Fergus Butler-Gallie: priesthood, frocks, scouse, faith, Liverpool, and Mummified Hearts | podcast

Fergus Butler-Gallie is a priest and writer. His latest book, Touching Cloth, is a memoir on his time as a priest in Liverpool.

We cover many topics relating to Fergus's life, work, and perspectives on faith and the Church of England. I also ask him what he would do with the Church of England if he had a magic wand.

Fergus provides insights into life in Liverpool, discussing local culture, diversity, and the famous Liverpool accent. He argues that many stereotypes and assumptions about the city are inaccurate.

We explore how Fergus's time as a minister in Liverpool impacted his faith, with Fergus sharing that it was an overall positive experience that affirmed his sense of calling.

Discussing the Church of England, Fergus critiques the managerial bureaucracy and argues for decentralization and a return to an earlier model. He wants more inspiring, eccentric bishops.

We discuss eccentric reverends from history that Fergus has chronicled, including a food-obsessed dean who famously ate the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. Fergus shares thoughts on the Eucharist and transubstantiation, after I suggest an analogy to actors embodying a role. We discusses how wearing a clerical collar changes how one is perceived.

"Dean Buckland was dean of Westminster, which is a very high profile job in the Church of England. And he made it his mission to try and eat everything that had ever existed. So he ate mice, he ate tadpoles...And they go and say, "Oh, now we reach the most impressive thing that we have." And they're very carefully taking it out this casket. And they said, "Because you're such a privileged group of people, we're going to hand it around to all of you. And this is the mummified heart of King Louis XIV smuggled out of France at the revolution and now kept here in our private museum." And it goes around all the people. They look at it and think, "Oh, this is amazing. This is wonderful." It gets to Dean Buckland, he looks at it and he says, "I've never eaten King before." And he pops it in his mouth."

We play a short game of over rated under rated and end on Fergus’ life advice.

Fergus rates: James Bond, the British monarchy, Afternoon tea, The House of Lords, Double decker buses , Black cabs, Pubs, and Cricket. On life advice:

Fergus recommends reversing our instincts - don't take seriously what we think we should, and take seriously what we think we shouldn't. For those considering ordination, he advises prayer and cautions it's not for everyone. "There are things in life that should be taken seriously and there are things in life that should not be taken seriously. The real thing to realize is that they're the opposite way around to the way you think they are. Anything you think should be taken seriously, don't take it seriously. Anything you think should not be taken seriously, take it seriously."

Podcast available wherever you listen. Video available on Youtube or above. Transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

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Transcript: (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Fergus Butler-Gallie. Fergus is a writer and priest. His latest book is “Touching Cloth” which is a memoir of his life so far in the Church of England. Fergus, welcome.

Fergus

Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.

Ben (00:00:19):

What do you think is most misunderstood about Liverpool?

Fergus (00:00:23):

Everything is the answer. Almost everything is misunderstood about Liverpool. You get people who make jokes about lack of employment or people stealing cars, all that kind of scally culture; that idea of scouters being sort of dangerous or idle. That very much-- that's obviously misunderstood. There’s the scandal around Boris Johnson, the spectator interview, the Republicans as a sort of grievance mongers. Again, I don't think that's true. But I think Liverpool has some myths about itself as well. I think it's actually, deep down in my experience, a very sort of small sea conservative city. It's a red city scout socialist. It doesn't like change very much. So I think the myths about Liverpool are the ones that are imposed on it from the outside which are generally very negative. Those are completely untrue. The people that are exceptionally welcoming, they're incredibly hardworking. 

Then there are the myths that Liverpool itself cultivates. We've always been a city of immigrants. We've always been this, that or the other. It isn't really true. The history of Liverpool is exceptionally interesting, I should say. I think the most fascinating of any city in Britain and from how it goes from a sort of fishing village founded by King John to this center of global trade, to what it is now in its 20th century history. But what I would say about Liverpool is the one thing that isn't a misunderstanding is that it's different. It is different. It feels different to other cities. It feels like it has a culture to itself. Fascinating stat recently that every single accent in the UK, every single regional accent is softening; i.e., moving towards a kind of center point, whether it's people who speak in a very received pronunciation; the queen-- famously the late queen. Her voice got sort of, “Started like this, near some clipped,” and by the end it became a little more elongated with the vowels.

Every accent is doing this; from Tyneside to Devon to sort of Cockney except Liverpool. And the Liverpool accent is getting harsh. Scouse is getting more scouse, more sort of harsh, which I think says something about its willingness and its desire to be different and do things differently. So that sort of myth. But I think everything else, the way in which that unfolds I think can lead to misunderstandings.

Ben (00:02:59):

And does their sense of identity and culture span most of the city, everyone who speaks scouse have it? Did that also span rich to poor, or was your ministry mostly in a kind of poorer community?

Fergus (00:03:16):

Very much it span rich to poor. The thing about Liverpool is having said, it has always been-- It is a huge diversity, but diverse in ways that people don't quite expect. So its wave of sort of, for instance-- It got the oldest Chinatown in the UK. Now, most immigrants to the UK from China came in the late 19th or late 20th centuries. In Liverpool, they came in the 18th century. And so you have people who are from Chinese Liverpool families who have been running businesses there for nearly 300 years. And that is a very different kind of routing. Ditto. It's black communities, partly because of its links with the slave trade, which again, Liverpool perhaps keeps quiet in some ways. So yes, it's very diverse and that, but that scousness is sort of throughout, it goes like a stick of rock. It really is throughout the whole of society there.

But my ministry was with everyone. That sort of is the great joy of the parish church I served in. So it is the oldest institution in Liverpool. Liverpool was founded as a little chapel by the River Mersey, which became the Church of our Lady in St. Nicholas, which means you were dealing with the Lord Mayor, the political elite, the mayor Joe Anderson, who was famously arrested on corruption charges. You are dealing with the Earl of Darby, because again, Liverpool is still hugely aristocratic in a number of ways. The Duke of Westminster and the Earl of Darby own vast tracks in the city center in a way that isn't the case in Manchester or Newcastle or even Central London which is considered to be more aristocratic.

But because you're in the center of the city and because in Liverpool distances are shorter, so you can have these glorious Victorian apartment blocks, Edwardian apartment blocks which are filled with comparatively wealthy people with these new skyscrapers and things like that. We had a skyscraper opposite us where there was a box on the top of it which was a self-contained apartment where Jurgen Klopp had lived for his first few years as manager of Liverpool. So you've got that, and then literally one street away you will have council housing, estate housing, you have people living very close to the poverty line. So unlike London where you can sort of categorize it, there are pockets of social housing in places like Chelsea and Westminster. But in Liverpool, it really is very, very obvious that from one street or even on the same street, one street to another, you have this incredibly close-knit living of the super-rich in terms of the footballers and some of the businessmen who were there and really, some of the poorest people in the UK. So yeah, we had to deal with both of them because they were in the parish and that's sort of the point of the parish church.

Ben (00:06:04):

Did they make you choose sides between Everton and Liverpool?

Fergus (00:06:08):

Yes.

Ben (00:06:09):

Although difficult congregations.

Fergus (00:06:11):

They did. And gosh, I have to say it. I followed football. My father was a director at Charlton Athletic football club when he left the Army. So again, I had always gone round-- I knew about football. I never quite believed the level of the intensity and the kind of rivalry is a big deal. I had a colleague who wouldn't wear anything red. He wouldn't wear red clothing. He just wouldn't wear because he was such Leviton. I will say I went to Goodison Park more-- I went to Everton more than I went to… I used to get out of it by saying, “Of course, I was really Tranmere Rovers fan who were the team in Birkenhead who play in white.

Ben (00:06:50):

So very good. Safer to be wearing black then, really. 

Fergus (00:06:55):

Yes, exactly.

Ben (00:06:56):

And so did your time in Liverpool confirm your faith or dent it in any way? Or did it swing in roundabouts? I have my impression from reading your work that faith is something that compounded and crept up on you over time. Crept is probably not the right word, but compounded over time as opposed to-- And I guess most people don't have a kind of damaging moment where they convert except for these occasional saints and perhaps like that. But I think for most ordinary people at it is, there's a kind of quiet growing, or not even quiet or maybe in steps and things. I get my impression that actually perhaps your faith was confirmed, at least in the everyday ministry. Was my impression correct or was it dented at all, or what happened?

Fergus (00:07:44):

It certainly changed and adapted. I think it was confirmed. I think your point is absolutely spot on. I think there is a myth that people have; maybe people outside Christianity, and I think some people in Christianity have this idea that there is a kind of burning bush moment. There is a road to Damascus. There is a radical showy thunder and lightning, jazz hands, assorted choirs moment where you say, "I now believe I'm a Christian." There are certain churches and certain people within the Church of England who I don't think help that. In that there's this idea that people say sort of, "Well, that was the day I knew I gave my life to Jesus. That's the day. I can pinpoint the day I became a Christian."

I could tell you when I was christened, when I was baptized as a baby. But I think part of the historic prevalence of infant baptism, of baptizing children in the Church of England which has always been its tradition, means that actually people then have faith on a back burner almost. If you're cooking a large meal and you've got something-- Let's say you are cooking a roast and you've got your gravy on the back burner, the gravy is a thing that will make the meal. But you're not paying attention to it for most of that meal until it becomes critical, until it bubbles over or until you realize the gas wasn't on at all and you haven't cooked it full stop. So I think for most people it is this sort of this slow burn, but as you say, compacted and confirmed by certain experiences undoubtedly.

But those often aren't one moment, they are whole periods of our lives. The period of my life that I spent in Liverpool absolutely did that. It showed me multiple things. It showed me the good the church can do. It was a very positive experience of what the church is doing, both in practical terms as we talked about. There is poverty. Enormous practical help is being given by the church in terms of food banks, in terms of legal advice, in terms of giving people kind of a sense of purpose, a place to go, a roof over their heads, et cetera. But it also showed me that the church can have a kind of sparkling intellectual life. My colleagues were fantastic there. It showed me that it can really give meaning, not just practical help, but actually something much deeper than that.

So I was hugely confirmed. It was a hugely positive experience for me and sort of selfishly. It showed me what the church can do, the capital C Church, it showed me what that small C, that individual church was doing. But it also confirmed in me, I suppose, a sense that this is what I should be doing as well. And I think inevitably talking about that thing about faith, I think there is a sense of imposter syndrome with clergy because you go up there and it's your job to do something that is in itself impossible, make it impossible to know God known as an unworthy servant of the most worthy God as certain theologians put in. But also you are aware that your faith does change. There are days when you don't feel like you're doing the right thing. And there are days where you don't feel you're in the right job. And there are days where sometimes you go downstairs and you're not even sure you believe in God.

But the whole point is you're held within an institution and you're held within a sort of cradle of worship, a rhythm of things that can keep you going. That's why that regularity and that rhythm is so important in the church. But for me, it sort of confirmed me against having had that before, there was sort of this, "Oh, should I be doing this?" I had raucous teenage years, I didn't behave well, not the kind of people who knew me when I was at school or university. When they hear that I've become ordained their kind of jaws hit the floor. There's a sort of, "Really him?"

So there is a sense of that kind of imposter syndrome. And I think that happens to people from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of traditions in the church. I suppose what Liverpool taught me is, of course, it's not actually about me. It doesn't matter if I have imposter syndrome. Every priest necessarily has that. It's about being held in the kind of cradle of the whole, held within that tradition, held within that rhythm of doing things and actually knowing that it could operate, it will operate, it does operate without you. And then knowing that you are sort of useless, so to speak, being liberated to then do what you need to do and becoming a kind of agent of that which is good and right and speaks to glory, I suppose.

Ben (00:12:31):

And have you ever lost your faith or come to a very low ebb that it might be? I recall a story. So we are recording near Ladbroke Grove which is in West London, and there is actually a set of karma like nuns around the corner. These particular nuns, a bunch of them have a vow of silence as well as prayer and live what most people would say such an austere life that it seems incredible that they are around. But there was a documentary that someone managed to fathom after writing to them continuously for quite a number of years. And the head nun, I get the terminology wrong-- But one of the most important nuns there described her time when she first joined the monastery. And she'd graduated from Cambridge from I think a reasonably well-to-do family who didn't understand her choice. And so she said, "No, I've done like a university thing and now, this is what I want to do."

But she also described for what seemed to be a number of years where she really questioned whether she was doing the right thing; these enormous vows of poverty, austerity, and continuous prayer for others. And I was listening to her and she wasn't sure for years that it was the right thing. Then she came closer to her faith and now very important. And that really struck me as someone who's living such an incredible life coming so close to losing faith or essentially I think had lost a sort of faith and then come back to it. I wonder if that was something you've come across or you come across in clergy who you meet?

Fergus (00:14:22):

Absolutely. And I very much find that faith that has gone through serious encounters with doubt. I mean serious encounters, not just, as I said, those moments where you think, "Oh, I can't be bothered today” because everybody has those. People have that with whatever job they do. But I think faith that has gone through serious encounter with doubt is always stronger at the tail end than faith that hasn't. And I do encounter people who haven't really experienced doubt. And actually I, for a long time didn't really experience it. I suppose I experienced, as I say, this kind of sense that, "Oh, should I be doing this?" But I don't know whether I'd undergone some of the real kind of horrors that some people undergo.

Now, I did go through a period of that, of feeling really very-- I took a job in London that was misery inducing. I hated it. I hated where I worked. I hated who I worked with. Hate is a very toxic emotion and it is cancerous in the sense that it spreads. If it isn't sort of treated, it will cause lasting damage essentially, and it will kill other parts of your life other than where it started. And I was beginning to find that to be the case. So when you are treating something cancerous, one of the ways of treatment is of course you blast where this has come from, that you try and kill with radiation. So part of me thought, "Well, maybe I should cut faith out of my life completely. Maybe I need to kind of chemo on that. I need to just irradiate that so that the other parts of my life cannot be poisoned by the real nastiness and poison that I'm experiencing in the world of faith in where I was working.

So I did come close to making that decision, but slowly but surely I realized that actually the analogy with it being sort of cancerous is wrong because actually the way faith works is sort of like anything. It has the potential for enormous good and it has the potential for enormous wickedness and evil and enormous bad. My job I felt as a person of faith was to, as I think anything, is it speaks more perhaps to the human spirit than to the specifics of faith. That when something that was good and enriching becomes bad and poisonous, it's about going back to basics and working out, "Well, what got me here in the first place and why do I feel this cool?" Everything has a potentiality of good, everything has a potentiality of bad. How do I go back to the beginning and turn back along the path of the good? That's what I sort of had to do, which meant actually quite the opposite of cutting it out completely. I had to go back to the very root basics of it. It's more pruning than irradiating. It's a kind of horticultural synonym is perhaps more helpful.

Ben (00:17:39):

I definitely got that sense for your time at Liverpool. And I got a real great sense of the rhythm of ministry; births, weddings, and particularly deaths and funerals. And I also got this sense that you wrote that a your kind of feeling fulfilled by this-- I would call it everyday ministry although every day sort of seems to not do it justice. And actually through that you were also conscious that you are holding something larger than yourself, which I thought was very telling. But I'd be interested in that theme of death which goes through the book. So my fun question would be, what reading or music would you have at your own funeral or what have you found most touching in funerals that you've been to? I asked this partly because I've had a show for the last couple of years, a performance lecture show where you get to help me create my own funeral. So I've had many different pieces of music chosen by my audience, but I'm always interested in what people would choose themselves.

Fergus (00:18:49):

Yeah. I have been to obviously lots of funerals and each funeral is different; that is important to know, even if the words you are using are ostensibly the same. I have a long running joke with my mother about this. My mother wants a kind of everybody coming in bright colors, celebration of life sort of thing. She wants happy music, cheerful music. That to me sounds appalling. I can't think of anything worse. So I keep on threatening that I would predecease her just to avoid having to go to her funeral, because what I would like is-- And this is partly because I think-- It's not that I-- Again, there are some clergy who can be very sort of judgmental. I have been to funerals like that, that work; that sort of make you feel happy to be alive. But the more funerals I go to, the more I realize I think we have a kind of myth. We like to think the funeral is about the dead person, but it's not. The funeral is about the living and how they can cope and carry on.

