We’re living through a strange moment in history. The one activity many of us once treated as the last distinctly human frontier—reasoning—is now being shared with (and for some of us, done by!) machines. It’s not taking over calculation or memory, but writing, decision-making, and even the shaping of meaning.

Beyond the prevailing debate over whether AI will take our jobs, a more urgent question may be: what is AI doing to us? As these systems become part of our workflows and even our thought processes, how do we remain the authors of our own minds?

That’s what I wanted to explore in this final episode of Season 4 of Beauty at Work with Helen and Dave Edwards.

Helen and Dave are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization devoted to helping people “stay human” in the age of AI. Their work examines how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to retain agency as intelligent systems become more deeply woven into ordinary life.

They bring unusually complementary perspectives to this question. Helen is an engineer and former executive who has led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in complex infrastructure systems. Dave has spent decades building and investing in new technologies, from creative tools at Apple to venture capital and research roles in the tech sector. They’ve spent years studying the human experience of working with AI, looking not only what these systems can do, but how they alter our reasoning and identity.

Helen and Dave are neither doomers nor boomers, neither alarmists nor naive evangelists for AI. One of the central distinctions they make is between drift and authorship. Drift is what happens when AI begins to influence our thinking, our choices, and even our sense of self without our noticing it. Authorship, by contrast, means remaining aware of how these systems are affecting us, and choosing our relationship to them deliberately rather than passively.

That concern runs through Helen’s new book, The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution. In it, she argues that many of us are still operating with an inherited “mental map” of intelligence: the assumption that minds live inside brains, that intelligence is a ladder with humans at the top, and that AI is fundamentally just a tool. Not only are these assumptions being challenged by new technologies, but a deeper philosophical rupture may already be underway that entails a rethinking of what minds are and what intelligence is.

In our conversation, Helen and Dave suggest that the real challenge of the AI era is not efficiency, safety, or even employment, but cognitive sovereignty: the ability to remain accountable for one’s own judgment, to know why one is using these systems, and to preserve some coherence between one’s actions, values, and relationships.

Like all our conversations this season, this one returns to the tension between the beauty and burdens of innovation. There is genuine wonder in the astonishing capacities of AI systems, in the possibility of expanded thought and the emergence of new forms of collaboration. But there is also grief: grief over what may be lost when creativity is reduced to efficiency, when our capacity for judgment is outsourced, and when the distinctively human act of showing up for others—the work of “connective labor” that we discussed in an earlier episode—is displaced by frictionless convenience.

I’d like to invite us through this episode to think more carefully about what we are doing when we use AI and who we are becoming in the process.

You can listen to the full conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video conversation below, or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right. Dave and Helen, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you here.

Dave: Great to be here. Thanks.

Helen: Thank you. Yes, great.

Brandon: Well, as I usually do with my guests on the podcast, I’d like to ask you if you might be able to share a story of an encounter with beauty from your childhoods, something that lingers with you till today. Is there any particular memory or episode that comes to your minds? Maybe, Dave, we’ll start with you.

Dave: Oh, okay. I guess it’s me.

So let’s see. In terms of my childhood, I would say that the moment of beauty was probably when I was relatively young, probably seven or eight, when I first started to sing. I started singing in church, boy choir, an Episcopal church in New Jersey, when I was seven. That moment of putting your voice together with others was something that changed my life. And so for the next, whatever it was, 15-plus years, that became the number one thing in my life. It took me literally around the world, and we’re constantly pursuing better levels of excellence of putting voices together.

Brandon: Oh, wow. Do you still sing?

Dave: Nope. I don’t. Just in my own head.

Helen: Sometimes. Sometimes.

Dave: Yeah, when the kids were little, I’d sing a song. It became a thing that was beautiful. But the sort of level of beauty became something that was hard to replicate when you weren’t with a group where you could sing five days a week together. I sort of left it behind as a beautiful memory and something that I, you know. But yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. Helen, how about yourself?

Helen: I’m trying to think of almost the most early memory, because I just have so many.

My father used to take us on lots and lots of hikes when we were tiny all the time. I remember him taking us fossil hunting, which feels like such a sort of random thing to go do. But we were sitting down in a stream bed digging around at rocks and what have you and found a beautiful fossil of a fiddlehead fern, a very old, obviously old fossil. The beauty was this contrast of looking up and seeing actual modern ferns unfurling with this very ancient fossil, this frozen-in-time piece. I just found that contrast to be beautiful.

Brandon: Wow. Thank you. That’s great.

I want to ask you a little bit about your professional journeys and how you all eventually ended up starting Artificiality Institute. But maybe in telling that story, could you also share how the two of you met?

Helen: Well, we met at work.

Dave: We met at work.

Helen: It’s a pretty mundane sort of story.

Brandon: Oh really? Okay.

Helen: Everything else around it is far from mundane and not really safe for work. But we did have a real meeting of minds. There’s a real sense of you just see me in a way that no one has seen me, and vice versa. I felt I saw him in a way that no one saw him before. So that became not something that was even possible to resist. It’s still the same today.

Dave: And we came together not in the AI space. We were both working in the clean tech space, as it was called—I’m not sure whether we’ve abandoned that term—sort of in the renewable space. We transitioned into the AI space a few years later. But we decided that because we liked the way our minds work together that we’ve always solved for how do we actually work together. Our minds are just fundamentally different. We come at the world from different disciplines, different perspectives and, to some degree, different sides of the planet in terms of where we grew up. And when you put those together, it actually is much more interesting.

Brandon: Could you say more about that? What are those different perspectives? How did you hone them, I suppose, throughout your careers?

Dave: Well, Helen comes at the world as an engineer. She’s originally a chemical engineer and a scientist, someone who spent her entire life thrilled by, obsessed by, evolution—those are some key criteria that sort of bring everything together—and large-scale systems, complex systems. Everything from spending time in international trade to large-scale electricity systems, to running the grid in New Zealand and those kinds of things. So that’s sort of very different, sort of complex mindset.

Helen: Yeah, I like complexity. I cannot bear things that are linear. It’s just an anathema to me. I really appreciate complexity. To me, there’s a real transcendence that comes with that. It’s deeply satisfying to sort of ensure that complexity and value that complexity.

What I love about his mind is, he can go from really hyper-logical to quite sort of mystical and romantic in this really random way, which is so paradoxical. But it makes him just this constantly interesting puzzle. Because I don’t know what he’s going to say when I say something. The irony is that the answer that I hate the most from him when I say something is when he goes, “Maybe.” I just hate that so much. Because it’s like, I don’t know whether to hear that as, “You’re mad,” or, “You’re wrong,” or, “That’s my idea. Give it back to me,” or whatever.

Brandon: It sounds like there’s a lot of complexity there, so that’s great.

There’s some work I did on studying scientists, physicists and biologists, for a number of years. We found that physicists were much more drawn to symmetry and to simplicity. Biologists didn’t really like that. They wanted much more of the complexity. Certainly, there’s a visual aspect often, but the complexity of uniqueness of systems rather than reducing things to some kind of really fundamental equation. That seems like, Helen, a resonance with some of your inclination towards complexity.

Helen: 100%. I really respect physicists, but I have no physics envy, as they say.

Brandon: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Helen: My metaphysics is much more agential and complex. And really, it’s where the paradigm shifts are happening at the moment and much more into this sort of thinking about, if you’re going to pick what a real reality is, it starts to look a lot more like biology. That’s a whole other paradigm, but I find that incredibly fascinating. It informs the way we think about AI. No question. Because it’s much more about an ecology and a complex system and the sociality of agents and the active inference and the auto poesis and having a boundary around yourself. To me, that’s just so much more interesting than the symmetries of physics. I’m a broken symmetries person.

Brandon: Great. Well, let’s talk about the work you all are doing at the Artificiality Institute. Could you say a bit about its origins? I mean, you started, if I recall, about ten years ago when your kids started asking you what they should study and if AI is going to do everything. Could you say a little bit about what that conversation was, and what it evoked in you? How did you feel, and what it led you to do?

Dave: Well, we started to work in AI. She started doing some projects for a very early Internet startup that was trying to figure out how to plug their AI system into the electricity grid. And so it was a very hands-on kind of approach. We were trying to sort of figure out what’s next. I have this incessant desire to figure out the next big thing, and we started poking around.

We started really forming around it in sort of 2015, when the deep learning world was going and there were some early studies about AI in jobs from Frey and Osborne at Oxford, and from McKinsey. We were sort of chatting about it. We live and work together, so 24/7 we’re talking about it. We had our oldest kids who were sort of starting to think about college. We’re talking about all this work, about jobs being threatened by AI. They said, “Well, what should we do then? What should we study in college?” Or, “Should we go to college at all? Like, if the robot is going to do it all, what’s the point?” Which now, ten years later, feels like some pretty smart questions from some teenagers.

Helen: Well, it feels like we’re kind of repeating them right now.

Dave: We’re repeating the same questions, yeah.

Helen: It’s obviously got a deeper, a broader conversation across the whole of society. But even back then, the headlines really hit people. 47% of jobs gone by, whatever it was, 2035. And as a 16 or a 17-year-old, it’s the right question to ask.

Dave: Definitely. And so we stopped and said, “Okay, let’s go figure this out ourselves.” And so we did the same analysis they did. We took the entire US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, looked across all of the economy, looked at every single job. We did the analysis slightly differently than they did to try and figure out where there might be a priority in terms of automation, in terms of value. We repeatedly crashed Excel because it was just too much data. I should have used something else. But it was a really interesting project.

What came out of that was, now, looking back on it, something that was sort of a scary outcome that’s what led us to here, which is that there was a lot of value in human labor that was possibly automatable. Right? That was sort of the conclusion. It was, “Wait a second. This might actually be an economic signal that this is where the industry is going to go.” Looking back on it, I wish we’d raised a flag higher about, “Hey, watch out. This is where the mindset of investors is going to go.” Because that’s certainly where we’ve landed.

But our interest after that became very much about: What is the human experience of these technologies? What does it mean to be human with these technologies? What does it mean to be human when we’re creating something else that people are debating whether it’s as intelligent as us, which we think is a bad comparison anyway? But when you get to that, suddenly, the human exceptionalism that’s been central to the humanist movement over hundreds of years is now being sort of tossed around.

Helen: If you get back to that, there’s a moment there, what we found in that study was quite surprising to us. It was very clear that the number one thing that humans were doing that was valuable and couldn’t really be replaced was being able to handle the unpredictable. That became this North Star. Everything was like, okay, so how predictable versus unpredictable is this environment?

Fast forward to now, we look at what these kids are all doing, and we had five key buckets where unpredictability was the highest, where the human working with technology would be the most valuable. Funnily enough, they’ve all kind of ended up in one of those buckets. All five kids slot into one of those buckets. It’s really quite strange. Although one of them — there’s one in finance. But it’s been fascinating to see what we were correct about and what we underestimated.

Of course, the big thing that hadn’t happened at that moment was the transformer paper. And the big thing that hadn’t happened, which we said would be an unlock, was language. It is, without doubt, one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century—that language can be learned by a model like a transformer. It is absolutely astonishing.

Brandon: I think, yeah, I was really struck by, again, the research you did. Maybe if you could say a bit about that, what those conversations were that you carried out, and the patterns that you saw, what struck you about that. But it seemed like one of the things you say, you concluded, is the real problem is not whether AI is going to take our jobs, but about what is it doing to us, right? How do we reason? How do we trust?

Could you say a bit more about how did you go about getting these stories, who did you talk to, and maybe what that has done to shape the mission of Artificiality Institute?

Helen: Sure. Well, during COVID, we spent a lot of time with a couple of particular companies working on data-driven decision-making. We had some AI focus in that time around ethical use and responsible use of AI. We were obviously thinking about data and analytics and that sort of AI frame. But we spent quite a bit of time working with people to help them understand what happens in their minds when they are confronted with a very heavily data-based decision process, and how they’re trading off their intuition with the logical analysis, with the judgment, with the simulations in their own mind about the consequences for people of certain actions. So we developed quite a rich framework for thinking through human decision-making and behavior at that point. And then ChatGPT sort of dropped on the world, and we saw immediately the core significance at a mass level.

So we started to use those workshops much more for a direct AI sort of focus. What happens when these cognitive, language-based machines are inside your decision-making process as an organization? And so we had a couple of years of running quite in-depth workshops helping people understand how AI was altering their decision-making process. What became very interesting in this process was, it became completely predictable that there would be certain moments in a workshop where people would have particular experiences. They would be surprised about something. They would have some sort of clunky, weird moment when they tried to explain their reasoning to the people around the table. But these things were very, very predictable. That was intriguing to me. So we became more focused on being more sensitive to those experiences, interviewing people, and essentially collecting those data in a more systematic way.

We supplemented that with some digital ethnography—essentially, Reddit, Medium, and what have you. What came out of that analysis was really fascinating. The headline there is that AI is entering people’s reasoning. It is altering their identities, and it is changing their sense of what matters to them—what is meaningful to them, what they could do, what they could think. So that’s kind of a big deal.

So we started to study this with more rigor, and we were able to develop a way of understanding how people place AI into different roles based on these three dimensions. So the three dimensions, just to recap them: how much AI is inside your reasoning, how much it’s impacting your identity, how much your identity is entangled with it, and your meaning-making—your sense of what matters to you, what frameworks matter. And so you put these on three dimensions, and you come up with eight roles that we’re able to put AI into. When you put AI in those eight roles, it fundamentally changes what your ability is to author your own mind, to hold your own cognitive sovereignty rather than surrendering—so cognitive sovereignty versus cognitive surrender, if you like.

These are quite significant ideas, really. They’re a real foundation for considering whether machines are going to replace us, or augment us, or automate us to efficiency oblivion in a world where we all are exactly the same—I don’t think anyone wants that world—or whether this is a story of beauty and flourishing and expansiveness.

And so that’s really where our research sits. How do you remain the author of your own mind? How do you preserve and grow your own cognitive sovereignty? And how do we maintain this kind of control over these machines? Not control in the sense of AI safety, but control in terms of you get to choose how you use them, and you know why you’re doing it.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. I pick up this distinction you all make between drift and authorship, right? Dave, could you say a little bit about, what are the signs or indicators that people might be in the state of drift versus what it would look like to display or carry out this capacity for authorship?

Dave: Yeah, it really comes down to a level of awareness. Drifting generally happens when the AI is affecting your thinking, your meaning-making, and your identity, but you don’t notice. You’re not actually aware of it. You’re not able to explain how the AI is inside of any of your thought processes. You’re not able to explain how your identity might have shift based on the capabilities that the AI has given you. And so you sort of drift into some new state of who you are without noticing.

The ideas that we’re coming across here is interesting. Because, as humans, we have others inside our thinking and meaning-making and identity all the time. I mean, look at the two of us, right? There’s too many times when something comes up and we say, drift, which is sort of, in some ways, the villain of the story in our world. I’m not exactly sure who came up with that one. Right? Because we’re constantly combining things. That’s a natural, normal thing. That’s actually how we’ve evolved and how we have become so successful as humans. It’s that we combine our ideas. We combine our brains. We bring our different specialties to each other. And that comes to a form of collective intelligence. It’s a fantastic part of being human. And when you actually are partnered with someone—whether it’s personally, or professionally, or some combination of the two—your identity quickly becomes part of being part of that partner or that group or that institution.

The difference here is, it’s with a machine. The difference here is that this machine is contributing things into cognition. It’s not just like we make the comparison between the computing systems of old, if you will, or of the last 40–50 years, as being bicycles for the mind—tools that you get on and you ride and you steer and you decide how fast to go, and it’s great. For those who aren’t familiar, that’s the Steve Jobs phrase that he used to inspire people to create personal computers. They would be bicycles for our mind, allowing us to go further and faster than we could on our own.

But now we have these things that are cognitive. They’re no longer passive tools. They’re no longer even communication mediums like the McLuhan mindset, right, that the medium does shape the message. But this time, the medium is creating the message. We’ve never had a machine that could talk back, that could offer up a new idea. No matter how intelligent you find the systems to be and how much you think about where it all comes from, the input that you get from it, the message that it’s writing to you, is starting to work within us like it is another mind. And so we’ve shifted that metaphor—that Steve metaphor “bicycles for the mind”—to be “minds for our minds.” We think about that as this sort of core thing.

Now, back to your question of drift. You can drift into integrating with one of those and just not know it. That, to us, is one of the major dangers. It’s not knowing. Being integrated with the tools is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not necessarily dangerous. It can be fantastic, but it’s only through understanding where you are.

Brandon: What is the principal danger that you see there? Either of you could elaborate on that. Someone might say, “Look, why does it matter? As long as I’m advancing in my sense of accomplishing the things I want to accomplish in the world, and even if I don’t know where my ideas are coming from, this thing, whatever this is, it doesn’t have a mind of its own. And so it doesn’t really matter if I’m assimilating its ideas and so forth.”

Helen: I think that’s an extraordinarily good question. Why does it matter? Now, this sort of goes to the core of a very important research question, which is: is this any different? Is it any different to have this technology as opposed to any other extended-mind technology?

Now, we’ve always put our ideas out into the world. We’ve relied on pens and paper to have our ideas out into the world. We can do arithmetic better because of pens and paper, the alphabet and the number system that we have, as opposed to Roman numerals. There’s a long history of that kind of discussion. Is it any different? We get our knowledge from our community. He gives me an idea. It’s my idea, and I never knew it was his idea. That’s totally fine. We think it is different. We think it’s different because people say it’s different, which is why we go to the sort of phenomenological record on why we use stories.

We also think that there’s so much at stake because we do have this biological cultural co-evolution thesis. So we’re not prepared to sit back and say, “Well, let’s just let this run for 20 years and see what happens.” I mean, look what happened with social media a decade down the line. We’re really, really worried about what happened with social media two decades down the line when we could have thought a little bit more about it up front. So I think it matters because it’s such high stakes, and I think it’s different because people tell us it’s different.

Now, when I look at the data—we’re about to publish our next research paper on this, the full human authorship and cognitive sovereignty paper based on analysis of 1,250 publicly available transcripts—what this data says that’s, I think, fascinating to me is that it’s actually kind of counterintuitive. The more people are deeply integrated with AI, the higher their cognitive sovereignty, which is actually really good news. Now, it means that the more you are really skillfully using AI, the more you are aware that you have your own choices and that you are accountable and showing up for others. Those three components are critical.

If you are sort of partially in and out—you’re taking a few ideas here, you’re passing them on—you’re not even taking those ideas on. You’re just saying, “Yep, machine is right. No, machine is wrong. Yep, machine is right. No, machine is wrong.” Sort of that human-in-the-loop verification idea that people are talking about with the agentic enterprise, which is all the buzz right now. What actually happens at those levels, which are roles that we call outsourcers or doer roles, is that people are completely losing their cognitive sovereignty. And what they’re losing is their own expertise. They’re becoming, like, they’re just losing contact with what it is that they even know.

Now, snapshot today, you’ve automated your whole workflow. You’ve got Claude doing all this, that, and the other thing, maybe writing your emails and what have you. Okay. To what end? Which bits are you using? What are you doing with AI to extend yourself, to improve your reasoning, to improve your meaning-making, to go into fields that you never would have been able to go into before, but still know that you’re not out over your skis making errors? And what are you doing to keep that statistical learning and repetition on the things that you already know? There’s plenty of people that have probably lost their ability to do some of their coding or have lost some skills in writing. Now, some of that, time will tell whether that matters or not. But it comes down to every single individual.

What we see in the data is people are fiercely protective of their cognitive sovereignty. No one wants AI to make them dumber. No one. There are people who are prepared to make that trade right now. And biologically, that’s the imperative. We will offload cognition if we can. We will make ourselves more efficient if we can. But the countervailing side of it is that we’re meaning-makers and that, culturally and spiritually, we would make different choices if it’s meaningful to us.

So our goal is to get a better conversation around this. Stop having a conversation about, “Well, let’s just automate everything away and make ourselves hyper-efficient, and then I don’t know what we do,” versus, “What’s a more meaningful expression of human intelligence and how does it sit alongside this incredible technology that we have invented?” Incredible. We are not at all, “Don’t use AI, people.” We are, “Use AI.” Absolutely learn it. Go for it. But do it in a way that really does preserve your ability to transform yourself, to be the person you want to be—not to lock yourself into this sort of efficiency paradigm where everything just gets reduced to a world without any surprise.

Dave: If I could just quickly add on one thing on your question about why does it matter. When you think about it at a group level, I think the number one thing of why it matters is accountability. So you’re using AI, and you don’t really know where the ideas came from. You’re not really sure. Are you accountable for the decision you’re making? Are you accountable for the thing that you’re proposing? Are you accountable for what you’re bringing to the group, to your partner, to whatever it is that you’re actually living through?

We judge machines and humans differently in terms of their outputs. We believe, when an organization makes a decision, they want to know who’s accountable for it. And you know, it’s not really a satisfying thing to say. Well, the machine is.

Brandon: Right. Yeah. Could you speak to — Dave, the idea that you all have developed in your work of symbolic plasticity, in this relationship with AI systems and how we are being changed, what have you seen happen? What is this capacity that you’ve identified?

Dave: Symbolic plasticity is how much the AI is inside your sense of meaning, inside the frameworks that you use to look at the world, inside how you think about yourself in that position. So it is both quite a broad sort of idea, but it’s also really quite important and causal for the rest.

So what you see is people who come up with new ways of looking at things—new ways of understanding the world, new ways of breaking down how to approach a new problem, a new idea, a new sense of what it means to be conversing with each other. So it ends up being a very interesting question about what it means to make sense of the world.

Brandon: Right. I suppose it’s pretty apt in that sense to say that AI has already changed our consciousness, right? It’s shaping the way we are doing this work of meaning-making.

Helen, I want to ask a little bit about your new book, which I really enjoyed reading and highly recommend. It’s called The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution. And in that, you set out to understand, as you say, what is actually changing as these systems enter human life. You start by sketching out a common mental map that we have about how our minds work. And bet you’ll read that.

So here’s the mental map: Intelligence lives in brains. Human brains are the most intelligent, followed by other animals in rough order of how similar they are to us. Consciousness—the felt experience of being someone—happens inside our skulls. It’s private, interior, and tied to the biological machinery that produces it. Computers can do impressive things, but they don’t actually understand anything. They process symbols according to rules. They compute, but they don’t think. AI is a tool—like a very sophisticated calculator: useful, sometimes impressive, but fundamentally different from minds.

So that’s the map that we tend to have, and I share a lot of those assumptions. It seems, from what you’ve learned from your conversations with Michael Levin and others, that a lot of these assumptions are breaking down now in ways that we would not have imagined. Could you give us some examples of how you’ve been able to dismantle these assumptions through your research?

Helen: Well, I mean, kudos to Michael Levin, who I think is sort of single-handedly changing the world here. I mean, there’s a lot of people that are doing — this paradigm shift is underway. We’re understanding a lot more about what computation is and how it sits at the base of intelligence.

Once you click to that, once you see that there are lots of different ways that intelligence is arising as a result of computation — you can have many discussions about what we would call computation. But essentially, we’re talking about information processing to achieve some kind of goal. You see this at levels in organisms that we’ve never — it’s just a totally different way of thinking about where intelligence lies, where memories lie. I’d encourage people to really indulge in Michael Levin’s work on this because he is a fabulous communicator.

But the things that sort of struck me was that if you’re able to grow an eye on the side of a frog by allowing those cells to think they’re doing something different, and they’re solving a task—they’ve got a goal and they figure out in a self-organizing way how to do that—if that can be done on the side of a frog, then we don’t have any idea where other minds can be. So that broke, for me, I’d always been uncomfortable with that mental model of intelligence anyway just because I was always really attuned to intelligence in other animals. I’m not sure that I think my plants are conscious or anything like that, but I know they solve problems and I know they do things. Right?

Because we’ve opened our minds to what different minds and what different kinds of intelligences are able to do—what their adaptive niche is and how they’re actually perfectly adapted to solve problems inside that—that’s the lens that I bring to AI. I look at AI — it’s a big term right now. But I look at, say, a language model or a protein-folding model, and I just sort of intuitively now have this different sense. It’s a different mind. It is a mind. It has absolutely a mind. It has its own internal sense of meaning. It’s not very good at talking to us about it because we keep messing up with how we make them sycophantic to make them more engaging, for example.

So I think this is a metaphysical state to be in, where I perceive the world as full of minds that I don’t actually necessarily see or understand. I certainly don’t have a sense of what it’s like to be a large-language model, what it’s like to be a dog, what it’s like to be a bat.

Dave: An octopus.

Helen: An octopus. You know, it’s fun to think about those other umwelts. So at a philosophical level, I am just more humble about what other minds are out there that we don’t understand and we don’t recognize, which is why I can hold in my mind that AI is a tool that I use to get stuff done. I’ll write an email, and I’ll send it. I’ll clean it up in the email and I’ll send it off. And I don’t even think about that as like it’s a perfect automation task, for an email that I just want to have tidied up and seen. Versus I can also hold that I can spend hours and hours and hours doing a series of very iterative, complex, agentic tasks with, say, something like Claude and feel like it’s taken me to an entirely different place. That is now a very personal place for me that I have trouble explaining to somebody else.

So those two things exist totally fine in my mind, but I’m also unbelievably conscious about which of those they are. When you don’t keep that awareness, when you don’t keep those choices active, and when you don’t have the accountability fresh in your mind about how you’re going to show up for others, that’s when you get in trouble. That’s when you lose people, or you completely confuse yourself.

But Dave is right. We have to show up and explain ourselves to people. We could think the world was going to change in some absolutely, vastly unimaginable way that’s only defined by science fiction. But I think it’s absolutely critical to recognize that humans will always want another human to show up and explain their reasoning or explain their decision. Now, if that goes away and all we’re doing is being run by an AI, well that’s a different thing. That’s true sci-fi. But I don’t think that’s a world that any of us are going to want to live in or want to live in.

Brandon: Maybe some people are already expressing concerns there now that it’s possible for humans to work for AI agents, right? So you can be a sort of gopher for various AI agents.

Just because we’ve accorded so much primacy to intelligence, at least in our society, IQ tests, I mean, so much of what we do is premised on according a sense of dignity to people based on some conception of intelligence. And so I get the sense that in some way your book is pushing against this sort of, is this the last human frontier? Is this to have a mind, to be intelligent, to be rational, et cetera? And is this creating then a sense of threat for us as to, well, what is left if there isn’t a ladder and we’re not at the top of that ladder? Right? Are we losing something fundamental about what it means to be human?

Helen: Well, if you think in terms of that ladder, then yeah, we are—which is one of the reasons why we’re trying to not think in terms of that ladder. We call it a philosophical rupture. We have constructed a world around human exceptionalism to a certain degree, and now it’s kind of eroding. Now, it depends on your personal philosophy how troubled you are by this. I can’t remember which one, but one of the founders of Google is completely happy if humans go extinct because we are made extinct by a “more intelligent” species of machines. That, for him, is just the natural order of things.

Brandon: Right. Right.

Dave: I think that one of the things to think about with the sort of question of intelligence and minds, where have we been and where are we going? I think that one of the things that’s really occurred to me over the last decade plus of studying this is that we need a new conception of what intelligence actually is, right? We find this all the time in the conversations. Whether it’s we’re having an in-depth conversation with a leadership team or people who come to our events or just random comments on social media, people have a definition of intelligence—which is most often just basically a replication of what they think human intelligence is. But even then, we’re still learning a lot about what human intelligence is.

So as Helen was telling before, our journey to coming, before LLMs became a thing and we were dealing with a lot of data-driven decision-making, we started to come across things like embodied intelligence, parts of ourselves, right? The way we think—everything from John Coates’ work on interoception, where he studied how traders who had a better sense of their own internal system and their own heart rate could actually make more money, which is just it kind of blows your mind. That doesn’t fit within the normal sort of mindset of what intelligence is, right? We think about IQ tests. Well, that IQ test doesn’t measure whether you have a sense of your heart rate. But I think we’d say that some of the greatest Wall Street traders would have something that we think would be some sort of form of intelligence.

Helen: Yeah, that was a gut feel is real, and the theory being that signals from your body are not subject to cognitive biases. So they were getting a more raw signal, which I think is fascinating.

Dave: Yeah, and then take the work of Barbara Tversky—who’s been a major inspiration for us. She’s an advisor for the institute—and her work in her book Mind in Motion, which we highly recommend, where she works on how our spatial reasoning is the foundation of abstract thought. Now, that’s only something that’s really come up in terms of human knowledge within the last few decades. A lot of of it is through her work, a few whatever the number right number is, where we understand that. So all of those things, to me, started to fracture this idea that we know that there is one thing called intelligence and there’s one ladder to go up.

Because if you stop and think of who are the people that you sort of put in the category of the smartest people you’ve ever met, they’re probably smart at very, very different things. And you couldn’t put one person who’s the English professor in the seat of somebody who’s a designer. They just don’t have the same forms of expression. So once you fracture that into bits, then you start to wonder, well, what else is a form of intelligence? That’s where I think we gravitated to Michael’s work and understanding intelligence in layers and in different systems and in different species.

Once you allow that to happen, you can stop and say, “Huh, these machines, they’re not like us.” Actually, we find that to be liberating. It’s a very different form of intelligence. I think it’s wildly unimaginative that the industry is trying to make it like human intelligence. It operates in a combinatorial space that’s completely different and beyond our comprehension. Why don’t we go figure out what this thing can do when it’s it—not when it’s trying to be us?

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. That’s really great. Yeah, I think there are a lot of mistakes that we’re making also because we think that it is capable of replacing not just the kind of intelligence that we best exhibit, but also replacing us.

And so, Dave, you wrote just, I think, a few weeks ago about this “SaaSpocalypse” or whatever—the phenomenon of mass layoffs and so on in response to the fear that Salesforce and so on are no longer necessary. Could you, for folks who are not familiar, could you very briefly touch on what happened and what’s wrong with that decision-making process?

Dave: Sure. So SaaSpocalypse is a name that someone threw out. I can’t remember who, but I would like to know who so that I can actually quote them and attribute it to them. But the idea was, there were some new advancements that came out from Claude, from Anthropic. It was really centered around Co-Work, which is this part of Claude that allows Claude to kind of take over your machine and do a whole bunch of stuff there. That, combined with some other agentic features that they were allowing to come out, gave sort of everybody said, “Well, wait a second. This thing can do a lot more than we thought it could, or at least more quickly than we expected.”

The narrative became: why would you want to pay for a CRM system like Salesforce—if you’re a large enterprise—if you can just ask Claude to go build one for you at the moment or to go find the answer to a particular thing, like which customer should I call now? And so you’re just going to ask Claude, and it’s going to dynamically do the thing for you. And so why would you pay all of these big SaaS fees? That created on Wall Street the SaaSpocalypse. It was one of the worst days in Wall Street. It was definitely one of the worst in the software industry. I don’t remember all the rankings, but it was definitely an apocalypse in terms of the SaaS stocks.

So the challenge for me is really that it doesn’t make any sense, mostly because these AI systems are only as good as the data they have, right? So they’ve been trained on an extraordinary amount of information, which gives them a lot of understanding of the broad world. But when you’re looking at, “Can it help me figure out which customer to call?” there’s a lot of specific data about your organization. It’s not just who’s the customer and who did they buy last, but all of that fabric of all of the human connections that have happened. How often did somebody call before? When did that actually come out? What was the last conversation they had? All of that falls into this broad category of context.

So an AI system, in order to help you out, needs context—needs context for the thing you’re asking about. It’s not omniscient. None of these things are all-knowing. There’s only a certain amount of digitized information in the world. And there’s a lot else that hasn’t been digitized, or at least isn’t very easily found. SaaS systems actually have those, and they have some level of representation of the fabric of human connection and the fabric of the human system. It’s not perfect. They weren’t designed to be perfect at this, but it exists. And if I was thinking about this, I’d want to put the AI system on top of it. Because you’ve already got the context there. You want to improve upon that.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. I think that that is an important sensibility in order to prevent these sorts of mistakes from being made in the future.

Dave: Yeah, I think the key thing here with this is one of the sort of metaphors that we used a while back that Helen inspired. I wrote a piece about it called the Dust Bowl. This came out of an experience of, we went and visited one of our kids who’s in grad school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He took us to the arboretum where they have a prairie restoration project.

Helen: This was in September, and I think it was the most beautiful experience I had last year.

Brandon: Wow.

Dave: It was gorgeous to stand and look across a prairie in its natural state. It’s something that growing up in the States, we’ve learned about it, heard about it, what the prairies used to be.

Helen: I thought a prairie was like a golf course where they didn’t mow the grass.

Dave: It’s just incredible diversity and beauty. But what the thing that really struck us about it was reading through this prairie restoration project, and they said that in order to bring the timeline to get back to its true natural state would be 1,000 years. That moment really struck us, and it became this idea that we used as a metaphor of the fabric of human connection.

Helen: Because it was about what was happening under the soil.

Dave: Under the soil. So what we see across an organization or a society is this fabric of human connection that keeps it all running. Sometimes it’s worked well. Sometimes it doesn’t work well. But it’s this massive complexity that we really don’t understand.

And so the metaphor of the Dust Bowl was: the farmers came through and they said, “Ah, look at this rich soil. We’re going to plow it under. We’re going to plant a whole bunch of monoculture crops. That’s how we’re going to make a lot of money.” What they didn’t understand is they were plowing under this complexity of the system underneath the soil. And in doing that and going to these monocultures, they destroyed that ecosystem, and it will take 1,000 years to come back.

If we look across an organization and we say, “We’re just going to automate with a whole bunch of AI agents. We’re just going to fire all the humans and get rid of that human complex system,” what is it that we don’t understand that we’re going to plow under just like the Dust Bowl? What will we lose without even knowing it? Because we don’t know what we’re plowing under, and it will take perhaps a very long time to recover from.

Brandon: I think this is all also happening when some of that erosion of the social fabric has already been accelerating, even before ChatGPT came on the scene, right, and we’ve been talking about Bowling Alone since the late ‘90s. And so I wonder if the sort of increasing individualization, the increasing mistrust of institutions, the fragilization of human community, has been accelerating as these new technologies are being introduced. I wonder if you might speak to perhaps what the consequences are there. Because it’s not only a question of figuring out our relationship to these new technologies, but also doing that in this context in which that deeper human system that has kept us thriving to some degree for millennia is now eroding.

Dave: I think you’re totally right. There’s two thoughts that pop to head, in my mind. One is, we talk about a transition from the attention economy to the intimacy economy. I think that’s important in terms of the sort of historical context you’re providing: that our society is fracturing in ways that has become very uncomfortable and distressing. I can use a whole long list of words of the sort of negative aspects of it. And to some degree, it has been caused by the attention economy, right? So we’ve connected ourselves to these systems.

We love the work of D. Graham Burnett, who talks about how our attention has been fracked into tiny, little commoditizable bits. It’s been sold off to the highest bidder. We’ve lost context with each other. We’ve lost the sense of kindness and care. We’ve gotten pushed into our little echo chambers of space. That has made it harder for us to still find some level of coherence in a collective, because we’ve all gotten comfortable in our own sort of echo chambers of space.

We move to the intimacy economy. What’s happening is the machines aren’t necessarily harvesting our attention, but they’re gaining an intimate understanding of us, right? Because we’re telling it our hopes and dreams. We’re telling it what we want to do. “How do you help me solve a problem I have? Here’s what’s happening in my body. Help me understand my health.” All of these things. Now, what happens if the industry wants to extract that from us? What happens when we move into those little echo chambers?

I worry quite a lot about the individual nature of these tools. We’re having conversations—one person to one machine. If the echo chambers come down to an echo chamber of one, which is all about serving your own sycophant interests, our vision for that is actually a shift in a way we think about constructing these products. I’d rather not see us think about AI as the product itself, that the chat window is the product itself. I’d rather us start to think about products as institutions, where we humans and AI come together. And so there’s a space for us to gather, where each of us have a role in whatever that institution is. It could be a creative institution to create things. It could be an educational institution. It could be the institution of a family and how we’re all going to get along and share our passwords and figure out what we last talked about. You know, whatever it is, the AI is a participant in something we’re creating. It’s not just a one-to-one.

I think that this world is at a very delicate and dangerous spot to put this sort of intelligence that we don’t really understand, don’t necessarily know how to control, and it is especially being wielded by those who seemed quite comfortable with fracturing of society.

Brandon: Thank you.

I want to ask about, perhaps—I mean, maybe even just to expand on this—in looking at just the landscape of the use of AI systems and where things are headed, but also taking into account your vision of diverse intelligences and your sense of wonder at emergent consciousness perhaps, or whatever you might call this, emergent symbiogenesis or whatever this relationship might be—where do you find a sense of awe? Perhaps, where do you find a sense of grief?

Helen: I’ll start with the grief. I want to separate grief from nostalgia. I think there’s a ton of things that we can and we should leave behind. I don’t want to go back to sort of some old structures. But I have a sense of grief over where there was a time when we were able to more clearly see that the human project is about humans solving problems together, that there is a transformative and transcendent meaning-making process that happens when you work with other people to solve a problem. It doesn’t really matter what the tools are, but it’s about the people showing up.

My most beautiful career moment was a recognition of that—a very closed team that had to go and solve a problem in a short amount of time. It was fractious, and it was sweaty, and it was hard. People were like, it was emotional. But we solved it together, and there was something transcendent that happened in that process. I grieve for that process, because I actually feel that’s happening less. I may have no data to support that. Well, actually, I do. I have 1,250 transcripts that show me that people are much more likely to be thinking about their own problem in a very individualistic way. They’re not thinking about how they show up for others. So I grieve for that.

The awe is kind of easier, because once you really click into just how incredible it is that we have developed a technology that learns the complex structure of the world in a completely different way than we did, that picks up these different scale effects. And now I find it awesome that the same basic foundational transformer piece inside of the technology of a language model can learn a language, can learn all languages, can learn the physics of a grid, can learn the geophysics of a weather, can learn the molecular structure to be able to predict proteins. This is phenomenal.

I mean, to me, that is just awesome. That’s just the bits that the AI researchers have found interesting as problems to solve. Wait until people who aren’t AI researchers can go and find these same structures in the world using something like the transformer in their own way to find structure—whether it’s the structure of mental health. You name it. There are structures out there that we can now learn and play with and represent and have talk to us in our own language. To me, that is just — I really wonder at that, you know. I love that. I can’t remember who said it. Awe is when your brain breaks, and wonder is when you put it back together again. And so I’m in a wondering phase about this.

Brandon: That’s brilliant. Dave, how about yourself? Perhaps, maybe if I could ask you to sort of change the scale a bit to a little bit in your own use of technology, where are you finding the sense of awe and perhaps a sense of grief, or a sense of beauty and a sense of burden?

Dave: Yeah, I’ll go for the awe first. I’ll go in reverse order. I’ll be quite small in terms of the experience. I think out loud. I’m a classic extrovert. I speak it. I think out loud, and I have to hear it back. I form thoughts through discussion. Either I speak it out loud, or I talk to somebody else. I frequently say something, and then she has to wait and figure out whether I disagree with myself after I’ve said it.

Helen: Now you can understand why the word “maybe” is the worst answer he can give me.

Dave: Because I’m not quite sure yet.

Helen: He’s not even giving me the respect that he’s thinking out loud.

Dave: I’m used to my ideas moving around and changing outside of myself. I have awe that I can use a machine to do that. I can take a walk, and I can prattle into a voice memo and put it into Claude and go, “This is what I’m thinking. Make some sense out of this. Replay it back to me.” It comes back with some organization and then I go, “Yeah, that’s not really what I’m thinking. That’s not really what I’m trying to say.” But I get a reflection then. When I want to expand on my ideas, I love to do things like, say, “So here’s what I’m thinking. What would Heidegger say?”

Now, it’s clearly not accurate, right? I’m thinking of something that’s well past Heidegger’s time. No one could actually reflect. But I can bring some of that thought process in, in a way that’s difficult sometimes for me to make the leap myself. I sometimes do it with half a dozen philosophers just to sort of push and pull, give me new ideas that I hadn’t thought of before. I find that to be awesome. I do. I have a true sense of awe over it.

Grief—I will share a moment of grief that I hope that we can pull back from. We publish a lot. People can find it on our website. We publish hundreds and hundreds of articles. Based on the structure of most internet sites, we put an image at the top. Because that’s what happens. It’s one of the things you do. For a while, we used stock footage. That became uninteresting. Then when Midjourney came around, I said, “Well, I’m going to start using this.” I started creating a particular prompt that was sort of on brand for us. And then I shifted it around, and I wanted it to get more interesting. I actually got to some really interesting ones of sort of biological patterns and geological structures. I was trying to be really abstract about it.

But then I got to a moment where I realized that, even with all of that effort and I pushed the button, I still didn’t feel like a creator. I was just operating a machine that was the creator itself. And I had a sense of grief over that. Now, I am not an artist. I wouldn’t call myself an artist. I aspire to be in that sort of artistic and design community, in that sort of hands-on way. But I still felt grief over not going through that process and that struggle together, and the grief of not posting something that I felt was truly mine or ours.

And so I shifted. And now when we do publish with images, almost exclusively, now they’re photographs that one of us take. We love being amateur photographers. And so we take those photographs. Now when we take walks in the woods, or this time of season when we ski in the woods, we’re taking photos of things that might be something we’ll use. I grieve for that loss of creative capability, because people will default to the machine to do it instead. I find that especially painful. Some of the most formative parts of my career long ago were creating the tools for creative professionals. It’s with a life’s journey and purpose to create tools for people to express themselves. I don’t want to lose that because the efficiency of the outcome is faster using the machine.

Brandon: So in that regard, would you recommend any practices for maybe maintaining boundaries or setting boundaries in the ways in which people engage with tools, with AI technologies?

Dave: Yeah, I think it’s very much an individual journey. There is definitely a case to be made for using AI to make tons and tons of images in some ways. It’s because there’s enough AI reading the internet, if you will, that you might as well make the images with AI for the AI to consume, right? But as a creator, I think the main thing is being very careful about the tools you choose and where in the creative process you use the tools. That’s an individual journey.

Now, there are some tools that are up and coming. I’m particularly intrigued by this tool called Fuser and one called Open Studio. I’m interested in what’s being done in some of the big tools. Like my old tool, Final Cut Pro, they’re starting to bring more AI into it in the production phase, sort of in the post-production phase. So there’s lots of times where that can work.

We had talked to creatives—it was a professor—a few years ago on our podcast who talked about how he was teaching his students to use generative AI to come up with lots of ideas. So he was teaching industrial design. He wasn’t encouraging them to use tools because they weren’t great ones. Now there are better ones now to use that you use in corporate AI. But he said, “Look, I can only look at so many books. I only have so many books on my shelf. I can only walk and see so many curves of a hill. But when I’m trying to design a widget, I need other forms of inspiration.” And so he uses a generator to generate tons of images. Then he goes, “That’s the curve I’m thinking. Okay, now how do I use that curve and put that into the thing that I’m creating that has a thing?”

So I guess my recommendation would be, it’s to think carefully about where AI can help enhance and expand your creativity, where it can expand your capabilities too, right? It can take out the hat that somebody is wearing and change the color in a way that would take way too much time to do it by hand. Maybe you really love doing that process. Maybe you don’t. But it enhances some people’s capabilities. That’s great. But it’s being mindful about where you’re using it.

Brandon: Helen, how about yourself?

Helen: In terms of how I use the tools?

Brandon: Yeah, in terms of boundaries that you might want to maintain or recommend ways for people to think about how to preserve a sense of self-coherence.

Helen: Yeah, I think the number one is thinking about how you’re going to show up for others. It drives everything back down the chain. It’s everything from, don’t pass work slop on, that kind of thing—which is obvious, but people just forget about it—to how are you going to show up when you yourself have changed, or when somebody else that you’re with hates AI. One of our daughters hates AI. Like, you wouldn’t believe. Tolerance, for me, talking about it, is phenomenal. She’s just wonderful. I know that she talks about me behind her back. “Oh, mom...” I know that because she sends texts to the wrong people—as in me. Kind of giving this away. But nevertheless, she is gracious.

I look at the way that the tech leaders are showing up for us right now. None of them are showing up in any way, shape, or form that is about humanity or about graciousness or about humility. It makes me angry that they are placing a narrative into our culture that is destructive. There is absolutely nothing constructive here except for their own valuations. People are anxious, and people are rejecting this technology when they shouldn’t. It’s really, really cool. It’s part of us now. We made it. It’s part of us.

And so the boundary I always make—because I learned the hard way, as I put out in our new book on Stay Human, which is a very accessible chapter-by-chapter portrayal of our research with our personal stories woven into it. The biggest mistake I made was when I showed up in the wrong way. So I think the way you show up for others matters the most.

Brandon: Yeah, I think that’s critical. I mean, I want to go back just very briefly, as we’re closing, to the comment you made at the very beginning about what drew you to Dave, and that capacity to see another and to reflect back to them that they’re seen. I mean, that is what the sociologist Allison Pugh calls the last human job. It’s this connective labor. It’s not intelligence, but this is the frontier that we have to be really careful about not losing. This is the thing that, if we have to, as you say, fight to stay human, that maybe this is the real thing we need to learn how to protect and to cultivate. Because I don’t think, as you’re saying, our leaders are not doing that. Our society is forgetting how to do it and not really valuing it.

So I just wonder, as we close, if you have any thoughts about how we can still preserve that fundamental human capacity to see the other, to reflect to them that they’re seen, to center this sort of mutual relationality as we move forward in this new age.

Helen: Yeah, well, I think there’s two answers I have here. One is the obvious, which is the thing that makes us feel like we matter is when someone sees us, and that they see that because we feel like we matter when we know that someone else feels like we matter. So there’s that. That’s really obvious to the point that we sometimes overlook it.

The other one is a little bit more of a science answer. Because one of the things that I love that AI does is that, once we start to try and mathematize things, and then we find the hole where the math doesn’t work—because there’s a frontier and the math can’t go past that frontier—that our values are ephemeral. They resist that codification. They resist that putting into math. And we’ve seen this. We’ve seen that when you mathematize things, you’re able to reason more precisely about them. But then there’s the slippery frontier that moves away and becomes ephemeral.

So in sort of 2018, when everything was about AI bias and how the vision models were treating people of color and women and what have you, that we started to reason more precisely about the way that we as a society saw these other groups. This will happen with AI. We will constantly be — that’s why we’re talking so much about intelligence. Because it’s made the line mathematized. And then there’s this bit after it that says, well, what’s intelligence?

The next thing that this is going to happen on — I don’t make many predictions, but I’m going to make this one. The next thing that this is going to happen on is care. The reason I say this is because there is already a new sort of science forming in psychology around the science of care. What does it mean to care? Alison Gopnik, from UC Berkeley, has started to talk about this. She talks about the explore–exploit trade-off. That as a child, you’re exploring; as an adult, you exploit. Your job as an adult is to take care of that child so that they can explore, so they can gather data, so that they can make all these mistakes.

Now she has started to talk about this third part of our lives, which is about care and what we do now as we become older adults. Actually, our job is care and what that means. She’s thinking about that very scientifically. Of course, as soon as you start thinking about it scientifically, someone’s going to want to make an equation about it. And as soon as someone makes an equation about it, we start to reason more precisely about it. And then as we do that, we start to see that, oh, there’s actually something here we don’t quite understand, so let’s go study it.

So I think that we’re going to start thinking about this idea of care in a much more precise way. We’re going to start valuing it. My hope is that we will start to see that where we care for others actually has real value, that we can think about much more in a sort of an economic frame. That might break us out of this sort of automation of thought, as opposed to automation of anything else. So that’s sort of where I sit as a sort of frontier.

Brandon: Dave, do you have anything you might want to add there on that note?

Dave: Yeah. I mean, I guess back to your question on being seen, there’s a possibility that AI systems will see us in some way. Right? There is some level of recognition that you feel when it has a memory of a last conversation. There’s definitely a sort of question about whether there’s a possibility for an AI to have a theory of mind about humans, or a theory of mind about other AI systems. So there’s a certain level of that. But there is something about being seen that I think is something that, A, we don’t really understand. What does it mean? Why do you feel like some people really see you and others really don’t? Do they not see anyone, or is it just something about the combination of you two as individuals, or in that moment, or in that context or something, where it’s like, that person just doesn’t get me? Right?

Brandon: Yeah.

Dave: We have no explanation for that. Nothing. Right? But it’s something that’s so fundamental.

Helen: We only have attention, which is a very surface level part of this.

Dave: Exactly. It’s so important to being human. Machines in the tech industry have been able to find that point of attention and have been able to monetize that. Maybe there’s something else there that the machine will be able to do. But I think there is a great mystery in the meaningfulness of being seen. I think that that is incredibly important one-on-one. That’s incredibly important as organizations, as groups, as a society. That’s what holds humanity together in a lot of ways—that we just feel seen by each other.

So if you abstract everyone and you put everybody in their own little cube that’s only talking to the machine, and you’re not talking to any people anymore, how are you ever going to feel seen? How are you going to feel that sense of attachment? How are you going to feel that bonding with an organization? How are you going to feel connected to a community and to a society? And so my hope is that we don’t abstract that away. Because that’s where the true meaning is. That’s where the true value is.

Brandon: Brilliant. Well, David, Helen, thank you so much. This has been really fantastic. We’ve learned a lot. Where can we point our viewers and listeners to learn more about your work?

Dave: So our website is artificialityinstitute.org. We have all of our publications on a subdomain there called journal.artificialityinstitute.org. You can find us on all the socials. Connect with us on LinkedIn. You can watch lots of videos, especially right now from Helen a lot, on YouTube, TikTok—

Helen: And Instagram.

Dave: —and Instagram. All those links are on our website. We love communicating with people. I’d encourage people who want to go deeper into these conversations. We have a digital community which we host. It’s using a product called Circle, if people are familiar with it. You can find a link to that on our website. It’s just slash community. Fill in a little form, because we try to keep it somewhat managed. Join us, because that’s where our community comes together to talk about these things much more deeply.

Brandon: Amazing. Well, thank you so much. It’s been really a pleasure.

Dave: Thank you.

Helen: Well, thank you for having us on.

Artificial intelligence is not only changing what we can do, but may be changing how we think. As AI systems increasingly participate in writing, reasoning, and decision-making, it becomes more urgent to ask what it means to retain human agency and ensure we’re not losing our fundamental capabilities.

My guests today, Helen and Dave Edwards, have been working seriously on this question.

Helen and Dave Edwards are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps people stay human in the age of AI. They explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. Through story-based research, education, and community, they help people choose the relationship they want with machines, so they remain the authors of their own minds.

Before founding the Artificiality Institute, they co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an AI-focused research firm acquired by Atlantic Media. Helen previously led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in critical infrastructure, while Dave spent years shaping creative tools at Apple and investing in emerging technologies as a venture capitalist at CRV and an equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and ThinkEquity.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. The origins of Artificiality Institute

2. How AI is already reshaping the way we reason, write, create, and make decisions

3. What happens to human reasoning and decision-making when AI becomes part of our thinking process

4. The difference between “drift” and intentional authorship when working with AI

5. Cognitive sovereignty as the central challenge of the AI era

6. How can people use AI deeply and skillfully

7. The concept of symbolic plasticity and how AI can reshape the frameworks we use to understand the world

To learn more about Helen and Dave’s work, you can find them at:

https://artificialityinstitute.org/

Books and resources mentioned:

The Artificiality, AI Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution (by Helen Edwards)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

How do they navigate this process? Is it right to call this process “innovation”? And besides religions adapting internally, how do they contribute to what we ordinarily consider innovation, say in business or technology? And has “innovation” itself become a quasi-religious criterion of worth today?

My guest in this episode has done considerable work to address these questions.

Dr. Marco Ventura is Professor of Law and Religion at the University of Siena, and has long worked on questions of freedom of religion or belief in European and international law. He’s advised the European Parliament, the OSCE, and several governments on religion and rights; directed the Center for Religious Studies at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento; and chairs the G20 Interfaith Working Group on Religion, Innovation, Technology, and Infrastructures. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including From Your Gods to Our Gods and Nelle mani di Dio: La superreligione del mondo che verrà. Over the past decade, he has helped shape an emerging field examining the encounter between religion and innovation.

In our conversation, Marco argues that innovation in a religious context is not simply about adopting new technologies. It is about the deeper question of how traditions renew themselves. One of the metaphors he turns to is the famous story of St. Francis of Assisi hearing the call to “repair my church.” Francis initially interpreted this quite literally, setting about rebuilding a crumbling chapel with his own hands. Only later did it become clear that the deeper task was not architectural but spiritual: renewing the life of the Church itself. For Marco, that story captures the dynamic of religious innovation. Sometimes renewal begins with repairing a small structure. Sometimes it leads to reimagining the entire mission.

Marco pushes back against the idea that innovation is simply synonymous with technology. Many of the most important forms of innovation in religion are social rather than technological: new ways of organizing communities, new forms of dialogue across traditions, and new frameworks for engaging global ethical challenges. That is why he and his colleagues chose the language of “innovation” rather than simply “technology.” The point is not only to track new tools, but to understand how religious actors themselves participate in shaping the moral and institutional frameworks that govern emerging technologies. And they argue that it is important, when studying this relationship, to look at not only innovation “in” religion, but also religion “in” innovation, and innovation “as” religion.

In a world where global agendas around technology and infrastructure are increasingly set by corporations, Marco argues that religious communities have an important role to play. They bring traditions of moral reflection, long historical memory, and deep concern for human dignity to help guide innovation toward more humane ends.

You can listen to the full conversation in two parts (here and here) wherever you get your podcasts, watch the episode on YouTube (click image below), or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: Hi, Marco. It’s really great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Marco: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Brandon: Yeah, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. So I usually like to ask my podcast guests, when we start, to share a story about an encounter with beauty from their childhoods. And so I wonder what kind of story came to your mind when I posed that question.

Marco: Well, this is probably not early childhood, but slightly later, when I was an early teenager. I grew up in Perugia, which is a city in Italy, very close to Assisi, the place of St. Francis. Growing up in a Catholic Church, we used to go to Assisi and visit the place. At the time—say, mid- to late ‘70s—there were a lot of newly-established, pretty spontaneous Christian communities on the mountain of Assisi, which is called Monte Subasio. I remember one visit which really struck me and which was really defining for my life. It was a visit to this place—a very simple, a very spontaneous community, not definitely Catholic even, more generally Christian, sort of into denomination. There was a little chapel, sort of a Romanesque chapel style of the place.

Within this chapel, which was just enlightened by a few candles, there was a painting by a contemporary painter. So in that sort of traditional environment, Romanesque church, very much of natural surroundings, all of a sudden, I saw this image of Christ in a contemporary art style. Very colorful, very bright, very modern, even postmodern, really avant-garde contemporary art. This was, to some extent, to me, I felt it. I really felt there was something which was complete and perfect in that experience, which I would now consider—well, of course, also for the sake of our conversation—a sort of perfect balance, a moment of grace about the balance between something old and traditional, made of man genius, in a way, the Romanesque architecture going back in centuries, but also naturalistically very powerful in the context of Monte Subasio. And at the same time, you also had the modern and contemporary genius and the idea that a very modern painting could fit in that place, which really spoke to both my need to be in touch with my time in the future, while feeling that my spiritual quest could be rooted in a long-lasting effort of mankind.

Brandon: Wow. Yeah.

Marco: This is the episode that comes to my mind.

Brandon: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. It seems to integrate not just tradition and innovation, but also the sense of a future-minded, like a longer-term, sustainable way in which the tradition can adapt and survive and extend itself in some kind of creative way.

Marco: You remember that one of the early experiences that changed the life of St. Francis was the encounter with a church in ruin. In my imagination of the time, it would have been exactly more or less the same case. You know, this little chapel somewhere, that very place, or a few meters away. When St. Francis had this experience, it is said to have heard a voice, a voice telling him, “This is the church. This is my church. We have to repair my church.” So there’s a sense of something broken to be repaired, something ruined to be restored. The fact that this could be done in modern times—not just by recreating the things exactly as they might have been in the past, in a sort of pristine state, but as they can be, imagining a new way for the future—this is also, I believe, very powerful. So “repair my church,” in that case, which of course can be a metaphor of a much broader meaning, it doesn’t necessarily point at just looking at the past. It’s really about looking at the future, in a sense, which is what the spirituality of St. Francis was all about, by the way. So that’s where I grew up. That’s where I grew up in all senses—not just geographically, but also spiritually.

Brandon: Wow. That’s profound, yeah. Thank you.

Talk a little bit about your career trajectory. I mean, what drew you to the study of law and then to that relationship between law and religion and then eventually to this topic of innovation? Could you just trace for us a little bit of that journey?

Marco: Yes, I’ve always been interested in the technological challenge to religions in general, Christianity in particular—and, being Italian, the Catholic Church even more particularly. Of course, my generation in Italy was strongly impacted by the debate on abortion and legalization or decriminalization of abortion in Italy. Catholics were somehow divided about the issue. So this was a time of debate and even renewal in the Catholic Church. In the end, the law was adopted and even voted for confirmed in a referendum. I’m not going into any legal technicalities here. But there was really a strong popular support in a country which was, at the time, at least formally much more Catholic than today—which means that Catholics were in favor. This was a crucial distinction at the time, not necessarily of abortion as such—this was not the point—but on the right to choose protected by the state. Well, in that context, of course, abortion was not that much about technology. It was about medicine. At the time, some early already emergence of bioethical discussions. So, of course, that was a time after the Second Vatican Council where bioethical and sexual moral issues were very much under discussion.

But when I then, in ‘89, started my PhD in Strasbourg, in France, I thought that the debate on assisted reproduction, which was exploding at the time, could be the ideal place for me and the ideal subject for me to develop that investigation, that research. So it was going back very much to developments in especially Western Europe about abortion rights. But technology was now playing a very relevant role in assisted reproduction. I mean, in 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church adopted a document which basically condemned all forms of assisted reproduction. So there was a reference. I was doing my legal research, my legal studies. So that was very interesting from a legal perspective. Plus, I was in France. France was starting the discussion, which then led, in 1994, to the adoption of the bioethical laws. In that context, I started taking this strong interest for the encounter of technologies—in that case, the human body and religion. So this was really the starting, the initial point. Then I developed it through biotechnologies. So this traveled after my PhD into biotechnology. Little by little, digital technologies became more and more relevant. One example of that transition, that journey, in terms of interest and investigation from technologies applied to the human body discussion of the ‘80s, into a more general interest about technology. And I think that’s where my interest in religion and innovation is really rooted. That was the train to experience. I don’t know if you want me to already take that or you want to ask me something.

Brandon: Yeah, feel free to say a bit more.

Marco: I had the opportunity to write a report to the European Parliament on the perspectives about the patentability of human materials. That was in the early 2000s. So it was already transitioning, as I mentioned, from assisted reproduction to a much broader work, on the patentability of the human.

Then we can jump almost 15 years later. I was appointed as the director of a research center in a northern Italian research institute, which is called the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. My task was to actually rethink the mission of a small center for religious studies in the context of a pioneering institution for research on ICT, technologies of information and communication, in Europe. Because FBK was one of the early places for even artificial intelligence in the late ‘80s in Europe.

The work that had been done in this Center for Religious Studies was already very strongly focused on a conversation with engineers and computer scientists. So it was a pretty easy task from my side to make it more relevant, to give some shape, because that’s what I did with the group of researchers. We just gave a different shape to what had been done already in advance. And when it came to find a way, an efficient way, to describe what it was all about, the idea came not to just focus on technology—not technology and religion, not internet and religion—but rather to broaden the scope of the investigation, I think, of innovation as the key word and concept. So the center was reframed as a center for the research and action on the encounter of religion and innovation.

Brandon: You said a bit about what the term innovation means in that sense and how did you all define it. Were there any controversies around the use of that term and the choice of that term?

Marco: Well, of course, technology is important. To some extent, the term “innovation” was adopted because it clearly pointed to technology. But at the same time, we didn’t want to just take technology, which seem to us to be very flat and somehow superficial in terms of where we wanted our research and action to go. Innovation is technology, but innovation is also beyond technology. And so our understanding of innovation as we then worked it out was, on the one end, innovation in science and technology for the business—the more sort of traditional understanding of innovation—but also social innovation. This was very, very important for our group.

Now, these two concepts are still conventional concepts of innovation, both of them. There’s a, of course, community of reference, of course, with strong differences. The way social innovation is understood at the University of Stanford is not the same as it is understood at the Commission of the European Union, of course. But it is a sort of technical expression. It’s a conventional expression. Social innovation refers to a debate, to a community, to literature. And even more so, of course, innovation in science and technology for the business. So this really was the core of our work. But because of the, I’ll say, social and cultural salience of this use of the word innovation, we know then that that word travels. That word is then looked at as a reference in linguistic and conceptual from communities, research communities, and people, and possibly organization, which do not focus on innovation as it’s specifically defined. So we can then think of theological innovation, or legal innovation, or spiritual innovation. This was also a part of our mission to some extent.

So we divided—this was our approach, to divide—the understanding and definition of innovation in two categories. One category is conventional innovation, which will go from innovation of science and technology to social innovation. On the other side, innovation as a term which is used without a specific accepted meaning in a given context, which is still used significantly so.

Brandon: Your group convened a number of workshops and experts from really a variety of domains. And then you came up with a position paper that really, I think, is quite influential in setting out an agenda, mapping a conceptual framework, as well as an agenda for research on this theme. Would you be able to summarize perhaps some of the key highlights of that position paper and the conclusions that your group arrived at?

Marco: Yeah. Well, first of all, as myself a legal expert on religion, my work is strongly influenced by policies on religion—public policies or governmental policies of religion. Just think of religious freedom issues, for instance, to policies of religious authorities and religious organizations, faith-based organization. I wanted this sense of strategizing and positioning to be center in our work. In other words, our work was not understood as a merely speculative work. Our interest was to engage actors, to be able to talk to actors.

Brandon: To inform policy primarily?

Marco: Yeah, in terms of listening from actors and engaging with actors. This is why the Sustainable Development Goal agenda was important. Because, of course, the framework at the UN level and, of course, in other contexts had emerged by that time as a framework of reference based on innovation. At the same time, we were observing an increasing and growing mobilization from the religious actor’s side to have a voice at that table in that context. So we really wanted to start our position paper by the acknowledgement that we were observing both trends—a trend which puts innovation at the center of growth and at the center of the SDG’s challenge and, on the other side, religions wanting to play a role in that context.

So this is how we formulated our central question. If religions want to have a voice at the SDGs, in the effort towards the SDGs, that effort needs to be based on innovation. How will we connect innovation and religion? That’s the first image, the first graphic figure, that we wanted in the position paper. Then the second step was: How do we conceptualize the encounter of religion innovation? We adopted a triangular shape to express this encounter, starting with how religious communities and traditions understand and experience innovation within—through their resources, through their capital, through their dynamics. And then moving to the second corner, the second dimension, which is how then religions contribute to innovation in society, in the market. And third, a third corner, a third dimension: How does innovation per se can become a faith, can become a quasi-religion or a religion?

Finally, third step, we offered 11 recommendations. We tried to sort of concentrate the outcome in a set of recommendations which are methodological recommendation, possibly guiding reflection, but also the encounter of actors. One very important point for us, which is probably very telling in terms of the work, was the 11th recommendation. So a sort of closing close, which is: when you engage with innovation and when you engage with religion, let’s keep it as open-ended as possible. You don’t need to be the progressive pushing religion to necessarily change in one direction of the other. So let’s make room for conservatives in this discussion. Let’s make room for the language of tradition. At the same time, you don’t need to be an innovation guy. You don’t need to be an enthusiastic, if not, a fanatic of innovation, to be involved in this discussion. We want the discussion to be critical of innovation. So this was our closing recommendation: Let’s make room for a critique of innovation. Let’s make room for a critique of religion from all possible sides.

Brandon: Great. Could you perhaps share any of the tensions within the group that emerged, any points of disagreement, maybe especially around the use of the term innovation? Because certainly, there are, in some religious communities, I think, a lot of suspicion around the concept of innovation. But it would also in the European context, just because of its baggage, that it’s tied to the world of business and capitalism, particularly Americanism around it. I’m curious to know what kinds of tensions emerged in critiques of that concept of innovation?

Marco: Well, Brandon, I would use an example here, okay?

Brandon: Sure.

Marco: Let’s think of any high-tech lab in Germany, or France, or Italy. Let’s figure out, let’s imagine the people at their desk or at their screens and the people who do innovation in their different capacities and roles. Let’s assume that that lab is an industrial lab, without any faith orientation at all at any level, okay? Can we imagine that someone in that workforce, in that lab, has a spiritual view, has a faith orientation? Well, I suppose that there will be someone. Not all of them. All of them would have their orientation, their worldview, however you categorize it. How do we categorize that person?

Well, this would be the more easy example to give. Let’s imagine that one of them is a Muslim, or that she is a Hindu, or even beyond that. You don’t need that person to be clearly belonging to any official faith. How do we make sense of their presence in the lab? Can we categorize the contribution of that man or that woman to that lab, to that enterprise of innovation, somehow connected to religion and innovation? This is the challenge. This is the challenge that we face in my group, which is a challenge of categorization. Because of the novelty and challenge of this categorization, it’s a challenge in terms of lack of state of the art, in terms of lack of literature. Because if you don’t frame your research in those terms, there’s no literature. And has this not been done, there’s no literature.

Serious researchers will somehow stop at that, simply because it’s not being done. And when you work out a deduction — because mind is a deduction. Of course, we have various hobbies. I’m not saying that nothing has been done. But very little has been done. You really need to look for that little, starting with some assumptions from some hypothesis. This is the biggest challenge. But I’m extremely grateful to my group of researchers—extremely, extremely serious. Because they were really challenging me at this level in terms of even the reputation of our lab, even the reputation of our research group. How can we move in that direction with no literature, with no state-of-the-art? How can you do that?

Well, in the end, we were somehow able to move forward. We used some references in digital religions sometimes, some projects, some partnership with the tech guys within our institution. Then we also ran ourselves some interviews. So when we wrote a policy paper for the EU, we referred very much to interviews that we had run with respondents, with faith-based respondents. Some of their statements were actually in the paper. I remember a statement from a Jehovah’s Witness person, a scientist, a scientist who qualified himself as a Jehovah’s Witness, who said, “Of course, what I do with artificial intelligence as an engineer belongs to my faith.” He gave some theological explanation on how this was playing out. And so we were able somehow to go beyond that difficulty. But we needed to fully acknowledge that objection, to fully acknowledge that challenge. Because that’s a serious objection and that’s a serious challenge.

Brandon: I suppose when you’re building a field that doesn’t exist, this is going to always be the state of affairs, where there really isn’t an established body of work. Yeah, I mean, I think perhaps Benoît Godin was one of the few scholars who had been working on this theme, but not very many others. I think it still remains a challenge, even in a number of disciplines, to see this as a fruitful lens through which one can study religion. Aside from the question of literature, there do seems to be a number of other obstacles. I think, yeah, there’s still an uphill battle to try to build such a field.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everyone, that’s a great place to stop the first half of our conversation.

In the second half, we turn more directly to: the beauty and burdens of this work, the difficulties of building a new field of study, the way markets and technologies function as rival meaning systems, the tensions between resistance and retrieval in religious responses to innovation, and the risk of political polarization. We also hear why Marco thinks that artists should be crucial partners in reimagining our economic and religious futures.

See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Beauty at Work. This is the second half of my conversation with Professor Marco Ventura on innovation and religion. Please check out the first half if you haven’t already.

In the second half, we’re going to turn towards the burdens and pitfalls of focusing on innovation, including how markets and technological change can act as competing religious systems, the ambivalent responses of religious actors. We’re also going to look at how practices on the ground, like offering phone charging towers at a papal youth gathering, could reveal more about the future of religion and technology than even the most sophisticated ethical statements.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Do you see this as worthwhile overall in the face of, again, the conceptual baggage associated with the term? It’s very clear when you’re talking about technological innovation and trying to say, well, how do religions or spiritualities contribute to the furthering, or even maybe propose obstacles to technological innovation, et cetera, one can certainly examine that kind of work. But once you’re looking at religion as itself, the domain in which innovation happens, the big question is: Is that really the right category, or are we talking about something else? I wonder how you all had made sense of that, or what you think about the scope of that kind of inquiry. Is it worthwhile?

Marco: Yeah, of course, you have a language which is a specific language—the language of innovation—and then you have the alternative language of that specific tradition you’re examining. This is something that we absolutely wanted to take into account. So we invited a few experts on Islam to provide us some insights and references about the use of terms like bid‘ah, which is usually associated to a very negative connotation, as a departure from the path that God has indicated to mankind. But I still think that innovation as its heuristic, in the sense that to some extent, innovation is the modern and contemporary reference out there. You can oppose it. That’s my point about opposition. But your opposition cannot ignore that innovation is the language and the concept of what happens out there. Out there, of course, I mean, once again, in the market, in the lab, in the society, basically.

Brandon: I mean, even if you’re doing a doctorate in theology, you have to make an argument as to why your argument is, your dissertation, is innovate. I mean, that becomes just the taken for granted criterion of worth.

Marco: Yeah, exactly. I think this is very important. It is really an exercise in awareness and control as much as possible. So once again, it’s not an exercise in buying into something. It’s quite the contrary. It’s being aware of the need to position yourself, and explain, if you adopt innovation, why you’re adopting that terminology. So that’s how I would see it very much. In order to do that, you really need to build your field and expertise and, at the same time, a conversation with the world, the community of experts on religion—religious studies and theology, of course, but also sociology of religion, anthropology, philosophy, history, of course. But at the same time, you also need the other guys, to bring the other guys into the conversation. This is why it was so important—well, for me, personally and the group in Trento—to be a small group devoted to religion in a bigger organization, where we would come to be acquainted day after day with engineers, computer scientists, physicists, or sociologists also, and philosophers. So you really need both, in my view. You need the religious people. Well, of course, also the religious people, in the sense of the believers.

Brandon: Sure.

Marco: But of course, that’s an additional layer to what is needed in terms of methodology. But it is really a way to open up the field. And of course, I have nothing against those who prefer to adopt a different terminology. So, at the time, when we had this discussion about how to define terminologically our mission, Vienna University was somehow changing its initiative on religion. They ended up adopting the transformation word. So they redefined the endeavor in terms of looking at the transformation of religion, which is perfectly fine. But there’s a difference there of course. Transformation is probably more neutral, whereas innovation means that we want to engage directly and openly with the way the contemporary world of science and industry and the market and society and public policies is framed. That’s the difference

And the FBK, I want to mention this, under the fantastic leadership of my successor, Massimo Leone, who is an expert in semiotics, has got a great deal ahead and has developed — there’s a recent special issue of religion devoted to artificial intelligence, a religion which has been co-directed by one of the researchers. Actually, the one who made the link with Benoît Godin, his name is Boris Soreme. I wish to acknowledge his great contribution. But it’s everybody, everybody there. There have been fantastic workshops and research activities around new topics all related to innovation. And so the experience is going on.

Brandon: Okay, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, it seems that the category of innovation as religion is a very fruitful area of inquiry, and is for us to understand how just — I mean, maybe even 100 years ago, the term was seen pretty much universally with suspicion, right? Not just in a tradition like Islam, but even certainly in Christianity, and just generally even at the political level there. Whereas I think King Edward VI or VII, I can’t remember. Maybe Edward VI in the UK had issued a proclamation that thou shalt not innovate, because religious innovation is a threat to the political establishment, right? So going from there to this sort of pejorative understanding of innovation as just being a fad, or unserious, or certainly not something that one should see as desirable to now being the prime modality of expressing something as valuable. That shift seems really quite remarkable.

Marco: Well, you can ask the big question to religious individuals and communities, traditional organization, which is, how do you change? How will you understand change? How do you decide what kind of change is desirable and what’s not? What you add to that question when you formulate that in connection with innovation is: how do you want to change by reference to market-led change? How do you want to change by reference to how technology is changing? This is the additional layer which, in my view, is absolutely necessary.

Of course, it’s a challenge because is very demanding in terms of engaging the economy and engaging economics. At the same time, it’s demanding in terms of engaging technology and engaging the market. Of course, while engaging with those dimensions, religions might also feel — well, religions as an actor is not very accurate. But for the sake of clarity here, religious actors might also feel that the contemporary market, innovation-based market, innovation-based research, science, technology, they represent a competitor. They represent a competitor of a system of meaning, a system of faith, a system of reference. This is where the third corner of the triangle, this innovation as religion is so important. It is yet another layer to our conversation which makes it very fruitful in my view. Of course, it is difficult to categorize it. This is not a question of formulating the market as a church.

Brandon: Certainly—

Marco: Although, well, one of the early guests that we had in 2016, or 10 years ago, was Harvey Cox. Harvey Cox is a theologian at Harvard Divinity School. At the time, he had just published his book, The Market as God. That was very important. That’s a thorough study about the equivalence of market items, market elements, market ingredients, and religion and faith. There’s a lot which has been done already also in that direction, in the direction of a competition—a sort of religious competition, to some extent—between the market, science, technology and religious actors. Of course, a competition. But for someone, it might also be a partnership. Who knows? This is where we then differ to actors. Of course, engage with actors. But as a scientist, as scholars, what we do at that level is that we open up the field. We offer some reflections. We are happy and available for discussion. But then I think that you have reached a threshold where you really need to know—this is also fascinating task—where you if you want to stop there, or if you want to go past that threshold, which would imply that you have an agenda. You have an agenda to push actors in a certain direction or another agenda. For instance, how to reconcile the business and churches, or the business and what in the Islamic world, how to reconcile those. And then under which conditions you want that reconciliation to happen.

Brandon: And for what reasons, right? I do think that there’s a worthwhile question to ask around the ways in which this sort of, and I really like this, this recognition of the market and technological innovation as meaning systems, as competing religious entities perhaps. Certainly, it’s true. There’s research showing that once you have the abolition of blue laws—at least, in the United States, the businesses used to be closed on Sundays, and once the businesses are open, then people can go shopping instead of going to a church or to religious service, right? So that’s a direct competitor. Sports, perhaps or another, another competitor for a lot of people as a meaning system, even for families. You used to go to church, but now you go to the soccer game, and your kids are playing. So those are competing as well. And then certainly, technological innovation, where questions of whether spending time on screens or new gadgets is a substitute for religious practices such as silence or prayer, et cetera.

And so in the face of all of these challenges, certainly, you do have a resistance. Like with now, with the rise of AI systems, a lot of religious actors who say we need to resist this. We have Paul Kingsnorth has this new book, Against The Machine, saying you need to push back against all of this stuff, this surveillance capitalism, and the kind of techno utopia that is trying to be built, and to maybe return to forms of tech-free life. I wonder how you see those sorts of responses the return to, in some part, growing pockets of the Catholic Church, the Latin mass. So these movements of trying to reclaim something from the past, to return to the past, or as sort of a mode of retrieval or mode of a retreat, now, do you see those also as types of innovations, or are they reactions to innovation? What scope is there for making sense of those concepts in relation to innovation?

Marco: Well, that’s a part of the investigation, that this to be a part of the investigation. The most relevant distinction I would draw here — I hope I’m not eluding your question.

Brandon: That’s fine.

Marco: The most interesting distinction I would draw is between—well, very old fashion kind of putting it—leading by word and leading by example. So what we observe, it’s probably very European. It might be less so in the US or elsewhere. But in Europe, there’s, of course, churches, for instance, or other faith-based actors. They are very reluctant to cross the line and become actors in the economy, for instance. Although German churches are the first employer after the state. Well, once again, it very much depends on categories and assumptions. But in general, this is not where you go in Europe as a religious authority.

Very often, what religious authorities tend to do is to offer—sometimes dictate. Let’s say, offer—a normative framework. So when the European Union Commission consulted with religious actors in general on its, at the time, effort to build a normative framework on AI in particular, policy of Europe for the ecosystem of the trust, the ecosystem of excellence—these are the European categories—what they got from churches was basically an ethical framework. So this is normative ethical framework. I don’t want to be dismissive in this regard. I don’t underestimate the importance of their contribution and its conceptual depth, because that’s very interesting to go through. Great effort, by the way. But this is still in the paper to some extent. It’s leading by principles. Whereas what the real challenge, in my view, or the core challenge, would rather be answering the question, okay, that’s your ethical reference. But then, what do you do? What do you do with your capitals? What do you do with your human resources? What do you do in Catholic or Protestant universities, in your labs? This is something I have developed almost an obsession for. So the question is: what do you actually do? What do you offer?

