand. Like, because yes, there might actually be downstream consequences that I'm not thinking of that I can't predict. Oh, God. Like, I've tried to think through, could this have like these, when you talked earlier about consequences, make sure you're thinking out as far as you can and not three weeks, you know, like as far out as you can possibly imagine.

But, you know, you're doing your best, but recognizing it as a trade-off, recognizing that we're not going to be able to achieve the utopia, that's one thing that always scares me, like reading the Gulag Archipelago, for those who don't know, is written by a guy named Solzhenitsyn, who was taken into the Russian Gulag system basically.

And his punchline is that it starts with a few little lies to get along. It starts with not wanting to make waves because they're coming after your neighbor and not you. And it's like, ah, do you really want to raise your head? It's the government saying, hey, this is all working really well. But you know people are actually starving to death in the Ukraine. And you're just like, nah, and smile. Yeah, that's fine.

And he said, and then that ends what they do show up on your door one day. And you do end up spending, I forget how long he spent in the gulag. It was a long time. And the gulags are, you know, just brutal and people dying left, right and center. You're being tortured. I mean, it's crazy. And

It's more or less him screaming for, it's a long book, hundreds of pages and recognizing that you get to that because people really believe in something, like they really want to do something good.

when they lose sight of the fact that there is no utopia. There are only trade offs. They ignore the trade offs because they think that it leads to a utopia. And it's one of those like, if I could just get, there's two things I always want people to do. One, please start distrusting yourself a little more. Absolutely. Like that's huge. That's a variation on the theme of humility. Yes. And a variation on the theme of team of rivals. And I mean, it just cuts to everything we've been talking about.

Yup. And then to your point about a team of rivals, the whole point of a team of rivals is that you recognize you won't be able to think through the problem well enough because of your own blind spots, your own frame of reference. And so you need somebody from the outside that sees things totally differently than you. That will give you that opinion, but you have to be emotionally resilient because it always hurts when somebody points out that you were being foolish. That's never fun, but really powerful if you're willing to do it.

And that's the second thing, which is, so one is distrusting yourself. The second one is looking at, is this actually working? And so looking at this idea of trade-offs, like, I thought it would give me this result. It didn't. It gave me a different result. I know I'm never going to get perfect anyway. Is this the trade-off that I'm really willing to make? If we could get, I think, and again, you know, I distrust myself, so I don't know this is right, but this feels like a thing that people should really be looking at.

So I think the distrust ourselves is in a positive way, which is to say, not in a way that is that undermines self confidence, not in a way that undermines willingness to try and take risks, but just the sense that none of us can know everything. There's so much you've talked about today that I know nothing about neuroscience. I mean, I have, I try to read.

But, you know, I'm in no way shape or form a neuroscientist who can really understand the biology of the brain and the implications for the chemistry of the brain and the implications of that for all of this. But I think trade-offs, you know, Utopia is another form of perfectionism. So it's not something I've ever strived for, and it's not something that I think is healthy for anybody to be trying to aim for.

But trade-offs, that's the world we're in. We're making choices all the time. And one of the things I'm trying to show with the book is that it doesn't need to be exhausting. It can be fun. I mean, a lot of the questions in the book are conversations. They're just ways to connect and they're ways to sort of do

the team of rivals without having a big structure. It's just, you know, chat about a few questions while you're waiting in line for coffee or with children or with, you know, work colleagues. It's really an informal way to connect and an informal way to sort of say, oh, yeah, I didn't think about it that way.

And the emotional resilience, I mean, the way you put it, I'm really sensitive to, you know, you have to be emotionally resilient. I would respectfully say easier said than done, right? It's really hard. It's when these things hit our emotions, it's really hard. And as you pointed out earlier, such an important point you made that a lot of times what we're willing to accept as truth

is tainted by our emotions or driven by our emotions. Something may be presented to us as factually true, but we just don't want it in our world view. That's not the way we want the world to be. And somehow we convince ourselves that it's not true, or that even if it is true, we can still do what we want to do. So I think all of this is incredibly important.

Yep. It doesn't matter what you look at. It matters what you see. I remember I had this argument one time with my business partner and it was there was this one employee that he really didn't like and another employee that he really liked. And we had been going back and forth because I was like, Hey, that guy that you like, I'm not sure that he has the aptitude that you think he has.

And so I ended up being in a situation with both of them and employee A, whom my partner really liked, and that I had concerns about, made a pretty catastrophic error. And employee B, whom my partner did not like, saved the day.