Now, for some people that might be a kind of celebration of life thing. But I think actually a really important moment with funerals is it's one of the only times we do acknowledge death, where we actually say death is real and people do die and we will die. And so for me, there's something I think enormously salutary about basically telling people that, "Yeah, okay, this has happened." Yes, life carries on, but death is a thing that we pass through. Now again, as a Christian, I don't believe death to be the absolute end. I don't. So for me, this idea that in a funeral you don't acknowledge death and you simply focus on that life that has just been lived and the wonders of it is sort of slightly counterintuitive because to me, there is much, much better to come.

Firstly, because I believe in the concept of eternal life. I believe in heaven. And two, death then becomes the elephant in the room. I think it's much better to look at it head on and be honest about it. So for me, what would I have? I've sort of said I want everybody dressed in black. I want it pouring with rain. Only the priest is allowed an umbrella outside. I want my will read out by a kind of crusty lawyer and there to be a kind of-- I want an absolute textbook kind of church; historic Church of England funeral. Partly because as I say, I think there needs to be an acknowledgement of death and an acknowledgement of eternal life. Those are the things I'm interested in. And again, what I've said explicitly is there will be a reading from the Bible and there will be a sermon, and the sermon cannot mention me.

I don't want it to be about me. I want it to be about the thing that I hold to be true and the thing that I've cultivated my life around, namely the idea that Jesus Christ, by His death and resurrection has defeated death. Preach on that, not on me. I'm thinking of employing a bouncer to remove anybody who uses the phrase celebration of life including if need be my mother from whatever church it's held in. I'm being slightly facetious, but I am-- Ironically, of course, as someone who is quite kind of cynical, that funeral would probably reflect me more than a kind of all singing, all dancing. I've been to all of them and as I say, I do think the ones that work best are the ones that say, "Yeah, this person has died. Death is not the end, but death is real." Whereas some of them I think are attempts to pretend it's not.

Ben (00:22:28):

If I recall correctly, I think you wrote in your book that people were the church's greatest treasure. Do you still believe that to be true?

Fergus (00:22:40):

Yeah. Well, so that goes back to the story of St. Lawrence. So St. Lawrence is the patriot saint of all kinds of things; comedians, barbecues which relates to his manner of his death. He was roasted alive. And midway through being roasted, St. Lawrence sort of summoned over the Roman guards. He went, "Come over here, come here." What could you possibly want? You're being burnt alive. He said, "I think you need to turn me over. I'm done on this side.” So he got them to flip him around. But the prank that he got into trouble with was when the Emperor of Rome asked him to bring him the great treasures of the church. “I need money. He could bring me the church greatest treasures,” meaning silver and gold.

And St. Lawrence bought him a group of people. He bought him specifically the lame, the old, the children, the mute, the deaf, et cetera, the blind. So yes, I state that the church's greatest treasure is people. However, I would preface that with the fact that some of the church's greatest problems are rooted in people as well. And the thing with the church is it is a human institution. If the church shouldn't have humans in it, it could be perfect, but it isn't. And the reason why it's not perfect is because it's got humans in it. Yet its whole existence is predicated on the fact that there are humans in it. So that sounds very roundabout, but what I'm essentially trying to say is that I am not some great candle carrier for human nature.

I actually have a very low view of human nature. I do think we are inclined to do bad things. I think we regularly do bad things. I can only speak for myself in that regard. But yeah, I have a kind of swiftian view of human nature, which is not positive. That said, it is the job of the church to see in the human the possibility of the divine, the possibility of the good and the perfect and the beautiful and the truth. And again, it goes back to what I was saying about funerals. The best way you can do that is not by pretending that the bad stuff isn't there, but by acknowledging the bad stuff, saying, actually, "Yes, we are bad and wicked and do things wrong," full stop. That then enables us to live in a way that is so liberated by acknowledging that, that we can work towards the good and the beautiful and the true. Does that make sense?

Ben (00:25:09):

It does. It also explains how you want your funeral constructed. So if you were to ask that same question, "What is the greatest treasure of the church" to the synod or to the manager class of the Church of England, do you think they would respond in the same way? And I guess my question is getting at, I think a lot of people on the outside of the church don't really understand the church's institution or the church's bureaucracy. And actually there's been quite a lot of mumblings from frontline vicars and priests about the problems of the institution of the church, which is, as you say, rooted in its people, perhaps rooted also in its economics, in its governance, in its long checkered history. So I'd be interested in your reflections on the institution of the church and whether they value the same things in the same ways, or how it has come about.

Fergus (00:26:05):

Yeah. I think we are in the midst of a serious problem at the moment of disconnect between the ordinary people of God, the ordinary people of the church and its managerial class. Were you to ask them, “What are the greatest treasure of the church?” You would get a consultative process, you'd get a 600 word policy document, you wouldn't get an answer. You would get a claim that they'd followed due process, that they'd done this, that and the other. You would get a working group formed. You wouldn't get anything that speaks to anything that is beautiful and true. That is my big issue. We've reached a point yes, where the structures are hugely complicated. But the way I describe it to people-- And again, people who don't understand it, is that there are two churches of England.

There is the Church of England that is your local vicar who often has many, many churches that he or she has to look after. It's all the people who help them. It's the people who try and live according to the principles of Jesus Christ on a day-to-day basis, who volunteer their time and their money and their effort, who say their prayers, who struggle along. These are the Church of England. They are the Church of England and they are the people if you go into your local Church of England church nine times out of 10, they are who you will encounter. Particularly if you're in a place where it isn't kind of lots of gathered churches, you get a problem in London where you have people traveling all over to these sort of big, showy churches who then don't really have much connection with the specifics of where they are of the parish. But nine times out of 10, that's what you'll get.

You then have Church of England PLC. You have a kind of managerial class. And again, they are increasingly monochrome; not in there necessarily in the externals of diversity, but in the way they think. So absolutely fascinatingly. I'm not a huge fan of the Myers-Briggs test. I think it's mostly voodoo. But I think it was very telling that whilst the external diversity of the bishops has changed in terms of their class background, their gender, their race, their educational background, their areas of interest ostensibly, that has become considerably more diverse. What's become much, much, much more mono is the way they think. And tellingly, I think it was said that there was only one or two bishops on the bench who didn't have the same Myers-Brigg profile as the rest.

So that is why we have institutional inertia, I would suggest is that people who think in the same way, namely that, what should triumph is the procedural over the human. What should triumph is the sort of technical over the mystical. Now, these are people who to my mind be fantastic as your bank manager. I'm not sure they'd be very good. Well, they haven't proved to be very good as bishops. They haven't proved to be very good running the church because yes, the church needs procedures. Yes, it needs management. Yes, it needs the technical. But what you cannot do is try and make the people whose job it is to set hearts on fire, to make people go and do great sacrificial things, namely the bishops, the leaders, the shepherds of the flock, the people who are the successor to the apostles.

Remember who Jesus choose as disciples are not managers. He chooses very unlikely people, dangerous people, difficult people, people who make mistakes, grumpy people, unrealistic people. That's who He chooses as His disciples, not the safe managerial class. And the problem is that now we have a church that is run by a safe managerial class in the interests of that safe managerial class. And that will then mean that that first Church of England we talked about, the kind of the good or ordinary people of God will always play second field to procedure. And that actually you have sucked out the human as well as the divine. And you were left merely with a kind of husk of policy, paper that doesn't mean anything.

Ben (00:30:11):

And does that explain why the church has run into such troubles over safeguarding and its response, or at least a bureaucratic response. And there has also been, at least in Britain at the moment, a dispute on pay and on economics as well. I have one reflection hearing that. This is from Corporate World. We often joke that you cannot change or influence corporate culture by policy. And in fact, putting a policy on it is usually your death now. That's because there's people very well meaning going, "Ahhh." The only thing we can do is create a policy because actually culture is arranged by leadership and behaviors. Actually, even in corporate world is defined by corporate purpose. What you want to achieve in the organization or company that you work for?

And I found it's an interesting paradox because you would've thought that with the church-- And in fact you do meet people like you who are full of faith and purpose so that you would've made it easier. Yet it seems to be not so. Is that your major through theme for why it has run into these troubles with safeguarding and economics and things like that? Or is there something more going on?

Fergus (00:31:37):

I think there are multiple layers there. I think every institution has people who will enter it to do bad things. There are bad faith actors. And the problem with the church is much with education or the health service. Is that as an ostensibly caring profession, ironically it will attract a higher number of sociopaths, basically, because there is a curtain behind which one can hide. So, yes.

Ben (00:32:06):

Interesting. And do you think they always give people because of its nature as well, the benefit of the doubt first time round?

Fergus (00:32:12):

Absolutely. And there's a whole-- We're told to forgive people. So there is an inbuilt problem there for Christianity. But that's not an impossible problem, that's not a circle that should be square, because Jesus is also very clear. Anybody who harms those-- He specifically says this about children, about vulnerable children. He says, "Anybody who harms these, it's better for him that he would have a stone thrown around his neck and he'd be thrown in the sea." So there is clear structure there. I think what you have is-- and it's absolutely fascinating to hear what you say about the corporate world, because I get the impression that the corporate world is, as you say, moving away from this idea that you can manage your way out of problems, that you can simply slap a policy on it, that you can simply follow due process and things will fundamentally then work.

Former bishop of the Church of England famously said, "You can rely on the Church of England to enter a room just as everybody else is leaving it." And it strikes me that the Church of England is still in the room of managerialism, of policy, of paper. I have friends who work in the corporate world. They are being sent on meditation retreats, their leadership; people in their leadership roles. They're being sent to rediscover the ideas of Ignatian spirituality, to connect themselves, to create healthy rhythms within which they can operate. My leaders, someone whose job it is to speak spiritually, we are being sent on kind of hackneyed MBAs out in conference centers in the home counties. And I hope this will somehow help us manage our way out of decline. It's deranged.

And it is essentially doing exactly what it's doing; trying something that the rest of the world has found wanting and we are thinking, “Hang on.” And it means, again, that bad faith actors can work very well. So there's this recent absolute scandal in the Diocese of London where this guy, Martin Sargent, who's now gone to prison for defrauding the diocese of millions of pounds, essentially could walk in saying, "I know all this business voodoo. Let me run things." And rather than saying, "Hang on, actually that's not how we run this institution. This is a different institution that works essentially on a completely different hierarchy to that,” the leaders of the church turned around and said, "Three bags full. Yes. How can we give you everything you need?"

So there's a kind of this sense that because we need to-- Because yes, the underlying issue in all of this, of course, is that fewer people are going to church. The church's assets are increasingly spread too thinly. The economic problem goes back to at least the 1950s, the 1960s, when essentially every vicar was paid a different amount; different parishes were worth more because the way that it was funded were based on the historic assets of that parish. Now in the 1970s, the church says, "Well, let's centralize that. Let's bring it all into the center and we'll spread it out evenly." The problem is that what the center did inevitably was spend more money on the center and less money on the peripheries. And so now you have a system where the center is-- the managerial class has grown enormously.

It used to be that the bishop had one, two secretaries and that was it. And now you have 70, 80, 90, a hundred, 200 people in some diocese and offices, vast corporate buildings. That money has to come from somewhere. And where it has come from is from the parishes. Now, it's almost impossible to give that back because of the way the centralizing of that funding has worked. But you do have an economic problem because fewer people are going to church. And again, that perhaps is a problem of leadership because we can't convince people. When we are totally caught up in this argument over, “How do we pay people and how do we keep the show on the road?” We are not focusing on how we actually encounter people. But again, how can you encourage people with the skills you need to come and join that institution, to come and give up opportunities to earn elsewhere, opportunities to have more comfortable lives elsewhere. To say, "Yes, take up your cross. Follow me," when you can't even pay them. You can't even give them a house in some cases. You can't even offer them anything. You have to say, "Well, not our problem."

Ben (00:36:27):

Interesting. It strikes me that that reading of the church shows me that the churches reflects all of the problems that we see in society. But maybe a step, half a step to three steps behind. It also strikes me that actually that manager class is performing like a very poor corporate. And this is probably maybe imitating something that's not. Whereas if you had-- I'm just going to throw it out because people would know; Patagonia, which is a very purposeful clothing company. Purposeful companies tend to have a mantra of three P's, which is people, planet, profit. But they put the P’s in because without profit, you can't support the people and the planet. So this is why it comes within a corporate form, not obviously for church. But it strikes me that churches actually haven't had very good CEOs or managers, but actually they wouldn't necessarily.

So if you had a magic wand or God's powers for this, is there one thing or a couple of things that you would wave and change around the Church of England or organized religion? Because increasingly I hear-- I guess it's with the stats on the organized religion bit across all of them are pretty much going down. But if you ask the question slightly differently; something around spirituality or something around community and faith, particularly in this country, although I see it echoed in surveys around, it's still roughly where you would've thought it might be because at the margin, human beings do seem to believe in one another. Yes, you have bad faith, you have bad apples everywhere. But actually, there is a stronger sense of community around that which I find quite striking. So magic wand, what would you do?

Fergus (00:38:16):

Yeah. How one does that? How one is able to take that goodwill, that real desire. And I do think there is such a strong desire for what the church can offer and the church is failing to get there. So what I’d do with the magic wand, I would distribute the money more effectively. The way the Church of England has billions of pounds of assets, the way that is distributed is completely shockingly bad. Talking about what we went to earlier, if it means actually saying, "Okay, we're going back to position one," where we are unraveling all of the bad change that has happened in the last 40, 50 years, and then let's work out how we can do it more fairly from there. That's what I would do.

I would say actually we will completely repeal the concepts of common tenure, which is how barista employed. We will completely repeal all of the centralization of funds. And then let's see where we are. Distribute that out. I would sack almost the entire current pension bishops frankly. One of the reasons why I will never get really prolonged in the Church of England, but I would, because I don't think they're up to scratch. I think they are theologically uninspiring. I think they're managerially incompetent. And I think they are stuck within a cycle of dehumanizing technocracy, which means they cannot see the wood from the trees and they can no longer see the humanity of the people of God. And I have replaced them with people who can. Those people may be too old, they may be too young. They may be not skilled enough in the technical ways of the world; technical managerialism. None of that matters.

I would make sure that every diocese has a bishop who can speak comprehensively and coherently of the beauty of following Jesus Christ because that's what it's all about. I don't think you have that in the current crop, frankly. And so I would make sure that-- Again, I would change the way we appoint it. I would return some of that power back to people who are independent of the church because this is part of the problem that we have become much more introspective in how we appoint people in the Church of England. And much more power is held within a very small, very churchy, clique essentially. It used to be that you had input from the state, you had input from external people.

It was much more you say, "Hang on, what are the skills?" A bit like, if in a company you don't always want that to be a totally internal appointment. If you're appointing a CEO in a company you don't want, “Well, what we're going to do is simply have the board. The four people who sit on the board are going to choose one of themselves and they'll hold it in rotation.” That is not a recipe any for kind of construct engagement. You get people from the outside and say, "What do you think we need? What do we think we need? What are our values?" That doesn't happen. So I'd have a return to that. And then having said all what's wrong, I would have a big campaign both in terms of reminding people in the parishes, going round and telling them this. But also telling people outside the church of all the good that is done and all the good that can be done, and the enormous fulfillment that it can bring.

Being engaged in the Church of England, being employed by the Church of England, being a minister in the Church of England, finding my calling and my identity in the Church of England is by far and away the most rewarding thing I have ever done. That I include all the world travel, degrees, books, relationships, et cetera. My engagement with the Church of England is the thing that has rewarded me more than anything else. We need to get out and tell people that that's possible. And I fear we're not doing that. So yeah, I would have a blitz on how we communicate. I'd have a blitz on how we encourage. I think that's the huge thing that's lacking. I cannot emphasize how low morale is, and it shouldn't be, because morale is low in the rest of the country. The frontiers of the state are kind of constantly shaking. The political parties are hugely demoralized. The city is not hugely buoyant with confidence. There's stagflation, there's nothing works. The church should be a beacon of hope, not simply a circus mirror in funny outfits to the misery that permeates the rest of society. That's what we need to recapture. That's what we need to get.

