The hidden forces shaping your choices

Summary

---

TED Radio Hour – "The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices"

Date: April 10, 2026
Host: Manoush Zomorodi
Featured Guests: Sarah Lake, Deb Chhatra, Michelle Gelfand, Jeff Speck

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the often unseen systems and influences—"hidden forces"—that subtly, and sometimes overtly, shape our daily decisions and habits. From our food and infrastructure to our cultural norms and neighborhood design, host Manoush Zomorodi interviews experts who reveal how environment, policy, and psychology influence everything from what’s on our plate to how we travel, interact, and live together.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hidden Forces Behind Our Food Choices

Guest: Sarah Lake
Theme: How industry, government, and environment shape what we eat—often without our awareness.

• Historical Context (00:44-03:38):

  • The normalization of daily meat consumption in America was not organic, but engineered post-WWII through government subsidies, technology (large-scale farming, refrigeration), marketing, and programs like the National School Lunch Program.
  • Quote:
    • “There’s industry associations not just for beef, but for pork and for chicken… All of these are industry funded. We don’t see this. Right? This is one of the many invisible forces that’s shaping us is the way in which these companies are influencing our choices.” —Sarah Lake (03:28)

• Personal Story & Health Consequences (03:38-04:59):

  • Sarah describes her father’s heart attack, linking it directly to a meat-heavy diet—a moment made painfully ironic as her family ate McDonald’s during his surgery.

• Shifting the Food System (05:12–06:30):

  • Sarah now leads the Tilt Collective, aiming to “make it easier for people to eat less meat and more plants without even realizing it.”
  • Their approach: Work with companies and governments to alter default offerings and incentives, making plant-rich foods more available and affordable.
  • Quote:
    • “What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what’s offered to us.” —Sarah Lake (05:40)

• Plant-rich Foods & Market Challenges (06:30–08:59):

  • Despite interest, plant-based alternatives struggle with marketing (“blended burger” sounds unappetizing), placement, and familiarity.
  • Success story: When supermarket Lidl put plant-based burgers next to meat and priced them equally, sales surged 30% in six months.
  • Quote:
    • “Because ultimately this isn’t about no meat, this is about less meat… We know that this can work because it has before.” —Sarah Lake (08:27)

• Grocery Store Influence (09:16–11:06):

  • Store layouts make buying beans or plant-based foods harder—they’re often relegated to inconvenient locations, unlike well-lit, prominent meat displays.

• Language & Framing (11:06–12:12):

  • The strategic move from “vegan” (connoting scarcity) to “plant-based” (sounding positive/bountiful).

---

2. Infrastructure: The Systems We Depend On

Guest: Deb Chhatra
Theme: Invisible infrastructure shapes daily life and faces existential challenges from climate change.

• Vulnerability & Energy (14:58–18:25):

  • Infrastructure—water, electricity, comms—operates invisibly until it fails.
  • These systems are stressed by climate change, requiring wholesale transformation away from fossil fuels.
  • Quote:
    • “There’s kind of a truism that our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break. And when they break, they’re sort of at the forefront of our attention…” —Deb Chhatra (15:29)

• Opportunity in Change (18:28–20:10):

  • Climate crisis = opportunity for more equitable, resilient, decarbonized systems.
  • The science and technology (wind/solar) are now ready for this transition.
  • Quote:
    • “As we decarbonize these systems, we have the opportunity to make them resilient, to make them responsive, to make them more equitable.” —Deb Chhatra (18:45)

• Investing in the Future (21:39–22:15):

  • Building resilient infrastructure is more cost-effective than paying for climate disasters after the fact.

• Cultural Landscape & Megastructures (24:28–26:36):

  • The new era of infrastructure should mimic resilient, adaptive ecosystems (like forests), not just monolithic monuments (“Hoover Dam 2.0”).
  • Quote:
    • “In the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure, not like monuments, but like forests.” —Deb Chhatra (24:28)

---

3. Social Norms: The Invisible Rules Guiding Us

Guest: Michelle Gelfand
Theme: “Tight” vs. “loose” cultures, and how social norms structure societies, organizations, and families.

• Unwritten Rules & Cross-Cultural Differences (26:59–31:26):

  • “Social norms… are these unwritten rules for what’s expected of us in everyday settings.” —Michelle Gelfand (27:17)
  • Cultures can be “tight” (strict rules/punishments, e.g., Japan, Germany) or “loose” (more permissive, e.g., Brazil, Netherlands).
  • Each system has advantages: order vs. openness, self-control vs. creativity.

• Origins & Adaptations (30:15–32:16):

  • Tightness often arises in cultures that have confronted historical threats (wars, disasters).
  • Stereotypes may align with real science, but every culture has both tight and loose domains.

• Tight/Loose in Families & Class (33:29–36:37):

  • The framework applies inside countries, between social classes, and even within families.
  • Working class environments tend to enforce tighter norms (more rules) due to greater exposure to threat/insecurity.
  • Memorable Experiment: Children from different social classes respond differently when a puppet violates rules—working class kids are more likely to correct the puppet.

• Personal Application & Balance (38:00–39:48):

  • Individuals, families, and organizations can self-assess and intentionally balance tightness and looseness (“Goldilocks principle”).
  • Quote:
    • “This is what I call the Goldilocks principle of tightness and looseness, that we need a balance of the strength of norms in our everyday lives for the maximal happiness.” —Michelle Gelfand (39:48)

---

4. Walkability: Design Choices Shape Our Mobility

Guest: Jeff Speck
Theme: Urban design profoundly affects how we move—and whether we connect with others.