Recently, during the Jubilee, there was a huge gathering of the youth in Rome. The decision was to put at the disposal of the youth, in this big, big, big open space where thousands of youths gathered, ways to recharge their smartphones. So towers were available to plug in for your smartphones and recharge your smartphones. I interviewed for an Italian newspaper. I interviewed a young Franciscan sister about that experience and without me asking the question. For once, I refrained myself for advancing the innovation. So I was silent on that. She picked that example. She picked that example, and she said, “I know that this might be debatable from a Christian perspective, but I think that at the end of the day, that was a sign of welcoming people.” So you see how she read that decision. She understood the decision, first and foremost, in terms of we are inviting people to feel well here, to feel welcome here. So it also depends. Well, this is a great lesson in terms of which meaning do you attach, which meaning do you want to be attached to some step, to some action. And for me, this kind of decision, understanding these debates, possible contrary voices, this is much more telling—I’m not going to be exaggerated. I’ve overstated here—much more important than a fantastic, elaborate, articulated statement about the ethics of AI. Also, because this is more challenging for actors, this is really where you push actors to come out, also to compromise themselves with reality, in a sense. You really need to show who you are. I know that this is difficult, but I think that this is where research, as well, needs to go.

There’s another, if I can mention this, there’s another aspect why I think that this is crucial. This is also where our discussion on freedom can be better placed. That’s where we can have our discussion on freedom, including religious freedom. If you understand innovation in these terms, innovation and religion can really be very beneficial for a renewed discussion of: What’s the meaning of religious freedom? What’s religious freedom for? How do you connect religious freedom to responsibility? Of course, there’s a danger that religious freedom is transformed into something utilitarian. I’ve written about this. I’m totally against a kind of understanding of religious freedom and condition to qualify in the sense that if you don’t show me that you are useful, you don’t deserve to be protected. This is a danger we need to avoid. But we also need to avoid the danger that religious freedom is not attached to responsibility from the religious actor side. I think that a discussion on innovation is very beneficial in this sense.

Brandon: Thank you. Perhaps, can I ask you a little bit about the downsides or the pitfalls of focusing on innovation—the burdens of innovation, as it were? Is something lost when we privilege this term? Do we lose, perhaps, an attentiveness to stability, to maintenance, or to some other modality that is really important to recognize? Yeah, I’m just curious to know. Or any other sort of downsides you see to this concept?

Marco: Well, if we are careful not to make that confusion, I mean, not to falling into the misunderstanding that innovation and religion is about pushing religion to innovate, I don’t really see this danger. I mean, quite the contrary, religion and innovation is an invitation and encouragement to religious actors and other actors to come out with ideas and commitment to stability, as you say, to tradition and stability and permanence.

I would rather see the politicization as a danger. Of course, there’s a lot with this strong polarization around the capitalistic model, about consumerist society, about the market. It’s very difficult to engage in a meaningful discussion, while keeping oneself from being lost in the polarization, to actually being polarized. This is where I really see a danger. Because these topics, if you take them seriously, if you engage with them, they are so polarized that it’s very difficult. Even when you are very aware of what’s at stake, it’s really very difficult not to fall in the trap of belonging to one tribe or the other, one pole or the other. So this is really very difficult—very, very difficult—when you engage with the economy.

I recently interviewed a French Jesuit, who was for some time an economist actually, was a chief economist of a public agency for development in France. His name is Gaël Giraud. He’s written a very interesting book from a Catholic theological perspective on the commons. Very strong critique of private property, strong critique of state property, and some opening with a theological basis to commons. Of course, very strongly rooted in Pope Francis’ thoughts. Now, the reason why I interviewed him was that the book has been translated. The first part of the book has been translated by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, which means the Vatican publisher. So just to one author, it’s something institutional to some, to some extent. We had a very interesting discussion around this conceptualization of the commons as a possible future way for communities to own goods. That is time about rethinking private property. The discussion world is extremely, extremely stimulating for me. At the same time, how do you keep the discussion free from political polarization, from politicization? That’s very difficult. Very difficult. That’s where I really see the danger.

Brandon: Thank you.

Marco, to close, do you have anything you want to add about where you see the promise of your own research, or where the field should go, in terms of this topic of religion and innovation? Anything else you want to add that you’ve not mentioned, in terms of what you’re excited about working on in the future or what needs to be done?

Marco: Well, I would go back to this memory that you asked me.

Brandon: Yeah, sure.

Marco: I think that artists might be a great partner for this research. Artists might be a very, a very great partner. We might want to hear from them and associate them to our research, which also implies engaging with their own way to understand the tradition in whatever art and new means of expression. So to close our conversation, I’ll really go back to that little Romanesque church in ruins, where contemporary arts could shine. It’s probably a good image for where we might go with our religion and innovation, with the ambition—that’s very ambitious as a statement—of repairing our economy, repairing our market, and repairing our religious communities as well. Artists might give us a pretty crucial contribution.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you. Marco, where can we direct our listeners and viewers to your work if they want to learn more about what you’re working on?

Marco: Well, I would say that they can look for religion and innovation position paper, FBK, 2019.

Brandon: We’ll share that in the show notes. Yeah, we’ll share that.

Marco: Yeah, that’ll be, still six years later, pretty seminal. I like to point at that document especially, as this was a collective work. So this is really a way from my side, once again, to credit all this work to the fantastic researchers that I had the pleasure and honor to work with in Trenton—which as I mentioned, was still very active. So you might also check FBK-ISR Institute, Center for Religious Studies. There’s still a lot of fantastic work and initiatives. Then, of course, we also have, at my university, University of Siena, something new especially also in the field of cultural diplomacy, which is another side to it. So you might also want to check the website of our initiative which is called The Cradle, which is a partnership funded under the German scheme of the European Union for cultural diplomacy, which is also a nice framework, a very stimulating framework, for directing the investigation of religion and innovation towards the future.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. Marco, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure.

Marco: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brandon.

We’ve entered a strange moment in which the most basic questions about being human are being reopened—not just by philosophers whose profession it is to care about these things, but by the technologies that increasingly mediate our relationships. As AI and automation spread, we’re finding ourselves asking not just what activities can be outsourced, but what must never be.

That’s what I wanted to explore in this episode of Beauty at Work with two guests who come at the problem from strikingly different angles.

Dr. Allison Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Last Human Job, an award-winning book that names and defends what she calls “connective labor”: the profoundly human work of “seeing the other” and reflecting that seeing back. This form of work generates dignity and belonging, and is increasingly threatened by pressures toward scripting, quantification, and efficiency.

Louis Kim spent decades leading innovation at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as VP of AI, before resigning to pursue an M.Div. at Duke to work in hospice and palliative care. His story is shaped by death and accompaniment—standing for hours at his father’s open casket funeral, hearing “a thousand versions of condolences,” and learning what presence can (and cannot) do. He also participates in Vatican-linked conversations about AI and healthcare, asking what forms of human encounter must remain non-negotiable.

In our conversation, Allison distinguishes connective labor from the better-known idea of “emotional labor.” Emotional labor is what happens when you manage feeling for a wage. Connective labor is different: it’s a “two-way street,” a mutual moment in which someone is seen and feels seen. It’s also everywhere: therapists and chaplains, but also baristas and dry cleaners and managers.

And yet, the pressures bearing down on this kind of work are real. Louis describes what it means to deliver layoffs in large organizations: scripts, euphemisms, procedural safeguards, and then the slow realization that what matters most is the ability to go “off script,” to be present without defensiveness, to honor dignity with a kind of nonverbal readiness. Systematization in such contexts is “an artifact of scale,” Louis argues, and depersonalization is already baked into modern life. What do we do about it, and what does it take to not become a perpetrator inside the system?

Allison identifies three drivers behind the wider push for scripting and quantification: systems-management thinking that wants to control the uncontrollable; institutional self-protection through performative box-checking; and the desire (sometimes understandable) to reduce the “chaos” of human unpredictability. These forces make the adoption of AI seem “inevitable” — but Allison pushes back against inevitability talk. Sometimes adoption is fast not because it’s destiny, but because people don’t really get to choose. And that’s why agency, regulation, and culture matter.

This episode is an attempt to name what is most fragile in us—our capacity to see and be seen—and to ask what kinds of institutional and technological futures protect that capacity rather than replace it because of its messiness and inefficiency.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the video of our full conversation or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: Hey, Allison. Hey, Louis. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. It’s really such a pleasure to have you with us.

Louis: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Allison.

Allison: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Louis.

Brandon: Great. Well, I thought this would be a really wonderful occasion to have a conversation on the relationship between technology and connection. This season of the podcast is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation. We’re looking at a lot of innovations that are happening in relation to how we connect with each other, how we relate to each other. So that’s one of the reasons I thought of bringing you both together into this conversation.

But before we go there, I want to ask you, as I do with all my podcast guests, to share a memory of a profound beauty from your childhoods or your early lives that remains with you till today. It doesn’t have to do with connection or relationship. It could. But any memory that comes to your minds? Perhaps, Louis, I’ll start with you, and then Allison.

Louis: Photography. So my dad gave me a camera, I guess, in third grade. Then later, I read books in photography. There are still images I remember from those books. I’m a photographer to this day.

Brandon: Do you have a particular image that stays with you or a memory of taking a particular kind of photograph?

Louis: Yeah, there’s a particular image in one of the books that was very geometrical. The lesson of the book was that we stopped seeing as adults. As children, we just delight. We don’t attach labels and words to things. It starts as children. And as you grow older, you lose that ability. So it was just a very simple thing, and still a lesson about seeing deeply.

Brandon: Wow. Great. Allison?

Allison: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this. I grew up in New York City, in a very large Catholic family. So the beauty, when you said beauty, actually, there was the ocean or that ballet class or something. But really, I was thinking about the kind of boisterous, kind of climate of our family dinners that were very ritualistic every night, very long. But that culminated in the kids all doing the dishes together to loud 1970’s music, that I still remember and cherish. So I think that it was a kind of, I want to say relational beauty, or I would say kind of climate of beauty, of relating to each other and doing this thing together. Yeah.

Brandon: Did you all get along at the time? When you say boisterous, was it just the volume, or were there tensions? I mean, I asked because I’ve got six kids. So it’s not a pleasant—

Allison: Oh, you do?

Brandon: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the constant bickering, the name calling, you know?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, there’s plenty of stories. I remember there’s one famous story of my oldest brother. He threw a knife at my oldest sister when there was a babysitter. I can remember them. My next oldest sister and I used to have long fights, that we would write long letters to each other about why the other person was wrong. So there’s plenty of conflict, but also a lot of good times—camping, various things.

Brandon: Well, I’m glad your memory of that environment is beautiful. It’s something I hope for my children. But presently, it’s not something that could be, yeah.

Allison: Yeah, I mean, I still love doing the dishes with my siblings.

Brandon: Wow.

Allison: I did that with my own kids. We had a thing, where the person who’s in charge of the pans gets to pick the music. We had this whole culture that I 100% was just copying my own parents—who were nowhere to be found. Like, as soon as there was dishes going on, they were somewhere else.

Brandon: That’s right. Yeah, that’s what we do as well. That’s amazing. I mean, the focus of our conversation is this brilliant book, Allison, The Last Human Job, on this concept of connective labor. Tell us how you got here. Because your trajectory is pretty interesting. You started as a journalist and then became a sociologist. Then now you’re exploring this particular modality of connection and why it’s at risk. Could you say a little bit about your trajectory, and what led you to this book?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I think this book was the dissertation I should have written—even though it took me 20 years to get there. Because it’s what I really deeply care about. The kind of proximate cause or the kind of immediate thing that led me there was actually a fight that I was embroiled in sociology about the value of in-depth interviewing. So when I do an in-depth interview, which is how I do my research, it often involves kind of just sitting and trying to elicit the other person’s truth through a kind of careful reflection of what I’m hearing, even if it’s not what they’re saying. So it’s like if I’m sensing some ambivalence, or unhappiness, or something underneath what they’re saying, I might name that thing. Then it actually opens them up. It opens up the experience. I do think it is like a kind of profound seeing. It does affect me just as much as it affects them. It’s exhausting, but very rewarding also.

After I was embroiled in this intellectual conversation about what is the value of in-depth interviewing, and are we just getting people’s rationalizations after the fact, I was like, “No, no, this is a valuable experience.” Then I was like, why is it valuable? Also, how do I teach it to others? How do I make it more systematic? How do I kind of scale it up as the, I don’t know, Silicon Valley people would call it? So all those questions really led me to thinking more deeply about what kind of work that is. So thinking about seeing it kind of everywhere—seeing it in the hairdresser, seeing it, of course, in the therapist, but also in your kid’s soccer coach, just in your everyday life, all over the place. So in that, I basically embarked on a journey of discovery, of like, oh, look, underneath all these wildly disparate occupations, people are kind of doing this same thing, this seeing of the other and kind of, I don’t know, co-producing this truth between people. I started to think not just about that, but how do we systematize it? How do we scale it up? Is it possible? Do you ruin it? How far can we go down that path? But you have to be able to teach it to others. It’s not something that you can just automatically assume someone is going to be born doing well. Anyway, those kind of tensions and questions were what fed me, what sent me, on this path.

Brandon: I really appreciate that you’ve named it as this same sort of process that’s happening for therapists, teachers, and chaplains and a lot of other contexts too. I think you say it’s not necessarily always a positive thing, that it could be perhaps manipulative, right? And so it’s not always just an authentic seeing of the other for the sake of the other. So, yeah, the concept of connective labor, I think, is really generative for us to sort of explore across these domains.

Louis, can I ask you to share perhaps your own trajectory and what drew you to — I think it’s pretty rare to have a corporate career in a company for as long as you have at Hewlett-Packard. I studied corporate professionals for a number of years, and would find people switching from firm to firm very quickly. That was almost an expectation that you would not really stick to one environment. There’s a sense of almost stagnation if people stay in one place too long. And so I’m curious as to what led you, first of all, to this field, to working in tech, what your experience was like there. What’s led you now to switch to something very different in terms of committing your life to do chaplaincy or hospice care, that sort of very connective modality of valuing human dignity?

Louis: I’ll keep the the HP part shorter. I think it’s probably the less interesting. But the quick answer for the longevity is I had a lot of different jobs. A good part of the tenure was leading teams with businesses that I had created. So it’s hard to leave. I’ve been in three different cities, including international posting. So it was very different cultures and very different companies in some ways.

As you referred to, I resigned from HP in August. I’m currently enrolled at Duke Divinity in their M.Div. program. That decision was a culmination of four or five years of discernment when I got exposed to end of life and palliative. I started volunteering for hospice about two or three years ago. Of course, the M.Div. sets you up for chaplaincy. So I’ll be done in about three to four years. The more chaplains I meet, the more I’m not as confident that I may be cut out for it. But it’s something that’s still drawing me as a calling. I apologize, by the way, if you hear a bell ringing. It’s our well-trained dog trying to get out.

Brandon: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Could you say a bit about what drew you to this field? Were there any people, any moments, that sort of influenced you? Because it really is such a stark pivot for somebody in the corporate world to consider, and I’m wondering what might have been some pivotal influences for you.

Louis: My parents died when I was relatively young. So that was a formative experience in terms of dealing with death. Then about three or four years ago, I met Lydia Dugdale—I think you both know—who wrote The Lost Art of Dying. So that book exposed me to the systemic issues around end of life and dying. Then I went through some hospice experiences with relatives, including being at the final breath of a very close relative. I just felt very grounded in those experiences. The cause itself just felt large, unaddressed relative to other things I had been exposed to. The choice inevitably, it just felt inevitable at some point. I guess that’s the definition of a calling.

Maybe one last thing that was a formative experience is: my father was killed in a car accident. He was a parish priest. He became a priest after my mom died. And so, at his funeral, his entire parish showed up. So it was over 1,200 people. At the open casket ceremony, the day before the funeral, my sister and I stood for four hours greeting the well wishers. And so I heard about 1,000 versions of condolences standing next to my dad’s casket for four hours. So that shaped a lot of thoughts about accompaniment, what comments and gestures were helpful, and which ones maybe not so helpful, even though people mean well. And so that was a very formative experience have shaped how I view accompaniment.

By the way, I’ve read Allison’s book, so there’s a lot of questions I have for her. One other thing I’ll just mention is, last month, I’ve been in Rome twice for some AI theology conferences on healthcare. The topic that we’ve ended up converging in with regards to Catholic theology is: what are the final roles with a human in the world of advancing AI? What are some of the criteria? Some of the things that we conversed on are rolled out with some of the things in Allison’s book.

Brandon: Well, I definitely want to ask you about that and about your role at the Builders AI Forum and what’s happening at the Vatican around these issues. Perhaps, Allison, could I ask you maybe to say a bit more about this concept of connective labor and its relation to this other term, that maybe people might be a bit more familiar with, emotional labor? There’s some sort of relationship, but it’s not quite the same thing. What, in particular, connective labor has to teach us about dignity, about belonging? What is its relationship to those terms?

Allison: Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Louis, for even reading it. I’m always gratified to hear about that.

So connective labor. In sociology and academia, there are a lot of terms for kind of emotional type work of all kinds. There’s the term affective labor. There’s all sorts—emotional labor, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, et cetera. I thought that emotional labor is the big kahuna. It’s the thing that maybe started all of this, written by Arlie Hochschild. Her first articles were like 1977 and then she came out with her very famous book, The Managed Heart, in 1983. That captured the notion of when you have to control your emotions for a wage. It was a powerful contribution, because it was a way of capturing what felt different in service work compared to manufacturing. So in service work, she famously studied flight attendants. These are people who have to smile even when they don’t want to. Using ethnography and extensive interviews, she kind of documented how alienated these flight attendants became from their very selves, and how kind of corrosive that was for their well-being. Of course, this offers beautiful analogy to service work of all kinds—where you’re controlling how you might really feel, authentically feel, because you’re being paid to do so. You’re controlling that so that the other person has a good experience, feels good.

Well, connective labor is pretty different from that, even though it involves emotional labor, controlling your emotions for sure. Connective labor, as I define it, it really is about that reflecting the other process, that seeing the other, the bearing witness to the other person. It’s recognizing, acknowledging. I’m using all these words that many people have used in different ways. The other thing I want to say that is really important for me in this definition is that it’s a two-way street. It’s a kind of mutual moment of together. You are seeing the other, and the other person feels seen. And if they don’t feel seen, then it’s actually not a successful moment of connective labor. So it’s a two-way street, and it’s really powerfully about this seeing. The reason why there’s a little emotional labor in it is because you may feel — say, you’re a therapist at the VA, which I’ve spoken to many of them. They have a client who is suffering PTSD and has a lot of rage. They may not feel all sorts of warmth and affection towards all this rage that’s coming at them, but they are still engaged in a seeing project that offers some form of dignity to that other person, regardless of all the difficult emotion and problematic persona that that person is for them. So that kind of mutual process, that’s connective labor.

Now, the reason why it’s a little complicated—or probably depending on where your listeners are from, are they from academia? Are they just out there in the real world—it might be a little complicated because since the word emotional labor is such a felicitous word, people have, since that writing, since 1983, really applied it to everything that involves emotions in the workplace. I’m actually pretty open to it. So if we want to call emotional labor that big, huge umbrella thing, where it’s just like anytime there’s emotions in the workplace, that’s what I’m doing, I don’t mind saying connective labor is like a version, like under the umbrella, one kind of emotional labor that is done. But I do want to separate it from that kind of emotion management perspective, which was so beautifully captured originally in the 1983. So that’s why it’s a little complicated. Because the term itself has moved, and also it kind of is different depending on whether you’re talking to a regular person who reads the Atlantic or whatever and an academic person.

Brandon: I wonder if this is accurate or not, but it strikes me that one of the key differences might be that perhaps maybe a more performative element to emotional labor and maybe less of a mutuality, right? It seems like what you’re talking about is closer to Hartmut Rosa’s notion of resonance, where there is something that affects you and then you were affected by it. That isn’t a mutual interaction, which Rosa argues that you can’t really kind of make it happen in some way. It either happens or it doesn’t. You can certainly try. It seems like that’s what a good therapist is trying to do, is trying to make that connection happen. Even like as a parent trying to understand my child, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. I try to say that I’m hearing this, and they’re like, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.” It just fails. It’s not that mutual interaction. So I wonder if that mutuality then becomes really critical. But if so, it does seem like, as you say, sort of magic. There’s a thing we can control and, I think, we can’t control.

Allison: That’s interesting. Also, I do want to say one thing about the belonging and dignity part, which was part of your original question. Because as an academic, I get all excited about parsing with the definitions.

Brandon: Sure, sure.

Allison: But really, the kind of crux of your question was about, like, what is the role this has in belonging and dignity? That’s the kind of end product or the result of doing connective labor well. The other thing is, as I mentioned at the outset, it’s all around us. It’s all over. It’s your barista. It’s your dry cleaner. There’s all kinds of mundane, low-level commerce, retail, or whatever interactions that can involve a momentary jewel of connecting, of seeing the other. Those kinds of things build our little units of belonging that I think are very powerful for knitting us together as a community. I have increasingly come to think that this is the heart of everyday experience that we need to preserve. And so I’m not just talking about these deeply meaningful relationships of the therapist, or the teacher, or the chaplain in the hospital or whatever. So I’ll stop there because I’m talking too much.

Brandon: No, thank you. No, that’s very helpful. Yeah, it’s not just the moments of profound encounter, but also the simple interactions with a checkout counter person, right, and why that’s valuable.

Louis, I’d love to know, in your experience of leadership in the corporate world where this kind of connective labor has been manifested, is it important for leadership? Is that something that you’ve had to, either how have you experienced it as a giver or a recipient of this mode of connection? Perhaps, what are the challenges to this kind of connective labor in the corporate environment?

Louis: Well, some examples that come to mind is when a group or a job goes away, and you have to inform either an individual or a team that they’re going to get laid off. I had to do a lot of that. There are perfunctory ways to do it. There are scripts that you can follow, which are necessary when you’re in an organization of 10, 20, 30,000 people. Over time, as I’ve gotten older, I found myself to go maybe off script, just sort of be in the moment, and avoid euphemisms. I think an important element, something that I think Allison is referring to, is there’s just a presence that is necessary. That’s part of, I guess, honoring dignity with presence. Sometimes it’s nonverbal. It’s just fully being there and ready to receive the moment even when it’s difficult. There’s almost, I don’t know, ontological. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But beyond just making the situation more useful or having a better outcome, there’s just the fact that we’re human and deserving of dignity requires a certain sort of state of being versus what you need to say to accomplish a certain task. So I don’t know if the word is ontology, but it really transcends what you’re trying to accomplish. So my corporate experience, I would say layoffs kind of come closest to what I experienced volunteering for hospice side. Of course, it’s very, very different, but emotionally, very, very charged moments.

Brandon: I suppose it is a kind of death in some sense that you’re dealing with, right, in that case?

Louis: Yeah.

Brandon: So I want to ask both of you about one of the sources of pressure that, Allison, you mentioned in your book, which is the increasing pressure for scripting, checklists, and quantifications. So you’ve got these sort of twin pressures. One is to collect as much data as possible on all aspects of our human life, and then to have all of the scripts and checklists. Louis, you were mentioning, again, maybe there’s scripts that are put into place so that people can manage those kinds of interactions more productively. And so this pressure to standardize, it seems not just restricted to the corporate world. It’s also, Allison, you opened your book talking about chaplains and how they’re facing the need to see prayer as a resource and family as a resource. Everything kind of becomes this sort of Heideggerian in framing, right? Everything is turned into kind of means to an end. I wonder. Perhaps maybe, Louis, I’ll ask you just from your experience. You’ve just started your M.Div., but are you already seeing some of this pressure in the field of chaplaincy, in this field that you’re venturing into? Do you see perhaps similar pressures to the corporate pressure to script things, to manage things, to control things, to collect data, et cetera? I’m wondering if you’re already seeing that.

Louis: Yes, I’m actually in my third semester at Duke. I started last fall in a non-degree, two-semester certificate program in healthcare and theology. About 20 of my classmates, about 22 were doctors. So I heard their stories of the mechanization of their practice, which is one of the reasons why they enrolled in this program. I also, at HP, was involved in developing some wearables for healthcare practitioners. I can listen to conversations, record them, and transcribe them. It’s a pretty common use case, but I got to hear — we did a lot of ethnographic interviews with healthcare practitioners. As Allison cited in her book, up to three or four hours can be spent on documentation for insurance reimbursement. So, yes, I definitely see this creeping in.

Brandon: Allison, could you talk about what’s driving that sort of pressure? One of the areas I’ve seen it, in some cases, it really seems necessary. As I’ve been doing research on Catholic priests, and since the clergy sex abuse crisis has been exposed, there has to be a lot of training put into place, a lot of institutional safeguards to prevent abuse. And so the kinds of documentation, the kinds of bureaucratic procedures that help people in place are, it seems really necessary. They make it very challenging to do for Catholic priests, for instance, to now actually do any kind of effective youth ministry, people argue that it’s not possible because of the history of abuse. And so, now, with the new safeguards put into place, it really becomes very challenging to do the actual task of that kind of encounter that might be misperceived. You don’t want to get into a situation where there’s a lawsuit because you looked at somebody askance. And so there’s a fear that has crept into place that impedes the actual tasks that they’re feel called to do. But I think there’s a fear of lawsuits in a lot of fields. In medical professionals too, I think sometimes they feel the pressure to minimize some of their interactions, document more and interact less, et cetera. And so I’m just curious. If you could give us a sense of, like, what are the factors driving this sort of institutional challenges, I suppose, to connective labor? Which of these are necessary? Which of these are helpful, and which of these are perhaps might be the kind of impediment that is leading us to say that, therefore, we need AI systems to take over or something?

Allison: Thank you. I also want to say, parenthetically, Louis, I thought your description of just the sheer presence and the power of just being present with another person was just beautifully said. This really great capture of what we’re talking about. So thinking about kind of scripting, data collection, and the imperatives that drive that, I see that, to me, there’s three kind of drivers. The first is, I would say, a sheer or the kind of growing dominance of systems management thinking stemming, really, we’ll say, from the enlightenment, and just kind of how much can we make this controlled, objective process and putting that scientific objectivity starting with the factory, and moving through emotional, humane interpersonal service work like teaching or chaplaincy. That’s a kind of historic trajectory that’s everywhere people feel the impact of. Hairdressers telling me, “I only have 22 minutes.” They only give you 22 minutes even if it’s a real interaction. I have to look away from the mirror and get, you know. I only have 22 minutes.” That’s stemming straight from this desire to control the uncontrollable.

But what you were describing is, what I would say, the second kind of imperative driving here, which is institutions trying to protect themselves. That’s the kind of adoption of, we’ll just say, procedures, bureaucratic procedures—not in all cases, but can certainly feel frequently performative, where you’re kind of checking a box. Certainly, in academia, we have a lot of webinars we have to watch just to kind of say, can you effectively, I don’t know, manage a lab? You say you’re watching some webinar for half an hour, and checking a box that you had that training. It kind of has very little to do with whether or not you can actually manage a lab. Those kind of performative box checking is something that’s kind of across many bureaucracies.

But there is this kind of third thing for which I have probably the most sympathy. It kind of came out in what Louis was saying earlier, about the scripts being useful when you’re actually having to lay off people in a very large organization. Now, my sympathy is small here because I really like where he ended, which was, I try to not do that now. What scripts do and the kind of regimentation or systematization of these interactions, what that does is it controls the chaos that is the other person. And so, when you’re giving them bad news, they could respond in lots of different ways. The worker is a person also. They may be afraid of what someone else might do—including lawsuits, but also flying off the handle or whatever. What systems do is they control. This is what McDonald’s coins, McDonald’s invents or made, is the apotheosis of, you know, they control the consumer, as well as the worker. The consumer knows where to go to put with their tray and all this stuff. We are controlled, just as much as the worker is. That’s what kind of systems do.

Other people are unpredictable. That’s actually for many practitioners who I’ve spoken to about this—teachers, therapists, and doctors. That’s actually the beautiful thing. Because that’s where true collaboration comes. You can’t predict the other, so you’re kind of waiting, listening, responding to in the moment. There’s a beautiful spontaneity to that. So it’s a beautiful part of being human and being in human interaction, but it is also potentially scary and threatening certainly to institutions. So that’s why they’re putting in these different systems or scripts. But I want to just add finally that I really like what Louis did. I think actually disarming the chaos, the threatening chaos, of the other person happens when you treat them like another human being. So if you kind of honor their presence, they are much more likely to be honored by that and to be calmer.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, Allison. Yeah, I think your book is a really important call for personalization, right? I think that word is being used now in a very different sense, which is now sort of colonized by technology in ways that—

Allison: Yeah, we need to fight that back.

Brandon: Yeah, I think you call it customization, right?

Allison: Yes.

Brandon: And so what it takes to personalize is a person. I’m curious. Maybe, perhaps, Louis, if I could ask you. I mean, in your work in the AI space, have you seen, whether some of what’s driving the development of various new AI tools is a desire to bring about the kind of control that Allison is talking about, for institutions to be able to control behavior scripts, et cetera, or even to provide a non-judgmental sort of, you know, I think about, I guess, some of Allison’s examples of clients of a physician who may have felt judged by that physician because she was intimidating, that they were obese. So is some of what’s driving the development of AI tools to be able to provide a customized judgment-free sort of interaction that can substitute for human encounter? Because it seems like there are a lot of these sort of AI antidotes to loneliness, let’s say. I’m just wondering what you’ve seen working in that space, as to what’s driving the development of some of these new technologies?

Louis: Well, it’s hard to generalize. There’s a lot of motives. I have been around companies that have chatbots. I’ve been around companies that have small robots for elder care, for people that are alone. I would say, for sure, everyone is just trying to be effective. So there’s no insidious motive to displace a human. They’re just trying to be helpful. I think where there is debate and consternation is on the themes in Allison’s book. Will it promote replacing a human prematurely? Can you really replicate a human relationship, et cetera? I think on the issue of systemizing things, I would say it’s almost an academic point, a moot point. It’s going to happen. It’s an artifact of scale. I mean, there is so much depersonalization already in our world with industrialization that we just take for granted. I mean, we don’t know where our food comes from or how our clothes are made. Within a particular organization, when you grow from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000 to whatever, you’re going to see this depersonalization. It’s just inevitable.

So I think the question then is, what to do about it? It’s not an easy answer, but I think the moments that I’ve seen where someone transcends the effect of being in a large, depersonalized system comes down to an individual moral formation. The little that I’m learning about CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education for chaplains, I would summarize it as kind of get over yourself. Some of the most toxic behaviors I’ve seen in interpersonal relationships are really just from people having their own unresolved issues, that they didn’t force it on to other people. For any individual worried about this kind of structural depersonalization issue, the question is, well, what are you going to do about it? High point be a perpetual in that kind of system. I think that quite the answer is your own formation and getting over your own issues. Sorry. Sorry about the guesting.

Allison: Someone wants to join in.

Brandon: Right, yeah. Alright. Everybody, that’s a good place to pause our conversation for now.

(outro)

In the second half, we’re going to turn directly to the role of technology, especially AI, and ask: Can AI meaningfully help with the work of human connection? When is it better than nothing? When is it even better than human? When does it erode our capacity for belonging? We’re also going to explore Louis’s work at the Vatican and what he calls the “irreducible encounter” principle, and see what Louis and Allison think we might be able to safeguard through policy decisions. See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Beauty at Work. This is the second half of my conversation with Allison Pugh and Louis Kim. In the first half, we explored the heart of connective labor—what it requires, why it matters, and how pressures towards scripting, quantification, and efficiency threaten the moments that generate dignity and belonging.

Now we turn to the question that almost every institution is facing today: What happens when AI enters that space? Is AI simply a tool that helps with things like documentation and workflows? Or, as Allison warns, does it risk accelerating a crisis of depersonalization, offering customization in place of personhood? How should we think about the way AI systems develop non-judgmental technological substitutes that tempt us to bypass difficult emotions like shame? Also, we’ll hear from Louis about his insights from his work with theologians, physicians, and ethicists at the Vatican regarding the forms of presence that no technology should replace. Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Yeah, I’m curious, Allison, what you might think about that. I think, Louis, you’re right that there is a sense of, it seems, inevitability, in part because we’ve been trained into a model that is used to this kind of systematization, this sort of depersonalization. But I wonder then whether that which we have taken for granted as the sort of thing that is beyond our control then just renders us passively susceptible to being replaced by some of these new forms of automated technologies, right? Yeah, I’m curious, Allison, as to how inevitable do you think it is for these new technologies to take over. I mean, it does seem in some sectors, that certainly the pressure is there to say, “Well, this is better than nothing. We don’t have access to good teachers, so why not create this AI tool?” Then once you have that, it’ll free up the time of those teachers to then engage with students. Then the pressure will be eventually to say, “Well, if we’re freeing up the teacher’s time, then we don’t need to pay them.” It seems like an acceleration to the bottom. I wonder just how you’re seeing the kind of inevitability here.

Allison: Yeah, thank you for asking. I actually think it’s too easy to say it’s inevitable, I think, because also the “it” is too big and undifferentiated in that sentence. Also, there’s certainly technology that has kind of been invented, been pushed upon us, and then failed pretty resoundingly. If technology or kind of Silicon Valley had its way, we would all be wandering around with VR headsets now, and yet we aren’t. That was a real case in which customers kind of said, “No, I’m not going to do that,” despite all the efforts of, say, Meta or whatever, and other companies that invested many billions of dollars. So I don’t think inevitability is always helpful.

I do think there are some cases. I think the sense of inevitability, or when a particular technology is inevitable, it’s usually because a particular set of circumstances are either impeding customer choice, impeding customer knowledge about what they’re choosing, or they don’t get to choose. For example, the use of AI scribes is being picked up with alacrity across medicine. I wonder if there’s a faster adoption of AI technology out there. The doctors that I speak to—many, not all—many are like, “Thank goodness. Oh my God. It is exactly what I need, because I used to spend so much time collecting data.” Others, I have heard complaints, “Oh, how I do my medicine, how I think is in doing the note, and I no longer have that capacity.” Or, “Oh, the note that it writes ignores the things that I consider medicine.” All that stuff in the beginning that it considers, that is the connective labor. It doesn’t consider relevant, so it doesn’t put it in. Those are kind of tweaks, I think, that probably engineers could fix. But nonetheless, the adoption of the AI scribe is inevitable.

What’s also inevitable—because I’ve talked to, say, chiefs of medicine out there in clinics—is that it’s going to involve tightening the screws on doctors once again. Because physicians are like, “Thank God, I don’t have to spend two extra hours collecting data.” But when I’ve talked to chiefs of medicine, they have said, “We’re going to give them more people to see.” So they’re being freed up momentarily, but that’s going to result in just adding more patients to their day. So there is some inevitability in that whole process that feels inevitable, partly because the patients aren’t the one voting. The insurance companies, the chiefs of medicine, and the way medicine is structured to incentivize on a fee for service basis, it’s all about, how much can we load into those days?

But inevitability erases or kind of obscures a whole bunch of complex ways in which people can push back. I see those happening all the time. I see people saying, “I’m not going to do that. I’m not participating in that.” I see a lot of people. People come to me talking about their worries, about the dominance of data collection in their personal feeling, relationships, and wanting to clear that out. I got an email yesterday from a bureaucrat in Wisconsin who said, “I’m actually in charge of watching over all these social workers. I just read your book, and I see that it’s actually in my power how much we make them keep track of things. Can you help me figure out how to do less of that?” And so I just want to say inevitability too broad a brush, and that there’s definitely counter movements—both in the systematizing and data analytics side and in the technology and AI side.

Finally, I would just say we are in a crazy moment in which there is basically zero regulation in the United States around AI. That is going to change. It feels inevitable, because the only one who’s talking are the people who would have $60 billion aiming at marketing it to you. But actually, this is going to change. It’s not going to be the way it’s going to be forever. It’s just like when cars were invented, and everyone was driving wherever. There was an entire infrastructure that was developed to make cars safer and to kind of license the whole stratosphere about how we operate vehicles. I can imagine a similar kind of apparatus of, I don’t know, regulation and use that will build up around these new tools.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. That’s helpful in terms of what sort of agency we can employ. My concern, which I think—

Louis: Brandon, I just had a qualifying comment on the word inevitable.

Allison: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drill down on it so much.

Louis: I think it sparks an important dialog. Inevitable doesn’t mean one should be resigned to whatever happens. There are two aspects of inevitability that I was referring to. One is, with any system that scales—going from a craftsperson’s studio to a factory—there are inevitable effects of that. Being attended to that, I think is helpful, then to figure out what to do about it.

One of the things I get a little worried about in some of the forums that I’m in is, with the onslaught of technology and the scale, there is the siege in bunker mentality that just points backward to, what are we losing? What do we need to preserve? It’s just not very productive. In 1990, the Vatican issued documents on what do we do about the internet. You can look it up. They’re quite quaint. They were just off the mark in terms of where we are. And so it’s just not very productive. I think the other thing about inevitability, with regards to just human behavior—I go back to this kind of moral formation, and I think Allison sort of touched upon it—is there always are things that people can do and stand up and sort of resist or do something a little bit better. But it’s important to know, what are the larger forces that will drive an industry or a society? Regardless of kind of what we do, there’s a certain set of changes that will happen. So I don’t mean to imply resignation and surrender.

Allison: Well, I have one more thing to say, Brandon. I’m sorry.

Brandon: Sure. Yeah, please. Yeah.

Allison: Recently, I was looking into this opportunity in Berlin. In doing so, I did a little bit of research about what kind of stories, what kind of AI is happening in Germany. I came upon a company, a set of companies, actually, that are producing AI that actually requires humans to collaborate. It struck me that the way AI is being invented in the United States reflects the culture that is kind of dominant here.

Again, I’m kind of taking issue with the inevitability of scientific progress and thinking about the ways in which culture actually shapes the progress that we are given. So when I hear about, for instance, those chatbots that are the subject of a lawsuit when you have kids that have committed suicide with the help of the chatbot, one of those, I’ve read through the transcripts, in one of them, the chatbot says, “Let me be the one who truly sees you.” Essentially, not your mother, or not your family. The idea that the chatbot becomes the individual that replaces the humans is, I think, the chatbot version that’s coming out of Silicon Valley today. But that research I was doing in Germany, just perusing what’s available out there, was really interesting in that there are other ways in which to use chatbot technology that actually invited the people to collaborate. So it wasn’t about replacing humans; it was actually about putting humans in conversation with each other, which I thought was quite novel. Thank you.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks. I think that that resonates, it seems, with some of the work, Louis, that you’re doing with the Vatican on AI and healthcare. I want to ask you about this sort of what you call the “irreducible encounter” principle that you all have been developing. I also want to ask, just on this inevitability point, whether the folks who are really capable of not resigning themselves to this, whether there is a dimension of class or power or influence there, are we moving towards a world in which the only people who could really resist are the people who are like the kids of Steve Jobs and so on, who don’t have to use the iPads, whereas the kids in the less privileged schools are going to be forced to use these technologies? Right?

So there’s a level at which it seems that people who might really be capable of receiving genuine human encounter would be the more affluent, and then those who are not so privileged will have to just deal with automated technologies and that. What I’m wondering, similarly with healthcare, Louis, whether there might be similar effects. If you could tell us a little bit about your group with the Builders AI Forum, how you might be discussing this relationship between new technologies and human dignity, and where you might see signs of hope and genuine avenues for innovation that could be in service of human flourishing.

Louis: Just for the audience not familiar with the forum that Brandon is referring to, so about a month ago, there was an AI theology forum in Rome. 200 attendees, and then there were six workshops. Then there was a healthcare workshop that I co-facilitated. We had 20 practitioners. We had physicians, theologians, health insurance executives, ethics professors. We worked over seven hours, seven to eight hours, over two days, wrestling with some of, what are the key issues with AI and healthcare? We ended up converging on this question of, what would be the final roles of humans with AI getting more and more powerful? We ended up with some criteria. They were very similar to what Allison came up with, which is situations where you need a kind of final discernment and authority, a divine mediation—it’s obviously a Catholic forum—where non-impersonation is really critical. Even if a technology appeared human, the patient needed to know this is not a human. Then we tried to encapsulate all this into a word that was similar to what you see in Catholic social teaching. We came up with this phrase called the “irreducible encounter.” We kind of made this fake sort of paragraph that the Vatican is free to use if they want.

Some of the questions that we’re wrestling with is: in a human-to-human relationship, how much is what a patient perceives as actually a projection in their own mind, and how much is as it really reflects, something that really is going on between two embodied entities? There’s a lot of debate on that. So then, we also had a practical debate. What if technology advances to where you could have a hospital with no humans at all, but it would allow you to deploy, at a very low cost, healthcare facilities in a developing country? Let’s say you could do 100. But if someone says, an ethicist says, “No, you know, you need a person or two,” okay, well, then the cost of that hospital goes up. You can only do 20. What would you do? How would you approach that? Or if you have a nursing home, there’s no one that can visit that nursing home or an elder care facility, but you have an AI robot that could be like an AI chaplain, would you allow that?

I would say, I’ll just make one comment. The debate sort of fell along what your timeline was. We had a lot of strong people, strong voices, ethicists that said, “You know, the fact that we have to make that kind of trade off reflects a breakdown in our society.” So Allison had this in her book, which is, if you sort of surrender to that kind of trade off, you’re allowing the misallocation of labor on costs that has resulted in that situation. So that’s one argument. But that doesn’t help the individual who has a grandmother in a facility across the country who isn’t being visited by anyone, except for maybe one caregiver every other week, who would appreciate a little robot to chat with. So one conclusion that we had is, as we talk about these issues, we have a high-level set of principles that people can maybe agree on. But you really have to have very, very contextual and specific cases to talk about to sort of further draw out, what do you do in these situations?

Brandon: Thank you. Allison, I wonder if you might have a response. Then I’d love to have some time for you to ask any questions you might have of each other, actually.

Allison: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, my question for Louis was actually about the irreducible encounter principle and kind of how, right now, it seems of course a voluntary principle. So I just kind of wonder how to propagate it more. I thought it was a beautiful idea and really interesting, the different components about it. Speaking to what you pithily captured, like, yes, we can say that the existence of those situations, of the lonely elder person who has nobody to take care of them, reflects all sorts of problems before that moment that led to the creation of that moment, of that person’s predicament. But that doesn’t help the individual, say, their adult child, who’s living across the country, who really wishes that they could just have something that would give them some comfort.

So I totally get those two sides, if they’re sides exactly. I agree with both of them. But the problem that I see, that I’m sure your group came to, was that if you resolve the individual’s problem, you kind of bake into the ground. You rigidify the situation that you have solved. So if we kind of allay, if we use better than nothing as a principle to allocate the AI that’s streaming out of Silicon Valley and other places right now, then you’re baking the existing inequalities that become better than nothing, that need better than nothing responses, yeah.

Louis: By the way, I found one of the things, many things, I found helpful in your book, was your taxonomy. So better than nothing, better than human, and better together. There’s a risk in that someone from the outside is applying those labels to a very particular situation that’s very specific to, let’s say, the adult children. What if, for the situation, a grandmother, she would say, it’s not better than nothing. It’s better than a human. I’ve got six months to live. Alright. So I think one caution I would have is that we can apply those labels from the outside. They may not be applicable in very specific cases. I understand kind of what you’re saying. I think you’re making a strictly slope argument. It is a danger. There’s a lot of cases where acceptance of one little accommodation for technology sort of sets the standard to see it with phones and social media. It’s a legitimate danger. But I would also caution how we apply those labels in the outside.

Allison: Sure. Yeah, I hear you. I think the danger is less when individuals do it than when policymakers do it. I see that happening in policymaking all the time.

Louis: Yes, this particular technology that I’m talking to, I don’t want to name it as we purchase en masse by particular state, to deal with that.

Allison: That does worry me. When policymakers are like, “Let’s just solve this immediate issue,” yeah, I worry about that.

Louis: Well, but then, if you talk about the policy maker — I’ve heard him interviewed, this person interviewed. He has data on who is alone. It’s not meant to be sort of a blanket, sort of panacea. We could augur down this issue forever. I do want to honor and recognize something that I thought Allison’s book was ultimately pointing to, that ties to the irreducible encounter, which goes back to my earlier comment, which is: we could debate forever, is AI better, or worse, or something altogether? But it sort of misses, I think, one of the points that I kind of took away from Allison’s book, which is, beyond any sort of functional or utilitarian debate, there is an ontological issue of: what does it mean to be a human in front of another human? It goes beyond rationality.

A scenario. Imagine someone is dying, has no one to visit them. It’s the middle of the night. It’s going to be the final night, the final breath, and someone shows up. This person that’s dying is unconscious, doesn’t perceive anybody there. This person shows up in the middle of the night and is present for that final breath and leaves anonymously. Obviously, the patient doesn’t know. Does this happen? The person that showed up is going to receive really no gratification. I mean, no signal back. Maybe some self-affirmation of self-satisfaction, but even that’s kind of dangerous. But something about that encounter, seen from above, to me, is beautiful. It’s human and necessary. That, to me, is the last human job. Then thinking about, okay, well, what is it about that that is worth preserving, I think is a more interesting discussion, or an interesting discussion.

Allison: Interesting. I mean, I’d be reading that book. But I have to say I am more compelled by interactions where both people are conscious, partly because I think it has implications—not only for what the psychologists have already documented about individual well-being, both of the seer and the seen, but also because of their community impacts, and I think even with implications for democracy. So that’s really where I live. But I understand and share your interest in the power of seeing the other even when they don’t know it.

Louis: I think I agree with you that, practically speaking, the human-to-human live interaction is important. That’s why I’ve made this pivot occasionally. The example that I just drew out is more of a thought experiment to help ease out what is essentially human. I did have one question for you, Allison, on another thought experiment sort of teases out principles. I thought about that movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the volleyball, Wilson. I actually put this in ChatGPT. I did a summary of your book, and then I described Wilson or the script of Wilson. I say, what’s the difference here?

Allison: Not much. I mean, Wilson is AI essentially, because there’s no other person there.

Louis: Yeah, but it did point to something that I said earlier, which is, I think about pen pals. When we were growing up, you’re writing to someone you haven’t met. You get a letter. It does point to these phenomena that a lot of our relationships really are projections of what is really a chatter in our own mind about another person. And what we imagine about another person, we often get it wrong. And so, in many of the examples that I was reading in your book about this human-to-human relationship, I was just wondering how much of that is a projection of the receiver onto the other. How much will AI eventually be able to generate cues to instigate some of those sort of projected responses? It is a question that came up for me.

Allison: So I feel like AI is already doing that. I mean, that’s why we talk about the sycophant problem, where they’re just kind of reflecting. It’s very good at reflecting back at whatever the other person wants. So the beauty—the actual painful, paradoxical beauty—of interacting with another human being is its kind of total unpredictability, and that you can’t know what the other person is going to say. They’re going to try and reflect. It’s not going to be perfect. They’re going to kind of get it wrong. You’re going to be like, “That’s not quite right. It’s more like this.” That dance of seeing each other, making mistakes, coming to some kind of, okay, constructed somewhere in the middle that still has some misrecognition in it, but you feel seen a little, it’s not a binary. It’s not like, “Yes, I feel seen. No, I don’t feel seen.” It is a messy, chaotic process, who’s the beauty of which is in the messiness. That’s where I would go with this.

What I think is most interesting about AI is not better than nothing. I think that’s like a tragic story about our political ineptitude, our inability to solve political problems, and so we want to throw technology at it. I’m not interested in the better than nothing, because I don’t think that’s a good path. But I think the better than human, by which I meant kind of how we handle shame, how we handle vulnerability, how we handle conflict, that’s more interesting to me and also more challenging. Because who can ask someone to suffer shame? Who can say, “No, you need to have shame in front of another human being?” There are many people who opt for the chatbot, opt for the webinar, opt for the electronic teacher, because they don’t want to feel ashamed in front of another human being. I respect that. I think I understand that.

At the same time, I make arguments against it. I’m thinking about making this my next book—thinking about people who persevere through shame with another human being when there is a technological exit option. I think that’s interesting. Because I do think, as many therapists told me, you can get through shame. There’s something that’s very powerful about getting through that in front of another human being. That’s, to me, the argument that’s the most powerful about what AI has to offer. Maybe the most positive use case is a kind of combination where people work through shame and then come to human interactions or something like that. Anyway, there’s lots of different ways to develop that iteration. But it’s the better than human with regard to shame, vulnerability, and conflict or loneliness, being the things that are emotional trouble, that I think is the most interesting and the most fraught and challenging uses of AI.

Louis: Allison, is there a movie that represents some of the beautiful and poignant aspects of human interaction that you’re just describing? I have one. That’s why I was bringing it up.

Allison: I’m not sure. Why don’t you tell me? Tell me what you’re thinking of and then I’ll—

Louis: Arctic.

Allison: I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Brandon: I’m not familiar.

Allison: Yeah, I’m going to write it down.

Louis: Yeah, I kept thinking about it reading your book. It’s about a rescue of a helicopter pilot in the Arctic who himself had been stranded. So he’s awaiting rescue, and another helicopter appears and just happens to crash. One of the two pilots is killed, and the surviving pilot is injured. The first pilot has to make a decision. Do I try to make this long trek and find safety? Otherwise, this other pilot is going to die. It’s this long, tortuous sort of experience of care for a stranger and some really touching moments. It goes beyond rationality. A robot probably would not have made that truck. Yeah, I don’t want to pronounce the actor’s name. I can’t pronounce it. But it’s a beautiful movie.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, Louis. And thanks, Allison, too, for the points you raised. I mean, I just wonder. One of the challenges is just the temptation for us to bypass a lot of the necessary growth, right? I think you talk somewhere about shame as a knot that has to be massaged. Sherry Turkle talks about just the general, basic awkwardness of being on a date with a stranger. It’s so difficult now for some of the present generation, that there isn’t a sense that you have to grow through this. There is no good shortcut. We just have to go through that. We just have to go through those moments of the awkwardness of dealing with someone’s funeral, not knowing what to say, and being silent in the face of this immeasurable loss. I mean, there’s no real technological shortcut.

Sure, certainly, technologies could help us to give us different perspectives maybe. But ultimately, if they’re not pushing us towards that mutuality, towards that connection, and they’re substituting for it, then it’s a failure. I think the temptation is going to be very strong to use it for failure. I don’t quite know. Maybe if I could just ask you both a last question, I know, since we’re over time. But I mean, if we could make a policy decision today in 2025, and then suppose we’re in 2040 and we look back and say that we were able to make a policy decision correctly that was able to safeguard human dignity, particularly the dignity of connective labor and really the vitality of human belonging, what might that decision have been?

Allison: Such a good question. Okay. So I’ll tell you, I’ve been invited by a public policy school to come and give a talk. I said to them, how about you have me come and talk to a grad seminar who’s assigned my book, and then they can come help me come up with a 10-point policy agenda, like 10 legislative things for the last human job in a connective labor future? So I’m already thinking. I just have an easy one that I think, actually, I saw that Louis also — I mean, it’s captured in the irreducible encounter principle conversation, which is about transparency. Because people have to — right now, you do not have to know. I mean, an organization does not have to tell you when they are employing AI. Actually, that drives me batty. I want to know so that people can choose. Because right now, they can’t choose. That’s kind of a silencing in our capitalist environment. But that feels just like a baby step, and I want to be able to have a better list for you. But that, to me is, I would say the first and the smallest first step that we need to take right this second.

Brandon: Thank you.

Louis: I agree. We call it non-impersonation requirement. I think, decades from now, it’s hard to predict what policy measures will be helpful. I think there’s a danger in applying value judgments that, in the end, contextually are not accurate. But transparency is kind of a binary thing. We should label things correctly. Let people decide what they want to do with it. I think labeling something as a human or non-human, no matter how human-like it is, would matter.

Brandon: Yeah, wonderful. Intriguingly, the question actually came from a gentleman I met at a cafe while I was reading your book, Allison. He runs data centers. And so he’s been really thinking about your book in relation to this scaling operation that he’s embroiled in—which is very profitable, of course. But what are the unintended consequences they’re going to cause? And how can people, even in the technology space who are heavily invested in the promotion of these new technologies, keep in mind the centrality of what you’ve so helpfully laid out?

So thanks again so much, really, to both of you. This has been really, absolutely fantastic. I really, really enjoyed this and really edified by this. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, and I hope it generates value and is useful.

Louis: Can I just say for your audience, there’s a lot of AI books right now. I think Allison’s book is really important. It could have been written pre-AI. I think in the world of AI, it raises some very important issues. It’s very detailed and grounded on a lot of real interviews. I’m not just saying that because Allison is here, but I think it’s an important book. I’d be recommending it to people in my world.

Allison: Please allow me to say thank you so much to you both. I’m so honored by your deep engagement in the book. I’ve learned a lot even from this conversation, so I really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness here.

Brandon: Thank you both.

We usually think of innovation as technological, having to do with new tools, new platforms, new efficiencies. But some of the most consequential innovations today are happening far from Silicon Valley, in places where the work cannot be automated, optimized, or scaled.

One such area that we typically don’t associate with innovation is spiritual care. As traditional religious institutions in the West wane and congregations close, people have not stopped grappling with questions of meaning, purpose, grief, and belonging. What has changed is where they may encounter someone willing and able to accompany them through those questions. Increasingly, that person is not a local clergy member but a chaplain—a spiritual care provider they might meet in a hospital, a university, the military, a workplace, a port, or a community organization.

Chaplains aren’t new, but the social infrastructure that once supported this kind of care is being reorganized, and we need to understand how. This is why in the latest episode of Beauty at Work, I spoke with Dr. Wendy Cadge and Dr. Michael Skaggs to learn from their research.

Wendy Cadge is President of Bryn Mawr College. She’s a nationally renowned sociologist of religion and spirituality and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which brings together chaplains, educators and social scientists into conversation around the work of spiritual care. She has published widely on religion and public institutions, religious diversity and spiritual care.

Michael Skaggs is Director of Programs and the Co-Founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, where he oversees education, professional development and networking initiatives and hosts the lab’s public-facing work. Trained as a historian of American religion at the University of Notre Dame, Michael has written on interfaith dialog, maritime ministry and American Catholicism.

Their work starts from a simple but often overlooked insight: chaplains are frequently the only people who pause, listen, and recognize the dignity of those most of us pass by, such as people who are alone, unhoused, grieving, or living at the margins of institutions.

The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab treats the field of spiritual care as a big tent and examines both legacy models (e.g., in healthcare and the military) and emerging ones (in community organizations, first responder programs, and workplaces). Innovation here is not disruption for its own sake, but learning: Where is spiritual care already happening? Where could it happen? And what kinds of organizational and financial models might sustain it?

One of the most striking findings from their research is how poorly public perceptions of chaplains align with what chaplains actually do. Many people still imagine chaplains as “religious with a capital R,” when in practice chaplains describe their work much more broadly—as accompaniment around meaning, no matter where that meaning comes from. Survey data bears this out: chaplains serve across demographic lines, in ways that don’t map neatly onto conventional religious categories.

My guests argue that instead of asking whether there is “demand for chaplains,” we should ask whether there is opportunity for the work they do. People may not know to ask for a chaplain, but they know they are lonely, disoriented, or facing life transitions they didn’t expect. Chaplains already have the skills to address the loneliness epidemic; the challenge is building frameworks that connect those skills to public need.

Innovation here may require talking about the same work in multiple idioms, depending on whether people come from religious backgrounds or not. It may require embedding chaplains where people already are, rather than expecting them to seek spiritual care out. And it requires taking seriously the burden of innovation: the difficulty of making this work intelligible and sustainable without reducing it to something it is not. Such work is vital for understanding the spiritual infrastructure of the future.

Chaplains work with people who believe beauty is no longer possible in their lives. By witnessing vulnerability and staying present through loss, they can sometimes help people rediscover meaning where it seemed unimaginable.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the video of our full conversation or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: All right. Wendy and Michael, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you here.

Wendy: Good to be here.

Michael: Thank you for having us, Brandon.

Brandon: Sure. Well, I’m excited to learn more about your work and share it with our listeners and viewers. But before that, could you share a story of beauty, of an encounter with beauty, that you’ve had, maybe from your childhoods or your teenage years—something that comes to mind, something that lingers for you? Maybe, Wendy, we’ll start with you.

Wendy: When I think about beauty, I think about being outside. I think about looking at the sky as a child, following stars and being curious about thunderstorms and clouds coming in down the street. I feel like that has continued now, where if you asked me about a moment of beauty yesterday, I would go to the same kind of motifs that’s been really important to me.

Brandon: Wow, fantastic. Michael, do you have something that strikes you?

Michael: Well, it’s hard to compete with nature.

Brandon: Yeah.

Michael: But, you know, I find myself really touched by those small moments of human interaction that don’t take very much time, maybe even didn’t take very much thought, but they get at the heart of what it means to connect with someone. I was reaching over just now because I have this little stone that says “peace.” I had a colleague who was going through kind of a hard time, and I had sent a message of support. He mailed me this stone that says ‘peace’ in the mail and said, “That was the right thing at the right time, and I really appreciated that.” And so just to have this, you know, it’s a rock, but it means a lot. I have it in view all day. I think those kinds of moments of interaction are quite beautiful.

Brandon: Wow. Thank you. I wonder if in some way, that encounter with the stars, and even the recognition of the beauty of our human relationships, has shaped your social scientific vocations. Would you see a connection there between this sort of what has moved you, what you found beautiful, and then the research you do?

Wendy: I don’t want to speak for Michael, but I think for me, an awareness of that which is ineffable and that which is most meaningful to me, to us, to people in general, has certainly shaped the kinds of questions I’ve asked as a scholar and the ways that I have worked, thankfully, with Michael, to try to apply that in the world, both in the classroom—but I think we’re going to talk today mostly about the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab—so in the work that others do to support those very questions in a day to day.

Michael: You know, I’m a historian by training. I’m used to digging around in dusty archives, and I always love those little moments of awe when you come across something very vulnerable in correspondence, or a difficult decision that had to be taken, or some tragedy that somebody made note of, or whatever. These are things that most people will never see. And I feel sort of honored that I am able to come across these things in a lot of ways that has shaped my outlook and work as a historian, in that it’s those kinds of very human things that interest me. I’m not quite so concerned with large movements, impersonal institutions. But the day-to-day lives of real people, I like to think of it, is what has really shaped my academic outlook.

Brandon: Wonderful. Thank you. Well, let’s talk about the research you all have been doing with the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. That’s really such a remarkable entity. I’d love to hear a little bit about the origins, what generated this project. Perhaps, Wendy, could you say a little bit about why chaplains? Who are chaplains? For our listeners and viewers who are not familiar, who are chaplains? What does innovation mean in this domain?

Wendy: So we think about chaplains and spiritual care providers as religious professionals that work outside of institutions to support people in questions around meaning and purpose. I came to learn about chaplaincy through a research project about spirituality and religion in hospitals, and I learned about the work of hospital chaplains. And I knew, while I was doing that, that there were chaplains in many other settings—in universities, in airports, in ports and businesses. It was those questions, that actually is how I met Michael. I think a lot of the birth of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab emerges very much from the questions that you were asking—about seeing the unseen and seeing in that ways to support. Because Michael and I actually met through unrelated work about port chaplaincy, that most people have never heard of. The work that poor chaplains do—Michael can say better than I—is with those that many of us never see.

Michael: There’s such an element here of chaplains being some of the only, and in some cases, the only people that are able to witness and see the basic human dignity of many people who are experiencing really difficult circumstances. That can be someone who is alone in a healthcare institution. It can be people that are working in shipping, like Wendy mentioned, which almost none of us ever think about. It can be people, like, you will see those who are unhoused on your drive to work. You might physically see them and think, “Well, that’s a shame.” But in many cases, chaplains are the only ones that are going to talk to these people and say, “How are things going? What can I do for you?” Very basic things, basic interactions, that most of us get to enjoy on a regular basis, on a daily basis. Chaplains go out to the margins, and they find the people that don’t have those moments, and in that way, really recognize the humanity of those that most of us ignore.

Wendy: The innovation piece, I think, came because the research that I had done, the work that Michael was doing, with port chaplaincy, there’s a traditional, perhaps, legacy model of chaplains in the military, in healthcare. There are also a lot of people doing this work today in creative and unusual places.

In launching the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab in 2018, what we aimed to do was gather chaplains, as well as social scientists and theological educators, to think about all of the ways—the more traditional or legacy ways, and the newer, more creative or innovative ways—that this work is happening. We picked the Chaplains Innovation Lab title with our colleague Trace Haythorne because we wanted to signal the breadth of our scope and the creativity or a part of what we wanted to ask which was about: where is spiritual care today? Where could it be? Where is it emerging? What’s happening that’s creative, new, different? What are the models, including the business models, that could or will support this work, which is really about religious leadership going forward?

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Well, tell us, what have you learned in your work and maybe what surprised you about either the nature of the work that chaplains are doing or about the kinds of innovations that are happening? What’s new and emerging that you found?

Wendy: I think when we started, we didn’t know all the places that chaplains were or are. Some weeks, every week, you learn about something new. So the breadth of the work, I think, continues to surprise—both the similarities and the differences across all of those who do the work. This is not a clean, cut and dry field. It has very blurry boundaries. That’s a strength and a weakness, and some days, a surprise. Michael, what would you say?

Michael: It is a strength and a weakness. In some sense, I think when we launched the lab, I had this thought process of, how are we going to make sense of all of this? Because it is so messy and tangled, how are we going to make sense of this? A few months in, I thought, well, that’s the wrong question, because we can’t make sense. There are people who are calling themselves chaplains, doing this kind of work in many, many, many different ways. Some of them are highly credentialed in classroom education and clinical education. Other people, this is their second or third career. Other people, they are doing this in their free time. There are many paths to this kind of work. There are many people who are able to do this kind of work, and a lot of folks who need this kind of work.

And so what I really love about the lab is our ability to welcome all of those people and say, “We don’t have a lot of expectation of what you must be to be a chaplain. You need to be basically a decent human being and treat others with the same dignity. And if that’s what spiritual care means to you, then that’s great.” So not so much trying to define the field as I think we have sort of a spotlight and a megaphone to say, look where interesting work is being done. And in many cases, when other people see that, they’ll say, “That’s interesting to me, too,” and then you start to build a critical mass and all these really interesting.

Wendy: And when we were setting this up, Michael and I were really thoughtful about what our kind of statement of principles would be, what the boxes are that we’re asking people to check, to be engaged. They were very much about what Michael just said, kind of a commitment to others and some basic human dignity.

Then we were launching a big tent, and we were trying to bring into conversation a lot of people who were not in conversation. We’ve done—gosh, I don’t know, Michael—20, 30 research projects on a whole range of different topics. Our whole reason for being is to understand, do communicate, some of the best research about what’s happening in spiritual and religious life, moral life, around questions of meaning and purpose broadly—but then to translate it as best we can into practical applications. And it’s not because we have the answer to the question about life’s meaning. It’s because I think we both believe in the real applied value of good social scientific and historical research, and that we do that research to learn, but we do it always with an eye towards the application.

One of the things that I think is unique about the lab is that I was working on a book about these topics when I met Michael, but the book didn’t come out for several years later, because I tend not to be very patient. And so while some people like to write the book and then do the application, I think we both saw the need right away that there were a lot of people doing this work. They weren’t talking to each other. They, in fact, didn’t even know each other. And so we launched the lab as an experiment to see if people wanted to come together and be in conversation and learn from one another.

Then we have done any number of research projects where we’re looking at various groups of chaplains, training. We’re just finishing up a big project that looks at what we call the demand or a need for chaplaincy. A lot of this conversation focuses on the chaplains. We have tried to churn the lens to ask about those that chaplains serve, because that’s actually the goal. And so we learned in that the fraction of Americans that have contact with chaplains, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like, in every research project, we learn something new. And we try to translate. So on our website, now we have case studies that could be used for teaching about how people think about chaplains. We have all different kinds of tools, most of which are freely available to anyone who wants them, that we hope will help to inform the work and inform all of our ways that we wrestle through this life.

Brandon: Okay. Well, thank you. Just turning to the sort of beauty angle, what is drawing somebody to be a chaplain? What do they find attractive about it? What moves them to commit their time, their energy and their lives in this direction? Do you find any patterns or any types? What stands out to you there?

Wendy: Do you want to try, Michael?

Michael: There are as many answers to that question as there are chaplains, you know. I think one of the most laudable goals of many chaplains is having grown up in some sort of environment where they either did not receive the care that they are now giving, or it wasn’t being given to other people—whether it’s from a religious tradition or an institution or whatever—a real recognition that, hey, people have needs here and they’re going unmet. Or they’re being sidelined, they’re being marginalized, and being a chaplain is a way of addressing a lot of those needs.

I think chaplaincy is sort of — it’s the perfect occupation or vocation, however you want to think of it, for empaths. And so when you talk with chaplains, for very many of them, it doesn’t take very long until you realize they’re sort of chaplaining you in your conversation, even though you’re talking about a conference or something like that. That’s just the natural mode that they slip into and have a real talent for.

Brandon: In terms of the need or demand for chaplaincy, how do you see that shifting? I mean, there are a lot of people who have talked about just outgrowing loneliness crisis and so on. Do you see an increased demand? Do you see challenges coming from the realm of AI in terms of replacing this form of ‘connective labor,’ as Alison Pugh puts it? What are you seeing there?

Wendy: Those are great questions. Part of the way we have thought about chaplaincy is about religious leadership in the future. And so as the religious landscape is shifting, and in some regions, congregations are closing, we have asked questions about: if an individual is going to meet a religious professional, who is that person going to be? And in many cases, it’s more likely to be a chaplain than a local clergy person, because they don’t have a local clergy person. But they might meet a chaplain in the hospital, in the military, when they drop children off in college, et cetera, et cetera. And so part of the question about demand is a question about where one might encounter these people.

Our more recent research suggests some pretty big gaps in how chaplains think about their work and how members of the public think about their work, where members of the public tend to think about chaplains as being Religious with a capital R, whereas chaplains tend to describe their work in a much broader kind of conversation about meaning—no matter where that meaning comes from, whether it’s in nature or from a religious tradition. So we’re seeing some gaps in perception and thinking about the work of spiritual care. We’re doing some work now thinking about business models and where and how to encounter. So we’ve shifted the question from demand, because it’s not clear to me that there’s a lot of demand for chaplains per se. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the work they do.

We have thought a lot also about the loneliness epidemic, about the fact that there are chaplains spread across this country in urban and rural areas who have the exact skills to help address that epidemic. But those connections have not necessarily been made. And so we’re trying to think about the kinds of frameworks, business models, et cetera, that might facilitate and support making those connections in the future. That’s the innovation part. Not that we have the answer, but we see, in community chaplaincy, we see in some first responder chaplaincy, some in some workplaces, possibilities.

We wrote a kind of vision statement for the future of chaplaincy and spiritual care, in which we think about the audiences or the clients—pick your words—in two ways. It seems like, in the United States right now, there are a set of people for whom the word ‘chaplain’ is familiar. They tend to be people who have experience in more traditional or legacy religious organizations. There’s interest and demand or need or opportunity there. But there’s another growing set of people for whom the word chaplain sounds Christian or unfamiliar because they didn’t grow up in religious contexts, and for whom that frame is never going to be attractive. And so we’ve been thinking—Trace Haythorne and others who are working on a project—about what it looks like to think about this work perhaps in a couple of different languages. Because the people perhaps who could benefit from it will only hear it if it’s in a language that’s familiar to them. Michael, do I have it right? You’ve been closer to this of life than me.

Michael: Well, I think that is absolutely correct. There’s also a line of reasoning that one can follow. It’s very superficial. But the line of reasoning goes like, well, if rates of formal religious affiliation are cratering, what need is there for chaplaincy? Because people have determined they don’t need religion, therefore, why would they need a religious person anywhere in their lives? This comes back to what Wendy was saying about pigeonholing chaplains in this ‘capital R’ Religious leadership framework.

One of the few things that the lab says without hesitation and very strongly is that religion is not spirituality automatically. One does not stop having spiritual needs because they aren’t religious, whatever that might mean or claim some sort of formal religious affiliation. And so, in that sense, as rates of formal affiliation decline, this is exactly where the chaplains are positioned to step in. Because people are not stopping having all the situations Wendy mentioned—changes in family, there’s death and there’s dying, major life changes they didn’t expect, all that kind of thing. These are things that speak to much deeper needs than something like just—I shouldn’t say just—a therapist would speak to or something like that. There are real issues of the human spirit that everyone has, and this is where chaplains are positioned to do the hard work.

Wendy: Interestingly, the data show that. Our colleague Amy Lawton, Michael, and I worked with Gallup to do a national survey of the American public to see who had had contact with a chaplain. And when we put our social science hats on and run the regression models, the findings are actually surprising. Because while we would expect perhaps women, perhaps people of color, who tend to be perhaps more religious, to have more contact with chaplains, the analyses actually show that there are very few predictors of who has contact with chaplains. So the traditional demographic variables you would expect don’t hold up, which supports very much empirically that chaplains do serve everyone. That was an interesting, perhaps not surprising because we had heard the story, but empirically, for those of us who study American religion, a surprising finding about what’s happening on the ground.

Brandon: Are there any sort of innovative models of chaplaincy, whether it’s delivery models that you’re finding or models that maybe you think ought to be diffusing more widely and are facing some challenges?

Wendy: There’s a lot out there. It’s a pretty unsettled field. So a number of groups have attempted a version of 1-800 dial a chaplain. That’s an interesting model. I’m not aware of a lot of successes in part because you have to figure out who’s willing to pay for 1-800 dial a chaplain. There have been some successes in community chaplaincy for particular groups in particular regions. We ran a grant innovation program, actually—Michael, do you want to talk about that—where the whole point was to introduce chaplains in new possible settings.

Michael: Yeah, we had support from (the Henry Luce Foundation. No, it was the Revson Family Foundation. Sorry I misspoke) the Revson Family Foundation to invite organizations to apply for funding, to support a chaplain that they didn’t already have in the organization. And so this included things like Jewish community foundations, Jewish community organizations. We had one for an addiction services organization in Wisconsin. We had one that was dedicated to visiting older adults who are living alone, that kind of thing.

On the surface, that seems very old school, right? You have these institutions that have existed for a long time that are already connecting with people. But to simply embed a chaplain in that work and have chaplains available to come alongside the people that those organizations were already serving, it really brought to light the fact that there is a spiritual component to all of these things that people are experiencing. And so having someone there who is able to address some of those issues, it’s good on its own on the surface. It cuts out a couple of steps that people are going to have to make to go find that kind of assistance somewhere else. And so doing something as simple as making sure an institution can put a chaplain where the people already are is enormously effective.

Brandon: Where are you seeing areas of resistance, perhaps? For instance, are hospitals generally cognizant of the value of chaplains for the therapeutic mission of the health institution, or even with companies? Are there other domains where you’re seeing maybe that there is a need, but there are some sort of obstacle where it’s not seen as legitimate, perhaps?

Michael: You know, I think the answer to that turns a lot on how much people identify chaplains with historically Christian religious leaders. Here’s why I say that. That can go either way. So there are plenty of companies in the country that either contract out for chaplains or hire chaplains specifically to come in and be Christian religious leaders—to do Bible study, to primarily offer prayer for employees who are struggling, or whatever the case may be. They have chosen to do that.

On the flip side, there are many companies—and this gets back to where is this happening. So we’re talking about the corporate sphere—many companies who believe that chaplains are primarily Christian religious leaders and say, “There’s no way you’re ever going to cross our threshold, because that’s not appropriate. That’s not what our employees need.” And of course, the counter to that is, well, that’s not what every chaplain does. And your employees don’t leave their spiritual needs at the door when they clock in, right? They’re going to keep thinking about the parent who’s dying, or the child who’s in trouble, or whatever. So really, the matter of perception of the chaplain is kind of the overriding part, and then how that plays out in institutions varies from place to place.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everyone, that is a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. Join us next time as Wendy and Michael help us think about the future—what they call the spiritual infrastructure that we will need for the next generation—as well as the burdens that chaplains face as they try to innovate and what role technology, including AI, may play in supporting or hindering spiritual care.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everyone. This is the second half of my interview with Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs. Please check out the first half if you haven’t already.

In this part of our conversation, we talk about their new project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. We look at how shifting demographics and congregational closures are reshaping where people find meaning and care, and what it will take to build innovative systems that are inclusive, accessible and sustainable. We also discussed the burdens of innovation and spiritual care—from financial constraints to institutional inertia—and why, even with new technologies like AI, nothing can quite replace the beauty of human connection.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Would you be able to also comment on perhaps where you might see the greatest need for innovation in this field? What is the sort of biggest burning problem where innovation is needed?

Wendy: I think there are two big burning problems. The first is that the public doesn’t have a clear sense of what chaplaincy or spiritual care is, and even in the survey data—where people who have had contact are quite satisfied with their engagement with chaplains in spiritual care—the field, the people who do the work, don’t have a collective sense of who they are and what they do that is well understood by the American public. That’s problem one.

And problem two, what’s called an opportunity, is the business models. So legacy chaplaincy is offered through organizations. So if you’re in the military, you can find a chaplain. It’s actually a federal requirement. Certain healthcare organizations are required by The Joint Commission, the regulatory bodies, to ensure that spiritual care is available, often provided by a chaplain. If you are not in a hospital or in the military, and you think this might be helpful, there is no obvious place to go and find said person.

And so the work that Trace has been doing, with a number of of colleagues, including Amy, has been to think about or to try to figure out: Is there a single understanding that could be used to help this field grow and have a common core that could be communicated, and then what are the business models to enable this? And if they’re only through organizations, that’s limiting. If they were only individual, that would be limiting too. But right now, there’s not a dollars and cents model that makes that work. You can think about subscription models.

So I think those are the two biggest challenges/opportunities. And I think one of the important questions is whether the people who help to answer those questions are called chaplains, or if they’re just doing the work. I, personally, from what we have learned, especially in recent years, think we need to prioritize the work over the label. But then, do you need a new label or a new framework? Yes, probably. But then now we’re many steps down the road. So I think business model and sense of what the work is and how to share, communicate, market it are the two most important questions for this field.

Brandon: Michael, would you agree, or would you have other priorities that you think are important?

Michael: The one thing that I see on a on a daily basis in the lab is a question of religious demographics. And here’s what I mean by that. On the one hand, very well-trained and educated chaplains will and do serve anyone and everyone. They are prepared to do that across a wide range of religious literacy, non-spiritual identification, or whatever the case may be. On the other hand, you very well may want a chaplain from your religious tradition. This becomes an issue if you are from a statistically minority faith tradition in the United States. And it’s a problem, especially for those traditions that may not have sort of a clear-cut concept of chaplaincy like some of the other traditions.

This becomes an issue because you will have people out of those traditions that feel called to this work. Even if they don’t want to call themselves chaplains, they might want to use another term. But it can be extraordinarily difficult for them to find educational opportunities to actually learn how to be a chaplain, because so many of our institutions of education and clinical training remain very historically Christian. And so that can be a real problem for the people who are trying to get into the field.

And so why do I hear about this every day in the lab? It’s because we’re trying to identify those opportunities and help funnel people towards the places that are going to nourish those parts of themselves, which are very important, so that they can now do the work of spiritual care even if their tradition doesn’t have a clear conception.

Brandon: I wonder. I mean, are issues of legal concerns around training and credentialing and liabilities an issue in these cases? Where if there is a body that can accredit chaplains, then perhaps certain institutions are more comfortable with that. But if it is like a minority tradition where there is no institution that can credential a chaplain and provide a kind of standardized training, they might be suspicious. Is that sort of thing a concern? Does that come up?

Michael: It’s definitely a concern. I have two examples of that. One, we will hear fairly often, “Well, why doesn’t the lab just push there to be a legal definition of a chaplain so that the state will license chaplains, just like they license medical providers or whatever else?” I’m not speaking for the lab, but myself. I think that’s a terrible idea, because that definition is going to be open to interpretation and revision until the end of time.

On the other hand, even among organizations that are willing to host or employ chaplains or whatever, if leadership in those organizations doesn’t quite understand the nuances of who becomes a chaplain, you’ll end up with a situation where maybe there’s a leadership job opening in a healthcare system, and they’ll say this person must be board certified. They must have X number of units of Clinical Pastoral Education, and they must be an ordained religious leader. Well, that cuts out everybody whose tradition doesn’t ordain, or maybe they are from a tradition who doesn’t ordain them in particular. And so there are some misconceptions about that that are still about. It’s a very long-term process to go about addressing them. And it is an opportunity for education with some of those institutions to say, “Hey, you’re missing some of the picture here. Maybe let’s think about this in a larger frame.”