And when I came back and told him the story, I said, man, employee be really saved that moment. And he was like, I knew it. I knew employee be was a problem. And I was like, no, employee be saved it. And he was like, I know, man. I knew that he was going to end up making a mistake. Oh, wow. And I was like, whoa. I'm like, hey, repeat it back to me.

employee be saved the day. And he was like, oh my God. He was like, whoa. He was like, I was so sure he was going to be the problem. I literally couldn't hear what you were saying. And so it was neat because he could, he finally on the third one was like, whoa. And so he himself saw in real time, like how easy it is.

when you are just convinced that something is going to be one way, even though you're looking at the very thing, you're seeing it with your own eyes, you see something completely differently. And I've had that illusion happen before for me, where I'm expecting something to happen. And for a second, my brain actually sees it. And then you're like, wait, no, oh my God, that's not at all what is literally before me.

That's exactly why I say we really need all of us. We, my hand up first, we need to be really focused on are we listening to what people are really telling us and not to use your word expect, not what we expect to hear or what, you know, we think somebody should be feeling. And this comes up all over the place. I interviewed young doctors, sort of residents at a hospital.

And, you know, they'll say, but they'll have sort of a series of symptoms in their mind. And so they're doing this thing where they think they've already made up their mind that it's X disease. And the person before them is saying, but I also have this and I also have that. And no, actually, I don't really have that. And they're not, they're not listening. And they're also not, to your earlier point, looking at the potential frame of reference influence of the individual.

So, for example, a patient from another country who's in a U.S. hospital who might bring cultural sort of frame of reference, but also ways of expressing themselves about illness, ways of, you know, what they will or will not say with family members around. Some of, you know, certain cultures like family members around in medical situations. And in these doctors, we're just, you know, time and again, it's

It's like, I heard A, B, C, and D, and therefore the diagnosis is X. And sometimes it might be X, but it might also be Y and Z. And sometimes it's not X at all, but it's exactly what you're saying. It's we're so convinced of what we should be hearing.

Yeah, it's bananas. I want to get into some of the fun, no, put in quotes, because the first one from your book, because the first one is terrifying. But I find the answer very interesting. So if your mom, let's say, had dementia, like very developed dementia, and her sister was dead, but she was curious, when is my sister coming to visit?

Would you because truth and transparency are two things you talk about in the book a lot? Would you? Tell her the truth knowing you're gonna have to say it every single time she asks because she'll forget again So I have to say two things before I dig into the answer one is that my heart goes out to anybody who is dealing with any form of dementia in any way Yes, it is

It's a tragic illness. And thankfully, there's a lot of research in the works, but it's not as advanced as we would all hope that it is. And the second is that I am not a medical expert, although I did speak with a number of medical experts when I was thinking about this question. And I also did speak with a number of people who are actually dealing with it. And what a lot of them said was truth over and over again. It's relived.

over and over again, the tragic part of it, the harm, the hurt. And for a lot of people, there's nothing that they can do with that truth because the person is gone. It's not like it's going to change a decision that they could make for themselves while they're in various degrees of ability to make decisions for themselves.

And so that I thought was a really important point for everyone to think about. And again, I don't tell people what the right answer is. I'm just trying to open a window to give some thoughts and to share some thoughts from my research. But I thought that was a really important point, suffering. And also, to what end would you be insisting on a truth? And then back to the being humane, is there something else you can do?

if telling the truth isn't really going to help well maybe that something else is surrounding the person with other people who are going to provide them love and companionship so that that loss is I don't want to say mitigated but that there's there are other sources of love and companionship to try to help compensate.

Yeah, as somebody so my wife's grandmother passed away, I mean, I think technically cancer is what took her life, but she had like full blown dementia at the end. And yeah, just for sanity's sake, it was people stop telling her, you know, when she would ask about somebody that had passed away, they're just, they're not here right now. They'll come back another time.

And to the point about having North Star and let that guide you, like in terms of limiting human suffering, hers and everybody else. It was just like, oh my God, it's just so much easier. Because you test that, you know, she's at the store, she's coming tomorrow, whatever. And it was like, oh, okay, word. And she was fine, right?

and doesn't remember asking about it the next day anyway so there's no sense of like oh you said yesterday she was coming today what the hell like what's good nope it's just like oh tomorrow cool tomorrow cool and yeah that that to me is where

It really is, you're basically cobbling together a framework of strategies that will work into the letter sort of in one case, but then you have to be more deft in another case, which is why having that North Star of what you're trying to do, reduce suffering, for me, making sure the individual has sort of control of their destiny as long as it's not infringing on other people, becomes an important framework that allows you to do your best, right? You're never gonna have a perfect answer.