• Neighborhoods and Social Ties (41:48–42:27):

  • Car-centric suburbia discourages interaction; walkable communities foster connection.

• Principles of Walkability (43:23–46:56):

  • Speck outlines four qualities every walkable place must embody:

    1. Useful: Daily needs (work, recreation, shopping) within walking distance.
    2. Safe: Streets designed to slow cars and protect people—narrower lanes, two-way traffic, parallel parking.
    3. Comfortable: Spatial definition—narrow blocks with buildings close to and taller than the street.
    4. Interesting: Varied visual environment—doors, windows, human activity.

  • Quote:

    • “You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, you want to have two-way traffic, you want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on.” —Jeff Speck (45:24)

• Transition & Challenges (47:25–49:53):

  • Despite progress (especially with bike infrastructure), pedestrian safety remains a crisis, especially as urban poverty moves outward into car-dependent suburbs.
  • Speck’s new goal: Offer a walkable way of life to more people, focusing on downtown revitalization rather than fighting suburban sprawl.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• Sarah Lake:

  • “What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what’s offered to us.” (05:40)
  • “Because ultimately this isn’t about no meat, this is about less meat…” (08:27)

• Deb Chhatra:

  • “Our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break.” (15:29)
  • “As we decarbonize these systems… we have the opportunity to make them resilient…” (18:45)
  • “In the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure, not like monuments, but like forests.” (24:28)

• Michelle Gelfand:

  • “Social norms, culture is this really interesting puzzle because it’s omnipresent. It’s all around us 24/7, but it’s invisible.” (26:59)
  • “This is what I call the Goldilocks principle of tightness and looseness, that we need a balance of the strength of norms in our everyday lives for the maximal happiness.” (39:48)

• Jeff Speck:

  • “What that means at a deeper level is to create an environment in which people will make the choice to walk or to bike or to use some other form of micro mobility rather than driving.” (43:23)
  • “You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, … and lots of other things going on.” (45:24)

---

Timestamps for Major Sections

• Food System & Meat Marketing: 00:44–12:12
• Infrastructure & Climate: 14:58–26:36
• Social Norms (Tight/Loose): 26:59–39:48
• Urban Design & Walkability: 41:28–49:53

---

Tone & Language

Throughout, the show maintains an inquisitive, accessible tone—balancing serious scientific/policy discussions with personal anecdotes and clear, relatable examples. The experts speak plainly, often using narrative and humor to underscore their points.

---

Summary Takeaway

Each of us is impacted daily by vast, mostly invisible forces: from industry-driven meat marketing, to systems delivering electricity and water, to social norms defining acceptable behaviors, to the shape of our cities. By making these forces visible, the episode empowers listeners to question assumptions and imagine how smarter, more intentional design—of policies, environments, and practices—can lead to healthier, more connected, and ultimately more human lives.

---

Transcript

[Minouche Zamarodi]

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

[Deb Chhatra]

Our job now is to dream big.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Delivered at TED conferences to bring about

[Deb Chhatra]

the future we want to see around the world.

[Sarah Lake]

To understand who we are.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You just don't know what you're gonna find challenge you.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

We truly have to ask ourselves, like why is it noteworthy and even change you? I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel worth spreading from TED and npr? I'm Minouche Zamorodi. Today on the show Hidden Forces.

[Sarah Lake]

My grandma Toots was a big meat eater. She was a classic 1950s style housewife in the US and grew up in a time when meat was everywhere.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

80 or so years ago, when Sarah Lake's grandma was running her household and feeding her family, meat was served at pretty much every meal.

[Sarah Lake]

You would have breakfast with maybe perhaps sausage offered. You'd have lunch where it would be deli meat sandwiches and you'd have dinner that would center over a large cut of meat. And so my grandma was a product of her time.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Time now to tell you ladies how to keep father happy. Sarah says it wasn't like grandma Toots was a meat obsessed carnivore man type steak sandwich. In mid century America, there was a strategy to make meat the norm. Starting after the second world war as

[Jeff Speck]

savory beef stew when it's armored it

[Sarah Lake]

was impossible to avoid and it was advertised heavily and pushed on consumers.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Hormel bacon stays fresh longer when saran wraps.

[Sarah Lake]

This is when they first started creating national ad campaigns. And when you see these ads that meat is essential for your amino acids. It's essential for a well balanced diet.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Found that man must have food which

[Jeff Speck]

furnishes energy, food to build muscle.

[Sarah Lake]

And this is where we started getting this idea that meat was normal to eat every day in multiple meals. When in reality even 10 years prior to that, it was an exception to have meat at a meal rather than the norm.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

But three factors completely flipped what was for dinner. First, the US government increased its meat subsidies. Second, new technology led to larger farms that could raise and slaughter more animals faster. Plus people could refrigerate and store more meat. Finally, the National School Lunch program launched. Lunches are designed to be nutritious with a mandate to serve protein meats and

[Jeff Speck]

other foods rich in protein.

[Sarah Lake]

We saw the fastest and largest shift in our diets that has ever really happened.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I mean, I guess that's when it became like the American thing to do. You have meat and Potatoes at dinner. You grill a hamburger in the summertime. For me, I just remember when I was growing up, beef, it's what's for dinner. The ad that like is branded in my brain. And I guess that's the power of marketing.

[Sarah Lake]

Absolutely, it's a huge power of marketing. And when we say meat is so American, it has been created to be American by the meat industry. And there's industry associations not just for beef, but for pork and for chicken. We had, you know, pork, the other white meat, as an infamous campaign. And all of these are industry funded. We don't see this. Right. This is one of the many invisible forces that's shaping us is the way in which these companies are influencing our choices.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Every day we make choices, but who and what exactly are behind them? When are our decisions guided by desires and when are they guided by design? Well, today on the show, hidden forces from the food we eat to how we power our homes and even communicate with each other. An exploration of some of the systems that guide our everyday behavior. For Sarah Lake, a very personal health crisis made her consider how the American food system needed to be transformed to lead people to eat differently. It happened back when she was a kid and her dad had a heart attack.

