← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Shocking Reasons to Be Optimistic About the Future | Nicholas Christakis (Replay)
01:19:16
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- [00:00]
Nicholas Christakis
A vacation rental should come with support, not surprises. That's why VRBO comes with a VRBoCare guarantee and 24. 7 life support from real people. So if something goes sideways, VRBoCare can help.
- [00:10]
Tom Bilyeu
If the host cancels Verbocare if the listing says heated pool, but there's actually
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Nicholas Christakis
no pool to heat. Definitely a verbocare thing.
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Tom Bilyeu
If my teenager starts calling me Leslie instead of mom, that's a family thing. Leslie.
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Nicholas Christakis
That makes sense.
- [00:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Sorry.
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Nicholas Christakis
Book with support, not surprises, verbo care and 24. 7 life support. If you know you're Verbo terms apply.
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Tom Bilyeu
See vvrbo.com trust for details.
- [00:30]
Nicholas Christakis
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [01:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with Nicholas Christakis. Before we started rolling, we were speaking Greek. It's it is so rare for me to get a chance to speak Greek. So thank you for being kind and fighting through my, my deep American accent.
- [01:22]
Nicholas Christakis
You did have an American accent, but your sentences were grammatical, so that was good.
- [01:27]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so step in the right direction. It's interesting because my wife is actually Cypriot, so already I'm trying to sort of fake a Greek accent and not sound like a Cypriot, which my wife. So this is coming from a Cypriot, says they're sort of the country people and already they themselves have an accent. So yes, it is not easy to be understood and it's really rare here in Los Angeles to find people that speak Greek. It's a little bit easier in New York, but without getting too lost on that tangent. So one thing that I find just really fascinating in life is the notion of how much of us is born and how much of us is made. And you sit at that intersection. The book blueprint that you wrote about the evolution of culture, which I'm not sure you would explain it that simply, but I'll round it to that just to get us started. What drew you to that notion of how much culture itself evolves and stacks on itself?
- [02:23]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, that was certainly one motivation for the book. And in fact, as you mentioned, I try to explain what are the evolutionary origins of our capacity for Culture, I mean, why are we a cultural animal at all? And so this thing that allows us to be so variable from person to person and from place to place, this capacity for variation, which we take as so important is actually how to put this exactly, is actually fixed. So there's this kind of irony that the very capacity we have to be so different from place to place is actually a capacity that unifies us, that all human beings share this capacity for culture. And so one of the ways that if I could just step back even from that just a moment, every animal, almost every animal can learn from its environment. So an animal, you know, little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims up to the light, it will find food there. And that's independent learning where an animal on its own can learn. Some animals learn socially. So, for example, I see you put your hand in the fire, and I learn, you know, you burn yourself. So you've learned independently. Like the fish swimming, you put your hand on the fire, you learn that you burn. But I can watch you put your hand in the fire. And now I get almost as much knowledge. Fire burns, but I pay none of the price. My hand isn't burnt. Or I can watch you eat red berries and you die. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm not going to eat red berries. And so that's an incredibly efficient form of learning, social learning, imitation, observation of other members. Some animals learn socially. We do it. Chimpanzees do it. Certain other animal species do it, can learn socially from watching each other, but we do something even more extraordinary is we teach each other things we set out to affirmatively teach. Let me show you how to build a fire. And that is exceedingly rare. We do it again. Certain other primate species do it. Elephants do it, which is kind of interesting in certain ways, not quite like we do. And there's some thinking that certain dolphins species do it as well. Anyway, that capacity for teaching and learning and for accumulating knowledge and spreading it across time and place is what gives us the capacity for culture. So it's one of the tensions and ironies in the book because, as your listeners may know, there's like people think of, like evolutionary biologists explaining human behavior, evolutionary psychologists explaining it, and anthropologists and other people who are interested in culture as like fighting with each other. And this group is interested in universals and what all humans have in common. And this group is interested in variation and how every group is different. But actually, you can unify those ideas if you realize that we evolved to have the capacity to be different.
- [05:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, what is it? So you're a super smart dude, you write, you said, basically a book every 10 years. Why are you so drawn to this particular thing? I've become obsessed with it because I grew up feeling that I was not as smart as the people around me, that I was maybe going to struggle to do the things that I wanted to do in life. And that couple life instances led me to really feel like I was never going to go anywhere with my life. And so that had me sliding towards depression. And it was beginning to read about brain science and realizing, actually, hold on, this thing called brain plasticity. Actually, when I first started reading about it, it was hotly debated. And I just chose to believe that that was going to prove out to be true and so really leaned into that. And my life has changed radically as a result of me putting time and energy into skill acquisition. What has made this such an important obsession for you? Was it something in the way you were raised? Was it something you came across?
- [06:30]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, first of all, I became obsessed with the topic of this book for other reasons. One was to try to make an extended argument about our common humanity and the fact that human beings around the world are. There's more that unites us than divides us.
- [06:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Because he saw it going in a problematic direction.
- [06:49]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, because I thought for too long scientists and people on the street had been obsessed with the bad part of our nature and the evolution of selfishness and violence and cruelty and mendacity and warfare. But equally, we evolved to be good. We didn't just evolve to have these awful qualities. We evolved to have the capacity for love and friendship, cooperation and teaching, which we already discussed. And all these wonderful qualities. And in fact, these wonderful qualities, I would argue, are more powerful than the negative qualities they had to be, otherwise we wouldn't be living socially in the first place. In other words, if every time I came near you, you were violent to me, or you filled me with false information about the environment, you lied to me or you killed me, I would be better off not approaching you. We would all be better off living as atomistic, independent individuals. But that's not what we do. We live socially. And so the question is, how and why did we do that? And what forces counteract these negative forces? But I actually want to come back to the other thing you said about struggling with one's fate. But we can come back to that. If you want. We can keep going.
- [08:04]
Tom Bilyeu
No, I love that topic. But one thing I want to ask you about So I think most people watching this, if they have any name recognition with you, they will certainly know about the whole thing that happened at Yale. You were sort of the famous guy at the center of that, what I will call a sense of hysteria. And were you already researching this book? Like, here is a guy who is really intrigued by this notion of people are talking way too much about the negativity, what pulls us apart. He starts, because you say that nine years.
- [08:37]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah. And our difference is everyone is interested. People seem to think that what's important about us is. Is our sexual identity or our ethnicity or our immigration status or our racial background or our socioeconomic class or all these differences between people, which I don't negate. That is to say, I recognize that these differences exist. But to me, that's not what's interesting about human beings. What's interesting is what we all have in common. And in fact, it's the fact that we all have these things in common, the fact that we are united, in my view, by our common humanity, that allows us to bridge these divides. In other words, if you think that your life experience is dictated by your membership in groups, you know, whether you're an Eagles fan, for example, or, you know, whether you're in the army or in the Navy, or all of these distinctions that we make, if you think that your identity in life or your feelings, your thoughts are specified by your membership in groups, then why on earth do you communicate or talk to me at all? In other words, you must believe, as I do. I hope people believe this, that we can talk across these divides, that we are united by our common humanity. And so that's a philosophical principle, but it's also, as I discuss in the book, a scientifically grounded set of ideas. And yes, I started this book in 2009, and the events, the Halloween costume events of 2015, you know, reinforced. Although they were unpleasant, very unpleasant events, and I think many people lost their minds, it didn't degrade my fascination and admiration for our species and affection for our species. And so I rushed to finish the book, actually.