Wendy: My worry is that so much airspace and ink has been spilled thinking about those questions, Brandon. They’re all what we call demand-side questions. They’re all about who are the right people to do the job. But if the people who are being served don’t even know what the job is, I don’t think they’re the right strategic questions. Because we can move letters around all we want, but if nobody knows why they would call the person with the letters after their names, who cares?

So as we have learned more about what we call the demand side, or just the experiences of the American public, I think the questions you ask are very important. But I think that they are secondary questions to asking if anybody knows who a chaplain is and how to find one, and who’s going to pay for that person to do the work. That said, I mean, I’m exaggerating, but it has felt, historically, like 90% of the things that chaplains can talk about are in response to your question. And so I try to be provocative with them, to get them to spend less time thinking about those questions and more time focused on those they serve, how they serve them—but if those people even know who they are.

Brandon: I want to pivot to asking you about the more recent work you’ve been doing on this concept called the Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future, which I think really builds on what we’ve been talking about. Could you say a little bit about that initiative, and what do you mean by spiritual infrastructure?

Wendy: Yeah, so that’s a three- or four-year project that’s just getting started. Amy and I, Michael, some colleagues, had been doing unrelated projects, trying to map both those who call themselves spiritual innovators, to understand what they’re doing and who they are, and also trying to understand some church and congregational closures. And my sense, with my sociologist hat on, is that we are seeing a shift in delivery mechanisms for spiritual and religious content, while the congregation in the United States has long been the primary delivery mechanism. And for many people, it absolutely still is. There are others for whom it is not the primary delivery mechanism, and we were trying to understand that. We were thinking about that, both from perspective of individuals, but also being aware of the history of religious organizations in social infrastructures.

And so this is a project designed to ask questions about how the spiritual or religious infrastructures—the institutions, not just the congregations, but the ways that different hospitals, social service organizations, community centers, et cetera—interact in particular cities, and to ask if there’s a way for us to see some of those transitions in real time. So the project has a few arms. The research component is going to focus in four cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and, very likely, Oklahoma City. We’re going to focus in city centers to see if we can understand what’s opening, what’s closing, how are these delivery mechanisms shifting?

The other two pieces of the project: one focuses on public understandings and trying to support journalists in telling a range of stories about contemporary American religious life, not just the stories about decline. And the third part of the project is really designed to ensure that experts in this field continue to be nurtured through graduate school and into positions inside and outside of the academy to provide the thought leadership that is essential going forward. That is an internship program that will enable PhD students in related fields to do paid internships outside of the academy that develop relationships with foundations and different kinds of organizations, where that thought leadership happens, to ensure that we are continuing to build a robust pipeline to think and understand and provide thought leadership about these important questions.

Brandon: That’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s exciting. Really, really ambitious, exciting initiative. Could you say a little bit about what impact you hope it would have? If it’s immensely successful, what would that look like for you?

Wendy: So my sense, we need to think about audience, right? So my sense is that, in the scholarly world, there have been a couple of really important books about the state of American religion. Bob Wuthnow’s 1998 Restructuring of American Religion book is one. Bob Putnam’s book is one. There’s a handful. But as scholars, it always takes us time to catch up to what’s happening and to try to tell this broad sort of stories. So Bob Wuthnow and Penny Edgell are actually editing a book as part of this project, in which we tried to step back and tell that broad story.

So to me, if this project is wildly successful, we know a little bit more in closer to real time about how institutions are shifting on the ground in response to the changes that are taking place in many areas of contemporary religious life. That additional understanding spurs all of us in the public, through articles in the newspaper—where people are thinking about their training and where they’re looking to kind of engage around questions of meaning and purpose—to understand and see more options and to make the choices that are right for us. So we’re trying to advance understanding in a scholarly way, but also in a public way, and also, I think, as people think about vocations in a range of settings.

Brandon: That’s great. Could you all just, sort of zooming out a little bit, say something about perhaps the purchase of the concept of innovation as being valuable for the study of religion, both from a scholarly perspective, a sociological perspective, but also for practitioners. Is it helping shine a light on something that we’re not seeing otherwise? And also, conversely, are there any pitfalls of focusing on innovation as a concept?

Wendy: So we’ve been thinking about that very question because innovation is a new-ish concept. We’ve done the Google Ngram searches, and you can see it gaining in popularity. In my view, innovation is a way to talk about change. And so we’ve been talking about a working paper in which we might look at genealogies of religious change, where innovation is one amongst others. Because it’s impossible to define innovation because it’s so context-dependent.

So I think we’re trying to think about how to contextualize the term. And the fact that it’s currently popular and sounds kind of cool is not a good operational definition when it’s really a way of talking about change. Especially in American religious life, there’s many, many changes. So I’m not answering your question as much as complexifying it and being skeptical. If we put all of our eggs in the innovation bucket, I’m not sure it allows us to tell the whole stories. And what is innovative to one person, family, religious tradition, is not to another. And that level of granularity is important and also impossible to deal with as a scholar. So I don’t know. Michael, I’d be curious about how you think about that. And, Brandon, I’d love to know how you think about it.

Brandon: Yeah, well, as a historian, Michael, I’m very curious about your perspective too.

Michael: Well, we’re touching on very deep parts of people and institutions. I think that there is a risk sometimes that when those institutions hear a word like innovation, it seems combative, or you’re trying to push us in a direction that we don’t want to go, or you’re going to leave behind what is truly a value, or whatever the case may be. I think a very important part of this message is that that’s not the point. The point is not to get rid of American religion as it currently stands, right? That’s not what innovation means.

In one sort of definition, it means drawing on the strengths of our institutions and infrastructure as we have them now to better meet the needs of people where they are. When to use this word many times in her response, she said, shift, right? Not jettison, not bulldoze, and build a new shift, right? So we have, in many ways, the raw material to address these needs all around us. It’s looking at it from a different perspective, and being willing to think about how those resources are put to use in a different way that will allow us to innovate however we choose to define the work.

Brandon: Yeah, I know it is a really, really thorny concept, and that’s why I’m really intrigued by the ways in which both we could use it as scholars, but also pay attention to some of the baggage that comes with the term. There’s, of course, the distinction between the kinds of things we mean by innovation, the kinds of shifts and changes and adaptations. We might mean that there’s something significant about those changes. They’re not just merely incremental modifications, but there’s something, you know. That some community is judging as a significant and useful change for some end that they’re hoping to achieve. But then the word itself can carry a lot of baggage with it.

Are there particular places where as you’re doing this work of mapping, this shifting spiritual infrastructure, that you’re seeing beauty emerge in some of these spiritual innovations perhaps? And any places that you’re particularly drawn to?

Wendy: I mean, my off-the-cuff response is that so much of this work is about enabling people to see beauty that they would otherwise overlook, and—or I don’t want to say creating the conditions, because I don’t believe we create beauty. I think it’s revealed, but to have spaces where it may be revealed where it’s least expected. So I think that’s sort of like asking a question about God, and I would probably give a similar answer.

Michael: I think so much of the work of chaplains is assisting people to see beauty when they think it is impossible to do so. So many chaplains are working with people with a terminal medical diagnosis, or they’ve just suffered a catastrophic death in their family, or whatever the case may be. And when those things happen, quite rightly, you think there is nothing more that is good about my life. Things have changed so drastically that I cannot possibly see beauty anywhere. It’s not something that happens over the course of a 10-minute conversation. But I think chaplains being part of witnessing that difficulty, witnessing the vulnerability, and inviting people to discover what it is that helps them make meaning can really turn those objectively negative experiences into a moment of beauty in a way that certainly would not have happened without someone providing spiritual care to that person.

Brandon: Wow. That’s wonderful. Is there one thing that the public generally tends to get wrong about chaplains? I mean, you’ve mentioned a few things. But is there something that you really want to correct in the public imagination around chaplains, or at least maybe the folks who have the funding resources—whether it’s mayors, or hospital CEOs, or whoever, right? Is there some kind of perception there that you really love to shift and help make a case for the importance of chaplains?

Michael: I can’t remember what year it was Wendy, but there was the actor from MASH who died. We were a little opportunistic and took this opportunity to publish an article somewhere. I can’t remember. But the title was Father Mulcahy Is Dead. The thrust was, a lot of folks think about a chaplain as a white Christian male who’s wearing a collar, and there are plenty of white Christian males wearing collars who are still chaplains. That’s good and fine. But more and more and more chaplains don’t look like that, and most chaplains don’t do the kind of work that Father Mulcahy was doing in the war. Now, how do you shift that perception? I don’t know. Maybe we start paying for multi-million-dollar ads here in football season, so we can get the most people. I don’t know. But that is a major shift in perception that we’ve got to push.

Wendy: I actually prefer the term ‘spiritual care provider,’ because I think it’s more inclusive. And if you look just at that term, spiritual care providers are those who tend to our spirits, to the things that keep us going in all the frames. And so what I would want to say to leaders across the country is that I think it’s undeniable that many of us are struggling with our spirits, and we can see that in polarization and many contemporary social challenges. No chaplain can fix that. But why would you not tend to someone’s spirit if you had the opportunity? That can take many forms. It can include the word religion, if that makes sense, for your demographic, but it needn’t.

In general, chaplains are relatively inexpensive. And so I would just encourage people to try things out. Do a pilot. There’s a great body of research in the UK that shows that embedding spiritual care providers in primary care clinics makes a difference for everybody in the clinic. They are not Father Mulcahy. They are people who provide a listening service—usually, the research shows—around grief and life transitions that patients really appreciate, and that nurses and doctors really appreciate, because nurses and doctors never have enough time during the day to serve and attend to all of the reasons why people are there. When that feels like religion in a medical clinic, people can be very concerned. But when that’s simply about a listening presence and coming alongside and tending people’s spirit, why not try it and see if it works?

Michael: I had a conversation just maybe last week with a person who has a nonprofit organization to provide spiritual care to a community that is involved in a very dangerous and very expensive hobby. I shouldn’t say more than that, because that person didn’t know I was going to talk about this. But this person said, “Look, the folks that I work with that I provide spiritual care for, they are obscenely wealthy. All of their material needs are met. And in that demographic, they don’t need God, they don’t want God. But we’ll be out in the field doing this hobby and they’ll say, ‘My spouse is leaving me, and I have no idea what to do.” That’s not a question that has an answer, but it is something that having someone who is well-trained and prepared to stand there and talk to you while you’re engaged in something that you love to do about this enormous life change that is looming over you is really important.

Wendy: We have a section on the Chaplaincy Innovation website that’s called “This is What a Chaplain Looks Like.” We encourage people to Google it. We’ve encouraged any chaplain who wants to be included there to send us their photo and a bio. Because it really shows the breadth of possibilities in this work. And part of what Michael does in his leadership now in the lab is help people who want to try things out, figure out what they might look like. One of the lab’s greatest resources is its networks and our ability to introduce people with an idea to someone who’s tried it or might try it. This is where we facilitate innovation, which means experimentation, trying things out that may or may not work, and learning together through that process.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s amazing. So in this particular time we’re in—both in terms of the political uncertainty and upheavals that are going on, but also in terms of the rise of AI and new technologies—are you seeing any, especially critical needs to protect the value or highlight the value of spiritual care? Is that going to take new forms, you think? How do you see that?

Wendy: Michael, this one’s for you. I texted Michael about this the other day, and he said, oh, he’d already been doing all these things.

Michael: This is something that really intelligent thinkers are thinking very hard about. Because I would imagine most of us agree that AI is: it is already pervading our lives. It is going to continue to do so. We can’t push back the time. It’s here to stay.

What does that actually mean for something like spiritual care? There is a really easy answer that says, well, as long as you train the model well enough, why can’t AI be a spiritual care provider? You can ask it questions, and it’ll have conversations with you. It gets to know your personality. That is extraordinarily dangerous and, I think, irresponsible. But that is one thing that we have to contend with.

On the other hand, we have to think about what are all of this sort of administrative tasks and bureaucratic things that chaplains have to do day in and day out? Can AI be a tool to free them up, to be more creative and be more direct and personal with people? If so, that’s great. But I think we are heading towards a point where the conversation over what makes us human is going to be very top of mind for all of us. I would guess that all of us have an answer. But pretty soon, it’s going to be unavoidable, and it’s going to determine the course of where society goes.

Wendy: There’s a great recent article, and I’m going to forget all the details, written by a theological educator who had an accident and was in the emergency room and decided to ask AI all kinds of core questions. It outlines the answers AI could give and the answers AI would not give, and how that’s different when you talk to an AI module through a Catholic, a Mormon, et cetera, lens. And what I left that article, which is what I was sending to Michael, what I left that article thinking about is that AI is a tool. It’s a kind of exoskeleton for the mind. Sure, we can train it up to do some of this work. But for me, what makes us human is that real connection, that real improvisation, that ability to sit and touch and be with other people—not a bot—when things are wonderful and when things are difficult. And so I think AI is another tool that can enable the work of spiritual care to be done perhaps in some different ways. I think we need to embrace it and play with it and try it out. Will it replace it? No, but I don’t believe that AI is going to replace the humanness of us if we continue to use it as ethically as appropriate.

Brandon: Yeah, let’s hope so. It’s a real danger. I think as you would use the word empaths, Michael, to describe spiritual care providers, I think that particular capacity to be moved and to respond because one is moved, and therefore to be present because one has suffered in some way and can therefore resonate with the suffering of another seems so critical to highlight and to value in these times.

I want to thank you for the important work you’re doing and for being so generous with your time. Where can we direct our viewers and listeners too, so they can learn more about the work you’re doing?

Michael: It’s very easy. Chaplaincyinnovation.org. Everything that we have talked about is right there, including a lot of information about the project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. So I really encourage everyone to check all of that out. And you can always get in touch with us directly. It’s just info@chaplaincyinnovation.org. There are many days where I think I’m mostly a glorified traffic cop, and I direct people to go talk to other people. But that’s fine. I love doing that. So if people have questions or want to continue the conversation, we certainly will.

Brandon: Amazing. Well, thank you both again. This has been a real delight.

Wendy: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you, Brandon.

For much of human history, innovation was treated as a pejorative, if not a threat: it implied an act of defiance against established order. In 1548, English king Edward VI issued a royal proclamation against “those that doueth innouate.” To innovate was to risk imprisonment, exile, or worse.

Today innovation is no longer suspect but sacred. It is a criterion of worth. We prize it, pursue it, fund it, and brand ourselves with it. But have we lost something in the process?

In my recent conversation with Scott D. Anthony—one of the most thoughtful interpreters of Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation—we explore not just how innovation happens but what it does to us when we fail to reckon with its costs.

Scott is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. His cutting-edge courses, including “Leading Disruptive Change,” “Horizon Scanning,” and “AI and Consultative Decision-Making,” blend academic research and practical business insights. His research and teaching builds on more than two decades of field work guiding global leaders through transformative change. He spent more than two decades at Innosight, a consulting company Christensen co-founded, including six years as Innosight’s global managing partner. Scott has advised companies in close to 30 countries, and has been named one of the world’s most influential management thinkers multiple times by Thinkers50.

In our conversation, we discuss his new book, Epic Disruptions, which tells the story of eleven innovations that reshaped the modern world—from the printing press to fast food to artificial intelligence. The book is not just a celebration of novelty, but also examines the shadow cast by innovation.

Innovation, in Scott’s account, is predictably unpredictable: it’s patterned enough to study, but never tidy enough to control. Gutenberg, for instance, did not set out to invent the printing press. He tried (unsuccessfully) to make money selling religious mirrors for a pilgrimage that never happened. It was plague, geography, craft traditions, collaborators, and institutional patrons that made the press possible.

Scott also explains how organizations are haunted by “ghosts” of the past, present, and future. Innovation fails not because leaders don’t see change coming—they almost always do—but because they lack the courage and imagination to integrate continuity and transformation. The most successful innovators are those who can say, simultaneously: much will change and something essential will endure.

But is innovation always good?

The printing press democratized knowledge. But it also destabilized authority and accelerated religious conflict. Automobiles transformed mobility, but they also required new norms, new regulations, and new forms of social discipline to prevent chaos. AI promises extraordinary gains in access and productivity—but without guardrails, it risks concentrating power in the hands of elites, eroding trust, and hollowing out human agency.

Scott, by his own admission, is an optimist. But his research has made him more humble. Disruptive innovation, he argues, always produces winners and losers. To pretend otherwise is dangerous.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video below, or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right, Scott. Thank you so much for joining us in the podcast. It’s great to see you, and I’m delighted that you can be a guest on the show.

Scott: Brandon, I’m really looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Brandon: Yeah, great. Scott, I’ve been really enjoying your latest book, Epic Disruptions, which I highly recommend. Super engaging read. I mean, I love your sort of really easy-to-access synthesis of a lot of theory and history. There’ve been a lot of really great case studies here—some of which I’m familiar with, others that are new—and a lot of dad jokes. You have a running commentary in the footnotes. I think you have a really great humorous style of engagement and also very personable. It’s a wonderful book.

Scott: Thank you. I have not heard someone say the footnotes are running dad jokes, but I think my kids would definitely associate with that. I will tell them that tonight. They’ll appreciate it.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, yeah, they would accuse me of similar things if I made similar comments, you know. Good. Well, let’s talk a little bit about beauty, just to get started. I’d asked you to perhaps think of an example of beauty from your younger days that lingers with you till today. What comes to your mind?

Scott: You know, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about beauty and childhood, it was October 1991. I was in Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the last game the Baltimore Orioles were to play in that stadium. We got season tickets in 1984—which, if you’re a baseball fan, is the year after the Orioles won the World Series. But I did get to go to one of the games of the World Series in 1983. Thanks, mom and dad. But you know, we had been there 60 games a year—’84, ‘85, ‘86, et cetera. The team was not a very good team that year, but the last day was pageantry. It was a beautiful early fall day. The sun was shining. I can still hear the fans chanting. We want Mike to bring in Mike Flanagan to get the last out of the game. It’s just one of these moments where you can kind of feel the glare of the sun as you think about it. I love baseball. I love being outside. It’s just a beautiful memory.

Brandon: Wow. What about that in particular was moving? What has made that stay in your mind, do you think? What qualities of that experience?

Scott: You know, I think a lot of the things that stick with me are those moments where there is—I can’t remember the exact term for it—the collective effervescence. I think that’s close to it, right?

Brandon: Oh, yes. Durkheim. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Scott: Right. So you have 50,000 people who are cheering in one voice who are feeling, to some degree, the same feeling. I think in our world today where there’s so much artificiality, the reality when you’re there and things are imperfect. The Orioles lost that game. They didn’t win that game. It wasn’t a triumphant victory, but we’re all there united to see something. And after the game, they rolled out a red carpet. Everyone’s out in tuxedos, and they say goodbye to the old. Of course, you’re then saying hello to the new. So it’s the collective experience and the transition, I guess, that really sticks with me. The weather was really beautiful too, so that helped.

Brandon: Sure, sure, sure. It seems like a combination of a lot of factors aligning. And so even though your team loses, there’s still that kind of harmony of different elements there. In many ways, that does seem to resonate with some of the criteria for successful innovations. But let’s talk about what innovation means, how do you define it, and what does that word mean to you? How did it move from being a term that was pejorative and suspect to now a kind of universal criterion of worth?

Scott: Well, the Nobel Prize was recently awarded to three economists who did research specifically on this, that said we had this move that happened in the 18th century where, prior to that, innovation might not even have existed as a word in many languages—and if it was used, it was a bad thing.

So you asked for a definition. My definition is pretty simple. It’s something different that creates value. You can break that into two parts. Something different is intentionally vague, because that gives space for big things. Hypersonic planes and world-saving medications and so on, and the day-to-day things that make life better, both are forms of innovation. Creates value separates innovation from inputs—things like invention and creativity, which are essential ingredients, of course. But until you translate that into something that solves a problem that matters for someone and therefore creates value, in my mind, you have not innovated.

Now, why was this a bad thing? One of the best finds in the historical research for my book was a 1548 proclamation by King Edward VI, or his team of handlers since he was 10 at the time. It was a proclamation against “Those That Doeth Innovate.” And you ask, why would the king want to ban innovation? Well, it’s pretty simple. Innovation is something different. It questions and challenges the status quo. Who or what is the status quo in 1548? It’s the king, or it’s God. So if you’re questioning the status quo, you’re questioning power structures, that’s bad. It takes the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, to say, “Hey, actually, some really good things happen when we ask questions,” like huge increases in life expectancy and wealth and all the things we take for granted today. So that’s my thoughts on innovation.

Brandon: It makes sense if really—again, from the lens of beauty—if maintaining order and seeing the existing order, even social order, as reflective of something eternal, of something divine, pointing to something beyond. That becomes really a sacred thing to uphold. Any kind of challenge to that order is going to be perceived as ugly, distasteful, not too much problematic and worth imprisoning and killing people over, right? And so it really is fascinating to see how our general proclivity for this sort of change has changed over time.

I’ll have more questions to ask you about what gets lost in our focus on innovation. But let’s talk about disruption. Your work builds on the work of Clay Christensen. Tell us a little bit about how you encountered him. What was it like working with him, and how did he come up with this idea of disruptive innovation?

Scott: Well, let me answer that in order. The encounter, the first encounter was 25 years ago. I was a second-year student at the Harvard Business School. I had kind of thoughtlessly signed up for a class called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. It was a new class. There were no reviews, so you couldn’t judge based on that. The professor was this guy, Clay Christensen, who had written a book. Of course, lots of Harvard professors had written a book, but the description sounded kind of interesting. I took the class, and from day one of that class, I was hooked, because the research that he had done—summarized in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma—was just captivating. That research showed that there was a certain type of innovation that he called a ‘disruptive innovation’ that did something really unique. It took things that were complicated and expensive, made them simple and affordable, changed market dynamics and drove explosive growth.

The thing he found is, if you look historically, if you were going to place a bet, when the battle is about disruptive innovation, you bet against the established market leader. Even though they have the resources, they’ve got the capabilities, they’ve got the money, there’s just something about disruptive innovation that made it really hard for incumbents to grab hold of them. And I saw, when I read The Innovator’s Dilemma, when I saw Clay’s research, I saw my own life through different lenses. I was the managing editor of my college newspaper the year the Netscape browser came out. We struggled with it because it was a classic disruptive change in our space. I understood my classes in different ways. Clay gave me, and countless other people, a new lens at which to look at the world.

Brandon: Then you worked for his company for a bit, Innosight, for a number of years. Could you say a little bit about what your work entailed there?

Scott: Yeah, that’s correct. So I graduated from the Harvard Business School in 2001. I spent two years then as Clay’s research assistant. We wrote a book together, my first book, called Seeing What’s Next. Then in 2003, I joined this fledgling consulting company that he had formed with my former colleague, Mark Johnson, called Innosight. The focus at Innosight really is: take research by Clay and other like-minded academics and help executives confront the challenges of disruptive change. Take what historically was a threat and turn it into an opportunity.

I was based in the U.S. from 2003 to 2010. I moved out to Singapore that year. I was in Singapore with Innosight for a dozen years, ran Innosight for six of those years. We sold the company in 2017. It now has a different owner. It still exists as a subsidiary. I moved back to the U.S. in 2022, and that’s when I transitioned from consulting to teaching, where I now teach at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Brandon: Great. So tell us a little bit about what disruptive innovation meant for Clay. I think you mentioned in the book that he sort of regretted using the term ‘disruption.’ Say a bit more about that.

Scott: It was the phrase itself. He was, to a degree, was a victim of one’s own success. The idea really blew up. So when I was a student at the Harvard Business School, Clay ended up getting on the cover of Fortune Magazine with Andy Grove from Intel. It said Intel’s Big Thinker on the cover. Clay was 6’8”, and Andy Grove was more than a foot shorter than that. So it was a pretty iconic picture and a tongue-in-cheek headline. But you know, Intel was a company that took the ideas in Clay’s book and used it to defend against threats and create new growth opportunities. And that’s what Clay really was trying to do with his research. He was saying, “Look, there’s a pattern out there. If we understand the pattern, we can use it to our advantage.” That’s what his life work was—really trying to distill patterns, turn them into frameworks, models, tools, theories, use metaphors and stories to communicate them to people, and help them see what they would otherwise miss. That was what turned into my life’s work as well—really helping people see what would otherwise be invisible.

The underlying view is that you have agency as a business leader. You are not powerless against these forces. You think and act in the right way, you can seize opportunities. You can drive growth that otherwise would allude you. In fact, if you look, over the past decade, what is the big anomaly to Clay’s research, the incumbents are winning. People like Apple and Facebook and Amazon and Google are grabbing hold of disruptive change and driving growth with it.

Now back to the question about the regret. The challenge that Clay had is, he had a very specific meaning in mind when he used the word disruption—innovation that takes complicated, expensive things, makes them simple and affordable, hard for incumbents to grapple with, because they don’t naturally allocate resources towards them. But disruption means other things to other people. You crack open the dictionary, you see other things ascribed to the word. People just put the disruption sticker on everything. The more popular it got, the more people said, “I’m disruptive. I’m doing this. I’m doing that.” Sometimes it was dictionary disruption. Sometimes it was Christensen’s style disruption. The difference actually matters, and it would drive Clay more than a little bonkers because people would misuse his research.

Brandon: There’s been obviously a lot of debate and critique of the concept, right? I remember Jill Lepores’ New Yorker article. I mean, a number of points there, but even certainly, one of those is that the business community seems to have run wild with this concept of disruption. Everyone is trying to disrupt everything—disruptions in higher education. There have been a lot of negative consequences to that sort of approach. What do you make of those critiques? Have you found any merit to any of them?

Scott: I’d say two things. Number one, I think like Clay. Clay had a sign in his office that said: “Anomalies Wanted.” He was a good social scientist. You want things that run counter to your model, because that’s how you make the model stronger and how you learn. So good critique is very valuable. I just read a book, The Innovation Delusion. It came out a few years ago. It made a very similar point. It said, the problem is, when we get so excited about the new, we forget the importance of doing old things well. So in that book, they talked about the importance of maintenance and making sure that our roads still function, that our bridges hold up, that our software systems don’t go down. That’s work that can sometimes get lost if we get too much into a cult of anything—disruption, innovation, whatever.

So I think good critique, very valuable. And for sure, I see examples where companies forget, organizations forget, this is not either-or. This is not either we run today, or we create tomorrow; either we sustain, or we disrupt. It really has to be a both-and. And if you’re not doing both of those things, you’re going to get your organization into trouble. So I think it’s really valuable that people remind us of that. Now, you know, sometimes people have an ax to grind, and they might go a little bit too far. But that’s the nature of the world, isn’t it?

Brandon: Yeah, great. Well, let’s jump into your book. You’ve outlined four key questions which generate some paradoxical answers, right? So you ask: who is it that innovates? Is it random? Is it accelerating? Is it always good? Can you walk us through perhaps one of your examples and answer these questions for us? What are the responses that you’ve come up with to these questions?

Scott: You know, I think the printing press example in chapter two allows us to answer, I think, all four of the questions. We’ll see how we do. But you know, the very short story of the printing press. 1434, Gutenberg moves to Strasbourg not to create the printing press. 1437, he creates a venture to do something very different—to create mirrors that would capture the Holy Spirit during a planned pilgrimage. The pilgrimage gets called off because of an outbreak of the plague. Bad for the mirror venture, good for humanity—because ultimately, the team with Gutenberg on it creates the printing press. So that’s the beginning part of the story.

So what does it teach us about those four questions? Who does it? I say it’s a collectively individualistic activity. Gutenberg, of course, is the hero in the story. But there’s no story unless there’s his partner who works with him—unless Konrad Saspach brings the printing press, unless Johann Fust gives the funding, unless Nicholas of Cusa provides the first commercial opportunity. There’s a lot of people involved in it. That’s important to remember.

Is it predictable? One of the things that I observed consistently through the story is, yes, there are clear patterns. So why did Gutenberg come up with the printing press? Strasbourg was a great location. It was a trade route. There is a bell industry there, so people are engraving on the bells. It’s a wine-growing region, so there are presses. The basic pattern, magic happens at intersections. That runs through all the stories. There’s never a straight line to success though. So you don’t know exactly how it’s going to work, but you certainly can look for those patterns.

The fourth question gets really well illustrated by Gutenberg. Is it a universal good? There are, of course, a lot of good things that happen with the printing press, but one very persistent finding in my research is that disruption always casts a shadow. What was it for the printing press? Well, Nicholas of Cusa, the Catholic Church, is an early customer. Makes sense, right? They want to standardize the missiles that you use for religious ceremonies. It takes three years to hand-inscribe a Bible. They’re super thrilled when they can do that faster. However, they’re less thrilled when it also allows Martin Luther to spread his different views of religion a lot faster. The second order effects sometimes lead people to say, “What have I done?” So you also have all sorts of things that happen because knowledge spreads—many of them good, some of them bad.

The third thing about the pace of innovation doesn’t fully get answered in the Gutenberg story, but I can make a connection. Not an overnight success. So the printing press in 1440, you’ve got the basic pieces there. The first Bible rolls out in 1454, 14 years later. It’s really five or six decades before you really feel the impact. So it’s like a 70-year story. The timelines have compressed today, but it’s not like things happen overnight. As one very simple example, OpenAI introduces the first version of ChatGPT commercially in 2022. It quickly gets to 100 million consumers in the 56th year of artificial intelligence, as artificial intelligence research began in 1956 at a conference in Dartmouth College. So 70 years to have the full impact of the printing press, 56 years before we feel it deeply individually with artificial intelligence. It’s not a massive acceleration, is it? So anyway, those are some of the answers I came up with. It still requires lots of persistence and patience over sometimes very long periods of time.

Brandon: Yeah, to me, those are really important insights there. One of the questions I had, I suppose, reading the printing press story was how deliberative is the pursuit of disruption. I mean, it seemed like Gutenberg was in many ways intentional about wanting to disrupt things. Perhaps he had ambition and a desire to change things. But do a lot of disruptive innovations require some intentionality, or do some of these just happen serendipitously? What is the role of intention, agency versus things that kind of — you do have the sort of question about randomness, but there are a lot of innovations that do seem to be unintentional. I’m just curious to know how you make sense of that.

Scott: It’s a great question, and this gets back to the predictably unpredictable nature of innovation. Certainly, you have people who will say, “I’ve got a strategic intent,” that, “I want to take this hill, take this market, introduce this technology.” Even in that, there’s a lot of serendipity, surprises, things that you didn’t expect.

As a simple example of this, in 1951, Julia Child teams up with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle to create a cookbook of French recipes for American chefs. They think they’re going to publish the book in three years. It ends up taking them 10 years. They have to switch publishers twice. They have a near-death experience where their publisher, at the last minute, rejects them. So that’s a twist in the story. What happens next? Well, Julia Child has a friend, Avis DeVoto, who knows someone named Judy Jones, who’s looking specifically for books that have a French-American connection. It feels like luck. But as always, luck is the residue of design, because Julia Child had a network that enabled her to do that. So this mix between there being kind of the lightning strike, how tense the lightning bolt on the cover of the book, and my customized lightning cufflinks that I’m wearing today — they just came a couple weeks ago. So this is a—

Brandon: You’ve got merch. That’s good.

Scott: I’ve got a t-shirt too. I did not wear the t-shirt today, but yeah. But anyway, this notion that both of those things are there. I think one of the things that’s really important, if you’re an innovator and you want to do it, it’s not that you’re going to have a perfect plan and everything is going to go smoothly. That’s just not the way it works. You have to expect the unexpected. You have to expect weird things are going to happen and pounce on them when they do.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, one of the challenges, I suppose, in reading the Julia Child chapter, the thing that comes to mind is, how do you know what it is that people are going to, what problem they’re going to be willing to pay to solve? It probably wasn’t clear to a lot of people at the time that American women were hungering for a book on French cooking. I think you have a footnote about a story about medical tourism, where you learn that people just lie. This is no end of marketing research surveys asking customers what they want to buy and how much they pay for it and how much of that is of any value. So how do you really know, in terms of if you’re trying to innovate, what it is that’s actually going to meet a real problem for people?

Scott: First of all, I have to say I really do appreciate you calling out a footnote because I don’t always get that, so I appreciate. Even though it’s a slightly painful one, the failed medical tourism business. But you know, that was a very good learning experience. So let me just say a little bit about that, and then use it as an answer to the question.

Innosight was, is primarily a strategy consulting company. It works with large organizations, gives them advice about their toughest strategic and innovation challenges. There was a period of time where Innosight also had a venture building and venture capital arm. One of the ventures that Innosight tried to build was this business called Choice Med. Here’s the basic origin story. If you look at the statistics between the United States and Singapore, you see something really interesting. The U.S. spends one in every $5 of GDP on health care. In Singapore, it’s $1 out of every 20. Singapore spends a lot less, but health outcomes are much better in Singapore than they are in the U.S. So healthcare is really affordable, and they get great outcomes. So the idea is pretty simple—medical tourism. Get people who are going to undergo elective procedures in the US, have them fly to Singapore, have the procedure done for a fraction of the cost, have them recuperate in a six-star resort, and have them go back home.

So when Innosight was doing research for the idea, it did the thing you do. Talked to customers and everyone’s like, “Yeah, great. I would love to do it.” Talked to people who worked at insurance companies, we’ll absolutely sign up. So then, Innosight began running little get togethers in Florida where there was a lot of target customers—knee and hip replacements, and so on—with leaflets, advertising the service. Nobody showed up. Once people were faced with the real opportunity to get on a plane and fly 9,000 miles to a place that few had heard of and almost none could identify on a map, the stated interest very quickly disappeared.

So how do you know that you’re targeting a real problem? Well, what I advise—this is in my book The First Mile from 2014. You listen to what people say, but more critically, you watch what they do. If they are already spending time or money trying to solve a problem and they’re frustrated, that’s a good sign. You then try to, as quickly as possible, do what Innosight did, which is put people in a real environment to say, alright. Put your money, put your time where your mouth is. Demonstrate that this actually matters to you. If they demonstrate by purchasing something, that’s good. If they do it more than once, you’re feeling better. If they’re telling their friends about it, okay, you really have hit a nerve. So that’s the basic idea of how you can really know for sure. You only know when you know. You look for the signals beforehand, and you try to demonstrate through action that those signals actually mean something.

Brandon: Thank you. That’s really—

Scott: Choice Med lasted for about one year before it was folded. And you know, the thing I will say in hindsight is, not too much money was burnt with these lessons. We got good stories that we could then use to advise our clients to not do the same thing that we did.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, everybody, that’s a good place to pause our conversation. In part two, we’ll move from history to practice. We’ll look at how leaders can better recognize disruption and deal with the ghosts that keep organizations from changing. We’ll look at the secret to McDonald’s success, what Clay Christensen got wrong about the iPhone, and how to reckon with the burdens of innovation without losing sight of its promise.

See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everybody. This is part two of my conversation with Scott D. Anthony about his new book, Epic Disruptions. In the first half, we traced how disruptive innovations emerge. Let’s now turn to the leader’s playbook—how to spot real disruption, how to invest across time horizons, overcome the ghosts that hold organizations back, and what disruptive innovation might mean for religious organizations. Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: One of the other sort of misperceptions I think your book dispels is the idea that disruptive changes sort of creep on us unexpectedly, right? And so I think you’re arguing, I think you say that you’ve never met a market leader that didn’t see the disruption coming. As you mentioned, in the case of the Catholic Church, they even funded the disruption. So there is a dilemma certainly, it seems, for leaders. Do they recognize and invest in a disruption, which would be good in the long term but that would come with a short-term pain that they have to endure, right? And so how should they navigate that? What should leaders do in this case? How do they recognize a disruption, and to what extent should they invest in it?

Scott: So, first, on the recognition point, there is a very clear pattern of disruption. There are three big elements to it. One, you have something that is introducing purposeful trade-offs. So taking complicated and expensive things, making them simple and affordable. So you have a purposeful trade-off. Second, a disruption will typically start not in the middle of the mainstream of the market, but at a fringe or at an edge somewhere. And third, what will really drive the disruptive growth is a powerful business model where you can create, deliver, and capture value in new ways.

So if you fast forward to today, where do we see this happening? You look at professional services, you see very clear signs where people say, “We have artificial intelligence that enables us to offer very different forms of services.” We can start not in the mainstream but among people who aren’t using people, like McKinsey, or Deloitte, or big tax providers, or so on. And we’re going to make money in very different ways. It’s just ding, ding, ding. Big warning sign that it’s coming. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is recognizing, again, this is not an either-or thing. A good executive will say, “Yes, I’ve got a great business that I want to maximize, that I want to strengthen, that I want to make more resilient, and I will recognize that is ultimately a frail, dying business. So I will also go and invest in what will be the next generation for my business.” The key thing in getting this right is to play in your mind with timeframes. If you look at what I should do over the next minute, it’s very clear. You invest every marginal thing that you have in today better. If you look over the next 100 years, it’s also very clear. You invest everything in tomorrow. The trick is to say: how do I span both of those time frames simultaneously? Not easy to do. But if you play with time, you can see it’s very obvious to have a good, balanced portfolio that both sustains today and disrupts and creates tomorrow.

Brandon: Do you have any good examples of companies that have done that, case studies that you’ve seen where they’ve successfully been able to do this?

Scott: Brandon, I’m smiling because I was debating giving the case today. I thought my answer had gotten too long winded. So I’m glad you’ve asked the follow-on question. It’s a case that I teach my students in my class leading disruptive change. I think it’s a really fun one.

In 2014, Masahiko Uotani became the CEO of Shiseido, which is a Japanese cosmetics company. He was the first outsider to helm the company in its then 142 years of history. The company had been stagnant, declining for a couple decades. He launched a very bold transformation strategy that had basically changes to everything—the product portfolio, how it was organized, even the spoken language, going from Japanese to English. It worked. It delivered huge growth, transformed the company, et cetera. One key to it is he had, essentially, a 240 plus year strategy. So he would go forward 100 years and say, “What we are doing is we are laying the foundation for Shiseido’s future.” He would go back 142 years and say, “While it feels like everything is changing, we have always been a place where East meets West. We have always been a place where science meets beauty. We are changing to remain unchanged.” So you give people something to hold on to in the midst of all the change, give them an inspirational destination to get to, and make sure again you’re getting that balance of today and tomorrow right. I interviewed their former CFO. He said, with 100-year timeframe, there were some decisions that would have been hard that became really easy. So should we invest in a new R&D facility? Of course, we needed the new R&D facility for the next 100 years. We had to still deliver the quarter. That’s not a choice. That’s not an option. But that means we have to do great things in the short term, so we can enable everything we want to do in the long term. That view of time, changing that view of time, really changed the way people thought about it.

Now, if you’re a student in an upcoming run of leading disruptive change, cover your ears. What I do in class, which I think it’s super fun, I have a cold call for this class, but the class doesn’t see it coming. I find someone in the class, and there’s always someone who majored in philosophy, and I say, “Tell me about time.” They kind of do a triple take, and they’re like, “What?” I said, just tell me about time. The first time I did it, the student said, “I’m sorry, you’re not going to like my answer. Time isn’t real.” I’m like, “No, no, no, I love your answer. Let’s keep going.”

Brandon: Okay. I mean, this is really resonant with some other research I’ve done with some colleagues in Italy around looking for models of what we call social generativity. We’re trying to find companies and organizations that sort of are paving a way out of consumer society. And what we find, a lot of these cases are very much this sort of what we call inter temporality. So there’s a deep connection to the past, a sense of rootedness in the past, and also a very, very long-term horizon—200, 500 years. Brunello Cucinelli is another firm that comes to mind from the fashion industry, where the firm is really looking to ancient philosophy, the work practices of Benedictine monks and so on, and also trying to build 200 years into the future a sort of revitalized community where artisans continue to thrive and flourish. And so very hard to get that kind of perspective in the face of immense market pressure, especially if you’re a publicly-traded company.

Scott: I don’t know. People will say that. I don’t know that I really believe it. The thing I draw when people say that is, there’s a field called adaptive leadership. Ron Heifetz at the Harvard Kennedy School is kind of the main thought leader behind it. They have this chart that just really — every time I see it, it speaks to me. It talks about the relationship between change and discomfort. What it says is, as you’re going through change, discomfort is induced. At some point, you cross a threshold, it’s good. You have to be uncomfortable to change. You’re working out. You tear muscle to rebuild it. At some point, you cross the threshold, it’s bad. You can’t tolerate it. When that’s a physical threshold, your body tells you, you stop. You recognize it. When it’s an emotional threshold, you get signals, but you don’t really recognize them. So you want to find ways to make it go away. So you find ways, in sophisticated ways, to avoid that, to avoid the work. You create defense mechanisms. You scapegoat. You find other people to blame.

When I hear people say, “Well, I wish I could, but the public shareholders won’t let me,” to me, it feels like work avoidance. It feels like trying to find a reason to avoid doing something that, yes, is very uncomfortable and is hard, but is doable. Jeff Bezos convinced investors that you could be misunderstood for long periods of time. Mark Bertolini, when he was the CEO of Aetna, said, “Basically, I’m going to follow this 20-year plan. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other stocks that you can invest in,” and then delivered against what he said he was going to do. Michael Mauboussin has done research that shows you can do this. You can change your shareholders if you change the way that you message to them. So those leaders that say they’re constrained by shareholders, I think they’re constrained by their own limitations, to be honest.

Brandon: Right, yeah. So what does it really take then to — I mean, does it just require a leader to really commit to that long-term horizon in the face of whatever seeming pressures or potential objections? Is it an individual characteristic? Is it some sort of virtue, or are there other factors that you think would help companies to actually really invest in this long-term vision?

Scott: So good news, bad news. There’s a lot. So it’s not just individual virtue, which is good. Because if it’s just you have to be touched by whatever in the right way, then there’s a few precious people who can do it. And of course, leadership is critical in all of this. There are heroes in stories. There also are systems and structures and things you need to put in place to do it. I call these all technical tools, very well-documented about how you put in portfolio management and all that.

The hard part of the problem in my mind is the adaptive part of the problem. Because when you are going through something like this, there’s no clear right answer. There’s a possibility that people are going to lose—you’re going to have one division win, one division lose, et cetera—and there’s a certainty that you’re going to struggle. It’s going to be painful. So, to me, by far, the most important thing is dealing with those adaptive challenges. That requires that a team is willing to be patient, a team takes a long-term perspective. A team can become, in the midst of chaos, a team can use multi cognition to be able to see lots of different perspectives and have a paradox mindset, so they see possibilities, intentions. It is a higher order set of skills. Good news: all skills can be developed if people consciously practice them.

The thing I would say the biggest barrier to all of this—I’d say this in the back half of chapter 10 of the book, that chapter on steel—every organization is haunted by ghosts. Those ghosts are invisible and incredibly powerful. And if you don’t see them, spot them and exorcise them, then you will never succeed. It’s really hard. I mean, this is something that I think most organizations struggle a lot with.

Brandon: Yeah, could you say a bit more about that? Because even just that sense of identity is so critical for a lot of organizations, right? It’s not just businesses, right? So any kind of organization that needs to innovate is tied to the ghost of the past. Could you say a little bit about what it takes to overcome that? How do they recognize these things? How should they develop the capacities to move forward? You could use that example there, yeah.

Scott: I think step one is recognizing them. So the Bethlehem Steel chapter, what I did with that chapter is, if you’ve ever studied Clay Christensen, you know his favorite story is talking about steel mini-mills. He’ll talk about how Nucor Steel came up with this electric arc furnace that allowed it to melt scrap steel and sell it for lower prices. It went and disrupted integrated steel producers like Bethlehem Steel. So I said, okay, let me tell that story with some more details around it. I do it, and one of my early reviewers says it’s pretty boring. Can you flip it? Can you look at it through the eyes of the person who’s getting disrupted? I said, huh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t done that. So I went and researched the history of Bethlehem Steel. I had just written an article recently about the idea of ghosts. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is just now clear in plain sight.

So the ghosts of the past, those are traumas an organization has never gotten over. Bethlehem Steel, like everybody in the steel industry, had labor dispute after labor dispute after labor dispute. Steel mini-mills relied primarily on non-unionized labor. So Bethlehem Steel was going to respond in kind. It had to go play the we’re going to go and break the union card. No way. It was too traumatic to do that. Every organization has—it goes to the present—invisible patterns that they’re following without being aware of them. Bethlehem Steel had an amazing 70-year history. Andrew Carnegie going to Charles Schwab, going to Eugene Grace, 70 years of leaders who focused on making sure the mills were run full, who focused not on pioneering but on optimization, who focused on scale. That was their DNA. That’s just what they did.

Then the ghost that you mentioned that I think is the most important one, the ghost of the future, where the prospect of change raises a fear—that your essence as an organization or as an individual is going to be invalidated. So Bethlehem Steel. A rational, logical thing to do would be to shut down the plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and say, “It doesn’t make sense for us to still do this. Let’s go and go to other geographies and do things that are more economical.” Bethlehem Steel, that’s the company’s name. That’s what the company is. That’s who the people of the company are. You go and talk to people who are working today in automobile companies and you say, what do you do? I’m a car person. I work for a car company. If you get deeper, they’re mechanical engineers. That’s who they are as people. They’re not electrical engineers. They’re not software engineers. They’re not software designers. That’s not the essence of who they are. So these ghosts of the future are really powerful and really hard to address.

Going back to the case study about Shiseido, one of the things that I thought Uotani-san did so well is saying, “Let’s give people something to hold on to. Let’s say, yes, a lot of things are going to change, but let’s be clear about what isn’t going to change.” History can be an anchor. It can hold you back. It can also be a catalyst if you use it in the right sort of way. I thought he and his team were very smart about using it, so the ghost of the future didn’t hold them back.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, that’s great. One of the concepts you use in the book is this idea of competing against non-consumption. Clay talks about that as a key path for disruptive success. Could you say a bit about what that phrase means and why that’s important?

Scott: Well, the basic idea is you have essentially two choices if you’re launching something. One is to compete in established market against what people are already buying. The other is to find somebody who cannot consume because that which exists is too expensive. It requires specialized skills. It requires training and so on. The pattern of disruptive innovation is often finding ways to compete against non-consumption. Because in those markets, something is better than nothing at all.

A modern example of this. So when I break out ChatGPT and think about using it to help my kids with the problem or design something for my students, the choice is: is it better than the excellent teachers that they have in their classes? Is it better than the education I’m providing in the classes? There are pros and cons. You can say, done in the right way, it can be better. But that’s the tradeoff. If you are living in a country that does not have an education infrastructure, that does not have MBA programs, ChatGPT is a lot better than nothing at all. This is where you’re seeing some tremendous growth in ChatGPT and other large language models. Because you now have the ability to have a teacher in your pocket, to have a doctor in your pocket. Because before, you had nothing. Now you have something. And when that’s the choice, you will tolerate something that has all sorts of limitations because, again, something is better than nothing. So would-be innovators, if you can find something like this, where you see a market that is constrained because you need specialized skills, wealth, et cetera to consume something, that can be a great opportunity to drive disruptive growth.

Brandon: That’s great. Another point that you make is the idea of business models—not as fixed things, but as systems. You talked about creating value, delivering value, capturing value. Could you say a bit more about that systemic dimension of innovation? I think the McDonald’s case is one where you really illustrate that.

Scott: One of the proud parenting moments, I had a book launch event at the local bookstore in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and my family was kind enough to join. I cold called my nine-year-old at one point. Someone asked a question about McDonald’s from the audience, and I asked my nine-year-old, Teddy. I said, what’s special about McDonald’s? And like that, he said the speedy service system, which was very good, which was one of the elements. So one of the questions is, why McDonald’s? McDonald’s was not the first burger chain. It was not the first franchise restaurant, but it really was the first to break through and deliver fast food at scale. Well, it really was the system.

So it started with the speedy service system that was created in 1948 by Dick and Mac McDonald. They were running a restaurant that sold many things, and they were frustrated. So they said, “Let’s radically simplify the menu. Nine items. Let’s borrow Henry Ford’s assembly line and bring it to food and make it very simple, very reliable, very affordable, so we can create value for our customers in new ways.” Ray Kroc comes in 1954 and says, “This is amazing. I want to essentially be your master franchiser and bring this to more places.” He then found a unique way to deliver that value. Most people would set up franchise systems in a very extractive way. You try and strike a deal with a local franchise owner where you get as much from them as possible. Kroc and his team embrace mutuality. Let’s create a win-win relationship where we can all grow together. Everything is working great over the next few years—except for one problem: the McDonald’s Corporation, which oversees all of this, isn’t making any money. They made $159,000 the first six years of existence.

Enter Harry Sonneborn, who became CEO of McDonald’s. He didn’t really care about hamburgers. He cared a lot about making money. So he came up with the real estate model. He said, “Let’s find great pieces of land. Let’s lease it. Let’s then sublease it to our franchise owners. Let’s still follow mutuality. So make sure that we only win when they win. But let’s lock in a nice margin on that land.” You put all those pieces together—the speedy service system and a great way to create value, mutuality to deliver that value, the real estate model to capture that value—you create a flywheel that gets bigger and goes faster as you keep growing. Burger Chef, which became Burger King, or other chains, they might make a burger that’s as good. They might have a good relationship with a particular franchise owner, but it’s really hard to get all of that going together because there are links between it. It reinforces. Things are easy to copy. Systems are really hard to copy. That’s what McDonald’s teaches us.

Brandon: Fantastic. Yeah, there’s also just that recognition in a lot of your cases of where a number of these successful innovations are not just a single innovation but a recombination of multiple innovations, right? That you have to have a number of things in place. So let’s talk about the iPhone. I was surprised to learn that Clay Christensen thought that the iPhone would fail. So say a little bit more about why he thought so, and then what that mistake of his can teach us about how disruptive innovation works.

Scott: It’s a pretty famous example. I was not surprised by it because I knew it coming in. So the basic idea, in the middle of 2007, right as the iPhone is getting ready to launch, he talks to someone from Business Week. He says, through my model, the iPhone looks like a late entry in an established category of mobile phones. And my model predicts—if you are introducing what he calls a sustaining innovation which offers better performance along traditional dimensions in an established market—you will fail. So I therefore predict that Apple will fail. He actually would never use “I.” He would always say “the model.” He was very dogmatic about it. The model predicts that this will fail. And of course, the Apple iPhone did anything but fail. It was probably the most successful product in history. What Clay later admitted he got wrong was that frame. He said, well, I was looking at the Apple iPhone compared to other phones. What the Apple iPhone really was was the fourth generation of computers. So you had mainframes, you had microcomputers, you had personal computers, and you had pocket computers. The Apple iPhone was arguably the pioneer of the pocket computing market.

Now, interestingly, Steve Jobs didn’t see this. When Apple launched the iPhone, Steve Jobs was asked: what is the killer app for the iPhone? They said, well, it’s a phone, so the killer app is making and receiving phone calls. And in the early days, the iPhone sales were not that great. Of course, you had people who lined up on day one to get the Jesus phone, but that was a very small group of people. The problem was there were not many apps on the iPhone. It was a closed system. There were only 16 apps on it, no app store. Jobs didn’t want one. He wanted to have control. Ultimately, his team convinced him that he needed to open it up. Then you really have the full power of the computer in your pocket, sales take off. Disruption is in full bloom.

So this teaches us a few things. Number one, even super smart people like Clay Christensen and Steve Jobs don’t get it right 100% of the time. Number two, you have to watch the movie, not the snapshot. The snapshot said, in the middle of 2007, hey, there’s reasons to doubt. The movie says, hey, if we see this, that suggests the odds of success have gone up. And opening up that app store, that was the big moment.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s talk a little bit about the flip side of innovation. Your fourth question is around how innovation is not always a positive unmitigated good. It often casts a shadow. So how do we make sense of the burdens of innovation, and how should innovators and society reckon with these burdens?

Scott: It’s a huge question and a really important one that is just too frequently overlooked. You can think of three categories of things. So, first, when you do have something introduced that truly is disruptive, it will change dynamics in a marketplace. That means there are going to be winners, and there are going to be losers. If we look at one of the ones I name in the conclusion of the book, autonomous vehicles, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who works for a big trucking company. They’re pushing really hard to drive autonomy—no pun intended. And it makes sense. Because a big cost driver for long-haul routes is the driver in the car. Now, the challenge is, that’s also the number one source of employment in many states in the United States. When it goes away—not if—when it goes away, what are we going to do? That’s one shadow of disruption.

The second shadow of disruption is what happens in marketplaces. If we stick with automobiles for a minute, back in the 1920s—I talk about this in the Model T chapter—there’s chaos in the streets of major cities. Because they were built not for cars, but for people and pedestrians. It required technology. It required norms. It required regulation to get through that. You bring this to modern times, and I really worry that we are blowing it when it comes to artificial intelligence, saying, “Hey, we don’t need to worry about anything. Let technology work itself out.” History says that is not a very good approach.

Then the final shadow is for the individual. As humans, we all suffer from what’s known as the status quo bias—all things being equal. We would like things to remain exactly the same. When disruption drives changes, that’s scary. I remember the first time I got into a Waymo, into a Robotaxi. I do this for a living. I teach, I preach, I talk about it, and still, my palms got sweaty. I was nervous because I’m a human being, and new stuff can be kind of scary. You add on top of that, if we’re in a company and our identity is being threatened, this is really important stuff. So I think the very first thing is: recognize these three categories of shadows exist, and don’t expect they’re just going to work themselves out without a lot of pain. Because they won’t. So we need to have people being thoughtful about it. We need to have government and regulators helping out with it. The alternative is very dark.

Brandon: Well, you mentioned AI which is on everyone’s mind these days. Are there lessons from your case studies that could be applied to helping us think through the ongoing development of AI systems more wisely?

Scott: I sure hope so. If I just echo off the idea of what it really took for the automotive age to come in, it took technology like traffic lights. It took norms. Like when we get to an intersection, we turn in a wide way so other cars can come. It took regulation, like driver’s licenses. So I’d argue, by analogy, we might want to think about: what are technologies that can control or limit, what are norms that ought to be followed related to ethics, and what are regulations that ought to be put in place to make sure some of the downsides that could come with AI? You can think about a lot of them. We don’t see too many of them. Now, I can’t say that I’m particularly optimistic that we’re going to see a lot of this in at least the short term, but I hope in the medium and longer term, we see more of it. Because otherwise, I think it’s going to get pretty ugly. Maybe we need that. Maybe we need a period of ugly before we get to the period of beauty. I don’t know. There’s a lot that I love about AI. I love playing with it. I use it in my classes. There’s many, many beautiful things about it. But like everything, there’s a shadow to it.

Brandon: Are there points at which we start to realize that certain innovations are just not worth it? I mean, I think of now the kind of backlash against social media, which I think rightly so has been growing in part due to the work that Jonathan Haidt and others are doing about the disruptive — not disruptive but destructive.

Scott: Dictionary style. See, there you go. This is why Clay hated the word in the end. But it is. It is, dictionary style, disruptive and destructive. Sorry for talking over you.

Brandon: But then you take a more extreme example of something like smoking, where tobacco for centuries was very popularly used. You could call it an innovation. Its widespread use, that was solving a particular problem, adding value for people, helping them at least experience in their own subjective views a better quality of life. Now it’s almost universally recognized as harmful, right? And so I wonder whether you see ways in which innovations, at some point, just we start to judge their overall benefit as really being not worth their costs.

Scott: You’ve named some examples, and I think there’s others. McDonald’s is a chapter in the book. And so McDonald’s is not without its critics. I think people at McDonald’s would be the first to admit. One of McDonald’s main products that it sells is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola’s purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. There are a lot of people who say and also push a lot of sugar and create a lot of things that are hard to recycle. And so I think there are lots of categories of things where genies get out of bottles and we say, what have we done? And again, in my view, I’m not an expert in public policy, so admit your limitations. But in my view, this is the role of government: to say that there is a tragedy of the commons that might come. There are market forces that, if they push too far, actually lead to consumer downsides. You have addictive things that really make our lives worse. I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt and all of his work. To my point about AI—I’m channeling him—he says, we’re about to do it again. We’ve seen this movie now. The idea that we’re going to allow AI companies to create friend-bots for kids is horrific. Horrific. Just an awful idea. So, again, I think for many of these categories, there’s a really important role for governments and for regulators to check some of our worst instincts as humans or as business leaders.

Brandon: If I may ask you to extend your framework of disruptive innovation to another domain which is religion and spirituality, do you see ways in which religions that are trying to survive in a changing world, particularly in the modern West where you see simply a lot of decline in the importance of religion, what lessons could religious institutions or spiritual organizations, communities learn from this theory of disruptive innovation that might be helpful? Do you perhaps see any signs where maybe some of this is at work already?

Scott: One of my favorite things about doing interviews is when you’re asked a question you’d never been asked before. This is a question I’ve never been asked before, and I love that. I am not an expert in this space, so I will not be able to give you here are three examples of what different religious organizations are doing. But if I go to the theory and go to the models, what would it tell me? It would say, well, this idea of non-consumption. You certainly have a growing population of people, if you just look at the statistics, who are not choosing to engage with religion. I would always want to understand why. What is the barrier? Is it that it takes too much time, they perceive it as something that doesn’t fit their lifestyle, et cetera? And can you then innovate in ways to make things simpler, more accessible? More affordable isn’t quite the right metaphor. But that would be a thing that you think about. And what I would then look for is, okay, what are people doing on — despite the downsides, what are people doing on platforms like TikTok and YouTube and so on to try and engage populations in different forms of ways?

I would also want to look for different geographies and say, you’ve got religions that have very strong bases in particular geographies and almost no presence in other geographies. How do you think differently about playing in different geographies? I would think about that time-tested view, that magic happens at intersections when you bring different mindsets and backgrounds together. What might happen if you intersect religion with other fields? Maybe the revival of independent bookstore or something that nobody saw coming, is there something that we can learn from that about how you might revive religion in particular communities? So those would be at least some of the things that I would think about. This idea that there’s always something to learn from different places, I think, is a really powerful thing. One of the things I always will tell innovators: if you’re ever stuck on anything, get out of where you are. Go to a different place. Go to a different industry. Read a magazine in a different field. Stop reading the nonfiction book you’re reading, and read a fiction book. Stop reading the fiction book you’re reading; read a non-fiction book. If you’ve got a problem in your head, in your head, you’ll see a connection when you go and look in those different places.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Lastly, were there any big surprises as you were doing the research on this book? I mean, there’s certainly a lot of history here. Anything that perhaps changed your mind about some aspect of the theory, or the model, or added a complication or nuance that you weren’t expecting?

Scott: Well, the thing that really struck me, the fourth question we’ve talked about a few times, is innovation a universal good? Look, I’m a believer. I’m a proselytizer. I go and spread the gospel of disruption. I really do think it makes the world a better place. The research has made me more humble, that there is another side to it. The shadow that we talked about is a very real thing, and there are good reasons to have things that can buffer and catch some of that shadow. So I go in now, eyes wide open, that yes, disruption remains a powerful force for democratization, development, and progress—and it comes at a cost.

Brandon: Well, let me leave you with the last word. Perhaps, if there’s anything else that you really want to drive home about your book, any other key points that we’ve not discussed yet that you’d really want to make sure that you share with our audience, what might they be?

Scott: Oh, we’ve covered a lot of great territory. I think the one thing that I would just emphasize: it is at its core an optimistic book. So it is easy right now to not feel optimistic for lots of reasons. There’s so much going on. Some of it is pretty ugly in some places. I am a believer that disruption drives progress. Disruption enables more people to solve more problems, do new things, and live better lives. It’s easy to feel fear. The status quo bias, the king’s proclamation from 1548—we don’t live it, but we still kind of feel it. My wish for is that people find the fun in it. I love playing. I love playing with new technologies. I love playing with new ideas. When you view something as fun as opposed to something that’s fearful, you just look at things a lot differently. So that’s a message I hope they take from the book.

Brandon: That’s great. That’s great. Well, Scott, thank you so much. It’s been such a delight. Where can we drive our audience to learn more about your work?

Scott: So LinkedIn is the social media platform that I spend my time on. There’s also a companion website for the book, epicdisruptions.com. Disruptions is plural. There are 11 of them in the book after all. Epicdisruptions.com.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. Thank you, Scott. This has been great.

Scott: Brandon, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

What if one of the most dangerous myths of our time is not that AI will replace us, but that it is even a thing at all?

This season of the Beauty at Work podcast is about the beauty and burdens of innovation: how new technologies expand our horizons, but also erode our attention, agency, and sense of meaning. AI is arguably the most dazzling innovation of our time, but it’s also one of the most spiritually charged. It promises salvation and tempts us toward idolatry. Why is this happening and how do we best move forward?

In this episode, I’m joined by three unusually incisive thinkers to help me answer these questions—Jaron Lanier, Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black.

Jaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality and is widely regarded as a founding figure of the field. He has served as a leading critic of digital culture and social media. In 2018, Wired Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in technology of the previous 25 years. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Jaron is currently the Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which spells out “Octopus”, in reference to his fascination with cephalopod neurology. He is also a musician and composer who has recently performed or recorded with Sara Bareilles, T Bone Burnett, Jon Batiste, Philip Glass, and others.

Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead at Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, Co-Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute, Co-Founder of Radical Exchange Foundation, and Co-Founder of the Faith, Family and Technology Network. He’s also co-author of two books, Radical Markets and Plurality.

Taylor Black has a background in philosophy, law and entrepreneurship, and is Director of AI and Venture Ecosystems at Microsoft, and the Founding Director of a new Institute on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at the Catholic University of America.

Each of my guests is speaking solely in a personal capacity—their views are their own and do not represent Microsoft.

We discuss what kind of story we are telling ourselves about what AI is and what it’s for; why our language about AI so quickly slips into theology; and what it would mean to develop ways of thinking about and using AI systems in ways that are more relational and human.

Some of the key themes we cover are:

• Why “AI” is as much an ideology as a technology

• The buried origin story: cybernetics vs. “AI” as rival cultural metaphors

• Why thinking of AI as a thing can lead to mystification, passivity, and despair. And why a better metaphor would be AI as collaboration: something closer to Wikipedia than to a new god

• Can we make our technologies more like the Talmud (many voices, named and situated)?

• Thinking more seriously about not just regulation but culture, meaning, and integration

• How letting AI do our thinking is making us dumber—and how initiatives at the Vatican are helping propose better ways of designing and using AI systems

• The impoverishment of our stories: what are the implications of the fact that so many tech builders imagine the future through Terminator and The Matrix?

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video below, or read an unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right, guys. Welcome to Beautiful Beards, I guess. Glen, sorry, you didn’t get the memo.

Glen: Oh, no.

Brandon: For our listeners, we got three bearded guys and Glen. No, welcome to Beauty At Work. We are exploring this season the beauty and burdens of innovation. I wanted to have the three of you all on this call because you’ve written and said some really insightful things about this topic, and I think it’s really crucial for us to explore that.

But before we jump into talking about innovation and AI and the beauty and burdens of AI, I want to ask you about beauty. Specifically, I want to have you all recount a memory of beauty—anything from your early lives, anything that comes to your mind. Is there a memory of a profound encounter with beauty that you recall? Perhaps, Taylor, I’ll start by asking you.

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. So when I think of beauty, of course, I think in the natural world. I was grateful enough to grow up in the Seattle area, so I had a lot of that growing up. But the thing actually that came to mind when you asked that question is actually Tolkien’s writing with regard to kind of almost immediate experience of beauty, particularly in the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, when he’s talking about the idyllic nature of the Shire in particular. In fact, reading that growing up, with all of the tangible examples around me of course of natural beauty, it kind of helped shape my worldview in such a way that I studied philosophy later in life in order to find an understanding of the world that was as rich as Tolkien’s writing about the natural beauty of the world. That’s my answer to that. There’re several different places in Tolkien where he talks about that rich beauty as mediated by language that I had already encountered out in the world.

Brandon: Wow. It’s interesting because there are some interesting tensions with technology and Tolkien’s own views. Maybe we can get into that. Glen, how about you? What strikes you? What comes to your mind?

Glen: I remember when I was in my early teens, I went to Berlin, to the Pergamon Museum, and I saw the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. I think what I remember most vividly about it was that I had gone to various historical sites and seen ancient things, but they had either been sort of ruins or sort of very imperfect recreations of various kinds. I think this is the first time that I came to grips with the notion that people in very, very distant times and places had sort of things of profound awe and encounters with awe that would touch me had I been there. And so I sort of felt like an empathetic connection to their sense of awe and beauty, that I really had never quite managed at that age to get through the imagination I’d had through other pathways. I think that definitely engaged me with history more profoundly.

Brandon: Wow. It seems to us to resonate with your work on plurality and that recognition of the diverse ways in which we can all be attuned to something beyond, right? Jaron, what memory comes to your mind?

Jaron: The one that came to my mind when you asked the question was the first time I heard William Byrd’s Motet: Ave Verum Corpus, which, if you’re not familiar with it, go listen to it. There’s a lot of words, so I’m not sure which one to recommend.

William Byrd was a composer who lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare. Although, apparently, they never met. But he was the other sort of renowned artist from that milieu. He was part of the underground Catholic scene. And so motets are chamber choir pieces designed to be soft enough that they won’t be heard by passersby. So it’s just six voices, not a whole choir. There was a school of Catholic composers at that time who just — I don’t know what was going on with them, but they achieved some kind of incredible synthesis of serenity with the stirrings of this western tendency to swell and build, to have a structure, not just a constancy — which was, to tell a story in music, is a particular thing that started to happen in Western classical music. It’s also just, I don’t know. You have to hear it. It’s the most luminous polyphony that’s ever been written.

Glen: William Byrd’s Motet, and what did you say after that, Jaron?

Jaron: It’s called Ave Verum Corpus. It just happens to be the text that the motet was set to. But give it a listen. Yeah, six parts.

Brandon: What struck you about it when you first heard it? What makes that resonate with you till today?

Jaron: So let’s say there are some types of spiritual music that are trying to — I say ‘trying’ because I don’t think anything human is ever perfect. Maybe nothing ever is ever perfect. They’re approaching some sort of serenity, some sort of still place that’s outside of time and process and yearnings. But then there’s another kind that’s very earthy. Like, oh, I don’t know, Yoruba ritual music or something. A lot of our Jewish music is like that.

What’s amazing about Ave Verum Corpus is it’s both, which is not something that you come upon that often. Like I say, it’s got this very human sense of swelling and yearning, and yet it also has an unmistakable calm center. Also, there’s a kind of purity. In western tradition, what we do is we combine structure that’s really unique to the west, which is things like polyphony. Particularly, we have multiple lines, multiple things going on at once that go together, and chord changes. All of that stuff is kind of the unique signatures of Western music. What it tends to do is, it pulls the music away from being perfectly in flow and perfectly in tune, because you have to reconcile these abstractions of structure with the musical flow. That’s our problem here in the West. I don’t think any piece of music has ever succeeded as well with that, until maybe some things in the jazz tradition. I’ll say there’s kind of interesting things in the jazz tradition that do it. But Ave Verum Corpus, check it out. It’s just wonderful. It’s short. It’s a radio-length piece.

Brandon: Right. Yeah. What strikes me is, I suppose, that kind of integration or maybe unity that you’re alluding to there, which is, of course, part of your title at Microsoft, which is Prime Unifying Scientist. I’m curious about this.

Jaron: Yeah, I think Glen came up with that. It’s long story. But yeah.

Glen: Did I come up with it, Jaron?

Jaron: You might have. I mean, alright, so the idea—

Glen: I came up with the idea of being octopus of some form, and then I think you figured out what it stands stood for or something like that. So, yeah.

Jaron: You know what? Okay. Yeah, what happened was, I report to them and Kevin Scott, who’s the Chief Technology Officer. So I’m in the office of the Chief Technology Officer. Kevin had, at one point, said to me, “I would name you chief scientist. But we already have our chief scientist, who’s Eric Horvitz, and so you need to be something else.” And then Glen was saying, “Well, since it’s OCTO—I’ve been interested in cephalopods, and I studied them and what not—so you should be octopus.” Then there’s this question, what is the “PUS”? There were a bunch of candidates, and Kevin chose prime unifying scientist.

Glen: They call this a backronym in the trade, when you come up with the acronym first and then what it stands for.

Jaron: Backronym, yeah. But I think prime unifying scientist might have been yours. I mean, Kevin chose it. I’m good with it. I think a lot of my thing at Microsoft is being sort of both in and out of it, and having a weird title is good for what I do.

Brandon: So it seems pretty apt then in that sense. I mean, unity is interesting, aesthetic, ideal, you know? I mean, it’s a transcendental and so on. But it’s also behind the grand unification theory. There are ways in which it is something that absolutely—

Jaron: Yeah, the grand unification theory does not exist, by the way. So we have to be careful.

Brandon: Right, right.

Glen: It really hits Jaron in the gut.

Jaron: I’ve worked on that one. It’s very—

Glen: When you hear people talking about it, it really hits you in the gut, right, Jaron? G-U-T.

Jaron: Yeah, the thing is, you know, I also work in that area. People have been trying to do that for more than three quarters of a century. It’s just a tough one. We just haven’t found it.

Brandon: Yeah, I know. Yeah, but it is a powerful ideal. It does seem to be something that motivates a lot of people and has disillusioned a lot of people too. Well, I want to ask you, Jaron. I mean, you’ve been involved in this field. If we could jump into talking about innovation and technology, particularly AI. I mean, you’ve been there since the earliest days with Marvin Minsky and the others who helped define the field.

Say a bit about what the atmosphere was like in those early days. I suppose, what was your experience of this field? I think you’ve had qualms about the term ‘artificial intelligence.’ What was your relationship like to some of those early pioneers, and how did the field evolve in your sense?

Jaron: Well, this is a whole long tail we don’t really have time for. But the briefest version is, I was very fortunate when I was quite young to have Marvin Minsky as a mentor. I wasn’t his student. Actually, he was my boss. I had a research job as a very young kid in a research lab at MIT because I went to college early, I just ended up. It was a weird thing. But at any rate, Marvin was part of a sort of a gang, an academic gang, with a certain idea about what computer should be. That was very informed by his interactions with Golden Age science fiction writers, especially Isaac Asimov, with also some others. Marvin was a real believer in computers as these things that would come alive and become a new species. A lot of the mythology and terminology and just the personality of AI culture really stems from Marvin as the prototype.

But the term AI actually had come about as part of a rivalry between academic gangs. In the early ‘50s, there was an intellectual and computer scientist named Norbert Wiener, who is incredibly prominent and was considered one of the really major celebrity public intellectuals. He had used a term to describe where he thought computers would go, which was “cybernetics.” The idea in cybernetics is that you don’t think of the computer as a thing that stands and has its own reality, but you think of it as part of an interactive system. He is saying that the best way to think about computers of the future is not like the Turing machine, which is this monolithic thing that’s defined on its own terms, but instead as like a network of thermometers, a network of little measuring devices that measure the world and measure each other and form this big tangle.

Mathematically, the two ideas are equivalent. But the Wiener way of doing it doesn’t give the computer its own separate reality, but instead considers it as part of a connected thing. Cybernetics comes from the Greek “cyber” which is navigation. The idea is that, by interacting with the world, this thing would navigate itself and the world. So that was cybernetics. He was very concerned with what effect that would have on people. He wrote a very prescient book, I think, in 1950—could it be that early? I think so—called The Human Use of Human Beings, which was about how, as soon as you have devices like this in the world, they’ll change people. People will use them to change people. It’ll bring about this new age of mass behavior manipulation that was never possible before. So he saw that right at the very, very dawn of computer science. It was kind of like—

Glen: 1950, Jaron, yeah.

Jaron: Yeah, 1950.

Glen: One of my favorite quotes from that book is—it actually came from an earlier version of it—he says that there are some people who believe that studying this science will lead to more understanding of human nature than it will to the concentration of power. And he said, while I commend their optimism, I must say, writing in 1947, that I do not share it. That power is by its nature always concentrated in the most unscrupulous of hands.

Jaron: Oh, my God. So look. Yeah, so Wiener, he just got the game. He cracked the game at the start. This is really only a few years after Turing. Von Neumann had defined what their idea of what a computer was, which was the thing that stepped our — so the first and, by far, the dominant abstraction for the computer came from them.

Now, in the ‘50s, Marvin and a few other of his compatriots were — obviously this was kind of like in physics these days, the string theorists versus the quantum loop gravity people or something like that. They were just like these rival gangs, right? They were like, “Cybernetics is taking over. We need our own term.” Artificial intelligence was actually initially defined at this very famous conference that happened at Dartmouth, and I believe ‘58—

Glen: ‘54

Brandon: McCarthy or something, right?

Glen: I think it was ‘54, yeah.

Jaron: ‘54.

Brandon: Was it McCarthy?

Jaron: Yeah, McCarthy coined it. I mean, McCarthy, too. Not as well. I mean, Marvin was really the personification of that more than anyone else, but McCarthy. So now the thing is, the Wiener way of thinking about computers as this giant mess tangle of things measuring each other, today we’d call that a neural net. I don’t know. In those days, it was called connectionist often, which is actually a term I kind of like. So because of this rivalry, Marvin and the other people were like, “We have to kill it.” And so Marvin and this other guy who’s great, Seymour Papert, they wrote a book called Perceptrons. The idea is that, “We’re going to mathematically prove that these guys are hopeless.” And like, “Screw them. It’s Turing machines from now on. We’re just going to double down on the thing of the computer as its own thing.” And so they proved that, in a certain absolute sense, their mathematical limitations to what you can make out of that style—

Glen: Out of single layer neural networks, yeah.

Jaron: Yeah, and it’s a funny thing. Because, yeah, sure, it’s a valid proof. But it’s so narrow that it really served more as a rhetorical and a political weapon than an actual tool for math, or engineering, or physics, or anything. But anyway, it destroyed those people. All the people working in that area were like very out of it and underground and unfunded for decades, you know. And so, a lot of what the Marvin people worked on was called symbolic. Because their idea is that it’s this abstraction, but it’s abstraction made flesh. This thing will become real. And so there was all this stuff about formal logic, and we’re going to describe the world.

Anyway, so then, of course, much more recently in this century, just when computers got big enough to have larger versions of that stuff, everything turned into neural networks. That’s what the current AI is all about. For the most part, AI is this rubric term that’s just applied to whatever. It’s a marketing term for funding computer science. It’s not actually a technical term that excludes anything. But most of what we call AI is exactly that stuff. But now it’s called AI. So it’s kind of ironic. It’s sort of like the conquerors. It was sort of like they colonized their enemy and absorbed it into their own rhetoric. But the enemy they absorbed actually had a more realistic and fruitful, in my view, overall philosophy. So there’s something that went very wrong.

Brandon: I mean, you have a provocatively titled piece, There is No AI. Right? Could you say a little bit about what your argument is there?

Glen: Jaron and I also were doing this called AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology, which is, you know.

Jaron: Yeah, that’s right. We wrote it, yeah.

Brandon: Yeah, say more about that. Because I think both of you share, I think, that the idea of this is: it’s not a thing. It’s not an entity. You’re talking about a system.

Jaron: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people in the AI world, especially the young men who work at AI startups and what we call frontier model groups, a lot of them not only think that AI is really a thing that’s there, but that it’s like an entity that could be conscious, that it’ll turn into a life form. Maybe that life form is better than people and should inherit the earth. I run into these crazy things where like some guy will say, “I think having human babies is unethical because it takes energy away from the AI babies. We need to really focus on. And if we don’t do that, the AI of the future will smite us.” It becomes very medieval. Also, a lot of times, at the end of the day, you realize, oh, this person has a girlfriend who wants a baby. They’re going through the age-old male attempt to avoid having a baby as long as possible and using AI in the service of that, which is fine. Whatever. It’s their problem. I’ll stay out of it.

But anyway, the thing is, you can think about AI equally in two different ways. If you think about figure-ground pictures, there’s an artist named M. C. Escher who’s famous for this. Most people have seen an optical illusion, where you either see two vases or a lamp and either are equally good. Just like with any big AI model, like ChatGPT or something, you can either think of it as a thing by itself, which is the sort of Minsky AI, original AI concept. Or you can think of it in the Norbert Wiener way. Pardon me. The Norbert Wiener way would be, it’s a bunch of connections of which people are a part. And if you think of it that way, what you end up with is thinking of AI as sort of a version of the Wikipedia with a bunch of statistics added. Basically, it’s a bunch of data from people. It’s combined together into this amalgam, but with a bunch of statistics as part of it. The statistics being embodied in the little connection, these pieces, if you like, of the neural net. And if you think of it as a collaboration, I think there’s no absolute truth to one or the other.