[Sarah Lake]

He had really high cholesterol. He had several blocked arteries that required a six way bypass surgery. Oh God. And yeah, it was apparent that so much of this was linked to his eating. And while he was having surgery, my mom had me and my brother and my sister and she took us to get dinner. At that point, it was late at night and the only place in the hospital lobby that was Open was a McDonald's and we sat there eating this greasy food in the hospital while the floor above me, my dad was having heart surgery that I had just learned was caused by him having a really unhealthy diet.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Today, Sarah is a food system and climate expert. She heads up the group the Tilt Collective. Their goal is to make it easier for people to eat less meat and more plants without even realizing it.

[Sarah Lake]

And the way in which we go about this is asking the question of how we can offer and incentivize more plant rich foods. We recognize that many consumers are quite limited in their choices, limited by how much food costs or where it's available if they can access it. So our approach is to say how do we get companies and governments, whether that's schools and hospitals or it's grocery stores and fast food restaurants to offer and incentivize plant rich foods. What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what's offered to us.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Sarah Lake continues from the TED stage.

[Sarah Lake]

And companies and governments today still make it really hard for us to choose anything other than meat. I mean, it's offered everywhere and it's cheaper than other options. What we need now is the same fundamental shift in what we eat, but in the opposite direction, back towards plants. We need to grow more food on less land by 2050, and to do that we need to shift from land intensive animal protein to land efficient vegetable protein.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

The story that I've been hearing from people is like, oh yeah, you know, fake meat and burgers and hot dogs and things like that had a moment but people just didn't want them. Is that what happened?

[Sarah Lake]

It is partially what happened. Part of the challenge is we're actually talking about a dozen different products with a dozen different technologies behind them. Things like black bean burgers and you have others that are things like lab grown meat, which couldn't be farther apart in terms of what they're made of and what the experience is eating them. The other part is just simply figuring out how to market these to consumers. One of my favorite opportunities is around what we would call sort of plant rich meats or blended meats, where you have a burger and instead of it being 100% beef, you actually make it 50% beef and 50% mushrooms or beans. And these products are available today, but we don't yet know how to present this. If you advertise a blended burger or a plant rich burger, consumers don't know what that is. And quite frankly a blended burger sounds disgusting. That's not really a product that we see as tasty and desirable. So a lot of this is a marketing challenge, some of it's an investment challenge and part of it is just the time it takes to get consumers familiar with these products and start building up the demand where people can have healthier, more plant rich options without having to give up meat. Because ultimately this isn't about no meat, this is about less meat. What we need is for companies and governments to offer and incentivize plant rich diets the same way they did for meat decades ago. I need to walk into a McDonald's and see a menu full of plant rich options and have them be just as cheap or cheaper than the Big Mac. And we need our schools and hospitals to offer plant based foods as the default where you can get meat. But you have to ask for it as the exception. And we need just as much money to flow into the plant based industry as currently makes Meat wildly and artificially cheap. We know that this can work because it has before. Take Lidl. It's one of the largest supermarkets in Europe. They decided to put their plant based meat next to the conventional meat in the meat section and make it the same price. So when you went to grab a package of ground beef, you had a healthier, sustainable, plant based option right next to it that cost the same. Within six months of making this change, the sale of their plant based products went up by 30% and shows no sign of flagging. Companies and governments have been telling us for decades what to eat. They have the power to help us choose differently.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

There's always something a little disturbing when you realize you've been making choices not because you were conscious of them, but because the system was set up to push you a certain way. So I guess I'm wondering the next time someone listening goes to the grocery store, what do you want them to be aware of?

[Sarah Lake]

It's always hard to realize that we might not be making choices out of free will. And it's not just about meat or just about a grocery store. This happens all the time where certain products trend and we learn about new things. So when you walk in a grocery store and you want to be aware of what's shaping your forces, one of the things is understanding how grocery stores are designed. So there is a strategy that is if you put, put products in well lit displays with good signage and at eye level, it's easier to want those products. And that is how a meat display is set up. It takes up a large portion of the store. It's very well lit. You have signs for each type of product. You also have a butcher counter, right? We have a dedicated space to getting your customized choice of meat. If you think about that compared to say beans, beans are often bottom shelf in a small ugly metal can. And so it makes certain products quite hard to find. And we're seeing the same challenge with many plant based options, that there's no standard place to put plant based options. Sometimes they're in the freezer section, sometimes they're in a vegan section, sometimes they're next to the meat, sometimes they're not next to the meat. And so this is one of the main ways in which we can help people choose these products is by figuring out where exactly they should be in a store and having a standard display. And ultimately, I think this is the heart of the issue. We should have consumer freedom of choice. But what we have now is actually the opposite. Consumers. When you poll them and Ask them what they want. They want healthy and sustainable foods. They will largely say they want to be buying more plant based products. But the challenge is they're not offered and they're not affordable and many of the products aren't quite there in terms of taste parody. But consumers want this.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I mean, on the plus side, when did we start saying plant based? I just remember vegan and vegan always had this connotation of, you know, you were missing out on something. There was a scarcity to it, whereas I don't know, when did this happen? Plant based sounds kind of bountiful in its own way. Much more positive.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah.