- [10:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that is. That brings up a few interesting things. So, one, when I think about what I'm trying to do with my life, so I'm trying to basically build the next Disney, which most people don't see that side of what we're doing because it is so much harder and takes so much more time. And I was literally today asking myself, like, why am I spending so much time and energy on this? It is so stressful. It is. It asks a Lot of me, both in terms of my time and energy, but my finances, like everything this is, it's a huge undertaking. And the answer that I've always come back to is it's the only way that I think I, personally, me, Tom Bilyeu, can influence culture. Like, when I think about what are the things that really are going to determine the way that somebody thinks? So my core thesis is, right now, your zip code determines. It is more predictive of your future success and your iq. I find that, like, really troubling. So. So what are the things that make your zip code so powerful? It's going to be, obviously, the way that the culture around you thinks that becomes the most problematic thing to put a finger on it. And so I thought, okay, what are ways that I can influence that? I can't change who your parents are. I can't change who your friends are, but I can change the way or I can change the ideas that get embedded in pop culture. And because my background is storytelling, I went to film school. That was my obsession, learning the language of story. I just thought, okay, I have a passion for this. I love it, I understand it. Could it really have a meaningful impact on that? Is that part of why you wanted to get this book out is to change the conversation that's going on?
- [12:07]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes, in part. I wanted to get people focused on, again, what we have in common. Two aspects of that. First of all, our common humanity, in the sense that what we share in common. But second, when you hear the term our common humanity, you typically think about good things. I mean, there's also bad parts of our common humanity, but we think about good things. And I want people to be thinking that way. I want, you know, like everyone, most adults have had this experience of traveling to another place. It could be another town or another state or another country. And when you first go, especially if you go to a faraway place, when you first get there, you think, oh, my goodness, this is so different. People are dressed differently and they worship different gods and they smell differently and they eat. Eat different foods. And their cities, their language is different. And, you know, everything is so different, you think. And then you spend some time there and you see that, oh, my goodness, these people are just like me. They. They laugh at jokes, they spend time with their families. They have friends which they derive satisfaction from. They cooperate with each other to achieve collective objectives. They're all these fundamentally human things that we do as an animal because ironically, ironically, these most human things of us, about us, actually, we can identify them in part because they're so animalistic, because they evolved in our biology. And one of the arguments, for instance, I make in the book is that if we can share the capacity for friendship with elephants, because elephants also have friends, they evolved independently from us to have friendships. And elephants social networks look just like our social networks. And even though the last common ancestor we had with elephants about 90 million years ago didn't have social networks, so the elephants, independently, by something known as convergent evolution, just like those famous examples of the armadillos and the pangolins, you know, that independently come to look similar, you know, with. But completely independently, they evolve these capacities. So, but you can evolve not just physical traits to look similar. You can evolve behavior. So elephants, and we independently evolve friendship. And so one of the ironies is if we look at elephants and say, oh, my goodness, elephants have friends, too. If we share this trait in common with elephants, then we can share it with each other.
- [14:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Did you see that video of the elephant that I think pretty recent, an elephant was friends with a dog. The dog died, and the elephant carried the dog back a mile and a half after being attacked by coyotes to lay it down outside the house and. And, like, show signs of continual mourning over the loss of that dog. Dude, I thought that is fascinating.
- [14:47]
Nicholas Christakis
I have not seen that video. But the ability of elephants to feel grief, which I also discuss in the book blueprint, has been long known by indigenous people in Africa and long observed by scientists as well. And it's a very. It's a very interesting property. And we know that elephants can express something that looks just like grief in us. And so why did elephants apparently independently evolve this capacity for grief? Well, the capacity for grief is the flip side of the capacity to be attached to individual people. So you might be sad if you see that a stranger has died, but you won't grieve the death of that stranger. If a person, you know, an identifiable, unique individual, dies, you feel grief. And so this capacity for grief evolved, I believe, and I argue in the book, in parallel with the capacity to express individual identity. So what do I mean by that? Why, for instance, I'll back up if I could. Why? Why do all of our faces look different? I mean, why don't we all just have a face that looks the same? For your kidneys to do their job, all human kidneys to do their job properly, should work the same. Physiologically, they should be the same, but for faces to do their job, they should look different. And what is the job of your face? The job of your face is to communicate, this is me, not someone else. You're trying to communicate your individual identity. And not only that, not only do we and the genetics of this have recently been worked out, or part partially worked out, like how our faces come all of our faces to be different. We don't only have the capacity to signal our uniqueness, we also have the capacity to recognize our uniqueness. A large part of our brain is devoted to being able to look out at a crowd of people and uniquely identify every one of them. Even we can look out at people we've never met before and say, these two are siblings, so we can discern a connection between them by looking at their faces.
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Tom Bilyeu
Do elephants have that same kind of ability?
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Nicholas Christakis
Yes. Yes. Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting.
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Nicholas Christakis
Yes. So elephants have identity and incidentally, so do dolphins and, of course, many primates. So they are unique individuals. Now, the reason for the evolution of this capacity to signal and detect individual identity is that, paradoxically, it's because we live socially. If you're going to live socially, you need to have a way of tracking who have you had sex with, who have you cooperated with. No, seriously, who is your offspring? Like, you want to feed your child, not someone else's child. So you need to be able to tell the difference among all of these other people. Who do you owe a favor to? Who can you call on for support if you are in a battle? So all of these qualities rely on these social qualities rely on our capacity to signal our individual identity. And then comes with that, the capacity for grief. So you mourn when Susie or Tommy dies. You don't mourn when some unnamed person dies, because they are unique to you and you have a connection to them. So this is grief anyway. So I'm not surprised at all about that. And also, elephants, incidentally, have another fascinating trait, is they seem to hate animals that eat carrion. So they shoo away if they find a dead animal on the savannah. And there are vultures there, they will run at the vultures or the hyenas and they will chase them away. They really don't like those kinds of animals. They apparently think they're awful. And they have been known to help humans in distress. So they can tell the difference. An elephant can tell the difference between a human that is sick and a human that is not, and help a human that is sick. Incidentally, dolphins have been known to do this, you know, to their famous stories going back thousands of years, many, many documented in modern times. Some of this is discussed in the book too where dolphins will rescue drowning sailors and take them a long distance to shore.
- [19:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, I used to. You ever watch that show Flipper?
- [19:03]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.
- [19:04]
Tom Bilyeu
I used to love that.
- [19:05]
Nicholas Christakis
I'm surprised.
- [19:06]
Tom Bilyeu
That whole notion of it, you know, the dolphin being there to help people out like that is how I grew up thinking about dolphins is that they had very human like traits. The ability to understand distress, the willingness to rescue somebody. It's pretty interesting. I didn't know that about elephants, especially when they're so notorious for. I would assume if they detect that you are a threat, that they are so devastatingly vicious is the word I would have used before you said that. That they can. That they'll go in the attack with humans. Aren't they one of the number one killers of humans in terms of animals
- [19:42]
Nicholas Christakis
ancestrally, there was no conflict between. Before we developed serious weapons. There were group hunts for mastodon and elephant predecessors a long time ago. So we occasionally would hunt large groups to people. This was too dangerous for us to go and hunt an elephant was not an easy thing. But there was no, like, intrinsic conflict between our ancestors. And given the ivory trade and given the conversion of land to agriculture, the elephants and humans come into conflict. And an unarmed human, of course, is nothing against an elephant. And you see occasionally in India, you know, people go running when they see an elephant. I mean, it's not a joke and. But they're peaceful. I mean, they don't intrinsically attack us. Not at all. I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted.
- [20:56]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [21:12]
Nicholas Christakis
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Tom Bilyeu
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Nicholas Christakis
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- [21:23]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [21:26]
Nicholas Christakis
for the ones who get it done. But they sometimes engage in crop raiding. This goes back to our discussion of culture so elephants will teach each other how to raid human crops. And they know, for example, to do the raid on nights when there's a new moon. And they, and they, and they. And yes, and they, and they have special knowledge about which crops are appealing and where they are located, which they remember and transmit. So they'll form parties to go, like hunting parties to go on a. On a dark night and then to get, you know, the desired food. Of course, the humans don't like this, so. Because, you know, the elephants will trash the whole field. But no, it's quite remarkable what they can do. Anyway, that's discussed in the book too.