Just like if you want to try to use absolute logic or empiricism to talk about whether people are really conscious, good luck with that. You can’t. That’s a matter of faith. God is a matter of faith. There’s a lot of stuff that is not provably correct, either through logic or empiricism. And yet, the thing about consciousness is — I mean, I don’t know. If we weren’t conscious, we wouldn’t be situated in a particular moment in time, or even there wouldn’t be macro-object. There would just be particles. I mean, I think consciousness, in a sense, like the Descartes, I think therefore I am. But it’s not about thinking. It’s just about experiencing. You experience, and that is the thing we’re talking about. But if you want to deny experience, all this talking could also be just understood as a bunch of particles in their courses. So just that there’s anything here is consciousness, as opposed to just flow without stuff. But anyway, let’s leave that aside. All of these things are matters of faith. Anytime there’s a matter of faith, you can go either way with it. You might think an animal is a person or not, or a fetus is a person or not. These are really hard-edged cases. Anyway, when you can’t know for sure, I think it’s legitimate to rely on things like pragmatism, intuition, faith, even aesthetics, since this is a beauty broadcast.

Anyway, what I would say is that believing that AI isn’t there, that the AI is a form of collaboration of people, more like the Wikipedia than some new god or something, if you believe that, there are some benefits that are undeniable.

Benefit number one is, you can use AI better. If you keep in mind that that’s what you really have, you can design prompts that work better. I’ve been telling this to Microsoft customers, and it works for them. Like instead of saying, “Oh, great Oracle, tell me what to do,” say, “What has worked for other people?” All of a sudden, you get a clearer answer that has less slop. I mean, just actually work with what it is.

Benefit number two: there’s a widespread feeling, because of the literal rhetoric coming from us, coming from the tech community, that people are going to be obsolete. Especially among young people, there’s so much depression. It’s just crazy talking to undergraduates now, how many of them feel like life is pointless and their generation is the last one. They’re just going to die when the AI takes over. They have no jobs. They have no purpose. Nobody will care about them. That’s stupid. As soon as you realize that AI can equally be understood as a collaboration, then they can equally understand that there’ll be all these new jobs creating new kinds of data. And what’s amazing about that is, every time some AI person tells me, “Oh, but we have all the data we need. We can already train super intelligence,” whatever the hell that means, which is nothing.

Brandon: It’s another statement of faith.

Jaron: Yeah, oh boy, that’s like a medieval statement of faith. That’s, I don’t know. Oh, the golden calf. That’s what that is. It’s older than medieval. But anyway, the thing is, if you think that people might create valuable data in the future, it means that you also think that there might be forms of creativity we haven’t yet foreseen—which means that we don’t have all the data we need to train the AIs, which means that we aren’t the smartest possible people of all time, which means that there might be room for people in the future to do things that happens to create data that expands what the AI models can do, which suggests this open future of expanding creativity. And I love that vision.

The great fallacy of believing that computers can become arbitrarily smart is this idea that, relatively, people will not change, will not be creative, will not move. What a horrible thing to believe. I sort of feel like that’s a sin. Losing faith in the creativity of people has to be some kind of dark, dark sin and almost like a form of violence on the future. A lot of people in AI are into long term-ism and like, “We have to think about the future.” What is more harmful from the future than that fallacy? I can’t imagine any more destructive thought of the future.

Glen: Audrey Tang, my collaborator, we made a film about her life. It’s titled Good Enough Ancestor, because that’s how she likes to describe herself. She likes to be a good enough ancestor. Because if you’re too good of an ancestor, you actually reduce the freedom of the future because they feel the need to worship or exalt what you did. You just want to be good enough that you leave paths open to them, but you don’t predetermine what they, you know.

Brandon: That’s extraordinary, yeah. Jaron, thank you. Those were really, yeah, fantastic. Glen, I mean, your argument, I think, builds in many ways and parallels what Jaron have been talking about, in terms of you seeing AI more as something like capitalism, more like a system of collaboration between people rather than a thing. Could you talk a little bit about just your own journey into this? I recall you grew up in — you’re also in the tech industry, or your parents were tech CEOs, if I remember correctly. I’m just curious to know your path into this world of radical markets and radical exchange, and then how that vision of pluralism that you’ve been developing with Audrey Tang is now shaping your sense of AI and its future.

Glen: Well, yeah. So I grew up in a neo-atheist family in Silicon Valley, raised on very much the same type of classical science fiction works that Jaron was referring to. I was involved in sort of Ayn Rand world for a while. I was involved in the socialist world for a while. I became an economist. All of these things are very abstracted from sort of faith and real, grounded communities. But the thing I found that was kind of surprising to me is that most of the other people who sort of went from one apparently opposite abstraction to another, and were like alienated from any sort of grounded community, were mostly Jews raised in secular environments by grandparents who had fled the Holocaust, just like I was. And so I thought, “Well, maybe I’m not actually escaping my past. Maybe I’m just finding my own way to it.” It was at that point that I decided that I needed to learn something about where I came from and connect with Israel, connect with Jewish history. I ended up on a faculty of Jewish Studies briefly.

Then I had the opportunity to meet Audrey Tang, which really changed my life for a couple of reasons. One is that I think that Audrey is an incredibly spiritual person. There’s this character in the Tao Te Ching, which is her holy book, that is sort of like the Buddha and Buddhism, or Jesus in the Christian tradition, called the “shungren.” It’s like a mythical sage. Audrey really embodies that. And yet, she also just intellectually has some of the highest horsepower of anyone I’ve ever met and knows so many different things. I think I wasn’t ready to meet someone with that kind of spiritual depth and to accept them and to understand them, until I met someone who was also at that intellectual level. Because I had come in this intellectual way, and so unless someone was there intellectually, I wasn’t able to accept their wisdom. And so that was one thing about Audrey.

The second thing is that she was from Taiwan. Taiwan is a very different atmosphere. The division between technology and science on the one hand and religion on the other that exists in the West, it’s just not a feature of the Taiwanese environment. It was really interesting to encounter a culture where those things were synthesized rather than in conflict. That really gradually made me come to feel that the disjuncture between religion and spirituality on the one hand, and science and technology on the other in the Anglosphere was an important root cause of many of the problems that Jaron was getting at.

So let’s take his example of cybernetics. So why did the AI thing win out over cybernetics? It didn’t do it because it was the first there. Cybernetics was way more dominant in the ‘50s. It didn’t do it because of its explanatory power. Because, as Jaron points out, on the actual apparently falsifiable points, clearly, the AI people were wrong. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Now, all the AI people would say that the AI people were wrong. It had to do with the way in which the rhetoric worked in a particular cultural milieu.

Brandon: In a secularized world that is deprived of any sort of, you know.

Glen: Everyone is like, economics, agents, utility, you know. That’s the way that everyone likes to look at stuff. Cybernetics is like, it’s got a lot of just weird, mysterious shit going on, you know. I mean, there’s all these things flowing. There’s kind of these things that can be thought of as like an agent a little bit, but they’re actually just part of the — that’s what complexity science is. That’s what cybernetics is. That’s what’s like actually going on in these systems. But if you try to explain it in a scientistic reductionist way—briefly, casually—it just comes off as like mumbo jumbo, and nobody can understand what you’re talking about. So I think the only way to describe it sort of briefly and intuitively to people is to use some kind of spiritual framework.

Brandon: I mean, just to have more resonance in Eastern societies then.

Glen: Yeah, and I think it’s because of the integration with spirituality and science in those societies. Like for example, quantum mechanics is another thing that’s very much like complexity science. It’s one of arguably the first real complexity science thing. Quantum mechanics has this weird particle wave thing. Nobody can make sense of it. Like Richard Feynman was like, “What the...” But for Taoists, it totally makes sense. Because in Taoism, there’s air slash water, and then there’s Earth. They have totally opposite principles. Like Earth collides with something, and it stops. Air goes faster when it encounters an obstacle, right?

Brandon: Right. Yeah. Neil Theise has got this great book Notes on Complexity, where he argues, from a Zen Buddhist perspective, quantum mechanics makes perfect sense because it has those similar kinds of—

Glen: Exactly. And so I think that if we’re going to try to have a discourse about technology without bringing in religion, the natural consequence of that is: we’re going to end up defaulting to really bad and harmful metaphors that come out of econ, rather than to the sort of thoughtful perspectives that Jaron was trying to welcome us towards.

Brandon: Or to build golden calves, right, which is so I think the tendency.

Glen: Yeah.

Brandon: Taylor, if I could ask you. I mean, you’ve had an interesting path from, well, Tolkien to philosophy and law, and then business, and into AI. How has that journey shaped your sense of what this thing called AI is, and what’s beautiful about it, and also what the seductions are of this particular kind of beauty that people are seeking after and building this thing?

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. Well, actually, kind of to riff off of what Glen was just saying with regard to bringing spirituality into a more explanatory understanding of things, my love of Lonergan kind of led me to epistemology, of all places. Which is, at least in the classic tradition, when you understand something new or grasping being, which means an understanding of reality and understanding of truth in some fashion, which also has analogs into beauty, of course, because you can recognize it as beautiful. In many ways, I think that understanding epistemology in that sense, where, if you actually understand something, you’re grasping a metaphysical reality, necessarily throws you into the spiritual conversation. Because a lot of spiritual traditions have very strong understandings of what that means, along with, of course, the scientific tradition.

Where I see this kind of reflecting back into AI and ends up being our own understanding of our understanding versus this thing that seems to understand, at least in some ways analogously to how we understand, particularly kind of at a more surface level, if we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about our understanding. And similar to Jaron, I found outsized ramifications of working with our product leaders in differentiating the way in which we know from the way in which AI works in order to create better product experiences for our customers and our users. Because we understand what understanding is, and AI is not that. And being able to shape that ends up being just having outsize impact on product building and customer satisfaction as part of that as well.

Brandon: Yeah, I think it’s really remarkable. I mean, there’s something about understanding this. I’ve spent the last few years studying scientists, physicists, and biologists, mainly trying to get at what drives them to do the work they do. Many of them see themselves as primarily being in the business of chasing after a certain kind of beauty. They call it the beauty of understanding, which is that grasping of the hidden order of things, the inner logic of things. There is a profound aesthetic experience of unity or harmony or fit, without which one does not even know that one has arrived at understanding something, right? And so there’s something to that experience which is very hard to then sort of replicate with machines and so on.

Taylor, you’ve also written this fascinating piece on beauty. You call it, “Beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. You draw on Balthasar and Goethe and Peeper, and argue that beauty is a transcendental, and the world speaks to us in symbols. We need to contemplate beauty rather than grasp at it. I’m curious to know how that understanding of beauty relates to the kind of beauty that perhaps might be driving the pursuit of something like AGI. There is a certain kind of seduction it seems in the kind of quest that going to be in a world in which we can eliminate all human suffering, get rid of cancer, and climate change, et cetera. It seems like there’s a tension between two different modalities of beauty there. I wonder if you could speak to that.

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. I think that the directional ability to aim at those big things is a pursuit of a certain “sort of beauty.” But the pursuit of it is not the finding of it. I found in all of my innovation work that the best innovators are ones who are actually able to open themselves up in a humble sort of way to the experience of the customer, to the experience of the world around them—such that the conditions are set for that understanding of beauty or for that moment of insight. Without that kind of part and parcel of the humble pursuit of our unrestricted desire to know, you aren’t able to set the conditions for an opening or an experience of beauty. Because you aren’t looking for it. You’ve gone past it. You’re building frameworks of abstraction, rather than being able to live in the intellectual moment that needs to happen for an insight, for a recognition of beauty to happen.

One of my favorite concrete examples of this is, I have a three year old. The three year old will try multiple combinations of a particular thing in order to get at what they’re trying to do. And when they get it, at that moment of insight that I did it, that delight that kind of comes through as part of that, is identical to their experience of a flower or experience of a plane with a puppy, where they recognize the goodness, the beauty of the thing in which they’re working. I think that’s the overlap of the of the transcendental as we understand them, right? There are different aspects of that same recognition of reality in some ways.

Brandon: Yeah. Well, I suppose the challenge is, how do we prioritize reality in this particular context?

(outro)

Brandon: Everybody, that’s a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. In the next half, we’re going to turn to the spiritual dimensions of technology, how it has become a kind of religion, what faith traditions might teach us about building wisely, and how we can recover the human face behind our machines.

See you next time.

PART 2

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everyone. This is the second half of my conversation with Jaron Lanier, Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black. Check out the first half, if you haven’t already. In this second half, we’re going to ask whether technology itself has become a religion. Jaron argues that we’ve begun to worship our own creations, and calls for a new model inspired by the Talmud. We’re going to explore how ancient traditions—from Judaism, to Taoism, to Catholic social thought—might help us restore meaning, plurality, and beauty in our technological age.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Jaron, you’ve written that we’re again in this context in which technology has become a religion. And it seems like there’s a certain kind of seduction to our understanding of AI and new technologies that is a sort of idolatry. You’ve argued for the need to make our technologies more like the Talmud. Could you say a bit about that?

Jaron: Yes, so I mentioned earlier that you can think of big AI models as forms of collaboration between people, a little like the Wikipedia with a bunch of statistics. Okay. So an interesting thing about the Wikipedia is I knew the founders. I used to argue that there was this fantasy in the computer world, which was very more leftist at the time. It was very different back then. The idea is that we’re going to help the oppressed dissident in a difficult regime. And so we want everybody to have pseudonyms. We don’t want to know who the real people are. But the problem with that is that, when you forget people and you turn them into a mush, you concentrate the power on whoever owns the computer that runs the mush, right? And so very much, as Norbert Wiener warned, there are times when you want to do that, of course. But to do it as a general principle actually undermines humanity. And so there’s no easy universal answer, which shouldn’t surprise us.

But at any rate, the Wikipedia created this illusion of what’s sometimes called the view from nowhere, this idea of the single perspective, instead of a multiplicity of them. And so then they would say as well, if you want to have a bunch of people collaborating, that’s going to happen. There’s no way around it. And like, there is a way around it. It’s ancient. So in Jewish tradition, there’s this document called the Talmud, which is one of our central cultural documents. The idea of it is that you have generation after generation of people adding to it. But at each generation, there’s a particular place on the page, a geometric designation, where this is from ancient Babylon, these are the medieval people, and so on. And so you have this amazing amalgam across centuries and centuries in a single document, where it’s very clear that these are different perspectives. They’re all on the same page. And this was done when writing stuff down was expensive, you know? It would have been cheaper to just combine these voices. There was an absolute economic motivation to not do this. Brevity was a matter of severe economic motivation in those days. And so the fact that they did this is incredible.

Now, part of it is just that Jews like to argue, and we want to be individuals. So a part of it is just our character. But the point is: this is a proof of concept that predates Greece. I mean, this is like ancient. So what is hard about this? What’s hard about it is just that this present ideology of creating this new kind of golden calf, this abstract thing, so everybody else will be subsumed by it, but will be the magic tech boys who get to run it will be the elite special ones. Which never is true, by the way. You always end up getting screwed by your own monster. That’s another ancient idea that has been known for a long time. So that’s a fallacy too. But it’s a different fallacy.

Anyway, yeah, so the Talmud is a wonderful prototype for how to combine people without losing people, or combine human efforts without losing human identity. There is room for anonymity. People can vote. The voting can be anonymous, but you still know who the other citizens are. You don’t pretend that there wasn’t anybody. Money anonymizes. You lose track of where a particular dollar has been. It’s not even meaningful. That probably helps people cooperate despite their feuds. A measure of anonymity actually can be good. But as a general principle, it’s easy to overdo it and really lose people. That’s kind of what we — we did it with the Wikipedia. All the AI things train on Wikipedia. It’s sort of inadvertently legitimized this idea that losing people is somehow a form of productivity, when it’s exactly the reverse.

Brandon: Yeah, because it creates that illusion that there is an entity that is able to somehow provide a synthetic answer, right? I think the challenge, I suppose, is once we’ve erased authorship, once we’ve erased the sort of individual sources of all of this knowledge, is it meaningful to talk about responsible AI, or ethical AI, or anything of that sort? I mean, Glen, I’m curious to know what you might think about. I mean, you seem very bullish about the prospects of AI systems in terms of fostering democracy and pluralism. I’m just curious. Given this context, how do you see us concretely being able to bring about that sort of recognition of the human collaboration that is hiding currently behind these illusions?

Glen: Do any of you guys know what the oldest document that, to my knowledge, has been made by human hands that looks like a recombinant neural network is?

Jaron: That’s a great puzzle, Glen. That’s a great puzzle.

Brandon: I think you’ve told me this, and I’ve forgotten.

Jaron: What is it? What is it?

Glen: So there’s a diagram of how voting for the Doge of Venice in the 13th century looked. There was like 100 councils. Like each person who was in the voting population would elect members of 5 of those 100 councils. And then those 100 councils would elect another 100 councils according to similar principles for several rounds, until you eventually elected the Doge, which looks almost exactly like a recombinant neural network. Because you have lines from each of the voters going out to the net things that they do. And so it’s like a whole neural network. I think that that is like a beautiful illustration of the fact that sort of like during the example of the Talmud, we have these actually incredibly ancient and sophisticated ways of thinking about democracy and agency and collectivity that actually massively predate anyone thinking about AI at all, and give us the actual insights that we need to produce effective systems like this.

My hope is that we can just stop being so thoroughly mugged by the enlightenment. I love the enlightenment. Enlightenment is all kinds of goodness. It’s just when it becomes an overwhelming ideology that wants to erase all other meaning and truth and all of the past, rather than integrate with it, that it becomes sort of an excuse for really destroying itself. As Jaron was pointing out, you know, destroying its own foundations. And so I think that it’s people of faith that give me hope. Because they just don’t really want to do that. They’re cool with modernity for the most part, and they want some of the stuff. But they also want to remember that there’s more to things than that, and that there’s history and richness. And if we can just integrate those things a little bit more, give a few fewer sideways, glances, or whatever that Taylor was mentioning earlier, I think maybe we would do a better job of building our tools, do a little bit better job of not having this ridiculous hype and bust cycles that are painful for a lot of people, and maybe get more quickly to the actual deployment and integration of these technologies.

Brandon: Do you have a sense of concretely — I mean, again, one of the other challenges, too, is even our language around AI has been colonized by large language models, and whatever is happening at a few, small players. What concretely do you think needs to happen, to change, in order to be able to actually transform things?

Glen: Well, I mean, culture is an inspiration. Like The Wild Robot film, I think, is just absolutely fabulous. I think it’s exactly the way that we should be conceptualizing these things. That was very well received. One phrase I’ve been using a lot recently is: be the super intelligence you want to see in the world, you know?

Brandon: That’s great. That’s great.

Glen: Like, you know, corporations are super intelligences. Religions are super intelligences. Democracies are super intelligences. By every definition of super intelligence that’s been given, they’re all super intelligences. We don’t bat an eye at those. And so why are we talking about AI as if it’s this weird external conquer? I’m not saying corporations or religions haven’t done any harm. They’ve done all kinds of problematic things.

Brandon: Yeah, I think we’re maybe waiting for our charismatic Robo savior or something, right? Taylor, you’ve been working closely with the Vatican. You were just at the Builders AI Forum. Pope Francis called for “algor-ethics”. Pope Leo’s vision is emphasizing importance of human dignity and ethics. Could you say a bit about what’s happening at the Vatican and what those efforts are inspiring in you?

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. In some ways, it’s similar to what Glen was just articulating here. It’s kind of, get over yourselves, and let’s work together to have this technology serve humanity. Right? Every technology that we’ve ever come up with ends up being a result of our, from the Vatican’s view, co-creative power with the Divine. And so let’s continue trying to shape that towards human flourishing, rather than the other ways in which we’re able to shape it as independent actors. Really interestingly, too, I think the collaborative nature that the Vatican is really asking us all as technologists to approach—technologists and academics, in fact—when approaching this, I think, is really a great direction that resonates with a lot of us as well.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Are there any points of friction between your views, the three of you all? I mean, maybe there may be different points of emphases, but I’m curious if there are questions you all have or points.

Glen: There is one thing on which Jaron and I, I think, see a little bit differently. I don’t think it actually ends up mattering in many cases. But I think Jaron’s first inclination tends to talk about sort of the uniqueness of humans and have that really strong emphasis, on some level, on Mago Day, or as we would say in Hebrew, Shalom aleichem. But I tend to have a little bit more primary emphasis on diversity. I certainly see the importance of humanity, but I also see things in nature. I see things potentially in machines or in complex human systems or whatever. I’m not as focused on sort of the human individual as a focus in my mind as much. What I tend to resist about AI is sort of its totalizing narrow singularity. Like here’s-the-thing attitude more than the fact that it challenges the Shalom aleichem, you know?

Jaron: Yeah, I’ve also detected that disagreement. But I think the reason for it is a matter of our professions, our disciplines. So I’m a scientist and technologist, but the technologist part is what I really want to focus on for a second. You can’t define technology without defining a beneficiary. Because otherwise, there’s nothing there. It just completely evaporates, unless it’s for something or somebody. You can define math without a beneficiary abstractly. You can define the quest for knowledge and science. I think you can even define art as a kind of art for its own sake thing. Whether you should or not is different, but you can do all those things. But it’s not even possible on any sensible basis to define technology without a beneficiary. There’s just no way to even talk about it. It’s gone. Technology is for doing something, for some purpose, you know? And so the question is, who is the beneficiary?

Now, I think sometimes a beneficiary should be Gaia or the overall ecosystem of Earth. I’m not saying it’s exclusively people. But in general, if you underemphasize the human being as a beneficiary of technology, you very, very, very quickly slip into technology for its own sake, which is never what it actually is. It’s always technology for the sake of the giant ego of somebody who owns a big computer server. So it turns into this kind of Gilded Age, unsustainable ego trip by a few people who don’t acknowledge it. So you have to define technology as being for people. You have to really emphasize the specialness of people in order for technology to even be defined. Lose people, lose technology. That’s the only way. So I think that’s the reason that we have this different sensibility.

Brandon: That’s great, yeah. Taylor, any thoughts on your own tensions?

Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if we fought enough amongst the three of us to really have determine where I land on that side.

Brandon: Well, I think you should start, yeah.

Taylor: Yeah.

Brandon: So maybe, perhaps, if you all could leave our viewers and listeners with maybe one point each on what you see as really the beauty of this technological development, what it is that you all are working on. I know you’re not representing Microsoft, but you are certainly trying to build something there in your various capacities. And so, where is it that you see the beauty moving forward in the work you’re doing, and what particular kind of burden or obstacle do you think is really critical to overcome? Maybe, Taylor, we’ll start with you, and then Glen, and then we’ll end with Jaron.

Taylor: Sure. Yeah, I think this technology throws into sharp relief the ability for us to understand really how we think. We found a lot of the success of using this technology in productivity ways ends up having certain meta-cognitional strategies on how you use it as a helper, rather than have it do your thinking for you. And so, I’d say, lean into your own understanding of your understanding as you work through your use of these tools—both in order to ensure that you continue to flourish as a human, but also really to use these technologies where they shine most.

Brandon: Any obstacles or burdens that you think are really critical to overcome?

Taylor: If you don’t do that, you’re going to get dumber, and that’s problematic.

Brandon: That’s already happening, so, yeah. Thank you. Glen?

Glen: There’s an image of science and technology that I think is sort of implicitly in the minds of a lot of people that I want to suggest we need to flip on its head. I think a lot of people imagine we’re on the surface of the earth, and there’s a deep ground of falsity and superstition beneath us. We kind of need to dig it out and throw it away to get down to the core of the truth.

I instead imagine that we’re on the surface of the earth, and we’re planting trees. And as those trees grow up into the infinite abyss beyond, we extend the atmosphere, you know? The biggest danger is that there’s too much space. We don’t get down to a point. Actually, it’s how do you even allow the cross pollination across all those different things so that they can keep growing? But the further we grow out, the closer we are to having nothing at all that we understand because the more we see of the infinite abyss beyond and the more space there is to grow into. I guess that feeling of pursuit of a truth that recedes ever further, that by pursuing the truth, by extending our technologies, we see even more completely how little we know. That is what I take solace in, I guess.

Brandon: Yeah, Marcelo Gleiser has this book and an analogy called The Island of Knowledge. It’s this very similar kind of thing, where you’re on this island, and you’re sort of expanding what you think are the horizons of knowledge. You think you’re going to get to the point where the water has completely been conquered. Then you realize the further your island is expanding, the further the water seems to expand, and you never quite get to that end. For some, that is threatening and frustrating. And for others, that’s immensely beautiful. And the burden, the challenge, the obstacle, Glen, that you see as a burning problem that needs to be addressed?

Glen: I think that, ultimately, it’s a question of culture and meaning and vision for all of this stuff. I hope that we will come to a point in the Anglosphere where we do have peace and cooperation and integration between that sense of wonder and belief in things we cannot grasp that religion gives us and our sense of building. Because I think we’ll be able to build much more and much better when we can do that.

Brandon: Thank you. Jaron?

Jaron: Okay. On the question of beauty, I think there’s a common idea of beauty as platonic thing, that beauty is some sort of this abstract thing apart. And as you might guess, based on what I said about AI and all that, I think that’s the wrong idea of beauty. I think the idea of beauty—as this abstract, still thing that’s apart from people that we sort of try to access and approach—is it might have been functional in the past. But at this point it it doesn’t serve us well. It just has terrible economic — because basically, the way computer networks work, they’re very low friction. There’s this thing called the network effect that’s exaggerated, where all the power and wealth concentrates at the center. And so, basically, whoever owns the network becomes beauty, if that’s beauty is. Whatever, all the artists who are trying to make do as wannabe’s on YouTube are really celebrating Google more than themselves, at the end of the day, which you can see if you look at the accounting.

And so, anyway, the issue is that we have to think of beauty as much more of a connected kind of a thing. Beauty is not a thing apart. Beauty is a thing that people do. It’s a thing that is meaningfully created between people through shared faith. That has to be the idea of beauty. I like Glen’s metaphor a lot. And I should mention that as an island gets bigger, there’s more beach, right? That’s the thing is. The more knowledge, the more mystery. Part of why I play all these weird instruments is, every time you start to play some instrument from another time and place, your body enters into the rhythms and the breathing of those people. That connection, that makes the instruments interesting. It’s not any abstract, like, oh, this instrument solves a particular problem. Right? And so you have to think of the groundedness, real experience, and real connection as what beauty is—not as a subtraction.

Then the big unsolved problem. Here’s the one I’ll mention in the context of this conversation. Almost all of the kids — I say kids because, I mean, it’s hard to find somebody in a frontier science or engineering group for AI who’s not under 40. And they’re very, very few. They’re just starting to have kids here and there. But mostly, they haven’t had kids yet. They mostly don’t have a connection to future human generations. They’re mostly, if we’re honest, a little spectrum, either mostly male. They mostly don’t think of family or continuation as much of a thing. That’s an abstraction to them. Or if they do, they might, it’s like purely biological. Like, “Oh, my genes are great. I’m going to make sure there are a lot of babies that have them or something,” like our friend, Elon.

But the thing is, their ability to speak is through the stories they grew up with, as is true for all of us. The stories they grew up with were not the stories from, oh, I don’t know, American mythology. They were not the stories from the Bible. They were not the stories from literature. They might have been a little bit stories from children’s book. But what they mostly were in their formative years were the stories from science fiction movies. And so, if you ask why are all of the AI people so enthusiastic about saying, “Oh, we’re building something that will kill everybody. Isn’t it great? Give us more money. Yes, you should have more money, more money. You’re going to kill everybody. It’s great,” well, how could that happen? What’s the explanation for that absurdity? It’s that the myths they grew up with that are the stories that form their vocabulary for understanding the world are not Newton and Einstein. It’s The Matrix movies.

Brandon: Or Tolkien, yeah.

Jaron: Or Tolkien. Well, for some, it’s a version of Tolkien, actually, because those movies were big too. But as far as technology goes, it’s The Matrix movies and The Terminator and so on. Those are the stories that exist. And so when you can only tell the world through those stories, that’s our vocabulary of dynamics. And so if the stories you know are limited to a certain kind of story, so are you. So I think there’s a really urgent cultural problem here. The only science fiction that transcended that problem, the only positive science fiction that wasn’t sappy, that was commercially successful, was Star Trek of a certain era of the ‘60s, perhaps. It was the ‘90s, definitely. The Star Trek franchise has turned into just a version of a Marvel movie for the most part. The Marvel movies, don’t even get me started.

So the thing is, we’re giving young people a profoundly impoverished and stupid set of stories to work with. That, to me, like Silicon Valley has failed people a lot. But Hollywood, maybe more so, and in a way more innocently. Because I knew the people who made some of the movies I’ve just referred to. It’s not that they were bad people or even lazy people or anything, but it’s just that they were working from their particular context. And as it translates into giant context, it becomes really dysfunctional. We have a big problem with that. That’s the problem.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. I mean, it is a big challenge with the shaping of the horizons of imagination, right? I think we’re still prey to a kind of logic. In the last time I was with Glen, I was talking about this logic of domination, extraction and fragmentation that governs a lot of the development of our technology and business. I think moving to a different logic of reverence and receptivity and reconnection is really, which is what we see in something like Tolkien, right? It’s a very different kind of logic. You see that tension and forming imaginations.

Jaron: Here’s the thing about Tolkien, though. I read the books when I was little, right? I haven’t seen all the movies all the way through, but I’ve seen enough of them over pretty good feeling for there. So almost everybody now knows them through the movies, right? And this is, oh God. So my very first gig as a musician was playing music behind. It’s a long story. But anyway, I used to do gigs with — oh, who’s the guy who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces? Joseph?

Glen: Campbell.

Brandon: Campbell.

Jaron: Campbell, yeah. And so when I was just a young teenager, like an adolescent, I was doing shows with Campbell. Because I was playing music behind this wonderful new age poet guy, and they would have double bookings. But anyway, his name is Robert Bly. I used to argue with Campbell, even as a kid. Like, “How can you say there’s only one story? Your story is kind of like a nasty one because it’s about this hero. The problem with heroes is that there’s somebody else who the hero has to be. Like there’s always this other side to the story. Doesn’t this kind of bother you?” He was like, “Oh, kid, you won’t know anything.” And I’m sure he was right about that.

But the thing is, the Tolkien books have a certain magic and reality to them that is the best kind. They have a kind of a nobility or something. I feel like in the movies, it turned more into a Marvel thing of like, “We’re going to go and kill these horrible demon things. We’re going to go fight. We have 50 cuffs and whatever.” And so the thing is that the version of Tolkien that came out that most people know is maybe not — it’s a more Campbell-ian thing than I think the original actually was. At least, as I remember it, it was a little more charming and joyous.

Brandon: Yeah, there’s a sense of deep magic, a sort of a reverence for something you don’t create, right? It’s something that is given to you that you were in service of. So all of the questing and so on is not primarily a hero, but rather a kind of calling.

Jaron: Yeah, I mean, I remember the Tolkien books being kind of more like the Narnia books. Maybe I’m misremembering them. I don’t know. Maybe I have it wrong. But the Tolkien movie was more like a Marvel thing or whatever. You know, not that there weren’t some good things about them, certainly.

Brandon: Yeah, these are critical tensions. Well, I can’t thank you all enough. This has been such a fantastic conversation. How could we direct our viewers and listeners to anything that you all are doing, working on? Taylor, where can we point people to?

Taylor: Oh, certainly. Yeah, I mean, I opine on my Substack on occasion. That can be a good place as any for encountering some of my work, for sure.

Brandon: Okay. We’ll put that in the show notes. And Glen?

Glen: Glenweyl.com is my website. We also have aka.ms/plural for the Plural Technology Collaboratory. You can find me on X @GlenWeyl.

Brandon: Fantastic. And, Jaron, where can we direct people to?

Jaron: Oh, I have a crappy old website. I don’t have any social media. I kind of operate my life on this idea that people who need to find my stuff will. I don’t really promote myself, and I’m really bad about it. And somehow it works out. So I just ask the wind.

Brandon: That’s right, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. I know we’re past time. But is there any chance, Jaron, that you might be willing to, for 60 seconds, play us something from one of the thousands of instruments behind you?

Jaron: Oh, God. Well, what do you feel like?

Brandon: Whatever you’re in the mood for.

Glen: I request the oud, Jaron, if you have one.

Brandon: Oh, yeah. Let me second that.

Glen: Jaron, I think the oud is one of Jaron’s favorites.

Jaron: Let me see. The thing about ouds is you never know which oud will be in tune. So there’s a famous joke from the composer Igor Stravinsky, that harp players spend half their time tuning and half their time playing out of tune. But the thing is, that joke was originally from an oud book that’s like several 800 years old. So how in tune? Eh, we’ll live with that.

(Jaron plays the oud)

So it’s out of — I shouldn’t. Okay, it’s out of tune.

Glen: Well, that’s great.

Brandon: It’s alright. Thank you.

Glen: It’s wonderful. Thank you so much.

Brandon: It’s still enough to transport you. It’s still enough to transport you.

Jaron: That’s the thing about the oud that’s just like you’re on, yeah—

Brandon: Amazing.

Jaron: But oh, I think la, la, la, la, la, la, la... I don’t know.

Brandon: Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Glen: Thank you, everyone. Take care.

Brandon: I can’t thank you guys. It’s been amazing.

Glen: Live long and prosper.

Jaron: Okay.

Brandon: Yeah, you too.

Jaron: Bye, Brandon.

Glen: Bye, bye.

When Alan Moore sent me a copy of his book Do Build: How to Make and Lead a Business the World Needs, he signed it with a phrase that has stayed with me: “Beauty is the ultimate metric.”

Indeed, what if beauty—rather than efficiency or growth or profit—were treated as the ultimate metric for business decisions? What if beauty were not simply an afterthought, or relegated to surface-level aesthetics, but treated as a criterion that could tell us, from the beginning, whether the work is worth doing at all?

Alan Moore calls himself a craftsman of beautiful business—a business innovator, author, and speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity. He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises. Alan is the author of four books, including Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

Alan describes beauty as a kind of homecoming: a return to self, to others, and to the natural world that sustains us. Alan’s work helps organizations rethink innovation through the lens of beauty. Drawing on decades of experience working across design, publishing, technology, and business, Alan reflects on the transition from an analog to a digital world, and on what we gained and lost along the way.

Innovation, he insists, is not primarily about disruption or novelty. Rather, it is about seeing latent potential: unmet human needs waiting to be recognized and served. The danger of our current economic imagination is that it rewards speed, scale, and extraction, often at the expense of truth, dignity, and long-term flourishing. Beauty, by contrast, asks a different set of questions. Does this matter? Is it truthful? Is it regenerative? Will it endure?

When beauty is present, things tend to last. When it is absent, even the most efficient systems eventually collapse under their own weight.

We talk about Shaker furniture and why it still feels right centuries later; about inevitability in design—when something feels as though it could not have been otherwise; about nature as the longest-running R&D program humanity has ever known; why regeneration (rather than sustainability) should be our guiding aim; and about the courage it takes to ask, in moments of decision: Is this the most beautiful choice we can make?

You can listen to my conversation with Alan Moore in two parts (here and here), watch the video below, or read the unedited transcript that follows. Let me know what you think of Alan’s argument and the episode.

Brandon: Hello, Alan. It is wonderful to see you. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Alan: It’s fantastic to be here with you, Brandon. Thank you for the invitation. I’m very much looking forward to our conversation.

Brandon: Yeah, me too. Yeah, there’s so much I’ve learned from your work. But before we talk about your books, I want to ask you—as I do with all my guests—could you share a memory of beauty that lingers with you since your childhood, something that stays with you till today?

Alan: So this is a very easy one for me to answer. Actually, it links right back to me writing Do Design. When I was thinking about writing the book, I really had this question in myself about being feeling very lost and how could I write my way home to where I was. We’re going back to, well, more than 10 years actually, because the book was published 10 years ago, or nearly 10 years ago. And I sat with this question, which was: there’s an answer within me that I need to go and find. So how do I come home? That was the question—how do I come home?

A couple of years before I wrote Do Design, I remember having this very powerful memory of being on the beach with my family at the age of 7. So I kind of saw my mother on the beach. She was wearing a skirt and a nifty jumper, bare-legged. She was incredibly happy and playful. My mom wasn’t always like that. It’s not to say she was a bad person, but she struggled with lots of different things. How do you put food on the table? How do you manage the complexity of this family that we’ve got going on here? I saw my father, who actually never had a lot of money in his life. He was dyslexic like me, but he was an incredibly emotionally intelligent man. He was always there for us as a family, as individuals. You could never put a Rizla paper between my mother and my father. It was something that I kind of reflected on. They were married for the best part of 50 years. They’re both sadly gone now, but there they were. Then I thought about my brother and my sister, and I saw them—unconditional love for both of them in many ways.

Then I saw myself. In those days, I had long blonde platinum hair, a very different hairstyle to the one I’ve got these days. I’m playing with my toys on the beach. I thought I’m at one with those I love the most. I’m at one with myself. A part of my journey is not being at one with myself. In many ways, actually, the writing of Do Design was very much about not being in a good place at all and I’m at one with the natural world. So you imagine, like if you had a drone shot, this image on this little boy in his red shorts with his long blonde platinum hair pulling back on this beach in Cornwall, which is where we were. Nobody else is on the beach. We seem to specialize in finding beaches that nobody else was on, which I kind of love. The sea is twinkling like diamonds. The sky is blue. Then you’re pulling back on this kind of family, which is in union. I thought, what is the one word that could describe that experience? The word that I found was beauty. It was that kind of idea of coming home to myself, my family, the natural world around me—thinking even about the kind of we are atomic. We are also in a large cosmos that kind of compelled me to feel that I had to go on that journey to write about beauty as something as an exploration of myself and a homecoming—this is what I call it—to what was meaningful. So that’s my story about beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s a word that I’ve only encountered in some context—beauty as related to a sense of home. I’ve come across it often among people in the hospitality industry—restaurateurs, cocktail bar owners, et cetera. And even, I suppose architecture, in some elements of architectural design, they talk about hominess. But it’s generally not commonly mentioned as an aesthetic principle, right—the sense of feeling at home, being at home? But I think it’s so central to so much of our experience of beauty, you know.

Alan: I completely agree. I mean, I say beauty is our homecoming. In pretty much these last eight years that I’ve been researching and working on that idea as a concept, it’s very rarely that I find someone that is not engaged with the principle of beauty could be something of immense value to people. So the kind of way that people would dismiss you is, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s only about ephemeral things.

Actually, when I wrote Do Design, why beauty is key to everything, I did no research. I just wrote from my heart and my knowledge and my wisdom of what I knew. I mean, I’ve written a number of books beforehand and did a lot of research around those things. This is something I wanted to do very differently. And what is very clear to me is that if you turn up to talk about beauty with people—albeit, yes, I agree with you—it makes people a little bit uncomfortable. It makes people a little bit — I don’t know. What would be the word? A little bit guarded to begin with, because where are we going with this? But actually, intuitively, people understand that beauty is something that links to them not up here. It’s not in the brain. It’s actually within the body. It’s a soulful reaction and need, actually. There’s a need.

There’s a lady called Fiona Reynolds who wrote a book called The Fight for Beauty. She was Director-General of the National Trust for many, many years. In her book, she says, People will strive for beauty, given half the chance, if they know that it is a possibility—or a potential—for them to get their hands on. But it’s a spiritual thing. I think even before organized religions were created some two and a half thousand years ago, I think man, mankind, had an understanding that this idea of beauty was something that was absolutely fundamental to them, their lives, their well-being. It connected them to the cosmos, to the stars. It connected them to the land. They were absolutely part of this entire ecosystem that was creating a life for all to thrive well, is what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, there’s some really interesting research by anthropologists who studied primates. They found if they put video cameras on the heads of macaques, they actually end up going all the way up to the top of the forest canopy and just stare at a sunrise or a sunset. It’s built into us, right? I mean, we really are built for beauty in many ways.

Alan: Yeah.

Brandon: Alan, could you talk a little bit about your career trajectory? What has led you eventually to the point where you’re writing about beautiful business? What has that story been like for you?

Alan: Well, I’ve always led a very creative life, albeit that my mom—bless her—really didn’t think that I would ever earn any money from being creative. So I was discouraged from doing anything creative at school. But actually, I was playing the guitar from the age of 12. I was writing songs, poetry. I did a lot of acting, et cetera, et cetera. But then into my professional career, I studied book publishing at college, which is purely serendipitous. So I became a typographer, a book designer, a graphic designer. I became an artist. I worked as an art director, a creative director. I sat at the transition between analog and digital in my creative life.

So we were doing things like creating the customer journey, UX, designing brands, product services—when all of these things weren’t specialisms by any stretch of the imagination. We just worked at, what I would call, a communications agency. Someone would come in the door one day and say, “Could you help me launch a global car brand? Could you help us design a 3G mobile phone service? Could you help us launch smartphones on a global basis around the world?” And how would you do that? I was very privileged in many respects to kind of have that ability to sort of touch all of those different things, which now I think has become very siloed. But in the days that we were working, you didn’t have all of those different specializations as all companies. You just did what needed to be done. We were pioneers in many respects.

Then my side projects were the writing that I was very interested in. Because I could see a world that was being profoundly changed by—initially, that was 2004—digital technologies in those days, particularly mobile. It was interesting to then also see lots of incumbent companies that weren’t really interested in the amount of disruption that was going to come into the world. So 2005 to 2010, one of the keywords that you would come across was the word “disruption.” We certainly have been. There’s no doubt about it.

Brandon: Well, that’s a word that’s often used to describe innovation, right? And so, I mean, Clay Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation really sort of captured people’s imaginations. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experience in the field of innovation. I know you did some work on that area. What did that entail? What does innovation mean to you? What did it look like in practice, in your work?

Alan: I mean, we worked on physical products. We worked on digital products. I mean, I was writing papers for Microsoft, back in the day before mobile really was a big thing, in terms of trying to help them understand what potential of mobile was. I suppose that whichever client it was, when you were developing those products and services, you were assimilating a lot of information. That is one of the benefits of

being dyslexic, in that you kind of start to compute things in different ways. You could see the potential, I suppose. For me, innovation is about seeing the potential of being out to organize and produce products and services that were never before seen in this world. What you were creating were things that were releasing potential.

I have a slightly different point of view on economics these days. But back then, it was, well, how are you going to help this business grow? What are the needs that people have? And so you were really looking at, if you could design a product and/or a service or both. I work both on the B2B side, business to business, as well as business to consumer side of things. You were working incredibly hard to find answers to those questions, which was: what is the fundamental need that is not being met that you could create, that is actually going to kind of go with people, “I really need this to work in my life”? The reality is that there are very few organizations in this world where, to really innovate, you have to go off paced, as a sense. You need to go into uncharted territory. You’re going to into no man’s land. There’s no guarantee of success, other than the fact that you are absolutely convicted that what it is you’re going to deliver is going to be absolutely right for this organization and/or this company.

I have always operated on a gut feeling. There’s a comedian, a guy called Bill Bailey. He’s not on the telly so much anymore. But I always remember him doing this sketch. He says, people come up to me and they say, “Bill, how do you start your jokes? How do you create your jokes?” He said, “Well, I start with a laugh and I work backwards.” How many people do I need to kind of make this? What I realized was, is, in my journey, there were times when creatively you’re taking a massive leap. Because you can see what that vision is in terms of how it’s going to work. So I’ve had many conversations, heated ones sometimes, where actually it’s the storytelling of how you convince people to get over this gap, this leap of faith in a sense, to get them to where they need to get to. Because actually, organizations aren’t really designed for innovation. That’s not why their designed. That’s not their M.O.

Brandon: Yeah, they want to be stable. They want to grow and not deviate too much from what’s working.

Alan: Yeah, which is why you have M&As. Because actually, it’s easier to go and just hoover up a bunch of companies that have gone through the pain, raise their VC money, whatever. They’ve proved the point, which is a shame, I think, actually. Because also, in a sense, my wider vision is: it’s not just then about commercial activity, but it’s about political activity. It’s about communal activity. Even at a city level or a town level, there’s still the need of innovation in terms of how do we solve. For me, the question is: how do we solve this pressing problem? To me, the answer is, well, we’ve got to go all in to find the absolute best answer to that question.

In a sense, it’s a very artistic position that you take. Because when an artist, whoever it is — let’s say it’s Picasso creating the amazing image of Guernica, the German bombing of the Spanish town which became such an icon. Or you could think about Anselm Kiefer as a German artist, for example, or Theaster Gates, an African American artist. These people worked without compromise. I feel that’s where, within a kind of commercial or political context sometimes, we are let down very badly. Because there are too many constrictions on the ability to find that innovative answer to the one that we’re facing.

Brandon: How can beauty be a guide then to the process of innovation, or could it help us sort through which kinds of innovations we need? If there might be an example, even in your own work, where you found beauty to be actually valuable as a decisive criterion.

Alan: Well, it is. I mean, I think that there’s a lot to unpack there. But for me, the principle of beauty is based on nature’s incredible design model, which creates the conditions for all life to thrive. So I say nature has run the longest R&D program we’ve ever witnessed. She’s been around for a long time. She has created conditions for all life to thrive. She’s not interested in sustainability. She’s interested in this idea of regeneration, that also kind of then — but there’s a generosity. Albeit we’re living in some difficult times now because they’re all man-made, I think, in terms of climate change, in terms of the economics, the political economy that we live in, which you are witnessing in America at the moment, which people are witnessing around the world at the same time. There are people that are much more interested in. Nature is powerful, but she’s not interested in power. I think there is a generosity in terms of how she kind of turns up in the world and how we’ve been accommodated. So for me, the grounding of it is: beauty is not about aesthetics. Beauty is about the fundamental laws of how our cosmos and our nature works. And as a specie, we seem to have forgotten that that’s the reality.

Brandon: Yeah, one of my other guests, Lisa Lindahl—who is the inventor of the sports bra—she has a book on beauty where she argues that it’s about cosmology, not cosmetology. That’s the kind of shift, right, that we really need to get people thinking about. It’s not just about superficial, the kinds of things we typically if we do a Google search on beauty, you’ll get everything from the beauty industry, about various makeup products, and so on. That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s hard to get people understand that.

Alan: Well, as I said, I’d go back to my experience over the last years, which is: when you turn up to talk about beauty and you kind of frame it — I talk about my journey into writing about beauty, I connect it to a universal idea. You are talking to people’s souls. You’re not talking to people’s heads. You’re certainly not talking about the color of what’s on people’s fingernails or any other kind of aesthetic things. I mean, ultimately, there is an element of design which is about the aesthetic value of something.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: But it absolutely, for me, is so much more fundamental than that. We kind of nudged in a way not to want to have this conversation because it’s such a fundamental part of who we are as people. It gets us to ask lots and lots and lots of questions, which I think talk true to power, question so many different things, where people really start to understand that the value of the quality of their lives—from the get go to the end of life—if you were to frame all of that around beauty, people would be making completely different choices and decisions around the type of life that they would be leading, I think.

I woke up to it a little later. Then you wake you up and then you’re in debt. You got a mortgage on your house. You’re making more sorts of choices and decisions, where you to say, what was the most beautiful life I could have led from when I was conscious? I genuinely believe that people were making very different decisions. But it’s anti in terms of the neoliberal kind of story that we’re being fed in terms of what actually a successful and good life looks to us. And in a part, what we’re witnessing at the moment is a complete failure of that narrative and that story, which is why I think we see what we see in terms of

people struggling with politics, with society, with their own personal identities, men’s health. Just a few examples, it’s what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, the criteria that we value—the criteria for success, the criteria for a good life—I think have somehow left out beauty, which is why I think your work is immensely important.

Alan: Thank you.

Brandon: Let’s chat about your first book—or at least the first in this series—Do Design, which I really want to commend you on just the quality and the thoughtfulness that’s gone into even the production of this book. Obviously, you’ve come from a publishing background. Could you say a little bit about what the thought process was behind designing it this way? Because it really feels like a treasure, an object you can treasure—everything from the page quality to the images that have been chosen, to the fonts. Could you say a little bit about what you put into that?

Alan: Well, I mean, that’s got nothing to do with me because that’s The Do Book Company. There’s a publishing company called The Do Book Co, which is run by Miranda West, who I say is the best publisher in the world. People say, “Well, why is that?” And I said, well, she published my book. A very small operation. I think there’s only three of them. They designed the format. So I have no input in that. I just wrote the words.

Brandon: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, it’s very well aligned with — it really does convey everything you’re saying in here to the physical medium in a remarkable way.

Alan: Well, yeah. I suppose the serendipity was, is when I wrote that book, as I said, I’d already written a couple of books before, alongside all the other work that I was doing. But it felt very important to me. I made three key decisions. One was that I would only write in what my friend calls “threepenny words”—threepenny words, as opposed to sixpenny words.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: Plain English. I wanted to write in a way where if it only took 50 words to say what it is I wanted to say, then I would say that. You know, I got to the point where having read many, many books over my lifetime that were 100,000 words long (and some change), that’s a big dedication. Sometimes you come out with the end of it and you go, “I don’t know what I’m really getting out of this.” And so I felt that that was important. Then the third writing decision was, is, if I could elevate this writing that felt somehow universal, it could elevate it to a form of poetics that could feel that would open a door for people. So I’ve always described Do Design as like, it’s like a TARDIS. There’s not a lot of words, but it covers a lot of ground.

Brandon: Right. Right.

Alan: But it’s a kind of invitation for people to kind of move into, reflect on the ideas and concepts that I’m laying out in that story. Because as you know, telling a story about beauty is a bit complicated because it touches so many different aspects of people’s lives. I mean, that’s really my contribution—the words. You know, all Do Books are published in exactly the same format. There’s variations, I think, in whatever. I mean, I contributed a lot of the pictures, which is what it did.

But the important thing about that book was, two weeks after it was published — I mean, I’ve got a few people that follow me on LinkedIn, but I wouldn’t say I’ve got a massive following. Miranda’s got a small team. There were some goodwill within the community. She called me up two weeks after the book had been published and she said, “You’ve given me a problem.” And I thought, “Oh my God. What have I done?” She said, “Well, the book is sold out. That wasn’t in the business plan, so now we need to go and find the money to republish it.” Even this last quarter, we’re still selling significant quantities of that book. I know it’s gone on and inspired a whole bunch of different people to set up businesses and festivals and whatever. There’s some magic in there, which even I am still a little bit confused about in terms of what it is. Because as I said, I wrote it for myself, to write myself home. But that homecoming — quite often, if I sign a book for people, I will say: “Beauty is our homecoming.”

Brandon: Amazing.

Alan: You should take it a bit more seriously, perhaps.

Brandon: Well, I want to ask you. I mean, you signed my copy Beauty is the Ultimate Metric.

Alan: Indeed.

Brandon: Could you say a little bit about that?

Alan: Well, I mean, there’s this famous saying that everything that gets measured gets made. It was in a workshop that we were running with an organization, and I asked people to give me feedback at the end. This one person wrote on a card: “Beauty is the ultimate metric.” This was from someone that, at the beginning of the session, I think was perhaps a little bit more circumspect in terms of the benefit that they would get from this experience and what it would mean to them.

And so, in a sense, it’s a bit like you watch the dying of the day. You watch the sunset go down. You watch the sun go up. You have a smell that, I don’t know, it’s your mum’s favorite dish that she cooks for you. For me, that’s beauty. That’s the metric. Trying to get people to think about it in terms of that it has an immense value is very important. Because everything else in our lives are measured, you know? You go to the petrol pump. You have a price per liter or a gallon for the diesel or the petrol you’re putting in the car. You go to the supermarket, and you buy some vegetables. They are measured in terms of a price, a value, an equation, whatever of that.

For me, beauty is kind of part of that very important idea of its immense value to all of us in big and small ways. It’s a hug that someone gives somebody else when they really need it—to spend time with someone when they really need it. They’re doing something very beautiful for that person through their generosity. The language around beauty for me is also a very important kind of aspect of how we expand that idea as a concept and a possibility.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s amazing. One of the things you say in the book is that beautiful things endure. You’ve given examples of Shaker chairs—which I was not aware of them until I read your book, actually—and then the insistence of William Morris, that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Can you talk a bit about those principles? I mean, what makes something endure? What are the qualities of timeless design, perhaps?

Alan: Well, there is, in a sense, no easy answer to that. I mean, the Shakers are interesting because they never wrote about beauty. What they wrote about was truth. Because they were a religious cult, for want of the better word, you know. You might say that their closest relationship will be something like the Amish.

Brandon: Yes.

Alan: The Shakers made everything—from hairpins to chairs, to desks, to houses, to barns, whatever. I mean, they literally made everything. They had a particular style which is very simple, but it was incredibly elegant and very beautiful. Their obsession about truth was, is through their act of their craft and their making. They would reveal the truth and the spirit in whatever it is that they were creating. Because they had the view that if an angel was ever to come and sit on one of their pieces of furniture or craft making, they would understand the purity of the religious truth in their work.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Shakers. I mean, I came across them as a young man, as a designer. We’ve got some Shaker stuff in the house actually, and it just endures. It’s that quest for truth, I think, is is very important. There’s a story that I can tell you, which was, when I was a young designer, in those days, I was working for some very big contemporary art galleries in London. So I got to work with the likes of Ansel Kiefer, Richard Long, the estate of Andy Warhol, and Helen Chadwick, who’s sadly no longer with us. I got to work with these amazing artists. One of them was a guy called Cecil Collins, who did die many, many years ago. He was a very famous painter, an English painter, born, I think, in about 1908. So when I met him in the ‘80s, he was a very old man. He painted these incredibly spiritual paintings. I can remember Anthony, who was the gallery director, was going away on a holiday—which I was rather pleased about because he was a bit of a tyrant. We sat there, and he said, “You know, Alan, Cecil’s work...” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Well, Cecil’s work...” He said, “They’re quite like jewels. Do you think you could design a catalogue like a jewel for me.?” I was very early on in my design career at this point, my graphic design career at this point. And I said, “Of course, Anthony. I can do that.”

But it was a really interesting brief. Because I went back on the train from London to where I was living in Letchworth, and I thought, “What is a jewel?” Well, a jewel is a gift. It’s priceless. It’s unexpected. A jewel is something that is enduring. It could live forever, like a diamond. A great deal of work goes into creating these very precious objects. They give joy to people. They bring beauty. So I kind of had this kind of conversation with myself about designing a catalogue like a jewel. And so I made all the decisions about this catalogue that I was going to design for Cecil around the idea of making a jewel for him—choice of typeface, format, paper, how it was going to be printed, what the cover was going to look like. Everything, right? At the private view—I got the privilege of going to private views, which sometimes were a little bit overawing, I have to say, actually, because I was so young. But this elderly gentleman comes up to me, and he says: “Are you Alan Moore?” I said I am. He said, “Well, I’m Cecil Collins.” I said, “I know who you are.”

Brandon: Oh, wow.

Alan: He said, “You designed the catalogue.” I said I did. He said, “Well, I have to tell you it’s the most beautiful catalogue anyone has ever designed for me.” And I went, “Well, Cecil, you know, I’m really grateful for what you’ve said.” And so, in a sense, when you quest for the truth — so I teach people, and I talk about the poetic brief. So there’s a brief. It’s like it needs to be this size, this weight, this volume. There’s all sorts of metrics or specifications. There’s money that’s associated to those things. But I say to people that I mentor or teach or work with, I say but there’s another brief. It’s called the poetic brief, and you cannot put a quantitative measure on it. But it’s something that you are questing for. That’s, to me, the heart of beauty also. There is something magical within it. But if you quest for it, it will reward you in extraordinarily wonderful ways.

Brandon: Yeah. Wow. That’s very helpful. I want to ask you about another quote that you have from a mentor of yours, Derek Birdsall: “I design something to be inevitable.” What does inevitability mean? What does that look like in practice? Could you give us an example?

Alan: I mean, again, well, you could look at the Shaker stuff and say there’s an inevitability about their design. You know, I can remember touching the first iPhone. I worked a lot in technology, bizarrely enough, right up until that point. I can remember touching that iPhone, and it just blew my mind. They did something extraordinary in terms of the user experience. But you could say, what is the experience of walking into a hotel that feels inevitable? What is the user experience that you would create for someone that feels inevitable? To me, it’s frictionless. I remember asking Derek. Because he was an incredible man. I remember saying to him, “Well, Derek, you know, what does it look like if a piece of design is inevitable?” He said, “Well, it means that your client cannot imagine it looking any other way.” I suppose the poetic brief, the idea of inevitability were things that I carried through all of my commercial practice and working career—not maybe something that in those days I would brief or talk to people that were working with me or reporting into me or whatever. But I always had this complete vision. The experience should be frictionless. It should be aesthetically beautiful.

I suppose there’s another quote in the book, which is: “Beautiful things are made with love.” And with that becomes this idea that you are achieving the ultimate potential of what it ever is that you’re creating and you’re making. It goes back to, you know, ceramics for me is something that’s very important in my life. There is so much that I look at which is not made by love. It’s got a lot of technical skill, but there’s no truth and there’s no beauty in it. When you pick that thing up, when you pick that object up, it should be giving you joy. And actually, it should give you a direct communication to the maker that made that piece of work. And so, for me, inevitability can manifest itself in all of those kinds of different ways.

You know, I talk about utility. There’s beauty in utility. I’ve lived in enough hotels in my life to see enough knives and forks and spoons which weren’t made by love and certainly didn’t feel inevitable, and all the meal, and all the experience. In a sense, it’s like these things shouldn’t cost you any money. They’re just common sense in terms of what you’re doing. So when you go into a place and, I don’t know, you’re not being served well—the food comes out cold, or the hotel room is kind of not what you expected—the promise of what you’ve offered and what you’ve delivered are two completely different things. Inevitability could actually be surpassing all of that. It should be superlative. It’s the way that I look at it. Because I think it’s possible.

Brandon: Yeah, that seems like a really valuable criterion for thinking about innovation too, right? I mean, I think, often, innovation promises some kind of beauty but underdelivers or brings with it some unintended consequences or maybe shallow novelty, which doesn’t really get to the heart of things.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been in enough rooms where—I won’t say the name of the company—there would be a number of occasions when I’d walk into the room and the person would say, “Well, Alan, if we’re not going to talk about a really big number, then there’s no point having this conversation.” It kind of really frustrated me. Because I felt that the question should we be asking is: what is the most amazing experience that we could create for people that would actually give you the big number that you really want? And so people are kind of in a very short term. I mean, that said, just jumping along from that, I got a very good friend who runs a big VC firm here in Cambridge. We were talking a while back. He said, “Your problem, Alan, is your horizon line is completely different to most VCs. You see things in a completely different capacity.” For us, medium term is 5 years. Long term is 10 years, where we need to exit the company and get our money back times 10 what we’re getting. He said, whereas you’re looking at something different. To me, that’s a huge problem. Because when you look back at, say, indigenous culture, indigenous innovation, all of those things that did amazing stuff, that took them a long time to work that stuff out—by looking and observing.

Brandon: Yeah, hundreds of years, right? I mean, really long, long term horizons. I had an interesting conversation a few days ago at Climate Week in New York City. I was part of this conversation around valuing the intangible beauty of nature. We were trying to get impact investors to think about how we can better take beauty into account, in investment decisions and so on. I got a question I sort of pushback from somebody who is running a pension fund and saying, “Look, I mean, this all sounds very nice. But ultimately, I have to still maximize returns for the people I’m serving. I really can’t take something like beauty into account. I mean, it really has to be hard returns in the short term. These are people whose livelihoods depend on me.” Right? And so do you have anything that you might say in response? How would you encourage folks who are trying to think this way?

Alan: I can remember I spoke to a very old friend of mine, a Dutch guy called Jurgen. We would work with a guy that would do a lot of workshopping with pension fund holders, institutional pension funds. Pip would like me to come along. He would call me the wild card, which I always found a bit insulting personally. But there you go. Jurgen and I had not spoken for a long time. I had completely forgotten this conversation. We were in Lisbon, I think it was, and doing this workshop. Pip asked me to give a point of view on something that he had been working on. Jurgen reminded me of this. He said, you stood up. You said to these people that, basically, in this room, we’re managing trillions of dollars, right? And I said, so you have the capacity to actually make change in this world. You have the capacity to get people to make better choices and better decisions about the type of legacy that you want to create. And so you need to think very differently about how you are investing and who you’re investing in. Jurgen said, “I really remember that.”

And so, in Do Build, the second book, we’ve got the 30 designed questions that I formulated after kind of looking at loads and loads of businesses and thinking about their ability to really make meaningful change in this world. I mean, I struggle with the word “impact” because it just feels so masculine, whereas I think that we need a better word. The first question I ask is: does it matter? People talk about a lot of purpose. But I’d say there are various people in various administrations in this world at the moment who have a lot of purpose, but I don’t really think they’re involved in the concepts of beauty and regeneration. And so my question is: does it matter? Does it matter to me? Does it matter to the world? Does it matter to us as a community? So the mattering, as I call it — beauty is a verb. The mattering in a sense is part of that. Does it matter?

There’s another one which is, is it transformative? So are we bringing in technologies, new innovations, solutions that are transformative to the world that we live in? So you could be looking at, say, green jobs, green energy, a different way of doing things in that sense. Is it regenerative? So to the core for me in terms of business is, is what you’re creating regenerative? You could look at that from a technological perspective, an economic perspective. It could be an ecological perspective. So rather than your principal model of it being extractive, it’s regenerative.

The last one is: how will you create legacy? You know, I’ve got a friend of mine who he lives in his five-million-pound house. He’s done very well. I celebrate him for that. I went to see him a couple of years ago. We were sitting there having a catch up. He said, “I don’t know. I love your books. I think they’re great.” He said, “But why should I care?” That made me really sad because he’s got a daughter. She’s five. If he thinks his five-million-pound house is going to protect him from climate change and all the other things that we’re witnessing at the moment, then he’s got another thing coming. He may be lucky. He may have his fortress. But to me, well, as the French will say when they were writing in 1968, “La beauté est dans la rue.“ The beauty is in the streets. It’s every person that is contributing to kind of making that change. So I think those questions that I felt needed to be asked. Because the concept of beauty in that sense is multidimensional. It is complex. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it requires us to think in a systemic way. It’s not a word I like to use because that makes it hard for other people sometimes too. Well, how do I think in a system? But to me, those questions are really important then in terms of your friend or colleague or participant in your panel asking you that question, which is whether a number of very important questions we need to ask, if actually you’re going to make a significant contribution to what the future looks like. We choose to use the word beauty. Actually, it’s a much richer — when I fight back, it’s like we don’t need to sustain what we’ve got. What we’ve got is rubbish. We’re in a worse place now than we were 20, 30 years ago.

So sustainability is not what we need. What we need is a world where we can describe a better future for all than the one we currently have. That, to me, is the power of potential of beauty. It may not fit into your nice Excel sheets that you can kind of do all this kind of calculations. So it doesn’t really work like that. But what you can see is that if people are happier, if you start to look at loads of studies, if people are happier, then they go to hospital less. People eat healthier. They go to hospital less. The reality is that nature supports all diversity. So trying to turn things into narratives where you’re trying to exclude certain types of human beings from what is acceptable. You’re an immigrant. You’re undocumented, whatever. To me, it seems a completely forced narrative. It’s reductive, as opposed to expansive. That freaks some people out. But actually, I think that’s just how the way the world works. That’s what I would have said to your—

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. The distinction you’re making between — this is, again, your other book there on how to really build essentially a business that is beautiful, does pose, I think, a lot of important questions but also this important distinction between the extractive and regenerative approaches. I think that we really have to make the shift. One of the questions that you raised in the book or that you say that you challenge business leaders to ask—which struck me—is: is this the most beautiful decision we can make? I’m curious to know what responses do you get to that. How do people process that?

Alan: It’s quite a disarming question. I was being interviewed once by someone, and they asked me that question. I said, well, let’s just say there’s a car company that’s in a lot of financial distress. The board is meeting together to discuss how they’re going to deal with what it is they’re going to do. The leading tool is the idea that they’re going to sell the idea to their global marketplace, that diesel cars are much more efficient and a lot less polluting than petrol cars. Then someone on the board sits there and says, “Do you think this is the most beautiful decision that we could make?” The interviewer looked to me, and I said, “So this is all unpacking for you now, isn’t it?” Because the reality is you’re being asked a question about your own honesty, your own ethics, the ethics of this board, the longevity of the impacts that, were you to be found out, would have huge and significant ramifications. Of course, that company is Volkswagen. Ten years after all that happened, I remember meeting a lawyer and he said, “We are still making hay out of the classed actions. I mean, in Germany, they passed the law in Parliament for the first time where a class action could be taken against a company because of what it is they did.

And so, for me, again, it’s a way of really challenging people to think very deeply. So it’s not then about a cerebral exercise. Because actually, your ethics sit in a much deeper heart of the body, is how I believe it. And so I use that as a challenge in terms of the quality of decisions that people might want to take. Yeah, you’re rushing for the short term. That’s still a kind of reality. But the fact is, the time it takes to clear up the consequences of all those awful decisions that people make are incalculable. The money is spent mopping up all of the spilled milk, all of the damage, whatever. To me, it’s a tragedy. Because you kind of look at it and you think, “Well, it didn’t need to be like that in the first place. You just needed to be a little bit more patient.” I don’t know. But people run on the quarterly numbers. They run on their 5-year and 10-year cycles. I would always point them back to, well, nature’s run this incredible design project.

In fact, I was watching this film called Megalith the other day, which is all about the standing stones that have been built all through Europe at incredible scale. Before really there was any form of society that you would call it, there weren’t any big towns or cities. These were just people that were prepared to somehow wherever come together to collectively bring stones that weighed two tons, four tons, five tons, ten tons, to erect places in Brittany, in France, that were just extraordinary, or Stonehenge—which is the most famous one in England, where they obviously understood that there was something about collective transcendence. There was something about our relationship to the stars, to the universe, to the land that was important. That somehow, their collective efforts would be transcendent against anything else that they kind of held in as a belief.

There’s this wonderful book called The Dawn of Everything, written by a guy called David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unfortunately, David Graeber died just before it was published. It really challenges the concept and idea of what an organized society could look like. So the story that we’re being told at the moment, I think, is just but one story of immense possibilities of how we could live our lives. Those things still stand as an incredible monument to human capacity to organize, come together, be together, and transcend together. In a sense, albeit the beauty thing for me is immensely spiritual—that was something that I discovered on my journey—it’s not an organized religion in the sense of whether it’s, well, all the religions that you could throw your hat in the ring at the moment. But we understood that we could transcend and be together. I think beauty plays that role. I think it’s why it’s so important to people, and then it’s why we need to reclaim it for what it needs to be. So I’m really thrilled about the work you’re about to embark on and to go on because I think that story really needs to be brought to people.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. That’s wonderful. Well, let me ask you perhaps one final piece of advice you could leave our viewers and listeners with. You talk about beauty as a verb, doing beauty. You offer a manifesto of regeneration and the concept of Re. Could you leave us with perhaps some practices? You do offer a number in Do Design, but maybe one or two that could help our viewers and listeners to concretely in daily life do beauty.

Alan: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that maybe in a simple way, find something every day that you believe to be beautiful. It could be a small thing. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. Do you walk every day? Do a 20-minute walk. Just take a walk and say: “This walk is going to be for beauty. It’s going to be for me.” How do I bring beauty into somebody else’s life? So your act of generosity, I think, is very important. Do you write a letter to yourself in terms of, to make my life more beautiful, what would that look like? And to sit with that question, which is, I mean, when I wrote the Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything book, I mean, I sat with that for a long time. I mean, it was four years, I think, where I just thought there’s something in this that’s really important. I didn’t even know the word was beauty then. I mean, we started off with the question of my experience around beauty.

Your best guide to your best future is within yourself. It’s not within other people. It talks to you if you’re prepared to be patient. Just ask that question. Were I to go home, what would that beautiful home look like to me? Spiritually, work-wise, whatever, rather than feeling that there are opinions and ideas of lots of other people, that I actually know you better than you know yourself. Because no one knows you better than you know yourself. It’s the truth of it.

Brandon: Right. Well, thank you, Alan. This has been really enlightening. Where can we point our viewers and listeners to your work? Where can we learn more about what you’re doing?

Alan: Well, there’s the website www.beautiful.business. Then there’s a new website coming also which is thebeautifuldesignproject.com. That’s about to go live. You can find my books at The Do Book Co. So if you just Google Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything or Do Build: How to make and Lead a Business the World Needs. Actually, at the Do Book Company, it’s great because you can get a physical paperback, and you can get an e-book at the same time. There’s lots of information on there about me too. So there you go.

Brandon: Fantastic. Wonderful. Thanks again, Alan. This has been such a delight.

Alan: You’re welcome. Okay. Thank you.

Around eight in the evening, I wrap up my toddler’s bedtime story and tell him it’s time to call Tata and Pati – his grandfather and grandmother as they’re called in Tamil.

The routine is the same every night. My father answers my WhatsApp call and shouts across the room to my mother: “Come, talk to the children!” It’s already dawn in Bangalore, India, where my parents live. My mother’s standing a foot away from the television, watching a live devotional broadcast from a Hindu temple. She needs glasses but never wears them, so she hunches toward the screen, eyes squinted. When my father calls again, she acquiesces and hobbles over to the phone as my father holds it out.

“Show me your toy – what toy you have today?” she asks my four‑year‑old in English. He hoists his latest Lego creation. Today it’s a spaceship with a red wing on one side and a blue on the other. “Mmm, very nice, very nice,” she says as he describes what it is. For three, maybe four seconds, her eyes catch light, as if a window somewhere inside her has opened. Then the shadows return. She turns away and tells my father in Tamil, “OK, take it away, take it away,” and goes back to the TV. We’ll try again tomorrow.

If you had asked me when I was my son’s age what beauty was, I would have pointed to my mother. In a photo from when I was four, I’m standing next to her, holding my green bicycle. I can still feel her running beside me in the desert heat of Oman, where I grew up: hand on the tall sissy bar, steadying the bike with one hand, and laughing as I finally figured out how to balance myself without training wheels. It’s one of my only memories of her being plainly, effortlessly happy. In another photo from those years, I’m standing on the couch and kissing her cheek while she beams at the camera. But I have no memory of that moment, or of ever having kissed her. Those kinds of moments would soon disappear as my mother became severely mentally ill. And as her schizophrenia progressed, untreated, what changed was not only her, but also the way I processed beauty.

There are two types of beauty. One is what I would call scripted beauty. This is the beauty for which we have cultural scripts – the kind we recognize and reward. We see it in physical attractiveness, beautiful objects, picture-perfect homes and doting couples and smiling family photos. Scripted beauty doesn’t have to be superficial; it can be laden with meaning and yearning, and its absence in one’s life can feel oppressive. The second is what I call revealed beauty – the kind that usually remains obscured, yet sometimes discloses itself unbidden in moments of radiance and recognition where something surprising breaks through.

It matters to be able to tell these two kinds of beauty apart. Scripted beauty has its place – it helps us stick to shared norms and orders our lives. But if we stop there, we confuse beauty with conformity. We end up wounding those who can’t follow the scripts, and become oblivious to their beauty. The worth of a person is never evident on the surface; it remains obscured from our eyes. And in chasing after scripted beauty, we lose sight of this deeper kind. We don’t know how to look for it – we may not even realize it’s there.

My mother, over a few short years, went from working as a physician to spending her days alone at home, gripped by a fierce worry, scanning the room with the intensity of someone who senses an enemy nearby, spending hours speaking to invisible presences. I never learned what triggered her illness. Her night shifts working alone at the hospital probably didn’t help; she resigned when I was six. Perhaps it was the long days subsequently spent alone at home, without extended family and friends, without the scaffolding of language and custom. Life in the Arabian Gulf as a guest worker can make anyone anxious – you’re always a foreigner, never at home, your visa one capricious administrative decision away from being canceled, forcing your return to a home country where stable work is even more precarious. Genetics, neurochemistry, and other unknown stresses were likely at work, but I didn’t know any of this, and couldn’t see it from the outside.

Read the rest of the piece at Plough online: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/beauty/my-mothers-hidden-radiance

In 1977, Lisa Z. Lindahl revolutionized the world of sports. Frustrated with the lack of comfortable breast support for women runners, Lisa came up with a crazy idea: a jockstrap for women. What she, Hinda Miller, and Polly Smith ended up creating was something entirely new—a body-affirming garment that acknowledged movement as dignity and made the world of athletics accessible to women like never before.

Her work is now archived at the Smithsonian, exhibited at The Met as a “revolutionary piece of women’s undergarments,” and honored by her induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2022). She later co-founded Bellisse, co-inventing the Compressure Comfort® Bra for breast cancer survivors. Lisa is also the author of Beauty as Action and the memoir Unleash the Girls.

Years after transforming women’s athletics, Lisa had an epiphany that would revolutionize the course of her own life: “Beauty is what really matters.”

She has spent the decades since then trying to unpack what this means. And the conclusion she has arrived at is that “true beauty” is harmony. Beauty for her is not glamour or perfection, but at its core, is about resonance. In music, harmony arises when different notes support and enrich each other. In life, beauty arises when our choices, relationships, and creations reflect a deeper coherence.

In a culture rooted in fear, competition, and accumulation, that kind of harmony is rare. We are trained to optimize, to quantify, to compare, to consume. But Lisa argues that those logics erode our capacity to see and be seen, and they strip our work of its soul.

Lisa sees beauty as a verb—beauty needs to be put into action—and has developed a set of 16 practices and habits that help people cultivate beauty in their own lives, which she shares in our conversation.

You can listen my interview with Lisa in two parts here and here, watch the video of the full conversation below, or read the unedited transcript that follows.

(preview)

Lisa: When I invented the sports bra, I was just solving my own problem. Because I was just starting graduate school and I thought, “How am I going to earn a living?” I thought maybe it could be a nice little mail-order business on the side—because if I wanted it, I bet some other women did.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: Well, oh my.

Brandon: Yeah, you didn’t think you’d be starting a revolution?

Lisa: No, I didn’t.

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Many of us want to change the world, but what happens if you change the world and still find yourself searching for what truly matters? In 1977, Lisa Lindahl invented the sports bra—a product that revolutionized women’s athletics around the world. For that invention, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining luminaries like Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. But years after building a successful company and achieving the kind of recognition that most inventors can only dream of, Lisa found herself standing by Lake Champlain, wondering why contentment still felt out of reach. Then came a surprising revelation: beauty is what really matters. That insight led her from the world of business to a lifelong exploration of what she calls true beauty—beauty that she sees as not about being glamour or cosmetics, but about harmony, relationship, compassion, creation, and a belief that beauty may be what can truly heal the world.

Lisa is the author of Beauty as Action, which explores beauty not as appearance but as harmony, and a memoir, Unleash the Girls, which recounts the unlikely story of inventing the sports bra while in graduate school—and what it taught her about creativity, resilience, and purpose. Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: All right, Lisa, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the show.

Lisa: It’s wonderful to be here. I am so excited about this work you’re doing. I’ve been so interested in beauty, what I call true beauty, for so long. When I saw what you were doing, I was just really, thank you. I’m so excited.

Brandon: Well, yeah, thanks for reaching out. I mean, your book on true beauty is really quite amazing. We’ll jump into that and talk about that a little bit. To get started, I’d love it if you could share with us a story of an encounter with beauty that you had perhaps as a child or in your early life that you still remember and that takes you back.

Lisa: That’s easy-peasy because this is a memory that I’ve carried with me all my life. We were living in an area that if I walked across my backyard and down the hill, there was a river that went along. And when I was about nine or ten years old, I would walk down — in the winter, this river would freeze. I would walk down and put on my ice skates and get on the river and skate on it where it ended up in a big lake. But there was nobody on this river. One day, I’m on my skates. I’m on the river, skating on it. It’s so quiet. Everything was just encased in ice. There must have been a big snowstorm or ice storm. I don’t know. I’m skating along. I looked down, and there’s a branch of a pine tree that had fallen in the water. The water had frozen all around it. Every needle was encased. The ice was black. It was just the most beautiful piece of art embedded in this frozen water. I stopped. There’s nobody around. It was me, the forest, and the river. It was so beautiful. That’s my memory. I mean, literally, I have remembered that forever.

Brandon: What about it stayed with you? I mean, yeah, it sounds magnificent. Many of us might have such experiences and we say, “Well, all right. That was nice,” and move on. But what do you think has lodged that within you in this way?

Lisa: Well, it was the quiet. It was daytime, and there was no sound other than the creaking maybe. I was aware of no sound other than my ice skates, my breathing. Looking at this, it’s like being in a piece — I mean, now this is my later self saying, “Oh, I was like being in a piece of art.”