[Sarah Lake]

It's been an intentional decision to use the word plant based and I think to move away from this vegan mentality. I think it's all or nothing. Often we hear, well, it's so difficult to make this change. It's so difficult to go from a food system that relies on meat to one that relies on plants. And what I always say back is it's going to happen anyways. Our food system is going to be wildly disrupted, whether that's from the impacts of climate change or zoonotic disease or even tariffs and trade wars. And we can instead proactively plan and we can start transitioning towards a more plant rich food system that is better for farmers and ranchers, better for consumers, and all around better for the planet.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Sarah Lake is a global food system and climate expert. She's also CEO of the Tilt Collective, a philanthropy working to shift consumer eating habits. You can see her talk. Sarah and I talked in April 2025 and at the time we also contacted the beef, poultry and pork associations for comment. A spokesperson for the National Pork Board told us that the USDA agrees pork can be part of a balanced diet. Since then, the USDA has released new dietary guidelines recommending that Americans double their protein intake, emphasizing red meat and animal based proteins. Nutrition experts are skeptical about this new advice today on the show Hidden Forces. I'm Minouche Zamarodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Lisa. Lisa has a lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses tailored to how you sleep. They are meticulously designed for exceptional quality with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Premium materials that deliver serious comfort with free shipping. Go to Lisa.com for 20% off, plus get an extra $50 off with the promo code radiohour. That's L, E E S A R promo code radio hour.

[Deb Chhatra]

This is Ira Glass. On this American Life. We tell stories about when things change, like for this guy David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected and very unpleasant turn.

[Michelle Gelfand]

And it did take me a while

[Jeff Speck]

to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button.

[Deb Chhatra]

That's right, because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts,

[Minouche Zamarodi]

it's the TED RADIO Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi. On the show today, the hidden forces behind our everyday habits. So think about your typical morning routine. Maybe you start your day with a nice hot shower. Then you head to the kitchen where you flip on the lights, grind up some coffee beans, turn on the stove to make breakfast. Oh, and it's a little hot out today, so you turn on the fan or crank up the AC while you listen to the day's headlines live from

[Deb Chhatra]

NPR News in Washington.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Whatever your routine, every single morning, pretty much everything we do relies on a vast network of hidden infrastructure.

[Deb Chhatra]

So things like water, it could be things like electricity, sewage, gas, distribution, telecommunications, all kind of collectively in the space of what we think about as infrastructural systems. And we take these systems for granted and we just work on top of them.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

This is Deb Chhatra. She is a professor of engineering at Olin College and the author of the book How Infrastructure Works. Inside the Systems that Shape Our World.

[Deb Chhatra]

There's kind of a truism that our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break. And when they break, they're sort of at the forefront of our attention. Right. If you don't have clean water coming out of your tap or if you have an electricity outage or even if

[Michelle Gelfand]

the Internet goes down. Right.

[Deb Chhatra]

Which is not a survival need.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Right.

[Deb Chhatra]

It's not a life threatening thing in most cases. Right. And it still really upends your day when that happens because we have learned to rely on these systems as our

[Minouche Zamarodi]

infrastructure buckled roadways, melted electrical cables, public transit shutdowns. But these systems that we rely on are being pushed to their breaking point. The extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest this past weekend was brutal for the region's infrastructure. In Texas, millions of people are enduring

[Deb Chhatra]

their third day without electricity in freezing cold temperatures. Many families are being advised to boil what little tap water they have. Others just have no water at all.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

As the climate changes and severe weather events become more common, Deb says our infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

[Deb Chhatra]

So one of the things which we can't kind of lose sight of is that we want these Systems to remain functioning and resilient because they underpin what we can do with our days and how we do it, rather than spending our days thinking about, well, where am I going to get clean water from or how am I going to function without electricity?

[Minouche Zamarodi]

And I think for many of us laypeople that we've taken for granted, that we turn on the tap and clean water comes out, or that we always have electricity, this is quite a wake up call. How much has a realization set in that the way we've set up our infrastructure has to change?

[Deb Chhatra]

Well, I would say there's two pieces to that story. So the first one is that almost all of the systems that I describe require energy to work. And most of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels. So that's the first thing, that if they're powered by energy, and that energy is coming from fossil fuels, it produces greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide. The second thing though, is that we now know that that landscape is changing, that climate change is being felt as climate impacts or climate disruptions. That's really meaning that things that we kind of took for granted about how the landscape works, what weather would be like, what a hundred year storms are changing. And what that means is that the infrastructural systems, the networks that we built thinking that they were in a stable landscape, well, that landscape may not be stable, in fact, most likely is not stable. So they're just not going to work very well anymore. And whether we like it or not, we need to rethink our infrastructural networks. But these are physical systems that are embedded in the landscape. And that means that we need to think about these sort of landscapes as a whole.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Here's Deb Chatra on the TED stage.

[Deb Chhatra]

Our landscapes, of course, have been stable, and we know that that's not the case anymore, right? Climate change, that's what climate change is. It's making our landscapes less stable. And that means this is longer heat waves, this is stronger hurricanes, this is fires, this is flooding. Everything that we think about as extreme weather events, this idea of a natural disaster, the thing that makes it a disaster is precisely that it's not natural, right? It's that it affects humans and human communities. And because our landscapes are becoming less stable, sooner or later the who's affected will be all of us. But we can flip this around because as we decarbonize these systems, as we transform them, we have the opportunity to make them resilient, to make them responsive, to make them more equitable. I mean our infrastructure systems, they are the most powerful tool that we have for how we can respond to climate change. We know that we can do this because after decades of policy commitments, we've done the research, we have the renewable energy technology to transform this. We know that there's at least a pathway. And once we know that a pathway exists, we know that many pathways exist, but we can only choose to walk those pathways together. This is no longer an engineering problem to be solved.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

So in light of changing climate, unstable weather, unstable landscapes, we need to decarbonize our infrastructure systems. And you say that this actually presents a lot of opportunity. Yeah.