- [22:19]
Tom Bilyeu
One of the things that I want to go deeper into is grief, man. Like grief is. That is a crazy part of the human experience. And when you see footage of somebody throwing themselves on a casket and wailing and you know so intimately that sense of just devastating loss, like, I'm never going to be able to go on from this. Even having the concept of dying from a broken heart is pretty intense. That whole thing, man, about humans is fucking crazy. And what we will do to avoid it, how far we will go when we're in the grips of it. It's pretty intense.
- [22:55]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes. If you've never. Yeah. If you've never had grief. First of all, I was a hospice doctor for many years. I took care of people who were dying. And I've personally experienced grief. My mother died when I was 25. She'd been sick my whole childhood.
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Tom Bilyeu
Is that part of why you became a hospice doctor?
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Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. It's another whole long story. We go on that tangent, if you want. In fact, I'm remembering two tangents ago. Eventually I might circle back to. But no, I think that feeling, it's a very physical feeling. Like your chest aches and you want to. You want to hurt yourself, you know, pull out your hair and why the fuck is that?
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Tom Bilyeu
That's so true. I have literally never put that into a thought before. Why on earth do we do that?
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Nicholas Christakis
We don't know. That's self injury. Covering yourself with ash, not eating. It's a very complicated thing. And the thing is, typically human beings don't experience grief very often. That's why it's so distinctive. It's not like just bad sadness. It's a different feeling. And while most people are familiar with sadness and anger and depression and human beings have these feelings, grief is a rare emotion in part, again, because it's tied to particular people and also to permanence. For example, right now during the coronavirus pandemic. Incidentally, I'm writing another book about this called Apollo's Arrow that's coming out in October.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's fast turnaround for you. I'm impressed.
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Nicholas Christakis
Yes, I very unexpectedly decided to do it. But there's a lot of grief related to this, not just because people have lost their lives. And when you and I are speaking about a hundred thousand Americans have lost their lives, that means probably about a million Americans know that those people and are grieving. And probably 10 million Americans are aware of someone who has died. But as the pandemic claims, more and more lives, more and more people will either know someone who died, be grieving that person, or be aware. That is to say, no personally. In other words, I'm making a distinction between you're intimate with someone, your family member or close friend, versus oh, I know this person and oh my goodness, they died. So that's going to change in our society over the coming year or two as the pandemic continues and grief is going to be part of it. But we don't just have grief for the loss of life, we also have grief for the loss of our way of life. Right. There's a sense in which some things have been permanently lost. People who graduated from high school and college this spring did not have commencements. People have lost their jobs, people have lost their careers, they've lost opportunities to have a wedding like they had wanted planned a wedding. And these are non trivial losses. And sometimes you can think of these as eliciting grief because one of the qualities of grief is that it's focused on something distinctive and something that is basically permanently gone. Right. Like that's why you feel grief, that it'll never come back. So I think there's going to be a lot of grief as part of this pandemic as well.
- [26:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, I'd love to know if you have insights into. When I think about grief, the wailing, the chest pounding, the hair pulling there. When I literally sit here and think about what that feels like, there is this need to move, to do something, to, I don't know, like if there's some association between movement or aggression. It feels like to your notion of permanence, it feels like I so cannot deal with the fact that this is permanent, that I need to change the state of something else. I need to change my own state. Like the notion. There was this book I read in high school, the breakers or something like that. It was about people who wanted to destroy and tear things down. And I remember reading it going. I fucking get this. Like, I get the impulse that's a very. To break something, but I don't know that it's it. I didn't resonate with it in the sense of I want to watch it burn. I resonated with it in the sense of like, changing its state, like, just dramatically getting your hands in it, breaking it. There is something freakishly cathartic about that. And I don't know if there's, you know, back to my central obsession with you. And your work is 50% you're born with, and 50% is changeable. And it feels like that collision of something in your subconscious is like coughing up into your conscious mind. And the only way to deal with it is through movement, which obviously, as a species, we've been. I mean, some say that we have a brain specifically for movement.
- [27:39]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, first of all, generally in grief, it's not a period of movement. So usually people, when they grieve, stay home, they might stay in bed, their motions become slowed.
- [27:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think that we pass through, though, a more a violent phase of that in the beginning? That certainly is my experience.
- [27:59]
Nicholas Christakis
No, it's possible. So, yes. So there's a rage component too often at the imminent loss. So often people, for example, if their loved one is sick and dying, they will feel a kind of rage about that. And you also, incidentally, see that a lot when people, you know, when people engage in mass killings in our society, it's often because they feel hopeless and they want to burn it all, you know, which is a kind of, you know, extreme manifestation of what we're discussing. But generally, after the death of the person, most people do not. But not to say everyone, but most people, in my experience, grieving is a kind of period of subdued expenditure of effort. And many religions, of course, for example, in Judaism, you sit shiva, for instance. In Islam, there's a lot of traditions about how you wash the body and rituals, funeral rituals and so forth. And Christianity, of course, the same. So there are many. Hinduism, Buddhism, there are. All these religions have rituals that also partly are directed at supporting the person who's suffering and grieving, but also reconnecting them to the broader society because, you know, a tie has been cut. So there's a lot of visitation and attention. For example, in chimpanzees, when one chimpanzee's loved one dies, other chimpanzees will come and groom the grieving chimp more, and there'll be more social engagement in an attempt to reconnect the person to their and incidentally, there have been some observations in chimps about body washing. Like mothers of chimps that babies that die will tenderly prepare the body of their baby. The same thing has been seen incidentally in killer whales, where mother killer whales will try to carry the body of their dead offspring for a long time and move it to the surface to breathe and so forth. So many examples of blackfish. Yes, I did.
- [30:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, good Lord. The part where they. The guy is recount and he seems like a tough nut, the tough nut, grizzled guy, talking about, you know, back in the 70s or whatever when they captured him and they were showing the footage and he was. He breaks down crying, talking about how the whales were screaming and they wouldn't leave as they were harvesting the young. And I was like, oh, God, like, that is horrendous.
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Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes, that's an excellent example. That's exactly right. And old whalers would do awful things. I mean, they were whalers, but, you know, and in the intervening centuries we've come progressively to be more humane about animals, which I think is terrific. And incidentally, more humane about each other too. As many people have argued over the last couple hundred years, generally speaking, the moral sphere has widened. It used to be just us and now more and more groups count as being important, which is good, eventually, including animals. The whalers would do things like, like kill the young calves or injure the young calves so that it would draw other animals together. And there's one awful story, I can't remember if I put it in the book and I don't remember where I got it, but these, the orcas are very smart and they were being predated. There was a pod of orcas and they were being predated by humans with harpoons in a boat, like modern humans, not Inuit hunters. And the orcas seem to form a plan where the females and the children went down one branch of a river and the males tried to draw the humans away from their, I don't know how to put it, their women folk, you know, and young. Unbelievable. Like, they clearly know, you know, so, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, these other animals, these sentient, social, intelligent, long lived, all of those qualities go together. Animals are very similar to us in these same fundamental ways, ironically, that define our common humanity. I don't know, we just got on grief and I forgot how we got down this tangent.
- [32:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, even before we leave that one thing I would love to understand, why did you stop. Stop being a hospice doctor, which I could not fathom doing for even a day. So you are a better man than me, Gungadin?