Ben (00:42:44):

Sure.

Fergus (00:42:45):

It is magic wand stuff.

Ben (00:42:46):

Yeah. That sounds amazing. Actually, the cities, although there are stagflation things, is currently reasonably thriving, actually. But that's an aside. I summarized that as really interesting. That has given me more insight than I was expecting. So decentralization, I'm not sure about how the economics of its work. But that's really interesting, the decentralization and a call to an earlier time. I could see that you might not be very popular with bishops or the manager class, but I think there's an element of truth to that.

Fergus (00:43:22):

I would say there are some incredible people. I can pinpoint two or three bishops who I think are hugely impressive. And I can pinpoint people who are in that managerial class, particularly some of the people who are fighting around the safeguarding staff who are trying to do things who are fantastic. So I would say it is not all of them, but as you know through the kind of corporate world, there is a kind of management brain that has affected the vast majority.

Ben (00:43:48):

Sure it's not one way. But it actually strikes me that the church has a governance problem. And like you say, there's good people, but the system has come across which is causing people in the middle-- And yes, maybe there is a lack of diversity of thinking as well, but the weight has compounded the wrong way and they cannot escape from that. Because, for instance, just your comments around how elections happen. So in a corporate world your board is meant to be very independent. And in fact, you have shareholders who will sack the board if they get very grumpy about it. So there are the other mechanisms. But you are right, this idea is that you are choosing the best that you can for your long-term purpose. And there was lots of things around that.

But it strikes me that the church, if it's just choosing within its own way and if the same people are going to choose people who are like them, which you would generally gravitate towards because it takes a certain kind of person to choose people not like you. And actually, that strikes me as a governance problem because you can actually change those decision making things by policy or by different mechanisms. But if the people in charge know about that and that, and you have your synod and all of that time, it strikes me as that. But maybe harking back to the earlier time, you've written a great book on clergy over the last, I guess few hundred years and they come in different flavors. And so listening to this also that the church has lost some of these flavors of eccentrics, I guess intellectuals, people who are kind of borderline heretics, I would guess as well.

You've also written a great book on how they stood up to fascism and the like. So my thought on that is, if you were going to be one of these types of reverends or priests, who would you have chosen to be? Or maybe you can channel them as they were back in their time, but they're now transported to here and you are going to be one of these reverends. Would you prefer to be an eccentric or a prodigal son? A bon viver would be more spun. I don't know whether they have the most change. Which class would you do?

Fergus (00:46:04):

Margaret Thatcher had a line about being lady-like; being a sort of classy lady and she said, "There is one cast iron rule telling people about being a lady if you tell people you aren't." And I sort of think there's something about that, about eccentricity. I think if you go around telling people you're eccentric, then you are not a true eccentric because it can't be studied. The whole point of eccentricity has to be a complete detachment from other people's opinion of you. Now, as my previous comments probably suggest, I generally do have a pretty low interest in what other people think or say about me particularly people with senior roles.

I think each of these operate in their own time. If I could have the capacity and the free time and the bank account to be a true bon viver, that'd be fantastic. I would like nothing more. Seriously, I think God calls us in Christ to say that all things are blessed and you shall not call these things unclean and you must enjoy the great gifts God has given us. I think there is a reason why the central right of Christianity is a meal with food and wine and shared with friends. And I think that is sacramental. That is where we can encounter God. God institutes the sacrament in and of himself. He says, "This is my body." So, I think, yes. I suppose someone who enjoys living.

Ben (00:47:57):

Who was the most underrated bon viver then that you wrote about, do you think?

Fergus (00:48:01):

Well, one of the most famous ones was the former Dean of Westminster, Buckland. Dean Buckland was dean of Westminster, which is a very high profile job in the Church of England. And he made it his mission to try and eat everything that had ever existed. So he ate mice, he ate tadpoles.

Ben (00:48:26):

This is Dean of Westminster Abbey.

Fergus (00:48:27):

Dean of Westminster Abbey, yeah.

Ben (00:48:29):

When was this?

Fergus (00:48:29):

This was in the Victorian era. So again, this is sort of the height of the church's bar. And they put as Dean of Westminster, this man who's obsessed with dinosaur faeces. So he excavates dinosaurs. And again, that was considered a threat to the churches. This shows you just the catastrophic declining in confidence and culture that we have that at the height of the Victorian era, the height of the problems around Darwin and questions around the origins of the universe, they're pointing to Westminster Abbey a man who believes his main role in life is not to sort of minister at the great moments of church and state, but to eat everything that he possibly can, including every kind of type of animal. He even eats the mummified heart of Louis XIV.

He goes to a museum, his private museum, they only let 10 people in-- Looks around this big. And he gets a ticket because he's the Dean of Westminster. So they think, "Oh, he'd be a very good person to have on our private tour." And they go and say, "Oh, now we reach the most impressive thing that we have." And they're very carefully taking it out this casket. And they said, "Because you're such a privileged group of people, we're going to hand it around to all of you. And this is the mummified heart of King Louis XIV smuggled out of France at the revolution and now kept here in our private museum." And it goes around all the people. They look at it and think, "Oh, this is amazing. This is wonderful." It gets to Dean Buckland, he looks at it and he says, "I've never eaten King before." And he pops it in his mouth. Of course these people are completely horrified. And his only comment was, "It was very dusty." This is the kind of person they're appointing.

But he's an incredible figure and an incredible sort of gourmand and incredible thinker. I mean, his lectures on geology are still studied at Oxford today. So he was a great liver and eater and drinker. The more recent underrated bombardier is a man called Brian Brindley, who was a great manager on this civil action. He very recent only died in the last 25 years or so. I think it was the year 2001 he died. He was a great lover of food and drink. He used to go shopping in red high heels to his local Tesco and he would fill his trolley with double cream because he ate double cream with everything because he said it made it less rich. Famously, he put on this party for his 70th birthday; party where he decided to have seven courses.

And unsurprisingly given his mode of living, midway through the-- I think it was the dressed crab and the birthing Crut in between the two, he killed everyone dropped dead. And the people said the only person who would've considered carrying on eating in such a circumstance was of course him. But it was a great way to go in his grand 70th birthday at the Athenaeum Club. So I think he's a lesser well- known one. Although, interestingly, when people talk to me about that book, he is the one most of them have met because he was…

Ben (00:51:28):

His funeral had to have been a great feast. That would've epitomized his life. I spent about five years of my life going to Westminster Abbey three times a week and listening to stuff. And I had never had anyone like Dean Buckland. But that would've been really inspiring. Underrated saint, do you have an underrated saint? What does Church of England think about saints nowadays?

Fergus (00:51:53):

We have saints.

Ben (00:51:53):

You do have saints, but kind of more famously in the Catholic traditions. But you have your own. I feel they're all underrated then, aren't they?

Fergus (00:52:00):

Well, the Church of England has a funny deal whereby it's sort of about the reformation. It said, "Well, we're not going to get rid of saints. We still believe in the community of saints, but we're not going to make any new ones.” They did actually make an exception there with King Charles the first when the restoration happened. Charles was declared St. Charles King and martyr and put in the calendar. Now since then, in the 20th century actually, the Church of England has put together a calendar whereby it includes holy people; often unlikely holy people from recent years, martyrs of the 20th century. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer is in there. People like some of those sort of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa are in there. Teachers and preachers from the 19th and 20th century; bishops, Charles Gore, who founded a lot of monks and nuns back in the Church of England. He helped bring them back. He's in there.

So there's a real mix of people, but they tend not to call them Saint X. I mean, in terms of most underrated saint, there are so many glorious ones. There is a saint, my absolute favorite saint whose name is Joseph something. He is a saint not in the Church of England; he is in the Catholic tradition. But he's a patron saint of loud noises. He was a junior brother in a monastery in Peru, I think it was. They needed money to rebuild the church. It had been destroyed in an earthquake. He said, "We don't know what to do, we can't farm, we can't do anything." So this chap said, "Okay, I've got you." So he found the noisiest donkey he could, went around and he listened to the constant bray, “hee-haw, hee-haw,” went to the owner and said, "Can I buy your noisy donkey?" He said, "You'd be doing me a favor to take it off my hands."

And essentially he went around every house in the town and he parked the donkey outside the house and said, "I'm going to leave this donkey here until you give some money to the donation of the church." And eventually people got so fed up with the donkey making this loud noise and they gave him money. So this chap became a saint because he rebuilt the church, but entirely through making loud noises and annoying people. And I think he's such a good reminder that the saints-- We think of the saints as kind of doe-eyed, very pious, constantly in prayer, but often annoying and loud people can be saint as well. And that's quite a good corrective. When someone annoys you, you think, "Hang on, they could be a saint."

Ben (00:54:34):

Yeah. That's a theme I get through all of your books and writing. And actually we've had it in this conversation that the church even today, but in its huge history, has a lot of diverse thinkers. People who you wouldn't necessarily associate with the myth of a do gooder church goer now, much more wide-ranging in their thinking, in their interests, in their passions. Much more human in a concentrated humanity, which I found really fascinating. You bring that to life very well and with a lot of humor. I think my favorite saint, although I think this might be apocryphal, I think it's Saint Drogo who's meant to be a saint of coffee, but I think it's a late one or something on trading.

Fergus (00:55:19):

I'll have to look it up.

Ben (00:55:21):

So I have an esoteric question for you because it has only recently come to my mind. And that's around transubstantiation. So this is the idea of becoming something. I have this in my theater work and practice, and I was thinking about this and speaking with other theater practitioners. In theater, we say an actor-- There’s as an actor that comes to mind. Maxine Peak, she's a great actor. She becomes Hamlet. In that moment, she is Hamlet. And you don't say, "Well, she's obviously not a Prince of Denmark. She's obviously on the one hand, not Hamlet.” But actually in that moment she is obviously Hamlet. And we're not saying there's any process change. We are simply calling her Hamlet. And it occurred to me that that is actually a form of transubstantiation. So if other people are really saying, "This is the blood of Christ, this is the whatever," actually in that moment who's to say that's not the same process which is happening when we say, "Maxine Peak, you are Hamlet." And so my question is, has this ever come across in your thinking? And then maybe as my little segue as that's a little bit esoteric, is do you think you become a different person or do clergy kind of become a little bit of a different person, although you are the same person, when you are wearing the collar? Is that in itself a kind of form of transubstantiation?

Fergus (00:56:47):

Absolutely. I think that's a really interesting analogy. And again, there are lots of strands of theology around the Eucharist; of thinking around what the body and blood and what the bread and wine is from memorialism which says you're simply doing something because that's what Jesus did and you're sort of copying Him. Which again, there is a school of thought in acting that says you are simply copying. There's consubstantiation that says, "Okay, well it is more than simply... You have a kind of spirit with you and through you the reception of this, but it isn't necessarily in an essence itself." You have transubstantiation. You then have the kind of the slightly Anglican mess of the idea of the real presence that you affirm the idea that Christ is present, but you don't necessarily want to know how. It comes down to how technical you like your metaphysics and how technical do you like to know, "Well, what is this?" And as you say, would you technically say Maxine Peak is Prince of Denmark now? In that moment, perhaps. But I suppose as a good Anglican, I think the technicalities are less. It's about incidents and accidents. The technicalities of it are perhaps less interesting than the fact of the moment, the living in the moment.

But that leads onto do you become a different person when you're wearing the collar? Yes. Because you become a cipher for everybody and you've become a different person to each individual person you encounter. So you are a different person to the lady who comes to the midweek communion service, to the guy sitting outside Tesco who you give five quid to, to the person who just sees you on the bus. But you are necessarily a cipher then for that person's encounter with the church, that person's encounter with God, that person's encounter with themselves and their own relationships with the world and the divine. So you necessarily become, whilst I should say-- this is why it is a good analog-- whilst also maintaining the kind of bread and wineness of your own, the fact of your own being.

You are still at that point son or daughter or husband or wife. You are a friend, you are a lover, you are an irritant. You are someone who is allergic to milk. You are someone who doesn't eat tuna. You are someone who prefers sparkling. All the things that are bound up in the sense of self are still there. Yet you also then have this fact that you are no longer yourself. You are now a type, a cipher, a kind of placeholder for on one level the church, but on a better level, you are there to represent Jesus Christ. And that's a huge responsibility.

Ben (00:59:42):

That's fascinating. I hadn't heard it explained that way. It makes a lot of sense as to that communal being that you can bear. Okay. So back from the esoteric. Little deviation into hardcore theology there for a moment. We'll go to a few more fun things. Who would you like to write a biography of yourself? Or would it have to be autobiography, which you're doing. But if someone's going to write a biography of you, who would it be?

Fergus (01:00:12):

Can I have a dead person?

Ben (01:00:16):

Yeah, Shakespeare.

Fergus (01:00:18):

No, not Shakespeare. I would like Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy because I think that he is kind of absurdist and he was a clergyman so he'd get it. I think he is one of the funniest writers ever to write in the English language. His kind of almost modernist rush for the absurd that you get interest from Shandy is unparalleled. And I think might be the only way-- Sometimes I find myself in a situation and think, “This is so absurd. There is no way of communicating this with a straight face.”

Ben (01:00:48):

Yeah. So there's a whole branch in creative arts where-- There's an argument that humanities have gone slightly wrong by not following more of the Tristram Shandy line. Because the other line in modern novels, which you'll probably know more than me, I haven't particularly studied literature as a theory, more as a practitioner. Is you have the kind of modern story which needs to be, perceived to be quite close to how we think life is. And if it feels too farfetched, it's we don't believe it. Whereas we have this phrase now is that we see things in real life and we go, "Oh, if that was a story, you wouldn't believe it."

Whereas if you follow the Tristram Shandy line and you have got elements of this magic realism and these other things which are obviously fantastical fantasy and science fiction would be there. But actually that fantasy in science fiction, magic realism and all the like, what we found is that by being so obviously not of the real world, it's actually revealing something deeper. It also shows much more what we call narrative plenitude. And actually, I think about it because it's a little bit of your critique of the institution and the church because it doesn't have that variety anymore because it's adhering itself to something that it thinks it wants to be, which is closer to this modern life concept as opposed to towards that you are eccentrics, you're Buckland's, your Tristram Shandy.

Fergus (01:02:21):

The thing of course which book does that better than almost anything else? The Bible. People say to me, "Do you think it's true that x, y and z happened in the Bible where you have Balaam's ass, where the donkey starts talking?" It's like, "Well..." My other great argument is who is one of the best theologians of the Bible is Pontus Pilot because he asked the question, "What is truth?” And then he answers his own question when he says, "Behold the man." So the truth is necessarily then encapsulated in the lived experience of Christ. That is where truth is from.

Ben (01:02:52):

Deep Bible stuff.

Fergus (01:02:54):

When someone says to me, "What about all the kind of crazy stuff in the Bible? Is that true?" It's like, "Yeah. Crazy stuff happens all the time." And actually, something that is crazy and as you say, magic realism, that can speak more earnestly of the truth than someone describing their, “I went to the shops and I bought some toothpaste and then I went home and I spoke to my friend and then I went to bed.” Something that is ostensibly more anarchic or more absurdist can speak much more deeply of the truth than something that is simply procedural.

Ben (01:03:25):

Yeah. Gets closer to the mind, gets closer to the human. Given that we're nowhere near close in any of that. So your writing day or your week? So you minister, you are going to have hopefully another job soon, but where do you find time for your writing? Are you one of those who writes an hour a day or four hours a day? Or does it come in fits and starts and do you have anything particular to your writing process?

Fergus (01:03:53):

It's quite erratic. I used to always carry notebooks with me. I've now gone into the appalling habit of the notes app on my phone, which I hate. But I do find myself-- I might be on the tube or on the train. I have a really small notebook laptop with me that I try and keep with me at all times. I do try and keep written notebooks on me, but the thing I always have on me is my phone so I can always take notes on that. So I will often write whole paragraphs or whole articles just if they come to me if I'm traveling. I spend a lot of time traveling. So I've now got to a point where I work really well on the train. I'm traveling around the country if I'm doing promotion to the book.