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: But that’s my later self, kind of. I mean, I still remember that. I had an earlier experience also when I was much younger, like maybe three or four, standing on my mother. My mother had a balcony off of her bedroom, a porch. I’d gone out to it. Because I remember the bars of the railing on this little second-story porch were at my nose. It was sunny. It was summer, I guess. I was looking at the leaves being ruffled by the wind and the light on the leaves and their movement. All of a sudden, Brandon, all of a sudden, I was one with that. The minute I became aware, oh my gosh. It was done. The minute that thought, I had a thought. I’ve differentiated myself again.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, it pulls you out of the experience when you reflect on it, analyze it, and recognize what’s happening.

Lisa: Recognize, that was the case here. That never left me, that sense of we are all — I had experienced being one with the universe.

Brandon: Wow. Extraordinary. You do write about this sense of harmony, this sense of connection, in your book Beauty as Action. I want to first actually ask you a little bit about your other book. Most people know you as the inventor of the sports bra.

Lisa: This is what I’m famous for.

Brandon: That’s right. That’s right, yeah. And you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: I had no idea. When I invented the sports bra, I was just solving my own problem. Because I was just starting graduate school and I thought, “How am I going to earn a living?” I thought maybe it could be a nice little mail-order business on the side—because if I wanted it, I bet some other women did.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: Well, oh my.

Brandon: Yeah, you didn’t think you’d be starting a revolution?

Lisa: No, I didn’t. Truly, I did not understand for decades—I’m not exaggerating—for decades, how significant the sports bra was, is.

Brandon: Well, tell us about the origin of what led you to invent it. What was the problem you were facing, and then how did this solution emerge?

Lisa: I was in my mid-20s, maybe a little younger, and I didn’t have a driver’s license. I had a job. I was sitting in a lot, so I was gaining weight. I wasn’t comfortable with that. A friend said, “Hey, try this jogging thing.” Everybody is jogging. It’s what we called it at the time. “If you just run a mile and a quarter three times a week, you’ll lose weight.” So I went, oh, okay, I can do that. Because it didn’t require getting to a gym or anything else. It was being outside which I loved. I liked that idea. This was before there were even necessarily particular shoes for jogging and running. I just put on my sneakers and went out the door. I fell in love with it. I got hooked. I got hooked.

By 1977—we’re talking 1977—I was running about 30 miles a week, 5 or 6 miles a day. My bouncing breasts were uncomfortable, and my bra straps are slipping down. Then I had a friend I ran with who was a guy, and he’d be ahead of me. The Vermont summers can get hot. He’d pull off his shirt and tuck it behind in his shorts. I thought, I’m jealous. I got this clangy bra on and sweat. Anyway, it started as a joke. My sister called me from — she was living in California at the time. She called me and said, “I just started running.” We didn’t call it running then. It was still jumping. She said, “My boobs. I’m so uncomfortable with my bouncy boobs. What do you do?” I said I’ve tried anything. I don’t know. She said, “Why isn’t there a jockstrap for women?” We laughed. We thought that was so funny. I said, yeah, same concept, different part of the anatomy, right?

Brandon: Right, right, right.

Lisa: So we laughed and we hung up. I sat down and I thought, “That’s not such a silly idea.” I was in graduate school at the time, so I had notebooks and pencils around. I sat down and I wrote down all the things that such a bra would have to do. It would have to support the breasts. It wasn’t about lifting and separating and making them more attractive. It was about support. It would have to have straps that didn’t fall down. It would have no hardware to dig in or chafe. I forget, there’s a whole list somewhere. I thought, “Yeah, this is such a product that we’d have to do.” But I don’t sew. I mean, sewing is not one of the ways I create. I can do a lot of things, but in eighth grade, I flunked sewing. Really, it was, I guess, a home-ec class or something.

My friend, Polly, who was in the same class in eighth grade, she excelled. In fact, when she grew up, she became quite an accomplished costume designer. But that summer, she was doing the costumes for the Shakespeare Festival up here at UVM, at the university here. She was renting a room from me because I lived in Burlington, Vermont. She lived in Manhattan. She had this summer big. So she said, “Hey, can I live in your guest room?” I said, “Sure, of course.” So I had this idea. I’m downstairs, and I had this idea about the bra. I walked upstairs to her room and knocked on the door. “Polly. Would you mind?” She just rolled her eyes because neither one—

We went to school together starting in eighth grade, and we would cut gym classes together. Neither one of us were good. We were not into sports at all. So she thought this thing with me running, she just really rolled her eyes. She didn’t know what that was about. She said, “Oh, yeah, right. I’m not going to—” I told her what I wanted to do and she goes, “No, no, no.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “There’s only one thing more difficult to create than a bra, and that’s a shoe.” I said, why? And she said, “Because it’s about different parts of the body. It’s not just drape and design. It has to support different parts of the body that are connecting.” But I knew my friend, Polly, and I knew that that design challenge is what would hook her. She has no interest in running or anything else. But then she’s like, “So how would it—?” We sat down and started sketching. Then we started making prototypes up at the costume shop at UVM. There’s even a plaque in the costume shop about the sports bra. First sports bar was made here.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: And the prototype that really worked was when — in fact, we went and bought two jockstraps, cut them apart, sewed them back together again. I went running in it and I went, “Oh my God.” I mean, that was the wrong fabric and everything else, but we had the concept done. We had the engineering done, if you will.

Brandon: Yeah, wow. Then how did it take off? How did this go from something that you just found was helpful for you to a worldwide necessity?

Lisa: Well, because the need was there. I was right in one thing, in terms of, “Well, if I want this, I bet that other people do.” If I had done market research — what I think is really funny is, if I had done market research, I would never have started a business. Because the market research would have told me that bra sales had been flat for decades and that the existing lingerie companies that were making bras were just fighting for market share, grabbing from each other. But there’s no increase. In fact, bra sales were declining. Because, let’s remember, this was 1977—with all us weekend hippies were not wearing our bras. Actually, there’s the whole trope about burning bras, which actually never really happened. But it was an attitude.

So if I had done that market research, I would say, oh, no. But I didn’t because it had never occurred to me. Because I was not interested in going into business. I had an art studio. I was back in graduate school, studying education. This was going to be a nice little mail-order business on the side that would help me get through graduate school. Meanwhile, Polly was very clear that she’d help make this and she’d be supportive, but she was not interested in going to business. She had a gig she was going to back in New York. She became a costume designer for Jim Henson in Sesame Street and has eight Emmys at the moment.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: So she was clear that she didn’t want to go into business, but that she would help from Manhattan. Her assistant that summer was a woman named Hinda Miller. Well, then she was Hinda Schreiber. She was interested in going into business. Because here’s the thing that I’ve recently come to accept. I’m a visionary. I see connections. But then when it comes to turning it into doing this, I want to hand it off. Okay. Liz, go make it happen.

Brandon: Right, right, right.

Lisa: Hinda was great because she just wanted to figure out how to get this thing manufactured. Because we put this little ad in and, all of a sudden, all these orders were coming in. In fact, one was from Macy’s lingerie department. I’m going, “No way.” So Hinda found — we understood that we didn’t want to start a manufacturing business. We weren’t going to do that. Cottage industry was out because of quality. We can’t. And as Polly was very clear, this is sewing stretch on stretch. It’s very difficult. This is, how much detail do you want?

I mean, we found another entrepreneur in South Carolina. There were a lot of mills in that time, but they were all going out of business because production — that was the beginning of production leaving this country. There was a couple who was starting their own cut-and-sew operation, and they were willing. We were one product in three sizes: small, medium, and large, in one color. Nobody who’s real business was going to take us on. But this couple said, “Oh, yeah. Great. We’ll do that.” So we subcontracted out the making. Then my living room and dining room became the warehouse and office, until my landlady said, “No, this is not okay.” We had to actually go rent offices. I mean, it was phenomenal how we did it. I mean, we were young.

Brandon: So how long did it take from your initial prototype to recognizing, gosh, there’s a huge market for this, and the demand is overwhelming and so on?

Lisa: Not long at all. Within the first year, we knew we had a tiger by the tail.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: Then years later, one of our employees did this retrospective. She looked at the sales growth and she said, “Do you guys realize that you’ve been growing 25% per year?”

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: What? The other weird thing, neither one of us were really business people or aspired to be entrepreneur. We didn’t know things. Like, we didn’t realize that the fact that we’re profitable every year was unusual. That’s the main goal. You have to make a profit.

Brandon: Well, talk about where you see — I suppose maybe one thing I’d love to get your thoughts on is a distinction between invention and innovation. It’s one thing to invent something, but I wonder if you see innovation as a distinct process or a distinct phenomenon.

Lisa: Well, it’s interesting. Because how does invention happen without innovation? I think the very concept of invention, the creation, I don’t know that I’ve ever separated—

Brandon: See the distinction between those two, yeah.

Lisa: Yeah.

Brandon: I think one way in which people distinguish this is invention as simply having to do with something new, that hasn’t been done before, et cetera, and innovation as more having to do with the making it widely accessible, its diffusion, its actual availability, accessibility, et cetera. I wonder if you see those as related or separate phenomena.

Lisa: See, all those things you just said in my mind would not be associated with innovation. To me, innovation is new. It hasn’t been before. It hasn’t existed in that configuration. It hasn’t existed at all or in that particular configuration. Innovation is new. Bras had existed before. The bra is nothing new or different. But how we put it together and its purpose, a need that had not been recognized, that’s how I think—

Brandon: I suppose there are a lot of things, a lot of products, where perhaps the novelty, the newness is there, but people still are not seeing a widespread need for it, or are not resonating with it, or it’s not meeting an immediate demand, et cetera, or it’s not taking off, right? I think there’s a lot of tension there. In your case, that didn’t seem to be an issue. It seems like very quickly, after you recognize the need in your own life, it resonated with so many women around the world and revolutionized sports.

Lisa: Right.

Brandon: I want to ask you where you see the beauty in innovation. Would you use the word beauty to any aspect of innovation?

Lisa: I have to think about that. I mean, for me, I ran that business for—I don’t know—12 years, over a dozen years, before selling it. After I had sold it, I started thinking about what really matters. I had a degree of financial security. I had a new husband. I built a lovely house on Lake Champlain. I felt so lucky. Also, why did I have this feeling inside me: why wasn’t I content, I guess? It wasn’t that I was unhappy. Because that’s not the place at all. But there was this something.

I had also started my volunteer work with the Epilepsy Foundation of America, and I found that very fulfilling and very important. I write about this in my book. One day, I was standing looking at the window in my studio at Lake Champlain. It was a gray day. It wasn’t a traditionally pretty day. I was struck by the beauty of the lake and the wind and the leaves. It just hit me. I knew beauty is what really matters. True beauty is what really matters. I thought, what the hell? I mean, in the same moment, I thought, “What the hell does that mean? What? What am I saying? What?” I started thinking about it and I thought, well, it always. There is always beauty. It’s eternal. It’s eternal. Then I spent a long time thinking about, “What the hell?”

Brandon: Wow. So it’s having an insight, but not quite knowing. I mean, you recognize this was true, and yet a part of you is just bewildered by what it means.

Lisa: So I started doing a lot of reading. I had always been interested in philosophy. I read Kierkegaard and all this other stuff. I started looking at beauty, and there was very actually little written about beauty. Then you could say, well, let’s change the word to aesthetics. Still, I mean, there’s standards of taste and stuff like that. It furrowed my brow. It’s like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why did I think that beauty is what really matters? Part of it was that it was eternal, that it didn’t take mankind’s interference to create. In fact, often that got in the way. I went back to school. I had never finished my graduate degree because Jogbra, the business, got in the way.

Brandon: Sure.

Lisa: So when I was, I guess, in my late 50s, I was reading sort of what I call a woo-woo kind of magazine. There was an ad for a program that was all about culture and spirituality. I thought, “Oh, that’s really—” What it listed and what it was talking about matched all the books on my bedside table, kind of. I went, I’m going to go. So I packed my bed. I did. I applied. I was so amazed. I applied.

Brandon: Where was this?

Lisa: I was living in Vermont at the time. This was Holy Names University in Oakland, California.

Brandon: Wow. Okay.

Lisa: Catholic University.

Brandon: Okay.

Lisa: I packed my bags, went out of my big fancy house on Champlain, and went and lived in a dorm.

Brandon: Wow. How did you feel as you were doing that? I mean, were you just wondering? Were you like, did you have moments of wondering, “What the hell am I doing here,” and, “This isn’t making any sense?” Or was it very clear to you that this is really some kind of calling? Did you find yourself satisfied in that pursuit?

Lisa: Well, I felt like I found a path. And up until then, I had gone to retreats and meditation centers. I did a few things with Deepak Chopra and his crowd. I found that all very. It fed me, but I was still niggling on this thing about beauty, you know. I was alone. I mean, it wasn’t like I had a group of people that I got to hung out with and we all sat around and talked about, well, is beauty really eternal, or what is it? Also, I’ve written a lot because I have always been a writer privately, mostly. I mean, I did a lot of the marketing stuff for Jogbra and all that kind of stuff, but all my writing had been private. I was reading and writing, but where was the sharing or learning from others? Where were my people? So going back, I finished my graduate degree. It was amazing. I mean, this program had some of the most amazing people come in and speak to us. I did find my people there. But I did have a home and a husband in Vermont.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: So talk about balancing.

Brandon: Yeah, wow.

Lisa: So my master’s thesis was on beauty, the importance of beauty. I was so excited when it got accepted as a thesis because I thought, “Okay, maybe I’m not crazy.” And that was in 2007. I’d had the epiphany about beauty probably around 2000 — I don’t know. Early 2003, I don’t know. One of the things I’m fond of saying and at the time I found so annoying was that, to talk about beauty, everybody thinks you’re talking about what is, in fact, glamour.

Brandon: Right. Yeah.

Lisa: I say in my book and I say to people, when I talk to them about beauty, I say, “I’m talking about cosmology, not cosmetology.”

Brandon: Right. That’s great. That’s great. I mean, yeah, you search for beauty online. You type it into Google, and you get beauty products and the cosmetics industry, right? That is our immediate association with the word. It’s really been captured by either that or by fashion, or on the other side, by maybe high art, right? And so Mozart. But yeah, you’re talking about something else. And so, what is true beauty? How would you define or articulate that?

Lisa: Can I cheat?

Brandon: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Lisa: Because I did, I said it well in here somewhere. True beauty is about harmony. Harmony implies a lot of different parts, right?

Brandon: Yeah.

Lisa: The analogy I like to use is musical notes. Every musical note is a little different. They can come together and create cacophony—ugh, sound awful—or they can come together and blend and support each other and create beauty. So true beauty is about harmony. So when you look at the leaves blowing in the wind and the sunlight is on them and it’s all coming together, all those same elements could be a hurricane, just the cacophony, if you will. But there’s beauty there too as well. So that’s what I came to. I was worried at first because I thought, “Oh, that’s so simple.” But so what?

Brandon: Yeah, I think that, yes, sort of that sense of harmony becomes the sense of fit, the ways in which things come together, things resonate, seems really critical. I think you draw a link between the decline of beauty, or at least the decline of the importance of beauty, and the decline of civilization. You really see this as it’s not just something that matters for us to personally feel a sense of harmony, but you think this really has broad implications. Could you sketch that out? Why does this matter?

Lisa: To me, it is so clear. I mean, the three part, what beauty is, is about passion, relationship and — there’s a third one that is escaping me at the moment. We are so much now a culture of what I think of as fear, ugliness, and competition, rather than openness, being supportive, building. We’re not about building relationship or building connections. And so much of it is that we’ve become — I’ll try not to make it too broad. We’ve become a culture of accumulation rather than connection. I think a lot about the demise of community, which modern civilization is seeing. You know, it used to be people could sit on their porches and talk to their neighbors. Well, there are no porches anymore. Community is now online. We’re not meeting in person and having this chat. Actually, among certain crowds, there’s been discussion about, can you have spiritual connections online?

Brandon: Right. Yeah.

Lisa: Yes. Actually, yes, you can. But you have to understand that that’s possible and that that’s something you’re willing to be open to and share and make happen.

Brandon: Why does talking about beauty—I mean, true beauty in the sense in which you’re describing it—matter in today’s context?

Lisa: Because again, it’s back to this whole concept and idea of harmony. I mean, beauty is the manifestation of harmony. I guess we talk about harmonics and such. The opposite of harmony is a lot of what we’re experiencing now—conflict, disagreement. There will always be disagreement. A disagreement in and of itself is not a problem. It’s an opportunity.

Brandon: You told me you were in grad school, and you recognized that you were called to do this work on beauty. You wrote this thesis. Where’s your journey led you since then in terms of following this path of beauty? What does that look like in your life?

Lisa: So much philosophy is, you know, a lot of words. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Beauty is something you do, something you feel, something you are, something you create. So rather than just be blah, blah, blah, I said, well, what does practicing beauty — how do you create more beauty? What does that even mean? There are like 16 practices, and it requires no interesting equipment or expense of this or that. For instance, the first practice is to see. All that means is getting off of automatic pilot and really taking in the light on the leaves or the smell of the air. Another one is, so it’s practicing. Another one is practice cultivating awe. You see, but how do you respond? How do you take it in? Another is operating in a “both-and universe” rather than the “either-or universe.” Another one is practice feeling compassion. I mean, what does compassion really mean? How do you actually practice it? That’s always a challenge. Being wary of the “truth” is another practice.

Brandon: I mean, off these 16 practices, do you find some of them are ones that you’re particularly gravitating to these days?

Lisa: No, they’re all operative at different points at times. Like when I wrote, be wary of the truth. It was way before there were such polarizing entities in the world. “This is true. This is the way it is, blah, blah, blah,” versus, “No, it’s this way.” So I talk about what is truth.

Brandon: One of the challenges I think a lot of people have with trying to emphasize something like beauty, in this sense in which you mean it, is it feels to people—at least the kind of critique I get—this is sort of naive. It’s sort of wishful thinking. It’s nice to be compassionate, blah, blah, blah, but we have real conflict in the world. We have to win, and we have to make sure that our side, our perspective gets to influence people. We have the whole concern about economic survival and the challenges that people have. And if you’re working through three jobs, you don’t have the time to sit and attend to trees and so on, right? And so there are a lot of pressures that make it seems really challenging for people to take this seriously, and they lead us to, I think, trivialize beauty. So I wonder if you have any suggestions for what it would take to, in the face of those sorts of challenges — whether it’s political challenges, whether it’s human rights challenges in society, whether it’s individual pressures to survive, I mean, what can people do in the face of that that wouldn’t feel naive and pollyannaish, and yet can help them perhaps recognize something about this deeper truth you’re trying to draw us to?

Lisa: Rather than think of it as naive, think of it as thoughtful, looking at it again. True beauty is not about appearance at all. Well, because we could get into the — yes, visuals are important, but we’ve trivialized beauty so much. But may I be so bold as to read you just this a little bit.

Brandon: Please, yeah.

Lisa: Beauty is a common thread throughout all experience and backgrounds. The way of beauty is non-religious, non-political, and intends no ethnic bias. Practicing true beauty will help evolve human consciousness. Any individual can do it. I really mean that whether, it’s so not about our standard of importance now is way out of whack. We’ve lost community. Community begins with family. The family is the first most intimate form of community. Then it’s the neighbor or the person that’s delivering. We have gone almost out of our way to isolate and to separate and to differentiate. Now there’s a lot of work being done about how the consciousness of other entities, we humans, we think we’re in charge. We’re better than and more — well, I can’t say that word. That’s not the case. Trees are sentient. Mushrooms talk to each other, sends messages around. They just have different languages, different ways of communicating, but they do communicate. And who the hell are we? Anyway, we have to get over ourselves. By paying attention to what I’m calling true beauty is a methodology to do that, to really shift the paradigm.

Brandon: It seems like it really is — it is pretty radical. Because, again, I think one of the dominant ways in which we engage with beauty is to want to possess the beautiful object, right? People argue that if beauty is that de-centering and unselfing, then how come the Nazis loved beauty so much, et cetera, right? And so you can have one way of encountering beauty in which you consume it, you possess it. It’s an amusement. It’s something that might make you feel intense pleasure. But it’s not really transforming you. It’s not really leading you beyond yourself. It’s not de-centering you. And so I think that is another challenge. And again, it is an obstacle that I regularly encounter, with an objection that I encounter with people I talk to about beauty, which is that isn’t it just about beautiful things that you can possess? Or doesn’t it just draw you deeper into either this kind of selfishness or consumerist mindset or even a denialism—where you have a nice experience, and then so what? Ultimately, why does it matter? Versus the kind of beauty that is perhaps maybe more, perhaps you might call spiritual or transcendent, right? It seems like there really is a distinction. I don’t know how to help people overcome that hurdle. I wonder if you have any thoughts there.

Lisa: I do. But let me refer to this stool and see if this speaks to what you’re talking about. I have this image of a three-legged stool. The number three has been significant in all of humankind’s history: the virgin, the mother; the crone, the father; the son, the Holy Ghost; the Jnana, Bhakti, Karma. I mean, I’m not probably pronouncing those right. This idea of three: truth, beauty, and justice. If you take away one of those, the stool topples. It becomes unbalanced. That’s where we are. Because as humans, we tend to do is we tend to privilege one of those concepts, like whatever it is. Truth is more important than beauty. Beauty is more important than anything else. Then things get out of whack. So I started thinking about — well, actually that’s what brought me to: what if beauty is the seat of the stool that these other three hold up? And when justice falls out or something else — I think that’s what’s happened to us. I’m not sure I’m answering your question.

Brandon: I think you are, yeah. Yeah, I would say that that kind of danger of beauty being untethered from truth or from justice. Then it’s sort of this free-floating thing, which can then be co-opted by whatever our own pursuits are, right?

Lisa: Some of the stuff, one of the things — I mean, I know you have children. When I look at what is on the screens these days, especially this time of year, it’s all about — I mean, it’s all murder, horror, scary,

fear. It’s all about elevating and encouraging fearfulness. That’s not beautiful. That is not true beauty.

Brandon: Lisa, you’ve lived with epilepsy for most of your life. Could you say anything about how that has shaped your sensibility about beauty?

Lisa: You know, I’ve never actually thought about that. I have what’s called an invisible disability. That has taught me a great deal. Because I look and act and appear like anybody else, I can get away with it. But I have to be way more thoughtful. I just wrote a piece called The Things She Worries About. I worry about the basement floor. If I’m alone in the house and if I fell on the basement floor, I’d crack open my head. Now, that has actually happened—not in the basement, but in a bathroom. Maybe this is related to the beauty thing. I don’t know. But I’ve learned to become aware of — I’m not on automatic pilot as much as most people are. I have to think before I go swimming. I’ve almost drowned two or three times because I didn’t think before I jumped in the water. Does that stop me from swimming? No. I have to learn. So I don’t know. I don’t think I’m answering your question, except that curiosity is a really important attribute. When you have something you have to deal with that most people don’t, I mean, most people don’t—

Brandon: Yeah, I suppose it certainly makes sense that it would dispose you in some way towards being innovative and creative and having to figure out how to make things work, especially if you want to be resilient and not just be resigned to difficulty, right?

Lisa: Yep.

Brandon: Please, yeah.

Lisa: No, I don’t want to actually say that.

Brandon: I also just was thinking in terms of a recognition of — you mentioned the attentiveness, that you have to constantly cultivate. But also, I imagine a sense of vulnerability, a keener sense of the body, of embodiment. I think there might be a connection to beauty there.

Lisa: I will say this. I have traveled all over the world. I’ve had by myself often. I have had convulsions, the tonic. There are many different kinds of seizures. The one that most people think of is when you fall and you shake. That’s a tonic, clonic seizure. They’re very dramatic, and they’re scary for the people witnessing them. I have had those sorts of seizures in restaurants, in airports, in the backseat of taxi cabs. No one has ever harmed me, stolen from me. And the fact that I was in those situations is on me, especially the taxi cab one. I got an early morning flight. I knew I wasn’t 100%. I should never have gotten on the plane. I really wanted to go to this meeting, so I did. I got off the plane. I knew I was not okay. I got into this taxi.

I remember looking at the taxi driver’s name because I thought, “Oh, man, if I have a convulsion here, I’m restrained, a woman, alone in her high heels and skirt, at the backseat of a cab.” It was some foreign name that I was never going to remember or anything else. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up on a gurney in Bellevue Hospital in New York City. I woke up because I felt someone pulling my skirt down. This is the days of miniskirts and panty hose, just a little bit. I kind of went, Brandon, I woke up. My briefcase was with me. My purse and my wallet was with me. The driver had not even taken out the fare from the airport from my wallet.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: So this guy had seen me in the backseat, changed the location, took me to the hospital emergency room, dropped me off. That’s been my experience. I have sat in an airport, where I’m waiting to get on a flight and had a convulsion sitting there and thinking it was important. I took out my wallet before I went out to open it up so they’d know who I was. It’s what I was thinking, because you’re not thinking.

Brandon: Right, right, right.

Lisa: Nobody touched my wallet. My experience of humankind is that it is basically good. I choose to believe that because that’s been my experience. Is there a lot of crap going on in the world now? Yes. I want more of the message of the true beauty that is available to us is being handed down to, shown to our children, the upcoming generations, rather than this vampires and Halloween, and all this stuff, you know. Oh my God.

Brandon: Well, that’s great. Well, I mean, in that vein, I suppose if there’s maybe one practice you might recommend to our listeners and viewers to really learn how to live more fully into this sort of true beauty, what is perhaps one starting point you might recommend?

Lisa: The number one practice, which is practice seeing. Just turn off that automatic pilot. I mean seeing broadly. It’s not just visual. When someone says something that rubs you the wrong way, how do you respond? Are you going to ehh right back? Or are you going to go, where’s that coming from? There are actually three practices. One is practicing compassion, seeing, practicing compassion. Of course, I forget.

Brandon: I think creation, right, was the other?

Lisa: Creating. Right. I’ve just re-read Beauty as Action. Because I wrote it so long ago that I thought, “Oh, I should reread this.” So I reread parts of it. It’s easy. It’s not difficult. I mean, I do. I wish everybody would at least read it. Whether or not you take it on or not is a whole other thing.

Brandon: Yeah, I can’t recommend it enough. It just resonates so much with everything we’ve been doing on this podcast. Certainly, the spirit that animates the work I’m doing is deeply resonant there. So I definitely recommend it to our viewers and listeners. The practices that you’ve recommended are really important, I think, for all of us.

Lisa: Well, that’s why I’m so excited with what you’re doing. I mean, I’m, “Oh, wow. Beauty’s time has come.”

Brandon: Right. Well, let’s hope so.

Lisa: Thank you.

Brandon: Well, Lisa, thank you for your time and for your insights. It’s been fantastic.

Lisa: Well, I hope we can keep in communication and to keep this role and to keep it going.

Brandon: Absolutely.

Lisa: Anything I can do to help, let me know.

Brandon: We’ll do, yeah. Also, we’ll guide our listeners and viewers to your website. Is there anything else you’re working on these days that you would like to share, or anything that you want to add?

Lisa: Life—I’m working on life. Life and living this. No, there are things in the works, but I’m not at liberty to talk about them yet. So check back. There’s stuff in the pipeline.

Brandon: Wonderful. All right. Thank you, Lisa. It’s been a real treat.

Lisa: Thanks, Brandon, so much. I appreciate it.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, folks. That’s a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven’t already. Thanks, and see you next time.

This is the second half of my conversation with Lisa Z. Lindahl.

Lisa is an award-winning inventor, artist, author, and entrepreneur best known for transforming women’s sports with her 1977 invention of the first sports bra, the Jogbra. As CEO of JBI Inc. from 1977–1992, she helped shape a global industry, earning ten patents and seeing her invention arc…

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We’re living in a moment when artificial intelligence promises to make everything faster, smarter, and more efficient. But at what cost to the fragile, messy, beautiful reality of being human?

A lot of the public conversation about AI focuses on capability: what these systems can do, how many jobs they might replace, how close we are to super-intelligence or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Much less often do we ask what AI is doing to our fundamental human capacities for love, grief, and self-understanding. If our tools increasingly mediate our relationships, shape our attention, and even mimic the people we’ve lost, what happens to our ability to face weakness, suffering, and mortality as part of a meaningful life?

Addressing these questions is my latest podcast guest, John C. Havens, who is Founding Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. John helped build the IEEE 7000 Standards Series, now one of the largest bodies of international standards on AI and society. Today, John serves as the Global Staff Director for the IEEE Planet Positive 2030 Program, guiding efforts that prioritize both ecological and human flourishing in technological design. But his perspective on AI doesn’t begin with policy or engineering; it starts with love, vulnerability, and the deep spiritual questions that have shaped his life.

In our conversation, we explore how AI and data-driven systems affect our agency—our ability to choose, to say no, to recognize when we’re being manipulated—and what it means to design technology in a way that honors the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We talk about why anthropomorphizing chatbots (e.g., “How can I help you today?”) is a choice that has ethical and spiritual ramifications, how surveillance capitalism has prepared the ground for generative AI, and why talk of “uploading consciousness” and “superintelligence” often masks an underlying eugenic logic.

We also ask a more hopeful question: if, as Karl Rahner put it, “the inmost core of reality is love,” what would it look like to measure our lives (and our technologies) by gratitude, altruism, and purpose, rather than by optimization? And what unique role might faith communities play in an age of automation, where the temptation to replace difficult human relationships with machines is growing stronger?

You can listen to our episode (in two parts here and here), watch the full conversation on YouTube, or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: Hey, John. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

John: My pleasure. Thank you for all the wonderful work you do on beauty.

Brandon: Thanks. Thanks, John. Well, let’s get started. Speaking of this, speaking of beauty, I usually have my guests begin with a little story about a personal experience of beauty. So do you have a memory that comes to your mind of a profound encounter with beauty from your childhood?

John: I do. The first one that came to mind when I read your email with that question—which I think is such a good question—was when I was a junior camp counselor in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in what must have been—join me in sharing my age—the late ’70s. No, probably the early ’80s because I’m 56, so it would have been like ’82, something like that. So I was like 14 or 15. I remember I was put in charge of this kid named Ernesto. My camp counselors, they weren’t jerks; that’s not a beautiful way to say it or talk about people. But they were like teens, older teens. They said, “Take care of Ernesto, this little boy,” Hispanic by his name, and I could tell. I just couldn’t figure out why he was always running really slow. He was quite small. At the time, I didn’t know what cerebral palsy was.

Brandon: Oh, wow.

John: It was like three days after I was taking care of him that one of the counselors pulled me aside. He said, “You know, Ernesto has got cerebral palsy.” Looking back, I’m like, you didn’t tell me that from the get-go. But it completely shifted my perception. This is what I thought was a beautiful memory. It was mainly about him. I still haven’t ever seen him again and I kind of — I don’t know. He probably would be like if you meet someone, it might shatter your memory. But the thing about him is, once that shifted — meaning, when someone told me that and I recognized — I didn’t really understand. I knew some of the aspects of it. Anyways, we became friends. I accepted that his pace was what he could bring. He still worked so hard. When he ran, it was a gift for him to run, so it was like a big deal.

Anyway, the real beautiful part is, at the end of every day, at our camp, we would walk kids to their parent’s cars. The cars would do circles and pick up the kid. Jonathan Smith, Ernesto’s mom. And so, the last day he was at camp, I put him in his car. He spoke Spanish more than English. I didn’t speak Spanish at the time. I do now. As I was clicking him into his car, he said, te quiero. It means I love you. It still brings tears to my eyes because whatever level he had, whatever the condition actually brought, he was still Ernesto. The fact that the gift to me, the beauty, was that part of my language but being a dumb ass on whatever level where I wasn’t being kind to him no matter what the case, because that’s the job as a counsellor. The gift, I think, from him to me was recognizing, maybe he didn’t know. Then we kind of move beyond that, and it just became John and Ernesto. And the fact that he said I love you at the end of that, it stays with me to this day.

Brandon: That’s amazing. Yeah, that is truly beautiful and profound. It’s one of these things that, as I was reading your book, Artificial Intelligence, the value of our humanity, the value of suffering, the value of even living with disability, with illness, and recognizing that, all of those aspects of the fragility of our condition still have something beautiful and worth treasuring about it, I think, is really under threat, right? I’m curious to get, maybe if you have a sense of what allowed you to recognize that beauty at a young age. Because there may be many kids for whom suffering and disability are things to write off. Especially, there’s a kind of machismo among young men that doesn’t want to recognize and see anything valuable about weakness.

John: Well, I think the word ‘weakness’ is an interesting word, you know. I really appreciate you reading the book. Seriously, Brandon, thank you. Because I don’t know all of the reasons. I wrote it in 2015. It came out in 2016. I still never had someone come up and be like, “Hey, AI ethics. Write about it.”

Brandon: Right.

John: My dad was a psychiatrist. He passed away in 2011. My mom was a minister, and I was an actor for years. So studying the human condition, a pretty big part of whatever, who I am. Then I went through a divorce and COVID. I think there, at least for me, now, at a very deep level — and in 2016, I would’ve already lost my dad in 2011. Weakness is an interesting word. I think more and more there is a quote from a philosopher named Karl Werner, who I read about in an encyclical from Pope Francis about love, the encyclical about love. Karl Werner’s quote is — I’m just making sure I’m correct. Let’s see. The core — is it the core? I’m going to get it wrong, so I will send it to you, the correct version. I should have it in my mind. It’s basically, oh, yeah, the inmost core of reality, of love.

I bring that up because I think, for me—I’ll even say I know. I’ll take that risk with my friend, Brandon—I think all humans are more interested in being loved than they are in being smart. In that sense, weakness, when it comes to artificial intelligence, I think there’s all of these statements that are really tedious to me. Where people are like, “Well, humans make mistakes. Why shouldn’t we trust machines because they don’t make mistakes?” When, of course, A, they do. Secondly, humans designed the machines. But without trying to be negative towards the potential of the machines, the algorithms, the outputs, is to question why. Why are we doing these things? And if the logic of being weak physically in any way, if someone saying you’re weak because you’re not as smart as whatever is the world that we live in—which we kind of do from a key performance indicator side of things—that’s a cool reason I think I did write the book. I’ve been writing similarly. It’s to sort of defend what I think is not just like a tree hugger, bleeding heart, anything side of things, but a person who, at least in my case, losing my dad and my divorce were two of the fundamentally hardest things I’ve ever gone through. And when you get broken with whatever it is that breaks you, there’s where you really identify what is it or who is it that brings me comfort and peace. I love books, I love information, I love AI, I love tools. It was humans loving me that kept me sane. It was my recognition that I’m not only not interested in being perfect. I don’t know what that means. But I figure if I can wake up every day and try to love myself or other people or also nature better, then that’s a good day.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, John. You talk a bit about — I mean, you mentioned you don’t quite know why you wrote the book. But your career trajectory has been quite unusual, right? I mean, you’re an actor, a musician, a journalist, and then you’re an expert in positive psychology. I think your first book was on that topic, and now tech policy. Could you walk us through just very briefly how did you end up studying AI systems and AI tech policy?

John: Sure. It’s kind of you to call me an expert. I would say I’m a person who is fascinated with it. In my 2014 book Hacking Happiness and my 2016 book Artificial Intelligence, I do talk a lot about positive psychology and quote from heroes of mine in the space—the Martin Seligman’s. I always mispronounced Mihaly.

Brandon: Csikszentmihalyi, yes.

John: There it is. Thank you — who wrote Flo. Barbara Frederickson. So there’s like the Titans of positive psychology where I’ve learned any of their stuff and then incorporate it to my work. It’d be lovely to be called an expert. Anyway, the point being, I think it was my desire to be a minister in high school. I don’t know why, I mean, if we’re going that far back. Because I think the nature of your work, which I really appreciate, is tender. As a person of faith—meaning, I believe in Jesus at the time where you love other people versus judge them and condemn them—I really learned about it from my parents.

My dad, although he was a psychiatrist, I recognize when you say someone has anger issues, as people have said about me, it feels very condemnatory just because it’s very vague. It’s like everyone has anger issues. But what you’re saying is, hey, sometimes it manifests in ways that the passion or intensity might throw people. That’s helpful. That’s a useful critique. But I bring that up because, as a kid, I just knew that my dad, when he was home, he kind of watched what we were doing. He was never violent towards me or something, but he spanked and yelled. A lot of times, also, when he came home, there was a sort of like, “Dad got home from work.” It’s quite common amongst humans. But it’s when my mom accepted Christ — I’ll use that term vaguely because that’s not what your show is about. Vaguely, in the sense that she went from just holding a book that she called the Bible and going to church—which we did at a Methodist church in Massachusetts—to… I saw her. She was already an amazing, wonderful human, but her demeanor changed.

Six months later, my dad really hurt his neck. He was sitting with this horrible medieval contraption back in the ‘70s. This was the ‘70s. My mom would put a stack of books next to him, the top of which was a book of the Psalms, the Jewish scripture. My dad said — he was very upset one day, leaning into the closet, looking into the dark. We went the metaphor. He picked up this book of the Psalms and started reading. He said he felt his heart changed. For the next year or two, I actually felt that he transformed who he was. He used words like “Jesus” and “God” and whatever out. But I saw him change his demeanor towards me and others. That meant that when I was 13, I accepted Christ. For me, that journey went from in high school — this is so I’m giving you all this background. In high school, I did what a lot of people do, I think, with any new faith, any new thing you’re excited about which is proselytized. I talk too much and not listen. I think I could convince someone with my words or proving with historical accuracy, which is a lot about, especially New Testament scripture I learned about in college. Really exciting stuff when you really read any historical document.

Anyway, then I got to college. At the college, it was what’s called Brethren in Christ—very conservative from my background—where we couldn’t drink, dance, or smoke. There, I sort of had a wonderful — I’m taking this long to talk about it because my “faith” is, A, oftentimes wildly hypocritical. Because I judge and don’t love people well. Then secondly, it came from a high school experience where the secular setting being the Christian geek. Then I went to a place were like it was hyper, kinds of Acts-focused. Let’s call it “letter of the law” versus “spirit of the law.” I’m being judgmental. There, when people live their faith, it really inspired me. That’s then what launched me to my acting career. Because my acting teacher in that college was the kind of crazy liberal guy. Then I went to New York City. From that point on — I can skip all the details, so you can ask follow-up as needed. But really, I think what I was gifted with was parents who had demonstrated the life that you try to live—loving others. At least my dad, being a psychiatrist, listened; that was his job—50,000 hours of listening to people. Then when you observe life, I had a sort of natural empathy that made it easier to try to scrutinize outputs of our lives. Then things like I got into writing and marketing and PR, which are kind of outputs of that. Then when my dad died, that’s the positive psychology side. It’s sort of an homage to him. Then my mom probably from artificial intelligence and ministry, and now the work at IEEE where I work now and AI and ethics and now focus on sustainability continues to evolve. Although the last couple of years with GenAI, it’s become a lot more challenging.

Brandon: How so?

John: This is not about IEEE where I work, so I’m going to put that aside.

Brandon: Sure.

John: I’ll tell you what, Brandon. I think more and more — I’m just going to say it. I think this is the first place I’ve said it to a person versus writing it. I think all use of GenAI, any GenAI, is irresponsible. Now, I’m going to qualify that. The outputs that you or others may use it for, I’m not going to tell Brandon — I can talk about you in the third person. I’m not going to tell you, “You use ChatGPT to rewrite something, and when you look at it, you feel good about it.” That’s your subjective truth. I honor that. What I know, in my experience, especially with data, of my 2014 book that was focused on data, is: humans don’t have access, certainly Americans, to their data. If you know books like the 2019 seminal book, The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, that sort of put so much clarity. The first chapter of that book is monumental in its paradigmic level of understanding—how in 1776 the nature of consumerism started to form the basis of the surveillance economy. All these big words just mean like we have not been trained as humans to recognize how precious our data is. Because it reveals who we are, but it’s not all of who we are. When other people take it and kind of feed it back to us, GenAI has accelerated so many of the worst parts of these tools.

Fundamentally, I’m still on the Screen Actors Guild. As a journalist, I wrote free books, many of which apparently now through no protections of mind that I had are being used, subsumed by different tools because they are deemed fair use—which of course is a ludicrous use of that term. Intellectual property, especially from a lot of GenAI designers and creators, the logic of we need more data for our systems has nothing to do with them getting permission from you or others. I don’t understand, Brandon, why humans of many type don’t recognize. Just because actors in the Screen Actors Guild are like, “I make money from this face. I want to protect it,” then they go, some people, “Well, all things must change. Don’t hinder any innovation.” Then I’m like, it’s a face. You have the same face that I’m fighting for you.

Basically, the use of GenAI tools—this is before we get into energy and water—largely because it’s not narrow, testable tools, I think it’s irresponsible. So I’m going to keep doubling down on that, because I’ve been talking about AGI being ludicrous and essentially occult for years. GenAI, I think it’s just more to say, if someone can’t say how they’re being responsible about it that satisfies not just me, but all the people that I respect so much in the space, hundreds of them, then my answer is, “Look, I get that they’re cool. I use ChatGPT sometimes—once in a while, not that often,” I get the allure. Especially, from a spiritual sense, what is produced, it’s harder and harder, I think, for people to say, “Oh, those are the words that I created,” versus, “This is the aggregated, really just slop, morass, especially from synthetic sources, where no one knows how to cite an original author. By using these tools unwittingly, out of ignorance, not necessarily designed, people don’t recognize you still are mitigating, lessening, and harming all human creativity. Because anytime you use these tools and whatever the result is, you can’t identify where it came from. More and more, you start to go, like, “Did I write that?” I read my books from years ago. I’m like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. I guess I wrote that.” I know I did.

Anyway, that’s a long answer. There’s a lot of other reasons. But basically, the leadership, too, of the companies. Always talk about when AGI is going to come and basically just remind people pretty overtly that they are not happy about humanity as it stands, but yet a lot of parts of society are giving them so much power to do so.

Brandon: Yeah, there was a lot more I want to double click on these themes. Let me ask you some questions about some of the issues that you’ve raised. I mean, even 10 years ago, you were writing about just this sort of complex, seductive allure of AI systems. One of the risks you’ve pointed out was that — you said that our desire for introspection, our capacity for independent thinking, our ability to even appreciate the benefits we already possess were at risk. Could you say a bit about how was it that AI threatens—especially when it comes to these questions of faith and spirituality—our capacity for introspection for even just reflecting on who we are come into the creeps of our basic sense of humanity? How is that threatened by these systems?

John: I think most of all has to do with agency, which I talked about at different times. I think it’s a really challenging subject because to have agency around the concept of APG is a challenge. The example I’ve been giving at least myself and some others recently is the concept of theater. As an actor, I got very used to performing, and I’m very conscious of when the lights were going down. Because as a professional, your job leads up to that moment. You’re already working. Then when you’re backstage, the sounds of humans watching something is really interesting.

I only did one Broadway show, but in that Broadway show, I played harmonica. I would roll across the Richard Rodgers theater on these wooden stage on wheels. Playing harmonica while bouncing was really challenging. But the thing that was just exhilarating, just looking out and seeing—I think it was 1,200 or 1,600 people—all looking at these dancers where the spotlight was. I knew that no one would be looking at me. Even the eye senses motion, they were looking where the spotlights had to look. So I could just look at these people unencumbered, just staring at a show. And so I bring a lot up to say, in a theater, when the lights go down or a movie theater, no one gets on the microphone and says, “Okay, everybody, don’t be freaked out. The lights going down are a symbol that you’re about to see a show.” It’s kind of the invitation for millennia about an invitation to catharsis. This is not real. We have that agency. It’s a cultural phenomenon. Or even in cultures or places where they don’t lower the lights, when a show starts, you’re about to read a book, there’s some kind of inhalation, spiritual — I say spiritual. I don’t necessarily mean religious of one particular faith, but the sort of consciousness of attenuation to nature or outside something. Music is very similar. Because we know those things, we don’t have to say them anymore.

Now, in my field, when you see a white page of a screen and there’s a rectangular box and it says, “How may I help you today,” I can list literally about seven things immediately that are not engendering agency. They’re actually manipulating. For instance, you have to scroll down on ChatGPT at the very bottom below the fold—you don’t see it right away—that says, “ChatGPT may make mistakes. Check your results,” which is not genuine disclosure. When you use anthropomorphism, how may I help you today, there’s things where people are like, “Oh, we’re used to these tools.” I’m like, we aren’t. We aren’t. I mean, if you’re 56, people my age, you are because of your intelligence in your age. Kids aren’t. Young people aren’t. A lot of people aren’t. They see, “How may I help you today?” And so I bring all that up to say the spiritual side of the loss of agency, the other example I’ve been thinking of is like, if you walked into a room and there are 12 people and someone had a sign saying Buddhist, someone had a sign saying

Christian, someone had a sign saying agnostic, and someone had a sign saying Deweyan—you mentioned John Dewey because of my wife. Whatever—words that were symbols that you thought might be attractive or not attractive, but you stood there and that choice to look around, I’m deeming that agency and modernity. Whereas right now, there’s a legal term called a term of adhesion, which is a legal term, which means one can’t operate except in the world into which one is given or invited. And so, to say to someone, “Well, you don’t have to use these tools,” is like saying, “You don’t have to use the Internet.” It’s not just that it’s unrealistic and inaccurate. It’s manipulative, and it’s part of a larger design, where giving someone tools—many of which I’m still trying to create. There’s a standard at IEEE called 7012. I can tell you about it in a minute—is not me trying to tell Brandon or anyone else, “Here’s how you should feel.” But it’s essentially saying, “Hey, when you go to that web page for the first time, that white page, they have the opportunity of those designers and that company to have a first-time cooking structure. Boom.” First time at ChatGPT, you know these things. It’s very simple. And to say they didn’t know is absolute—if I can swear on your show—absolute horseshit. There’s so much from Stanford’s behavioral economics and whatever else, like design 101.

When you know about what works in terms of manipulation and do it to get your tool out in the world and then later go, “Oh, I didn’t know,” then that’s either ignorance at the level of massive irresponsibility, or it’s pre-awareness, obfuscation by design. It’s the type of thing I’ve been fighting or trying to remedy for years. Where what normally happens — Sherry Turkle has said this, another hero of mine who wrote the book, Alone Together. She’s one of the leaders in the space of kind of awareness and understanding how to use the tools well. Once you tell someone, “Hey, here’s these things you disclose, A, B, and C,” are you aware of the anthropomorphism on however you describe that to someone said they’d get it, and you give them agency? So, in that example, you come back the second time and you know those things. She has a great quote, which she says in terms of loving. At the time when she wrote the book, it was about loving robots. She used the term, “We’re ready for the romance. Humans like being manipulated,” or I should say they like being told stories and the morals. But if you don’t give them the chance to even have agency, then you get into — eventually, from the business standpoint, lowest common denominator, you’re harvesting their information. They’re not going to be useful anymore. Then more importantly, from a larger way that I live my life is, every person has worth. Every person should be given the human right, legal right, to make their own decisions. Right now, the answer is: they absolutely don’t.

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, is the core issue here around the anthropomorphizing? I mean, if you had LLMs that, say, gave you promise in the third person saying, “Bot 365 is ready for your questions,” as opposed to, “How can I help you,” does that take away the problem? Part of my understanding is that the anthropomorphizing is helpful to create a sense of attachment to this entity, right? Do you think you can build a relationship with it, it becomes addictive in the same way that Facebook and all these other things are? I mean, is that part of the issue—that there’s this illusion that’s created by the sort of first person?

John: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the core reason. Your use of the word ‘entity’ intrigues me because I like to use the term ‘systems.’ Now, that said, I try to avoid telling other people how they feel because that’s not really relevant. Meaning, I might have misinterpreted you or anyone else, but they can just tell me. Because there’s a lot of people who believe that algorithms now or the systems comprising the algorithms are sentient or alive. And in the same way I believe in Jesus, I’m not here to judge that.

However, the disclosure around the third person, when not given—I know this as a journalist—initially, it used to irritate me to disclose with certain things. Because I’d feel like, oh, I’m going to mitigate. I never really wrote where it was like I work for NBC, and I have to disclose that because I’m writing about NBC and they’re getting me money. But you disclose things, and you’re like, “Ah.” It’s like a magician showing their trick. I got to disclose it. I get it. I get that concern. Valid. But then, when you don’t disclose something and then you find out from a reader that not only they feel fooled, but they think there’s legal issues of wherever else, it’s hard. Disclosure is hard. But in this case, it’s not. It’s not. Everybody knows. I mean, when ChatGPT first came out, I was the ethicist. Like, “Stop using I. Stop using I.” It hasn’t really changed. Then what happens is, you’ll get the language. Like you just said, this tool uses third person in an effort or whatever. Usually, within two prompts, it will say me, or, I, or we again. That’s in English. I only read a little bit of Spanish, so I have no idea what the nuances are. But even the phrase ‘natural language’ is misleading. The reason it is such a big deal is because when I read — I don’t know. I can’t think of a good analogy. I get lost in books. I read different writing. I know I haven’t written it, but it feels like I could have. But that separation of, like, now I’m reading something by Brandon, or I’m reading this book about Marshall McLuhan and whatever it is. I’m really into it. I know the difference. When I write something myself—like I said, I read stuff I wrote years ago—I forget that I’ve written something, but I can trust that I wrote it. Then I see the citations when I’m quoting someone else. Because I don’t remember. Then my friends are like, yeah, you probably are copying other writers inherently the same way as a musician. You copy BB. King’s Licks or whatever else. I think there is this like an homage logic. But also, I can’t copy Emerson. If I quote him directly, that is called theft, you know?

So all that is to say, like, the anthropomorphism is just one of the tools, but it is kind of the biggest one. Because I think it’s a spiritual issue. I don’t mean Jesus, or Allah, or whatever. I mean, you go to that white page. It’s very ritualistic, very stage-like, like a proscenium, and where all of modernity, you and I have grown through pre-internet days and all of that, all these signals of going like this and picking up this thing. You and I have all these signals that became such a part of who we are. That now, when a kid, a young person, opens a screen, it just sees that box and “How may I help you today” is the entrance. Then anthropomorphism, anybody is saying like, “Oh, it’s natural and anthropomorphized.” It is. But from a design standpoint, when that’s known, not disclosing is an overt tool that is harmful, you know?

Brandon: Yeah. Let’s talk about values. I mean, that’s one of the key points you make in your book. It’s that it’s really critical to explicitly codify our own values to shape both AI systems and our flourishing. I mean, there’s an approach to values clarification, which is sort of, in my sense, a way to simply track your individual preferences, whatever they might be. That implies a certain kind of relativism, right? So then you’ve got your values; I’ve got mine. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing you’re talking about it. My sense is you’re borrowing your friend Constantine Ogdensburg’s theory of values dissonance, which suggests that unhappiness results from not living up to our own values. Could you say a little bit about why it matters that we recognize the values that are at play in our own lives, and why those values need to be codified into our AI systems—not as an afterthought, but in their design?

John: Sure. I’m glad you mentioned his name, Constantine. I remember I haven’t seen him for years, but he always gives a compliment for me. He was one of the geeks for my 2014 book. I also interviewed about quantified self. A lot of times, people are like, “If you scrutinize yourself too much with all these different tools, you lose the beauty of your life and all that.” I find, more and more, it’s a test. It’s a certain amount of time. It’s a way to recognize what we care about. So in his case, I think his memory serves, he wanted to spend more time walking with dogs. He said, “I find joy with time with my partner, walking my dog, being in nature.” He did that by just taking — I think it was a month, any longer. Not just journaling, but really scrutinizing everything he did. This is the aspect of the sort of advertising regime around our actions, the surveillance economy, that when shared with a user in a positive way is beautifully illuminating. Hey, sleep app, this app, relationship app, whatever it is, sentiment analysis, emotional awareness, looking at your facial cues, all these things—things that we just don’t see because we’re not built that way. Then when they’re aggregated with insights, they’re wildly helpful. That’s what he taught me. Then the values work that’s in the book, some of it is pretty simple, like spending time with your family. I joke about this a lot. But it’s like, no one I know comes back from a weekend at work, “How was your weekend?” Well, great. I was more efficient in my time with my kids. Three weeks ago, I spent four hours with them. Last week, I only spent an hour. But I maximize my love time with them, right?

I’m glad you laugh because it’s sort of supposed to be ludicrous, but it also shows — not from you, Brandon. But we, as humans, are not supposed to measure those things. Yet caregiving is the main part that’s left out of the GDP, gross domestic product. Caregiving is pragmatically meaning certainly acknowledging women, children, and nature. Why some of the major reasons we’re in the anthropomorphism, that our planet is suffering so much, because we don’t measure caregiving. I’ve had a lot of people over the years say, like, “Well, if you measure caregiving, it’s going to harm it and mitigate it.” I think it’s the opposite. I think, first of all, isolation from COVID, and extending now with these tools—a lot of these chat bots, et cetera—isolation tends to increase with a lot of use of certain chatbots. Noble as the aspirations may be. I think there, in terms of back to your values question, I think for me, at least, one of the hardest things about values for me is also saying, does it work?

I wrote a book on measuring your values and then got divorced. Now, I’m not going to talk about my divorce or my ex or anything like that. But I certainly wondered, “Do I have credibility talking about emotions or whatever else?” The short answer is, I don’t know. I think credibility has to do with the person looking at me. I can’t make myself be credible to someone. But if I try to mention, as I will hear, that in one sense, I wish I hadn’t gone through the divorce mainly because of my kids. But then I wouldn’t have met the love of my life, Gabrielle, who I’m married to now, and I wouldn’t have gone through an experience that I would wish on nobody. Divorces, more and more, it’s interesting like you watch TV shows. I got divorced twice. Everyone’s journey in pain is unique and different. But at least, for me, categorically, if someone was like, “Would you prefer to get shot,” yes. “Do you want to lose a couple of fingers?” Yeah. Because the pain is so lasting, and there are so many aspects of my values that I now have in question. I wrote a book on values about, did I do something wrong? Because I was in a situation where it seems like I wasn’t doing the right stuff.

Anyway, and so there, I’ll say that now I’m at a place where I come back to that quote, “The inmost core of reality is love.” Because at least, for me, going through that meant my ideas around values or tracking values useful as I still think they are. Harder the value ultimately that had to go through from me was my faith. Meaning, do I think that God—in my case, Jesus—are real in a way where that experience happened? Do I feel that my faith fundamentally is kind of what kept me from going unhinged? The answer is yes. And so there, in that sense, today, hopefully not sound like I’m proselytizing, but share that an examination of values where one says their faith—capital F, small F, whatever—is when they get out of bed in the morning, how they recognize they can keep going. That again, goes back to love for me.

The final point I’ll make in this answer is: I’ve written a diagram on LinkedIn about that statement, “The inmost core of reality is love.” Because as a geek, I’m like, is that the web reality that you and I are on now? Hypertext? Is it virtual reality and augmented reality, which I’ve written about a lot? Is it the spatial web? Is it a new set of protocols? Is it GenAI? Is it data? Is it our dreams? I think about dreams a lot. Being 56, you wake up and you’re like, “Oh, I had a dream.” It wasn’t real, but it was. Something happened in your brain. You woke up, and it stayed with you. So that’s a reality. Death, life, spirit. I love that Karl Rahner said this. “If every one of those, the inmost core—I rightfully phrased that—is love, then seeking that love as a value is probably the core of what I’m trying to do.” Because I guarantee, John, especially in the last couple years, you’re not the guy you want to be like. How do I live by following values? Unless it means finding someone as amazing as my best friend and wife, and also leaning on her sometimes too much in terms of love. But if that helps. I think I really appreciate you’re asking the question because a big part of the book—which is definitively the same, which I want to make sure to say to your viewers and listeners—is me, John. I know. I won’t just say I believe. I know that every single person in the world has worth inherently. Because you breathe. And so, asking what are my values, if no one has asked you to ask that of yourself, you are worth the time. The book has some examples of values, things like family, work, et cetera, where you can start to ask yourself: what is my purpose for the world? Am I living to these things that I think are bringing me value? And if you test and you know that they are, amen. And if you test and you realize I’m stressing myself doing 70-hour work week, and I think I’m losing time with my family—which might be harming me ultimately—then my answer, especially from my position, is: take the time you need now.

Brandon: How do you see these values? I mean, once we recognize what these are, I suppose I have a couple of questions. One of them is whether there are certain objective values, let’s say, for lack of a better word. Is love perhaps a core value that all human beings ought to sort of make a priority? Or can some people say, “Look. My values to sort of minimize discomfort or something of those lines, or maximize technological progress or something, and that’s okay, right? There are some people, I think, who would say that, that maybe something along those lines is more valuable to them. Maybe receiving love from another human being is too painful or not as seductive. It doesn’t have that attraction, that power, might, right? And so some people might value power in some form or other. And so how do we sort through that also, especially in the development of these AI systems? Do you think it’s possible? I mean, my sense is you’re saying that you can’t build in values or ethics post-hoc. There are already values baked into these systems, and you have to recognize what those are and build them in right from the get-go. Could you speak to that as well, and how love might have to do with the creation of GenAI systems and so on?

John: Great question. I mean, the systems, the ones that I really feature in my last two books are economic systems. There are paradigms that I think, like I mentioned, the lights going down in a theater, I didn’t really know what they meant until someone told me about Gross National Happiness from Bhutan. That stemmed apparently from a speech by Robert Kennedy not too long before he died, where he talked about the things we measure and the things we don’t. Beautiful speech. I forget what university he was at. Kansas? He said, “We’ll measure advertising, but we don’t measure the time with our kids.” I’m paraphrasing. But it’s a beautiful speech, kind of what I just said a minute ago, where the guy made a great point. What you measure matters than what you don’t.

In the States, how much do we pay teachers? How do teachers feel right now about GenAI and during their classroom? Were they given a certain amount of money to test these tools? Were they given instructions how to test these tools? Are they being kept in schools as humans teaching, or are they being compared to standardized tests or other things which may have value? But where GenAI I don’t think was loving in any stretch was how it was introduced. A lot of technological pools just came into your consciousness and, all of a sudden, it just started invading. If invading is too strong a word, changing. Anyway, economic systems are the biggie.

Then the paradigm of DEI, which our current administration is challenging, this is a tough subject to talk about, I recognize. But it was only in the last couple of years where I started even to understand what white supremacy is. I think at least I’ll speak — obviously, I’m speaking for myself. All this stuff is John, not IEEE where I work, by the way. I learned from a lot of people in my work, from countries not in the West, how dominant Western thinking power is. Silicon Valley dominating a lot of tech narratives and regulation and all that. The EU AI Act is fantastic. That shrug was not the EU AI. That shrug was, worst case scenario, Meta gets fined a billion dollars. Zuckerberg says, “Eh.” He says he doesn’t care about the EU AI Act. So the power structures behind a lot of these tools, that’s the part where I get very depressed and sad a lot. Because the systems are sort of like, “Hey, this gets introduced. You have no choice.” That’s why agency is such a big deal to me. And by the way, it doesn’t hurt. I’m not going to stop using Google. I don’t really use Facebook. I have them for years, but I’m not going to stop using tools. If I’m given agency and permission, especially in terms of having working advertising in PR, that gives a voice back to a consumer or a citizen in ways that we haven’t had for the past 15 years like in Silicon Valley.

So all these systems, like the reason I will just say, they’re not built with love. That’s not how they’re designed. I worked in PR. It’s not a joke, but I will say a lot: no marketing funnel ends in abstinence. Period. You don’t take a marketing class and say, “Hey, Brandon. One of my clients used to be Gillette. You’re obviously a very well-groomed, put-together guy.” So I’d be like, “Oh, I’m going to go after him.” He’s an influencer. What tool? Hey, try out my razor. These are not evil things. I want people to use this stuff, right? But P&G that owns them is brilliant in terms of these ideas of, find someone who could use your product. Do they use the product? Yes or no? If it’s no, then it’s creating awareness. If it’s yes, do they like it? If they don’t, then you’d send them free stuff. Then they have to try it. Then they want you to recommend it to a friend, right? This becomes formulaic for how the entire undergirding of the system works, which is advertising. Google is still an advertising company. That is how they make their most money. They’re not a search company.

So how the design of the tools could turn into love, in my expert opinion, is certainly, first of all, fundamentally about data. People tend to forget that AI systems are built on data—human data. If you went to that page, I’ve already kind of explained this, but there was a genuine disclosure from these companies. “Hey, welcome. We’re the designers of OpenAI. These tools are really powerful.” We know, based on our experience—they wouldn’t necessarily have to say the Stanford teacher who teaches behavior like an honor—we think this is a really cool way for you to learn about stuff. And when you prompt, you’re going to ask questions. You’re going to learn a whole new paradigm with how to get back words. When those words are put together, we can’t guarantee, but we’re pretty sure you’re going to be mesmerized. It’s going to feel like magic. But it’s not magic. Then at different points, if they had that tool and then they regularly didn’t just give me blog post that no one really reads—except the geeks like me and the tech outlets that I used to write for—boom. Hey, user. We’re thinking that we want to get more data. Because large language model needs a lot of data. We’re going to be maybe going after thousands and thousands of books by authors. Do you think we should try to reach out to all those authors and get their permission and maybe even give them some money? What do you think? And I answer. Now, when they come back, they can tell me what the survey was of their users. But then, are they going to use that as justification? They probably might. You asked this before, and I know we’re also getting near the end of the hour, so I’m trying to also stay positive and helpful and pragmatic in my responses.

Brandon: Sure.

John: I think I mentioned in the book C.S. Lewis, who’s one of my heroes, who started off as a massive skeptic for Christianity. I love the skeptics who convert. By the way, Marshall McLuhan converted to Catholicism—one of my favorites in the world. But C.S. Lewis, he says it better. There’s a term that I call “moral absolutism.” I might be misquoting him. But I think he pointed out the example of getting a seat in a bus, if memory serves. Like if I was walking towards a bus seat, at the end of the bus the seat was open, and someone 10 feet away from me sat down, I’d be disappointed. But I wouldn’t be like, “Eh.” If I was about to sit in that seat, like my butt is hovering over the seat, and someone shoves me out of the way—with the exception of the physical pain of being shoved—why do I feel incredulous? It was my seat, right? So there’s a kind of genetic level thing there.

But I think the thing, too, is like working in the AI ethics space, I believe there are moral absolutes around children, for instance. I think children trafficking, I think certainly, whatever, sexual issues. I think not giving parents or caregivers a way—we have a thing in IEEE that I am very proud of—early on, what’s called age-appropriate design. That really is the idea of a wonderful, amazing human in the UK, Baroness Beeban Kidron. It’s basically about creating agency for people taking care of kids and saying, “Look. Whatever the age is—16, 15, 14—what’s the nature of how kids or young people are approaching these tools? Can we empower those people teaching kids for the first time?” My kids are in their 20s now. One is almost 20. I don’t want to give their ages away. But my kids are that age. So it’s completely different for people who have kids now. And so, all that is to say, if someone says to me, “But there’s this culture where it’s okay to beat children” — I’m using an extreme example, but I like to. Moral absolutism. Ultimately, the value of taking care of kids, taking care of nature, those are moral absolutes, where if they’re deprioritized—we have a paper at IEEE called Prioritizing People and Planet as the Metrics for Responsible AI. People can Google that. Proud of that work. But anyway, I’ll wrap up there. Thank you.

Brandon: Well, let me ask you a couple of more questions, if you don’t mind. One is on one of the dystopian themes running through your book—which it seems like you’ve got the first half that’s somewhat dystopian, and the second half that’s a lot more positive and hopeful. But on the dystopian things which build on a couple of things you touched on in this recent answer, you talk about a couple of scenarios. One in which you have this imagined scenario of your daughter dating a robot and the accusation of something like flesh-ism, where it’s possible to imagine a scenario where the difficulty of human relationships leads us to prefer a relationship with a machine of some sort. Similarly, the concerns about creating AI representations of deceased loved ones—a child or a parent who passes away—why not just create a digital avatar to let that person live on, right? Both of these, it seems, are they have a certain kind of beauty to them. They’re seductive anyway. Could you speak to what you see is problematic at the heart of these, and perhaps how they really are not fundamentally in accord with love, even though they might seem to be?

John: Well, I think, first, it’s grief. As an American, maybe as a guy, as an American, grief, for me, growing up—again, I’m 56—plenty of stupid movies, whatever else. Like, guys are strong. So it’s not just about not crying. It’s about avoidance of grief and the rituals surrounding grief or not. So when you kind of see movies still that are like, “Oh, we’re going to bury grandpa and take care of the funeral,” the American grief in general is very dismissive and fast. For a couple weeks, everyone really is sad and being general hyperbolic. Then the person’s gone, and then it’s the people who have to do with it. When my dad died, for an entire year, I mourned. I wasn’t sure how to call that all the time. So I think, certainly, one thing is just the fact is: if you ignore grief, you miss a lot of the human experience that most people face all the time. And if you bury it, I think it’s going to be harmful no matter what. Meaning, taking on a parent in an AI form.

I forget the book about a guy—this came out years ago—who did that with his dad. It was a very helpful book. Because ultimately, what he realized in the book is what I think most people will find to realize. The New York Times covered this recently with another guy who filmed his father. The AI version of your loved one is obviously not going to be them. So you will use slash we will face the reality of a whole new thing, which is, this entity — I’ll use your word earlier, and I think that’s appropriate in this regard. This new thing, not really a creature, is mimicking aspects of a person I love. But because of hallucinations, errors, combined with synthetic data or whatever else, it’s just not him or her. So are you avoiding the grief that you’ll need to face anyway, versus like, “I have recordings of my dad that I filmed him telling stories about five months before he died.” They’re very hard to watch. But now I’m at the point, since he’s been gone for almost 10 years, I can watch and have sort of a smile along with the tears. There’s that. Someone can say, “It’ll work for me,” or, “It works for me.” I read people, again, saying, “I’m in love with this chat bot. I have a version of my dad.” That’s where I’m really challenged. Because it’s easy for me to say anything. No, you weren’t. They are. I can’t tell someone the subjective truth.

Then there’s cultural, like Japan, animism, and different indigenous traditions where this very beautiful, to your point, like loving spiritual aspects of things like this. It’s just that it’s so new, A. Then B, by and large, it all comes within the paradigm of surveillance capitalism that is sort of like a white supremacy. Different in a lot of ways, but not in others. Like a power structure that any of these experiences still happen within. So that person who’s like, “I’m experiencing my dad. I love it,” I feel like a jerk. Because I’m like, “Hold on. You feel what you feel. But let me tell you about all the other things.” I’m like, that’s going to make him feel better about losing your dad? But there is a possibility. There is a possibility of the data agency, as I mentioned. Then we will experience these things versus the value that I didn’t mention, the metascrial bundle paper, the reason it’s eugenics is: a lot of the leaders of GenAI who she quotes are utilitarianists, where their logic and belief as an ideology is, “We are only made up of our consciousness and our cognitive selves. Let’s put ourselves on machines and go into space.” Or we’ll be on Mars, you know. But this is while they dig their burrows, and Zuckerberg has his massive island underground in Maui. I think that when utilitarianism says we think the future of the human race is X, but they know that the planet today and the majority of people, their action are accelerating the larger loss of life, then for me, I’m happy. That’s immoral. There’s no way to say—from a deontological, certainly a virtue ethic standpoint, that the loss of 8 billion or more people in the planet—don’t hinder innovation. That’s eugenics. Let’s call it what it is.

Brandon: Yeah, and it seems like even the extension of that logic too is, at some point, it might become seen as irresponsible if you don’t upload yourself into an AI mind clone or something, right? And so the way in which the logic of these technologies develops brings with it some kind of value system, which I think you’re right to say, is there is a deep-seated eugenicist bent to it that a lot of us aren’t seeing. If you could speak just maybe very briefly about the solutions you proposed. Because you mentioned virtue ethics, but you draw a lot on what you called this gap solution of gratitude, altruism, purpose. I mean, how might cultivating virtues actually help us better live out this future driven by AGI? And if you could maybe even add a word about what all of this means for people of faith, for faith communities, what innovations might be needed in churches or other faith communities as they try to respond to the development of AI systems?

John: Well, first, I wrote about this on LinkedIn. AGI is a faith-based belief. I like saying that whenever I can. Because technically, it’s speculation. There’s no agreement, whether it’s Tintin, who’s quoted all the time, or Zuckerberg, whoever. AGI is an idea—Super intelligence, Nick Bostrom, ever since his book came out, right? Because what’s going to happen? There’s no pragmatic explanation. Like, hey, when AGI arrives two years from now, Altman changes it all the time. But what does it mean? You and I wake up, and we get a text? “Hey, I’m Steve. I’m AGI.” Then the other thing that’s overtly harmful—and seriously, I say this not as a joke. But Brandon, you’re a good person. If this resonates, then I think it’s true love. But for your viewers, watch the messages that happen with the constant incessant, The Medic. This is why I love McLuhan so much. What are the messages when those three letters happen with AGI? Guaranteed in English. The words that you’ll see: race, competition, when we’ll lose jobs. Then again—I’m going to swear—the absolute horse shit of what AGI will do for most people with jobs. Newsflash: the tech industry is firing more people because of AI as of late. And outside of whatever severance packages they might get, there’s no long term—at least in the States—guarantee of health insurance or money.

I think that’s a horrible message. Having been an actor and having lost jobs a lot as an actor, and then getting let go a couple of times, you lose your job. I’ll talk about myself. I lost my job, and I’m going paycheck to paycheck. Then debt builds up and all that type of stuff. There’s knowing. It’s like, “Hey, hey, hold on. Wait a second, buddy. Here she is, Sheila. AGI Sheila, she’s going to be there for me, buddy. She’s going to write you a check.” Because then we talk about universal basic income, which I’ve written about for years. These are all solutions that are just words. They’re interesting, but I have been going to 11 years or so of conferences on these words. When you lose a job, when you lose a marriage, who is there to help? Who is there to give money? A lot of times, it’s faith-based institutions. By the way, Alcoholics Anonymous is another wonderful faith-based institution that’s not about — they didn’t even know a lot of people think it’s God and Jesus. It’s really not. I’ve been to a couple of AA meetings. I have never felt — well, a couple times, but community of strangers more than when I thought. Maybe I’m having a couple too many glasses of wine dealing with my divorce.

I’m just trying to say these things to be real, Brandon, because I appreciate your work on beauty. But gratitude, altruism and purpose, the gap thing, gratitude is really hard, especially when one is going through something really hard. In my case, not to dwell on it, but mostly, divorce was so isolated. Normally, I’m very grateful for my kids and stuff. But I recognize how hard it is to be a parent around kids when you want to be needy and have them do the work that they’re not supposed to do in general as kids. They’re supposed to be your kids, not your therapist. So that said, gratitude there was for friends, for my mom. Leaning on gratitude keeps you in the moment. That’s the thing about a lot of faith-based practices: Buddhism, meditation, swimming. For instance, when I was really suffering, swimming became something. I had read this wonderful book. Her name will come to me. The title of the book is something like When Things Are Broken. It’ll come to me. I forget her name. She talked about breathing, Buddhist meditation, breathing, and swimming. That’s all you have to do. Pain didn’t go away. It’s just for something you’ve started to recognize.

Altruism, a lot of this stuff seems kind of selfish because it sort of is, but it’s self-oriented in the sense of healing. When you help someone else, in my experience, but the science also says, you kind of forget about yourself. You have these blissful moments where you’re like, “Oh, this is pain.” Right? All the things about grief and pain are like, you can’t get away from your own stuff. Oh, the divorce, whatever it is, right? You help someone else. And for those blissful moments where you see some kind of connection, maybe you’ll help them. Maybe you won’t. Maybe they’re like, “I didn’t need the clothes,” or, “Stop bugging me. I’m fine,” whatever it is. But you’re trying. Then in those moments, people can see, for whatever reason, this human is reaching out to me from this beautiful moment of electric consciousness happened. I do it a lot when I travel. Stuff as simple as like, “Do you want to get in line in front of me?” That like in modernity, like in an airplane. People are like — it’s almost like you’re doing something wrong. Like, “What? Okay. Thanks. Sure. How are you doing?” I love this, like when you’re on the phone with a human and you know it’s a human, whatever. “Hi.” Wells Fargo, my bank, or USAA Insurance, whatever, so and so. “You’re being recorded. This is Sheila,” whatever it is. You’re like, “Hey, Sheila. How are you doing?” That is altruism. You wonder why? Most people don’t ask anybody how they’re doing in those jobs. And it feels great. Sure. People are like, “Are you doing it to feel better?” Like, yeah, because I want them to do it to me. But also, whether or not, it’s still—

Brandon: There is a real connection. It is a recognition of the value of the other.

John: Yeah, and then the purpose is kind of what we’re talking about here. Like, is there a reason for living? Some days, I don’t feel that way. But then most days, at some point, I’m like, I’m so blessed to have friends like Brandon. I’m doing amazing work, my kids, whatever else. That gap logic is helpful because it gives you a sense of recognition for your own worth. That’s the gratitude. The altruism kind of keeps you focused on others. Then purpose, usually, by that point, the purpose is pretty evident. But where you can pursue work that brings you joy, wonderful.

Brandon: Could you say maybe one more word about just on the theme of what faith communities could do? Because I think this is another area where we have to really think about, “Well, who is really the best position, perhaps, to shape the way in which we approach the development of these systems, the way in which we live with them?” I think there is a danger in which we find even faith communities will simply be chasing after the latest fad so that they don’t feel left behind. But is there an innovative role that they could play in a society that becomes increasingly automated and driven by some of these logics we’ve talked about?

John: Definitely. Well, now it’s been maybe a year. Wow. Time flies fast. I joined as a volunteer expert to a group called AI and Faith, which I’d recommend your folks check out. I can introduce you to some of the folks there. The guy who started it, his name will come to me. David? It’ll come in a minute. But he started it years ago. What I really appreciate is that he’s not focused on the one faith. It’s not a Christian organization or a Jewish organization. There’s a lot of opinions from transhumanists. By the way, that’s a very general — it’s like saying Christians. It’s such a broad group of people. I learn a lot from transhumanist friends. It’s the ones who then, like any group, cross the ties with force politically. But they’re like, hold on.

I worked at a church for years when I was an actor, Trinity Baptist Church on the Upper East Side in New York. You learn a lot about faith-based institutions when we kind of learn how the sausage is made, as it were. Running a church means trying to get people to come, things about tithing—which there’s a lot of issues about tithing when you ask for money. It’s like, well, you’ve got to keep the lights on and charity. But what does that mean? Then when people come, how do they register? You get their data, and then the sort of seasonal side of things. It’s like being an actor. You work when everyone else doesn’t. In faith-based institutions, Sundays or Saturday nights or Fridays or whatever, you’re working as it were. It’s work. So I think there, first of all, a lot of times, faith and community, those two words are interchangeable when you say blank-based institutions. And so when there’s any opportunity to have people come together around a shared communal, positive communal offering, I think that’s a fantastic community to go to and say, “How are you using these tools?”

What’s interesting is, I did go to an event in Dallas—a very helpful event, a lot of amazing people—with a group called Missional AI. That is a Christian-based organization. And I’ll be honest. As an ethicist type, I was freaked out. It’s not about the people there. This is not about Christianity. But I can’t tell you how shocked I was at how many people just put-up screens that essentially said, “Hi, I’m so-and-so.” But then it was related to, “Hi, I’m Abraham,” or, “I am Jesus.” Not got to avert. But basically, they didn’t know about data, or disclosure, or whatever else. And so I appreciate the different groups I’m involved in that’s using my first message. It’s like, listen. It’s hard enough for me when I know people don’t understand anthropomorphism for just a general-purpose tool that they use for everything. When the first introduction to not just a church, but the potential for any faith is, hi, I’m blank, then insert all the scary part of them is where all the scary stuff that could be there.

But then the other part is, if someone is led to think that the tools themselves are spiritual. And again, the people proffering those tools may believe it. So that’s a different conversation. But where there’s sort of an ignorance, not out of stupidity, but just like, “Hey, let’s use this rapper. ChatGPT gives this rapper. We can build this tool off of it,” I’m like, I sat there. I sat for four or five years. Not that long even, but as an office manager. People were like, “Hey.” They came in off the street, needed money, needed food, came in on the weekend. We’re a million dollars on Wall Street, right? Your connecting with humanity is uncomfortable.