- [32:36]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, for many reasons, some personal, some administrative or practical or professional. So I practiced as a home hospice physician in Chicago from 1995. I finished my medical training in 1995 when I was about 33. And then I started at the University of Chicago. And then I worked as a home hospice physician taking care of people on the south side of Chicago, home based hospice. So I would, on Saturday afternoons I would go to people's homes of people who were dying and take care of them and their families as best I could. I was part of a hospice called Horizon Hospice in Chicago, even though I was at the University of Chicago Medical Center. And then in 2001 I moved to Harvard. And then I worked there as a palliative medicine physician, initially on the PA Medicine Service, a hospice service at Mass General Hospital. And then I moved to the Mount Auburn Hospital. And about 10 years ago now. So it would have been. When was it exactly? It was maybe 2010 or something like that. I finally stopped seeing patients. I did it for a number of reasons. First of all, I had taken on some additional responsibilities at Harvard. In fact, I was the so called master of, just like at Yale with a Halloween incident at Harvard with greater success. I had been the so called master of one of the houses so called at Harvard for four years or so. And that was important and heavy duty. And so I didn't have time to continue my clinical practice. My laboratory was taking off. We were doing a lot more science in my lab and it needed my attention. And then I had some logistic issues like traveling around the city. I just was spending so much of my time going from place to place. So that's one of the reasons I gave it up. Another reason was that, and this will take a minute to explain. So when I first started practicing hospice medicine in 1995, there wasn't even a specialty, a board certification yet in hospice care. And the care of Americans then as now, was abysmal. So you may, your listeners may not know this, but something like half of Americans die in pain. We're the richest nation on earth, and half of Americans die in pain. Between 40 and 70% then and still. And we have other awful things. So most of us want to die at home. Many of us, most of us cannot. You know, many of us have extended hospitalizations before we die, which is unnecessary or other kinds. We have a lot of suffering before we die. And so I was very angry about this and very concerned about this. And my Initial part of my career, I did a lot of research about how to improve end of life care in our society. But I was also a practicing hospice physician. But in 1995, the main patients I was asked to see were patients, let's say, in their 60s and 70s and 80s, who were dying of solid tumors like colon cancer or breast cancer or prostate cancer or lung cancer that was metastatic. And you need to understand that most of the time, 95% of the pain that we feel is what's called somatic pain. When a tissue in our body is affected and the nerves detect the pain and tell our brain, this part hurts. There's a different kind of pain called neuropathic pain. That's when the nerve itself is affected and. And the nerve is screwed up. Not the tissue that the nerve is detecting, but the nerve itself, let's say, is being invaded by a tumor. It's called neuropathic pain. So the patients I was taking care of in my 30s were older than me. They were dying of somatic pain, which you can easily treat with morphine. And I could help the families and the patients easily, enormously. So I could go to a patient's bedside. Things were a mess. No one had talked to them about the fact that they were dying. No one had prepared the family. The patient was in pain. I could give them morphine and just sit there. And if you gave it intravenously, it's unbelievable. You just. The morphine. No, it's unbelievable. The patient's in agony and they want to die because they're in so much pain and you relieve their pain and they're like, actually, this is not so bad for a while. And. And you feel so powerful and so physicianly, you know, you feel like you're doing some good in the world using this very simple drug. And of course, there are more complicated tricks up your sleeve because often pain is very easy to treat. But there are other symptoms, believe it or not, like constipation or dyspnea. Shortness of breath is awful at the end of life, or itching, which is very hard to treat, can really affect people a lot. And they're miserable from these symptoms, and those are harder to treat. But anyway, so typically I would be taking care of someone much older than me with a somatic pain and with a family situation that required me to prepare them from, like, let's say, a natural end to a decently long life. Okay, 1995, that's my practice. What would you do if your online store converted 36% more shoppers, you could take 36% more vacation. Another pina colada. Yes, please.
- [37:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Open a new retail location with 36% more square feet.
- [38:02]
Nicholas Christakis
Fantastic. Hire 36% more help. You're hired and you're hired. Shopify has the world's best converting checkout up to 36% better than other e commerce platforms.
- [38:11]
Tom Bilyeu
What you do with those extra sales
- [38:12]
Nicholas Christakis
is up to you. Switch to Shopify today@shopify.com setup and get a $1 trial. Shopify.com setup well, what happened in the intervening 10 years or 15 years is progressively a lot of these principles got filtered back to other doctors in the hospital. So other doctors became better at using morphine. Prior to 1995, doctors were afraid to use it. They didn't know how to use it. They thought if they gave the patient a milligram or two of morphine, they would die, which is wrong. You know, they didn't know. They were afraid to talk to patients about death and dying. So they would call us to do it because we were the experts. So we would just go and basically sit and listen, which was, you know, the skill that's required. But eventually those skills moved correctly and wonderfully moved to the rest of the medical system. Pain became a fifth vital sign. Up until that point, we had heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate and blood pressure were the four vital signs. It was a big move in the 1990s to add a fifth one, pain. So at the foot of your bed, the nurse is recording five vital signs, not four. Like how much pain are you in? And the idea there was if you ask the patient every day, are they in pain, they can't tell you. It's an 8 out of 10, 3 days in a row and you don't do anything about it. You know, you have to address it. So all of that stuff filters back. So what happened as a result is my personal practice changed and I got older. So I went from being 35 to being 45. And now I was being asked to see a 32 year old woman younger than me dying of metastatic ovarian cancer. Metastatic to her sacral plexus, the nerves at the base of your spine having neuropathic pain, which I couldn't easily treat, and three small children at home. So how can I tell her, help her to accept death, you know, so. So the caseload became much, much, much harder.
- [40:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Honestly, how do you talk to somebody like that about death? I mean, that is. When I heard that you were a hospice doctor, I thought, dude, you are meeting people at the Worst period in their life, obviously their family's worst period. I mean, this is like. It would be hard to go home and laugh.
- [40:21]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes. Well, many professions have that. Police, firemen, nurses, oncology nurses, burn unit nurses, you know, people who. Coroners, you know, there are many professions in our life, in our society, which involve contact with sadness and pain and challenging, you know, very challenging situations. Soldiers, for goodness sakes, you know, who return from battle can have PTSD and so on. So it is difficult. But you, of course, you're human and you're entitled. It's your job, and this is what you signed up for. And you then are entitled also to go home and have a normal day and be pissed off while you wait in line at the post office like anyone else, or be happy because you're hugging your kids like anyone else. So, yes, you can compartmentalize. And most people do. Some people do burn out in all the professions I mentioned and many others. And then they switch professions. You know, it's too much for them after a while.
- [41:24]
Tom Bilyeu
So you said listening. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say, you said that listening was a key part of talking to somebody about that. Is it just that? Is there a universal thing that people want to talk about? Is it they just need to be heard to be with somebody, or are there actual things you need to impart?
- [41:45]
Nicholas Christakis
No, many people want to tell their life story near the end of life. This is a very common experience, and they want to talk to their families about it. And sometimes they want to talk to their healthcare providers about it. And sometimes it's an interesting. I mean, there's some lore among hospice nurses. I don't know, maybe I don't know how your reach is and how many hospice nurses are listening to this, but when they hear this, they're all going to nod their heads and that, you know, that often it's a bad prognostic sign. The patients will be not doing so well, and then they'll perk up and they'll be very chatty and they'll tell you about their life story, and then the next day they die. And, you know, I've never seen any formal scientific study of this phenomenon, but I certainly have experienced it myself, and it's certainly a lure in hospices that often when the person engages in that kind of life review, especially if they were failing, and then they kind of perk up to do it, it's like a sign of death coming. So, no, I think people, first of all, people generally like to be heard. I mean, you Know, I don't know if you've. We were talking earlier about your Cypriot wife, you know, oftentimes, or I don't know if you've seen that viral video about. It's the nail, you know, like the nail in the woman's head. And the guy is just trying to say it's the nail. And she just wants to be. She just wants to be heard, right?
- [43:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [43:05]
Nicholas Christakis
And, I mean, that story is very gendered, but men are very similar. You know, you. You just want your partner to listen to you. You know, it's my wife.
- [43:14]
Tom Bilyeu
And I will literally start conversations by saying, either I just want to be heard right now, or I actually want you to solve it. Because we found if you don't set that out right at the beginning, you are in for a world of hurt.