[Deb Chhatra]

We now know how to use renewable energy at scale in a way we didn't 20 or 30 or so years ago. It's hard to pin a date on it because there's two main things. One is the Danish wind turbine, the standard wind turbine that I'm sure you and almost everyone who's listening has seen. And the other is the ability to produce solar panels relatively inexpensively and at scale. What those two changes mean is that we are now capable of of using renewable energy at the same kind of scale that we use fossil fuels at. So 20 years ago, I would be saying at some point in the future, we will be able to harness all of the abundant renewable energy that is arriving at the planet, and we will be able to rebuild our infrastructural systems to use that energy instead someday. And now I get to say that day is here.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

And in some places the work is being done. In the uk, there's a massive effort underway to shift the electric grid to have 95% renewable energy by the end of this decade. Countries like Costa Rica, Brazil and Norway are already there, all relying heavily on hydropower for their electricity. And in the us, tech companies are leading the charge for transitioning to renewables to meet the future demands of the artificial intelligence industry.

[Deb Chhatra]

The fundamental idea behind a lot of infrastructural systems is that you invest in these systems because you're investing in the well being of the people who are going to use them. We understand that building out infrastructural systems is widely understood to be something that pays for itself, even in terms of return on investment. A lot of hard headed economists and financial analysts have shown that the cost of actually building out the infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of climate change is much, much cheaper than dealing with the effects of climate change.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I was actually recently just outside of la where there are these massive wind turbines that you've mentioned and I couldn't help but think about electricity the whole time I was there, because they were so in your face. They're huge. You can't avoid them. And I asked someone, I was like, what do you think of them? And they said, oh, you know, you get used to it. They become part of the landscape.

[Jeff Speck]

Did you ever look at certain parts of California where they have heavy windmills?

[Minouche Zamarodi]

But the President has said he is not a fan. Like on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2024.

[Jeff Speck]

It is the ugliest thing. It looks like a graveyard, almost a graveyard of windmills.

[Sarah Lake]

It's pollution. It's so bad.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

And the federal government will not be supporting these projects. So where will the revamp of our infrastructure stand without federal funding?

[Deb Chhatra]

So I think that places that have the resources and have the kind of political will to start addressing this kind of transformative change and mitigating climate impacts, they will keep doing it, whether or not they have federal resources to do it. Places that have the resources can move further ahead and make more resilient, sustainable communities. Places that don't are not going to be able to do that. There'll be a bigger division between those two. And that's not just in the United States. That's going to be true globally. A lot of that work will continue regardless of what is happening at any kind of higher sort of higher levels in the hierarchy. And I teach teenage like I teach undergraduate engineering students. And so I really want them to understand that their lives are not about fixing the problems that their grownups left them. No. Your job is to build out this world, Right? And you will. On the way there, you can address all the problems that you've been left.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I mean, when you put it that way, wow, what a time to be an engineering student. This is like, there is a chapter here where you can really, really make a huge change, where a generation from now, if people just think what you've done is normal, you will have succeeded. Right. Almost like when the railroad tracks were laid in the United States.

[Deb Chhatra]

I think it's very much like that because we remember. I mean, I think few of us remember directly, but certainly we understand the role of the New Deal as making that big investment into our lives collectively by building out infrastructure. And I think it's the moment where we have the opportunity to do that again. And this time, you know, we get to go sort of much farther and to do it in a way that is much more responsive to our needs. And it'll be, you know, there might not be another Hoover Dam to Point at right. But I think the evidence of that work could and will be everywhere, and it'll be just a part of the fabric of our lives. I think that will be true after this transformation. And some of it might be big fields, but a lot of it might be just embedded, you know, into our daily lives or into our communities. So in the 20th century, we built out these kind of massive monolithic systems. And I have to say, like, I am a fan of our charismatic megastructures. So in the US that's the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam. These were built as monuments, and they were built to endure. But in the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure, not like monuments, but like forests. So if you think about a forest ecosystem, it's powered by the sun, it's rooted in the earth, there's no waste. Everything is basically used to grow new things. It endures, but it actually evolves and changes with time. And of course, it provides a place where all who live there can thrive. Our infrastructural systems are how we take care of each other at scale so that we can take care of each other as individuals. They underpin our agency, and they really foster and allow us to develop our social relationships with each other. All of these are about what it means to be human. And that means that a commitment to a shared infrastructural future is a commitment to our shared humanity. So this is the world that we can create together. Thank you.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

That's engineering professor Deb Chatra. She's the author of the book How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems that Shape Our World. You can see her full [e-mail] on the show today. The hidden forces that shape our habits and choices every day, including the way we behave around other people.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Social norms, culture is this really interesting puzzle because it's omnipresent. It's all around us 24 7, but it's invisible. We don't really think about it. We take it for granted.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

This is Michelle Gelfand. She is a cross cultural psychologist.

[Michelle Gelfand]

And I try to do research to uncover the hidden cultural codes that guide our behavior, really what we call social norms, these unwritten rules for what's expected of us in everyday settings. And, you know, we're constantly following rules. We just don't really realize it.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Over the past three decades, Michelle has published over 150 papers in academic journals, including one in particular that became, well, a hit. It was published in the journal Science in 2011. The study examined cultural norms in over 30 countries around the world. And it became the basis for Michelle's book, Rulemakers, Rule Breakers How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.