I was in Scarborough the other week, I'm going up to Yorkshire again. I've been in Liverpool. I'm going to the West Country in the autumn for a big tour there. So there's a lot of traveling. I don't drive so I use the time to work and I find that is hugely helpful. But if it comes to actually sitting down and writing a chapter, I do like to have done all that noting and all that. I've got hundreds of-- What I tend to do is I copy it. This is incredibly boring, but it does speak to the slightly chaotic nature of it. What I will do is I will write it in the notes app on my phone. I will then copy it to a Gmail document, a draft Gmail, send that email to myself, this whole random array of notes, and then put that on a Word document. And then from that, extrapolate further word documents that are like, "Okay, well that relates to that article that relates to that chapter." But when it comes to actually sitting down and writing the chapter, I like to write generally in the evenings. Sometimes in the afternoons actually I can work from-- I don't like really working in the mornings. I like to have a bit of a lead in, but I can work from 11. 11 o'clock I can probably start work. I like to sit and get a really solid three or 4,000 words done.

Ben (01:05:40):

That's pretty good in the day. But it strikes me you write a lot from observation. Your writing seems to me very well observed. And I'm guessing that comes from your notebooks and other observation. Then the other thing which is not utterly unique, but it's not perhaps super common, is a very strong thread of humor. And therefore actually both your observations and your commentary is often undercut-- Undercut isn't the right word either, but crosscutting both humor to either emphasize a point or to make some other observation. And the humor is obviously often centered around yourself like good standup comics do or in the footnotes or even in some of your sentence structure. And it strikes me that you've been funny for all of your life starting from young.

I think I heard your one podcast say that you were a little bit of a clown as a boy. But I was just interesting. Is there anything which comes around how you make those observations and the way that your humor comes out? It also strikes me as if we were to call something, because we don't call it much, but there is a ‘Britishness’ to your humor or an English. Actually, you hear it-- I don't know whether this might be a public school thing; Touching Cloth. If you know, you know is all I'm going to say on that. So there is a strand of that which I find also really intriguing. Is it something that you have to work upon or is it partly, I can now hear in this because you've got a slight irreverence for authority or rather you will see something and tell it how you see it, which is actually there's a big strand in a great English tradition of that as well. So I guess the question is humor, observation, how does it all come about in how you think?

Fergus (01:07:37):

I suppose they come about through-- I always think through kind of being sort of anti-systematic, if that makes sense in that I know that I am a paradox and I know that Christianity is paradoxical. I grew up in a kind of very paradoxical context of being. I had a very privileged and very happy childhood in many ways. But equally it was sort of erratic and slightly bonkers and disorganized. So I suppose there are one of two routes you take when that is kind of the way you come into that. Either you then seek systems very strongly, even try and impose order. I talk in the book about my father's whole life has been kind of an attempt to impose order on the order list.

It's why he likes recycling bins. When I go back to my parents' house, the bin is divided into four different things going that you can seek to impose on or you can begin to embrace the idea that order is not in fact the norm. That again, the only thing I think that has any kind of coherent order on itself is the concept of God. And that's too ordered for us to understand. So to us it seems absurd and yet it is in fact your order. So there's this sort of an embrace of paradox, which I suppose is very British, the kind of idea or English perhaps. Again, speaking of someone who is irreverent of authority and yet knows he is part of an authority figure who is part of an establishment, who is a clergyman. And again, we've always been very good at that; I think, of holding that intention.

The finest writers in English, the comic writers in the English Canon are people who are both insiders and outsiders. It's Jonathan Swift who is an Irishman. He seems like an outsider. He fails to get political performance because he's too scatological and controversial and yet he is Dean of Dublin. He is an establishment figure. He's an Oxford graduate. Look at Jane Austen similarly, you look at Sterne. I think if you look at those great English comic writers, all three of whom interestingly have-- Two of them are ordained, one of them is the daughter and sister of cleric. And I think actually the great gift the Church of England has given perhaps to global literature is that ability to hold the paradoxical and say, "Yep, okay, these things are..." And it means you can poke fun of something without necessarily saying, "I want to destroy this thing completely." So I can poke fun at the Church of England and still say, "But I still believe it's better that it's there."

Ben (01:10:07):

I just laugh because you are saying that basically the Church of England is full of clowns.

Fergus (01:10:13):

Yeah.

Ben (01:10:14):

But with love and kisses.

Fergus (01:10:17):

Exactly. Exactly that.

Ben (01:10:18):

I read, I think you did a very good defense of P.G. Wodehouse as well as a comment correcter.

Fergus (01:10:24):

Yeah. Again, Wodehouse is very good at that. That whole concept of Wodehouse living in a sort of dream. I mean, the person who writes the finest defense of Wodehouse is George Orwell, who when Wodehouse is getting a lot of stick because he was living in France and the Nazis and entered and they made him some right things where he sort of says, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't be fighting after all chaps," that sort of thing. But Wodehouse’s genius is kind of living in that fantasy world yet also saying something true through the absurd.

Ben (01:10:54):

Yeah, paradox.

Fergus (01:10:54):

Paradox

Ben (01:10:56):

Great. Okay. We’ll do a fun section now of underrated, overrated, and then finish up. So I'll name something and you can go underrated, overrated, or you can pass or you can make some sort of comment. We've got a few. The theme is kind of Britishness on this. So overrated, underrated James Bond movies? Got to be careful with this one.

Fergus (01:11:21):

Yes, I do. It very much depends. Again, this is very Church of England to both. I think certain James Bond movies are overrated. I actually think the Daniel Craig movies are overrated, I'm afraid. I think some of the Sean Connery films are actually overrated. I think the Roger Moore ones are underrated again because they are preposterous and I enjoy that. I think Timothy Dalton is underrated, George Lazenby is underrated. I think actually Pierce Brosnan is underrated.

Ben (01:11:50):

All of the underdogs underrated. That's interesting. That's very British. Okay. Underrated, overrated, the monarchy? Let's go for the British monarchy.

Fergus (01:11:59):

Again, both. I think what is underrated is a lot of-- I think the crown actually operates in a way that it can create a kind of degree of coherence and a degree of cohesiveness, which again, is ridiculous. But rooting your national myth in something ridiculous is a hell of a rooting than rooting your national myth in something that you can practically oppress people's lives with. I am a monarchist. I am an ardent monarchist. What I think is overrated is, I think the human aspect of it. I actually don't want to know about what their feelings really, I don't really care. The psychodrama of it I think is overrated. But I think the concept of the crown is underrated. I think we don't realize how strong.

Ben (01:12:51):

Very fair. Afternoon tea?

Fergus (01:12:55):

Overpriced. I'm a man who can eat clotted cream until I die, which is exactly what would happen if I only ate it. 

Ben (01:13:06):

Good job. You are in the clergy then.

Fergus (01:13:08):

I know, yeah. Underrated. I think it has become too kitch. I think the actual roots of it are very good.

Ben (01:13:15):

Yeah. I think I would agree. The House of Lords?

Fergus (01:13:19):

Underrated. I'm a great advocate for the House of Lords.

Ben (01:13:23):

Should we still have bishops in them?

Fergus (01:13:25):

Yep. I would have only bishops. Just not these ones.

Ben (01:13:26):

Maybe the ones elected by elected bishops. Very good. Double decker buses?

Fergus (01:13:38):

I love the tube. I love trains. I hate traveling by bus because I get this sense that I could be walking quicker certainly, and I hate that idea. And I hate the fact that some bus routes, which I know they have to do, will take me away from my destination in order to get me there quicker. So if I'm on the tube, I can't see that happening. If I'm underground or I'm on the train line, I can't see that happening. So I think buses are overrated.

Ben (01:14:06):

Yeah. So you're using travel to travel as opposed to, I would say, well maybe you just sit on the top of the double decker bus, watch the world, don't worry if it's going to take you 12 minutes or 17 minutes. This is London. It's just going to take you whatever. Whatever route you decide to choose will always be about the same type. Actually, I really do recommend walking, but it will be the same. You have to walk away, around and you get stops.

Fergus (01:14:29):

I like walking and I get this sense that I could be walking.

Ben (01:14:34):

That’s true. Okay. Black taxis?

Fergus (01:14:37):

Underrated. I think with the rise of Uber and Bolt and Free now and all that they sort of say, "Oh, one of the black cabbies." But there are genuinely times where hailing a black cab has felt like saving my life when I've been walking in the pouring rain and I've got to get to a train or stuff. So yeah, there have been black cabbies that have undoubtedly saved my bacon a number of times. So I will say underrated.

Ben (01:15:05):

Pubs.

Fergus (01:15:08):

I love pubs. I don't think it's possible for them to be overrated because I cannot speak too highly enough of them. That said, there are a number of appalling pubs, particularly in Central London. There are bad pubs. So some of them are underrated, some of them are overrated.

Ben (01:15:27):

Yeah. Community pubs which have got more family orientated. I'm assuming-- I haven't been too much around Liverpool, but Liverpool wouldn't be the same without its pubs either, right?

Fergus (01:15:37):

Some of the pubs in Liverpool are just... It would be impossible to overrate them because they're so good.

Ben (01:15:43):

Okay. And then last one, cricket?

Fergus (01:15:45):

I've got a bit of a kind of tan partly because I have spent the last 10 weeks essentially playing cricket. I think cricket is underrated and I don't mean because I think it's some sort of great sporting thing, but I think cricket is long. It can often be boring. It has moments, flashes of inspiration that seem gone too soon. And it is often, as we saw in the ashes yesterday, incredibly unfair. Therefore I think it is a very good metaphor for life more generally. So I will say it is underrated.

Ben (01:16:21):

Yeah. I think I tend to agree on that. So I think the long form test match or things over days-- Well for theater, I think it does tend to reflect a five act play or the acts of life of which in any good five act play now that you have is partly boring, at least for modern life. Even Shakespeare in its long acts we cannot stomach it in the same way. Shakespeare in its time was actually a much more community sport, community practice than we have it today. And naturally I do think it ties together, Britain. But interestingly, if you go to India or Pakistan-- I guess this is mixed colonial legacy, but it really does tie together the country as well. So it's interesting although it's not a huge worldwide sport. I think it does reflect a certain amount of humanity, perhaps a little bit better than it might seem. Great. So what are your current projects or things you're working on or thoughts?

Fergus (01:17:20):

I'm writing on bits. I'm hoping to have a new book out next year that I'm sort of working away on and I'm negotiating the exact format of at the moment. But once that is finalized, which I'm hoping will happen this week or next, it will be a very busy run of the season.

Ben (01:17:37):

Is that a secret theme? Or can you mention?

Fergus (01:17:40):

It'll be something to do with places around the world. It'll be a bit more global than previous ones. We'll feature churches in some way, shape, or form. So it will keep its religious theme, but I hope it will be a bit more global. As you mentioned, I have been appointed to be vicar of Charlbury in Oxfordshire, just north of Oxford starting in January. So I've got a lot of kind of prep for that really. So yeah, it's keeping me busy.

Ben (01:18:08):

Keeping you out of London and the London church politics. Great. And then last question then. Do you have any life advice? So this would be very appropriate for clergy, or I guess you could say -- We've covered a lot. So either life advice about thinking about how to live in the world or maybe also advice for young people or people thinking-- because you don't need to be young-- thinking of a life in the clergy what it might mean to be ordained or not. So you can go either or; so vague life advice or thoughts that you want to end with.

Fergus (01:18:46):

So my vague life advice is this that there are things in life that should be taken seriously and there are things in life that should not be taken seriously. The real thing to realize is that they're the opposite way around to the way you think they are.

Ben (01:19:00):

Interesting. So reverse it.

Fergus (01:19:03):

Yeah. Anything you think should be taken seriously, don't take it seriously. Anything you think should not be taken seriously, take it seriously.

Ben (01:19:10):

Very good. Okay.

Fergus (01:19:11):

That's my advice. In terms of those considering holy orders in terms of ordination, it seems an obvious thing to say, do pray about it. I think prayer is helpful. Prayer works. It is a huge life-changing decision. It is not to be taken lightly. I have a clerical colleague who I love and respect very much. And he says, "I always think when someone comes to me and says, ‘They want to be ordained,’ it's my job to do my very best to put them off. And if they still want to do it, then to encourage them as much as I can.” It has been the most important thing I have ever done. But it isn't for everyone. And you can be a fully authentic and impressive person and a fully authentic and impressive Christian without having a piece of cloth around your neck. So do always bear that in mind.

Ben (01:20:06):

Very good. And I guess that means you're a fan of meditation in general, prayer as a specific form, all of that.

Fergus (01:20:11):

Yeah. And for me it is about rhythm. Keep some form of rhythm. For me it is saying-- One of the things I hate most in churches today is where you go in and you don't know what's going to happen. Where it's just like, "We're going to change it today because it's blah, blah, blah." I use the same words every morning and every evening to pray with because I think-- Again, it goes back to what we said at the very start about faith and doubt. If there is a day where actually I go and I don't feel it, I'm held in the rhythm of that regularity. If you're constantly trying to do something different every day then you're not going to get that rhythm in.

Ben (01:20:48):

It's the same with some Buddhist chanting practices. Actually Catholic chanting practices as well with that would help.

Fergus (01:20:54):

Repeated words. And they enter into your soul then in a way. I've seen people on their deathbeds who have that rhythm. And it will kick in, in the important times of your life when you cannot hold things in yourself, whether that's when you die or when you're going through major things, you'll just find those words.

Ben (01:21:06):

Yes, I've read about it within Mystic Practice as well, though I haven't personally seen it.

Fergus (01:21:10):

Yeah, and I've seen massive. But for me, the Book of Common Prayer, just this rate which has been part of the rhythm of English life and prayer for 500 years nearly now, it works. It's that rhythm. It's just keeping that rhythm of prayer taking over until you need it.

Ben (01:21:27):

Great. Well, on that note, I'll just highlight once again the book, "Touching Cloth." And Fergus, thank you very much.

Fergus (01:21:35):

Thank you.

David Edmonds: Derek Parfit, future selves, paradox, effective altruism, philosophy | Podcast

David Edmonds is a philosopher, writer, podcaster and presenter. His most recent book is a biography of Derek Parfit. Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.

“Derek was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read.” -Tyler Cowen

Other books include: The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow) the international best-seller Wittgenstein’s Poker.   He’s a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. With Nigel Warburton he produces the popular podcast series Philosophy Bites.  For three decades, he was a multi-award winning presenter/producer at the BBC and the host of The Big Idea. 

We start off discussing “Trolley problems” and the ethical implications of choosing between lives now and in the future. Edmonds provides a nuanced perspective, discussing the argument that while a life in the future is (almost) as valuable as a life today, the decision to kill five lives today could potentially reduce future life.

Would you kill five people today, or five people in 100 years?

I think I would choose five in a hundred years, but it would be a very marginal decision…on the whole, I agree with Parfit in I think that there should be no moral discounting in that I think a life in the future is as valuable as a life today. But presumably if you kill five lives today, you are affecting who gets born. So that's why I would kill five lives in the future because I might be also reducing future life as well if I take lives today.

We chat about if thought experiments are even useful at all (contra, Diane Coyle, who dislikes them).  

I then ask about real life challenges such as NHS budgets and potentially choosing between saving pre-term babies or diabetics.

I ask David about his favorite paradox (think about God and a very large breakfast) and give him the St Petersburg paradox to answer.

"Can God cook a breakfast so big that He can't eat it?" 

We discuss the life of Derek Parfit, his personality and obsessions. Whether he might have been a good historian (vs philosopher), the pros and cons of All Souls College and if an autistic cognitive profile mattered.

David gives his view on why Derek’s second book was (and is) considered inferior to his first.

We also touch on Effective Altruism (EA) and Derek’s influence here on longtermism and possible foundational philosophical roots to the EA movement.

We end on what chess opening David would use against Magnus Carlson, what countries David would like to visit, current projects and life advice David has.