- [43:26]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes. And good marriages will evolve this capacity, either explicitly or implicitly. And that's exactly right. And oftentimes, just five minutes of listening is all your partner needs. You know, they just want to share with you their problem. They had a shitty day at work, and they just want to tell you about their day, and it was awful, and there's nothing you can do to fix it. And they don't want you to fix it. They just want you to know they had a shitty day at work, and then you listen to them. And that's such a simple thing to do anyway. That's a very valuable skill. I learned this, the importance of listening, from a magnificent doctor at the Mount Auburn Hospital when I was at medical school. A man by the name of Matthew Carmody. Just an extraordinary human being and a magnificent clinician, a master clinician. So when I was still in medical school, Matthew. Dr. Carmody taught me about how to do this.
- [44:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that the ability to listen, I think, is already pretty extraordinary. And I would imagine that part of being good at that is also being able to give people straight, honest talk. There's somebody in my life right now who's dying of pancreatic cancer very rapidly. Talking about from diagnosis. He's, I would say, nearing end of life at this point, is no longer pursuing treatment. And I think he was diagnosed like two or three months ago just post the kickoff of COVID And the. Just the rapid bodily changes, the dramatic loss of weight is. It's really shocking. And to know, like, to try to run the experiments, which is where this has been interesting in my own life, to try to run the experiment when I'm doing something, to think, what will I think about this at, you know, the end of my life. Is this something that I'm going to regret? Is this not something that I'm going to regret? And you begin to realize that there really are. Like, you. You might think that, oh, that won't apply to me. But there's so many things that just seem universal. Whether it's, you know, wanting to be hurt out or whether it's needing to sort of come to terms with things you regret. It is. It's interesting, but you need that straight talk to understand what is happening so that you can begin that process. Like, is that something that doctors struggle with? Is that an important part of the process to just let people know what they can expect?
- [45:46]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, my first book was on this topic. It was called Death Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care. It was a whole book about prognostication and the formulation of prognosis, which is the first problem. Can the doctors formulate an accurate and reliable prognosis? Forget about whether they tell anybody. And the second are the chances of communication. Can you. Are they willing and able to communicate a prognosis? And of course, many doctors misrepresent the truth. They either sugarcoat it and they say everything is fine when it's not, or sometimes they do the opposite. They do something called hanging crepe. They will say the situation is more dire than they think it is, because then if the patient does well, the patient will think, oh, my God, what a great doctor. You know, I'm living longer than the doctor predicted. Which is incidentally, this has been discussed for thousands of years in the practice of medicine. So what's the right approach?
- [46:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Because I actually get why you.
- [46:41]
Nicholas Christakis
Well, what I would do, I mean, I don't know the right approach. First of all, what I would do is I always used to ask when I was patients, I would ask them, I would say something like this, and I wouldn't say it as fast or as callously. So ordinarily, I would say it in a very slower. I would sit down at the patient's bedside and I would indicate with my body language I was there for the duration until they were done with me.
- [47:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Would you touch them?
- [47:06]
Nicholas Christakis
Oh, yes, I would hold their hands, of course.
- [47:08]
Tom Bilyeu
That's so interesting.
- [47:09]
Nicholas Christakis
Oh, goodness, yes. And I had. Of course, first of all, you're a physician, you examine patients all the time and.
- [47:15]
Tom Bilyeu
But we're getting weird societally about touch. Man, I am way worried about touching people that I don't know very, very well.
- [47:23]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, that's a whole other topic. But in a professional situation, you know, where, of Course you would sit down at the bedside and it's very normal and human to hold their hand. Or often they would be my patients, I would have examined them or whatever. But so you communicate with your body language that you're there for the duration. And then I would say something like. And I wouldn't say it quite as rapidly or as directly, but the gist of it would be something like, people vary in their desire for information about what's likely to happen to them. Some people want a lot of information and some people don't want very much information at all. What kind of patient do you think you are? And they might say, you know, actually Doc, I don't want to know anything.
- [48:04]
Tom Bilyeu
You know, what are the percentages? Do more people want to know or more people?
- [48:09]
Nicholas Christakis
Most people in our society say yes, but it also varies and it's ethnically stratified. So there are many, many people, for example of Hispanic descent or Asian descent who say, talk to my children, I don't want to discuss that. So there's a lot of variation. There's some variation. Most people do want to know. And then you also have to recognize it's not a one off thing. If you've developed a relationship with a patient, you're going to see them again and their ideas about what they want to know will have changed and their clinical circumstances will have changed. So you can discuss this with them at some future point anyway. And then the question is, how do you communicate the bad news? And there's a magnificent book by Johns Hopkins University Press. It's called how to Break Bad News by Buckman. Is the guy's last name. I can't remember if his first name is Robert or Richard right now. Anyway, it's an incredible book and it's actually good in life in general. It's intended for physicians and nurses on how to break bad news. But actually it's just good in life in general if you want to. If you're a teenager, you want to tell your father or mother that you crashed the car. How do you break bad news? There's like good tips in there on like how to do this. And there are a number of principles. One, for example, is firing a warning shot. So you say, you know, I'd like to talk to you about some serious matters. Or, you know, I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news. So you fire a warning shot. You know, you don't just deliver the bad news, you allocate time, like I said earlier. Also, it's crucial in hospice care and caring for patients, a very important thing is a commitment to non abandonment. So both doctors, patients especially, but doctors too, one of the reasons they don't have these conversations is they're afraid that the doctor will abandon the patient if the patient is dying. Let's say they're worried that the doctor will just give up on them. So I was always very careful to say, you know, I have this bad news. And I would deliver the bad news and. And then I would say, but I promise I will not abandon you. And there's much that we can do to address your condition even if we cannot stop its course. So you communicate to the patient non abandonment support. There are things you can do. Empathy, sympathy, interest. Right. There's lots that's humanly available, you know, even at the end of life. So anyway, we're off on multiple tangents now. This is old work I used to do a long time ago. Yeah.
- [50:42]
Tom Bilyeu
And I came across Death Foretold when I was doing research on you. And I just, I find that part of your story so interesting and so rawly human. And one thing I'm always trying to do when I research somebody is to actually understand them, to understand their worldview. And just the hospice thing, which is an act of service so grand. I don't know that that can be overstated. And I know you may not perceive it that way because you actually did it, but from the outside that seems patently true. And then when I go into what you're doing from the looking at culture, but more importantly, having ended up writing that book as a way to try to get us to, as a society to focus on the good and not the bad. Good is even in the title.
- [51:27]
Nicholas Christakis
Right.
- [51:27]
Tom Bilyeu
The Evolution of a Good Society. I can feel you trying to help and be useful, which I find particularly interesting.
- [51:38]
Nicholas Christakis
Very kind of you to say that. Honestly. It's a very kind thing you just said to me. Thank you.
- [51:42]
Tom Bilyeu
It is, I think it seems accurate. Look, we've never met before now, but it just seems to hold true. And everything that I've watched and read about you leads me to that which I find interesting. What motivates people to do what they do and to try as hard at the things that they try. And this seems like a really interesting period in time for somebody who focuses on the things that you focus on. When I think about colonizing Mars. Right. You write extensively about shipwrecks, which, okay, that may be one of your unintentional communities, but you also talk about commune. So, you know, looking at what's going to Happen in Mars is interesting, looking at what's going on in AI robotics.