[Michelle Gelfand]

In some contexts, the rules are very strict. They're what we call tight cultures. They have a lot of rules and a lot of reliable punishments when people violate them. On the flip side, we have context where there are looser norms, where there's a wider range of behavior that's perceived as permissible.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

What we found was that just like we can classify people in terms of their personalities, we can also classify groups in terms of the strength of their norms.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Here's Michelle Gelfand on the TED stage.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

So tight, loose is a continuum. Some groups like Japan and Singapore, Austria and Germany veer tight. Other groups like New Zealand or Brazil, Greece or the Netherlands veer loose. And what we found was that tight and loose confers really important trade offs for groups that we don't recognize. So tight groups have the corner on order. They have a lot more law enforcement and also security, and they have much less crime. Tight cultures with their strong rules have people also regulating their behavior more. They have more self control. Tight cultures have less alcoholism, they have less debt and they're less fat. Loose cultures tend to be more disorganized, they have more crime, they have less synchrony, and they have a host of self regulation failures. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They're far more open to many different types of people, people from different religions, from races, immigrants, people with disabilities, many stigmatized people. In one experiment I did, I asked my research assistants from all over the world to wear fake facial warts, tattoos and nose rings. And they were asking for help on city streets or in stores. And there was a very clear pattern. People in loose cultures were much more likely to get helped when they were wearing these stigmas. As compared to tight cultures, loose cultures are also open to more ideas, they're much more creative, and they're much more open to change. And tight cultures struggle with openness. So you might be asking by now, what causes these differences? Titan loose cultures don't share any obvious characteristics, geography or language or religion or tradition. But there is a hidden rationale and it has to do with threat.

[Michelle Gelfand]

When cultures have a lot of chronic threat in their histories, you can think about threat from Mother Nature, like constant natural disasters or famine, or they have a lot of human made threats. Think about how many times your nation's been potentially invaded over the last several hundred years. When you have a lot of threat, you need rules to Coordinate to survive. And the idea is that loose cultures might have had less threat and that can afford more permissive norms because if there's less coordination needs, then you don't need to have tighter norms.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

You know, I always get worse worried about being like, oh, you know, Germany, they're rigid there. Nobody crosses the street, even if there's no cars coming, if it's not green. And my question to you is, is this a case of science proving the stereotypes in some way? You know, Berlin, actually quite a freewheeling city, except I lived there and it was true. No one crosses the street if there's no traffic coming. So I guess I'm curious, like, how do you sort of parse what is a stereotype that people have versus the science tells you?

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And, you know, every culture has tight and loose elements. You can, if we zoom into different domains, we could see. Yeah. You know, in Germany, there's strict rules on time and on jaywalking, but, you know, then you see people going, you know, having more nudity at beaches, which you wouldn't see in the U.S. the U.S. has strangely, like a domain of sexuality is a little tighter here.

[Sarah Lake]

Yeah.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Even though we have a lot of looseness when it comes to jaywalking, I can attest to that. You know, my home, New York State, New York City, it's. It's really dangerous, you know, and so that the point here is that we can place countries on a continuum, but we need to remember that it's dynamic, it can change, and that we can zoom in and we can find domains in every culture that are tight and loose and try to understand why they are the way they are.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

In a minute, Michelle Gelfand explains how the tight, loose framework can help explain differences on a personal level, too, within our families, friendships, and relationships. On the show today, the hidden forces that shape our lives. I'm Anouche Zamaroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Stay with us. Hey, before we get back to the show, want to let you know about all the videos that we've been making with our guests. You can find them on my Instagram Anoush M A N O U S H Z It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi. Today on the show, the hidden forces that shape our lives. We were just talking to cross cultural psychologist Michelle Gelfand. Michelle says that some cultures veer tight, meaning they have stricter rules and norms, while others Veer loose. And she believes this framework can help us understand our differences.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

Rather than red or blue, we can also differentiate our United States, 50 states in terms of a continuum of tight and loose. In our research, we could see the south and some parts of the Midwest veer tight and the coasts tend to veer loose. Tight states, just like tight nations, tend to have more threat. There's a remarkable similarity between scores on tightness in our data and Mother Nature's fury in terms of natural disasters. Once you grasp the tight, loose lens, you can also use it to analyze other differences that have eluded us. Let's take social class. In our research, the working class is far tighter than the upper class. And it makes sense. They experience a lot of threats, but it's the upper class that has more of a safety net. They have less threat, and so they can afford to be more rule breakers.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

And is that partly because, like, if you don't have to worry about having health care and, you know, all those other things, like a whole, a huge load is lifted off your shoulders and you can think about the world differently, you can move more freely.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Bingo. One of our studies that we did that, it was the youngest people in our samples, they were three year olds, kids between three and five years old. We brought them into the lab and we, we can't exactly ask them how tight or loose is your household, you know, but we have these kids playing a game, a new game with a puppet, Max the puppet. In the middle of the experiment, Max the puppet does something a little strange. She starts violating the rules of the game. And, you know, we simply actually look at what do the kids do? Like, do they laugh at Max? Do they tell him to stop?

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

Stop?