Podcast available wherever you listen, or below. Video above or on YouTube.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript (only lightly edited)

David Edmonds in conversation with Ben Yeoh

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to David Edmonds. David is a philosopher, writer, podcast and presenter. His recent book is a biography of Derek Parfit, of which Tyler Cowen wrote. Derek was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read. David, welcome.

David

Thank you, Ben. Nice to be here.

Ben (00:31):

I'm going to start with a trolley problem in honor of your book, "Would You Kill the Fat Man?" I think of this as a pure thought experiment. So maybe an easy one to start with; would you kill five people today, or five people in 100 years?

David (00:52):

Are they definitely going to die?

Ben (00:55):

Yes, they are definitely going to die. You can see I'm speaking to a philosopher. He's already thinking of the nuances. Not meant to be so tricky, but definitely going to die.

David (01:03):

Well, I think I would choose five in a hundred years, but it would be a very marginal decision. We're going to go onto Parfit later, but on the whole, I agree with Parfit in I think that there should be no moral discounting in that I think a life in the future is as valuable as a life today. But presumably if you kill five lives today, you are affecting who gets born. So that's why I would kill five lives in the future because I might be also reducing future life as well if I take lives today.

Ben (01:41):

Yeah. Very well thought out. So you can see this is someone who has worked on a whole book on trolley problems. So the follow up for that is, would you kill five people today, or six people in the future in a hundred years?

David (01:55):

Well, it's getting trickier and trickier, and the more you increase the gap, the tougher it's going to become. Again, I will take the five lives today. We know nothing about those lives. We assume that they might be young, they might be old, they might be past childbearing age. But with not knowing any of that, I'm assuming that a few of them will have futures where they may have kids and so on. So I'll take the six lives in the future.

Ben (02:32):

Sure. Great. And is there a number do you think we can find in equilibrium? What type of number do we get to go, "Ohh, this is getting really difficult here?"

David (02:41):

It is going to get very difficult. I'm not going to put a specific number on it. I think the reason why our intuitions are so sort of confused in these areas is that we find it very difficult to imagine that we can make a decision that will definitely affect people in a hundred years’ time; which is true because in practice, we just don't know what's going to happen in a hundred years’ time. So our intuitions are very, very messy. That's why I stipulate at the beginning-- I asked a question, "Are we definitely sure that these lives are going to be lost?" But I think we find it very difficult to get our head around it because the future is so uncertain. There would be some number of lives where I would say, "Let's take the current lives now." If you said take one life now, or a million lives in a hundred years’ time that would be quite easy, for example. But where the equilibrium lies, I think I would find that very difficult to say.

Ben (03:47):

And I very much enjoyed reading in your book the explanations between the difference between intentionality and all of these little nuances around these analogies. And I think you referred to it earlier. I've started off with this future one because I was going to ask you, but you already said, what do you think Derek Parfit would choose?

David (04:07):

Yeah, again, I think Derek would come up with my answer because of what I said; that current lives may create future lives. So if you remove current lives, you are also removing future lives. But he had this idea-- and I think he's right, that a life just because it's not yet in existence is nonetheless as morally significant as a life that currently is in existence. So just as we might think that it doesn't matter whether somebody is suffering on the far side of the world as opposed to suffering in the next town to us, that geography is an irrelevance-- all other things being equal; so time is an irrelevance as well. So I think he would say that, but I think he would come up with my answer, that there are those complications that I mentioned that current lives can create future lives.

Ben (05:05):

Yeah. I hadn't, until I started reading some moral philosophy, had truly thought very hard about that; about what is the discount we might give to time, something like economists might say, or distance or some of these other things. But I was interesting. You'd done some work or had a podcast with some experimental philosophers. I hadn't realized that this was a kind of newer branch of philosophy where philosophers go out into the world and try and survey and ask some of these questions, at least in revealed surveys because there's an issue with kind of revealed preference or survey preference. But when we survey, what type of number do you think we would come up? And does that number then indicate-- at least for the society or country that we might do this in-- does that kind of give where society has a type of discount rate for a future person? And is this useful or problematic?

David (06:06):

It might be useful in all sorts of ways. I wouldn't necessarily rely on it ethically because people can make ethical mistakes. They were very good grounds for discounting; for economic discounting. Those are the one on the whole, people would prefer something now to something in the future. And so you have to pay people an interest rate to delay their consumption. So that's how we operate. We prefer our preferences to be satisfied immediately. We have to be given a reason why we should delay our preferences and the discount rate sort of covers that.

Also, the other reason for discounting is what I mentioned earlier-- is uncertainty. You can never be certain about the future. So if you were sure that you could save a life now, well that's obviously a very good thing to do. You're very unlikely to be certain that you can save a life in a hundred years’ time. So it's worth discounting for that for the chance that in fact, you won't. So there are very good reasons for morally discounting on the grounds of probability, but not on the grounds that the life in a hundred years is less important than the life now.

Ben (07:30):

That's very clear. So it's not to do with the so-called value of that life, but the uncertainty that you can save it. So I was speaking last year to the economist, Diane Coyle. Diane seems to hate thought experiments. Simplistically, her line of argument essentially goes, "The nuances of the real world are so far removed from thought experiments that they become unhelpful," or I think maybe she just gets very annoyed by them. We've kind of indicated that it's so far that you have to think quite carefully about what these nuances and types of revealed. On the other hand, even in this short conversation, some of the mechanisms behind how we think do seem to be potentially revealed by these experiments and particularly mathematicians and physicists before they go out and try and find experimental evidence, will try and use these models of the world. Has those who kind of think thought experiments not useful swayed you at all over the years? Or from your start as a moral philosopher using these thought experiments, do you kind of think, "No, they have been useful?"

David (08:39):

Well, as you mentioned, I wrote a whole book called, "Would You Kill the Fat Man" about the famous Trolley problem. And many of your viewers and listeners will know what that is, but I'll just spell it out. So there was a paper that came out in 1967 by a philosopher called Philippa Foot. The paper was actually about abortion; 1967 was the year that abortion was legalized in the UK. And of course in America, Roe versus Wade-- the American courts have just overturned it. But that decision was 1971 or 73, I think. I've forgotten now. I think it's 73-- I'm not sure now. Anyway, 71 or 73, but a few years later. So abortion was a very live, practical applied issue in the UK. In America, it's remains. So in the UK, it's much less of a live moral issue.

But in any case, she imagines that there's a train going along-- I'll change her thought experiment slightly to make it easy to understand. There's a train going along. It's going to kill five people. You are standing by the side of the track, you can turn a lever and turn the train down a spur where unfortunately one person is on that track. So you have a choice between letting the train carry on in which case five people will die, or turning the train in which case one person will die. And what's interesting about that is that almost everybody says that you should turn the train. And then later on, another philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thompson, in the 1980s-- 1986, she comes out, imagines that this time the train is running along again, it's out of control again. There were five people tied to the track.

This time there's another way of saving them. You're standing on a footbridge and you are standing next to a very large man. These days we talk about a person with a heavy rucksack. And you can push this large man or this person with a heavy rucksack over the footbridge. The man is so large or the heavy rucksack is so heavy that it will stop the train from killing the five people. But the large man or the man with the heavy rucksack will die in the process. The question is, "Should you kill the fat man, the large man, the man with the heavy rucksack?" In this case, almost everybody says it's wrong to push the large man or the person with the heavy rucksack. It's a great puzzle because in both cases there's a choice between five lives and one life.

I think that is a useful thought experiment because I think it does get at some important intuitions that you touched on earlier; have to do with intention. And I think intention explains the difference between these two cases; we can go into it if you would like. So I think there is an example of a thought experiment being very helpful in reinforcing a view that what we intend matters in moral philosophy. I should say that there's a whole branch of moral philosophy or sub-branch, called teleology, which has hundreds of these weird thought experiments. And some of them I think are completely useless because they're so weird. They've got so many aspects to them, so many dimensions to them, and they're so implausible in almost every way that I think our intuitions no longer hook onto anything of any substance.

So we imagine that train is going along and the only way you can save the five is by pushing a tractor. The tractor will push a large man in front of the train, blah, blah, blah. There are so many kind of permutations to this thought of them. Some philosophers say, "Well, obviously the right thing to do in this example is X." And my reaction is, "Well, I don't think anybody could have any strong sense of what the right thing to do is because it's now so wacky and so absurd." I think those thought experiments are not useful. But I think some of them can be. I think the basic thought experiments in the trolley problem are useful, and the justification for those thought experiments is that in the real world, it's precisely because the real world is so messy and has elements to it that are relevant to the situation at hand. That if we can clean up the real world and remove some of the complications, then it might help us see what's going on in some of these cases. So I think if done right, these thought experiments can be helpful.

Ben (13:49):

That strikes me as a good defense. "If done right," I guess is the big caveat there. But I'll accept that. So I'm going to give you close to a real world puzzle then. I gave this one to Jonathan Wolf (Jo Wolf), and also to Larry Temkin; two other philosophers who've been on the podcast. It's really to do with the UK health system or the health systems overall, but specific to UK, which has a defined budget. So I guess all government policy does have this budget. I usually do it with preterm babies and also diabetics. But they're just kind of two classes of patients which the National Health Service here in the UK or any closed system budget has to do. The issue is around the fact that broadly speaking, although there's uncertainty, the calculations to save a year of a diabetic's life-- and you can talk about these kind of qualities; these quality adjusted life years (QALY)-- but just to say this is the ballpark, tends to be say something around 20,000 pounds to save a year of that life for diabetics. And actually, there's other patients who are like that.

Then you have the preterm baby-- although you can also put rare genetic diseases in this class. Preterm babies tend to cost somewhere between 200,000 to a million pounds to save a sort of year of life on a sort of equivalent. And rare genetic diseases-- maybe not quite as high as that, but very large numbers. This is a puzzle which actually the government when they were thinking about this-- And I think Joe was involved, but some philosophers were involved in terms of how to try and set and think about pricing that and what we should do. But then they also actually surveyed people. So they actually thought, "Okay, what is this also that society would like to do or not?" So a lot of this was behind the scenes in terms of how the policy developed. How then do you think we should think about weighing up money spent on things like diabetes or diabetes patients compared to preterm babies or rare genetic diseases or other interventions which could be very expensive, but would also save your life?

David (16:15):

Well, I totally understand the QALY approach. I think one can question the basic assumption. And often when people criticize the movement of effective altruism, they sort of criticize the basic premise which is that the kind of individual has to accept the status quo. Actually, we don't, we could try and change the status quo. The premise of your argument is that resources are limited. Of course they are. But presumably, one can choose to spend more on health if one wanted and less on some other things. But accepting that there is definitely going to be a limit at some stage, you can't spend everything on health. There are other priorities; transport, education, other important priorities. You've got to spend something on defense. I think the quality approach is a very sensible one.

I think healthcare is-- especially a system like in the UK and national healthcare, it has to rely on public support. And so it's not totally unreasonable to throw in some survey evidence about what matters to people. I mean, I do think that should only be a very small part of it because people can be very prejudiced in all sorts of ways. If you were to do this with animals, people would prefer furry animals, cute looking animals to animals that were less cute, even if there was kind of suffering; the suffering was equal on both types of animals. So I do think you have to be cautious about taking into account public support. Having said that, as I say, the National Health Service has to rely on some kind of consensus because we're all paying into the system. And to take into account people's preferences to a certain degree, is not unreasonable.

Ben (18:39):

That seems fair. And then in this particular case, where do you fall out?

David (18:45):

Well, you mean between the diabetes case that cost 20,000 and the preterm case that cost 200,000?

Ben (18:53):

Yeah. So I guess would be, do you think actually we should perhaps not save as many of those preterm babies? I guess that's the crux of the dilemma.

David (19:06):

Yeah. It sounds very heartless, doesn't it?

Ben (19:08):

Yeah, it does.

David (19:09):

That's why people are so reluctant to do it. But I mean, that is the basis of the quality calculation. And of course, the whole point is if you don't perform those kind of operations or those kind of procedures, you can add many, many more lives to other people. So where the discrepancies is so vast like that, I think I'm prepared to bite the bullet.

Ben (19:40):

Interesting. So if you do the survey evidence, then the typical person in the street-- although I think it's not quite as strong as the trolley but it's almost there, says, "No, we should save the preterm baby." The kind of group which is an exception tends actually to be medical practitioners. Medical practitioners who tend to be, at least within this domain a little bit more cost benefit analysis or utility or utilitarian around it. The compromise that the system actually does, it says, "Well, we will take into account society preference and we will save some of both." But you can see with a limited budget, obviously you are actually not saving the maximum amount of either, and we don't really know where the number is. 

But it tends to be for these more rare conditions or conditions interestingly, and this comes through in the survey. I don't know whether this is society misjudging, but the idea is that these types of patients typically have something where they can be saved. So like rare genetic diseases and preterm, we have the medical technology. There is a sense that it wasn't the baby's fault or the person with the rare genetic disease fault. Something happened and we can do something about it. Yes, it costs a lot more money, but there does seem to be-- at least in UK society today, and I haven't seen data across other society. So I would be interested then if no one has done that, but has accepted that, "No, there is some sort of sense of fairness within that."

David (21:27):

Yeah. Well, I don't know fairness is necessarily the right word there. I was going to suggest that attitude to responsibility might be relevant here. So there are some diseases people have that are not entirely unrelated to lifestyle and to choices that people have made. And then I think people have the intuition that the preterm baby who's clearly not responsible for their condition is blameless. Whereas people elsewhere in the medical system could be held responsible to varying degrees for their conditions. So I think that's another intuition that plays into people's intuition. So I think that's probably a reasonable intuition to some extent.

Ben (22:26):

Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking with Diane and a few others over the years, I do put a little bit less weight on the pure utilitarian calculation than I used to do. Part of it is actually a little bit of disquiet around the fact that transitivity for some of these things may not hold up. That's what Larry Temkin has potentially convinced me of. But I actually, for a lot of things like this or at the margin, I don't see many better tools. We've got surveys and we've got other things to draw into what we call a technical health assessment which we have to do a lot of. But I have got a little bit more cautious on that. Perhaps that's a good segue though into paradoxes. And I was wondering, do you have a favorite paradox?

David (23:20):

Well, strangely enough, about 30 years ago in one of my early, I had a kind of twin career as a philosopher and a BBC journalist. So probably in the early 1990s, one of my first series was on philosophical paradoxes, and we covered five interesting paradoxes. Some of them were puzzles rather the paradoxes, but I guess I quite enjoyed one which is essentially about infinity which is, "Can God cook a breakfast so big that He can't eat it?"

Ben (24:03):

Yeah. I like that one. I told that one to my son actually after listening to your ones. Yeah, can you have a meal so big that you can't eat it?

David (24:14):

Can you be so powerful that you can cook a meal which is so big that you can't, as an all-powerful person, eat it? We did Theseus' ship which is not really a paradox at all. So that's the ship that goes into dry dock in Perez and it's rotten and you change the ship plank by plank until there isn't a single plank left of the original ship. And the question is, "Is it still the same ship?" That's quite interesting for all sorts of areas, including personal identity. It's not really a paradox, I don't think so much.

There's interesting puzzles about vagueness. I quite enjoy those about the bald man who can never go bald because if you lose one hair, clearly that can make no difference. You don't go from being hirsute to being bald by taking away one hair. So then you can take away one hair, then you can take away another hair, and at no stage have you gone from hirsuteness to baldness. Eventually, you have no hair left at all, and you can't be bald because one hair can make no difference. Now, that is a really difficult puzzle. There's one philosopher, Tim Williamson, who's a very brilliant philosopher who thinks that there is a moment where you actually do go. It's the only way it makes logical sense; that you actually do go from not being bald to being bald. It's just we don't know what that hair is. But that is a genuine, difficult sort of paradox to crack, I think.

Ben (26:01):

That's a good one. We might come onto something with ships because hopefully we're going to talk about maybe future persons and that thing. I wonder about the hair one. I wonder whether quantum has some-- Well, I guess there's a paradox within that because there's light wave or a particle answer yes, depending on how you look at it. But I was going to throw in a paradox, which maybe isn't quite a paradox, but it has a couple of segues into it, which is the St. Petersburg paradox is the one it's called. There's various ways I guess you can ask it. But one would be you sort of have a flip of the coin and it's 51%, 49%. And 51%, you double the value of something enormously. So you can say double the value of the world. And at 49%, the world goes to nothing so you destroy the world. Do you take that bet?