- [52:20]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, I do some of the robotics work in my lab too, but. But we do some work on social robotics and what we call dumb artificial intelligence. But the Mars stuff, when I was. I'm 58 and I thought I would live long enough to see a human on Mars. You know, when I was a boy, I thought I would live to see that. It was so important to me. And I. I don't think I'm going to live to see it. And I'm so sad about it because it's clear we're going to colonize Mars. And I suspect in 100 years, 200 years, when we have sort of colonies going, it'll be a replaying of the new and old world. The colonists won't like having to send resources back to the, you know, to Earth. And they want independent government. And all of that stuff, I'm convinced, will play itself out. I think we will eventually terraform Mars. I think it's inevitable. There is. I mean, there's technology to do it, you know, take time and it's expensive now, but we'll get better and better at this. And, you know, initially we'll live in. In the bubbles that we construct there. And anyway, that's all going to happen eventually. But I would love to at least live long enough for people to, you know, to witness a human being getting to Mars. And I saw the Martian. I've watched it a half dozen times. It's, you know, Matt Damon and, you know, it's just. It's so deeply moving, that movie and imagining him on that surface as the first person he goes. Everywhere I go, I'm the first person ever to have been here, you know. Anyway, I thought that movie and the book was magnificent.
- [53:55]
Tom Bilyeu
It is a very fascinating thing, the whole idea of humans striking out to have that adventurous spirits. We want to do that, but then understanding and being able to predict by the colonies.
- [54:06]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, so in fact, I had in the book, but I took it out. NASA has for years looked at shipwrecks as models for what would happen in an isolated colony. And in fact, there have been other experiments. For example, I discuss in the book the scientists that winter over on the South Pole. Small communities of about 30 scientists every year that winter over there. So, you know, how. How do these people get along? And so I did. I discussed the shipwrecks extensively in blueprint and I had a whole section on the colonization of space. But I cut it out because the book was already Too long. Maybe I'll publish it one day.
- [54:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, man, that would be really interesting. And I'd love to know, is NASA talking about things like Pitcairn and where. I'll say that was the. Everything has to do with the exact people that go. For sure. And your breakdown of Shackleton. And I've read the book Endurance, it's fucking phenomenal. Talking about how he. They were gone for like two years or something.
- [55:05]
Nicholas Christakis
Crazy amount of time. He was an extraordinary leader and the men were at an extraordinary spirit and they were able to survive. No one died. It's unbelievable.
- [55:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Unbelievable. Like people, when you read the book, you're like, there's no way. Like when you. Because you're reading it, you know, in a relatively short amount of time. So you don't think about the fact that two years is a long fucking time to be wet and cold. Like wet cold. And not know if you're about to die.
- [55:32]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, Crazy. My favorite story in the book, which I stumbled on, is the story of the Grafton and the Inverco on the south auckland Island in 1864. So it was almost a perfect natural experiment. Two shipwrecks on the same time on the same island, never encounter each other. Totally different outcomes. So on the southern part of the island, the Grafton wrecks. Five men wash ashore, they survive for a couple of years and all make it off alive. On the Inverco, 19 men wash ashore, all but three of them die. And they're very different stories. And what they did and how they did it was wonderful for me to read and I. I was even tempted to write a whole book about just that contrast. But I decided to just tell brief versions of their stories, which are amazing.
- [56:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Even the brief version was really fascinating in terms of. So from my own memory of reading Shackleton or Endurance, how one. He was trying to. And you talk about this in the book, he was giving people an opportunity to teach each other so that one person, you'd be high one minute, low the next. And so it created what you refer to as, oh, God, mild hierarchy. The notion of we need a hierarchy, but if it gets too crazy, then people end up revolting, and then the other guy was all about every man for himself. And it became cannibalistic and pretty crazy.
- [57:01]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes. Shackleton did lots of things that were very interesting and his men did. It wasn't just him, he was an extraordinary leader, but that men too were very good with each other. And this notion of setting up schools. So a lot of the shipwrecks that did well were ones in which they set up a school where they taught each other things. And as you summarized, what happens in a school is that today I'm teaching you Norwegian, tomorrow you're teaching me algebra. So we take turns being pupil and teacher. And so it, first of all, it stimulates our minds, but more importantly, it kind of keeps the hierarchy, you know, on its toes. So I'm not like despotically ruling over you. And so many of the successful recs and isolated parties had this quality of teaching, which also connects with the other theme of the book which we opened our conversation with today about teaching.
- [58:03]
Tom Bilyeu
So, yeah, I want to talk about Pitcairn and how it relates to what they're doing in Antarctica. So Pitcairn, which is the aftermath of Mutiny on the Bounty, right, If I'm not mistaken. So they end up basically allocating women to the men and it turns into like this whole disaster as some of the women die. And so they. Yes, the men are taking women from other men and it devolves into basically all out slaughter.
- [58:30]
Nicholas Christakis
They all die, one man survives, they kill each other, everyone else dies. Yes, except all the men die. But yes.
- [58:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So taking that notion and running with it especially, and I'm asking this of somebody, knowing that you do work, or at least you, you understand the world of like sex robots and things like that. How, how much?
- [58:50]
Nicholas Christakis
Let me just be clear for your listeners. I do not do any research on sex robots. I have done work on human robot interactions, but not sexual interactions. All right, fair enough, fair enough.
- [59:02]
Tom Bilyeu
You do work in AI as well, right?
- [59:04]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, I do.
- [59:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so sort of inevitable outcome that I have heard you speak on is, you know, where this goes with sex robots. And what is interesting to me is in how this all comes back to the culture that we end up creating. And this moment in history being particularly an interesting moment for culture, could end up going. We may be approaching a cultural event horizon beyond which we cannot see. And we don't know sort of where this is going. So bringing it back, as NASA or whoever starts thinking about colonies on Mars and looking at what's going on already in Antarctica, do they take sexual relations into consideration?
- [59:44]
Nicholas Christakis
Okay, so first of all, I don't know. I'm sure NASA is discussing and thinking about this if they send. Because even in the olden days they used to think in a very sort of heterosexist way, they would imagine that if they send same sex parties up, they would be no sex. But of course you can have sex. You can have sex with the same sex person. So that doesn't necessarily solve the problem or the issue of sexual relations. So I think NASA, I'm sure, is considering this and may even send up some couples. I'm not privy to their discussions, although now that you mentioned it, I'm curious what their thinking is. Probably some government report that one could obtain that if any listener finds or knows such report, they should email it to me because I'm curious to read what, what NASA says about sexual relations during space exploration. And I note with interest that, that the astronaut, I think it's Mark Kelly is running for. Oh, no, it's. It's his brother. I can't remember who's running for senate in Arizona right now. Anyway, Sex robots. Let's go back to that. So the issue there, the intellectual issue there is we are in the midst of creating, as you suggested, what I call hybrid systems of humans and machines. So what we're doing is we're creating groups of people into which we've interspersed forms of artificial intelligence. Like online, you can imagine a network of humans and some bots. And we've done some research on this topic. In fact, in my lab or in the real world, you could imagine humans and a machine, like a physical, you know, humanoid robot, for example. And we've also done some work with that in my lab in partnership with Brian Scazelletti's lab at Yale. He's a roboticist at Yale. And what we're interested in is not how do we optimize the AI or the robots to interact with human. You. We're not interested in human robotic dyadic interactions. What we're interested instead is how does the addition of robots to a system change human human interactions? Does the addition of artificial intelligence into our midst change how we treat each other? Let me give you a couple of examples, the simplest one. First, imagine that you are devising an Alexa device or some kind of a. A robotic digital assistant. And you're the manufacturer of this device. You probably don't want to make the device require a lot of politeness on the part of its owners. For example, you don't have to say, excuse me, Alexa, I'm very sorry to interrupt you. Could you please do me a favor? I need to know what the weather is. You could just say alexa weather, and the obedient device responds. Now, the problem is, if I'm only thinking about how you interact with the device, this might be fine. But now imagine that your children use this device and they learn to be rude, and then they go to the playground and they're rude to other children. Okay, so the human, human interactions have been modified by the addition of this type of robotic equipment or intelligence into our midst. Okay, so that's a simple example of the idea that I'm discussing with you. These hybrid systems of humans and machines. How do the human, human interactions change as a result of the addition of the machines? Now the sex robot case is very interesting because experts, and that's not me, have looked at this topic and have come to different conclusions. Some people think that the addition of sex robots will degrade human, human sexual interactions because they think that once you become accustomed to having sex with a robot, you are not going to be able to have enjoyable sex with another human being. You know, you're going to be accustomed to.