[Michelle Gelfand]

But we wanted to see, does this vary by class? Like, are there working class kids more likely to tell Max to stop as compared to the upper class kids? And in fact, we have some evidence that that seems to be the case, that this starts early. So this is just another way to think about tight, loose, this invisible pattern in a different level of analysis.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

You remind me, I had a conversation with my brother the other day about my niece who is like, maybe not the like, most athletic kid on the playground. And he was saying, you know, she really wants kids to follow the rules because then things are predictable, right? Like she, she, she's just, she's not hanging around on the monkey bars like some of those other kids who are crazy. So I guess I wonder about that too, you know, in, in every situation, depending on your limitations, you veer towards tightness. Or looseness.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, that's. That's right. And actually very interesting. I mean, parents, teachers, prime socializers of cultures. So you can even analyze school systems for how tight or loose they are. How do you design schools that have a healthy amount of accountability, but also empowerment from looseness? So parents are socializing what they think is the right balance in their households with their kids. Then schools are reinforcing this. So we all have our own story. I think what's exciting is to figure out where do our own mindsets come from, Whether it's from our socialization, whether it's from our occupation, our gender, our culture, how has it changed over time? And then we can think about, is it optimal? Do we have the optimal balance?

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Yeah, I mean, I would love to know how do you teach openness to somebody who veers more closed? Do you do it with rules? Like, you must be open and not punish anyone?

[Michelle Gelfand]

Well, we might call that legislative looseness. Right? There's places and times where you're allowed to be loose. You know, this is a very personal question because, you know, I have a quiz that assesses our tight and loose mindset and ask people to think about themselves in general. Like, in your life, do you like rules? Do you try to manage your impulses? Do you like structure? Do you like predictability? On the flip side, do you take risks? Are you someone that's tolerant of a lot of uncertainty? Are you someone who is a little more impulsive? These are kind of things that we ask people to think about. And by the way, you could think about in general or you can ask yourself at work, you can ask those questions in your work life, how do you think about rules and impulse control and structure in your social life, do you have a different mindset? So you can think about this in various different contexts, too? The quiz itself asks people to think about it generally. And then you get a score which is combining these variables. And, you know, you can think about someone who gets a score of very loose, moderately loose, moderately tight, or very tight.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I took it.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You took it. What was your score?

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I'm moderately loose.

[Sarah Lake]

You are?

[Michelle Gelfand]

Okay.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I said that to my producer, and she was like, of course you are. You always want to break the rules.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Wow, that's really interesting. So it helps us to a understand ourselves and also be able to communicate with people around us with greater empathy. So I score moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband's a lawyer. That dude is very tight. Right? He actually. We've been married for 30 years, and, you know, we made it work. But like, he gets deeply disturbed by how I load the dishwasher. And so, you know, he is in a context, an occupation where there's a lot of accountability. He has to have his time, like, you know, accounted for every six minutes.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Well, you're making me think of my kids where I know one I think would score quite loose, the other would score quite tight. And I shift, you know, I code switch between the two of them, encouraging one of them to go a little looser and the other to go tighter, just to balance them out a little.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, that's totally right. And in fact, that's kind of an ambidexterity. And you know, my daughters will say, look, in our household, the norms that are tight have to do with basically respect. Like, we need to work hard, we need to take care of our health. But the looser domains that they also know are like, you know, their rooms, how, how messy they are. We just close the door. You know, they're curfew. They've always had very lax curfew because we say, look, you need to be accountable to yourself. So we're not going to legislate that. As we zoom into any level, like whether it's organizations or households or relationships, we can start being intentional about where we want tight and loose norms and we can negotiate it. That's how we help people to pivot and have more ambidexterity.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

This is what I call the Goldilocks principle of tightness and looseness, that we need a balance of the strength of norms in our everyday lives for the maximal happiness. I want to leave you with a few different ideas of how you can use the tight, loose code in your everyday life. The first is that we should understand our own mindsets. We each have a certain default on the tight, loose spectrum based on our own personal experiences. The second is that we need to cultivate empathy for others.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Mindsets.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

Often people that we have a lot of conflict with are people that we have the biggest differences in our tight, loose mindsets. And understanding where they come from can be great to understand and empathize and build better relationships. And finally, we can harness the power of social norms to better our world. Culture isn't destiny. We can tighten up norms when they're getting too loose or loosen up norms when they're getting too tight. Luckily for us, humans developed and invented social norms and we can use them

[Michelle Gelfand]

to better our planet.

[Michelle Gelfand (additional researcher voice)]

Thank you.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

That was Michelle Gelfand. She is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can See her full [e-mail]. So we've talked about all kinds of different hidden forces in our lives, and that needs to include how we get around. In 2023, the U.S. census estimated that around 70% of U.S. workers commuted by car in places like Phoenix, Arizona.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You know, 25 miles each way, hour

[Sarah Lake]

and a half in traffic.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Ignacio Delgadillo used to spend a lot of time in his car because Phoenix is one of the least walkable cities in the United States. Its sprawling suburbs and wide streets are great for cars, not so much for pedestrians.

[Michelle Gelfand]

We really didn't talk to our neighbors. We don't really know, like we say hi and bye as we're driving by, right?

[Sarah Lake]

And then we just all go straight into our garage.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

But about a year ago, Ignacio and his family moved to a community designed to be car free. Cul de sac in Tempe, Arizona. Here, the streets are built for foot traffic. Buildings are close together. Trees line narrow walkways. A plaza with shops and restaurants serves as a town square.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You naturally see people all day, like doing what they're doing, right?

[Sarah Lake]

They're going to work, they're going to

[Michelle Gelfand]

school, or they're just out enjoying their walk.

[Jeff Speck]

However much of a driving or car dependent city you may happen to be in, there's a certain number of people who, when presented with the opportunity, will live car free and that that market is completely unmet.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

This is urban planner Jeff Speck. We talked to Jeff last year about his life lifelong goal to make American cities more walkable. He says the cul de sac Tempe is a great example of how neighborhoods can be transformed and that the benefits go well beyond just meeting your neighbors.