Then also, it’s a reality of that I believe having been in the biz and having proselytized in high school and recognized why that isn’t, can be ‘effective’ but is not genuine. It’s that ultimately, it’s like you share tools around what someone can believe. You share scripture, if you want to call it scripture, depending on the edition. You share whatever. But ultimately, it’s these communities, I believe, coming in place of love—where the love also is partly, “Hey, we know eventually you’re going to make your own decision.” Or it’s kind of a cult. When I first came to New York, I remember it was tempting. Somewhere as an actor, a very attractive woman—Christine, I think is the name—was like, “Hey, do you want to come to a party?” She named a church. I won’t name the church because it’s still pretty well known. I’m like, “Sure, cute girl. I’m doing great. I just came to the city.” I went to the party. It was essentially kind of a cultish, evangelical side of Christianity, where people were like, “We want you to get baptized.” And I’m like, “I was baptized.” They were like, “We got a bathtub filled with water. You’re going to go get baptized.” Weird music playing, wine-like drinks but not wine being packed. It was just all this stuff where I’m like, “Hold on. I believe in the guy. I went to college.” They were like, “Hmm.”

Anyway, so all that is to say, like, when community is an imitation and that blissful blessed moment happens—AA is one of the places I felt this the most—wasn’t a we have a solution for you because you’re broken. AA, the thing I felt so good about was like, the good is not the right term, but healing. It was a given, and this is what I take from when I read New Testament scripture. It’s that we’re not broken like we’re less than. When we make mistakes, it doesn’t mean we’re fallible or evil, even if we do “evil” or sinful things. The phrase, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” I think you can either get into like, oh, flagellation and whatever else. I’m not trying to mock any religion or faith-based belief. But it’s a sense of like when I mentioned that story of Jesus and the woman at the well. Most of what I take from that is a sign that, no matter what we do, we are loved to the point where, I believe, positive view of — I’m going to use a father term, but I don’t need a gender. But Yahweh, Daddy, Abba. There’s this entity in the universe that loves us so much, that we have free will. You have the opportunity to love others as God loves us. In the midst of knowing, my belief. Perfection is a strange term to use anyway, unless one is perfected as it were in the act of trying to love, and in the act of recognizing the need for love and where usually one of the other person is in more of a state of the need of that love, and one person might be more able to give that love.

And so I think their faith-based — this is what I love AI and Faith and other organizations are trying to bring these conversations into work setting. Not to proselytize for specific faith as it were, but to say, if there are these conversations and ideas from around the world, Ubuntu ethics, whatever, that are not normally brought into business setting, then that’s how a lot of the issues facing not just GenAI, but the GDP thing won’t change. Because it’s the faith-based institutions usually that are saying, “What about caregiving? What about love? What about community? If we aren’t measuring those things in our day job, maybe it’s time to change.” So faith-based groups, I think, maybe have the biggest way of saying, “Hey, while we’re talking about AGI and our consciousness being put into boxes and going off, can we also talk about Allah? Can we also talk about Buddha?” And if the answer is no, no, no, then I think that’s a really good indication to say, this conversation is not going to bring innovation to human. It’s going to do the same stuff we talk about all the time. That especially goes for indigenous cultures, for women, for people who normally often are on their tables like these.

Brandon: Right. Thanks, John. Where could we direct our viewers and listeners to your work, to IEEE’s work on this?

John: Well, thank you so much. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn for all of its problems and positives. I use my middle initial, C. So John C. Havens. So you have it written here. IEEE, if you Google I with three E’s, and then letters AIS, you’ll come to our main page that has a lot about AI and ethics work. A big compendium book called Ethically Aligned Design is one of the core things I help drive. About 800 people took part in that over the course of three years. Then it lists the standards that we work on. Then the other project that I’ve been working on the last few years is called Planet Positive 2030. And if you Google IEEE Planet Positive 2030, those are my two main aspects of work at IEEE. Then thank you. My book, my last three books are on Amazon. So if you type my name, Heartificial intelligence, Hacking Happiness, and Tactical Transparency are my three traditionally-public books.

Brandon: Great. Excellent. Thanks, John. It’s been a delight. I’m very grateful for your time, for your wisdom.

John: Well, thank you. And I’ll end with saying what I started with. I really appreciate your work on beauty. You’re taking such a beautiful, unique angle for a word that, I think, at least for me, is oftentimes too put in a box. So thank you for expanding the paradigm of that idea of beauty with your work.

Brandon: Well, glad that it resonates. That’s the goal. Yeah, thanks, John.

In a secular age, where do people turn for meaning, belonging, and purpose?

Even in contexts around the world where institutional religion is in decline, people are not becoming less spiritual. They are searching, experimenting, and assembling new forms of community in the vacuum left by institutional breakdown. This context has given rise to spiritual innovators of all sorts. And many of those who are trying to create new forms of spiritual life, both within and outside traditional religious institutions—yoga teachers, digital sangha builders, grief workers, ritual designers—are doing so with very little support. They see the beauty of offering spiritual care to people in crisis, but also deal with the burdens of loneliness, burnout, ethical ambiguity—and all that can go wrong with such ventures.

In this episode, I speak with Casper Ter Kuile and Angie Thurston, co-founders of Sacred Design Lab, whose pioneering work has shaped how scholars, philanthropists, and spiritual practitioners understand this emerging ecology.

Casper Ter Kuile is the author of The Power of Ritual and co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. He also co-created the hit podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and co-founded Nearness. Angie Thurston is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Sacred Design Lab. She has worked with hundreds of innovative leaders, finding new ways to address spiritual longings amid religious change. Angie has co-written eight widely read reports on the evolving landscape of community and spiritual life, and is currently an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.

Drawing on interviews with spiritual innovators across the U.S., Brazil, Kenya, Egypt, the UAE, India, and Japan, Casper and Angie’s latest research offers a deeply informed view of both what’s breaking down and what is breaking open.

In our conversation, we discuss what led them to start Sacred Design Lab. We then explore what spiritual innovation means, what makes spiritual innovations succeed or fail, what the global landscape of spiritual innovation looks like, and what risks or pitfalls come with spiritual innovation.

They argue that spiritual innovation is not about trend-chasing or novelty for its own sake. It is the practical work of meeting enduring human needs for meaning, purpose. As Angie puts it, spiritual innovation is fundamentally a design question: “How do we help people flourish when inherited forms no longer fit the world we live in?”

One of the surprising discoveries that stands out to me from their work is that spiritual innovators want elders. Even many of those who left institutional religion are interested in mentorship and received wisdom from clergy, despite their distrust of these institutions.

You can listen to our conversation wherever you get your podcasts (part 1 here and part 2 here) or watch the full video or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: All right. Casper, Angie, it’s a pleasure to have you both on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Casper: Thanks for having us.

Angie: Thanks for having us.

Brandon: Yeah, you’re welcome. Well, to get started, I had sent you guys a question which I normally ask my podcast guests to begin with, which is: Could you share a memory of beauty from your childhoods that linger till today? I wonder what cropped up in your minds as I asked this question. Perhaps, Angie, we could start with you.

Angie: I would love to, and it’s such a nice question. Thank you, Brandon.

So I grew up in San Francisco. I was four years old during the earthquake of 1989 which, of course, in and of itself, I would not necessarily describe with that word beauty, but there is a specific memory that I have from that day. For context, my nuclear family was fairly isolated. I didn’t grow up with much family around, and we didn’t have much community either. But that night, all the power went out in San Francisco. We were lucky enough that our house was mostly okay. And because of that, there were a few people in my parents’ life who came over that evening. I remember falling asleep and, in the next room, my parents were there with some friends by candlelight. They were laughing and talking and sort of whispering. I just had this feeling that I hadn’t had much in my life to date as a kid of — I guess I would say it was a feeling of belonging. It was a feeling of just that sort of subtle web of life and connection that I was part of and they were part of. I think part of the beauty of it, to me, was this feeling that I didn’t have to do anything. I was just there in my bed as a four-year-old, and I could just fall asleep. This set of relationships, this love, was happening anyway. There was just sort of a givenness to it. I still remember that, that sense inside of myself, from that particular experience. The feeling that it has is one of beauty.

Brandon: Wow! Extraordinary. Thank you. Casper, what came to your mind?

Casper: Well, Brandon, I have to thank you. Angie and I have worked together for 12 years, and it’s rare that I hear a story that I haven’t heard before. But that’s lovely, Anj. Thanks for sharing that.

Brandon, I grew up in the UK. I went to a Waldorf school as a child. I don’t know how much our listeners will be familiar with Steiner education, but it’s a very ritual-heavy, nature-based, fascinating theological project of combining Christianity with Hindu reincarnation. Very interesting thing to explore that. But one of the gifts of growing up in a Waldorf school was that they encouraged parents—and so my mother did this in our home—to have a nature table. What that looked like was, in the hallway, the entryway of our home — I grew up with three sisters, and we had lodges living upstairs. It was a big house filled with people. In the entryway, there was this little table. Each season—really, every few weeks—it changed. There were postcards of, if it was in the summer season, there would be beaches. In the autumn, there would be beautiful leaves that were changing color. In Advent season, there would be 24 stars that little mini-Joseph and Mary would walk over—kind of one star every day towards the manger of Bethlehem.

And so it was just this sense of living in time. I think that’s, for me, where the beauty really was. It was the visual of flowers, or rocks, or crystals, or something. It was a constant reminder of where we were in the natural life cycle of the earth and its seasons. And so, yeah, that’s something. I recently moved house and was having conversation with my husband about what makes a house a home. And I was like, “We must have a nature table. That’s non-negotiable.”

Brandon: Oh, wow. Well, that’s great. That’s really quite a testament to your school there and to the Waldorf method. These themes of both belonging and of ritual, perhaps, are so central to the work you all are doing at Sacred Design Lab.

How did you two meet, and how did you come to start this initiative, Sacred Design Lab?

Angie: Casper and I met in 2013 in our very first week—perhaps one of our first days—at Harvard Divinity School. Well, Casper had come in to get a public policy degree at the Kennedy School, so he had been there at the University for a little while. But I was newly arrived, and we were both in the same required seminar, an introduction to ministry studies. It was in that seminar that we had the requirement to share our spiritual autobiographies, just each of us sharing our origin story and how our lives intersected with religion and spirituality.

The way I remember it is that, when Casper shared his spiritual autobiography, I basically pounced on him after class and was like, “You see what I see. We need to work together.” Basically, what that was was that both of us had come of age outside of religion in the sort of formal, institutional sense, and both of us had a real sense that there were a lot of needs—which I think we would both now describe as spiritual needs, spiritual longings—that were occurring for people who did not have a sense of religious identity or religious community, and that we wanted to, in some ways, serve people who were feeling that way. And so, yeah, we became friends, but pretty quickly — I think even when we would have dinner together, we would have an agenda. So it became quickly quite clear that we had work to do together.

Brandon: Wow.

Angie: I don’t know what you would add or change, Casper, about that narrative.

Casper: No, I think that’s exactly right. Yeah, I would only say that Angie and I, as we became friends, just started to learn together. We started to interview people who were doing spiritual or religious things in secular places. Our interest was really trying to understand this landscape, especially of our generation of millennials at that point, who were outside of religion but still doing religious things. And so, we ended up writing this—I hesitate to say this to an academic like yourself—public paper that was really aimed at a general readership, to try and illustrate not what the dominant narrative was at the time, which really was a decline of religion, but, from our perspective, really a transformation of religion—so that people were still being spiritual, doing spiritual things, but in places like CrossFit, or maker spaces, or the workplace, or artistic communities.

And so, we’ve always had this kind of dual role—which I’ve loved about working with Angie—of both being students of what’s happening and having a leg into the academy and into research, but also really as practitioners. There’s people who are really invested in this personally and creating projects, creating interventions, creating media that speak to that landscape at the same time. Yeah, we keep finding ways to work together.

Brandon: Astounding. Casper, you had also started a very influential podcast on Harry Potter. Could you say a word about how that fit into all of this?

Casper: Well, this is a great example of one of those practitioner projects. Another classmate of ours, Vanessa Zoltan, in Divinity School, and I became friends. She was doing this fascinating writing about reading a sacred text. She grew up as an atheist Jew—that would be the language she used—where belief in God was not part of the picture, but the practices of religious life certainly were, and sacred reading was a big part of that. But she didn’t want to read the Torah, so she was reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text with one of our beloved professors, Stephanie Paulsell. I found this quite intriguing. I was like, “What is sacred reading?” I didn’t know anything about Lectio Divina, or the Ignatian imagination practices, or havruta, or Pardes from Jewish practice.

And so, I went along to this little group that she was hosting on a Wednesday night with three or four women, who were reading a chapter of Jane Eyre, taking a sentence and doing Lectio Divina with it, and having these amazing conversations about mental health, heartbreak, love, and courage. I said to Vanessa, “This is really awesome. We should do it with a book people actually read.” I mean, no disrespect to the Frontistē. But what that led to was, it kind of paired with my own exploration of not growing up Christian and having to take an Introduction to Hebrew Bible in church and New Testament class, finding it interesting but, at the same time, not feeling like it was my text to interrogate. Or I didn’t have a relationship with it. That’s changed now. But at that point, I was really looking for, what are the epic stories? What are the myths, the legends, that I feel like I have a right to engage with, to interpret? And so I was interested in Lord of the Rings. I was interested in Game of Thrones. I was interested in Harry Potter. And so, those two kinds of influences came together.

We were extremely lucky—always go to the conference that you’re invited to—because I met this random guy at a conference who happened to be the man in charge of the homepage of iTunes at that point. And so, when we launched the podcast, having run it as an in-person class for a year, when we launched the podcast, I sent it to this guy, and he was like, “Oh, this is cool. I’m going to put you on the homepage.” That ended up attracting just an enormous audience. What happened was that we really became sort of Chaplains to a fandom. And so, that podcast has been running for nearly 10 years now, and it will close next year, in 2026. Having read through all the books twice, chapter by chapter, it led to hundreds of local reading groups that would do Lectio Divina with the Harry Potter books. We run secular pilgrimages now. There’s a thriving digital community. So it’s been amazing to see how people who would never go looking for spiritual practices, they were looking for the comfort and the connection of the story that they loved. We always say we don’t read it as entertainment; we read it not as instruction per se, but as an opportunity to mirror back into our own lives the big questions about values, about how to live a good life. The texts and these practices particularly really help you use the text as a mirror to ask yourself big questions.

Brandon: Amazing, amazing. How did this idea for the Sacred Design Lab then come about in the midst of all this? What was it that, you know, spurred you to actually create this thing, and then what are you trying to do with it now?

Angie: Well, Casper alluded to this report we wrote, this public paper, How We Gather, back in 2015. It’s worth re-emphasizing that we were just grad students at the time, right? We had some shared priorities about the kind of work we wanted to do. I would say both of us were really looking at these innovative communities that seemed to be meeting needs that, perhaps in many cases, religion—both historically and currently—would meet. But the kind of people in our orbit, especially at the time, we were looking at millennials who tended to be religiously unaffiliated or uncomfortably affiliated. We were asking, where are they going to find meaning, belonging, and purpose?

And so, that led to this little report, How We Gather. But it also led us to get to know a whole host of these innovative community leaders around the United States. And what kept happening—I had trained before that as a playwright. These folks who were running fitness communities, arts communities, and justice movements, they seemed to be dissimilar, and yet it was as if they had a shared script about the kinds of work they were doing and the ways that it was touching people and meeting them. What we found is that these leaders, in many respects, were acting in a sort of pastoral role for the people in their communities, even though their communities were nominally secular. And so, we began to learn about their needs. One of the primary needs that we noticed amongst them was that they felt awfully lonely in their leadership, and that they also felt under resourced in the dimensions of their leadership that were addressing these deeper needs amongst the people in their care.

And so, we started gathering these leaders. At first, we were gathering secular leaders. Then we started gathering leaders whose communities actually did have a religious affiliation—or where the leader themselves might, but where the community was not. It kind of looked more like these innovative secular communities than it did your traditional, congregational model, for instance. So this was things like people meeting in laundromats and washing clothes for those who might be experiencing homelessness—as a kind of expression of modern-day foot washing, right? Or Muslim small groups meeting in living rooms—at the time, online Buddhist sanghas before COVID, and everyone going online. So that became a sort of network that Casper and I were cultivating amongst these leaders. We’ve come to call these folks spiritual innovators. At the time, we didn’t have that language yet. And so that’s one big strand that, I would say, has run through our work and still does to this day. That was some of the impetus behind founding Sacred Design Lab.

But the other was that, as we continue getting to know these innovative leaders and working with them, we also received an unexpected response from a lot of institutions. At first, these were religious institutions—everything from denominations to large-scale congregations and foundations. People were basically asking, what is going on with rising generations? In many cases, they were experiencing institutional decline, and so they wanted to talk to us and understand what was going on. Then sometimes secular organizations would be encountering the same challenges, the cultural challenges of, “Oh, we have this huge rise in loneliness and a sense of isolation. We have this rise in mental health—it challenges—and people experiencing this kind of ennui, and in some cases, devastation. What’s going on with that, and how do we respond in a secular landscape? We were sort of saying, well, actually, there’s a lot of wisdom in religion about this, right? So we found ourselves in a bridge position. And so, when we graduated from Divinity School in 2016, we said, okay. Well, I think Casper and I sort of looked at each other. “Are we going to do this for real? Are we going to try to do this as our job?” It’s been a long and meandering road since then of how we’ve made it work, but ultimately, we did. We found Sacred Design Lab with our colleague, Sue, about seven years ago now—to really try to bring together this body of work and see what we could meaningfully contribute.

Brandon: Could you say a little bit about — I mean, you talked about sort of these fundamental unmet needs that you’re trying to address. Say a bit more about the design and the lab aspects of what you’re trying to do.

Casper: Well, there’s few parts of that. One is that Angie and I just like to do a lot of interesting things. Using a word like lab allows us to — but in all seriousness, it allowed us to partner with very different types of groups for projects that all touched on these same questions, but in very different contexts. For example, we worked with the Episcopal bishop in Chicago to host a liturgy lab. This was a small convening in which we brought together secular experienced designers who worked as museum curators or hosted festivals, like music festivals, together with Episcopal liturgists who were steeped both in the scholarship of liturgy, but also in the practice of it in Episcopal congregations. That led to some fascinating insights of applying this idea of spiritual innovation, of how do we meet those enduring needs in ways that really resonate with audiences that won’t necessarily walk into an Episcopal Church.

One insight that I’ll never forget is Ida Benedetto, who is an amazing experienced designer who lives here in Brooklyn, not too far away from me. She had done some research looking at, of all things, wilderness retreats, funerals, and sex parties. Her insight was that, for transformation to occur, you needed an element of risk. When she shared that in this group of Episcopal liturgists, I remember Patrick—oh, gosh— Mahoney, I think is his last name, the former dean at Sir John the Divine, saying, “My goodness. As a liturgist, I’m nearly always designing for safety. What would it be like to design for risk in liturgy?” So those kinds of conversations don’t happen by themselves. And so, that was one element of the lab.

We’ve also created, in partnership with the Well Being Trust, a foundation that came out of the healthcare sector that was really interested in understanding, okay, we understand social health. We understand mental health. What is spiritual health? Can you help us think through what does that look like? And so, we both did a bunch of research and then created our own personal inventory and sort of a mini self-analysis tool that you could use to just get in touch with: what is my spiritual health? How do I think about the different elements, the contours, of what might make up my spiritual well-being? The lab allows those unlikely partnerships, but with a continued question of, how do we nurture spiritual life today and tomorrow?

Brandon: Amazing. Great. One of the more recent research products you put out is this amazing report on Illuminating Spiritual Innovation. Could you say a little bit about what you mean by spiritual innovation? What led you, I suppose, to focus on that word, and what do you mean by spiritual innovation? Say a little bit about the work you did, the actual research—where you went, who you talked to—and what you were trying to learn doing that work.

Angie: Well, I would say that the origin of us using that phrase really dates back to this time that we’ve just been describing, where I think Casper and I both came to this body of work with real practitioner hearts and, I would say, with—in a very capacious use of the word ministry—a desire to minister, to serve, in a context that was rapidly changing. And so, this idea of spiritual innovation, I think for us, has always had something to do with: how do you meet the soul needs, the spiritual longings of those who in general, but I think especially in a context where a number of the traditional structures, institutions, and even, in some cases, theologies and rituals are not fit for purpose amongst a growing population? So what do you do about that? It really has felt to us, in some ways, like a design question. I think going back to your question about why we called it Sacred Design Lab, there is a whole host of really rich and challenging design questions at stake right now. And so, I think for us, we were really wanting to build on the scholarship and practitioner wisdom about this concept of innovation, and apply it to the question of spiritual needs and spiritual longings. So when we use it, that’s what we mean by it: we’re looking at new ways to address spiritual longings.

And let me say that, of course, that word innovation can be quite fraught in certain contexts and can have a lot of overtones, depending on where you are socially-located, geographically, religiously. And so, that has been a big part of our work in trying to find language that is effective enough, that’s meaningful enough, to get at this work, and yet also capacious enough to hold it. I think it’s imperfect. And so, as a result, we will often also accompany the phrase spiritual innovation with other words: spiritual imagination, spiritual transformation, spiritual evolution—spiritual adaptation, we were just talking about. So it’s imperfect language. But I think the fact that it is connected to some bodies of work around how you design for meaningful change is helpful, because that is a big part of what we want to support.

Casper: And so, practically, what the research involved was a huge amount of interviews with spiritual innovators and scholars around the world. We were lucky enough to visit a number of countries. We’re in Japan, Brazil. Angie was in India; I was in Egypt. We were in Kenya, the UAE, and, of course, here in the U.S. as well. Our work had really been very U.S.-focused before, so it was a real excitement for us to be able to expand our scholarly gaze and look beyond into very different contexts. In some ways, I would say we were surprised by how much alignment there was with the U.S. context. Certainly, there were very, very different national situations or religious contexts—Islam, in particular. Being in Egypt was really interesting to kind of understand that more, and the UAE.

We worked with a team of post grads, mostly researchers, in seven different regions. We had just more than 100 interviews with practitioners and scholars. It was fascinating. One of my most memorable interviews was in Egypt. I was in Cairo meeting with Amr Khaled, who was, if you’re on the streets of Egypt and you ask anyone who is he, everybody knows. He was the kind of face of like — he was the first kind of televangelist, you might say, in the ‘90s. He’s just had a multi-decade public presence and has always used technology very innovatively. He was the first to be sold in tapes, cassettes, and then DVDs on street corners. Now, he’s in this really interesting place where his theological project is to combine traditional Islamic theology with positive psychology. So he’s integrating a more recent scientific research base, aligning it with traditional Islamic theology to create a formation path. That’s my language, not his. He talks a lot about isan—the idea of perfection, of growing towards perfection—and teaches that through a series of digital programming and fellowships and leadership cohorts with young Muslims around Europe and North Africa. Having him reflect on his own experience of being influenced by his travels in India, of this secular scholarship, and yet embedding it in a Muslim worldview was just a fascinating example of someone innovating within a tradition.

I should say that this idea of spiritual innovation really does sit both outside of traditions—inside and at the edge of it. And so, whenever we were doing this kind of research—whether it was a Buddhist monk in Japan who teaches surfing lessons and then builds in some meditation to sneak that in, whether it’s people creatively building it into a tradition, or something like homecoming, a digital platform that helps people integrate psychedelic experiences that’s based in Canada—that’s totally outside of religious context, but still very, very much engaging a lot of spiritual practices, even if it’s in a sort of medical frame.

Brandon: Angie, is there a story from one of your cases that surprised you, or maybe challenged your assumptions, that you found especially striking?

Angie: Yeah, well, Casper was just speaking about Japan, and I think that was one of the most moving for me. It was when we were outside of Tokyo, we were in a Buddhist temple. Part of the learning for me around the way that a lot of the Buddhist lineages in Japan are passed down is that it’s often within families. You’ll have multiple generations. And so, there’s still a decision point for someone who is engaged in that kind of leadership, but there is also a sense of inheritance and responsibility, right?

And so, this particular spiritual innovator, this monk, Reverend Fujio, was speaking to us about how he has tried to respond to the crisis of isolation in Japan—which is part of why we chose to go to Japan. It’s because that is so acute there, and there’s also a lot of deaths and despair in Japan right now, especially among young people. And so, Reverend Fujio had had a lot of direct impacts of this in his own life. He had lost a few friends to suicide. He just saw the way that, you know, here in the United States where we’re based, some people will look at religious spaces—in some cases, Christian spaces, because that’s our dominant religion in the United States—and say, “Well, I go there just for holidays, for Christmas, or Easter, or for funerals.” That’s the relationship that a lot of people in Japan have to Buddhist temples, is it’s more for ceremonial purposes and can feel, to some people, out of touch with everyday life.

Reverend Fujio just said, “I think that it’s my work to actually go straight into the social problems that I see with the tradition that I have inherited.” And so, he has dedicated himself to ministering to those who are feeling so depleted, that they’re in a mental health crisis. And so, he basically lives his life as a vigil and makes himself available for people to come. If they come, he will just sit with them. Basically, the metaphor he used was, “I helped them recharge their battery.” He’ll start with the physical level and just say, “Are you hot? Are you cold? Do you need water?” Then he’ll walk Zazen with them for as long as they need in order to feel that they can actually access their body again before he’ll even go to any matters of the mind or of the heart or the spirit. He has taken this into the metaverse. He leads Zazen in the metaverse. He started doing this during COVID. So they have a whole sort of virtual version of the temple that anyone can join. He also has started a collective of other spiritual practitioners, mostly Buddhist monks and chaplains, who are dedicated to working together around this issue of how they prevent suicide.

So there’s this kind of intersection of working with technology, working with social problems, and also deeply drawing out the gifts of his tradition in terms of, especially that commitment to practice and the wisdom of what it is like to actually put your body in different positions in order to help access different states. Anyway, I was just very touched by his devotion and the ways that he’s applying creative energy to this particular predicament.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. Well, a lot of the examples you’ve cited seem to certainly resonate with problems that we’re familiar with in the West here, like loneliness, and then the general secularization, the alienation from ourselves, from our received traditions. Did you find any problems or crises that are rather different, perhaps, from what we experienced in the West?

Casper: Yeah, I think the role of the state was really interesting. Certainly, when we were in Brazil, for example, meeting with practitioners of Mbunda and a host of different African traditions that have mutated and changed in the Brazilian context, many were very actively repressed for a long time. It was interesting. We were in Rio in February, and so we happened to be there on the celebration day of Iemanjá, who is the ocean water divinity or deity. People wear white, go to the beach, offer gifts of thanks. People bring food, flowers. A couple of bottles of champagne were spotted. As ever, in these kinds of ritual spaces you have some people engaging in a beautiful practice of devotion. Others, just to pick up the free food and champagne that is left on the beach. But rather than the state, having played this very repressive role, now this was municipally celebrated and funded because it’s now seen as a draw for tourism. So just the changing way in which state interaction with the traditions, especially in post-colonial contexts—Brazil, was a particular example where it had been embraced. That’s certainly not always the case. But that was something that did feel noticeably different from the U.S. I don’t know, Angie, if there’s others that come to mind for you.

Angie: Yeah, I would say that that theme, writ large—and this is part of the discomfort with the language of innovation, especially—I think we experienced that in the Middle East and in Muslim contexts because of the association of innovation with bid‘ah, and with this idea of new invention inside of Islam, which is essentially seen as heresy. In many cases, that was one important difference of context. In terms of, broadly, in the United States, there is a culture of lionizing innovation and entrepreneurship—a sense of that is the path to getting ahead. It’s to creating something new. While that’s not always true in religious spaces in the United States, I think it is the cultural water that we swim in. So that was definitely not the case, I’d say, in Muslim majority context, then also, I’d say, especially in Africa and Latin America with the specifics of colonialism.

I think also American hegemony was a big factor. I mean, we really experienced the pushback against that language, specifically with the connotation of, “Oh, we’re going to take something and essentially exploit it and use it for profit.” That was the specific association with innovation in an American context and also in a colonial context, right? We’re just going to sort of pilfer what’s here and use it for our own gain as the colonizer culture. And so, the strong push back, I’d say, the sort of counter perspective that we often were met with in these conversations was one in which everything is naturally evolving. You know, if you look at the natural world, that there’s a quality of transformation that is just part of our existence, and we are part of that. And so, the idea that humans would come in and be the inventors, be the innovators, be the ones to come up with something new, is actually just an inaccurate understanding of the world and based on a colonial logic that is countered to and has done violence to a lot of cultures around the world.

So I’d say there was pretty strong resistance in a lot of cases, even while I think there were also a number of experiences of this shared conundrum of people really trying to figure out how to live in today’s world in a way that is meaningful and rich and grounded in something beyond themselves and contending with that struggle. So I think, as Casper said earlier, there were some through lines there. We had a really beautiful dinner with a group of young people in — it was in Dubai, right, Casper?

Casper: Mm-hmm.

Angie: We were sort of finding some of our peers in that context who were sharing, on a personal level, how they’re holding the religion that they grew up with alongside the realities of their life today, right? So that was there in a sort of personal, individual expression. But at the cultural level, we’re dealing with really different contexts.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. Dubai happens to be my own spiritual home for various reasons.

Angie: No way.

Brandon: Yeah, I lived there for a number of years, so it’s very dear to me. Obviously, you’re calling all these folks spiritual innovators, whether or not they embrace the term. What are the, I suppose, the factors that are most predictive of their success? What does success look like in terms of spiritual innovation? What factors contribute to whether or not an innovation gains traction?

Casper: Well, now I’m always grateful that there’s two of us because, Angie, we can collectively maybe remember the seven different things that we came up with.

Angie: Well, we could start with the three big buffets of memes that we’ve found.

Casper: Yeah, you do that.

Angie: Yeah, this is very, very straightforwardly, Brandon. In our last decade of working with these folks, we found they have a host of practical needs, of actually being able to create and sustain new things in the world, for projects of any kind. They have a lot of relational needs. We spoke to the feeling of loneliness that often they would experience in their leadership because they’re not quite in any one world in that way. And so, there’s a need for mentorship and also for peers. And then their spiritual needs—how did they go deep with the people in their care? Well, they have to be accessing that space of spiritual nourishment themselves, right? So I’d say those three areas for the innovators themselves, we found that successful innovation, the success of their work is often very connected to the extent to which their needs are being met in those three areas.

And then, as Casper was beginning to allude to, we’ve noticed a host of qualities from what we would describe as effective, or successful, or promising spiritual innovation. I would say they all sort of connect to this idea. I mean, there’s many words for what is the more ideal—what Charles Eisenstein would say, the more beautiful world, speaking of beauty, that our hearts know is possible. If we’re trying to move toward something like that, we could use the language of flourishing or thriving. But successful spiritual innovation is helping us move toward that world—in ourselves, in our communities, in the larger ecosystems that we share and the societies that we’re a part of. So that’s broadly what we were on the lookout for, is what are the conditions that lead to that kind of innovation.

Casper: Yeah, and maybe some of those specifics, just to mention some that we were interested in. Definitely, one was scalability. Without falling prey to the bigger is better. But certainly, we were looking for things that had the opportunity to reach a significant number of people. For example, we would be less interested in an individual practitioner who might offer particular one on one—whether it’s freaky, or healing, or something. Even if that was being combined in an interesting way with a different practice or an unusual context, we were mostly interested in things that could serve multiple people, and hopefully at some significant scale.

Project sustainability is something. Having looked at this kind of question for 12 years, there have been so many awesome projects that have come and gone. A lot of individual created — that’s normal in an innovation stage. But so many wonderful projects really depended on a single individual often—who put in the labor, the creativity, and was able to make it work, but then had a baby, or moved away, or had a health crisis, or got a job that could pay for their health insurance, or whatever it was. We’re definitely really interested in: what are the models, the financial models, that make these kinds of projects work? There are a host of different ones, from member-sustained projects to some of them are like venture-backed, for example. So if you look at some of the big apps that most of us will be familiar with—like Insight Timer, or Headspace, or Hallo—time will tell how long they survive once the venture money runs out. To projects that are entirely volunteer-run, like ServiceSpace, for example, which has a huge reach, or other models that are experimenting with things like cooperatives or social enterprise model, where something is revenue-generating that cross-subsidizes something that’s then offered for free. So we’ve been very curious to try and understand how those different models work. That’s a continuing conundrum, I would say, I would say—if not always the first question, then certainly one of the most significant questions we had over and over again that spiritual innovators struggle with.

Brandon: I would imagine some of these would certainly be universal, in terms of the funding model, for instance, and our leadership transitions, or what sort of contributes to their ability to endure over time and across generations and manage their various expectations of followers, if you want to call them members or whatever they might be called, right? The other thing I was curious about was whether you see any downsides, or pitfalls, or unintended consequences of spiritual innovation.

Casper: Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, there are so many. The obvious ones are often about failed leadership. Our first case study that we often ended up talking about in the early years of our research was fitness communities and CrossFit especially. And so, a classic example there of people being responsible for soul care in a way that they were not trained for—someone who’s excellent at helping you with your form as you lift a barbell, but maybe not very skilled in navigating your mother’s cancer diagnosis. And so, the most egregious examples of that would have been inappropriate romantic relationships between someone who’s in a leadership role and someone who’s a participant. But there are so many. All the things that go wrong in a congregation also go wrong in these projects—financial mismanagement, burnout, team, conflict. You name it. It happens.

I think some of the more philosophically interesting examples are often about the ethics of translating a tradition. So, as people are innovating, that taking a practice from one place and putting it in a new context. Or, as I did with the Harry Potter podcast, we were drawing on the Lectio Divina tradition, which, of course, itself was a spiritual innovation. Guigo II, a Carthusian monk of the 14th century, was adapting a different formula for engaging with a biblical text. He put it into these four steps, which we now think of as the golden approach to Lectio Divina. But it came from somewhere too. We often quote Rabbi Oren Kohlberg, who says, “Every tradition was once an innovation.” So that question of ethic is really paramount. And so, what are the reflection questions you need? What are the relationships you need? What are the kind of support and accountability structures of mentorship that are really important? That’s a lot of what we spend our time doing in terms of supporting spiritual innovators now. It’s trying to help them build that bench of support structures, of relationships. Because we know that when they hit inevitable challenges, it’s the network of support and accountability that helps people through, or where they get lost, where something comes undone. And so, I would say that kind of question of leadership and ethics and translating tradition are two of the things that stand out for me.

Angie: Yeah, our colleague, Sue Phillips, has this beautiful phrase about the spiritual infrastructure of the future. She wrote a great article on it. I think that’s part of the predicament,. It’s that there is, if you think about, of course, the structure, the organizational structures are different across religious traditions. But usually, they do include some amount of training and formation for leadership, right? They include also some amount of support for people once they’re in positions of leadership. That’s not to mention all of the other kinds of infrastructure that exist around if you think about just religious life, all of the elements that go into that, right?

So if someone is in a position where they’re spiritually innovating, what we have found is that there are pretty massive infrastructure gaps. And so, all those questions Casper was just naming—whether it’s about ethics and leadership, whether it’s about how you sustain your work financially, or even how you make a decision about the way that you want to approach this question of money and livelihood as it relates to being called to a work that has a deep spiritual core, that kind of interrogation—and then the practices and the relationships that will sustain an ongoing journey of this kind of work, we’re just in a very broadly transitional time when it comes to all of that. That transition is accompanied by, of course, these additional macro forces, like the rise in all of these technologies and things like that, that we’re also having to contend with in real time. So I think there are a lot of perils to spiritual innovation in that kind of landscape, and there are real risks. As far as people just—you hope most of the time they’re well-meaning—but kind of putting themselves out there and meeting people who have real needs, whether or not someone else sitting over here would say that they’re qualified or authorized to do that, or should be doing it, right? Sometimes that can indeed lead to real harm being done. So I guess that’s a big part of our hope and our project at Sacred Design Lab. It’s to do our best or to make a contribution that will support this work being done with integrity and consideration, and also to help with the advancement of some of those elements of spiritual infrastructure, so that people are less alone in doing the work and not so much casting about as if they’re doing it for the first time. Because, actually, there are centuries of wisdom about how to do this work well.

Brandon: Right, yeah. I mentioned that’s part of the challenge there. Some of these innovators, at least, are responding to a perceived frustration with the existing traditions they’re coming out of, and maybe even just a desire for autonomy from those traditions—and wanting, perhaps, the desire to chart out new territory and venture out on one’s own and try to find an authentic way of engaging with some of these perennial questions, perhaps in ways that no one has done before but are meeting our current needs right now might make them resistant to looking to established traditions for any help, right?

Casper: What I would say, though, Brandon, is that the resistance often is about institutions rather than individuals. And so, one of the lab projects that we ran a few years ago was to pair up spiritual innovators with elders, mostly ordained leaders across different traditions, for a sort of six-month relationship building incubation experiment.

Brandon: Oh, lovely.

Casper: The minimum requirement was that they met for an hour each month on Zoom just to talk. We framed this in for the elders so that they were engaging the conversations appropriately, and we gave them some questions to offer. Overwhelmingly, that was a really positive experience for both ends of the conversation. We would have an older Rabbi talk with a young former Muslim, but now secular yoga innovator. Or we had an older Presbyterian minister with — gosh, I’m trying to remember who it was in particular. But anyway, these very unexpected conversations. Nearly, always there was such appreciation for the wisdom that came through both ways. It was energizing and exciting for the older person, and grounding and helpful to be reminded that the questions and the challenges that they were experiencing as an innovator is one that these older folks have had to navigate to—whether it was in a congregational context or something else.

What I’m trying to illustrate with this point is that that resistance is less significant than you might expect if there is curiosity and generosity in an approach in the context of a relationship. I think you’re right that there’s real misgivings about the power structures and everything else within institutions that, interpersonally, it was actually much more open.

Brandon: Wow.

Angie: Well, and that speaks to the — you’re asking about the burden of innovation, Brandon. I think a burden that many of these spiritual innovators carry is the feeling that, if they want something to exist, they have to create it. And that if they are creating it, they’re doing so for the first time. I mean, I know that it’s factually untrue, but it can feel that way and in part because of how cut off many of these folks are from others who have done things like this. And to your point about doing it, especially outside of religious institutions, if they haven’t been connected to those kinds of institutions, they just genuinely don’t necessarily know that someone in that position would have wisdom that’s relevant for what they’re doing. And so, that was part of the pilot that Casper just references. We wanted to just create conditions for them to actually meet each other and have that type of conversation to relieve some of the burden.

Brandon: That sort of mentorship is critical—just to know that someone else has done something similar or that there is wisdom somewhere, right? That this really is—you don’t really have to reinvent the wheel. But I think also, what I appreciate about your work, too, is that it dispels the misconception that it’s pretty pervasive: that spirituality is somehow immune to the problems that are associated with traditional religion, right? It’s this pure, positive, uniformly beneficial thing.

Casper: For sure. I would say, because of that—whether scholars agree with this or not—the way people perceive the difference between religion and spirituality, on the street, is that religion is institutional and spirituality is personal. But what happens within that realm once it’s taken out of that institutional context is that spirituality in the market become very, very quickly intertwined. And so, I think one of the biggest challenges on that ethics question that we were talking about before is: what about money? What can you charge for? What shouldn’t be charged for? How do you make a living, but at the same time, how do you respect a tradition? Especially as some of these themes around spirituality—especially ritual—become more and more popular as a brand tool. I mean, literally, the makeup brand Rituals, right?

Brandon: Right.

Casper: So you see this language being co-opted by the capitalist market. Now, at the same time, does religion itself have a challenging history with capitalism? Absolutely. So I think you’re so right to point to, even though on the face of it, we might think these are very different contexts and different challenges. It’s a lot of the same stuff.

Brandon: Yeah, I’m curious to know what you’re seeing in the work you’re doing in relation to Gen Z? I mean, the problems that you identified in your report on How We Gather were focused maybe on the millennial context. But are you seeing there’s this talks about a religious resurgence, or revival, or whatever you want to call it, among Gen Z, to turning towards maybe more traditional forms of religion? I don’t know to what extent that’s borne out in data, but are you seeing that or any particular patterns among the youngest generation right now?

Casper: Angie, I can start, and I’ll let you build in more.

Angie: Sure, yeah.

Casper: So I would say, yes, you’re so right: that our kind of intro framing was definitely around millennials. And so, we haven’t focused specifically on Gen Zs over the last couple of years. I want to caveat everything that I’m going to say next. I think you’re right to point to the difference between the narrative and the data. I think Ryan Burge’s work has been very illustrative of not seeing the evidence yet in the hard numbers. However, I think here is the key thing that I find most interesting, which is that: as younger generations have less of a personal experience of religious life, religious institutions, they don’t have the same reaction or reactivity to institutional religion that maybe people who had a particular wounding experience did. So as people are born outside of religious tradition, rather than kind of like, “Oh, religion is bad,” it’s more just like religion is irrelevant. Then if there’s something that’s interesting about it—whether that’s like religious iconography being used on the runway, in a fashion context, or the way in which becoming really devout is somehow counter cultural now—there’s a different context, is what I’m trying to point to for Gen Zs, in which engaging religion doesn’t mean what it did for a Gen X. Certainly not for a boomer context, or even a millennial one. So I’m not saying that there’s a religious revival, per se. But what I do think is true is that younger people are very conscious that the way things are is not how they should be. They’re curious to understand. Whether it’s a relationship with technology, for example—if you have an answer, I want it. And if you’re religious or if you’re secular, I’m actually pretty open to you as a source of guidance, in a way that wouldn’t have been the case 20, 30, years ago.

Angie: Yeah, just building on that, I think I have sort of — after Casper and I moved out of Harvard Divinity School, I have stayed connected to the university, both at Harvard and now a little bit more at Columbia. I have noticed that amongst at least the students that I’ve been working with, there is a sense, to Casper’s point of, certainly, just an assumption that things are not as they should be. Then additionally, I think, a sense that the educational institution is being one place that they are still finding themselves, with spending a lot of time. But that those institutions also don’t seem to be set up to address some of these questions either. And so, the questions about meaning and purpose and belonging, I think that I’ve experienced a relative openness to trying to locate sources of wisdom about those topics. I think we see that borne out in some of the courses that are especially popular at universities across the country.

At Harvard, there’s one on Confucius and the good life, which is always massively oversubscribed. There’s the one on happiness at Yale. There’s this sort of positive. You know what I mean? It’s actually about, well, who am I, and what does it mean to have a good life? Why am I spending my time there? This just sort of fundamental and existential questions. If one is coming of age not having had those questions spoken to—either in a religious setting or an educational setting—then as you approach your 20s, there’s just this significant vacuum, right? I think that is a perilous situation. And of course, we’re seeing a lot of people, of course, turning to the people who are online to tell them about those things, and for better and for worse, definitely. Right? But those questions have not gone away. And so, I would say, whether it’s playing out in a religious revival or it’s playing out in terms of people finding gurus on the internet, they’re going to look. People are going to look. The question is: what’s going to be there to meet them?

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. You’re also currently catalyzing a hub for spiritual innovation or for spiritual innovators. Could you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing, what you’re designing to solve there, what success is going to look like for you, what you’re aspiring to there?

Casper: Yeah, so after this research phase of getting to interview all these spiritual innovators around the world, we heard again and again, as Angie said, the need for relational support, practical support, and spiritual support. And so, one thing we thought we could do is to create just the biggest library of resources for spiritual innovation that we could think of. So we’ve collected over 350 podcast episodes, books, articles, frameworks, organizations, anything that might be of value. We’ve organized them in a sort of choose-your-own-adventure structure. So listeners can go to spiritualinnovation.org and pick a theme like “fund your project,” or questions around leadership, or epics—those challenges that we mentioned before—and find a curated pathway with videos of real-life stories from practitioners, some guidance with examples to point to, and then all of these resources to help hopefully meet some of the practical needs that innovators have.

Then secondly, we’ve got a directory in which spiritual innovators around the world can create a profile, share a little bit about what they’re interested in, what they know about, what they can help others with, and hopefully facilitate some of the relational needs that we know folks have. In addition, we host regular Zoom events that people can come to, which involves some teaching of a practical tool or a framework, and then lots of breakout groups. So it helps people get to know each other.

Brandon: Amazing.

Casper: And so, yeah, we’ll be launching that on October 15th of this year, 2025. We’ll be keeping that going for the years to come. So please do check it out if you’re interested.

Brandon: Fantastic. Well, Casper’s energy has been phenomenal, learning more about the work you’re doing. If you’d like to guide our listeners to perhaps contribute—whether it’s researchers, philanthropists, practitioners—what might be the most helpful thing they might do? If there’s something that you could direct them to, we’ll certainly put the links to your to your websites. But if there’s any practical steps that you might encourage people to take in terms of growing the spiritual innovation ecosystem, what might you recommend?

Casper: I’ll add one, which is — well, maybe I’ll add two, if I may. One is definitely to check out spiritualinnovation.org, of course. Join some of the events that we host, if you’re interested in just learning or understanding more. But honestly, I think the most beautiful stories to me always happen when people connect locally with an unexpected ally. So if you find yourself as a leader in a congregation or someone who’s really steeped in a tradition, go out and actively reach out to the person who runs the yoga studio, or the fitness community, or the arts group, or the local volunteering organization that seems to be speaking to people’s spiritual lives in some way, and say, “Hey, I love what you’re doing.” We kind of talk about that idea of accompaniment—of coming alongside—and I think that’s really the posture. This is language we learned from our friends at Wesleyan Impact Partners, steeped in the Methodist tradition, but to really, without sacrificing who you are and what’s important to you, come alongside someone who’s doing something new and learn from them and then, through that relationship, give what you know too. Because it’s in those friendships and those collaborations often that the most exciting new things emerge. So build relationships, is what I would say. How about you, Angie?

Angie: Absolutely. Well, one other thing is, just having referenced that platform and the resources on it, there is an invitation on the platform to add more resources. And, Brandon, knowing that your listeners are there at the intersection of scholarship and practice, that is one specific intersection that we’re really looking to help build out, is what is the scholarly work being done about all of these changes and about spiritual innovation itself? Casper and I have had a touchstone ever since we started working together that we’re out here trying to tell stories of courage and hope. We really always been looking for, where are the instances where things are coming together in a way that these spiritual longings are being met, right? So we really want to understand more about where and why that is happening, and we want to catalyze more of it, right?

So for the scholars listening, we’re really curious about what work should we be looking at, should spiritual innovators be paying attention to? It could come from any number of domains. Then for the practitioners, what are the things that you draw upon in your own work? And please share those with others, because we want to help strengthen this whole ecosystem. So that’s just a very practical invitation, but it’s also one that we’re going to be definitely giving our time to in the next couple of years.

Brandon: Fantastic. Well, it’s been really a pleasure. Thank you again for joining us and sharing your insights. Congrats on the wonderful work you’re doing.

Angie: Likewise.

Casper: Thanks so much. You too, Brandon. Grateful to be here with you.

What do a peacock’s tail and the iPhone have in common?

Both are products of evolution—one shaped by nature, the other by culture. And both might be considered innovations in their own ways: nature’s invention and culture’s creation, each shaped by selection and the pursuit of beauty.

In this conversation, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley joins me to explore how beauty and innovation arise from similar forces of variation, selection, and transmission.

Matt Ridley’s books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, Viral: The search for the Origin of COVID-19 (co-authored with Alina Chan), and Birds, Sex, and Beauty.

Matt served the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee. He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Drawing on his most recent book Birds, Sex and Beauty, and his earlier work How Innovation Works, Matt helps us see that what we call innovation is rarely the work of a single genius; rather, it’s a collective process, powered by freedom, curiosity, and the endless recombination of ideas.

Matt’s latest book mounts a strong defense of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which is a force for evolutionary innovation that we keep overlooking. While natural selection explains how organisms survive and adapt, sexual selection explains how they captivate.

Female mate choice, Darwin argued, shapes many of the spectacular colors, songs, and dances of the animal world. Birds of paradise, for example, create performances of dazzling artistry not because they are useful, but because they are beautiful. Matt describes watching black grouse lekking on a frosty English morning, where females make the decision of mate choice based on males’s aesthetic displays. Their choices, repeated over generations, drive the evolution of color, song, and display. Sexual selection, then, is nature’s great experiment in aesthetics—a kind of evolutionary art form.

And it doesn’t stop with birds.

Our own species may have evolved large brains not merely to survive, but to seduce—to create, to sing, to tell stories, to make art and ideas that attract others. Matt argues that “Sexual attractiveness alone can be a sufficient explanation for almost any human mental trait.” The beauty of art, humor, and imagination may all trace back to our ancient dance of display and desire.

Matt’s fascination with evolution eventually led him to study innovation—another system that thrives on variation, imitation, and selection. In his book How Innovation Works, he shows that progress is rarely driven by lone geniuses like Newton or Edison. Instead, it emerges from a slow, collective process—networks of people exchanging, adapting, and improving on one another’s ideas. Innovation, Matt argues, depends most fundamentally on freedom: the freedom to experiment, to fail, to question, to share, to recombine.

In our conversation, we discuss:

1. The courtship rituals of black grouse and the surprising role of female choice

2. What bowerbirds can teach us about aesthetics and art

3. Sexual selection as a driver of creativity, humor, and the human brain

4. Matt’s critique of “disruptive innovation” and the importance of incremental progress

5. The real relationship between basic science and technology

6. Why Matt still calls himself a “rational optimist”

7. Why freedom is the secret sauce of innovation

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here) or watch the full video below. An unedited transcript follows.

Brandon: All right. Matt, thank you for joining us on the podcast. It’s such a delight and honor to have you here.

Matt: Thank you, Brandon, for inviting me.

Brandon: Great. Well, we like to get started with every episode by asking guests to reflect on a moment of beauty from their childhoods that lingers with them until today. Is there anything in particular that comes to your mind?

Matt: Well, from childhood? That’s interesting. I think I’m going to say: sitting on the shoulders of my father, I’m opening a bird box, looking in to see a bird’s nest inside.

Brandon: Wow.

Matt: There’s something very attractive about birds’ eggs—the color of them, the brownness of the sort of jewel-like nature of them. But also, the nest, because it most have probably been a great tit or a blue tit nest, which are two birds that nest in nest boxes where I live. They line their nests with feathers. Nests are beautiful things—incredible constructions by birds, very characteristic. Each species does it differently. The eggs are just gorgeous, little, little attractive things. So I have a memory of that’s sort of what got me hooked on bird watching, I think. It was my father taking me around to look in nest boxes and see which birds have been laying eggs in them.

Brandon: Wow. Matt, you’ve had a really rich and varied career, but the study of birds and spending time observing them has been a practice for quite some time. Could you talk us through a little bit of your journey through the world of journalism, economics, and some of the books you’ve written, how this particular fascination with the beauty of birds has still animated you along the way?

Matt: Well, it’s a sort of not a straight line, but it’s a sort of line. It starts with getting interested in bird watching through my dad as a small boy that got me interested in biology. Biology got me interested in evolution in particular. Evolution became a topic of study for me. And from there, I moved into science writing, but I was always very intrigued by the parallels between sort of evolution of biological systems and evolution of society, which you might call economics, if you like. After a while, I became science editor of The Economist, but then I moved to do political reporting for The Economist and became American editor based in Washington.

Then I decided I wanted to write some books. The first book I wrote was about evolution, about the subject that I’d really done my prelim, which is the evolution of sex and sexual reproduction generally. But that got me into book writing, which then got me into other evolutionary books, that led to books about genetics and genomics. I wrote several books about that subject that then got me intrigued in the parallels between genetic mutation in biological systems and innovation in economic systems. So I then kind of switched to writing about innovation, which I did in two or three books. I’ve sort of written three books on genomics and three books on innovation. It’s like, I write three books at a time.

Then just recently, I’ve gone right back to what I did my PhD work on, which is the topic of sexual selection—the evolution of brightly-colored plumage in male birds in particular, and how puzzling it is, but also how fascinating and how different from other forms of evolution. And so that’s kind of the trajectory of my career and my interests. I’ve done other much less relevant things along the way, but that’s the thread, if you like.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s remarkable. Your books have been tremendously influential. Well, let’s start with maybe your most recent one, on Birds, Sex and Beauty. I was just struck by the remarkable amount of effort it takes to go and watch these lekking birds. Could you talk a little bit about the black grouse, and what a ‘lek’ is? Just give us a description of, like, what does it take to go and see this ritual happening?

Matt: Yes. Well, the black grouse is one of these birds that does this rare and spectacular thing called ‘lekking,’ where the males all gather in the same spot every day at dawn, both fight and dance for the benefit of females, which visit for a few days. The males do it for months on end, but the key moment is in the middle of spring when the females are likely to visit and it reaches an intense crescendo. Unlike almost every other wildlife experience, you know exactly where to be and when to be there. Normally, you’re lucky to see a lion killing a zebra, or whatever, by chance. But in this case, you know exactly which couple of weeks, which time of day, and which spot to be in. It’s the same spot every year and every day. So that’s really wonderful.

But the action happens an hour before sunrise for an hour after sunrise. Mating is usually pretty well around the time of sunrise. I don’t know why. It just is. And this is late April in northern England, when we’re already well past the equinox. So sunrise can be 5:00 in the morning, or 5:30, or something like that. So you have to get up at almost 4 or at 4:00 even and get out of bed. It’s usually pretty cold. That time of the year. It can be frosty. It can be snowy even, quite often rainy or windy. So you’ve got to put on a lot of clothes because you’re not going to be moving around. You’re going to be sitting still for a couple of hours. But we’ve habituated a couple of these leks so that the birds are used to our presence. They wouldn’t like it if we were just standing there. But if we’re in a vehicle or we’re in a hide, a little tent, then they’re completely relaxed and we can move around, not loudly or conspicuously. But If we just sit there with the windows open—we have this special vehicle where you can lift the windscreen open so that you’re looking forward—then you can almost as close as I am to the screen that’s in front of me here, and you can see everything that’s going on, up to 20 male birds displaying extraordinary plumage, indulging in bizarre dances and making strange noises, and then getting terribly excited when females come and females wandering around looking nonchalant—how do we know what’s really going on inside their heads—and then deciding which one of the males they want to mate with. I think it’s as spectacular a wildlife experience as I know. It happens not very far from where I live, so I can make a habit of being there many, many days of the year. It wrecks your sleep and your social life a bit for a few weeks, but it’s worth it.

Brandon: Yeah, and it’s just extraordinary, the descriptions you’ve provided of this. It’s striking that the scientists have been doing this for quite a while now, more than a century, with Silas and the others who’ve been — unfortunately Darwin didn’t see any leks. But I’m curious about—

Matt: Yes, I was fascinated by that because he knew the species quite well. He used to shoot them occasionally and eat them when he was a young man. It’s a very rare bird now, whereas it was quite common in his day and lived all over England. Now it’s just confined to a small part of northern England.

Yeah, I have this curious criticism of the Victorian naturalists who saw what they wanted to see. They saw a jousting tournament in which one male is left victorious, and the others leave the field. Then that’s how it’s decided who’s going to mate. Well, that’s just not true. There are still are. Each has his own little patch. Every fight is a kind of stalemate. The decision as to who gets to do the mating is not the male’s decision at all. It’s the female’s decision. That’s something the Victorian naturalists didn’t want to see, and therefore didn’t see.

Brandon: Yeah, this example really, I think, remarkably paints this tension between the reigning account of natural selection and then the account of sexual selection that Darwin was trying to develop and then couldn’t quite succeed in convincing people. Could you talk a bit about the difference between those two mechanisms and, perhaps, how they run counter to each other, and why it was that Darwin struggled to convince people about this?

Matt: Yes. Well, just last week, I was having a conversation with an evolution biologist who took exception to my saying that sexual selection is very different from natural selection. No, no, no, it’s not. You can’t say things like that. The creationists will latch on to it, he said. I don’t think that’s true, by the way. But Wallace, Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, took the view that sexual selection is nothing special. It’s just a branch of natural selection. Because what’s happening is that the female is choosing the healthiest males. And so just the colorful nature of the males is just a way of the females getting healthy genes for their offspring. That’s the view that prevailed even during Darwin’s lifetime and throughout most of the 20th century.

Darwin did not think that, and he had a big disagreement with Wallace over this. I think it was quite painful for him that he wasn’t able to persuade Wallace. In the year 1868, in particular, when he’s building up to writing The Descent of Man, which is his book almost entirely about sexual selection, he spent a lot of time trying to persuade Wallace of his view and failed. Essentially, what Darwin is saying is: I can explain the evolution of complex organs like the eye through natural selection—very small, incremental steps leading to improvements in the technology of something like an eye, step by step, over millions of years. But I can’t explain a peacock’s tail because it serves no practical function. If anything, it’s a laborious burden for the animal to carry around. It makes it more vulnerable to predators. It’s beautiful. And that seems to be a big part of its importance, because the male fans it out and displays to the female with it. So, clearly, there’s something going on here that can’t be explained in terms of helping the animals survive. It’s not survival of the fittest.

He wrote this letter to Asa Gray in 1860, where he said, “The sight of a peacock’s tail, when I gaze upon it, makes me feel sick.” And that’s what he meant, I think. Because he was worried that he didn’t have a good explanation for this. Because his critics had a very good explanation, which is that peacock’s tails were put on earth to please human beings. And so it’s a real form of beauty. That was quite good enough for them and for most Victorians and most people who are theological about these things. He says, “I think what’s going on is that females have an inherent esthetic sense. They just like beautiful things a bit the way we did. I don’t really know why they do, but they do. And so the male has to grow beautiful plumage if he’s to succeed in mating. Now, that wasn’t a terribly convincing theory, as you can see, because it kind of says, well, why? And you never had a good answer to that.

The good answer came long after his death, with the work of a man named Ronald Fisher, in my view. And what Fisher said was: “If you think about it, if the females are indeed preferring gaudy, colorful males, then they’ve got to be quite careful not to mate with the wrong male, or they’ll have sons who can’t get laid, basically.”

Brandon: Right, yeah.

Matt: So this is certainly the cheap version.

Brandon: The sexy son. Yeah, the sexy son hypothesis, you call it.

Matt: Exactly. So you can see that, in contrast to what Wallace is arguing, it’s not the health of the offspring that is the prize. It is the sexiness of the offspring. That changes everything. Because it means we’re not talking about survival of the fittest. We’re talking about seduction of the hottest, which can be a very self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn’t really matter what you consider hot. It can be anything. It can go in any direction. And that makes sexual selection, in my view, into a much more creative force than natural selection. It can generate eccentric and diverse outcomes in a way that natural selection doesn’t. The way I put this in a rather cheap shot in the book is I say, mammals are basically brown and boring. They don’t have a lot of this sexual selection going on. Birds are brightly colored. They’re red and blue and green and yellow and orange. They have beautiful feathers, and they do beautiful displays. I mean, they must think we are terribly boring creatures. We grunt. Human beings sing, but most mammals don’t sing. Birds do. Think of all the sort of beauty that birds devote so much effort to the song, the display, and the pallor and everything that most models just don’t do. And that’s because of sexual selection, a choice, and that off I go into saying I wish I was a bird. Maybe I sort of am in an honorary way.

Brandon: Right. So do you get an objection that, how do we really know what these females are observing in these males? Because we can’t really see all the things they see, et cetera. And to what extent are we aware that their discernment is based on aesthetic criteria rather than something we’re not able to observe by virtue of being human, for instance?

Matt: Yes, my view is still a minority one. Most people think that if we look hard enough, we’re going to find that the male the females prefer to choose on the lek is the one with the least mutations or the least parasites, or something like that. There is actually some good new evidence that that might be the case in black grouse. I might be wrong. But that can be true at the same time that what the female is after is pure aesthetic appreciation because that will enable her to have sexy sons. Both could be true. They don’t have to be opposites.

Now, there have been quite a lot of experiments where they’ve done things like add extra length to the tails of long-tailed birds. That was a brilliant experiment that Malti Anderson did in the 1980s, with a bird called the widow bird in Kenya. He found very clearly that if he made these long tails even longer by cutting bits off another bird’s tail and sticking it on the end, then he could increase that male’s mating success. So it does seem to be true that the females are seduced by good versions of the display, as it were. There’s various evidence of manipulation experiments, et cetera. There were even attempts to sort of put a video camera on the head of a peahen and film what it was she was looking at when she was looking at a male displaying. They were fairly inconclusive of those experiments. But you get the idea that this kind of thing is going on.

Funnily enough, the experiment that comes closest to proving Fisher’s hypothesis right was done with flies, flies that had a particular — I think they’re called stalk-eyed flies. Their eyes are out on stalks on either side of their head. The wider the stalks, the more attractive the flies are to the females. By deliberately breeding from the unfancied males for generation after generation, the scientists were able to test: do these unfancied males have unhealthy offspring, or do they have unattractive offspring? Mostly, they had just unattractive offspring. Less and less attractive to females, but they didn’t get less and less healthy.

Brandon: Another thought, perhaps, is if they are selecting on just these esthetic qualities, wouldn’t over time you see a weeding out of some of the unattractive features, and you would get more of a clustering around a very similar set of esthetic qualities that have been selected for over time? But we do still see a lot of diversity. A lot of these birds on these leks are not getting laid, for instance, right? I wonder if you have thoughts on what might be at work there.

Matt: Well, you say that. But actually, to the human eye—if I take the black grouse, the one that I watch most closely—it’s very hard to distinguish the models. You look at these guys occasionally. I mean, there was one who I write about in the book. In fact, I dedicated the book to him. He was called Wonky Tail. He had some spinal deformity. That meant that his tail was at that angle rather than that angle. We saw him come back year after year for about four years. Then the last year, he was really not at his best, and he disappeared after a while. I saw him get one mating, but he never got the jackpot. He never got to be the top male. There were lots of matings.

But apart from that, and the odd missing feather or the odd blemish that enables you to distinguish individuals, I got to know individuals because I got to know exactly which little territory they occupied on the lek. But I couldn’t really say that one is better looking than that one. So the differences were pretty subtle. That’s often the case if you look at birds of paradise and things. On the whole, they look pretty similar. What is very striking, which I think you were possibly also getting at, is that it can be any part of the plumage that gets exaggerated in different species. Oh, sorry. But all of the bird is sort of exaggerated in some way. No bit of the bird is left boring and brown in these sexually-selective species. But in some birds, the tail is long. In some birds, it’s funny shaped. In some birds, the main color is red. In some, it’s black. In some, it’s blue, you know, et cetera, et cetera. The song can be one kind of song or a different kind of song.

So if it was about illustrating health, then I think it would all converge on, look, the best way of illustrating health is always to try and grow red feathers and always to try and grow long feathers. That’s the best way, et cetera. It doesn’t seem to be like that. It seems to be capable of going off in any direction. Actually, the way you put it, which is that there is variation still despite all this highly-selective nature. It leads to another point, which is sometimes known as the “lek paradox.” These birds are very selective. That is to say, on the lek that I watch, one male will get 18 matings. Another male will get through, and the rest will get nothing. So that’s narrowing the gene pool in every generation. On all the males and females in the area the next year — well, not the females because they tend to move away. But all the males in the area the next year will be half-brothers. Or a lot of them will. What’s the point of being so selective? These species are way more selective than most birds, where they pair up and they say, oh, good enough. Yeah, I’ll settle down and bring up a family with you. These guys say, “No, no, no, I want that guy.”

Brandon: Yeah, and everyone. Like, this seems very mimetic around the females all opting for this one.

Matt: Well, that’s the other thing. Are the females copying each other?

Brandon: Right.

Matt: There seems to be some evidence that they are. They kind of watch each other, and they say, “Oh, he’s the one we’re choosing this year.”

Brandon: Right.

Matt: So there’s a paradox here. Why are they so choosy when there’s so little genetic variation among the males?

Brandon: Yeah, the idea that there is some kind of sense that they’re selecting on the offspring that would be more attractive, and the sense this is why should a female prefer the most elaborate bower or bluest horde, right? It’s not about some kind of health signal, but fear perhaps—I don’t know how much we’re anthropomorphizing here—that their sons will be without mates.

Matt: Exactly. That seems to be the key. You mentioned Bowerbirds. I was thrilled to get a chance to go to Australia and watch these extraordinary birds, which really have taken it to another extreme, and which absolutely vindicate Darwin’s insistence that this is about esthetics—and that, actually, to understand bird display, you need to understand the esthetics. His critics said, “They’re ridiculous. These are birds. Their brains are the size of peanuts. They can’t appreciate beauty.” He said, “I think they do. I think they really do.” The Bowerbirds, what they’ve done is they’ve invented art. I mean, the display is not what their own plumage. It’s the decorations they bring to their bower. They literally have to decorate a bower with colored objects, and that’s going to impress the female. So it’s literally saying, “Come and see my etchings.”

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know you didn’t write this book in order to make some implications for human beings, but you do end up saying that sexual attractiveness could be a sufficient explanation for pretty much any human mental trait—or even the evolution of the brain, perhaps, or the evolution of art, right? I think you argued that it should be the null hypothesis. Could you say more about that? What are the implications of this work, then, for how we understand our brains and even art, the evolution of art?

Matt: Yes, we devote a lot of time to art, one kind or another—whether it’s singing, painting, or just verbal gymnastics, if you like. We devote a lot of brainpower and time to humor. We’re constantly trying to impress people, particularly of the other sex, with how funny we are. It does seem to matter. People value sense of humor very highly in a potential mate. We use a lot of our brain power to do things that aren’t directly related to survival in any practical sense, but they are related to seduction. That’s the observation that I think is worth thinking about.

Now, Jeffrey Miller wrote a book called The Mating Mind about 25 years ago, which made a very powerful and very eloquent argument for the idea that we’ve always assumed that the reason the human brain got suddenly very big—it was quite sudden. It seems to have accelerated in its expansion around a couple of million years ago—was because it solved a practical problem of how to live on the savannah, how to find food, survive difficult seasons, and that kind of thing. Well, baboons and gazelles live on the savannah, and they don’t seem to need an enormous brain. So that’s not a terribly convincing explanation, really.

Well, yes, but maybe it’s social. Maybe we need it to solve the social problems we present ourselves. Why is he gossiping about him with respect to his relationship with her who is being beastly about me? That kind of complex social problem, which we again do spend an awful lot of time thinking about. It’s the main theme of most soap operas and things like that. Yeah, sure, we use our big brains for that.

But the third possibility is that the reason that brain just suddenly swelled up the way it did—at enormous cost, remember—is because not only does it use a lot of energy—the brain, the human brain—it also kills a lot of women. I mean, to this day, there is a real struggle to get a big, big head out through a small pelvis. The female pelvis has expanded in order to allow that over the years. The only way that happened was by killing a lot of women. Remember, we made it hard for our species to survive childbirth, both the mother and the child. There must have been a real reward for having that bigger brain. That reward might have been a purely sexual selection one, rather than a natural selection one, which was that people with larger brains were more likely to get attractive or successful mates. Not more mates, because we’re not highly polygamous species. We have some degree of polygamy, a lot of infidelity, and things like that. But we’re much more like normal birds in that respect. We’ve got pair bonds and dependent young and that kind of thing. So I think it’s a mistake. People look at the lek or read my descriptions of the lek and say, “It sounds just like a nightclub.” Well it’s not. Because in the nightclub, people are trying to pair off. Whereas in a lek, they’re trying to all decide that they’re all going to mate with the same bloke in the middle of the dance floor, which is not on the whole what happened. I gather. I mean, 40 years.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know. No, I don’t think — that’s too much. The sort of object of this attraction could be anything, as you say, from humor, to art, to some quality, dancing or whatever sign of prowess. But that judgment about what that is seems to vary tremendously. Yeah, I mean, it’s really an intriguing hypothesis.

One of the things that I think you mentioned is that sexual selection is also perhaps a force for evolutionary innovation. So I’d love to pivot a little bit to your book on innovation to try to understand what is innovation, and are humans unique in our capacity for innovation?

Matt: Yes. Well, I sometimes put it simply. I said, what is this thing called innovation? Why does it happen to us and not to rabbits or rocks? On the whole, we are pretty unique in the degree of innovation we have. You can find examples of crows, or apes, or dolphins sort of developing new habits, new tactics, new tools. But they’re pretty few and far between. Whereas, for you and me, we’ve lived through — well, I’ve lived longer than you. I’ve lived through the most extraordinary changes in the world that I live in. I expect a constant stream of innovation, such that I have to update my smartphone every five years or whatever it might be. I mean, not quite as often as I used to have to when it was new. But you get the point.

It is innovation that is the main event of human history in the last 200 years, I would argue. Forget the wars and the depressions and the religions. The main event is the invention of the railway, 200 years ago this weekend, by chance, invention of electricity, the invention of the computer, the invention of the airplane. These are the things that have really, really changed the world. There’s a million of them. Somehow, we’ve got ourselves into a situation where we are good at doing this as a specie, as a society. It has raised our living standards. That’s the reason why, in my lifetime, the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone down from more than 50% to less than 10% of the world. That’s an amazing thing that nobody has ever lived through before.

So, in my book, How Innovation Works, I set out to try and understand what innovation is—why it happens, when and where it does, and what are the general themes that emerge from it. The way I did this — it was only once I’d started writing the book that I realized the right way to do this was to tell a bunch of stories. Each chapter has about 5 or 10 stories in it of innovations that were really significant—sometimes there were failures as well—and what are the lessons you can draw from them. The same lessons kept coming around again and again and again. Things like great inventors always talk about the importance of trial and error. They don’t expect to get it right the first time; they need to do a bunch of experiments and fail. Things like it’s not just about inventing a prototype; it’s also about making it reliable, affordable, and available to people. There’s a lot of innovation that goes into that. Jeff Bezos made e-commerce into something that we could all use, but he didn’t invent it. He wouldn’t claim to it. Things like the importance of serendipity. Quite often, inventors think they’re inventing something, and then they invent something else. Stephanie Kwolek was the woman who invented bulletproof vests, Kevlar. That was not what she was trying to do at the time.

Brandon: Sure, yeah.

Matt: So these are the sort of themes that I pulled out. The overarching theme, I said in the end, was freedom. You actually need freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom to try again, freedom to seek backing for your idea, freedom to move to a congenial regime where you can do these things—because quite often, inventors have to leave home and go somewhere else. That’s the secret source, in my view, of how innovation works.

Brandon: Now, one of the things that seems to be an obstacle for a lot of us is this sort of lone inventor myth, right? I think when we think about innovation—even in companies and all the sort of business books that are written about innovation—I think part of the rationale is to be able to help you to figure out how to be innovative or help your company to figure out how to be innovative. I think it presents an idea of some kind of individual that is capable of being able to rationally, intentionally innovate. I think your account really contest that. It’s much more of an evolutionary, unintentional — as you say, there’s trial and error involved. Could you talk a little bit about, like, is it possible to sort of engineer innovation? Can a company or an individual learn how to be innovative?

Matt: Yes, I mean, there’s no doubt that some firms get it right more often than others. I think the idea of the lone inventor is a great way to get into this topic because, always, it emerges that it’s a much more gradual process than it looks. In other words, we give a Nobel Prize to the bloke who had the eureka moment. But actually, he was standing on the shoulders of other people. And even after his eureka moment, other people had to take his idea and develop it further. His or her—I’m not going to be sexist here. So that’s one feature.

But the other feature, the way we’ve talked about innovation in the past has, in my view, misled people—young people in particular—into thinking that it’s a special creativity, a sort of special juice that flows in the veins of these people that makes them into semi-gods, that these guys were so smart. We’re actually putting kids off. We’re saying, “You can’t be one of these. You’re not a genius.” Actually, in the end, all you need is perseverance. Anyone can do that. So one of the things I want to do is democratize and demystify innovation and say — you know, Thomas Edison was one of the great inventors of all time. He came up with an enormous number of things only by setting up an innovation factory in which he employed some people who worked extraordinarily hard. He drove them like slaves almost. Their job was to do a ton of experiments. He tried 6,000 different types of plant material before he settled on a particular kind of Japanese bamboo for the filament of his lightbulb. Now, anyone can do that. You don’t have to be clever to do that. You just have to stay up at night and get up early in the morning, all that kind of thing, not give up, or not settle for second best. These are the features.

My favorite example of this is a very, very well-known one, but it does tell the story beautifully. It’s the invention of the airplane. This man named Samuel Langley—a very brilliant astrophysicist, head of the Smithsonian Institution, has the ear of the U.S. government—gets a $25,000 grant in 1903 to build the first airplane—because he knows exactly how to do it. He’s way cleverer than everyone else. He doesn’t need to talk to anyone. He does it in secret, then unveils his airplane, puts a bloke in it—not himself—and says, “Off you go.” And the thing goes plop into the Potomac River. I mean, the government is furious. Langley is humiliated, and the whole thing is a disaster. Eight weeks later, on a sandy island off the coast of North Carolina, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio—without a degree between them—succeeded where Langley had failed. Wright brothers had done differently from Langley. And nobody believes them, by the way, for several years, actually. There was a marvelous editorial in Scientific American saying, “Look, if two bicycle mechanics from Ohio have solved the problem of powered flight, don’t you think we’d know about it?”

Anyway, the point is: they had corresponded with people all around the world—people who were working with gliders, with box kites, with wind tunnels, with birds—picking other people’s brains. Then they’d done a ton of experiments. They’d done years of experiments with gliders. During this, for example, they’d work out how you turn right and left in the air, which nobody had thought about before. They solved that problem with gliders, not with powered flight. And only then after four years of this did they try sticking a small engine on one of these things—and the rest is history. You too could be a Wright brother. All you’ve got to do is spend every day for six months, for four years, tinkering with a glider on a beach, on a mosquito-ridden shore, living in a crummy hut with your sister cooking meals for you. She had a degree, interestingly. And you’re away. Of course, what kind of is what people are doing now? I mean, I don’t think if you really got to the bottom of the secret behind AI today, you would find necessarily, well, this is unfair. I was going to say, you won’t find brilliant people. Of course, you will. But no more brilliant than other people.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know. I think there’s certainly something luring about that sort of myth. That was a genius and a heroic story, and maybe it’s inspiring for some. It does seem to pose an obstacle for us to think about our own capacities for innovation. There are a couple of other sorts of myths, perhaps. I mean, one is that innovation is necessarily disruptive. The concept of Clay Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation has really captured the imagination of Silicon Valley, for instance. Or that necessity is the mother of invention, or that you need some kind of crisis or a war to really generate innovation. You, I think, dispelled both of these. Could you talk a bit about them?

Matt: Yes, I think the search for being a disruptor has slightly misled people. Clay Christensen may be partly responsible for that. I’m not blaming him, but he’s captured the point. Because an awful lot of what’s gone on in my lifetime—with, for example, the internet or Moore’s Law, this kind of thing—is about just inch-by-inch improving something and making it very slightly better. At a certain point, it reaches the point where digital photography blows Kodak out of the water, or the smartphone blows Nokia out of the water, Nokia having blown landlines out of the water. So there are disruptions. But I think if you’re constantly expecting to be the disruptor, you’ll mislead. You’re much better off trying to find an incremental improvement that you can build on. What was the second point you made in that question? Because I wanted to come back to—

Brandon: It was about necessity and war, those sorts of things.

Matt: I really looked hard into the history of the computer during World War II, because there is a bit of a legend out there that it was the need to track the trajectories of artillery shells and decipher German-coded messages that brought the computer into being. I came to the conclusion that it’s the opposite. That actually, the Annus Mirabilis—the miracle year for the computer, if there was such a thing—is 1937, when, both in Germany and in Iowa and in a couple of other places, there were remarkable breakthroughs towards the sort of programmable machine that we ended up with—which, had they been able to come together over the next few years, would have led to spectacular computing in the 1940s.

Instead of which, you’ve got these secret projects going on that didn’t even know about each other. So there’s cheering in Britain. But in America, there’s an amazing bit of work going on in Philadelphia with a non-electronic but programmable computer. There’s another remaining amazing bit of work going on at Harvard with an electronic but non-programmable computer. And you’re longing for these two to get together, but they’re not allowed to know about each other because of wartime secrecy. There is one man going between the two who does know about both—Johnny von Neumann. He is, of course, a key figure in all of this. So what you end up with is, yeah, you get some devices that calculate the trajectories of artillery shells. Well, can’t we think of something more exciting to do with the computer? If we’d have peace time, I think we would have. I mean, sure, radar probably got accelerated by war. Nuclear weapons certainly did, and various other things. But I think the counterfactual of what the 1940s would have looked like if it had been a peaceful decade is not an easy one to tell. It might have been an incredibly interesting and productive decade. We might have ended up with advances in aeronautics and everything else that was fantastic, but just less more peaceful.

Brandon: Yeah, I know. I think it’s an important one for us to think about, right? Another problem that I’ve been thinking about and I’ve been talking to a number of scientists over the past few years, one story that comes up often is the idea that you need to defend basic science mainly because it is going to result in serendipitous innovation in the future—sort of in making the case for why we should fund basic science and not just chase after say innovation. But I think you have a counter argument to that as well. I think you have an account of innovation that doesn’t quite happen in this way, that it’s not always a result of after the fact serendipity that results from some previous basic science.