- [63:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's. Why do they say that? I'm not even saying I disagree, by the way, but I'm just curious.
- [63:25]
Nicholas Christakis
Maybe the robot is extremely obedient and you don't need to worry about if the old robot climaxes, for example. You know, you're just very selfish when you have sex with a robot. And those are not good qualities if you're trying to.
- [63:35]
Tom Bilyeu
But doesn't that. So that gives me pause. As somebody who's outside the world and has really studied this, I naturally gravitate towards your opinion, which is at a purely biological level, 50%. The part that you can't change is just you want to be good, you want to, you want to connect. So what I hear in that argument is there is actually a collision between that part of you that wants friendship, that longs for connection, that hungers for those the rewards nature has given us for being a social animal.
- [64:01]
Nicholas Christakis
Right.
- [64:01]
Tom Bilyeu
That had to be pleasant. So it feels good is colliding with something else. The desire to be selfish, for things to be facile, whatever. And that facile and selfishness is actually winning out over the other side, which is. There's something rings true about that, but is distressing.
- [64:21]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah, I see the connection you're making. Although that's not where I would have taken the argument necessarily. And if you'll allow me, I'll come back to that in a moment because I just want to finish this first part.
- [64:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, please.
- [64:28]
Nicholas Christakis
Because other people say no. The addition of sex high functioning, realistic sexual robots into our society will be a good thing because it'll allow people, for example, to become better lovers. They'll practice with a robot and then they'll have better sex with humans. Or it'll allow them to do experiment with things that are prohibited, like, you know, threesomes or same sex encounters if they, you know, you, you, you, you want to experiment with the same sex experience, but you don't actually want to do it with a human. Maybe you'll try it out with a robot first kind of thing. So in other, you know, whatever people might be willing to do things with robots they wouldn't do with humans. So there's a group of people and I can't remember if I discussed this in the book or not. Was this in Blueprint? I don't remember. Maybe I do discuss it.
- [65:06]
Tom Bilyeu
I've heard you talk and read the book. So sometimes I forget what I heard in the book and what I've just heard you speak about.
- [65:11]
Nicholas Christakis
So forgive me, I can't remember either right now. But anyway, so I don't know actually how it will work. But what I can tell you is that the addition of forms of robotic intelligence into our midst are going to have an effect, for better or worse or both, on human, human interactions. And it behooves us to think about this. And in fact, in an article I had in the Atlantic, maybe that's where I made this argument. I talk about how we might need a new kind of social contract, basically with machines. Like if we're going to design machines, these machines need to obey what I call the social suite in the book Blueprint, this corpus of qualities that we evolved to be able to live together. We would not want to engineer machines that don't obey those principles. It's like Isaac Asimov's, it's like a fourth law. You don't want robots to do stuff that harms our society. It's not just that you don't want them to harm humans by any act or omission. And you don't just want to teach them to obey humans, you actually want them not to harm society by anything they do. So anyway, that's the whole hybrid systems argument on your point about how this intersects with the other ideas we've been discussing about innate tendencies to good and bad, selfishness and generosity. I mean, I think the answer is that, you know, we have both of those qualities. All human beings do, and our societies do too. And my claim is not that these vices don't exist. My claim is merely that the virtues in toto are more powerful than the vices.
- [66:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So I haven't, I haven't thought a lot about this. So I'll be thinking out loud here. Definitely punch holes in my thinking if you see them. This is as we're Talking where I come out on this. So it seems to me that there's a difference between happiness and fulfillment. Just to give words to it.
- [67:07]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes.
- [67:08]
Tom Bilyeu
I'll define happiness as amazing but very ephemeral. It's temporary. So I often refer to that as the bowl of ice cream. So a bowl of ice cream is amazing.
- [67:20]
Nicholas Christakis
My best friend, one of my closest friends, I have two best friends is Dan Gilbert, who wrote the book Stumbling Unhappiness. He's a famous psychologist. So the bowl of ice cream and a bowl of. There's a bowl of cherries on the COVID of his book. But anyway, go on.
- [67:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Unfortunately, I have allergic reaction to cherries. So cherries to me are.
- [67:39]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes. But anyway, it's an ice cream model of happiness. Okay.
- [67:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, so it's rad to eat.
- [67:44]
Nicholas Christakis
Right.
- [67:44]
Tom Bilyeu
But there are second order consequences. And so just going in on a bowl of ice cream isn't necessarily going to make you feel good. And I would say over time it actually ends up making people feel badly about themselves. So then you've got fulfillment on the other side, which is often born of suffering and doing difficult things. Going to the gym every day, not eating a bowl of ice cream, like those things will end up making you feel good about yourself. Serving people like you did in hospice, it's like, man, if at the end of your life you don't look back on that and say, fuck, I feel so good that I did that. Like, I have served these people. And however your mom is intertwined in that, if there's some element of I have helped people in a way that she wasn't helped or whatever, obviously we haven't discussed that, but like that, to me it had to have been hard. But I have to believe that like in moments of crisis, like that's something that you can lean on and say, yo, I have done that. It's a beautiful thing and builds part of who you are and how you see yourself and what you value yourself for. So when I think about the friction in the human animal between doing what is easy, doing what is selfish, doing what is quick, I get the impulse that I'll call that sort of falls into the happiness bucket. But then over here, like if you only live here, if you are demanding of your sex robot and your sex robot has no sense of like doing well by culture and society at large. It's like that will end up you. Even if you only ever have sex with your sex robot, which I did not expect to go this deep on this conversation, but even if you only have sex with your sex robot, you won't feel the things that you could feel over on the other side. So even though momentarily it makes sense to be selfish and all of that, after a while, the internal feeling that you have will end up being, I think, one of isolation and loneliness and all of that, because there's no sense of partnership, and it ultimately becomes that sense of partnership that's more meaningful.
- [69:47]
Nicholas Christakis
So, first of all, my train of thought, I was just trying to look up for a moment because I'm. I went to high school with one of the key figures in Westworld, the actor. Who in Westworld?
- [70:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Which one?
- [70:02]
Nicholas Christakis
Jeffrey Wright.
- [70:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, Jesus.
- [70:05]
Nicholas Christakis
Yeah.
- [70:05]
Tom Bilyeu
You went to high school with Jeffrey Wright?
- [70:07]
Nicholas Christakis
I did. And he's a wonderful man, and I can't even believe if he hears this. Yeah, amazing.
- [70:13]
Tom Bilyeu
In. Yeah, he's a phenomenal.
- [70:14]
Nicholas Christakis
In Westworld. Yeah. So the whole thing in. In. In Westworld, I forgot how we got onto this. Now. Why was I trying to remember?
- [70:21]
Tom Bilyeu
We were talking about sex robots. I was saying, happiness versus fulfillment. So don't just be selfish. Even with your sex robot, it will end up not serving you.
- [70:30]
Nicholas Christakis
I mean, but. Yeah, but. I mean, the. But I mean, that whole film, that whole movie, that whole TV program explores some of the themes we're discussing, not so much or even just the sex robot issue, but more generally, you know, what does it mean to be human? And actually it explores, you know, our inhumanity. You know, how. You know, I mean, they're very deep themes being explored in that movie. And I think Jeffrey is just a phenomenal actor in general, especially, though, in that. But anyway, I'm sorry, I've lost the. The. We're getting the part of the conversation where now we're like so many tangents on so many tangents. I've had a wonderful conversation with you and the range. The range is just deploying my mind right now. But I don't want to end on the topic of sex robots, but I can't remember we were talking about a more profound topic.