[Jeff Speck]

Traffic safety, community identity, tourism, stormwater management, transit effectiveness, urban competitiveness. It reduces obesity, other chronic diseases, health care costs, crime, traffic congestion, maintenance costs, fossil fuel dependence.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

He also says making cities more walkable takes very careful planning with seemingly invisible design choices that prioritize the needs of people over the needs of cars.

[Jeff Speck]

What that means at a deeper level is to create an environment in which people will make the choice to walk or to bike or to use some other form of micro mobility rather than driving. And to do that, according to my general theory of walkability, the walk has to satisfy four basic criteria. It needs to be useful, it needs to be safe, it needs to be comfortable, and it needs to be interesting. And each one of those criteria then places upon us a series of mandates that surround urban design and city planning, my profession, to create that environment for the potential pedestrian or cyclist.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Okay, so, so to be walkable, a city needs to do those four things. They need these attributes for every walk a person takes. Let's start with the first. The walk needs to be useful. What do you mean by that?

[Jeff Speck]

So useful has to do with the proper mix of uses. So places to live, workshop, recreate, all within walking distance. It typically means more housing in your downtown, which would balance the uses in your downtown and have it be active around the clock. When a neighborhood which is principally a business district becomes a truly mixed use district, with the proper balance of jobs and housing, it comes to life.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Okay, so we've made our city, we've made our walk useful. Now we need to make walking safe.

[Michelle Gelfand]

How so?

[Jeff Speck]

The typical American street is designed for speeds well over the post of limit. And that's the exact opposite of what they do in the Netherlands, for example, where you make the streets as tight as they need to be to cause the drivers to go. The speed that is so safe for the community. The resistance that you find to accomplishing this typically lies in public works departments and engineering departments, which are led by engineers who still embrace the older concept of traffic safety, which in America grew out of highway safety. So if you think about yourself when you're driving on a highway where your speed is a constant, anything you can do to reduce opportunities for conflict, to increase elbow room is going to make that street safer. So wider lanes, one way traffic, no parallel parking, no trees, that's the clear zone, big swooping curves, all those things make a highway safer. But it's precisely the opposite that makes a downtown safe. You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, you want to have two way traffic, you want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on. And so the biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who is trained on highway design and has brought it into city design.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

Okay, our, our walk is useful, our walk is safe. How do we make it, number three, comfortable for walking?

[Jeff Speck]

Comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion because, and it's a little counterintuitive. We like to be in places that have spatial definition. If you can picture lower Manhattan or, you know, the cranky parts of our oldest cities, those have the smallest blocks of all. And that gets us into the comfortable walk and that delightful feeling of being embraced by buildings on both sides. Yeah, so that idea of spatial definition is central to making walkable places. And we, you know, our favorite streets tend to be quite narrow, and then the buildings aren't that tall, but they're considerably taller than the streets are wide.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

And that brings us to the fourth and final principle of making a city walkable, which is that the walk needs to be interesting.

[Jeff Speck]

Yeah. So the final category of interesting is basically not having blank walls, not having parking structures, having lots of eyes on the street in the form of doors and windows and signs of human activity. You know, we humans are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other humans, and that's what causes us to walk.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

So when you arrive at a. At a city to work with them, do you find that you need to first sort of change their cultural outlook on how to provide the best thing for their citizens? Is there a mind shift that you have to get them to do before you actually start talking about the details?

[Jeff Speck]

Well, I think what's different now, as opposed to 10 years ago or even certainly 30 years ago, when I started doing this work, is that there's now an openness within public works departments and engineering departments to this information. And the thing that has evolved the fastest is bicycle infrastructure. And when we're building new projects now, we're mandated by the city to not have the bike lane in the street. The new standard is to put it up on the sidewalk edge.

[Minouche Zamarodi]

I mean, you're speaking to number two, a safe walk or a safe ride, in this case, on a bicycle. But we've been hearing so many headlines about the rise in pedestrian, and, I believe, biker deaths. So if more cities are becoming more welcoming to walking and riding bikes, why is this happening?

[Jeff Speck]

So more cities are getting more serious about improving pedestrian safety. But that's really just starting to kick in at volume now. And it used to be that the poor people lived in the inner city and the wealthy people were suburbanizing. Now many more of America's poor are living further and further from the city center in order to afford a mortgage. That's where a lot of people are stuck now. And sadly, they're stuck there without cars, many of them. So you have kind of the double whammy of people living without cars in an environment that was designed without ever imagining people living there, using it without cars. And I should say, when I joined this movement in the 80s, I really thought we could stop sprawl. I've pretty much given up on that goal after, what, after 40 years. But I've replaced it with a new goal, which is essentially to offer the walkable quality of life, you know, the walking lifestyle to as many more Americans as possible. And that's why, you know, I'm going where the people are and doing much more downtown work. And most of my work is for cities who call me in and say, you know, we realize that we could be so much better if we made our downtown more walkable. And what are the steps to getting there?

[Minouche Zamarodi]

That was urban planner Jeff Speck. He's the author of Walkable City How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. You can watch his ted [e-mail] and hear more from Jeff in our episode, A More Walkable World. Thank you so much for listening to our show. This episode was produced by Hersha Nahada, Rachel Faulkner White, Katie monteleone and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour, Katie Monteleone, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousy, Fiona Guerin, and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon, Becky Brown, Jimmy Keeley, and Simon Jensen. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Minouche Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

[Sarah Lake]

This message comes from Instacart. Instacart knows not all bananas are created equal. Some want them green, some ripe, some want them ready. Right now. With Instacart's Preference Picker, available at most retailers, you can choose preferences like avocado ripeness or deli thickness before your shopper starts. So instead of hoping for the best, you get groceries picked the way you would pick them, download the app and get bananas just how you like. With Instacart,