No, that's right. And I think the way you describe it is really helpful and is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the book, which is we can connect with each other over these questions. And when you said it was fine, you didn't mean it was fine because, you know, we can just go do unethical things and it's fine because we were given a pass in difficult circumstances.

You meant I think if I may you meant that it was fine because there had been a lot of thoughtfulness around it and actually a lot of connection probably among family members or with maybe with doctors and and Just stopping and pausing and thinking about the question and doing the best everyone could under the circumstances. Yeah, no doubt What are some of the the more fun questions that you had pursuing in the book?

So there were questions or things that don't have serious consequences in the long term, like should you use Spotify for free. But I'll tell you the one that seems to really resonate. So I gave the book, in my recent Stanford class, I gave the book to all 65 students, and I said, all right, you're going to each table groups of six. You can spend the next 25 minutes. You're going to pick three questions that you're particularly interested in. Each table of about, I want to say they're going to be 10 tables.

Each table chose entirely different questions with one exception. The one question where there was overlap was would you read your child's journal? Interesting. And the London Times also very kindly did an interview about the book and the excellent journalist kept asking me about that one question both sort of, you know,

on the record and off the record. And then we sort of talked about, you know, what does that mean for sort of checking your children's social media? But I thought that was so interesting that if all the questions, that was the one that around I think four or four of the tables out of six had and all of the other ones were entirely different. That is really interesting. Now I have a hot pot. I have a hypothesis of why. I'd love to hear it.

Well, my hypothesis is that it is the most consequential thing. So everybody's looking for a way to be better, make better decisions, whatever. And because I've read the book, I know the punchline, which is that they were going through something with their kid, like they had a real, like they had other kids that had diaries. They didn't want to read those. It was like this one kid, I have so much friction with them.

Would there be an insight in that journal that would help me? And knowing that I am never going to discuss this with anybody else. So I get it. If people are looking at it from that lens, this is really consequential information. It would give me an insight. And then, of course, there's the humans you're having a biological experience. We're all wired for gossip. And so to get that nugget of information that you're not supposed to have would be incredibly tantalizing.

So, mix the desire to have tantalizing information with its insane usefulness, and I can get why people want a pass on that one. No, absolutely. And especially because they give themselves a pass for the very point you raise, which is, well, I'm not using it for gossip. I would never dream of sharing it with anybody except perhaps a medical professional who was bound by confidentiality.

So these questions are not that simple, but they are part of the goal of the book was also to show that not everything is a big techie question. You know, we have very real day-to-day questions through which we can connect with each other. And they don't all have to be sort of big, you know, the ethics of civilian space travel.

There is one though that I think is super germane and falls into that. And I would be remiss not to ask somebody of your expertise this question. So AI is going to have to make decisions in a car as to I'm going to hit something. And so somebody has to program me how to choose between a baby, an old person, and a cliff that will kill the driver.

So how would you advise them to think through problems like the trolley problem? Oh, okay. So let me first start by saying I'm not a technologist, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about these questions. The most important thing in what you just said in my view is that somebody is going to program it. And I think there's a question about at what point is somebody programming so that we know that if you get into this brand of car,

Oh, it becomes marketing. Wow. I think about that. This is what's going to happen. And also, do you actually have an obligation of transparency? We're the ex-motor company, and we have this driverless car. Just so you know, if you're ever in this situation, we're going to prioritize the pedestrian and not you. So I'm wondering about those questions coming down. And I'm not enough of a technologist to know how much

with machine learning, et cetera, that we're going to have the cars making their own decisions, so to speak. But I think it raises a really important, more general question, which is at what point are we going to put these things out there?

And it's not as obvious to me as a pro-innovation ethicist. It's not as obvious to me that we should wait as long as sometimes we think we should. So I've spoken to people about why are we so squeamish about the ethics of driverless cars? And we're not as squeamish about other things. And sometimes people will say, well, that's because we've created these. We didn't necessarily need them. So we've created them and there's no great rush.

And my answer to that is to your really important frame of reference point. We in the US and especially in the state of California, we have rule of law. By and large we have road rules and safe roads and people by and large abide by the rules and when they don't they're enforced. We have good hospitals. We have good car repair. We have car insurance.

for most people. But if you look at the risks of road deaths in some developing countries, and I will get this statistic wrong, but just for order of magnitude, I believe the World Bank published statistics a while ago that was something along the lines of 90% of the deaths from road accidents happen in developing countries where there are 50% of the world's cars.