- [71:21]
Tom Bilyeu
What I'm. What I'm trying to get to. The sex robot, to me, is just one sort of thing that shows how we have to think about culture as we evolve, because we're in this weird moment where we're gonna have a lot of decisions to make, whether it's. What do we program? AI, Which I think is. That's. That's what I think we should talk about now. Because what's interesting to me as you think about robotics and you think about artificial intelligence, is you have to give I'll use very layman's terms. Forgive me, I'm sure these are all wrong. But you have to give the AI an impetus. You have to give it a desire, you have to give it a goal. There has to be something that it's going to make decisions based on. Like, when you think about humans, I am sure you're aware of this. If you destroy the human ability to feel an emotion, which, of course, some people have specific brain damage that leaves them without the ability to feel emotions, they cannot make a decision. They can sit there and tell you, you know, if we had fish for lunch, like, it would be good, because, you know, it's a lean source of protein, and I think that's important. I've had a lot of beef recently, but, you know, if we had beef, it's actually a great source of fat, and they can't do it because there's no emotion for them to push them in one direction or another. So with AI, I think ultimately we're going to have to decide what are those things by which it makes decisions, like what are its goals? Why not hurt a human? Right. You have to program that into it.
- [72:41]
Nicholas Christakis
Why not be. Yeah, we're far from having that kind of capacity with artificial intelligence.
- [72:46]
Tom Bilyeu
But don't you see that as an inevitable place where it will get.
- [72:49]
Nicholas Christakis
Yes, yes, I think eventually we'll be doing that. And I have a partnership with a group called, that did this very famous set of experiments called the Moral Machines Project.
- [73:02]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know what that is.
- [73:03]
Nicholas Christakis
Some listeners may have done. You can go to this website and do these little tests where there's a robot driving a car, and the car, it has to make an ethical choice, and you have to help program the robot by expressing your views about what kind of lives should be gained or lost. So it's. How do we endow these machines with a sign of a moral sentiment? And I'm blocking on iyad's name right now, too, is Rawan, IAD Rawan. He's a wonderful computer scientist who's now moved from MIT to Europe, and he's continuing some of this work. But anyway, and we had a paper. We had a paper in Nature called Machine Behavior a year or two ago that sort of laid out some of these ideas, like how should machines be programmed to behave? And so on. Anyhow, But in getting back to your question, we're far from needing to actually address these questions. I mean, we barely are getting to the point where we can do natural language processing in a really fluid way. You Know, my dictation device, when I use this thing to dictate still is 10% of the words are wrong when I speak to it, you know, so we're far from, if we can't do that simple thing where it, you know, the idea that we're going to need to endow this, my word processing software with a moral chip is, you know, we're far from that. So I'm not, I don't spend too much time thinking about that, but I do spend time thinking about in my lab and doing work on how the machines can affect our morality, how we treat each other. So for example, we've done some work on how the addition of what we call dumb AI. So what my lab is trying to do is not invent super smart AI to replace human cognition or even, now that I'm talking to you, some kind of super moral AI that could be like a moral exemplar. No, what we're doing is we're developing, we're not inventing super smart AI to replace human cognition. We, we're developing what I call dumb AI to supplement human interaction. The machines don't have to be smart, we're smart. The machines just have to help us not be bad to each other. And we've done many experiments. We had another paper in nature in 2017 showing that we could program robots in a very specific way, autonomous agents online to help groups of people coordinate their actions and work better together. And some of our ideas are useful as well in optimizing communication between humans. Decreasing racism online. How do we get people to use less racist invective? How do we optimize the flow of honest information and truthful information online? The idea is that you can program these robots or these forms of artificial intelligence to work in simple ways using only local knowledge about the network. They're in distributed throughout the network and they act like traffic cops. You know, they kind of, kind of speed up and slow things down just a little and they can kind of change the overall dynamics of the system.
- [76:06]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm super curious, so I'm going to push on that because I really want to understand it.
- [76:09]
Nicholas Christakis
So I'll give you the example and unfortunately I have to go in just a little bit. The experiment we did one of the experiments, actually, let me pick a more recent experiment. So, so we had a recent experiment we did with Brian Scazelletti's lab. And this was work spearheaded by Maggie Treeger in my lab and Sarah Sebo in Brian's lab. In this experiment, groups of four were Formed three people and one humanoid robot. And they were given a task, which was a game to play on tablets, which was to lay railroad track. And they played 30 rounds of this game. And they had to work together to lay track from point A to point B. And there were straight parts and curved parts and so on. And they would take turns laying a piece of track. And we contrived it so that occasionally the robot would make a mistake. And we also contrived it so that the humans sometimes would have to make a mistake. There was no part available to them, so that they would have to goof. So people would have to take turns being the member of the team that was responsible for the team not succeeding on that round. And sometimes it was a robot and sometimes it was a human. And then what we did is we experimentally manipulated the robot's behavior so that sometimes the robot would be vulnerable. The robot would crack a joke, or the robot would say something like, you know, you think that robots are perfect, but as you can see, I'm terrible at this game. You know, something like that. And what we found when we did that was that the humans started not treating the robot differently. Like, oh, no, this is a sweet robot. Let me be nice to it. No, they started treating each other differently. That programming the robot to express vulnerability in its expressions in a challenging situation optimized the communication between the humans. And we were able to show, for example, that the humans were kinder to each other. They shared more equally in the conversations. They had all these other desirable outcomes. That paper was just published like four months ago or three months ago.
- [78:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it like a form of priming?
- [78:09]
Nicholas Christakis
You're right. Connected to that literature. But no, I don't think it's priming. It's something different. It's like modifying the social dynamics by thoughtful programming of these agents. And, you know, it'd be like if you're trying to. If you're trying to build a physical robot that's helping you move heavy logs, you would use principles of, you know, of fulcrums to position, you know, the lever action, the lever of whatever. Well, if you understand the principles of human interaction, then you can position the robot so that it supports, you know, good functioning by the people. We've done many experiments like this. We. We've done experiments where we've. Not with robots, but other experiments where we've manipulated the structure of human social interactions. And maybe I'll end with this. So. So most people are familiar from high school chemistry of the idea that there are more than Two. But let's consider two forms of carbon. And if you take the carbon atoms and assemble them one way into the form of graphite sheets of hexagonal carbon atoms, you have graphite, which is soft and dark. Or you could take the same carbon atoms and assemble them a different way in tetrahedrons in the form of diamond, and you get diamond, which is hard and clear. And there are two key intellectual ideas there. First, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms. They're properties of the collection of carbon atoms. And second, which properties you get depends on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other. You take the carbon atoms and you connect them one way, you get one set of properties. Take the same carbon atoms and connect them a different way, you get a different set of properties. And it's the same with human groups. We've shown in my lab, using experiments, that I can take a group of people and I connect them one way, and they're mean sons of bitches to each other and selfish, and they lie and they don't cooperate. Or I take the same people and connect them a different way, and they're sweet and kind to each other. So these properties you see that we think of as individual virtues are actually social virtues. Whether people cooperate with each other or not is not just about cooperative people. It's about cooperative networks. These are emergent properties of social systems. These are properties that arise not because of who we are, but because of how we are connected. And so there's a tremendous amount of work we do in my lab to try to understand this. And in the book blueprint, I explain how we evolved to build networks and to build practices that allow us, in the end, to be very kind to each other. And so my essential argument in the book is that the arc of our evolution is long, but it bends towards good goodness.
- [80:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Boom. That is a perfect place to end. Nicholas, this was so much fun, man. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, and hopefully we will get to discuss Apollo's arrow in the very near future. I'm excited that you got another one coming out.
- [81:05]
Nicholas Christakis
Dude.
- [81:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Everybody watching, thank you so much for joining. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care,
- [81:15]
Nicholas Christakis
everybody.
- [81:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, Please go to iTunes, go to Stitcher Rate, and review us. That helps us build this community, and that is what we are all about right now, building this community as big as we can. To help as many people as we can, deliver as much value as possible. And you guys, rating and reviewing really helps with that. All right, guys, thank you again, so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.