David (27:00):

Well, I definitely wouldn't. I don't know very much about this paradox. It reminds me a bit about the way that you are guaranteed to win money on a roulette wheel. That you bet one pound on red, and then if you lose, you bet two pounds on red, and then if you lose, you bet four pounds on red. And then if you win, you've won one pound. But if you lose, you bet eight pounds on red, and if you lose, you bet 16 pounds on red. And then if you win, you've won one pound. So eventually, you're bound to win one pound when you win. But the problem is you eventually run out of money. There's a risk that you run out of money. Like Parfit, who we'll eventually go on to talk about, I think the catastrophe of extinction is so great that you need more than a 51 to 49 odds to justify.

Ben (28:06):

Well, the paradox comes in because you're then asked to play it again and again and again. It's a paradox which is a struggle for utility theory actually. Some people think that ergodicity might solve that, but it's a utility problem. I mention it on two things. One is that when Sam Bankman- Fried (SBF) was asked it, he said he would take the bet which in hindsight seems really revealing. Most recently I heard Peter Singer decline to answer-- at least in public, on the grounds that he doesn't support gambling which was a very good dodge from Singer, because obviously a naive or pure utilitarian does tend to take the bet. But actually, I mentioned St. Petersburg as my segue into Derek Parfit because Derek in your biography, seemed to travel to St. Petersburg a lot to take photographs.

It was one of the images which stays with me. Images are quite interesting because there's some evidence that he had some form of face blindness or he didn't process faces in the way that a more typical person might process faces. I don't think Derek would've taken the St. Petersburg paradox, but he went to St. Petersburg all the time. But I guess my question here is what do you make of his photography and his, I guess, obsessiveness with certain images and going back to them? And do you think that had any commentary on how his philosophy came about? Or do you think it's quite separate in terms of just an interesting fact of his life, which doesn't necessarily bear any relevance to his thinking or his moral thinking?

David (30:09):

Well, I think it definitely tells us something about him as a personality, and that probably does tell us something about his philosophy. He had something called aphantasia, which is not quite the same as face blindness, but it's sort of linked. So he couldn't conjure up mental images. So if he was thinking of St. Petersburg, he couldn't conjure up all those beautiful buildings that he loved so much. Of course when he went to St. Petersburg, it was not St. Petersburg, it was Leningrad because he went at the time of the Cold War. He would go to two cities every year. So he would go to St. Petersburg and he would go to Venice. The other city he would photograph all the time that he didn't need to travel to-- he could just look out of his window, was Oxford.

So he would photograph those three cities and there were thousands and thousands of photographs he took of those three cities. He eventually gave up in about 1999, about 2000. But for years and years, he would go to these cities and he would take these photographs of the same buildings at sunset and sunrise. It was obviously an obsessive hobby. The word obsession comes up a lot when you're talking about Derek. He used to then come back after taking these photographs and he would then tinker with them. This was long before Photoshop. And what he would do is he would send them to a developer, initially in Italy, then later in London, and he would ask them to remove bits of the photograph that he didn't particularly like. He didn't want people in his photographs so if there was a person in his photograph, he'd get them to remove the person. Or there was a lamppost that got in the way, he'd get them to remove the lamppost.

Then he was very fascinated and interested and obsessed with color. He would want to tinker with the color and he would change how bright something was or he would kind of make something more mellow. If it didn't work, he would send it back again to the developer. Photographs would go back and forth half a dozen times at the cost of hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So does it tell you anything about-- well, it certainly tells you something about his personality and his perfectionism. He was a total perfectionist. He wanted to get everything right. He wanted to make, develop, to photograph the perfect shot.

His philosophy was very much like that. He was very slow at publishing, and that was partly because he didn't want to release anything into the world until he felt it was absolutely perfect. So there was definitely that parallel. Some people have said the way he used to remove people from his photographs is in some ways quite kind of un-Kantian; the people weren't very important. The overall image he wanted to portray-- and maybe there's a link there. So I think you can certainly draw connections between Parfit personality and his philosophy. I mentioned that he gave it up. He gives it up in about 2000. And then the rest of his life is purely philosophy. So for years he had these twin obsessions which were philosophy and photography. When he was young, he had a much richer life, but he got rid of all those other interests and just had philosophy and photography. Then he got rid of the photography and it was just philosophy. And that was, as I say, the last kind of 15, 20 years of his life.

Ben (34:15):

And within photography, do you know whether he started with also a broader range of subjects and interests and narrowed down to Venice, St. Petersburg, Oxford, or did it always start out relatively narrow?

David (34:32):

He was given a camera as a young person, and unfortunately we don't have any of the photos from that time. But I imagine it was a bit broader because that would mesh with his life. His life was much broader. He had many more interests in those days, and I can imagine that he would photograph his family he talks a lot about in his diaries that I have from when he's 10 and 11. So it's only a surmise, it's only a guess. As soon as he went to Venice, he fell in love with Venice. He'd been to Rome, but he didn't fall in love with Rome and he never went back to Rome. Whereas Venice, he went back to time after time, after time. I think he says at one stage that he was unusual in that when he found something that he liked, he never got tired of it.

So there would be musical pieces that he could listen to over and over and over and over and over again. There could be buildings that he could look at over and over and over and over and over again. He didn't crave the way lots of us crave. He didn't crave variety. It's a bit like-- My father was a little like that. If he found a nice restaurant that was the restaurant he would want to go back to time, after time after time. Derek was like that with most things; that once he found something that he thought was sublime, he didn't feel the urge to then try other things. He found Venice and Leningrad and he fell in love with both of them. He loved Oxford, never got tired of them and photographed them for decades.

Ben (36:23):

Yeah, I can really see that. My son is like that too. But I think about his early years in the biography, which I found really fascinating because we describe him now-- and I think philosophers of the time, as one of the greatest philosophers in the last fifty hundred years, certainly in the top. Partly in originality of his thinking and the work he did put out, partly because he seemed to enable so many other philosophers and thinkers. And one of the threads I get from the book is in some way his enablement of others, which I suppose is a kind of second order thing, in some ways might go on to be his greatest legacy. I guess we'll see. Obviously, he's that within his work, but he obviously enabled so many other thinkers. When I think in his early years, historian obviously could have become if you look at the beginning and the references, one of the greatest historians of our era potentially.

He seems to have, or you describe a strange relationship with numbers. But even without that numbers, it strikes me that he could have been one of our great economists, particularly one of the economists who didn't perhaps work with numbers or a historian economist. The passage or the passages talking about the discussions he had or this panel discussion with Amartya Sen and the others really made me realize how interconnected these intellectual stars are, the way they kind of talk and think. But also, actually that broad base that Parfit had in the beginning, I really now miss. I really want to know what that would've been and maybe not. So I was wondering whether do you think he could have been brilliant in so many other domains had this obsessive focus not happened? And I guess my follow up is my conflicted reading then about All Souls. But do you think this from your reading of all of the sort of transcripts and people that early year work is brilliant across many domains, including, I would say creative writing, history, economics all of that. Is that secure? And do you think therefore he could have gone on to do many things?

David (38:45):

He was clearly academically extremely gifted. He was clearly a superb historian. I think he found the right domain for him for a number of reasons. One is that I think he had to work on something that he felt mattered. And the reason he would never have been a great historian is that although he could do it very easily, and he was extremely gifted at it and could have no doubt done the primary research and strung it all together in a great narrative and had something useful and interesting and original to say about topics-- the French Revolution was the thing he specialized in, Aries specialized in when he was an undergrad. He didn't fall in love with history. He ultimately didn't care enough about it. In fact, when he goes to All Souls and some younger people arrive in All Souls, he tries to persuade them all to give up their history or to give up their discipline and to do what really matters, namely philosophy. So I think that was one reason why philosophy was right for him.

You mentioned his relationship with numbers. So he had a phobia about mathematics and notation. And as I discovered in my research, one of the weird aspects of that is that he was clearly quite good at maths. He came first in maths at school; both at his prep school and at school. He was first in maths, he was obviously a good mathematician. He was clearly capable of doing maths at least to a reasonably high degree, and he developed this phobia of it. So he would never write anything in logical notation. Some philosophers write like to present their arguments in logical notation, convert them into symbols. And when anybody did that with any of his arguments or with any of their arguments and sent them to Derek, he would say, "I don't understand. Write it in prose and then I'll respond." Yet he had a very analytic mind. He was capable of following arguments down a long family tree down lots of branches and keep it in his head; very unusual in that regard, which is one reason why he didn't need logical notation because he could follow it in his head.

Could he have been a great economist? I think his phobia about notation of maths had he developed that, had he gone into economics would really have been a constraint for him there because that is very important to economists. Every economist to some degree understands how to manipulate numbers and how to present arguments in econometric terms. There are some economists who can get away without doing that, but command of numbers and mathematics I think is very important to economists. So I think he would've struggled in that area. Economists on the whole like him because he thinks in lots of ways like economists and there were group of economists at All Souls where he was based with whom he used to communicate. He's very interested in things like the prisoners dilemma, which is a kind of puzzle or a paradox that economists have made great use of.

So game theory, he was very interested in game theory and applying that to philosophy. So there were definitely parallels between what he was doing and what economists were doing. He thought in a kind of economist way, but I'm not sure he would ever have been a great economist. I think he found his metier. He could have been an academic in a number of different disciplines, I think. But he possibly could have only reached the real heights in one discipline, which was philosophy. I think he found the right area.

Ben (43:08):

Well, that's quite convincing to me. I was wavering a little bit, but at least the way you put it and you have great firsthand and secondary knowledge of that. So I'm convinced. My follow on from that then is do you think he would've reached those heights without All Souls? So my reading of All Souls-- and now I've done a little bit more reading into it I found that like, "Oh, I hadn't known enough about the institution of All Souls." It seems that in some ways it very much protected him, allowed him to develop those obsessions and heights, and to some extent not immediately getting into All Souls and some of the challenges that All Souls brings in terms of getting that book out was also that.

I wonder whether without Derek, All Souls would've really progressed. I kind of view that actually there is obviously arguments for continuity. But when I look at the range within hindsight and looking back, and obviously I don't have the full facts, it seems to me a little bit too stuck in certain traditions and not enough moving forward into the world. So I get mixed feelings about it. But I do sense that maybe without All Souls, there needs to be a place or institutions where people like Derek can really make a home and they can be good for one another. So perhaps that outweighs everything else. But do you have a view on how important All Souls was and whether All Souls itself needs more change?

David (44:51):

So there are lots of questions in that. Let me first explain what All Souls is because most people won't know what All Souls is. So All Souls is a college in Oxford purely dedicated to research. So it doesn't have any undergrads. At the time when Derek goes there, it's unique. So they now have institutions where they just have researchers and there's a budget just for people to study and they don't need to teach. But at the time, there were no others. Derek applies in 1964 as a historian and as one of his rare failures, probably should have been accepted, but he was rejected. I think they were trying to put him down, bring him down a peg or two. He goes off to America on a Harkness Fellowship and he comes back and he applies again, this time as a philosopher, and he's accepted in 1967, and he spends the rest of his life in All Souls.

Now, there is one way that All Souls helps a lot, and another way which I think it possibly doesn't. So the way in which it helps is-- you mentioned this, Derek gets a prize fellowship for seven years, then he gets another fellowship for seven years, and then he applies for the senior research fellowship in 1981 that will give him a job for life. And I think he just assumes he's going to get it because everything has come very easily to him. He has had virtually no knock backs in his life, and I think he just assumes it's there for the taking. They don't give it to him. And the reason they don't give it to him is because he hasn't-- after 14 years of being at All Souls without having any real responsibilities, he hasn't produced a single book. And they say to him, "Unless you produce a book, we will throw you out. We will extend your fellowship for another three years. But unless there's a book, you are out in the big wide world."

That focuses Derek's mind. And I really think it's possible these kind of counterfactual truths. I mean, there's a whole area in philosophy wondering, "What kind of status these counterfactual truths have?" But let's assume that there are these counterfactual truths. I think there is a world in which All Souls hadn't put him under that pressure, and his famous book, "Reasons and Persons" had never appeared. So in that sense, they did him a big favor. He took on lots of students because he liked teaching philosophy, he liked engaging in philosophical tour, and he gave lectures as well. He took on a tiny bit of admin. But I think in general, it's not necessarily a case that academics benefit as much as they think they will from having these pure research posts.

It depends how much their workload is. Many academics are just weighed down by the bureaucracy, by the extent of the contact they have to have with individual students and how many lectures they have to give. And that leaves no room for research. But I think in general there's probably a nice balance to be had for a certain type of academic where you have some time for research, but you are also devoting time to lecture and to engage with students. The reason I think that is because I think engaging with students and lecturing is a catalyst to ideas and a stimulus for thought, and it doesn't necessarily benefit everybody to have these pure research roles. Having said that, Derek was definitely allowed to be himself. It suited Derek, I think. An institution like that where he was fed and he was watered and he didn't have to do anything, it suited his personality.

Beyond Reasons and Persons increased his productivity? Well, I'm skeptical about that. One final point about All Souls, it was a very conservative organization when Derek joined. Derek was at the center of a movement to make it slightly more modern in that it was all male when Derek arrived, and he was one of the leaders of a movement to bring women fellows into All Souls. Without Derek, it was inevitable, I think that at some stage it had to modernize. There are no all-male colleges left now at Oxford. So I think it would've happened eventually in any case. I think Derek sped up the process. I'm sure it could modernize further. I think if you talk privately to some All Souls fellows, they will admit that in some ways it's still quite stuck in its ways. On the other hand, in terms of demographic representation, it's a world away from what it was when Derek joined in the 1960s where it was mostly middle class or indeed posh white males. So that has changed very dramatically. But in other ways, the college has changed much less and probably not as far as it needs to.

Ben (50:55):

Yeah, I could see that. So the counterfactual is that it would've happened anyway, but Derek was part of it. Whether it would've happened quite as quickly, that's interesting. I'm going to circle back on two things. So one was that it was obviously good for his personality. But I do wonder on this connection to others because littered throughout the book are social events and they seem kind of very rich and kind of normal. But towards his later life, he does so many fewer of them. And there was this one kind of heartbreaking anecdote I felt about one social event. I think it was a funeral and Derek wanting to work on his philosophy kind of thinking that he would decline and someone countering saying, "You work on what matters." "Well, this is what matters."

And I wonder with that obsession, losing that little bit of edge, and I wonder whether All Souls didn't help with that. But perhaps before getting to the later life, I wanted to reflect just on quite how astonishing the first book is. I think you describe it or maybe someone else describes it as a kind of neutron bomb into philosophy. I think for people outside of academic philosophy is perhaps harder to really appreciate how different, how difficult it is to have new ideas in a way which it contained. And I really got that sense actually through your writing where you explain, I think, quite difficult concepts very clearly. Then you have this beautiful sense of essentially narrative. We have this non-fiction narrative genre, an arc now. But the narrative explanation of it is very beautifully written and quite moving. But I guess as you're philosopher trained, and actually in some ways this and some of your interactions makes you a kind of unique biographer on that, whether you would highlight how important you think that first book is maybe to you or to others.

David (53:14):

Well, it's not an uncontroversial or an uncontentious book or an uncontested book. So if you were to compare it to something like one of Kant's great works or the Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein, one thing that's important to say is that I think he won't find a single senior philosopher who would denigrate the Philosophical Investigations or who would think that Philosophical Investigations was not an important work. There are some philosophers who really dislike the way Derek does moral philosophy and who don't rate Reasons and Persons, which I think is his greatest book as highly as some others. So it's not an uncontested work of genius. On the other hand, it's widely acknowledged as an extraordinary work and a work that, as you say, is very, very different. I finished my undergraduate in 1986, Reasons and Persons comes out in 1984.