Now, that is the numbers are going to be wrong. And certainly they're going to be out of date. But it's just direction, right? Just the idea that we need to be thinking when we think about innovation and how squeamish we are about different risks or quite the question you're raising, we need to be thinking about it, I think, from the perspective of

other people's needs as well. You talk about reducing suffering. So if you're sitting in one of those countries where there isn't necessarily the same road safety, road quality isn't as good, there isn't medical care, rule of law is not necessarily enforced. Boy, driverless cars are starting to look very different. No doubt. Yeah, going back to that question that you said about

you're going to have, sorry, it wasn't a question, it was something you said in the book about autonomous weapons. And it got me thinking about autonomous cars and autonomous weapons. And that obviously when a car hits and kills somebody, and let's say, in fact, I think in the book, you give the example of somebody's daughter was hit and killed. And I was just like, Oh God, like that is so horrendous. I can't imagine.

You get to rage at the driver and you get to be angry. You know who to be angry with. There's a person to point your blame at. When it's an autonomous car, you're robbed of that. And also there's something unnatural about like a machine just killed my, you know, loved one that I think causes people great distress because I was thinking about let's say

that we did autonomous weapons and one goes off inappropriately and kills somebody innocent. But let's say that the overall number of innocent deaths have gone way down. People I think are still going to have a hard time with that because again there's no human to push back on something feels super unnatural. It feels like

When a human is in control, you feel like you can appeal to their humanity. And when a machine goes awry, it's like the state coming after you. It's so inhuman and faceless and just like there's something really scary about that.

Well, there's a reason why a lot of AI codes of ethics, and there is a proliferation of AI codes of ethics out there from different organizations to corporate codes of ethics around AI. There's a whole bunch of them. But one thing many of them have in common is sort of a human checkpoint, that there needs to be a human being in the mix. But another place that this comes out, and I don't know if you think this is kind of a similar example, but bot therapists.

What happens if a bot therapist gives really bad advice or fails to recognize someone who is at serious mental health risk or harming themselves? Is it this machine or this algorithm or this whatever this thing is, whether or not it's in a humanoid format, this app, or is it the company?

Is it the programmer? Is it the regulators who haven't adequately looked at this and said, look, you can only use it for these things and you have to say these things about it like smoking kills on a cigarette package? But it's the same kind of thing. It's like this machine. It's very, very difficult because we don't feel like there's somehow there's comfort. As polarized as we are, there's comfort in human beings being involved.

Yeah, I agree. I want to see more technology. I want to see it get that good. And I think it will. I think that there is inevitably going to be early mistakes that cause a lot of backlash. And that makes me very sad because it just it is, you know, what it is. But to your point, okay, imagine the worst case scenario or the person most negatively affected. Imagine that was me or my loved one.

It does like slow your role a bit. There's no question, but I, yeah, I'm very eager to see that happen because in the case of a therapist, for instance, a therapist, like a human, I should say, can take in something like 13 points of data, but your subconscious can take in like 150. So not to mention, not everybody has access to a therapist or financial resources to pay for a therapist, whereas some of these apps are incredibly accessible. Yep.

So you get these robots that can take in just ungodly 700 points, a thousand points of data, whatever it is. So they're just able to read way more. So the, like for instance, robots can already detect skin cancer better than a human doctor. I think it will become very soon that they'll be able to read PET scans better. So that, especially because it's just data and repetition, machines are going to get insane at that. I so favor.

diagnostic tools. I mean, again, there's a doctor that is going to interpret them. There's a doctor that is going to make a decision about what to do with them. So we very much have a human in the mix if it's done right. It's not, you know, a machine is going to diagnose you, a machine is going to tell you what to do. But when I see the data on diagnostics, on, you know, finding skin cancer, it's why would you, why would you shut that door?

I wouldn't. Yeah, I am super eager for that stuff. It's really, really impressive. This has been a lot of fun. Where can people follow you? So I have my ethics incubator site. And I'm also on Twitter, but only for ethics matters. You don't get sucked into drama? No, I don't get sucked into drama. Very wise. And I'm also reached out to me on LinkedIn.

I love it. Amazing. Thank you so much. Oh my God. Thank you for being here. This is wonderful. Everybody, you need a frame of reference in your life. If you want to do well, read her books. They are extraordinarily interesting. They will get you thinking all the right things. She doesn't preach. It will peak your curiosity, give you a framework with which to find your own framework, if you will. It's incredible. Speaking of things that are incredible, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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