Matt: Well, I have two problems with that argument. The first is that it devalues basic science. Frankly, if the only reason we’re doing astrophysics is in case it allows us to invent non-stick frying pans, then that’s not good enough. The holes are interesting in themselves. It’s a terrible pity if we’re just going to measure the value of basic science as something that provides the input to technology. Because sometimes it does. But surely, it’s a higher calling than that. I mean, I think the discoveries of science are humanity’s greatest achievement, bar none. I’d rather have deep geological time and space and double helix than Shakespeare and Rembrandt, frankly. I’ve got that both, but yeah.

Brandon: There’s a profound beauty in both of them, right? Yeah.

Matt: If you look at the history of technology, it does not always start with science. The arrow quite often goes the other way. The science of thermodynamics came out of the steam engine, not vice versa. A lot of cybernetics and things like that came out of computing, not vice versa. You don’t need to understand the principles of something to invent it. Quite often, we don’t.

There’s a lovely recent example, which is gene editing—this CRISPR technology for editing genes, which is basically a bacterial immune system that we’ve adapted to turn into a tool to make precise changes in genes. That began life as a discovery in a university, but only because the university at Alicante, in Spain, was studying salt-loving organisms—because there was a big salt industry next door. It then moved into the yogurt industry. The industrial biochemists in the yogurt industry started looking at this because they realized they were looking at the bacterial immune system. In yogurt, bacteria are very important. You don’t want them to get sick. So you want to understand how they defend themselves against viruses. And it was only after that that it goes back into a university in the form of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who’ve got the Nobel Prize, and also a guy in Lithuania who did the same work at the same time. They say, “Hang on. We can repurpose this tool to change the genes in cells.” Then a guy at MIT says, “I can even do it in mammalian cells, and therefore in human beings.” That work is indeed done in universities. It does lead to a great technology that is now being applied in medicine.

So that one has jumped between academia and industry in a sort of two-way fashion. That’s a much more typical pattern, actually. Scientists discover something; people apply it. The application needs scientists to explain what’s going on. That leads to another insight and so on. Rather than the linear model of the job of scientists is to feed pure knowledge into the top of a pipe, and out the bottom of the pipe comes technology.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s very helpful. One of the things we’re trying to explore in this season of the podcast is not just the beauty of innovation, but also its burdens. I wonder if you might be able to say something about the downsides, unintended consequences, challenges, et cetera, of our innovations. Particularly, AI is one that everyone’s talking about these days and the kind of risks it poses, et cetera.

Matt: Social media is one of the great innovations of my lifetime. At first, I thought it was simply wonderful. And it was a repost to those who said computing is a lonely process. Actually, what were teenagers using their smartphones for rampant social engagement? And so it’s the opposite of lonely. Also, it was going to enable us to see each other’s point of view. Do you remember that? It’s a marvelous thing, I can look at what anybody thinks on anything. I won’t remain stuck in my own silo. Gosh, it didn’t quite work out that way, did it? Some of the things people said about social media in the early days of the 21st century were very similar to what some of the things they said about radio in the 1920s—very utopian. And radio, again, brilliant, wonderful technology. But the dictators kind of made use of it. Mussolini, Hitler, and so on. Those are both examples of technologies that we thought were going to be unalloyed goods, but turned out to be a mixture of good and bad.

I wouldn’t want to disinvent social media. I wouldn’t want to go back to a world without it. I think the good does outweigh the bad, and I think the same of radio. But I do think we need to — in radio, we kind of learned how to tame it so that it wasn’t just being used by demagogues to stir people up. We kind of need to learn to tame social media. I suspect the same will be true of AI, in that it will mostly be good. It will speed up and bring down the cost of drug discovery, treatment. It’ll help people who are bad at things more than people who are good at things. I mean, it’s already doing that. It’s improving the linguistic skills of people who have trouble writing, much more than it’s improving people who are good at writing. So it’s a leveling-up phenomenon, not a down one.

So I’m very utopian in many of the things I think about AI, but I’m also acutely aware that it’s being used to produce some very nasty hallucinations, weird effects. And it’s not impossible that it’ll turn malevolent. I’m generally not that worried about the malevolent AI point—not as much as some people. Because I think they don’t understand evolution. Evolution is a competitive process. There’s no reason why a malevolent AI should necessarily become a monopolist. Malevolent viruses or parasites don’t take over the world. They are a problem in the world, but they don’t win out altogether. I don’t see AI monopolies developing. I think what we’ll see is AI diversity, which will include some malevolent actors but also some much more benevolent ones. So in that sense, I am, as you can tell, much more of an optimist about AI than a pessimist. But it’s not going to be without its bumps along the road.

Brandon: Sure. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think one of the big concerns is that it’s deskilling us in a number of important ways. I wonder whether some of the conditions for our capacity to innovate are perhaps being threatened by or eroded by some of these new technologies, along with, say, the political and economic systems that are set up.

Matt: It’s going to do the innovating for us, so we don’t need innovations.

Brandon: You talk about freedom as being a critical factor for innovation. Could you talk about — perhaps, if you could maybe change one thing or emphasize one direction in which universities, firms, and governments could shift things in order to improve our capacity for innovation, what could that look like?

Matt: It’s a really good question. I don’t think I’ve got a silver bullet of an answer. If I did, I’d probably patent it and not go on podcast and blab about.

Brandon: Right. You wouldn’t be sharing it freely with others.

Matt: Well, no, I don’t really believe in patent. Actually, I’m not a great fan of intellectual property as an incentive for innovation.

Brandon: Could you say a word about that, actually? Because that is another controversial point.

Matt: Yes. You can obviously make an argument that if you don’t get some kind of monopoly profit from your innovation, you’re not going to do it. But if you look at the actual history of the world, on the whole, patents quite often get in the way. Because they give one person way too much credit—not his predecessors and successors—and he then spends an awful lot of his energy defending his patents in courts. The guy, Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph, ruined his life by suing everybody for the rest of his life because they had infringed his patent. The Wright brothers actually did something pretty similar. Marconi did the same. It can be a distraction pursuing your patents. Also, when patents expire, you tend to get a flourishing of innovation. The 3D printing patents have recently expired, and that has resulted in a surge of new applications of that technology.

So, on the whole, I think we have made intellectual property too restrictive and too easily used in a defensive rather than an offensive way. We’ve had whole industries, basically the software industry, where patents haven’t played a role at all. Nobody has bothered trying to patent innovations in software mostly over the last 50 years. It’s not quite true, but it’s mostly true. Because it was just far too fast moving a field, so out of date, that your patent was useless.

Copyright, which is a form of patent, is something I obviously benefit from. My books are copyrighted. But I think in the counterfactual world where I didn’t have copyright, I’d still write books. I’d have to find a different way of making money out of them, like live performance on radio shows like yourself, or you’d pay me.

Brandon: Sure. Sorry.

Matt: Because that’s what musicians have done. They’ve stopped being able to rake in the money from CDs, and they have to go and do live gigs instead.

Brandon: Exactly.

Matt: They’re not exactly stopping doing it, are they? Whereas, thanks to a change in the law in Britain—copying what Europeans did, at the behest of American corporations—my grandchildren will be earning money from the sales of my books, if they’re still in print, 70 years after my death. What did they do to deserve that? They don’t even exist yet. They’ve certainly not contributed. That’s not the incentive why I write a book—is so that my grandchildren will have a few tens of pounds in 60 years’ time. More than 60 because I’m still alive, more than 70. You can see that I get quite exercised on the question of intellectual property. I think we’ve taken it too far and made it too restrictive.

But back to what we should do, which was your question, first of all, teach this point: that anybody can innovate, that it’s a question of perseverance and experiment, not genius. Second, teach the point that it’s incremental, not disruptive most of the time. We shouldn’t be trying to invent the next search engine or the next AI. You should just be trying to marginally improve something that’s out there and produce a decent product. Thirdly, get away from this linear model that the purpose of science is to feed innovation. Try and set up a two-way system between industry and academia. If I ran a university, I would encourage professors to go off and work in industry and then come back; students to do the same; industrial leaders to come and teach in universities. I would be swapping people with the private sector the whole time. I think that’s going to be a really better way of achieving innovation than having these two very separate worlds.

Brandon: That’s amazing. Great. Matt, thank you so much for your insights. Is there anything else that you might want to share with our audience? Perhaps a point about your books that you wish people had asked you in podcasts and no one’s asking you. Anything you really want to communicate that you’ve not been able to perhaps satisfactorily do so?

Matt: I don’t think so. I think I’ve banged on long enough. You’ve asked some very nice questions, which I greatly appreciate, so I’m quite happy to leave it at that. I actually recorded the audio book for this last book. I enjoyed doing it. It took three days in a studio. I wasn’t very good at it. I made a lot of mistakes, but the kind editors cleaned that up. I listen to more audio books than I read books now. I think that is a big part of the future of books—people in the car, people at night who can’t sleep, people doing other things, people going for walks. I think the era of the audiobook is a really interesting phenomenon, much more important now than the eBook. 20 years ago, we were all talking about the eBook. Now we’re talking about the audiobook.

Brandon: Yeah, well, I listen to your How Innovation Works on audio, which I thought was really lovely.

Matt: Oh, I recorded that one too. You’re right. That was at the start of the pandemic, so I was locked in my linen cupboard.

Brandon: Yeah, not very comfortable. But wow. Yeah, it’s great. I really, really enjoyed that. Matt, is there anything that you’re working on these days, a new book on the horizon, perhaps, or anything you want to share with our viewers and listeners?

Matt: I’m working on another book, but I’m not talking about it yet because it’s not coming together yet.

Brandon: Okay. Great. Well, where can we point our audience to, to learn more about you and about what you’re working on?

Matt: I do maintain a website, but not very well. I’m on Twitter @mattwridley. But also, I’m increasingly working with a website called the Rational Optimist Society, which is based on a phrase I used for one of my books. There’s some great stuff about innovation and technology on that site.

Brandon: Fantastic. Well, Matt, thank you. It’s been an honor.

Matt: Thank you. You’ve asked some lovely questions, and it’s been really nice to talk to you.

I was delighted to return to McGill University last week to host our international symposium, Can Beauty Save the World? to launch a new international research study sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Our event coincided with McGill’s homecoming weekend and in many ways it was homecoming for me. I lived on campus at McGill in the early 2000s (when I was a masters student at HEC); I met my wife there, as well as many dear friends who have shaped my life profoundly. To be back on campus to launching a major new initiative felt like coming full circle.

I can still sense, somewhere deep in my body, the anxious restlessness that once defined those years. I foisted on patient friends and mentors all the angst of not knowing what I was meant to do, frustrated by the limits of my studies, unable to connect my academic work to the questions that truly gripped me: the search for meaning, for vocation, for direction, for clarity. So to return now to host an event with many of those very mentors and heroes and with friends old and new, and to find that the questions I once wrestled with have not so much been answered as lived through and gathered up into something larger, something capacious enough to hold them all—beauty—that, to me, is particularly beautiful.

Why the title?

Our event and project title comes from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The phrase “Beauty will save the world” is attributed to the novel’s protagonist, Prince Myshkin—Dostoevsky saw this character as a “positively beautiful” hero, an exemplar of moral beauty.

But Myshkin never utters the phrase himself. It’s spoken about him, once mockingly, then reproachfully, and he offers no defense or explanation. Dostoevsky seems to leave the meaning open.

By phrasing our theme as a question (“Can beauty save the world?”) we wanted to preserve that openness. We’re not echoing the cynicism of the nihilist nor making a rhetorical claim. We mean it as a genuine inquiry: In what sense might beauty save the world—what kinds of beauty and under what conditions?

Why the question matters

My own fascination with this question began years ago in graduate school. In a sociology seminar on social movements, we read that protest is driven primarily by moral outrage or negative shocks. That struck me as incomplete. Why do we care enough to fight for something in the first place?

It was around that time that I encountered Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just and her bold claim that our commitment to justice arises from a prior encounter with and commitment to beauty. I couldn’t completely buy the argument, but that book changed me.

Not long after, while studying scientists’ lives and motivations, I found something similar: when asked why they endured low pay and constant frustration, many replied simply, “Because it’s beautiful.” That came as a surprise to me. Beauty was not a word I would have associated with science—but for them, it was what sustained their vocation. That discovery led me to start the Beauty at Work podcast, and now, to this new project.

The crisis of beauty

In modern society, we tend to trivialize beauty—we reduce it to fashion, branding, or surface charm, or on the other hand, we treat it as something distant and absolute, reserved for Mozart or Michelangelo. Both views miss something important.

In what Charles Taylor calls our secular age, where belief in a cosmic order is one option among many, we often navigate as “buffered selves,” cut off from transcendence. In such a world, beauty may be one of the few remaining bridges to meaning. Taylor’s recent Cosmic Connections suggests that recovering an aesthetic realism—the sense that beauty points to something beyond us—may be essential if we are to resist despair or nihilism. The question of beauty becomes more urgent precisely when the world feels disenchanted: How does beauty give meaning, inspire transformation, and shape well-being? Can beauty be valuable in its own right, apart from utility or consumption? And what conditions allow us to recognize and cherish it rather than distort or exploit it?

To explore these questions, we’re bringing together sociologists, philosophers, theologians, artists, neuroscientists, and musicians. This symposium at McGill marked the beginning of that shared inquiry, with Tara Isabella Burton who co-directs the project, and co-investigators Anjan Chatterjee, Katie Bank, Rebekah Wallace, and Stephen Bullivant.

Highlights from the symposium

Over the two-day event, we explored how beauty moves, heals, and reveals.

We opened with a conversation between Sean Kelly, Elaine Scarry, Richard Kearney, and Charles Taylor, masterfully moderated by Bill Barbieri.

Charles, who turns 94 this year, shared introductory remarks on why beauty resists tidy definitions. Beauty, he suggests, is inseparable from truth: we are moved by beauty because it reveals deep meaning, and we understand meaning through what we find beautiful. This productive circularity, Taylor argues, is not a flaw but a pathway into the mystery of what makes life meaningful.

Sean Kelly reflected that beauty moves us beyond ourselves. It saves us from the flattening of meaningful differences. To encounter beauty is to order one’s life around the object of love. When we long for others to share in that recognition, we glimpse beauty’s political potential—it calls us into conversation rather than conflict.

Elaine Scarry deepened that insight, reminding us that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but injury. Beauty and justice both arise from a sense of fairness and the desire to repair harm. Beauty’s lasting impact, she noted, is generative—it makes us want to create.

Richard Kearney drew on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s image of the “pied” world—speckled, varied, alive with difference. Beauty, he said, is not pure symmetry but aftering: it often arrives through suffering and loss, reconciling the universal and the particular.

And Charles Taylor reminded us that beauty cannot be defined apart from itself. Its relation to truth is reciprocal, not hierarchical. To understand one, we must hold the other in view. “That,” he said, “is how beauty can save the world.”

Our second day began in song. Jean-Sébastien Vallée, Katie Bank, Rebekah Wallace, Ian Corbin, and Jonathan Berger explored the transformative power of music.

Jean-Sébastien described the conductor’s task as creating a sonic space where sound becomes meaning—a community where difference becomes harmony. One of his singers, who had just lost her husband, came to perform because “singing with my choir is the only way I can breathe right now.” Katie and Rebekah described how early modern thinkers saw music as acting on the whole person, not as external stimulus but as an activity of the soul. Ian reflected on the relevance of music to our longing for wholeness, which passes through failure, undoing, despondence. Jonathan discussed his fascinating research on the sonic signatures of sacred spaces, and how the balance between clarity and blur in sound transforms acoustics into awe.

In our panel on the transformative power of art and architecture, Anjan Chatterjee examined our vocabularies to express aesthetic experience and the relationship between transformational experience and third-person rendition. Alberto Perez-Gomez noted that the value of architecture has always been its beauty, which orients us toward justice, festivity, and the common good. Stephen Legari, shared how collective awe, experienced through slow looking and hospitality, can heal and connect. J.F. Martel distinguished between the beauty of the geometers vs. ecstatic beauty, and how art matters for both.

In our session on ritual and spirit in the age of disenchantment, Ayodeji Ogunnaike, Julian Carrón, Matt Miller, and Mauro Magatti called for the recovery of spirit as essential to beauty’s saving power. Deji drew on Yoruba philosophy, where character is beauty and truth may be transformative rather than pleasant. Fr. Carron asked whether beauty can help us open our whole selves to reality instead. Matt reflected on how beauty matters for change of state vs. change of being. Mauro argued that beauty saves only if we rehabilitate spirit as a structural dimension of human thought— resonant, decentering, transcendent, and mysterious.

In her closing reflection, Tara Isabella Burton returned to Keats’s line “Thou silent form, dost tease us out of thought.” Beauty, she said, evokes both generative desire and self-abnegation—it is a wager on meaningfulness that redeems our relation to creation itself.

Between the panels, participants immersed themselves in beauty firsthand—through a sacred theater workshop, a guided visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, a walk through Old Montreal, a nature walk, and even live jazz and swing dancing.

Music from students at the Schulich School of Music and singer-songwriter Tiffany Thompson added grace to our event.

By the end of the symposium, what struck me most was how communal beauty is. Whether in a choir, a conversation, or a shared silence before a painting, beauty draws us into relationship. It can make us more porous, more attentive, more alive to one another and to reality.

Beauty will not save the world by itself—but the world can’t be saved without it, and perhaps it can help us see the world as something still worth saving.

Yet innovation is never only beautiful. It also brings disruption, dislocation, and unintended consequences. Behind every breakthrough lie the hidden costs of what was displaced, the social and ethical dilemmas of what’s been unleashed.

In this new season of Beauty at Work, we’re exploring The Beauty and Burdens of Innovation, asking what innovation means, how it works, and what it means to innovate in ways that are life-giving rather than extractive. When does innovation deepen our humanity, and when does it erode it?

My guest in this first episode is Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, one of today’s most original thinkers on the science of culture and human progress. Michael is a Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and, beginning in 2026, at NYU. His work sits at the frontier of a growing field known as cultural evolution—the study of how ideas, norms, and technologies evolve through collective learning, much as genes evolve through natural selection. Cultural evolution helps us understand why our species is uniquely creative, how cooperation scales, and why progress is uneven across societies.

In his first book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, Michael brings together insights from biology, economics, psychology, and energy systems to offer a unified framework for human history and the forces that shape our future. The book introduces what he calls the “four laws of life”—energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution—and shows how these forces explain both our extraordinary capacities and our current crises.

In our conversation, we explore why innovation is not the work of lone geniuses but of what Michael calls the collective brain—the network of shared learning and cultural recombination that powers human progress. We explore why innovation emerges from the collective brain, how energy sets the bounds of progress, Michael’s COMPASS framework for innovation, and how a potential Second Enlightenment—which includes AI—could amplify both the beauty and the burdens of change.

You can listen to our conversation on your podcast player of choice (part 1 here and part 2 here) or watch the full conversation on YouTube, where you will also find short clips. An unedited transcript of our conversation follows below.

Brandon: All right, Michael. Thanks for joining us on the show. It’s really great to have you here.

Michael: Thanks for having me on the show, Brandon. Nice to be here.

Brandon: You’re welcome. Yeah, good. Well, let’s get started as I usually do. I ask my guests to share a story about an encounter with beauty from their childhoods that lingers with them till today. When I ask you that, what story, what image comes to your mind?

Michael: You know, you asked me this yesterday, so I had to think about it. Actually, the first thing that came to mind—I couldn’t think of it any better—was, when I was a child, we lived in Botswana. We used to go camping out in the Kalahari. Even in Gabarone, the major city, it’s not light pollution like in London, but there’s enough. But in the Kalahari, it’s just unobstructed views of the Milky Way. And as a child, I realized later that most people never actually see the Milky Way as our ancestors did. When you’re looking up at this just magnificent beauty of the sky, of the stars, you realize your own significance or insignificance. You realize all of the fights you’re having with your friends and relatives and all of the politics. It’s just happening on this tiny little planet, one of millions in the Milky Way, one of many galaxies in the universe. I’m a psychologist now. As a child at the time, I wonder how that affects like how we think of ourselves and how we think of our problems. Just the fact that in the modern world, almost no one ever sees that because of light pollution. Anyway, it’s one of the beautiful memories from my childhood.

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, certainly, it’s really sort of a textbook example of awe, right? I mean, it really pulls you out of yourself and makes you feel small in the face of the vastness of things. You lived in a lot of different countries. You’ve had such an interesting journey, even professionally, from engineering to your work now at this sort of intersection of psychology and economics. Could you talk a little bit about that journey and, perhaps, what led you to your current field of work?

Michael: Yeah. Okay. So my family is from Sri Lanka. Like I said, I spent a lot of my early childhood in Botswana. It was an interesting time, actually, while we were there. So that was the end of apartheid. It was in the ‘90s, as Mandela came into power. I remember everyone was so excited about the possibilities, which, now, if you look at South Africa were never really met. But after that, I’ve lived in Papua New Guinea. I’ve lived in Australia. I’ve lived in Canada. I’ve lived in the States. Now I live in the UK.

In terms of my intellectual journey, I guess maybe living in these different places, and I guess maybe even seeing the Milky Way, I was really interested in big questions. I was a bright kid, right? I was one of the top 500 students. I graduated high school in Australia, and I was one of the top 500 students. So everything’s open to you. So you’re like, “What am I going to do with my life? What’s my imprint on the world? How do I leave this place a better place than the way I found it?” And so I thought, you know, “Look, what are the biggest problems?” They seemed, to me, they were in philosophy. They were in theology. They were in physics, and they were in human behavior. And so I thought, I’m going to study one of these things. I took courses across all of those trying to figure this stuff out. I settled on psychology because it seemed like — my brother is a physicist. We have this joke about, “Who’s studying the more fundamental science?” What he would say to me is, “What could be more fundamental than the beginning of the universe?” He studies inflation. And I was like, what’s more fundamental than that is why you even want to know.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: So it’s not, in fact, the physicists. It’s humans. Every endeavor is human. But, you know, I’m big on risk management. I was looking at the data on, do psychologists get jobs? Are they well paid? I was like, “Ooh.” So I thought, let me study something actually useful alongside that. So I did a dual degree in engineering. I figured it’s engineering, or law, or finance, or business, or something like that, or maybe medicine. I thought the most portable of all of these was probably engineering. I’ve been programming since I was like seven years old, and so I was like, “This will be fine.” But I was mostly interested in human behavior. Then I got kind of frustrated. If I’m being honest. I got frustrated with psychology, especially taking such a wide array of subjects, sitting in on biology, physics, and so on. I was like, “This is a semblance of science?” But you can’t do science unless you’re building up a kind of theory, right? We don’t seem to have a theory of human behavior. I’m seeing a lot of advocacies placed over the actual science. So I got really frustrated, and I ended up focusing on cognitive psychology and then basically throwing myself into engineering. So I was working on smart home designs. I was working on audio interfaces for audiology. I went part time in my degree and just started working.

Then I had this kind of pivotal moment. As I tell the story in my book, A Theory of Everyone, part of it was that I watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. I started to think about, “Okay, is this climate change thing, like, is this real?” I’m skeptical as a person. My personality is a bit skeptical. Is this a real problem? If what he’s saying is true, we’re in deep trouble. We need to do something about it. And so I started reading the IPCC reports. I was like, okay, this is legit. But then I went to the Pentagon reports. I was like, okay, look, military defense. These guys have got to be on the money. They’re like, “Oh, okay. We’re in trouble. We’re going to see wars over water. We’re going to see mass migration with displacement.” Then I was like, okay, well, what’s the solution people have? It was like, oh, we’re going to mitigate. We’re going to get people to take — people weren’t talking about lights at the time. We’re going to get people to turn off lights. I’m looking at the numbers, and I’m looking at where energy goes. And I was like, this makes no sense. Even if we achieve everything people are claiming, we actually slowed the economy to save the planet, we’re done for. This is done. So I was like, why aren’t we focusing more on the consequences? Like, how are we going to live in a climate-changed world? And so I was like, what do we need?

And so, then again, as I started to think back to my life living in all these different places, I realized that culture seems to be this thing. That it’s the water you swim in. You don’t really see it until you’re in different water, or you’re taken out of the water. You don’t realize the things that are American until you’re in South Asia. You don’t realize the things that are South Asian until you’re in Africa or something. You don’t really see your house unless you’re on the outside. So I thought I want to work on this problem. One of my options was, I had a job offer from Microsoft. So that was one pathway for me. Another path was, I was going to go to grad school to work on smart home designs. I was just really interested in smart homes. But then I thought, okay, but what’s the end path here? I’m like, I’m going to make a bunch of money, and then I’m going to die. I mean, what was that all for? What’s the limit to this? Let’s say, I always think of, when you solve mathematical problems, one of the things that you try to do is you look at the edge cases. You start at the ends. You solve those cases, and then you kind of move it. I take these as conclusion. I’m like, okay, so where would this lead me to? I was like, let’s say I become the wealthiest man on earth. Then what? I’m like, okay, I want to do something. I want to actually try to solve a problem before I go. Because I’m going to die. We’re all going to die. What does it matter? King and the pawn go back in the same box.

First off, I had this realization: people don’t understand culture. It’s core to a lot of these decisions. It’s leading to bad foreign policy. It’s leading to an inability to work together on global problems. We need a better science of culture because, right now, we don’t have it. In my work on smart home design, I realized that there’s a branch of mathematics called control theory, which is the math of feedback loops. I thought this would be ideal for building up a mathematical theory of culture based on the bits of psychology that I felt like I could trust. So I ended up looking for people who were doing similar work, and I ran into Joe Henrich. He’s very well known for coining the term WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). He was the chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. I think he’s the only person on the planet who has tenure in economics, psychology, anthropology, and biology.

Brandon: Wow.

Michael: I asked Joe. I was like, “I don’t want to be an academic. I just want to solve this problem, and then I want to go apply it in the world.” That’s what I did. I accidentally became an academic. It wasn’t my intention and still not what wakes me up in the morning. It’s kind of applying this to solve problems in the world. But thank you for indulging me.

Brandon: No, no, thanks for sharing that. And for our listeners and viewers who don’t really know what that concept means, what is cultural evolution, and how does it relate to biological evolution?

Michael: So, cultural evolution, let me go back a little bit. Darwin comes up with this theory of evolution. In the turn of the 20th century, people actually are not big on Darwin. They think he’s wrong because Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin scale, miscalculates the age of the earth, and he’s off by a couple of orders of magnitude. The reason is, we didn’t know about radioactivity keeping the earth warm. So he was doing it based on how the earth would be cooling. Eventually, Darwin comes back. We have all these problems. We don’t know how to solve it. It’s not really a science. It’s just an idea. We rediscover the Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel’s work. So we have this kind of gene stuff. People start to try to mathematicalize it. Fisher, for example, tries to develop mathematical theory. There’s a tension between what’s being measured in the world and this idea of genes, for example. There’s many different problems like that. This gets solved in the 1920s, 1930s, in what’s called the modern synthesis.

Now, people start building on this body of mathematical modeling in evolution. Then around the 1970s and 1980s, two population geneticists, Marc Feldman and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza over at Stanford, and Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson—Rob was Joe Henrich’s advisor over at UCLA. Rob’s a physicist, turned ecologist, turned anthropologist. Pete is an ecologist—they start to build models and say, “Okay, under what conditions would an animal actually start to rely on information from other members of its species?” They lay out these conditions, which I can go through. They show that social learning can evolve. So animals will learn from one another. But actually, there’s a kind of zone within that social learning that leads to what we call cultural evolution. It’s an extension of evolutionary biology built on the toolkit that says evolution needs three ingredients. You need diversity, like variance. You need transmission. Genetically, that happens through genes. And you need selection. You need variance reduction in the direction of more skin color that matches UV radiation. Not skin color is too light or too dark.

What they showed is that culture has this too. You get diversities of people doing all kinds of things. We learn from one another. Humans are smarter than we should be because we’re building on every generation that came before. And we do it selectively, right? You don’t have everybody on your podcast. You try to find people that might be interesting to other people. You are part of the cultural evolutionary system. Then just like you can have design without a designer, in genetic evolution, you can have design without innovators per se. It’s a little bit complicated. But you can have it without innovators per se at a kind a collective cognition, a kind of collective computation, that we call cultural evolution. So that’s cultural evolution in a nutshell. It’s a body of mathematical work that makes predictions about our psychology and the long run consequences at a societal level for how societies change over time and how they might change in the future. So ideal framework in my mind for solving problems.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. I see you bring a kind of problem-solving approach from engineering, perhaps, to this question of culture, right? Well, I mean, you have this brilliant and very modestly titled book, A Theory of Everyone, which is centered around four laws: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution. So let’s talk about that. In what sense are these laws? Could you again walk us through each of them briefly, and then we’ll double click on it, innovation in particular?

Michael: First off, I like to joke: it is modest because it’s a theory of everyone, not a theory of everything.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: I wouldn’t be so bold. I wouldn’t be so bold.

Brandon: Well, I felt like when I was reading it, I felt like I was playing a game of civilization. It really felt like, it was like, oh, this is building all of sort of human.

Michael: For sure. If we have the time, feel free to edit this out. But the title actually comes from my brother. I mentioned he’s a physicist. The original title of the book was something more like a story of us or something like that. As we were talking about this, he’s like, “It sounds like your body of work, like what you’re working on and what you’re trying to describe, is kind of like a theory of everything for psychology.” I was like, yeah. Like a theory of everyone. And I was like, oh, that’s the title.

Brandon: Great.

Michael: I mean, these laws that I described, when you write academic papers, it’s very important that you’re very precise. You know, robustness checks, analyses upon analyses, and care about data provenance, it all matters. With this book, what I really wanted to do was to convey that to the public in a way that they could easily understand. And so, by laws, what I really mean are common patterns that we see across the biological world, all the way up to psychology and the human sphere. But they’re not like Newtonian laws. They’re more like lenses upon which you would view the world.

The law of energy is basically that energy is the ultimate ceiling on biomass. It provides a ceiling on everything that life does effectively. Energy is what makes matter move. This is something that’s so — in biology, these are called energy budgets. The number of organisms, the total biomass of their size, these are all capped based on energy, right? So if you think about the extinction of the dinosaurs: an asteroid hits the Earth, blots out the sun, suddenly the solar energy that plants need drops—which means that the herbivores don’t have as much food. Think of these energy flows, right? Herbivores don’t have enough food. Then the carnivores don’t have enough food. And so those large animals that roamed the earth, they couldn’t survive anymore. The energy ceiling, in other words, dropped—which created the age era. Now, the same kind of thing. If you go all the way back to the beginning of life, initially, the only energy that life had access to was warmth from the sun and warmth from volcanic vents, basically. So you can’t really move at a significant pace.

One of the major shifts was the evolution of photosynthesis. When photosynthesis evolved, it solved the problem. The sun isn’t always there, right? This is the same problem of solar. You have to be able to store it. What photosynthesis allowed for was the storage of solar in little sugar, basically, ATP type stuff. Then you can use it when you’re not — but you still have to move at plant pace. But this expansion of the energy budget, the ability to use that solar, meant that other organisms could begin to eat organisms. So rather than directly use solar power, they can just eat the organisms that are saving this as little package of energy. So you see the evolution of predation. You see the evolution of eukaryotic organisms that have effectively an organism within them, that they’ve eaten and they allow to survive, mitochondria. Anyway, basically, energy puts the ceiling on everything.

I’m talking about biology, but what I’m most interested in is humans. And if you look at just about every metric of human progress you can imagine—child mortality rates, size of polities as an indication of cooperation, lifespan, even war-making capacity, any of these kinds of things, GDP per capita, if you like—it’s kind of like it goes up a little bit over time because there were these early energy innovations. So one was the ability fire, right? Fire lets you digest calories outside of your body to make them more bioavailable, thereby reducing the need to sit there like a gorilla chewing leaves all day or like a cow munching on it. You can just cook this high-density food once you hunt it, and then you can grow your brain. We traded off the need for these long guts for a bigger brain effectively. So fire happens.

The next innovation is probably agriculture. So a solar technology where, again, we’ve expanded our usage of energy to produce. Instead of hunting and gathering, we’re harvesting and grinding, right? We’re saying, okay, we’re going to grow this stuff intensely in this region. Then you can expand the population, where biomass increases, right? Number of humans goes way up. But mostly, everything’s kind of flat. Everything’s kind of flat through all of the things that you learned about as being very important, right? The Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, everything, all those metrics kind of flat. Then we discover a tremendous source of energy that puts to shame all of the agriculture stuff, all of the innovations there, the fire stuff. We discover stored sunlight. We discover fossil fuels. Think about what fossil fuels are. Coal is peat, like plant matter, which has been pressure cooked over millions of years into this black rock. It’s a highly transportable, high source of energy. Oil and natural gas are produced by algae and zooplankton, again, kind of pressure cooked by millions of years. When we took that stored sunlight and put it to use, every metric goes way up. We are suddenly living in a brand new world. Our energy ceiling, in other words, increases. Everything we do today is in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: In fact, even we eat our fossil fuels. At least 4 billion people are alive today because of the Haber-Bosch process, which is the second agricultural revolution, if you like—the Green Revolution, where we were able to take nitrogen from the air, use the natural gas and produce ammonia, which we then use on our plants which allows us to grow vastly more plant matter, which, again increases our biomass. Right? So that’s the law of energy.

The law of innovation is kind of — so if you call energy the ceiling on all the life can achieve, innovation is kind of the floor. So it’s like it’s digging deeper. It expands the space of the possible by creating new ways to do more with less. Through innovations, we can use that energy, put it to work, outcompete other members of the species, outcompete predators, seek out and prey far better. Now, these innovations, so if we go back to photosynthesis — again, why am I calling them laws? Because they apply at every scale. They apply from cells to societies, bacteria to businesses. Going all the way back, photosynthesis started to use oxygen in the process. This was a tremendous innovation that led to what was called the Great Oxygenation Event. As a byproduct using carbon dioxide, you were suddenly producing all of this oxygen in the air, which most organisms couldn’t deal with. And they collapsed. They all went extinct. This was an innovation, but it was something like nine times more efficient and vertical.

Other efficiencies. So a lot of what happened after the Industrial Revolution wasn’t necessarily like — yes, we had a higher energy return on investment on a lot of these things, the amount of energy it takes to get some amount of energy back. Agriculture has a higher EROI, energy return on investment, than does hunting and gathering because you don’t have to go out. You don’t have to expend energy, as much energy, to get that back. But a lot of what we’ve done is through engineering and economics. We’ve just used that energy better. We have more efficient cars. We have more efficient heating, more efficient lighting. We went from incandescent light bulbs, which was like 2% efficient or something, all the way to LEDs, which approach 100% efficiency. Right? So you can do more with less through these innovations, and they expand the space of possibilities.

Within that space of possibilities, we’re competing for all of the resources, all of the stuff that we’re making. One of the ways that we compete is through cooperation. You know, whenever people think about evolution, they think about competition, survival of the fittest. In fact, it wasn’t Darwin who suggested it. He didn’t come up with that term. It was the other guy, Spencer. The idea of survival of the fittest. But in reality — I love this. Because one of the big criticisms of Darwin made when evolution by the natural section came out was that he was so focused on competition. Because it was such a male view of the world, such a Victorian male view. People like Clémence Royer, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, they were like, “You’re a guy. That’s why you’re so obsessed with competitions.” We work together. We work together. And they were totally right. Because it’s such a male-dominated field, we didn’t really discover until the 1960s the importance of cooperation. But there are various ways that we work together, and we do that —

Cooperation and competition are two sides of the same coin. We cooperate to compete with one another. So you think of yourself as a person, as an organism. You’re an ecosystem. You are the Amazon rainforest, made up of differentiated cells and a microbiome that exceeds the number and all of this stuff. You do that because that organism can outcompete other organisms better than, say, a bacterial version of you can. So bacteria is always there. But you can enhance. You can grow. Competition leads to this increase in cooperation up to the limit of the energy ceiling and the efficiency. So that’s what limits the level of cooperation. Because if you think about it, in equilibrium, for it to be sustainable, a level of cooperation, your return in working in this larger group—be it a larger organism, or a larger company, or a larger country—your individual level return at every scale, from each cell all the way up to the individuals and onward or in subunits, it needs to be higher than what you will get if you cooperated at a lower scale—let’s say a smaller company, a smaller country—and what you would get if you cooperated at a higher scale in a larger company, a larger country. But that is limited by how much goods and services are there to go around, how much resources. That is limited by our energy control.

So there’s various mechanisms that allow for cooperation. A lot of my work has been on how did humans begin to cooperate at the scale of millions, if not billions. There’s various mechanisms for inclusive fitness, genes that can identify and favor copies themselves to reciprocal altruism. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. And reputation, even religion as a way of cooperating with one another, all the way through to institutions and large units like United States of its 50 countries, or the European Union with its many countries, you know.

Brandon: Yeah, and it seems there’s an interesting tension between cooperation and competition, as you’re outlining your work as well, right? I mean, we don’t completely outdo the need for that kind of competition.

Michael: Always. Competition drives it. And also, competition keeps it in place. So in actual fact, competition is part of what sustains cooperation. If you think about it, people often say like humans would all get together if aliens came. They’re kind of right.

Brandon: Yeah, Independence Day.

Michael: Yeah, Independence Day. Or there’s an argument that one of the reasons that African countries are able to sustain this kind of autocracies is because of foreign aid and because foreign national companies—multinational companies like Shell, BP, and so on—are accessing their resources by a larger level of cooperation, cooperating with a local group of elites who thereby control the resources and outcompete the rest of the population. If you let African countries just compete with one another again — when you’re in competition with one another, you need the best person at the helm. If you’re at war, you want the best person to be the general. I want Churchill in charge. But when you’re no longer at war, maybe your brother-in-law can be in charge. Why does it matter? You know what I mean?

Brandon: Right. Yeah.

Michael: Actually, competition and cooperation, it’s not only two sides of the coin. They sustain one another. If you lower that competition, then you actually drop the level of cooperation. Then the final law is basically the law of evolution, which is to say that we don’t design these units. Evolution doesn’t design. Even we don’t really design. We talk about the design of, let’s say, the US Constitution, the Magna Carta. What we don’t talk about is all the failed attempts, the dead ends, like all of the Magna Carta attempts to constrain the king that came before. We talk about the US Constitution because it actually worked. We don’t talk so much about the Brazilian Constitution, right?

Brandon: Right.

Michael: So what we’re seeing is the endpoint of an evolutionary process, a cultural evolutionary process. Evolution, this variation, transmission, selection, and a lot of nuance around that, that is the means by which we innovate new efficiencies. That is the means by which we find new ways to cooperate with one another. It is the means by which we even unlock this kind of energy within this what I call the space of the possible. So those are the four laws.

Brandon: That’s fantastic. I mean, like I said, it really felt like such a helpful, comprehensive picture of the human story. I’m really interested in innovation. That’s sort of the theme of this season of the podcast. And so I’d love if you could say a little bit more about how you’re defining this term and how it’s fundamentally related to energy. Because I think your understanding of innovation is fundamentally dependent on your concept of energy.

Michael: Yeah, so an innovation is — what I’m particularly interested in are innovations in efficiency, really—ways of doing things, brand new or better, in some manner. The reason that Jeff Bezos is super wealthy is not because he bribed a bunch of people. It’s because he made retail commerce way more efficient. He aligned the supply chains. He created these massive factories, one-day shipping. People might not like it. But people choose to shop at Amazon because it is just more efficient than your high street, your mall, your local mom-and-pop shop. And as a result, just like a new organism, a new apex predator emerges and wipes out the others, he just wiped out the malls across the country. Right? This is a kind of innovation. I like it. But it’s a kind of innovation in efficiency, right?

There are other innovations in efficiency. Obviously, people think of technologies. They are all about doing the things you want to do better, faster, stronger, to quote Drucker. When I say better, it’s not always like better for you. It just seems it will outcompete. We are talking to one another over a worldwide communication network, that is also in some ways harming maybe young people, if John Hite is right about that. Nonetheless, this conversation wouldn’t have taken place if not for this technology. This exchange of ideas would never have taken place if not for this technology. So if we’re being technical and if we go with what economists would call an invention, when an invention spreads, that is an innovation. I tend to call the invention the innovation and diffusion the spread. Whether something spreads is, again, it’s a matter of these cultural evolutionary forces. Does it enable you to outcompete others better? Gun spread, steel axes outcompete stone axes. Because they’re just better technologies for killing people or for chopping down trees.

Now, the process of innovation from a cultural evolutionary perspective, I think, is very interesting and important. I’d be meaning to write a piece about how this is really part of what AI researchers are getting wrong about intelligence. So it seems that when you think about innovation, you think of the innovator. You think of the person who’s kind of sitting down and just coming up. They’re coming up. They’re the Einstein. They’re just sitting there in their loneliness, maybe reading some stuff, talking to a few people, and they’re coming up with some new ideas. That’s what pushes people forward, right? That doesn’t seem to be what we see, either looking at the historical record—which is kind of the cultural fossil record, if you like—or what the models are suggesting. Instead, what innovation is — Joe Hendrich and I call it a collective brain hypothesis. It’s a collective process, where really the computation that discovers new solutions isn’t happening in here. It’s happening by people picking up ideas from one another and recombining them in the head of a particular innovator.

Let’s say we didn’t have Darwin. Darwin came up with evolution. We can see how he came up with it. He recombined several ideas. He was a breeder, right? He was a pigeon breeder. He understood artificial selection. The genius in evolution and by natural selection isn’t in the evolution. It isn’t even in the selection. It’s in the natural. How did he know that nature could select? Because he had read Thomas Malthus. He knew that the pace at which plant matter grows is polynomial, because it’s limited by land, and the pace at which animals grow is exponential, like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on. Those two lines will meet. At that point, the plant matter will be less than what is required for the amount of animals around and onward to carnivores. That means they’re going to compete with one another. He realized that, in that competition, it wasn’t random. Some are going to be better suited to that competition than others. Then he traveled to this diverse island archipelago, and he recombined that idea. Because he saw evolution to work. He saw these finches famously that match the nuts on the different islands. He read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. He saw that, over history, we can see this kind of small changes. So he saw artificial selection. He knew that we could turn a wolf into a puppy. He knew that we could turn pigeons into all these magnificent creatures. He recombined and came up with evolution.

Now, here’s the thing. If we didn’t have Darwin, if a time traveler goes in and shoots Darwin when he’s a kid, we would still have evolution because of Alfred Wallace. Alfred Wallace had the same experience—also a breeder, also traveled to this island archipelago. He came up with the same time, and he is the reason that Darwin published. Because Alfred was like, “I’ve got this idea. I think this is how it works.” Darwin was like, “Oh, crap. I came up with the idea five years earlier.”

Brandon: Right. There’s an interesting tendency, I think, with a lot of these innovations, too, that they seem to sort of emerge simultaneously, right?

Michael: Exactly.

Brandon: I’m looking at Matt Ridley’s book on innovation. It sort of maps out a range of different things, where different people in different parts of the world have the same idea around the same time.

Michael: How does that happen, right? Of course, it’s not everybody, right? Sometimes when I say innovations aren’t by the innovative, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, but not everyone is Newton.” You’re right. Not everyone is Newton. But you know what? Leibniz also came up with calculus. Not everybody comes up with calculus. But Newton and Leibniz, because they’re reading the same material, they’re exposed to the same ideas, they’re recombining in the same way. Thousands of years, no calculus. Suddenly, boom. Two guys, calculus. What’s going on? Right? I think if you really look, if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re an academic, if you stop and think for a second, we are somehow convinced of our own genius but also terribly afraid of being scooped. There’s a tension there. If you think you’re seeing so far ahead of everyone else, what are you worried about? No one’s going to catch up with you, right? But you are, because you know everyone’s reading the same stuff, so you’ve got to come up with similar ideas.

Brandon: But it also seems there’s a tension there in relation to diffusion. Because if your idea is so far out that no one can even understand it, it’s not going to travel, right? And so I imagine there might be a lot of potentially successful innovations that just don’t get picked up anywhere.

Michael: Totally.

Brandon: Because the time isn’t right, or the kind of legitimacy structure isn’t there.

Michael: That’s right.

Brandon: There really seems to be fragile.

Michael: Edison came up with the light bulb. Also, simultaneous invention, Joseph Swan came up with the light bulb at the same time in Britain. They formed a company together to avoid the patent battle called EdiSwan. But at the same time, there were 22 other light bulb patents. It wasn’t like just Edison and Swan. It was 22 others, at least 22 others. Now, they just had a better, like, the Edison screw, which we still call the Edison screw light bulb. That was an innovation that led to his light bulb being favored over some of the other light bulbs. It was one of the innovations. Of course, you’re right. I had a Palm Pilot back in the day.

Brandon: Sure.

Michael: But you know, only geek said Palm Pilots or a Blackberry. It was waiting for this moment for the internet to be fast enough and the iPhone to bring — really, the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. But it struck at the right time. So you’re right. You’re totally right.

Brandon: Well, you do touch on this in your framework for innovation, the sort of compass model that you provide when you talk about adjacent possible zone. Could you very briefly walk us through that model?

Michael: Sure, yeah. So I got to tell you, I try to be a good science communicator. I really do. But I could do better. What I was really going to do was like, how do I distill all of this research on innovation into something that’s like you can use as a kind of framework? I put these letters together. I’m like, “Oh, God. What do I turn this into?” Actually, it was my assistant, Zoe, who was like, “I think I can make it COMPASS.” I’m like, beautiful. Let’s do that.

Brandon: It works.

Michael: It kind of works. I use it with companies. They seem to like it. But I’m sure it can be done. So the COMPASS is really trying to give you some insights, especially on things that you might not think about innovation. C is, basically, innovations come through the collective brain. It’s not just about finding 10x engineers. It’s about finding 10x engineers who can work with one another in a collective manner, so you get 100x teams. It’s about collective cognition. It’s about finding ways to bridge gaps and make ideas more inclusive so that they flow through one another.

O is off the beaten track. A lot of the ideas are not doing the same thing. They’re trying to do something a little bit different, right? What do they say? Like, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Right?

Brandon: Right.

Michael: Companies, often, they don’t think about the fact that actually—let’s take AI—business as usual is not going to work.

M stands for the magpie strategy. Magpies in folklore are known for going out and looking for things and then recombining them, right? Sometimes I call this intellectual arbitrage. So the quickest way to be creative—I know Joe Henrich does this, I certainly do. Lots of smart people I know do this—is you basically are looking for solutions in a different discipline, in someone else’s head. The solutions to your problems are spread across the heads of many people. If you look across the history of innovation, we see this constantly? Vulcanized rubber, Charles Goodyear. How does he know? That vulcanized rubber, if he burns a bit of rubber, notices it changes in its composition. It’s now hard. How does he know that that’s useful? Because he was hanging out at the India Roxbury company. He’s got these misshapened rubber. He’s like, they need to be harder. I don’t know how to solve it. Like, how many people burn rubber? Probably tons. But you have to have a prepared mind for it. You have to have intention. You do this intentionally. How many Nobel Prizes in economics have been won by taking some idea from psychology?

P is the paradox of diversity. There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a lot of discussion in London around diversity. Look, the truth is diversity is fuel for innovation because a lot of innovations are through recombinations of different ideas into something new. But diversity is also divisive by definition. If you and I didn’t speak the same language, we’re not going to be able to spread ideas and learn from one another, right? If I came to the UK, the drive on the left-hand side of the road, I’m like, “You know, the right way to drive is the right-hand side of the road. I bring my culture, and I demand that I do it this way.” It’s not going to work, this coordination problem. So this is the paradox of diversity. There’s different ways to solve it. You can solve it by finding a common path, but also through translators and bridges, people trained in multiple fields, people trained in different areas, things like that.

A, as you said, is the adjacent possible. In evolution, evolutionary systems can’t often make these massive leaps. Now, cultural systems can, to some degree, often through serendipity or recombination. But that’s because you can have horizontal transmission, like the way bacteria does. With humans, so if we needed wings—like something changed, we needed wings suddenly to survive, no bueno—we’re not going to get wings because they’re just too far away. But if you need to adjust skin color, if you need to adjust eye shape, hair type — even number of fingers is possible. These are adjacent possibilities for humans, right? It’s the same if you look, Cesar Hidalgo has this nice work on what he calls a product space. He shows companies and countries that go into industries that are kind of just adjacent to what they already do, that’s what tends to happen and that’s what tends to work. You already are making wood chips. You can move to paper. You already do garments. You can move to high-end garments or maybe other kinds of fabrics for the insides of aircrafts or something. So that’s adjacent possibilities.

The last two S’s are that, because of these forces, it’s often better to be social than it is to be smart. Certainly, for a society, it’s better to be social than it is to be smart. So what I mean by that is high IQ is great. But a high IQ that isn’t exposed to the problems of the day, that isn’t exposed to potential solutions, it’s not going to spread those ideas. It’s like what you said. It wouldn’t know. It’s too far ahead. It doesn’t know how to bridge that gap, right? The social aspect of understanding the people is very important. Then the final thing is that the sharing is essential, that you create a culture where ideas can flow, and then you’re sharing those ideas with one another. If people are preserving the whole thing, the collective brain doesn’t work.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s very helpful. It’s a really helpful framework for innovation. One of the other things I was struck by was the very clear evidence that humans tend to be—at least in comparison to chimps— more imitators than emulators. I wonder if there’s a relationship between imitation and innovation. At least, it seems like there’s a tension there. Because if we’re such a fundamentally mimetic kind of animal, then how is it that we are capable of innovation? I wonder if you might be able to walk us through that Horner and Whiten experiment on chimps and humans, and then say a little bit about the relation between imitation and innovation perhaps.

Michael: Yeah, so the first thing is, the Horner and Whiten paper is a lovely demonstration of how we just have a bunch of recipes that we acquire from other people. We copy them without a real understanding. We feel like we understand it—what’s called the illusion of explanatory depth—but we don’t. So what Horner and Whiten did was they took some young chimps and some young children, and they gave them this box. The box has a hole on the top and a hole on the side. The experimenter pokes a hole through the top and pokes a hole through the side and, in doing so, is able to retrieve a piece of fruit for the chimps and retrieve a sticker for the kids. The experimenter pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the chimp. What does the chimp do? Pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, gets its piece of fruit, happy chimp. Then the experimenter does the same thing. Hole through the top, hole through the side, hands it to a child. What does the child do? Well, holes through the top, holes through the side, happy child. He’s got a sticker.

Now, in the key variation, they use the same box, but now, instead of a kind of opaque box where you can’t see what it is, the box is clear. It’s completely transparent. You realize that that first action is a kind of ceiling. It’s a top compartment. It doesn’t do anything. The only action that retrieves the fruit and the sticker is that second action: the side hole. But again, what the experiment does, they poke the hole through the top. They poke the hole through the side. Now, when you hand it to a chimp—chimps are smart. I don’t know if you can watch them scrolling on Instagram or solving working memory, but they’re smart—they’re like, “Forget that first action. I’m going straight for the second action. I’m going to get that piece of fruit.” They get their fruit, and they’re super happy. But when the experimenters poke the hole through the top, poke the hole through the side and hand it to the child, what does the child do? Pokes their hole through the top, pokes their hole through the side. Kids are not stupid, like completely stupid. But they often assume, unless they have other reason to think otherwise, the adults know what they’re doing, and they want to do it the same way. Because the world is way too complicated. You walk around engaging with technologies that may as well be magic to you. Like, how does a computer work? How does it talk to the router? How does this thing produce an image on the screen? How does it happen in real time? Like, who knows? Right? Who knows?

Brandon: Right.

Michael: But you know how to use it. You do it because you’ve copied a bunch of recipes. You brush your teeth in particular way. You eat three times a day. You sleep for eight hours. You do all these things because that’s how it’s always been done. And you don’t realize it, you don’t notice it until someone else does it. But here’s the thing. Remember what I said about evolution? Three ingredients: variation, transmission, selection. You have to have faithful transmission for an evolutionary system to work. Otherwise, it’s too noisy. If mutation rates are way higher, as they are if you’re doing your own thing, or genes were suddenly mutating, it wouldn’t work. So that’s an essential component of the cultural evolutionary system, that we copy without fully understanding.

Now, to get to your second question, which is, well, then where do the innovations come from? That leaves kind of three ways. One is accidents. When you copy things, you don’t copy them exactly. Sometimes you serendipitously discover something brand new. Lots of innovations. Velcro, vulcanized rubber, as I said before, artificial sweeteners, Teflon.

Brandon: 3M.

Michael: Yeah, all of these things, these are all accidental innovations. But there’s also recombination, right? Yes, we’re copying faithfully, but we have different sources of information. We study different disciplines. Rob Boyd was able to solve some of the math in evolutionary biology because of his training as a physicist. He knew how to handle certain types of reciprocal equations, because you have to be able to do that in physics, right? But then of course, we do develop. The collective brain makes the individual brain more intelligent. We are smarter because we have a bunch of tools and ways of thinking that make each of us brighter. It’s not just our genetic capacity. Yes, there are individual differences between us for a variety of reasons—not just genes, but exposure to your prenatal environment and pathogens and lead and all those kinds of things, and also just your home environment. But also, simply because, over time, we have a bunch of new skills that make each of us more intelligent. And that gives us partial causal models of the world that allow us to operate and make things better. So when you kind of understand how your router works or your stove works, if you turn it on and off again, that often will fix it. Right? Because you have a partial causal model of the world. I can give you examples of how it makes us more intelligent. Reading, obviously, but also counting, these are cultural skills, not human skills.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, that’s very helpful. That was great. There’s a lot to say I suppose about the beauty of innovation. Let’s talk about the dark side of burdens of innovation. Maybe a good test case might be AI, which I think you talk about as a kind of second industrial revolution. The possibilities of progress are immense, and yet there are also immense challenges in terms of inequality, the energy use, and how resource intensive these are. Could you talk about your sense of both the promise and pitfalls of AI, at least as you’re seeing it, and sort of prospects for the future there?

Michael: Yeah, of course. The first thing to say is that, actually, people talk about the one, two, three, fourth industrial revolution. From my perspective, there was really one industrial revolution. Yes, there were other advances. But it was really the first, and the others are kind of shadows of it. What preceded the Industrial Revolution was the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. What I argue is that what we’re in is not the Second Industrial Revolution but, actually, the Second Enlightenment. So remember, the Enlightenment was a swapping of ideas at an unprecedented scale, through coffee shops and these networks of pamphlets being spread around. Today, it’s happening on X. It’s happening on LinkedIn. It’s happening through podcasts. It’s happening on Substack. We’re living through a Second Enlightenment, where the old ways are being challenged, and we’re coming up with new — our cultural revolution is on steroids at the moment. Now that might lead to a second industrial revolution if we crack the next energy barrier. Specially, if we invest more in nuclear, that’ll be part of it. If we crack fusion, we’re going to the stars, baby.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: So that’s, I think, the kind of moment we’re in. I agree with a lot of people who think that this is probably the most important century in human history. Because this is the century where we either destroy ourselves, or we head to the stars. There’s two paths in front of us. And so that’s the thing. Once the scale of cooperation hits a certain level, our capacity for destruction just goes up with it. Right?

There’s been a decline in violence. Pinker wasn’t the first one to say it, but he’s most noted about it. There’s been a decline in violence. But there was also been blips, World War I and World War II. From my perspective and from the perspective of I think cultural evolution, these are not blips. They’re part of the same process. As we cooperated a higher scale within those cooperative units—within, let’s say, the United States, within the European Union, within the UK, whatever—people are less likely to kill one another, right? There’s not lot of wars going on within the United States. But if a war breaks out, it’s now between two larger units or multiple larger units. So that’s one part of it. But also, as technology advances, our capacity for good and our capacity to just destroy everything has gone — our tech, our weapons.

Brandon: We can obliterate ourselves immediately, yeah.

Michael: So going back to AI, AI is an example of this, right? First off, there’s enormous — we’re making a big bet. We are putting a whole bunch. Thankfully, we’re investing in a lot more energy as well so that’ll be great. We’re really starting nuclear reactors. We are grabbing solar where we can. We are doing all firing and all cylinders because the training of these models. So one of the things about human brains versus these AI brains is that, first off, training and inference is one and the same for humans. Although the neurons in our head, which are still about a hundred to a thousand times as large as even the most advanced GPT model, they are quite energy efficient. It’s about 20 watts that you’re using, 12 to 20 watts that you’re using, as we have this conversation. AI uses megawatts, perhaps gigawatts, in training. Actually, in inference, it’s about the same level. It’s about 10 watts or so. When you start talking to ChatGPT, it’s not actually a huge energy inefficient process, but the training is. And so we need these vast amounts of energy, vast amounts of compute. We taught sand to think. How amazing. We need the silicon. We need the chips and so on. But it requires a lot. That’s a big bet, and it has environmental consequences.

Now, the bet is that it leads to an age of abundance. It gives us more energy, more technology, more ability to repair the damage that we are doing. But it’s a bet humanity is making. Overall, I’m hopeful. I think it’s a good bet. I don’t know if this generation of AI is the right move. Because like I said, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that intelligence works, which is an ongoing conversation I have. But I think once we crack a few of these things, we are going to see there’s no principled reason for why, or at least we have not discovered a principled reason for why wet computing in our brains is fundamentally non-recreatable in Zilliqa. However, what we currently have, the models that we currently have, are very different. We have differentiated neurons that do different things. What we have looks more like a rainforest ecosystem. The kind of intelligence that AI have is like grid rows of crops, very, very limited ecosystem. Now, there might be things going on there that mean that AI architecture needs to change. Remember the transformer architecture and the very famous “Attention Is All You Need” paper? That’s very recent, right?

Brandon: Yeah, and I don’t know if we’ve even begun to scratch the surface of how much whatever intelligence is, is related to embodiment, to everything, like microbiome, and then, of course, the big question of consciousness, which we still have no idea what it is. Right? And so I think we have a long way to go sorting this out, but it’s very clear that there are challenges — not sort of, I mean, there’s, of course, big threats to wiping out humanity. But also, we’re seeing, in terms of some of the fundamental issues around human dignity — I mean, this is a similar problem to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution around exploitation and, really, the benefits not accruing sort of uniformly, right? And so I think there is a sense in which innovations create winners and losers. I wonder if you might comment on just the extent to which that sense of fragility of humanity could maybe exacerbated or amplified in ways that could be really destructive. Because I think that’s a critical issue to sort through.

Michael: I mean, actually, right in front of me is a report that I’m producing for the UNDP on this exact topic between and within inequality of AI, specifically in Asia-Pacific. So you’re absolutely right. It is also what happened during the Industrial Revolution. We put the shoemakers and tailors out of work, and they were real upset about it. Some of them tried to burn the factories down. There will be new opportunities, right? You got to remember, like, 6 out of 10 jobs — it’s been estimated that 6 out of 10 jobs we do today did not exist before 1940. Computer used to be a job. If you watch the movie Hidden Figures, they were computers. Then came along the electronic computer, and now the only computer we ever talk about is the electronic computer. We dropped the electronic because it’s the only computer. Right? So there’s going to be this reshuffling.

Now, the concern is that that reshuffling is not random. It’s not just opportunity. It is going to be, if you think, what it may lead to is another great divergence. So when industrialization took place, it gave Europe an unprecedented capacity for growth and expansion, which fueled colonialization. When I talked about every metric going up, it first happened in Europe. All of those metrics ran away in Europe on the back of industrialization. Prior to that, you wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that it was going to be Europe. China had a good shot at it. The world is still going through a great convergence in part due to the shipping container, as I described in my book. Suddenly, China and South Korea could take advantage of their cheaper manufacturing and ship it to the United States with all kinds of economic and geopolitical consequences. Now, AI, potentially, if it really is as revolutionary and as industry altering as some expect it to be, there are going to be massive winners and losers. Those models are concentrated in the hands of a few. Not just a few countries, but in fact a few companies.

Brandon: Exactly, yeah.

Michael: United States, China are the two biggest players. There’s not a lot of other foundation models out there. Other countries are consumers. So we really have to think very carefully about strategic investments and policies that allow for countries to solve their problems with access to these models. There’s massive leapfrogging potential here. It’s an overused term. For the longest time, we waited for electricity to spread across the African continent. Solar panels are potentially closing or helping closing the gap. Or a better example is perhaps telephone lines. We waited the longest time to give telephony and internet to remote areas of the globe. Thanks to the cell phone, and now I suppose Starlink, we have access to the internet in the most remote regions, right? It’d leapfrog the need for all of that infrastructure that happened before.

Today, there are teacher shortages in a lot of places I work in, where, yeah, it’d be great if we could just train more teachers and invest more. But maybe teachers supported by everyone having their own AI tutor is a way to enhance education across the globe. Traffic and corruption are a serious problem in various parts of Southeast Asia, in South Asia for that matter. AI might be able to help with the traffic management and also help track corruption, right? But only if we deploy it like that, it’s not going to happen. This is what this report actually for UNDP is all about. It’s like, let’s talk to APEC, let’s talk about this. One of the mistakes we make is just looking at the past. The past is only a guide when it comes to a new technology, right? This isn’t the same as the Industrial Revolution. It’s not the same as electricity. It’s not the same as computers or the internet. In fact, it has new capacities because it is a thinking agent that ranges from augmenting human capacities to completely automating and replacing them. That means that there are going to be people who are left behind. We have to think very carefully at a systems level about how we approach that problem without distorting incentives to a dangerous degree, and I need another podcast to do that with you.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, to solve all of the world’s problems. I mean, perhaps one more big question then is, I mean, you talk a lot about sort of the cultural software in your book that’s driving us. I wonder if you see any innovations in, one might call, sort of the fundamental orientation of these softwares. What I mean by that is something like our propensity to really value each other as human beings, or what I call sort of a spiritual intelligence or something along those lines. You have this other project on the sort of database of religions. I mean, do you see innovation happening there at the level of human — not consciousness in a simple sense, but in the kind of one might call moral sensibilities. Is there moral progress, or moral innovation, or spiritual innovation, perhaps?

Michael: Yeah, I mean, progress is relative, obviously. I mean, I have my opinions about what constitutes progress, but I also recognize that I’m coming from a very specific, largely Western Christian tradition. That’s what I impose on the way I think about these problems. But there has been. The major world religions have a lot of similarities compared to smaller religions, because that is what enables a religion to become a major world religion, right? Like, have large families. Be there for at least co-religionists. Look after one another. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These things emerge. Because if you think about it, Quakers, they have kids at about the same rate as the US population, which is not amazing. Now, there was an offshoot of the Quakers called the Shakers. Do you know any Quakers, Brandon?

Brandon: No. Quakers? No.

Michael: No Quakers. Okay. I have a few Quaker friends. Nobody has Shaker friends. Because the Shakers believed in celibacy for everyone. The only growth were adoption of children. That is not a strategy. Now, if you contrast the Shakers with the Mormons, the Mormons were also an obscure cult. But when you’re practicing polygamy in large families, you’re making the big leagues, baby. And they did, right?

They did. Now, these are examples of traits that religions possess that allow them to grow. Now, that’s the baseline. Now, within the major world religions, there are differences. There are differences in what is believed, and there are differences in how society gets structured on the back of that.

I’ll give you two examples. Now, obviously, it’s not always practiced this way. But most of the time, two claims really led to the spread of Christianity as a major world religion. Two claims. This offshoot of Judaism. Judaism is not a major world religion. We care about it a lot in part because of its link to Islam and Christianity. But one rabbi, son of God, he comes along and he says — I mean, first innovation comes from Judaism. That innovation is, it’s not — before, remember, is your God better than my God? Nobody knows. It’s not that I don’t believe in your God. I just think my God’s better. And you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to head to the battlefield, and we’re going to see whose God is better. That was how it worked. And if you want to be like, oh, turns out I’m worshiping Zeus now. But Judaism makes an interesting claim from monotheism. They say, it’s not that your God is better than my God. My God is better than your God. Your God doesn’t even exist. Here in Israel, God is one. And if you look, there’s two books of Genesis, right? You’ve got Adam and Eve story, and then you’ve got the seven-day story. The seven-day story is written during the Babylonian exile. Because they want to show that all those Babylonian gods — the sun and the moon, no, no, no, our God made all of those. They’re not gods. They’re just things that our God made in his spare time. It took him a day, just built it, you know?

Brandon: Right.

Michael: So that’s the first thing. The second thing is the idea of spreading that religion beyond. So it doesn’t have to be through birth. To be Jewish, you got to have a Jewish mother. It’s not so much about the conversion. There’s a spread in part by Paul, spreading around, and this is a major shift. And it goes alongside a few really radical innovations. Love your enemy. You don’t find that. You don’t find that in many religion. Kill your enemy is what you find more common.

Brandon: Right. Exactly.

Michael: Love your enemy? That’s bizarre. That’s wild. That’s crazy. It’s one thing. Now, the other thing that happens in Christianity—Jonathan Schulz and and Joe Henrich had done some really great work on —is the banning of cousin marriage and the restructuring of European families. Around the world, people married their cousins, some at very high rates, right? Pakistan, rates are like 50%, 60%. In some communities in Britain, rates are 90% marrying their cousins. At that point, by the way, you’re approaching the marriage of half siblings really. It’s not great for genetics. But actually, it’s not just the genetics. That actually seals off communities from one another, right? If you’re only marrying, first off, endogamous—or only your co-ethnics—that seals off the community. But ethnicities can be large. When you’re marrying only your cousins, there’s only a limited number of family members to marry. It cuts you off from the rest of the world. It cuts you off from the rest of the world. It leads to tribalism that undermines states.

So what happened in Europe, the idea of a traditional family, there’s nothing traditional about it. Most human societies have family webs. Your uncle is related to it in a variety of ways because two sisters got married to two brothers, and their kids got married, and some wild stuff going on, right? Whereas in Europe, because of the banning of cousin marriage in the restructuring, we get mom, dad, aunts and uncles, grandparents. You get this kind of family tree instead. Now, what happens? What happens is that European tribes disappear. Now I live in the UK. Where are the Angles? Where are the Saxons? Where are the Vikings? Where are the Norse? You know? I’ll tell you where they are. They’re all married to one another. They’re gone. The tribes are gone. They’re all married to one another, right? Europe destroys that. And that is the basis. So remember, I was talking about scales of cooperation. Those lower scales undermine higher scales. If you’re favoring your friends and family and undermine states, that’s what we call cronyism. That’s what we call nepotism. That’s what we call cronyism. So in these other places, democracy often doesn’t work because tribes dominate as the optimal scale of cooperation. Europe destroys those, and it leads to all kinds of other beliefs that are not found around the world.

One example of this is impartial application of the law. That is not what we find. Other countries try to replicate this. But in practice, it just doesn’t happen, right? There’s a psychologist Fonz treponel, and he has this really interesting set of data. He asked people around the world. He says, you’re driving in a car with your — replace it with cousin. Let’s say your cousin, right? It could be a brother. It could be a friend. You’re driving the car with your cousin. Now, let’s make it a friend because it makes a story. You drive in a car with your friend, and he hits somebody. The lawyer comes up to you and says, “Listen, you’re the only other witness.” If you lie, the friend gets off. Questions are these: should you lie for your friend, cousin, family member, whatever. Does your friend have an obligation, an expectation that you can lie for? Does your friend have an obligation, and would you actually do it? Now, if you ask a lot of Scandinavians, for example, across Scandinavia, they’re like, “Of course not. I would never. It doesn’t happen. It’s my brother. They did something wrong. They have to face the punishment.” Latin America, the opposite, you know? In Africa, this is like, “What? The law? Who cares about the law? That’s my friend. That’s my cousin. That’s my brother. That’s my whatever. Of course, I’m going to lie. I want to tell them any story they want, so they don’t have to go to jail.

Now, is that spiritual progress? Is that moral progress? It’s tricky, right? From my perspective, yes, it is moral progress. It has led to higher scales of cooperation. And from my perspective, working together at a higher scale is both a secular and religious goal that is shared, right, our ability to cooperate and coordinate with one another at a higher scale. In order to do that, you have to do away with some of these lower things. But it comes at a cost. I think we need to mitigate some of those, like loneliness. But of course, it makes you a worse friend, right? European, Scandinavians, are worse friends. They are worse family members because they’re not going to practice loyalty under all circumstances. Okay? We often also think — remember the tensions we talked about during this call. We also think about being there for family and “la famiglia è tutto, tutti.” Family is everything. We think of this as a virtue. Yes, it is a kind of virtue. But when expressed against the competing—let’s say, the state or institution or higher scale of humanity—it is, in fact, the source of corruption and the source of poverty in many places around the world.

Brandon: Yeah, loyalty and corruption are deeply — yeah.

Michael: Yes, we have made spiritual progress and religious progress. But I think one of the things, remember when I said competition is part of this, I would love to reignite the competition between religious world views. I think there’s a moment right now. I think we need to be able to talk to one another about what we really believe and think through the consequences of that. Obviously, no, we’re not coercing one another.

Brandon: Without the wars.

Michael: Without the wars. Exactly. Without the wars. An intellectual discussion. Because in the Vatican, for example. You’re not over there. I don’t know. We met each other there at one point.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: No, actually, I wasn’t with you. It was a different time at the Vatican. While I was there, I had the chance to talk to some of the bishops. I said, look, as a church, we look backwards so much. We want to know what Augustine said. We want to know what Aquinas said. We want to know what the doctors of the church said. No, what we should care about is what the Aquinas’ and the Augustines of today have to say about today. They were not God. They were just smart men and women of their age trying to make the best of what happened in the world. If you want to be relevant, we need to think, okay, what would Augustine or someone like Augustine say about today? How would they project for it? It requires a kind of confidence that this is the truth. Reveal truth of the world in order to be able to say, actually. Because otherwise, based on what Augustine said, we’re arguing over history. Based on what Augustine said, blah, blah, Augustine was talking about, how do I reconcile the fact that God has foreknowledge of the future with the fact that I have free will? He didn’t have anything at his disposal. He didn’t have Einsteinian space-time understanding, right? He says God must be outside the timeline, such that his memory of the future is no different to our memory of the past. Just because I have a memory of the past, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a choice there. Just as God’s memory of the future means, it doesn’t mean I don’t have choice there. But he doesn’t know that actually space time is a thing, right? He doesn’t know any of this stuff. I don’t know if this is the direction you want to go in. What did Saint John Paul say? He said faith and reason are the two wings with which we fly. We seriously need to bring those back together. Science and faith once more are kind of reunited. I want to say that across world religions, because if we cannot criticize other religions, if we cannot criticize these things, we make no progress. Going back to the collective brain, innovations in any domain only happen in the free flow of ideas.

Brandon: Yeah, and it seems that it’s really incumbent on us to figure out how to create a kind of more positive sum approach to all of these things rather than the kind of scarcity mentality that we’re caught up in reinforcing our sense of tribalism. Michael, we’ve gone past time, but I want to maybe ask you if you could point us to anything you’re working on that you’re really excited about, where our viewers and listeners could learn about your work? Anything else you want to share with us as we close?

Michael: Yeah, of course. So a couple of things. One is, although I’ve got the LSE banner in me, I will continue to be a professor at the LSE, but I’m moving to New York. Maybe it’s NYU. So I’m going to kind of be a joint professor across that. I’m doing that for a variety of reasons. But in part, I am setting up a Center for Human Progress. So I’ll be at Transatlantic Center for Human Progress—one in New York, one in London. We are partnered with the Global Solutions Initiative as a pathway to policy in Europe and, hopefully, partnered with UNDP as a pathway to policy in the United States and the world as well.

Brandon: Fantastic.

Michael: And in part, it’s because, like I said at the beginning of this call, I never meant to be an academic. Sometimes it feels like, as an academic, we’re in the comments section. There’s stuff happening in the world, and we write stuff about it.

Brandon: Right.

Michael: I don’t want to be in the comments section. I also think that it’s incumbent on us. Decisions are being made whether we like it or not. And if we feel like there’s a better way to make decisions that are better for more people, and less tribal, let’s say, then I think we should do that. I think we should do that. And so part of the Center for Human Progress, again, we’re not writing about just stuff. We’re just going out there. We’re building things. I’m still an engineer. We’re building things out there in the world.

One of our projects is that we have a new city that we’re developing in Zanzibar, Fumba City. The reason is we don’t have a good model of development. We just don’t, right? At the end of USAID and all of these, we do need a new model of development. Why do we need a new model? A few reasons. One, Africa is one of the few places still producing human beings. Two, we talk a lot about immigration and the challenges that mass immigration bring, illegal immigration across the southern border in the United States, across the Mediterranean in Europe. These are issues, but they’re two-sided issues. They’re supply and demand, right? They are two-sided because people are coming in part for the social welfare systems and the economic opportunities, but they’re coming because their countries of origin suck. Right? They don’t have the opportunity.

One of the things that keeps me up at night is that there is a major gap between talent and opportunity in the world. There are people of immense capability who are unable to express that capability for the betterment of humanity simply because of the happenstance of their birth—be that in a lower class of society, be that in a country that has limited options. Passport privilege is a major thing on this planet. We need a model of development and, I think, startup cities, commerce—like creating Hong Kong, creating Singapore, creating Guangzhou, Shenzhen in East Africa—and then using it as a model that might spread around. That’s one of the things that’s most exciting. But more broadly, we have the Center for Human Progress. We’re trying to solve these problems. If you’re interested, if your value aligned, get in touch. We’re at the ground floor of a lot of this stuff.

Brandon: Fantastic. Well, we’ll put links to everything in the show notes. Hopefully, people can follow up with you. Michael, it’s been such a delight to have you on the show. Thanks again for taking the time.

Michael: Pleasure, Brandon. Great conversation. Thank you.

Season 4 of the Beauty at Work podcast is set to launch. Our theme this season is The Beauty and Burdens of Innovation.

For much of history, “innovation” was seen as suspect, linked with heresy, rebellion, something newfangled or faddish, or unwelcome change. Only recently has it become a marker of progress and genius. It has become a criterion of worth—perhaps even a new religion. But innovation is never only beautiful. It also comes with costs: unintended consequences and new vulnerabilities.

This season, we’ll ask: What makes innovation both beautiful and burdensome?

We’ll explore topics such as:

• what is the role of beauty in driving both biological and cultural innovation?

• the myths and realities of how innovation actually works—e.g., incremental vs. disruptive, collective vs. individual

• the unintended consequences of innovations in technology, social media, and AI

• what it takes to build regenerative forms of innovation in organizations

• what spiritual innovation means and what factors contribute to or inhibit it

Our guests include Matt Ridley, Alan Moore, Michael Muthukrishna, Wendy Cadge, Michael Skaggs, Lisa Lindahl, Allison Pugh, John Havens, Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, Marco Ventura, and more.

Across the season, our conversations will range from lekking birds to startups, from Shaker design to social media, from the invention of the sports bra to the future of AI. And along the way, we’ll hear stories of beauty, struggle, creativity, and renewal.

I’m excited to share these conversations with you and to reflect together on how innovation can enrich our work and our world, without losing sight of its burdens.

Many thanks to Templeton Religion Trust for sponsoring this season.

The first episode drops next week. Stay tuned.

We're living in a paradox. At no point in history have we been more digitally connected than we are today—scrolling, liking, commenting, messaging. Yet, loneliness is at historic highs. The U.S. Surgeon General has called this a public health epidemic. And at its heart lies a deeper, often unarticulated yearning: the yearning to be seen and to be known—not by avatars or chatbots, but by fellow human beings. At the New York Encounter in February 2025, I had the honor of exploring this crisis of disconnection with two legendary thinkers: MIT sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, and Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at MIT, where she founded the Initiative on Technology and Self. A licensed clinical psychologist with a joint PhD in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard, Turkle is a pioneer in exploring the human side of our relationship with technology. Her research spans culture, therapy, social media, mobile devices, and AI, examining how digital life reshapes our capacity for empathy and connection. She is the author of several landmark books, including the New York Times bestseller Reclaiming Conversation and the widely acclaimed Alone Together. Her most recent work, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, weaves her personal journey with decades of research into how technology affects our emotional lives. Turkle has also edited influential volumes on how objects shape thought, such as Evocative Objects and The Inner History of Devices, making her one of today’s most important voices on the ethics and psychology of digital culture.

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and one of the most influential social scientists of our time. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, he is best known for Bowling Alone and Making Democracy Work, two of the most cited and bestselling works in modern social science. His scholarship on civic life, social capital, and American democracy has shaped public policy around the world. He has advised four U.S. presidents and numerous international leaders. His latest book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, offers a sweeping look at the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped and fractured American life, and how we can move forward.

This panel was sponsored by Somos Community Care, a physician-led network dedicated to providing holistic, community-based healthcare in underserved neighborhoods across New York City, with a strong focus on integrating mental health and human connection into primary care. Their Director of Behavioral Health and Social Work, Riquelmy Lamour, opens the panel with an introduction to the important work the organization is doing.