I have just next to me now, my paperback edition which was given to me by sort of one of my best mates, I think after we graduated. So I must have had the 1986 edition. I went on to do philosophy post-graduate work straight after that. But I gobbled up Reasons and Persons, and I adored it. I think I would find it very difficult to read now because it's very, very dense. It's not obtuse or deliberately complicated. It's extremely transparent and clear in the way he writes. He does his best to make it as clear as possible, but it's very dense. It's got thousands of arguments in it. So unless you've got a great deal of intellectual energy, it's hard work reading from the start to the finish.

But I had a lot of intellectual energy when I was young and I gobbled it up and it had the same effect on me as it had for many people. It was a very, very important book. And I think for lots of people, it persuaded them to go on and do philosophy. For lots of other people it shaped their philosophical interests and people spent the rest of their lives working on philosophical problems that Derek had first identified in Reasons and Persons. I think along with one of the reviewers, that it's close to a work of genius. It's a fantastic, fantastic book; Reasons and Persons-- a very, very important book. So I think in decades to come it will still be read. That's how I would place it. I think that's true of very few works of contemporary moral philosophy, but I think it's true of Reasons and Persons.

Ben (56:33):

I didn't realize that even something like Wittgenstein wasn't contested in his lifetime, but I guess there are very, very few works like that. And so I guess my follow on question just on the writing would be why did the second book not have the impact of the first? I guess there's a question that Tyler Cowen also asked, and I've had a few. I've got a kind of, "You have some inklings within the book” and I have some friends who sort of have some notes on it. But do you have your thoughts as to why the second book-- I guess if we talk about the consensus, didn't have the same impact or hasn't been considered in the same vein? And do you think there's a chance within time that view might change? Or do you think actually it does look like it won't be considered in the same cannon as the first book?

David (57:31):

I'll answer that. Let me just pick up on the Wittgenstein book. Philosophical Investigations was published after his death so it's a posthumous book-- all of Wittgenstein's work apart from the Tractatus. He had an amazing reputation in the Anglo-American world way before he died. The Tractatus had made him sort of internationally famous. But his current reputation is largely based on this huge body of work that only appeared after his death. On What Matters, I think there were two reasons why it didn't have the reception that Reasons and Persons had. The first is that pretty much everybody working in the field had already read it because Derek had been working on it for so long. And because he wanted to get every point right, because he wanted to respond to every potential objection, he had sent it to hundreds of people.

When it eventually came out, I think many of those hundreds of people didn't bother reading it because they'd already read it in multiple drafts. Because they would send it back to him, he would deal with their objection or their points and file it back to them, they felt like they'd read it. It's true of Reasons and Persons as well as On What Matters. Derek, because he wanted to deal with every objection, he made the books longer than they should have been. They've got elements to them that we could have done without. He could have written cleaner books. I mean, it's interesting to compare him with somebody like Thomas Nagle, who was a kind of friend of Derek's. Thomas Nagel writes these brilliant books where he gets to the nub of an issue and he sort of dispenses with all the kind of flippers.

Derek wanted to cover everything and so that's not the way he works. On What Matters just becomes too big precisely for this reason, because he's sending it to all these people. They're sending him objections, and instead of saying, "Well, we don't need to deal with this objection," he would deal with every objection, especially if it came from somebody he respected. So that was one reason why I think it didn't have the reception of Reasons and Persons. The obvious, I think it's just less compelling, it's just less convincing that he has managed to persuade people which he hopes that he has done. He managed to persuade them one of two things. He has two projects. His twin projects in On What Matters are to try and show that the different traditions in moral philosophy are compatible.

The book, "On What Matters" was for many years called "Climbing the Mountain." And his metaphor was that all these different philosophical traditions in ethics are climbing the same mountain, but from different sides. And when they reach the summit, they realize that they have everything important in common. So that was one of his projects. His second project was to show that morality was objective and that there were moral facts in the way that this laptop exists is a fact. Well, not quite in that same way, but that there were moral facts. I think he just hasn't convinced a great many people who weren't already convinced of his position about that. So On what Matters has many, many fascinating things built within it. And so if you have two years of spare time of your life to devote to a philosophy book, go ahead and read On What Matters because that's how long it will take you. Maybe three years depending on how much spare time you have.

There's lots of fascinating things inside it. But the overall project, I think hasn't convinced many people. So I think there were those reasons why it hasn't and won't be remembered in the same way, whereas Reasons and Persons kicks off whole areas of philosophy, which philosophers still investigate to this very day. I mean, most famously, of course, future people and our obligations to future people, which really didn't exist before Derek. So Derek was really the first person to come up with a whole set of puzzles and problems to do with what we owed to future people. And that there are still lots of people working in that area. And just for that reason alone, I think he'll be remembered.

Ben (01:02:56):

That seems really fair. And I guess one of my friends who's critical of the later work does think he's simply chasing the wrong mountain, as it were. So I can see that. Probably then it's worth dwelling on some of that legacy on the future person's piece. And maybe taking it practically today is, I think one could consider him perhaps as the grandfather of the effective altruist movement. We mentioned this a little bit before. His nickname is EA. Although they have several strands to their pillars and their thinking and it's still an evolving movement, one strand is this idea of what we do over the future-- And some of it was in long-termism. Their version of long-termism can go thousands or millions of years. Most people, I guess, are thinking in five or 10 years. But I was wondering if you had a view as to how influential he was in the EA movement and whether you have a view on EA as it is today.

David (01:04:11):

So I think the father of the EA movement, philosophically speaking, is probably Peter Singer who writes a famous paper in 1971 to do with poverty and affluence and what our obligations are to people in need on the other side of the world. And that paper sits there not doing very much. I think the founders of the EA movement sort of come across it. It's a famous paper in philosophical circles, but they realized as Peter Singer always believed that it had practical implications, and effective altruism is born in whatever it is, 2009. 

Interestingly, Peter Singer says that Derek Parfit is the only genius he has ever known. So Singer in a way is a disciple of Derek so-- I think Singer himself has been hugely influenced by Derek. So there's that effect of Derek through Peter Singer. The effective altruism movement gets going and for some years, its main focus as Peter Singer's main focus had been, is on poverty, global poverty, destitution. And then because Reasons and Persons is an important work for many of the people in effective altruism and because Derek is sort of obviously broadly sympathetic to the movement, they approach him and they say, "Derek, how about signing up to effective altruism and maybe signing the pledge? And the pledge says that people should commit to giving 10% of their salary, their future salary to those in need."

And Derek says, "Yep, he's in favor of effective altruism. He supports the movement." But then he quibbles about the pledge itself, and he quibbles on a number of grounds; some of them just kind of weird. So he doesn't want to call it a pledge, he wants to call it a promise. I have no idea why. I tried to get to the bottom of this. I couldn't work out whether a promise was supposed to be a deeper, more profound commitment than a pledge or I don't know. He didn't like the word give because he felt that that implied that it was ours to give, that we owned it in the first place. And in fact, he felt that we in the West were just lucky. We had been born into wealthy societies, coming from comfortable families, comfortable societies, and we had income that we could dispose of just out of luck. So he didn't like the word give.

He didn't like giving what we can because he felt that obviously we could give more than 10%. It wasn't giving what we can, we could surely give 50%, 60%, maybe 80%. But his most profound influence on the movement was that he wanted it to be an option that part of the money we dedicated from our 10% went not just to causes to do with poverty in global South, but could also be to causes that would affect people who are not yet born. And I think it there, and they negotiate over that and soon after you get a change in the pledge, and that really is the beginning of long-termism, I think, because they absorb that. If you then accept that that's an option, then you get into issues about pandemic research and AI and so on. So that's why he's so important to the movement. I mean, of course there's another area, animal rights, which also becomes something one can devote one's 10% to, and that's much more directly influenced by Peter Singer than it is by Derek. But I think Derek is important in shifting it in into this long termist direction.

Ben (01:08:49):

Now, that's a very fascinating story to seeing that and the kind of importance of the personal connection. And actually, I guess still the relevance of moral philosophy today. I guess putting it all together, what do you think is perhaps most misunderstood then about Derek?

David (01:09:12):

Gosh, that's a very good question. I don't think there's much that's misunderstood about him, actually, if I can avoid the question, but that's a virtue. That really is a virtue. There's no time to talk about personal identity, but that's a big area that Derek writes about. And he changes his mind about personal identity in ways we shouldn't get into because it's too technical. Some people get him wrong now because they don't get his mature views right. But that's a very sort of technical answer to your question. On the whole, people don't get anything wrong about Derek and that is why Derek is so great, because he made it totally clear what he was getting at; the sort of motivation for his arguments, the logic, the reason, all the objections to his arguments which he tackles. He's as transparent a philosopher, I think, as it is possible to be. Peter Singer is another one who writes very, very clearly. It is impossible, I think really if you are honest and you sort of read Peter fairly, it's impossible to misinterpret Peter because he's very, very straightforward as a philosopher. And I think that's true of Derek as well. So I think if you are an honest reader of Derek, it's very difficult to misunderstand him.

Ben (01:10:54):

That seems fair. A bit of an unfair question on that, so feel free to dodge it. I guess one lingering thought I had-- and I'm not sure it matters absolutely, is that when I'm reading it, I definitely would put Derek in what I would call an autistic cognitive profile-- call it that way because I don't think terminology is quite settled on that. I think it explains some aspects and some aspects of behavior, but I'm not sure it entirely matters. Although I think in some ways it matters that it can show that people with this type of profile can do extraordinary things and thinking. For instance, I would also say that Tyler Cowen-- I think he says it as well, has an autistic cognitive profile. So it is quite wide for lots of things there and I think it explains it.

The narrowing over time is also quite interesting within that and how that's enabled. But I do think there's aspects you could either call atypical or not. I still can't really decide. I've seen some commentary as to whether it kind of impacts his philosophy, whether his own sense of person or his own cognitive thinking therefore influences some unusual thought because it's away from the typical person. But perhaps we can't really have a counterfactual on that. Have on reflection on that and your writing of the book come to any other views than the ones that you express there?

David (01:12:37):

Well, firstly, I think it's obvious that people who are atypical in this neurological way can achieve great intellectual accomplishments. So I've also written a book about the chess player, Bobby Fisher, and he's a much more straightforward case than Derek. It's obvious from a very young age that Bobby Fisher is neurologically atypical. I mean, Asperger's didn't exist as a diagnosis on people so Fisher would never have been called Asperger's because when he was playing chess, there was no Asperger's diagnosis. And now it's no longer a diagnosis, people talk about the autistic spectrum. So as you say, the terminology is complicated. People talk about some people being on the spectrum. So Derek, was he on the spectrum? Well, I'm ambivalent about it. It seems to me like he was. The problem is that his early life provides evidence that counters that diagnosis because he does have this narrowing and it's so much more obvious later on in his life.

The relationship between his atypical neurological setup and his philosophy, I think you can draw lots of connections. I think he had dispositions that many of us don't have. I think he was a natural consequentialist. I talk a bit about this in the book. I think he found it quite natural to regard the lives of strangers, even the lives of people who aren't yet born or people who've died, he found it as easy to feel emotionally engaged in their lives as he did with his nearest and dearest, which is a very consequentialist way of looking at the world. Consequences might say that what matters is how much benefit you create in the world, how much wellbeing or flourishing you get in the world. And it doesn't matter where it comes from, as it were. So Derek was, I think a natural consequentialist.

There's a further question, which is, well, if that's how he was naturally, and that kind of explains how he reaches some of his conclusions, or why he was inclined to reach some of his conclusions, why some of his conclusions seems so intuitively plausible to him, more plausible than they do to us. Whether that undermines the arguments themselves because you could argue it both ways. You could say, "Well, of course Derek would say that." Of course he would say that because he's not built like the rest of us. Of course he would think that's a perfectly plausible conclusion because that conclusion comes naturally to us. To the rest of us, we find that conclusion abhorrent, disgusting, repugnant. But of course he would find it perfectly acceptable.

On the other hand, we might say, "Well, who cares how he reached? Who cares what the conclusion is? What we should look at is the quality of the arguments." And if Derek comes up with robust arguments that are totally compelling and convincing, well, we've got to go with that. Insofar as Derek's arguments were ingenious and brilliant and reached certain conclusions, well, those conclusions are compelling if the argument is compelling. So those are the two ways you can argue the connection between character and philosophical conclusion.

Ben (01:17:01):

That's expressed very well. I think I probably sway to the latter. There's so much more we could discuss on Derek, but I wonder whether I could turn to you a little bit, as in, I think you are uniquely placed as a biographer in terms of your place in philosophy, your relationship to some of the main characters in this story. So I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on that and whether also I would sort of highlight just how beautifully written I think the book is in terms of this narrative that you bring to the non-fiction. I wonder whether it helps knowing some of the characters or not. But is there anything within your writing process that you would highlight? And I think having read now a number of your books, there is a certain style. But the story element in this book and the style of that writing I think has got a particular clarity and joy to read, which I think is extremely well done. So I'd be interested if there is anything in the process of that which you think is a little bit different, and then your place in this world as a biographer.

David (01:18:23):

Well, I was in a good position to write it because Derek was my BPhil supervisor. My BPhil dissertation was on future people. Then later on I did a PhD and my main supervisor was a woman called Janet Radcliffe Richards, and she became Derek's wife. So there is nobody else in the world who was taught by both of them. So I was in a good position to write it and many of the characters in the book I knew, and that helped in two ways. Firstly, it just logistically made it a lot easier because I could approach them and could extract information from them very easily. And secondly, of course, because I knew them, I had some insights into their characters as well. I could tell the story. I could be confident that I was telling the right story. I wasn't sure when I started the book what sort of book I would get, and the first half of the book came as a complete surprise to me.

So the sort of narrative arc that we end up getting, I didn't predict. And I think people underestimate the amount of luck there is in the writing process. There were good writers and there were bad writers, but sometimes you can just be lucky. And I think with Derek, I was kind of lucky because I knew that he would be, in some ways an easy character to write about because he was so eccentric and so on. But I didn't foresee the story I would end up with, and that was really a question of luck. I like storytelling so I spent half my life as a philosopher and half my life as a journalist. A central part of journalism is storytelling. You explain what's going on in the world with stories. So I like bringing those two aspects of my life together. And they came together I think quite nicely with this book. It was a total, total joy to write. It really was.

Ben (01:20:52):

And is there anything unusual in your writing process or writing day or you sit down, gather your materials, write a thousand words a day and a year or two, you have a book?

David (01:21:04):

Well, a bit like that, except I'm not nearly as productive as that. And actually at the moment I'm being very-- I've spent my life being quite productive and actually I'm going through an unproductive period. I don't really know what to do about it. I need to get back on a kind of productive track. I'm sure it's just partly sort of habit. So I tend to work quite hard. I'm very slow. The writing process is not at all natural to me. I read about some authors who get up early and write 4,000 words before breakfast. I'm really not like that, but I'm very disciplined and I tend to write an early draft quite early. So I'm not one of those authors who waits till they've got all their notes before they start writing.

I start writing quite early and then I'm constantly tampering and tinkering with it so that everything goes through multiple, multiple, multiple drafts. If I end up with 350 words in a day-- And actually, if there are 350 words I'm quite content with, that's not a terrible day for me because my advice for all bloody authors, it's that you just got to stick with it and do it every single day because 350 words is nothing. You can really write 350 words quite quickly if the words are coming to you. That can take me 45 minutes to an hour and then I can struggle for the rest of time. But if you can write 350 words a day every day, you've got a book in a year and a half, or two years; you've got a substantial book. So I think my single virtue as a writer is that I'm quite disciplined, but I try and work every day and not take much time off.

Ben (01:23:06):

So keep at it. What do you do with critical reviews? Do they bother you at all? One of my first plays back in 2003, got two stars in The Guardian. And the fact that I remember that obviously has had a thing. They've been mostly very positive reviews, but I did pick up a critical one, more critical I think of the philosophy than of the writing. But you just put it down? You know you're not going to convince everyone and we just move on or do they live with you?