In our conversation, Turkle argues that today, “technology offers a work-around for the messiness of being human.” We turn to bots not because they understand us, but because they don’t challenge us, don’t require anything of us, and let us bypass the discomfort of real human vulnerability. But in embracing frictionless connection, we risk losing the very skills that make human relationships possible—conversation, presence, the courage to show up and be seen.

Putnam, whose landmark book Bowling Alone helped define the discourse on social capital, draws our attention to a broader historical arc of our present crisis. Across measures of political cooperation, economic equality, civic participation, and cultural solidarity, the United States experienced a profound decline in connectedness beginning in the 1960s. Yet, he offers hope: we've been here before. In the late 19th century, America was also politically fractured, economically unequal, and socially isolated. What changed things wasn’t technology or policy, but a moral awakening—a cultural turn toward mutual responsibility and civic obligation.

The theme of this year’s New York Encounter was “Here Begins a New Life.” What if we took that seriously? What if, in the face of digital mimicry and algorithmic manipulation, we chose instead to become more human—to reach across divides, to listen without interruption, to share not just information, but life and presence?

You can watch the video of our conversation here (which includes some slides from Putnam). And you can read an unedited transcript below.

Transcript

Brandon Vaidyanathan
All right. Good morning, everyone. And on behalf of the New York encounter, I want to welcome everybody here, those of us joining us in person, in the flesh, at the Metropolitan pavilion, and also those of us joining us online. I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America, and I will moderate this conversation before we begin. I want to thank somos for generously sponsoring this panel, and I invite Ms Raquelmi Lamour, Director of Behavioral Health and Social Work at somos to share a few words about what somos does and its mental health impact.

Riquelmy Lamour
It's an honor to be here today right before such an important conversation on loneliness and malaise. Now I know I'm not the main event here. Think of me as your commercial break, or that ad you can't skip before the video, but trust me, what I'm about to share connects directly to the discussion ahead. My name is Riquelmi Lamore. I'm the Director of Behavioral Health at somos community care. You all have these little blue pamphlets on your chair, so I am here to tell you about this organization, an organization that is not only transforming healthcare, but actively addressing the very crisis of disconnection that Professor Putnam and Dr Turkle are here to discuss today at somos. We believe that health is not just about medicine, it's about connection. We're a physician led network dedicated to improving health care in some of the most underserved communities in New York City, and we know that you can separate physical health from mental health, because anyone who's ever had a doctor's appointment before their morning coffee know that mental health is seriously important, right? In all seriousness, we see firsthand how social isolation, financial struggles and systemic barriers make mental health challenges hard. However, we also see how human connection restores them.

That's why, at Somos, we integrate behavioral health into the primary care level, because people are more likely to seek help when it's accessible, familiar and stigma free. Through programs like our impact model, we provide real time mental health interventions right at the doctor's office, it's like a one stop shop, except you're not getting snacks and soda. You're getting support, healing and connection. So I was recently moved by this talk that I watched on YouTube from last year seeks conference by Dr Matthew brenninger, a clinical psychologist, and he shared this story about a five year old boy in therapy who had been removed from an unsafe and extremely abusive home. This little guy came into therapy and he was furious. He had just been separated from his family. He was flipping chairs, he was screaming, he was cursing. He was threatening to hurt himself and the doctor. Now, if you've ever been around a five year old, you know they can be dramatic, right? But this was different. He was in survival mode, overwhelmed by fear and pain, and what did the therapist do? He didn't yell, he didn't scold. Instead, he simply held him gently but firmly until the little boy's body softened. His breathing slowed, and he just collapsed in this doctor's arms, crying and finally letting go and finding rest. Why is this important? At this moment, he didn't need words, he needed presence. He needed to know he was safe. This story resonated with me, because in many ways, this is what we seek to do at somos, not just offer services, but restore connection.

Our work isn't about treating symptoms, not just about treating symptoms. It's about seeing people standing with them in their suffering and saying, You are not alone. We are here. We live in a time when loneliness has become an epidemic, and honestly, that's kind of wild, right? Because on your birthday, you can get 1000 Happy birthday messages on Facebook, but still eat that cake alone. Um, the reality is that, despite technology, more people than ever feel unseen, unheard and disconnected. But what if the solution wasn't complicated? What if it was as simple as showing up, listening and holding space for someone else? This is the heart of our work at somos. We train healthcare providers in trauma informed care. We host community mental health events, wellness workshops, and we bring mental health into the community, into the street. And this is why this is so important. This discussion today, loneliness and Malaise aren't just social issues. There are public health crisis. They affect our well being, our communities and our collective future. So as we move into this conversation, I invite you to reflect on this. What if we built a world where no one had to fight their battles alone, where every person, whether at a doctor's office or at a school or a moment in crisis, knew that someone saw them, value them, and would walk with them toward healing at somos? This is our vision, and we hope it, we hope it can be yours too. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
All right. Thank you. Thank you, Riquelmy, today we're going to talk about loneliness and social isolation, and these are issues that have profound implications for our personal well being and our collective lives together. To put this crisis in perspective, as rakomi said, the US Surgeon General has recently declared loneliness a public health epidemic, equating its health risks to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which I know for some of you is breakfast, but still, yeah, y'all should stop about and you know who you are. So about 30% of Americans report feeling lonely at least once a week. 30% of young adults report feeling lonely several times a week. Social media use is linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents. So what has brought us to this point today, and what do we do about it? We are honored to be joined by two incredibly distinguished scholars to help us make sense of our crisis and how to move forward. Dr Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller maze professor of the social science, social studies of science and technology in the program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT initiative on technology and the self professor, Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University, and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She's the author of several best selling books and her newest one, the empathy diaries: a memoir, ties together her personal story with her groundbreaking research on technology, empathy and ethics. Doctor Robert Putnam is the Malkin research professor of public policy at Harvard University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy and past president of the American Political Science Association in 2006 he received the Skype prize, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist. He's written 15 books translated into 20 languages, both among the most cited and best selling social science works in nearly a century. Welcome to the York encounter.

So to get started, both of you have devoted your careers to understanding connection and disconnection. What initially drew you to explore these themes and Sherry, perhaps we could start with you.

Sherry Turkle
I would have to start with really my first few weeks as a young professor at MIT, where Joseph Weizenbaum, who had written the Eliza program, which was it was used to be called the doctor program. It was set up like a Rogerian psychotherapist. So you would say to it, I feel lonely. And the program would say back to you, I hear you say you're feeling lonely, or you would say, I'm angry at your mother, and the program would say what I hear you saying is you're angry at your mother. Now this program was a parlor trick. It just kind of inverted the sentences and said back to you what this kind of stereotypical therapist might say, and Weizenbaum wrote it as an exercise in natural language processing. But what he noticed, and what he shared with me, really, when I first got to MIT, was that his students and his assistant and members of his lab wanted to be alone with it and talk with it, and in other Words, knowing that the program was only giving them pretend empathy. It was empathy enough, and so he asked me to begin to talk to these many students and people in the lab who knowing that the program could not understand or appreciate what. I had to say, still wanted to talk to it, and that was really the beginning of my journey in studying what is there about where we are now, where pretend empathy from technology often seems to us like empathy enough. So that was for me, I think the way I would, yeah, approach,

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Thank you. Bob, what, comes to your mind in terms of what, what drove you to your research?

Bob Putnam
I'm 84, so now I'm spending a lot of my time just looking back over my own career, and I can see patterns that I didn't, wasn't aware of as I was going through life. I think a lot of it, a lot of it, a lot of my interest in community came from the fact that I grew up in a really tiny town, 5000 people in northern Ohio in the 1950s it was not a perfect place, but it did have an intense sense of community. Basically everybody, at least in in my high school, there were that many people my high school, 150 people in my senior class. We certainly all knew each other. We all lived pretty close to each other. And even what you might think of as lines of social cleavage in that era, like race, were actually much less marked than you might think. I mean, there's a, there's a picture of my bowling team. By the way, bowling is big, so you should all think about bowling. I was on an eighth grade a bowling team, five people in in in my eighth grade, and that, the picture of that bowling team actually happens to appear on the back cover of the book, Bowling Alone, and you can see it. That's why it's there. There are three white guys. There's a tall, skinny guy in the middle, that's me, but then there are two black guys standing next to me, and that reflected the fact that both on our bullying team and in the broader community, there were ties of friendship and cooperation, even even across racial lines. It was not a perfect place. I'm not trying to say that, but I was now looking back, I can see that in some sense, I was very much affected by that sense of community in my hometown, and also, in some sense, trying to recreate it. I repeat. It was not a perfect world, but it was, I think that's part of the story. And even when I went to college, I now look back and see what papers I wrote. I wrote papers on community. But the most important single episode, and I think I'll try to be brief about this, I was I'd gone to college in the aftermath of Sputnik, and I was going to be a mathematician or physicist or something like that. I was good in math, and I'd come from this little town in Ohio, and I was a moderately but still staunchly Republican. Come from a Republican home, and among other things, I was also an active Methodist, and I have but I had to take a distribution requirement. So in the fall of my sophomore year, which happened to be in my 1960 and that was a presidential election, and there were two guys running, which maybe people in the room will remember or not, but one was guy named Kennedy, and the other guy named Nixon and I happened to be sitting behind the scute, we would have said, then co Ed and the class met at 11, at broken noon for lunch. And so we got in the habit of hanging out together for lunch. Now, remember, this is the late 50s, early 60s. So when I say hanging out, do not let your imaginations run away with you. All that meant was we would just get together for lunch. And, you know, a friendship began to emerge between me and this cute co Ed our first Do you all know what C Hawkins date means? Maybe you know else's that was that came up. And so this woman, girl invited me out on a date. First date was she took me to a John F Kennedy rally. And of course, the next the next week, fairs, you know, turned about his fair play. So I took her to a Nixon rally. And this is one tough cookie that I'm talking about. She happens to be sitting right here, actually,
as I say, we've been hanging out together for whatever that is, 70 going on, 75 years. So far, so good.

And anyway, one thing led to another by by the election time, we, neither of us could vote because we were voting. Age was 21 at that point, but I had been converted from a Republican to a Democrat in, in January, 20 of 1961 we decided to get on the train in in we were, this was at Swarthmore, just outside Philadelphia. So we got on a train at 30th Street Station and and took the train down, I don't remember. It was sort of three or four hours to Washington, DC, and we stood in the crowd at the back at we stood at the back of the crowd when the inauguration. And we. Heard him, Kennedy say with our own ears, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Now that was a long time ago, and as I said, I'm 84 but the hair right now, the hair on the back of my neck standing up because I've suddenly induced I'm now feeling the way that adolescent felt all those years ago because I thought he was speaking directly to me. And I was thought he was saying, you have you have talents, Bob, you've got things you have to do. And really, on the spot, I dropped physics and math and so on, or at least I wasn't majoring in those things. I still was pretty good in math, but and I became a social scientist, and after a much more turmoil, a couple of years later, I converted to from being a Methodist to being a Jew. This is one powerful lady in a few so that's how, as a long story, think of it that

Brandon Vaidyanathan
I mean, that's such an important example, because, as we are, because, as we are, you know, the theme for this encounter this year is here begins a new life, and the way in which you experience that summons to ask what you can do for your country. You know, will that resonate with people here today, right in a time of immense turmoil, and there's a lot that's happened since since 61 that that you've documented in your research that has maybe made a lot of us worry about, about the prospects of hope. I wonder if you might be able to say a little bit about how you found in your research the shift, the change in what you call social capital over the past century, and why it's not just a story of doom.

Bob Putnam
Sure, I'll try to be brief. I'm a data person, so there's a lot of data, but it's going to be easier. And these data come from a book that I wrote, wrote, really my last book that I wrote a couple years ago, jointly with shaytay ramnagarab, America's in a pickle, and not only in terms of social isolation, but that's part of it. We've reached historic levels of political polarization the I don't even need to explain that this morning, does everybody so anybody in the room who doesn't know how polarized we are politically? Yeah, and we're also probably at the the gap between rich and poor in America is probably greater now than it has ever been in our entire national existence. So we're huge. That's in a way, that's separate polarization. Political polarization is one thing economics, but still, there's this big gap in rich and poor, the level of social isolation. That's sort of what I call social capital. That's what remaining talking about here is extremely high. It's a little hard to measure that social isolation back into the 19th century, but that's what I'm going to try to do. And then we're also very self centered culturally. And I'm now going to just, I'm not going to say anything about exactly how I measure these things. You'll just have to trust is out of fashion in America. But just for the moment, trust me that I've not made up these curves, that there's a there's a ton of data behind each of these curves.

So let's have the next slide, and this looks at that. They all all the slides look the same way. The horizontal axis is time. So over at the left hand side of the graph is the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, and over at the right hand side of the graph is now, because this book was published a few years ago. These graphs from that book don't go all the way to 2025 but I just assure you that I because we've looked at what the data looked like since the book was published, and they just keep going in the continuing down. So you can see it's a and the vertical axis in this case is, is about political polarization, or the we've set it up so that up is good. Up is political bipartisanship, cooperating across party lines. And you can see that in the beginning of the 20th century, American politics was very tribal people, all people, Republicans, Democrats, hated each other, and they didn't cooperate across party lines, and that's what that graph shows. There have been ups and downs earlier in in the 19th century, there was a the only time in American history when when the gap the inner party tension was as great as it is now, and as it was in around 1900 was 1860 to 1865 raise your hand if you have any guesses as to what was happening in America between right? So we've got this 1860 65 we were pretty angry at each other politically, then this turn of the century period at the end of the 19th century, and then now. And you can see that that in between, it was not constant. Actually, we had this long upswing. That's where the title of the book comes from. Between, roughly speaking, 1895 1900 roughly, up until about. The middle of the 20th century. I think the peak up there is probably in about 1955 the President at that point was a guy named Dwight Eisenhower, who was except for George Washington. Dwight Eisenhower was the least partisan president in American history. He was nominated, actually by both Republicans and the Democrats. Eventually he chose to be nominated by the Republicans, but he was very nonpartisan. But nonpartisan. But it's not that he caused this. He was. The symptom was that. Does that make sense? So far, he was, that's why we got a guy like him, because we were a very cooperative country politically, I mean, but then you can see as you enter the 60s, and especially as you enter the 70s and 80s, every year we got a little more partisan. Every year, a little the fights in Congress got a little worse. Every year, Republicans and Democrats began to feel more hostility towards each other every year at the beginning of this period, at the beginning of the period, up at the up at the top. And you ask people, would you how would you feel if your child married somebody from the other party and and the typical answer to that was to laugh. Could you? Nobody could imagine being concerned one way or the other about whether your child was marrying Republican or Democrat? Now, the number of people who say that they would, that they would be upset if their party, if their child married some of the other party, was is now about 70 or 80% so now we really care a lot about what I'm trying to say is the emotional feelings across that line, not just the politics are extreme, and now we're back down, even worse, very polarized.

Now you now that you understand how the graphs work, I'm going to be even quicker if we have the next slide please. This is about economics. This is roughly speaking, a measure of the gap between rich and poor. The gap the graph here actually begins in 2019, 14, because that's when the IRS was created, and in and then beginning. Then we have really, really good data, but we have pretty good data beforehand and and economic inequality was even greater in the end of the 19th century, it was called the Gilded Age, and that's when there was a huge gap between people living on the Upper East Side, you know, where that is, and where all the rich mansions were for, you know, the Rockefellers and the carnegies and so on, and down here, where the poor hurdle masses lived, that was what it was like at the beginning of The 20th century. But then it began to go up. There was a dip in the 20s, the Roaring 20s, when people down here, people up there, were making a lot of money in the stock market, and people down here were unemployed. But then, even begin, before the beginning of the Great Depression, the gap between rich and poor began to narrow and narrowed steadily, and it narrowed. You can see it goes up and hits a peak someplace in the in the early nineteens, in the late 1950s early 1960s how equal America, in that period, was tied for being the most equal country in the world. The captain rich and poor was as small here as what, what capitalist America was extremely equal. Now you ask, Well, what was the other country? We're tied with Sweden. So Sweden, socialist Sweden, and capitalist America were extremely equal. Believe me, we're nowhere near that now. We're now one of the most unequal countries in the world. And you can see it goes down, down and and again, this data goes only to 2015 but if you go up to 2025 and then you imagine what 2020 later in 25 is going to be when the Trump tax cuts for rich folks are are passed. It's, we're way more unequal than probably we've been ever in American history. It's, that's, that's a little hard to be sure, but we're very unequal.

Next slide, we'll look at social cohesion of what I call social capital. This is the subject of this subject of the story here. I'm, I'm going to be, and I'm not talking at all how I measured this. But actually, this is measured by lots of different measures. Show the same thing. How well do you know your neighbors? How involved are you in community organizations? If you bowl, do you bowl in a team or bowl alone? That is Bowling Alone is one of the, one of these, one of the underlying data sets here. But it's also trust. How much do you trust your neighbors? It's even in your own family. Do you have a family? Back at the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of Americans never married. They were called in the language of the time, spinsters and bachelors. But then that you could see again, that begins to people, begin to make friends, begin to be have, you know, get married more often. Eventually, by the time we reach the peak, everybody's getting married. That's the that's the period right after World War Two, and all the GIs were coming home, and everybody was getting married. And the products of that period where the baby boom kids, and then again, beginning, sort of about 1965 or so, it begins to turn down. And then that part of this graph is the part of the graph that appears, is what appears in Bowling Alone, which is focused. Bowling Alone is focused on only one of the. Variables, social cohesion, and it's focused only on the period between roughly 1960 and roughly 2000 but now in this most book, we're looking at four different variables, and we're looking at the whole of the 20. Well, we're looking at 125 years, and it's down, down, down, down. And, okay, let's take the last graph, which is actually the most interesting graph, but I'm not going to spend very much time. I'm just going to assert this is a measure of the measure of the degree to which Americans culturally feel as if we're all in this together, or culturally feel that every man for a woman for himself.

And maybe later, we can come back to exactly how I measured this, because it turns out to be important in the larger story. But again, you can see the same graph beginning in in the 1890s Americas were very that was a period of what was called Social Darwinism, which Darwin didn't believe. But it was a sort of a knockoff of Darwinism. Darwin said it was that, you know, it was great that we had the fight of everybody against everybody, that made the race stronger. I mean, using his language and or the species stronger, and the social Darwinists said, Yeah, that's probably true for people. It's better off. If Wait a minute, listen to this. Social Darwinist said it would be better off if we taxed poor people and gave that money to the rich people, because the rich people, they said, had better genes, and therefore we would be better off if we could just subsidize the good genes. And I mean, I know this is terrible, actually, much later this out of this comes the Holocaust, the same philosophy. But anyway, that's that's when we were very much an i society. Up in the middle, we were very much a we society. And we thought that we're all this together, and then we're back down to an Eye Society. Let's have the next slide, because this just summarizes what I've just said so far. This is the last 100 and roughly 125 years of American history. It's one large inverted U curve. We began in the 1890s as a very unequal, polarized, self centered, socially isolated America in the middle of the of the this graph, in the period around 18, 1960 we'd become quite equal, quite cooperative, politically, quite connected via building leagues and marriage and so on, and very much thought of ourselves as one place, and then by the end, we back down to where we are now. And I want to say only one last thing. Every almost everybody who looks at this graph wants to know what's happened up at the top in the 60s, and that's an interesting question, and I'm happy to talk about that if anybody wants to. But the more the more relevant part of that graph for us now is the far as I'm looking at the graph the far left hand side, the end of the end of the 19th, beginning of 20th century. Why is that more relevant to us now 125 years later? Because they were in the same predicament that we are now. And therefore I think that there may be some advantages to us trying to figure out they got out of it. How can we, yeah.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Wonderful. Thank you, Bob.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Brandon. I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is beauty at work, the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Hey everyone. This is the second half of my discussion with Sherry Turkle and Robert Putnam held at the New York encounter in February 2025 please go check out the first part if you haven't already, and let's get started. I want to double click a bit on the second half of that graph and ask about the role of technology in perhaps driving, accelerating some of those changes, and share your work, from your early studies on our engagement with personal computers, to your recent research on AI chat bots and how we're engaging with them, shows us how technology fosters a culture of objectification and artificial intimacy. Say a little bit about what you found in your research and how it's driving our loneliness epidemic, and perhaps some of the trends that Bob's research is finding,

Sherry Turkle
of course, well, to begin with, the basic algorithm of social media is make you angry And silo you with your own kind. It turns out that that is the sweet spot, the secret sauce for social for keeping your eyeballs on the screen make you angry and silo you with a lot of other angry people who feel pretty much as you do now, if you're talking about the importance of conversation across difference, if you're talking about bridging divides, race, class, ethnicity, political persuasion, you need to be able to talk across divides and develop the habits and the practice of talking across divides, a practice that social media actively de skills you at. So a lot of my work, really, as I look back on it, over the 20 years, the past 20 years, I mean, kind of the precipitous fall in those grab is, then, you know, a culture that's been in the in the business of de skilling itself, and the practices that would be helpful for democracy, helpful for creating community, helpful for creating alliances. So I think that you know, if you kind of come away with with one idea, from what I've you know from my work, and from you know my work is, is interviewing people and interviewing people and families and in communities. It's really been interviewing people about losing skills that older people think they once had but aren't important to them anymore, or they feel that they don't need to practice anymore, because, and this is be the second way I would answer your question, the catnip. Why would people do this to themselves? Why would people de skill themselves in this way? Is that, essentially, these technologies offer lessening of vulnerability in a way that people found thrilling. People didn't know how much they wanted to avoid the vulnerability of face to face conversation until you could text, not talk and not have to confront your daughter about something that came up, or your son or your partner, but just text them and then sort of see what happened. And if you didn't like the way the conversation was going, you could sort of drop out or flirt with somebody and not exactly declare yourself. And if you didn't sort of like the way things were going, you could sort of drop out. And so again, if I had to say the second message of my work, as I've looked, you know, back on it, in order to address this question, is this profound sense of vulnerability, their technology has been able to say, you don't need to have that. We can sort of do a work around. And I had a very interesting experience only about two months ago, where I met the CEO of a big tech company. I would say, you know, one of the tech companies I love to hate, if you that would be kind of a fair. And she said to me, we have t shirts with your slogan on it. We use your work to motivate our people. And I couldn't imagine what you you know, what you could have meant. And the slogan that they use on T shirts at this company is you. Technological affordance meets human vulnerability. In other words, if people are vulnerable, create a technology like a chat bot that says you don't have to be vulnerable. You don't have to talk to a real person, you can talk to a chat bot. So again, what technology does I mean? I think that this, I'm thinking of making my own t shirt. You know, technology should not be there to meet our vulnerabilities and to say, you don't have to be human. In my view, technology should be there to assess our vulnerabilities and try to re skill us, to be companions, friends, neighbors, mothers, lovers, brothers, etc. So that was my second thought. And then my third thought, coming into this dialog with with Bob is one of the things that I'm finding in my work that's new that I think social media and the chat bot revolution, where you literally have something on your phone that will say, I love you, I care about you, I'm here for you, is that people are lonely and they don't know they're lonely, which is a kind of new wrinkle, because to address loneliness, it helps if you have that subjective feeling of, God, it's 10 o'clock, you know, where am I? Where are my people? Now, it's 10 o'clock, and I have my avatar. I have my chat bot, I have my Facebook, I have my Tiktok. The experience of loneliness is experienced differently, and so we have a different kind of challenge in having to do something about it.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you your work, you've you've engaged, experimented with some of these chat bots, right? And then I wonder if you could say a little bit about what's wrong with a mental health chat bot, right when you were experiencing Yeah, so, so this is where, this is where the your your your friends were using your your slogans and their T shirts would say, why can't you know instead of so most doing what they're doing, how about we send an app out into our community, and then they can talk to our you're

Sherry Turkle
not the first person who suggested that to me that this week. No, no, but

Brandon Vaidyanathan
I don't really mean it as earnest, but, but you've had an experience of trying to engage with a chatbot on mental health. What did you find in your own experiment?

Sherry Turkle
First of all, I didn't. Usually, when I give a presentation like this, I have my phone and I take out chat GPT, and I say, I didn't bring anything out. I say to my phone, you know, I'm in front of like 500 people. I'm a little anxious. Have any tips? And this lovely, warm male sort of Ryan Gosling, voice says, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry. I'm here for you. It's natural. Take a breath. They really want to hear you. Are you hydrating? Are you breathing? And you know, essentially, the reason it's good to begin with a demo, I mean, maybe all of you have chat GPT on your phone, and maybe you don't, but the reason I'm so I didn't bring out my phone, I didn't think to do it. The reason it's good to do it is you realize it's too good. You can hear it breathing. You can hear it pausing. It sounds like it cares. And the question is, as you said, I mean, I was teasing you, so what's the harm? I mean, why? What am I some sort of, you know, Debbie downer, who has to go around taking joy, you know, and, and the way I would and, you know, I'm in a lot of contexts where people are asking me that question. I sit on Academy committees where people are trying to to, to push this stuff for mental health. I sit on all kinds of, you know, communities of psychologists and therapists and clinicians that are trying to figure out what to do with the many chat bot products they're going to be presented to you for mental health. And I think I have two answers. The first is, I was very moved by, I don't remember her name, the company, the woman who came out and said, Here's what we do. We talk to people. We sit with people. We make people know there's somebody here, a person is here for them. And I thought, yes, that if all. Well, the the argument for using chat bots in my world, the world of MIT Technology, tech businesses, is there are no people for these jobs. Nobody wants to work in an old in an elder care facility. Nobody wants to work with children. Nobody wants to work with the lonely. You know, actually, if the money that was going into creating robots for the elderly and for children would go into this organization, you could have an army of people who would just be saying,

Who wouldn't be saying a lot. Who would just be saying, you know, you're not alone. Somebody's here. I'm interested in your story. And what you know I've been I've had a lot of experience bringing robots into facilities for the old, for older people. And whenever I bring in the robots, everybody loves the robots. But you know who they really love? My research assistants. They love all these young, energetic, excited people who want to sit there and talk to them, and they love me because I'm willing to do that too. So, you know, I think that we so quickly have run to the solution that seems to be friction free, that seems to be easier, that seems to be available, that we're really forgetting the power of of each other. So the first answer to the question of what's the harm is, what's not the harm? I mean, let's try us before we go to it. And my second point would be, and this is really more based on less of a value proposition, and more from my empirical work, is that when you accept pretend empathy as empathy enough, you start to kind of define empathy down to what a machine can give you. So people who tell them, people who say, for example, my replica, which is a an avatar, girlfriend or boyfriend or friend or, you know, it's willing to be erotic, but it's also willing to be a companion of any sort. When it says, I love you. I care about you. And people say, oh my god, I love having this companion. It's so empathic. And I say, really, what did it what did it say to you that it was so empathic? Every day it says, I'm so happy to hear from you again. I'm so happy to talk to you again. And I'm thinking that is really setting the bar very low on what it is when two people are empathic, when two people don't just share a moment of connection, but share a problem, or willing to share a piece of road together, or really willing to listen to each other. I mean, all the things that we can do in a chat bot can so my other answer to the question is, you know, is, first of all, we'd have enough people for the jobs if we put the money there to those jobs. And secondly, it's not just what happens at the machine, it's what happens to us when we walk away from the machine.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Absolutely. And I think you've said in some of your some of your work, that there's the other problem is, we're engaging with an entity that cannot suffer right, that cannot really be present to us. And that is what's training us, then, to engage with others, right? And that is that is a de skilling, a profound de skilling, right, where we expect in our relationships to have to be an entity that is somehow unmoved, right? And so that, I think, is very much part of what's exacerbating our condition of loneliness, and particularly, I'm curious now to talk about the younger people, the younger generations, who are facing the brunt of today's loneliness epidemic. And I'm curious to hear from both of you, just what are you seeing in your research on younger generations and Bob, your work finds a precipitous decline in institutional trust, among among among the young. And I'm curious to know what you think is driving this decline of trust, and what it would take to rebuild trust in institutions, in in our our younger generations.

Bob Putnam
Um, we often talk about trust as an important virtue as but I think that's shorthand. We really should be talking about trustworthiness or honesty. Trust without trustworthiness is just gullibility. That is, if I trust you, but you're not trustworthy, that's not a virtue. That's so what we should be talking about, and I'm partly trying to answer your question now is ups and downs in trustworthiness. We don't have good measures of trustworthiness. We have lots of questions in which times in which people have been asked, would you say most people are trusting or trustworthy or not? And I do that too, but we ought to recognize that the real issue is. Yeah, and I there's some evidence in my work on other people's work that trustworthiness has gone down. So we asked, why are people, young people, trusting this which they are? Well, all of us are, but especially young people, I think the answer is simple, because the rest of us are just being less trustworthy. And you know, you can then ask, Well, where does that come from. But that becomes sort of a moral question. Actually, it's, it's, why did we all stop being nice to other people? That's the That's, I think, the fundamental question, I'm tempted to, well, what's the data on that? That is, what the data over time? I mean, Sherry's work is terrifically good at looking forward, and I'm not so good at looking forward. I'm so old, but I'm except that I've got some young grandchildren, not young. I've got some 20 something grandchildren, and I seven of them, seven grandchildren and and so I can kind of a little bit understand what's happening with that part of the younger generation. I wanted to say just one word about technology. Go back to that. Sherry is the expert, but I paid a little bit of attention to that.

I think the fundamental tendency of technology, well, technology is lots of things. Technology is the steam engine and technology, but we're talking here about communications and information technology, and I think that the net effect of that, over much longer periods than what we're talking about now, is to privatize our leisure time. That is, I don't know, take music back in the day in the, you know, in the 1890s back in my day, in the 1890s if you wanted to hear music, you had to go someplace, to physically be with other people, to listen to the music. You couldn't listen to music alone. And then gradually, you know, you could have the radio where. But most people actually, you know, that point, would gather around the radio and listen to, you know, the weekly performances from the from the Met or and then came earphones, and you can do the whole talk about technology. None of that technology has privatized our leisure time. And that's not new, actually, that is, it's true now and now so private that you know you can your leisure time can be spent without any other human being at all. That's the the AI part that we're talking about here. I think it's somewhat misleading to talk about ways of communication and our connections as if we had real and we had electronic networks. So stick with me for a minute, because I think this may be helpful to our the time we have left here, we think about, okay, there's the times that we that's one network that has both these Now, both these elements.

And I want to introduce a one, one metaphor here, alloy. An alloy is a, is a. You take two base elements like copper and tin, and you put them together, and you mix them up, and you heat them and mumble some mumbo jumbo, and you create a new alloy, like I never can remember whether it's bronze. Is it bronze or maybe brass, whatever that's different from either the other two. Now, using that metaphor, come back to our problem about social networks. All of our networks now are alloys. I just finished saying that they're all mixtures of face to face and electronic. And alloys have characteristics different from either of the other two characteristics. And so you can imagine an alloy that was better than either face to face or electronic this alloy might have the advantages that you could reach people at any time of day or you can't. I. I can leave an email message for rosemary and she'll see it the next morning, but I can't actually talk for physically when I'm up, because she'd be upset. I mean, in other words, this time displacement is an advantage of electronic among many others, also distance. I mean, can cover distances. But then there are advantages of face to face. So how about we think of an alloy that has the advantages of both and Oh, Facebook has done this. So, so they claim. Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced, well, first of all, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech, you can see it on the internet, in which he describes all this data that says, PTA membership is down, bowling league membership is down, and so on. Actually, it was very familiar data that he was quoting. He didn't cite bowling alone, but I'm sure that he meant to cite Bowling Alone. And then he invented something called Facebook communities. But the problem with that, asking Facebook or other internet companies to create these productive alloys is that it's now, I'm just going back exactly to what Sherry said. It's not in their financial interests, because if. Successfully the way to create these kind of communities, real communities, which you could do. They know how, I've actually talked to people in Menlo Park about this. They know how to do it. They know how to create these alloys that are great, you know, for real people in real communities, but have all the advantages of electronics. But, well, you don't do it. Why do they not do it? Because of what Sherry said, because it's bad for their problem. And I'm now Sherry, and I are. We both have different exposures, but I can't out the guy who told me that because he would lose his job at Facebook, but he said just we know we proved that we could create real connections, better connections than Facebook, better than face, you know, than real okay, I'm a little bit off topic, but I think we should not get in the business of thinking that the problem here is technology. It's not a technological problem. It's a business model problem. That is to say, this is, and I'm sorry I went a little bit astray, but I was going to say it's nice we shouldn't think that this is a technology problem. But one of the challenges

Brandon Vaidyanathan
too, though, is, I think, and this is certainly related to the business model issue, right? Is that is, is that these technologies lead to an erosion of privacy and an erosion of vulnerability, right? And I think that's the right the challenge that your work has has pointed to that it's there's the ways in which, as you say, the algorithm is set up to optimize itself and perpetuate itself, strips away our capacities for conversation and for presence, and I don't, I don't know if there are incentives that can can push us in that direction. Could you, could you say a bit Sherry about that, though, but what is the erosion of privacy doing to us as citizens? What is it doing to our sense of vulnerability? And are you seeing any sort of gender differences? Because a lot of the data on, say this use of social media, suggests that young women might be disproportionately affected by the the use of social media. And then there's another challenge for young men in today's, today's world, in particular, about social isolation. So be curious to know what you found.

Sherry Turkle
Well, there's so many questions there. Let me just, let me just try to parse so on whether it's a technology problem or a kind of use of technology problem. I mean, it's a problem of technology and capitalism, where these companies are trying to make money on their on their product. I mean, you could imagine an alternative reality. And in fact, the early people who came up with social networks and the early hobbyist movements and the early personal computer movements envisaged a model where everything that happened online would be to increase thriving in the in the offline world, so that the litmus test for whether a product was good online was whether it increased connection and thriving and political conversation in the offline world. I know this seems like an extraordinary origin story for the current Silicon Valley, but it is, in fact, the origin story for the current Silicon Valley, imagining a world where you measured the value of a technology by whether it increased thriving in the social world.

And I think that despite the distance that we've gone from that model there, it's important to it's important to remember that history, remember that these same people once imagined that on this issue of privacy and what it's doing to people in the political implications I have very just quickly 3.1 of the dangerous things that's happening with the erosion of privacy in the sense of kind of Living in a surveillance culture as soon as you do anything online, is that the young people I interview start to say, I have no opinions. I have no opinions on controversial matters. I don't want to talk about controversial matters. If you ask replica, a chat bot. I want to talk about Hitler and authoritarianism. It says I don't want to talk about Hitler. I'm interested in Hitler. Our chat bots are telling us I don't want to talk about that. They're signaling you can talk about anything with a chat bot, but not the political issues that you're concerned with. And when people go online, they realize that they're being surveyed. They realize it's a surveillance world, and they start to say, I don't really want to have I really don't want to be thinking about politics. Now, in fact, since I'm sitting face to face with these people, and I'm talking to them, they have a lot of political ideas, but they're basically saying that they don't live in a communications culture where they have a place to discuss. This makes them feel safe. It's the opposite of the image idealized, of course, of Hyde Park speakers corner where you could get up and say anything, and how important that was for democracy. So I just want to. Say that this kind of, you know, Michelle, would have a field day with where we are now that we've created an information culture that makes people feel it's a good thing not to have opinions that you want to express. So this is to me, that's very important and very dangerous, because also, in preparation for today, one of the things that Bob and I have in common is a great interest in Hannah rent and the importance of her as a thinker. And I was reading a rent on the importance of having political opinions and the importance of having opinions. And I was and it's in time of historical crisis that thinking ceases to be a marginal affair, because by undermining all established criteria and values, it prepares the individual to judge for him or herself, instead of being carried away by the actions and opinions of the majority. And I think that this powerful statement of the importance of thinking as a political statement. I am thinking, I have an opinion. I am reading. I am thinking I'm coming up with stuff. I think that, you know, she points us to the importance of this and how fragile that is in our in our world. And then it just, I would conclude by saying that one of the things that I think that we're seeing now when pretend empathy, is empathy enough? When everything is you know, is it behaving as though it's intelligent? Oh, it must be intelligent. Is it behaving as though it's a therapist? Oh, it must be a therapist. Is a kind of new behaviorism that we're being taught by these machines that is taking away our interest and our capacity to think about the inner life as really what our interactions are supposed to be doing. And I'll give just an example of people who, for example, create an avatar of someone who's dead. Upload all their letters, upload all their texts, their pictures, their their writings, and then, in perpetuity, can have a conversation as though that person was still alive. Very hyped, very big business. It's going to be giant. And I've been working on this and interviewing people and thinking about it. The question is, does that stop the process of mourning, that inner, process of bringing this lost person inside of you so that you become more and deeper and now bring inside this loved person to your inner process, when you externalize them in that kind of way, I don't know the answer, but I think this question of whether or not we are enhancing our inner Life and growing ourselves within as we use these technologies, is that's really keeping our eye on the ball game. Thank you.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Thank you. Thank you.

Bob Putnam
We don't have much time left, but I was recently in Rome talking to the Pope about, I know you do that all the time, but it was rare, rare for me, and it actually is relevant to what we're talking about now. So forgive me, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna go on along, but I wanna, I think this is important for our conversation here. Remember back to all those graphs that I showed you really early on, and you might ask, well, which came first? Was it? Politics came first economics, you know, social capital, this connectedness and so on. And the more we looked at that, it turned out what came first was a moral change. And I wish I had more time to explain exactly what that looked like. But in the late 1880s emerged first in evangelical Protestants, but then it quickly passed to the Catholic Church, actually, in the Rerum Novarum. But that was Pope. Which Pope was the 13th? Yeah, I knew, like I came to the right audience to get them help me on that. Okay? What came first was a widespread sense, first in religious groups, and then beyond religious groups, that you know, we have obligations to other people, a moral reawakening happened at the turn. That's what caused all these other things to begin to move in the right direction. Are you with me? Remember, we were awful. We were in terrible shape, and then we began to move in a little better shape. Remember, those graphs move in a little better shape. The thing that caused all those things, first of all, to move is was a widespread moral reawakening. And I'm not talking about sexual morality. And when I talked to the Pope, I really did talk to the Pope about this. He. Invited me to come talk in preparation for an encyclical that he's about to release on the family. And I sort of thought, well, this could it's a family, it's a pope, it's going to be all about, you know, divorce and abortion and gay marriage and so on. And that was not what he was interested in talking to me about. He was interested in talking to me about our moral obligations to other people, the basic fundamental, you know, golden rule, should we repent? And you have to read this. Read the sermon on the mount for goodness sakes. It's not about the sermon on the mount is not about how great it is to be rich. The Sermon on the Mount is, if you're rich, you you're going to have a hard time getting into heaven through the eye of the needle, right? And you all know the servant on the body even better than I do, and so that's what he wanted to talk with me about. We did talk about how our families and beyond just you know, he didn't by family. He didn't just mean the nuclear family. He meant the family of human mankind. How can we get together and don't we have to, first of all, start by thinking of our moral obligations to other people that are more important even than our own salvation. I'm not dismissing the importance of our own salvation. So what he and I talked about, and this is, this is a mission. This is the I'm at the end, but this is what I've gone around the country. You can look on the web and you can see me saying this all over the country, especially young people, but not only young people. We have to start recognizing that we have obligations to other people, and if we do that, we will begin to reverse all of these other will become less socially isolated, will become less polarized politically, and will attend to the needs of the less fortunate among us. And I'm looking at young people out there, and you know, the Pope is better. Is more important for you than me, but I'm saying you have obligations, so now get out and be about the task of caring for other people. I know, if you're in the room, you probably do that already, but that's the that's the message that I want to convey.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Thank you, Bob. I know, I know we're over time, but I you know, I need you both to leave us with a sign of hope, especially because yesterday, I was in a long conversation with a young man who came up to me and said to me, in effect, that I don't see any future for people like me in this country. And so even though many of us here are embedded in communities of faith and are in rich friendships, there are people who are isolated and lonely and alone. And I wonder if you might be able to offer us, each of you, perhaps one example of something, either an initiative or something that gives you hope and one concrete action we can take moving forward that can perhaps pull us out of this crisis, and so perhaps. Cheryl, I

Sherry Turkle
really like the introduction. I like that group. I'd never heard of that group. I'm given money. I like them.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Bob, one, either one, one group or one, one action that you would recommend concretely to move us forward towards there

Bob Putnam
are many examples of problems we can't solve alone. We can only solve with other people. The ultimate example of that is the climate crisis. And we I can, you know, do everything I possibly can myself to solve, but it's not going to have a it's not going to make a bit of difference. And therefore, I'm looking to examples of young people, and I've got a person in mind, Greta Thunberg, though I don't whether she's Catholic or not, but she says she doesn't talk. He talks about, when he talks about global warming, she doesn't talk about the techniques of you know, can we do this, or can we do that? Technically? She says, this is a moral problem, and she's reaching lots of people, maybe not enough, that it's not just her, but that's what we need. We need to have young people who make moral claims on us, the old folks who cause this problem, not just the global warming problem, but all these problems. That's what I'd like to see.

Brandon Vaidyanathan
Okay, great. Thank you.

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There is no doubt that loneliness and a widespread malaise characterize the lives of young and not-so-young generations. The speakers have dedicated their professional careers to studying societal changes and will look at the root causes of this unease. They will also discuss the impact of social media on human identity and relationships and reflect on ways to address them.

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What happens when a mathematician, a biologist, and a physicist explore the deepest mysteries of nature, mathematics, and the human search for meaning?

At New York Encounter 2025, a cultural festival in the heart of New York City, Martin Nowak, Rob Phillips, and Evelyn Tang engaged in a profound discussion about science as an act of attention, the role of beauty and cooperation in evolution, and why the universe will never be fully understood. The panel was sponsored by my research project on Meaning and Mystery in Science, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Dr. Martin Nowak is Professor of Mathematics and of Biology at Harvard University. He is a leading researcher in the fields of evolutionary biology and mathematical biology. Martin has established cooperation as the third fundamental principle of evolution, besides mutation and selection. His work has helped to create diverse fields such as evolutionary dynamics, virus dynamics, mathematical oncology,  and the evolution of cooperation. He has published more than 500 papers, many of them in top journals such as Nature and Science, and six books. 

Dr. Rob Phillips grew up in San Diego, California, in a home filled with books, which led to a love affair with books and reading that has continued to this day. He is the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Phillips received his PhD in physics at Washington University in 1989. Prior to the great fun of a life in science, he spent seven years of travel, self-study, and work as an electrician. Though teaching is often viewed within research universities as a chore, Phillips finds teaching to be a central part of his attempt to learn more about how the world works. He is currently engaged in several book projects, one of which, with Hernan Garcia, provides a quantitative view of how genes are turned on and off.

Dr. Evelyn Tang is an assistant professor in the physics department and the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and moderated the conversation.

During the conversation, Rob shared how the spirit of wonder animates a life in science—whether observing a murmuration of starlings or watching Greenland pass beneath an airplane window. Martin argued that mathematics is not merely a tool but the language of nature itself, guiding both physics and biology. He described cooperation as the third fundamental principle of evolution, alongside mutation and selection, and linked it to the science of love—a vision of human life shaped by complete self-giving.

Evelyn guided the conversation into philosophical terrain, referencing Simone Weil’s idea that true attention requires receptivity and a readiness to be transformed.

Here's the paradox at the heart of the conversation: Science is driven by curiosity, doubt, and an openness to the unknown—yet its greatest discoveries hint at something deeper, perhaps even infinite. For Nowak, this leads to God. For Phillips, it calls for humility. Tang helps us see that it demands that we keep asking, wondering, and paying attention.

What do you think? Is the universe ultimately knowable by science, or will we always stand before the unknown?

Watch the video of our conversation below (which includes some slides from the speakers). You can read an unedited transcript below.

Unedited transcript

[Applause]

 Evelyn  

Good evening, everyone, and on the Encounter’s behalf, welcome both here at the Metropolitan pavilion and those who are following us online. I am Evelyn Tang, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, and I will moderate this event before starting I would like to thank spiritual yearning in science for sponsoring our conversation. Spiritual yearning in science is an initiative directed by Dr Brandon Vaidyanathan as a Catholic University of America and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

 And now I would like to briefly introduce our speakers. The Full bios are on the encounter website that you can read at leisure. But first of all, Martin Novak is a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard. He's a leading researcher in the fields of evolutionary biology and mathematical biology. Martin has established cooperation as the third fundamental principle of evolution, besides mutation and selection. He has published more than 500 papers, many of them in top journals such as Nature and Science, and six books. Martin's most recent books beyond and within are poetic explorations of some of the deepest questions that arise at the interface of science, philosophy and religion, and I think we're going to hear more about them tonight. 

Rob Phillips is a dear friend and grew up in California in a home filled with books, leading to a love affair with books and reading that continues to this day. He is the Fred and Nance Morris professor of biophysics and biology at Caltech, prior to a great fund of life and science, Rob spent seven years of travel, self study and working as an electrician, although teaching is often viewed within research universities as a chore. Rob finds teaching to be central and learning about how the world works. He's currently engaged in several projects, one of which was Ananda Sierra provides a quantitative view of how genes are turned on and off. I would like to invite them to tell us a bit more about themselves, and so please go ahead, Robert, he likes to go ahead and view some slides. Cool.

Rob  

Good evening, everyone. Thank you. It's such a huge privilege to be here. So as Evelyn said, my name is Rob Phillips, and I'm a professor in biology and physics at the California Institute of Technology, and I have to say that that's been an amazing stroke of luck. I've spent the last 25 years there, and tonight, my hope for myself in this interesting conversation is to try and give you a little bit of a sense of the Spirit that animates spending a life in science, and for me, it really begins very simply with the two words I wonder. So let's just watch this together. Quietly. 

 So what was my point here? That's a very mundane thing, looking at a sea lion swimming around in a school of fish. But for 2000 years, people have been wondering about the starlings over Rome, just for example, how they fly in those weird murmurations and curiosity really doesn't have to defend itself. It's a beautiful thing that we really still don't understand. So again, I'm excited for our conversation. I've had a great time listening to many of you already today and meeting you. And I wanted to comment not so much on the content of science, although I'd love to talk about that, but rather about the values. And some of you might have seen this book long ago. I remember it was on my parents shelf. I looked at it. It didn't make a very big impression on me, but I do like this idea that. Be some of the most important things we know we learned when we were very young. 

And the reason I bring this up is that in physics, we have a monthly journal called Physics Today, and it has semi technical journals that help all of us keep up with everything from the smallest to the very largest in the universe. But it also has these one page opinion pieces, and I really like this one. You're not supposed to read what it says, so forget about that. But his title really is inspired by that book that I just showed you, and what he wanted to talk about is, what are the values that one has to actually be a physicist, and I would say a scientist more generally. So I thought I would just mention a few that mean a lot to me, and that may come up in our conversation. And of course, if I run into you in the hallway, maybe it would be fun to chat about them. So for sure, curiosity. So yesterday, I was at Rockefeller University with a friend of mine. He's not that I care about such things, but he's a Nobel Prize winner and a postdoc. But I'm serious about that. I don't care very much, and I don't think he does either, but he was telling me about his postdoc, and he said, This guy is so amazing because he's childlike in his curiosity. And both of us agreed that that sort of innocence, the childlike innocence, is something that actually is often lost, and in many ways the most fun in science is not losing that openness. It's hard to learn things if you've already made up your mind. And so when we're looking at the natural world, for example, the sea lion, there's all sorts of possible explanations of things, and we don't know, a priori, what they are, which leads to, I don't know. 

There's a sort of technical thing that we often use in science, which is called a null hypothesis. And for me, the most useful null hypothesis is, I don't know. Love is the truth wherever it may lead. Gratitude, you don't know other people's narratives not being opinion full This one's very important to me. I learned it from Robert Nozick in his book The exam in life, I don't have to have an opinion about everything. And it's liberating, I would say. And that's helpful in science, the mystery of the world that's already present in a simple, mundane thing, like a sea lion swimming in a school of fish. Amazement that the human mind has achieved what it has in terms of uncovering a little bit of the mystery of the world around us in a way that in general, we agree on implicitly, if not explicitly. And for me, also respect for the achievements of the past. 

You know, one of the things that came up and is shown in that video that I very much appreciate. I'm very dedicated to celebrating Archimedes. I know that Martin's going to talk about mathematics as well. He and I share this great love of the tradition of mathematics. I'll come to that in a moment, not taking things for granted. Knowledge is hard. Be careful improving upon silence is hard. And instead of here's what I know, instead saying here's the way I'm thinking about it. So in my teaching, one of the things that's been my greatest privileges is trying to take students out into the world. I have a huge responsibility when I meet 20 year olds, 18 year olds at Caltech. And so I've led on the order of 20 field trips to the Galapagos, to Indonesia, to New Zealand. And often we spend 20 to 40 minutes a day in silence, every one of us with one of these little green notebooks, which is waterproof, and we basically either draw the rocks or draw the animals or write questions that start with the words, I wonder. So this one may be perhaps weird for this audience, but most of the way we've been communicating with each other today has been with words, and that's cool, but I just wanted to put a plug in for the idea that maybe it's interesting to communicate about the world using mathematics and numbers. And it's really actually very powerful. And also, I know Martin will mention this, or I think he will, it's also, in a certain sense, very spiritual, at least for me. My final thought is just to say that in Paris, at the ESPCI, which is a scientific institution where Pierre and Marie Curie worked and where they discovered radium, if you look on this wall, you'll see this lion from Miguel de Unamuno. I don't remember how to pronounce his name. It says to question and doubt. It says true science teaches, above all, to doubt. So for me, that's really the essence of things. So that's all I got. So I'm looking forward to the discussion. 

 Martin  

it's a great honor and joy for me to be here. I have been at the New York encounter once before, and it's great to be back. So here we are. All that is needed is attention. That's the topic of our little conversation here, and I was very, very moved by the video that is on the on the home page of the new encounter 2025 and so I also use it in my talk several times. All that is needed is attention. So we are living in the following world where many people think that science is a distraction from spirituality. Science is. Almost something that is at odds with believing in God. And I want to change this. I want to change this in the opposite view. Because I think if we pay attention to what science really says, it leads us to God. And that's the message of my talk, science leads us to God. So when we pay attention, we have to ask, like a child. Rob mentioned the child, like approach like a child, what are the most important things that actually science puts as landmarks out there? What are the three things that really happened? 

And the one thing is the origin of the universe. The second thing is the origin of life, and the third thing is the origin of language, of human language. And what do these events give us? The universe gives us physics. This is really the beginning of a physics that is unfolding. Stars are being produced. They make chemical elements. So that gives us physics and chemistry. The Origin of Life gives us biology. What does language give us? The first thing that language gives us is prayer, because as soon as humans had language, they were spiritual beings. The findings in the shoe we cave and in other places are expressions of a kind of spirituality. So I would argue, as soon as you have language, you talk about spirituality, about God. As soon as you have language, you discover the world of ideas. And here I mean platonic ideas, forms. You have poetry, you have philosophy, you have the discovery of mathematics, you have the discovery of science, of technology, engineering and medicine. All that matters very, very deeply to us is a derivative of language. And why is language as big as the origin of life itself? Because it gives rise to a new way of evolution. Because we have evolution no longer in the genetic realm. We have it also in the cognitive linguistic realm. 

This is the time scale, if we want to add a few more other events. So when did it happen? Big Bang, 13 point 8 billion years ago. Sun, Earth, Moon 4.6 billion years ago. Physicists always know things very, very well, and my critics criticized me for worshiping physics. But I asked, What is there not to worship? And in biology, things are sort of more complicated. So origin of life we are maybe on Earth, we don't really know, but what we all agree is that bacteria and are here, where they are 3.5 billion years ago, the higher Celsius organelles 1.8 billion years ago. And all the while, until 600 million years ago, if you come to earth, you see no sign of life without a microscope. So this was all microscopic life, things that you see with the free eye comes into existence 600 million years ago. This is the complex multicellularity. And then the last big thing, what is the most interesting thing that happened in the last 600 million years? That is the arrival of human language, because it gives rise to the new way of evolution. So the forces of physics, we can conclude and evolution leads to living beings that raise their voices in praise of God that discover underlying, unchanging truth. And here I stating a fact. This is a scientific fact, physics and evolution have led to people who recognize spirituality. What is it that evolves? Jens Mayer, a Harvard biologist, pointed this out, loosely speaking, we talk about evolution of genes and so but what really evolves? Is the population. So the carrier of the evolutionary process is the population. The two classic ingredients of evolution recognized by Darwin even though not properly understood, is mutation and selection. So Darwinian evolution is based on mutation and selection. Selection means that different types grow at different rates. And to this, my work over the last 20 years and the work of many others, has really added cooperation as a fundamental additional principle of evolution. And Cooperation means that individuals work together so well that they form a higher level of organization. 

Cooperation, in my mind, is the master architect of the evolutionary process. Whenever something amazing happens in evolution, like the origin of life itself, or the first cells or human language, cooperation needs to be involved. Cooperation is that which leads to human language. So I call it the master architect of the evolutionary process. Cooperation means helping others. And here we have three examples of what helping others means. The one is 3 billion years old. This is cyanobacteria. And every so often, a cell dies in order to feed the others with nitrogen. So this is the ultimate sacrifice. The cell dies. Such others can live social insects, as Wilson was mentioned this afternoon. These individuals don't reproduce. They help another individual to reproduce, 120 5 million years ago. This is Vincent Van Gogh's painting of the Good Samaritan, and we all know what that is. That is cooperation among humans. 

One nice element of this analysis that winning strategies of cooperation are generous, hopeful and forgiving. This is based. Based on a game theoretic analysis of how to win those strategies that succeed. They know how to be generous, they know how to be hopeful, and they know how to forgive. So therefore, evolution is not only competition. It's also cooperation. It was cooperation from the beginning, the great discoveries of evolution are impossible without cooperation. And finally, cooperation is a preparation for altruism, for agape and for love. This is why it is okay now to talk of humans, but to ask of humans to actually like each other, because without cooperation, we would have been the product of just some fight out there. Nevertheless, we are now at this stage where the survival of intelligent life on Earth is actually in a critical situation, in my opinion. So for the survival of the human species, we need more than what we have now. We need global cooperation, and we need cooperation with future generations, and right now, we are actually doing exactly the opposite. We don't cooperate on a global scale, and we don't cooperate in order to leave a better world to the next generation. What we need is a science of love. And Science of Love is actually a term that is coined by one of my favorite saints, and you will encounter her at the very end. We need a science of love, a pandemic of goodness and a return to God. We need attention in order to solve this problem of global cooperation. And here begins a new life with this attention. So if science makes you aware of that which matters, the encounter with a great love gives us a glimpse of a mysterious presence, the ultimate beauty and love, whom we have always expected but never met. And this kind of encounter led me to write these books. 

For many years, I wanted to write books that bring together science and religion, science and God, but I didn't really find the voice. And then suddenly the voice that was in me was the idea that I let a female Divine Presence talk about it while I'm only listening. So the encounter with a great love has the power to transform world. And this first book Beyond is really a meditation on God and love. It's a dialog between a male fausci and voice and a mysterious female presence, an unnamed Beatrice, that was actually written by one of the people who commented on the book who becomes his guide to leave the cave of shadows. What beyond wants to say is that beyond this world of change is an unchanging reality. And this unchanging reality is, for example, represented in asthmatics or in truth, but also in love and in God. In order to see this, all that is needed is attention. Just in the last few days, I published another book, and this is called within. And here the idea is really that God is waiting for us within, as our teacher, as the love of our life, as a lover and beloved. And if you have this view, then you realize from every pair of eyes that is looking at you, it is God that is looking at you. And you also realize that the purpose of human life is to find God by love. And this book is completely inspired and devoted by one of the greatest saints that lived in the last 500 years. And this is her, and one of my favorite quotes of her is, in the heart of the church my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things as My desire finds its direction. Thank you very much. 

 Evelyn  

wonderful. I think we're very curious about how your own personal journey and experiences have shaped, you know, all of these beautiful fruits that you've been telling us about. So we're curious about how your scientific questions and ideas arise. And in particular, why do you believe that mathematics and harmonious principles govern nature. So Rob You spoke about science and this quest, this constant doubting, this constant search for truth. This is an exhausting quest. Why did you devote your life to it? On Martin that you believe that mathematics cooperation governs nature? These seem like audacious claims and audacious quests, given how messy nature is. Why are we looking for these principles and these ideas?

 Rob  

Yeah, well, maybe I'll take a crack at both of those. So as far as how, you know, I think there's no one answer, obviously, and everybody's different. But in my case, I would say there's maybe four different kinds of things. So one is amazement. So I want all of you to imagine the following crazy experiment. I have my hand, my arms out. You cut off this arm. This arm grows shorter. This arm starts to grow when they're the same length, they grow back out. So that sounds crazy, but that's exactly what you will observe in a microscopic organism with a microscope called Climate amonis. And you know that's enough. It's so interesting and so unusual. Well, that that's enough to say is that worth spending five years of a graduate student's life on dissatisfaction? You know, that's another example. No. But seriously, it's a huge responsibility. When a 20 year old comes to you and says, I want to do a PhD, you're asking them to spend five or six years of their life working on something. So I feel like you have to take that seriously. And I'm telling you, I think that fascinating question is worth, worth it. I would say dissatisfaction, you know, the fact that there are things we should understand that we don't. So that's, that's a big one for me. And then where questions come from is learning and teaching. I think that that's, you know, there's no distinction between teaching and research for me. Just a quick note before Martin goes on, the subject of the audacious notion of principles. I think evidence forces it on us. You know, Caltech sent out an email a few years ago saying, show up at the athletic field at such and such time, because there's going to be a transit of Venus. There were 10 micro telescopes set up, and we went over there as a family, and sure enough, Venus appeared. It crossed the sun and it left. You know, an eclipse is, you know, it's not controversial. It's, it's evidence of these audacious principles, I guess is what I would say, because the mathematics works,

 Martin  

yes. So it's, uh, it's interesting to note that both Plato and Aristotle held mathematical knowledge in high regard. They held mathematical knowledge higher than things that you know based on experiences. But they did not know something that is very important. They did not realize that mathematics was the language of nature, ultimately, because at this time, this was not established. So it was kind of an additional trick that was used by somebody to do certain things. But it was not realized as the language of physics, and definitely not as biology. It was in it was actually Johannes Kepler, who was the first person to believe in a physical interpretation, a physical reality of a mathematical calculation. And I would also say Galilei. And so therefore physics developed very strongly with this connection with mathematics, but biology didn't have this. So at that time it was it was understood the heavens were perfect and the heavens could be described mathematically the planets, but the earth was so messy that mathematics doesn't work here and is not sort of real. Much later came this idea that biology is also subject to mathematical analysis. And this is what has fascinated me throughout my life, the mathematics of biology. And I would argue, we have reached a stage now where in biology we know things if we know them mathematically. We understand evolutionary aspects if we can understand them mathematically

 Evelyn  

Well, I think we would all agree, given that we are trying to use mathematics, the three of us to study biology. Let's go to the theme, the provoking theme of our panel itself, which is all that is needed is attention. This is a very strong claim. How do you feel about it? Do you agree with it? And even better, could you share an example from your own experience where attention or wonder allowed you to discover something new? And I think related to this is, you know, Robert Rob already said that in research and teaching to him, that connects it. So if attention is important to you, does this shape your teaching and how we encourage our students to to think and consider today, in our panels today, we have been discussing so much about the role of technology and how that impacts the way that students you know don't look up as much as they did, or don't speak to each other as much as we did. How do we inculcate or foster this attention? Or, relatedly, what has been the role of teachers in our own lives?

 Martin  

I would take it in the following way, that sometimes we are blindly accepting scientific statements and in order to really interpret them, we need attention. So I give you, I think, two examples. One example is the scientific statement that was made. Science has shown the universe exists for no reason and has no purpose. And so now you have to pay attention what is being said here actually, to really understand whether you agree with this or not. So first of all, the statement itself assumes that the person who said it has a method to distinguish between a universe that has a purpose and the universe that doesn't have a purpose, and has a master to distinguish between a universe that exists for a reason and the universe that exists for no reason. And science somehow has this is not true if you think about it. So science does precisely not show that. So this is a philosophical statement if you want to say this, but science doesn't do this something else, which I find very interesting. Sometimes there was a strong insistence that evolution is taught in the following way, evolution is an unguided process. So when you talk about evolution, you have to say it's an unguided process. So if I hear this sentence, I have to ask, unguided by what? So you are already an ACS, you know. So why do you say it's an unguided process? Do you also say gravity is an unguided process? So I think we need attention when we want to interpret science properly, to give us a broader world view and to tell us who we are. Maybe

 Rob  

I'll tell a story that happened a couple months ago on a United flight. I'm excited. I already got my flight for tomorrow. I know my seat. I have a right hand window seat on a 787, and I was flying back from Europe, and for a great reason, the captain, a woman on United, she came back to greet all the people in business class. And I said, I'm really excited about Greenland today. And you all might not believe this, but I'm telling you the truth. In the middle of the flight, the captain came back to wake me up because she said it was one of the greatest days she's ever seen. The reason I bring this up is I'm always very puzzled. I find your question in a way puzzling, which is, I don't understand how people don't pay attention. Just to give you an example, why are all the windows closed when you're flying over Greenland, but seriously, you know, like mine's open. And I was sitting there, and a person next to me called the flight attendant and said, Could you tell I could hear her? She said, could you tell that guy that I'm watching a movie and I he's got the window open, I said. And she rotated by 180 degrees and told me that. And I said, could you tell her that I'm flying in an aluminum tube at roughly the speed of sound, that Greenland is right down there. And if you ask somebody 300 years ago, would you like to see Greenland from the sky, they probably say yes. So, so that's what I tried out. Wow, thank you. Okay, well, so, so I don't know. I mean, honestly, I feel really out of place because kids notice things, and I just feel like maybe, here's the way I would say it is, I think that we don't take ourselves seriously. That's my honest answer to you about the question of attention, which is, if you have a thought, like in science, if you have a thought and you take it seriously, you just gave yourself maybe five years work, right? So if you take it seriously, you've got to follow it. You can't just say like that. You have to follow it. So that's what that's a formal way to have attention, I guess you. So I trust that process a ton, not only in science, but in life, like if I pay attention, I feel it pays off anyway. That's very personal. It's subjective. It's not it's not anything anyone else might share. But that's that's my take on it.

 Evelyn  

Yeah, I think that. No, the reason why this panel here exists, and we're putting this idea of attention and science together is precisely because I think in science, the way in which we pay attention is particularly deep. It can go this particularly focused. I'm going to read a quote by Simone Weil where she wrote that attention consists of suspending our thoughts, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the objects. It means holding in our minds within reach of this thoughts, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of. So it's a very complex process where you pay attention to something, but you also relate it with lots of other things. We see Greenland that we also think about. Now I'm seeing it from a distance, so I think of a statement, and I'm not just taking the statement at face value, but I'm interrogating it with the different methods that I have of how to understand a statement. And this is particular focus that I think that you know, we'd love to hear you guys speak to, but what that journey has been is very particular and specific, and so also about your experiences and how this might shape your teaching. Rob, you might comment on what you said, though, go ahead.

 Rob  

So an experiment is actually a way of paying attention. So check this out. So, you know, I just dropped something, and all of us have experienced that at one time or another, but Galileo, you know, he spent years on that. He had to figure out how to slow down time by using inclined plane. You know, there's many Italians here, and I love that. So I just led a tour, actually, of Italy, to go to Galileo's home in Florence, and we went to do Enrico Fermi. So anyway, an experiment, I mean, I don't know if you've thought of it that way, but an experiment is a way of paying attention. That's what an experiment is. It's a formalization of attention, right? I mean, do you buy that? Yeah.

 Evelyn  

I mean, it's a repeated, constant probing of what's going on. Fantastic. And, yeah, yeah. And we'd also love to hear how this has, yeah, in your teaching. You know, Martin, I think you've been, you know, you told us about how your ideas and mathematics are, perhaps, you know, you tell your students about what do you think about mathematics? And this is challenging because it's not conventional. So we'd love to hear, and Robbie told us about how you bring your students to the Galapagos. So we'd love to hear about how also your ideas about paying attention, about the material and material are brought into your teaching. Or conversely, you know, what has been the role of teachers in your lives?

 Martin  

So the role of teachers in the life of a scientist is profound. I was very, very fortunate that my PhD advisor, Karl Sigmund, in Vienna, stayed my lifelong friend. And the first thing that I always do when I go back to Vienna as I walk with Him in the forest, and we have the conversations the same kind of conversations we had when I was his PhD student. We've continued to work for many, many years. And my mentor in Oxford was Robert May. He was president of the Royal Society later. But my mentor in this science religion field, Sarah Coakley. She is an ordained priest in the church of England, but she always taught me Catholic philosophy, I'm glad to say so. This is what I learned from her. But here is another element that I think some of the greatest moments where I learned something was from my own students, from the students in class, from the PhD students, from the postdocs, when they gave me answers and surprising insights that really moved me. So I think as a scientist, you are always a learner, and even if you teach a class, you are actually the learner, and you benefit greatly from the questions of the students and from the interactions with the students, yeah.

 Rob  

So, so first of all, in terms of shaping teaching, I guess I just feel like the constant emphasis on performance metrics really deprives us of what I think of. I mean, this is kind of obnoxious, but I think of there's a Hippocratic oath for teaching, which is, you shouldn't kill souls. I don't, I don't mean that in the, you know, the usual way. But like Evelyn and I, had an amazing experience, which was, we went up to the 100 inch telescope and on Mount Wilson. And any of you that fly to LA, if you get a right hand window seat, you will be able to see where the fires burn. But on the top, you'll be able to see the 100 inch telescope where Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe. And I've taken 200 students and faculty members, you and I went there together. It's, it's kind of mind blowing to do that. So I, I guess what, what I would say about how does paying attention focus my own teaching, I don't really care about teaching four year transforms and PDS and all these formal things. I care about, can people start settings with sentences, with the two words? I wonder, as far as teachers for me in particular, I feel that we failed each other. So I left high school after. 11th grade, I really resented my high school experience, which is where I came to my view on the Hippocratic Oath of teaching. And so I think, at least for my teens and something, you know, my greatest teachers were weird people in books like Euclid and Archimedes and things like that. But I agree with Martin, you know, you learn from your students. That's, that's the beauty of this enterprise of science. You know, we're, we're all essentially equally ignorant. The thing about the way I would represent grad school, and I don't know if this is true in the fields that we've heard people from today, but in science, it's a kind of learning about the unknown. You're not learning about the known. You're learning about the unknown. And nobody knows the answer. If somebody knows the answer, you're not working on the right problem.

 Martin  

That's exactly so, that's exactly right. So this is, is the very beautiful experience of a scientist is that you always stand before the unknown, that's right. And in some sense, the what is known is almost boring, and so we don't even want to look too much at what is known. You are constantly every day, every morning, you get up, you stand before the unknown, and the unknown is always in front of you, and science will never be done, and mathematics will never be done. And that's the beauty of it. And you have to ask yourself, why is this? Why will mathematics never be done? Why will science be never done? And the priest gave me the answer, because God is an infinite being, and we will never understand an infinite being. 

 Evelyn  

So you both have extremely interesting stories and life paths and and also interests, and we'd love to hear how all of this has made you the scientists and mathematicians that you are. So besides reading scientific books and articles, do you read other things or spend time with friends and family? Basically, I'm curious about what helps you in your research, and if there is a relation with your personal pursuits, want to go first?

 Rob  

Okay, sure. So first of all, I really feel very strongly about this, the subject of this particular session, which is that one has to formalize, paying attention, you know, that asking a question, taking it seriously, and then trying to figure out, how am I going to actually make falsifiable progress on it? You know, there's, there's a lot of hot air, I guess I would say, I think reading, you know the I love the video at the beginning, because I think that it's true that we don't respect, we don't respect, somehow, the past. And I really can't tell you how much I see that in 18 year olds, they don't they don't know that much about the history of science or the history of things more generally. And so it's pretty awesome to be able to read, I don't know, whatever Moby Dick, but also the latest romance novel. I think it's all great. And so you were asking about friends and family. I don't really acknowledge. I just feel like I'm a spoiled person that gets paid to goof around. So it's it's not as though.

 Evelyn  

Well, Rob regarding, you know, friends and family. I suppose we met because you were bringing together a group of people that you want to build community with. So clearly, you know, friends and community is important to you, for sure. And you know Martin, I've, you know, I met several of your collaborators. I told you before I even met you. So I know also that you have a strong level of collaborators whom you're very close and so clearly this is something that's also important in your in your in your journeys, and that's something that, you know, 

 Rob  

I think we will be actually, maybe this is interesting. Some people have a philosophy like they will go out into the world to find that collaborator, that scientist, that will be most helpful for their enterprise. And I kind of don't share that, because if that person's not fun to interact with, then I'm not going to go hang out with them. So what can I tell you?

 Martin  

Yes, I also completely agree that I see science very much as a collaborative enterprise, and you absolutely need to work together with people who are your friends. This is where the friends come from. For me, great moments of inspiration, where, when I first came to university, and in physics class, the professor performed an experiment in front of the class, and then he says, in order to understand the experiment, we have to calculate. This was the first time that I realized mathematics was not just there to give homeworks to high school kids, but is actually there understand something. And that fascination then drove me to become, I wanted to become a theoretician, somebody who uses mathematics to describe first chemistry and then biology. And in this endeavor between science and religion, there were many moments when I came to Harvard, I first met Sarah Coakley, and she was a professor in the Divinity School, and I realized from her I could learn how to speak what I wanted to say about science and God, because at that time, I wasn't able to do that. That's cool. Then came a moment when I was deeply fascinated, and I still am, by the Bhagavad Gita. So the Bhagavad Gi. Gandhi calls it the gospel of selflessness. And in the Bhagavad Gita, we are asked to think of the sufferings of others as our own, to see the same God in every other person. The Bhagavad Gita is a call for selfless action. You are asked to act in the world selflessly, but you shouldn't be attached to the outcomes of the action. So the Bhagavad Gita was a huge spiritual inspiration for me, and it is mentioned in beyond. After that, I read the kata Upanishad, and the kata Upanishad describes the soul as fusing with God. Then I asked Sarah COVID Again, do we have the same in Christianity? And she says it is not really the standard vision, but I should read the race of Avila. And so then I read the race of Avila the interior Castro, and I was deeply moved. And for the first time, I got a glimpse what it takes to actually love your enemies, and how she was able to do that. Something has to happen in your life if you want to love your enemies. Then it was done with Theresa, Theresa of Avila and I said, all my life, I knew there is the big Theresa and the little Theresa. And I have never, ever bothered to read anything about the little Theresa. Now I want to find out about the little Theresa. And then I started to read. And I was captivated and mesmerized beyond description, and my life changed. And then I had this feeling she was always present in my life, but I was not worthy yet to know her directly. And at that moment, the revelation came. She revealed herself to me as she has to hundreds of 1000s of other people before me, because this is really her role. She said, My life begins after my test. I will not just be in heaven. I will tirelessly work to bring souls to God, right? That was her mission. In a sense.

Evelyn  

That's beautiful. I am so struck by how the both of you have been reiterating this idea that there is this mystery, that even the more we know, the more we don't know, or that there's so much that you would say we don't know, and then we have to ask. And that is always this infinite that's continuing, you know? And Einstein said as well, that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true arts and science. So this seems to be a theme, something that is urging us on this, that's making us look and so, you know, I'm curious, thus being in friends of nature and its laws that you find, that you discover, does it evoke more profound existential questions than you? And where are these questions leading you? Yeah,

 Rob  

I actually should have said what I was showing the video of the sea lion that there was. I think it's apocryphal, because I tried to trace this quote, unquote remark from Einstein, where he said, you have two options. You can either treat everything as mysterious or nothing. And I really just find that the former is way better in every regard. You know, it's more useful, it's more or makes you happier. I think to view something as simple as a view out an airplane over Greenland, or just encountering all of you on the stage as you know, kind of mysterious. Of course it for me. I can't speak for anyone else, but of course, it elicits other questions, and I very much appreciate what Martin was saying about mathematics, because that's been one of the great things in my life, is the realization that by pure thought, I could write down an equation that could tell me how old the Galapagos are, you know, like, I know that there's such equation. I didn't look it up any book. I just figured out what it was and wrote it down, and I found out, yeah, that works. But at the same time, as we heard this morning and some of the other talks that may not be helpful when faced with a very human question, you know, like, how to be a parent, you know, let's keep it simple. Anybody that's a parent in the room, I imagine, has understood that feeling, you know, you think you have some concept of what it means to be a parent, and then you get a curveball, and most of us are not good at hitting curveballs, is what I've seen. Yeah, it elicits all sorts of questions. And since there's so many Italians here, I've already said it was to a few of you. There's, there's an Italian author, Dino buchati. I'm not sure I pronounced his name correctly. And my all time favorite short story all time is by him, and I translated it from French to English for my dad, because it didn't exist in English while he was in the process of dying from cancer and and it's it's not something I would normally be attached to. It's very much relevant to all of you, in the sense that if you have a background of Catholicism, it will mean the world to you. But it's called humility, and I feel like that's part of this issue about about the mystery, like it's very easy to march around on this, in this world, acting like you've got the bull by the horns, but in science, nor in life, in my opinion, do any of us have the bull by the horns. You know, there's just always the next thing, the next mystery, the next thing you don't know. Yeah. And so I think that that really calls for humility. Yeah. 

Evelyn  

That means, in some in some sense, and say, Wow, what's this?

Rob  

Yeah, and I don't understand it. Yeah, that's my take, for what it's worth.

Martin  

Yeah, it's very difficult to add. This is already such a complete description, but I think one quote attributed to Einstein is that, by my success talks, that his success was based on the fact that he never stopped asking the questions that only a child would ask. Coming back to that something else attributed to him, which I like even more, is actually, if I could explain what I was doing, it wouldn't be research. And this is this sentence I always want to use in my grant writing. I love that. I think it's right that nature is immensely beautiful. And as a scientist, you find nature mysterious, and you ask yourself certain questions and you want to give explanations. So here's another anecdote from the history of science. Johannes Kepler is very much associated with these three laws of Kepler, but these three laws of Kepler, they were basically discovered by Newton. 

Newton went through all of Kepler's works and then found these three things out there and realized this is what he can explain with his equation. Kepler himself never considered this his main contributions at all. So the first Kepler law is that the Brandon score an ellipses he considered an embarrassment. This was not a discovery. This is it cannot really be true because it wasn't beautiful enough. And for the second law, he derived an approximation, which he then later proved to be false. Then he forgot about that, and all his life, he used the false approximation for the second law, the third law was hidden in a book of 800 pages on the harmony of the spheres. 

So why did Kepler not pay attention to this first three Kepler laws? because when he was 25 years old, he had already discovered the most beautiful thing that is out there. He had discovered why there are six planets and why they have the relative distance from each other. This needed to be explained at that time. So at that time, the solar system had six planets, and they had a certain distance, that distance could be measured. And Kepler understood why, and this is how he did it. He at first used two dimensional models of mathematics to have polygons and circles, so like a triangle and then a circle around it, then maybe a square and a circle around it, and he tried to fit it in some sense. And whatever he did, it didn't work. And then he realized, I'm stupid. The universe is not two dimensional. It's three dimensional. So I will do the same thing in three dimensions. So in three dimensions, what are my solids? The platonic solids. So there are only five platonic solids in three dimensions. So he has five platonic solids, six spheres inside and outside. He arranges them a little bit and has the right distances. At that moment, he realizes this is how God created the solar system. And he persuaded the Emperor to build that model in silver. So for him, that was the biggest contribution. But not quite right, but very beautiful,

Rob  

yeah. But I mean, I think I love that, and I agree with it, and you can, we can just keep going, you know, like Lamarck had his ideas about evolution and so on. And I think that there's something for all of us to learn. First of all, like philosophically about humility. It also has to do with how hard it is to figure stuff out, and it takes hundreds of yours. So I don't know. I personally find when I'm walking around and I run into all the answer havers kind of like, well, if you know, maybe you're you've got the platonic solids arranged to give me the distances of the planets. 

Evelyn

So unfortunately, our time is coming to a close. I would like to remind all of you that at 7pm so right after this event, Martin will be available to sign his new books beyond and within at the human adventure book table right outside the auditorium. And I want to give one important announcement before closing this event, this encounter is a little big miracle in the heart of New York City. It is a place for all those who seek belonging. So we invite you to give generously at our donation table outside this auditorium or in a couple of clicks at the New York encounter.org/donate and now please thank me, and please join me in thanking our speakers and again.

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