David (01:23:38):

Well, no, on the whole, they live with you. My first book was called Wittgenstein's Poker, and that was very well reviewed, but there were a few negative reviews and those are the ones I remember better than the positive ones. I'm definitely more thick skinned than I used to be so they don't affect me so much anymore. And Parfit has been very nicely reviewed apart from this one. I think it depends how it's written actually. So sometimes negative reviews can be extremely constructive. There was one by Simon Blackburn, which it was very nice about the book, but then took issue with Derek's philosophy. I know Simon doesn't like his philosophy, but actually I thought it engaged with the biography and had some criticisms about philosophy. That was fine. There was one negative review, which is the one you're referring to. And that actually did annoy me because for one thing, it just gets Derek's philosophy so badly wrong. It's amazing that actually it got published. It talks about Derek trying to reconcile Aristotle and Mill and Kant. And he doesn't even mention Aristotle. It's as though the reviewer hadn't even read Derek.

Review is written from such a great height, it's so pompous. So I did find that slightly annoying. But I think there was a backlash to that particular one because it was kind of over the top and silly. But on the whole, I'm much more thick skinned than I used to be. And I can see the virtue that often they will contain things which you think, "Yeah, I got that wrong, or if I was to do it again, I would do it again slightly different way. Or, oh yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that perspective." So they can be very helpful, but sometimes they're not

Ben (01:25:52):

Yeah, I get that. Actually, in my review there was a little positive comment and it was written also in good faith. I think that's the like, "I'll take it in good faith if I think they've engaged with the work, but not if I think they're something else." Okay. I've just got a few handful of quicker, more fun questions to end with the podcast. So feel free to just either pass or do little answers or whatever. So you are going to play Magnus Carlsen. What chess opening do you use and why?

David (01:26:32):

Well, if I'm white, I would play e4 because I've played hundreds of thousands of chess games or tens of thousands of chess games in my life, and many of them speed chess. I played very seriously until I was kind of 17 or 18 and then haven't really played professionally since. But I spent a year in Chicago where I had a chess buddy and we played thousands of one minute games. We would play 30 games or 40 games of an evening. So I would definitely play e4 because I've spent my life playing e4. I wouldn't know what to do with D4 or other openings so I would start with e4 and I would hope actually he would play the Sicilian, which is c5.

When they played e5, I used to play this opening, it's called the Vienna; Knight c3. It's a terrible opening. It's a fantastic opening if you're playing people who can't play chess. If you're playing bad chess players, then it's a brilliant opening because it's kind of got lots of traps. But if you're playing anybody who knows about chess, it's a disaster. So it served me very well until the age of kind of 15. And then from that moment on, it was a major handicap for me. I was a very lazy chess player when I was growing up and I didn't study it the way I should have studied and I didn't have a big portfolio of openings. Now, if somebody played e4 e5, I would play now Knight f3 which is the kind of standard way of proceeding.

Ben (01:28:17):

You think out of a hundred games, you might get one draw out of Magnus?

David (01:28:21):

No, not a chance. Absolutely not. Out of a million games I wouldn't get a single draw.

Ben (01:28:26):

I think you’ve maybe been to 64 countries I overheard, but anyway...

David (01:28:33):

64 countries with the BBC, actually. I think I've been to 82, 84.

Ben (01:28:41):

Which of these would you most like to go back to?

David (01:28:44):

I'll tell you the country I most want to go to that I haven't been to which is Burma. When I left Oxford, I worked briefly for a think tank, and it was the time of the Burmese Revolution uprising in 1988. I knew everything about Burma. I read every day the wires, and I could name all the Burmese general. So I knew everything there was to know about Burma. I've been very sort of interested in Burma ever since, but I've never been to Burma. So Burma is number one of the places that I'd like to go to that I haven't been to. Of the countries that I've been to-- I mean, I've been back eight times or so, but there's still vast waves of India that I haven't seen. India has changed a lot now so that if my kids were to go to India, they wouldn't see the India that I spent a couple of months going around India in my year off between school and university. And thank God there isn't the extent of poverty in India now that there was 40 years ago. So it's a very different country. But when I first arrived, it totally sort of blew my mind. The assault on the senses when I first arrived; the smells and the noise and the sounds. I'd love to see a lot more of India. I loved India.

Ben (01:30:12):

India, great. And then last in this sequence, who would write your biography? Who would you get to write your biography?

David (01:30:21):

So Martin Amis has just died. Many of my close friends love Amis' novels and I don't. I quite enjoyed the Rachel Papers, which was his first, and then the characters become quite cartoonish for me. But he wrote a book called "Experience," which was his own sort of autobiography. It's a fantastic, fantastic book. I always tell that about Julian Barnes as well, his friend, that I thought sometimes his non-fiction was better than his fiction. So if I could bring Martin Amis back to life, I would get him to write my biography. The only thing is I think he might be quite cruel so I wouldn't want to be around to read it.

Ben (01:31:31):

Yeah, that's very fair. Great. And then last question, are there any current projects you'd like to highlight? Although you mentioned that perhaps in a little bit of a rut, and maybe if you have any advice or thoughts? I guess we've covered a lot. So obviously you've done your BBC presenting, you've done moral philosophy and things, but if you sum that up, I don't know if you've got any thoughts on life advice or current projects you want to highlight?

David (01:32:03):

Well, current projects, I'm hoping to do something about Peter Singer and a famous thought experiment of his which was something he comes up with in 1971. And actually, we sort of mentioned it in passing eventually kicks off the effective altruism movement. But I'm being very slow about that. Life advice, I don't know. I do think when you make these decisions when you are young and you are sort of 18 or you are coming out of university and you are working out what to do with your life, it's not as bad these days because people, I think find it easier to move from career to career. But nonetheless, there's this kind of sliding doors period where you pick a career and you think it sounds interesting, but actually you're kind of stuck with it really for the rest of your life. It is quite an important decision to work out what is important to you, what matters to you.

One of the difficulties of course, is that it's very difficult to foresee what's going to be important to you in 20, 30 years’ time. Material possessions for example is something that young people probably underplay their importance in that once you get married and with kids and so on, those things can become more important to you than they were when you were 18. But then, you may want to commit yourself when you're 18. You may want to think, "Well I've got my principles right now and I don't want to be an old fuddy- duddy and kind of reject them when I'm middle-aged." I don't think I did think about them very much. I had various options and one seemed a bit more appealing than another, and I went down one route rather than down another route. I could have gone down these very different routes. I don't think I was thinking 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years down the track. But I guess my advice would be-- and there is an organization in effective altruism called 80,000 hours. Think quite deeply about what it is you want out of life because those decisions are more important than you realize.

Ben (01:34:47):

Well, that seems to me very good advice. Think more deeply. Well, I guess that's more thinking deeply about your own long term. So I will recommend the book, "Parfit" that David Edmonds has written. So please do look out for it. David, thank you very much.

David (01:35:07):

Thanks for having me, Ben. I've enjoyed it.

Penny Wincer, Charlotte Adorjan: caring, love and untold stories

My friend Salima Saxton has a podcast with Jennifer Cox. In this episode, she interviews Penny Wincer and Charlotte Adorjan. We know Penny and Charlotte - in part - because they are “our people”.

Our people because they have lived experience of caring. There is an autism thread running through this conversation. Caring is often unfair. It’s very often gendered. The burden falls on the women.

These are also the stories that are mostly untold. The untold stories of women, and carers. Untold stories of love and care. Untold stories of womens’ experience and the complexity of motherhood.

This is important that I’ve made a transcript of the conversation below (it won’t be entirely accurate as I’ve had to use automated transcription) but it should give you enough sense. You can also listen above.

---

"I've had to embrace the fact that I am now a carer. It's really hard to get your head around that, and the feminist voice in my head is screaming 'Don't give up your career'. But actually, what I want to do is try to make it work for me, rather than me trying to change it. 

Welcome to 'Women Are Mad', where we invite women to bring their anger into everyday conversation. We're all feeling it, let's get together to work out what to do with it. I'm Jennifer Cox and I'm Salima Saxton.

'Riddle me this, Salima, with your Cambridge degree and your excellent brain, why have countless successive governments failed to solve the caring problem of this country?' 

'When you say "this country", you mean Britain?'

'I mean Britain, because I've got the numbers for Britain. They're bastards. I'm sorry to be cynical, but I have the answer because I've got a sheaf of papers in front of me that I'm rattling away. There are 1.25 million sandwich carers in the UK as recorded. Sandwich carers are people caring for an older relative as well as a young family. I know for a fact that the actual number is higher because so many people don't think of caring as an identity. Instead, they think of it as just a natural part of life or an obligation, which is partially why the government hasn't gotten to grips with providing a real solution. The other reason is that 68% of these sandwich carers, remember these are just the recorded numbers, are women, and women are not permitted to speak up about their dissatisfaction or rage. They'd be seen as uncaring, as cruel, shirking their responsibilities. But if you put the problem back to these women who are voiceless, it sorts the whole thing out. It's gone under the carpet, we can leave it there, and that's the answer to my Riddle Me.' 

'Okay, well, thank you for answering your riddle. I'm very pleased that we're doing this special episode actually, this week, then. Related to Carers Week?'

'Yes, so we must say, this is a British thing, isn't it? It's the first week of June every year: National Carers Week. So, who have we got with us today?'

'Our first guest is Penny Wincer, she's an acclaimed author, a book coach, a podcaster herself of the brilliant podcast 'Not Too Busy To Write'. She's a parent, and she's a carer. Oh, and she's recently swapped hometowns actually with our fellow guest, Charlotte Adorjan. Charlotte hosts the brilliant 'Village Lantern' podcast and she's recently moved with her family from London to Melbourne. Both her children, Essie and Woody, have autism and as a family, they've launched "Woodism", which is an award-winning art collaboration between Woody and his dad who has turned Woody's unique phrases into linocut prints. My particular favorite one is "I love you all the way to the end of counting." Thank you so much for being here, we really appreciate it. Should we dive straight in? I'll go with the first question, the first formal question: What makes you angry? Penny and Charlotte, you should go first. Penny, go for it.'

'I've been really surprised, actually, by how the older I get, the angrier I get about everything. There is this narrative, I think, that as you get older you get - there's a lot of talk about "oh I don't give any shits anymore". Actually, I do give a shit. I give a shit about a lot of things.

 And so of course, that means lots of things make you really angry. The more life experience we have, the more injustice we see around us.'

'Yeah, yeah. Charlotte?'

'Yes, I mean this whole kind of angry women thing. There's that quote "if you're not angry, you're not paying attention" or something. And I feel like the people that aren't angry are probably the men, to be honest. Or they're the ones that don't directly get affected by the issues that we are facing. Do you think that it's actually that there were women, many women, I would say, who sort of forgot to get angry and weren't encouraged to develop a vocabulary for it? So it just sort of stays there in a nice package kind of under the surface and normally gets conveniently diagnosed as something else, like anxiety, depression, migraines. And this is why we've started this, essentially. Because there's so much mistaken rage out there. Also, it's been interesting, some of the response actually, because some people have said, "You've never struck me as an angry person, Salima". I think we're all much more multifaceted and able to express anger in many different ways. And actually, if we were all listening and paying attention to every other human, we could, I think, we would all connect with some kind of anger within us. Which brings me to it being National Carers Week, actually, as well. But, Charlotte, continuing on with what you were initially saying, does any of that anger come with navigating being a carer as well as being a parent, as well as being a woman?'

'Well, I think it's funny because I've had quite a lesson from my autistic kids on you know, they really hate unfairness. Their gauge for fairness is really solid. They hate being wronged. And to be honest, a lot of my rage comes from the world not being a level playing field. And if you add in things like being an unpaid carer, or the fact that I'm a copywriter in advertising by trade and it's a very male-dominated world. And you know, when I left my job, my boss, I remember him saying "You know when I think of a word to describe you, I think angry." And I was like "Oh my God, my 22-year career and this is the one word." And I thought, "Well yes," because it was never a level playing field and I was always pissed off because I never got the good briefs or I was always having….. To say, 'Well, why am I doing a four-day week now I've got children, when the dads, when they start having babies, they don't put their hands up for a four-day week?' You know, why? Like, what do they not want to see their children? Who's looking after their children?

So, I've always worked for myself since I was 24. When I went on maternity leave (and I use this term very loosely) I did not take maternity leave with either of my two children. But, it was interesting because I was spending a lot of time with other women who were on maternity leave, right? Because I met through my local neighborhood, a fantastic London neighborhood where we had to organize our own kind of meetups. There was loads of stuff going on.

I made some really good friends that year because there were women around, which was awesome because they were taking maternity leave. I was not jealous of them one bit because I was dipping in and out doing a bit of work, coming back and hanging out with them, hanging out with my child, going back to work doing a bit of back and forth. It was great. It was the dream, basically.

But they all went from really intense full-on careers to looking after a baby 24/7. First of all, I was not jealous of that, those two extremes. And then they were having to make the choice between going part-time and basically still having to do the same job because otherwise, they would never get anywhere in their career but earning way less money, or they would go back full time and they would spend all their money on care for their child and also feel really, really guilty and also not really want to be away five days a week from their child either.

I just felt like there were no good choices there. It just felt like there were no good choices in any of those. And if you take the time, then you take the hit. Your career takes the hit because you lose all of those years while everyone else is still kind of slogging away trying to make it work.

Absolutely. And I mean, even I, you know, I was so much more affected financially by having kids than I thought I was going to be. I was the higher earner. I'm not married anymore, but at the time, I was the higher earner per day and I thought, well, that means that we prioritize me and my work. And then we did, at first, and then slowly over time and a second child, suddenly it's not quite so much of a priority anymore, even though I was the higher earner initially. And I think that's actually really, really common as well.

And I think what I didn't understand when I was a younger woman was the hit not just in going part-time but the massive hit you take on your career for the rest of your career by slowing down a bit at that point but also on your pension. You know, the difference between women's and men's pensions since the pension cap is unbelievably huge, frighteningly huge. Yes, and it's because of the care work that women do. It's so true.

And then the care work that we do later at the end of the career because the numbers there are still startling to stop your children. I mean obviously, you know, Charlotte and I have disabled children who will require more support. But even if you don't have that and your children grow up, it's very likely that if you were the one at home caring for children, you're very likely to be the one that steps in when mom and dad, and mom and dad-in-law need that support because, well, you've already worked part-time for years, so

 why wouldn't you step up and do that? You know, there's no catching up from that, you become the go-to person at that point.

I think also the lack of catching up comes down to identity and confidence, right. Now having stepped out as an actor for well quite a few years when my three kids were young, launching myself back in has required an iron will, a kind of rhino skin, and what I just keep thinking, 'Well, you know, you just, just now or never.' So then I kind of oscillate between like wild abandon, enthusiasm for what's going to happen and it's happening, and panic.

Yeah, I think it's underestimated the impact of taking either slowing down or taking a break from a career on what that does to you and what that does to other people's view of you.

I was a photographer for many years, and when I first had children, that was my job. And it is actually a very masculine role, you know, there are now quite a few female photographers, but actually, when I started out an assistant there was hardly any. Even in the early 2000s, there were only just really just coming up, and I was the one that definitely on set I worked with loads of women, but I was the one on set who had the kind of traditionally masculine role.

So when I had my second child, I do feel like I disappeared. People assumed I wouldn't work. I lost work because people just didn't ask me because I'd had a second child.

*

I'd love to know where your ambitions lie for both of you right now. Do you have strong personal ambitions, Penny, Charlotte, unrelated to anybody else? It's very interesting because I've changed my entire life. I've moved from London, where I was born and, I think, I've only ever lived a mile from where I was born to literally the other side of the world. I'm in Penny's hometown now, weirdly, and she's in line which is nice.

I've changed everything and, to be honest, it's difficult because you want to cling on to things that you knew and loved. I had this career in advertising, a 22-23 year career that I worked really hard for. But the whole time, I was fighting a system that wasn't set up for me to be in. So yes, it has a quite male, Mad Men kind of vibe, and people would say it's changed a lot but not if you've got children or anyone with additional needs that you need to care for.

I'm meeting so many amazing women that have insane careers and they've had to become carers and reinvent how they work. Maybe that's where the multi-hyphen method has come from. So many women have lots of strings to their bows now because to be honest, we can't put all our eggs in one basket anymore. We need flexibility to the point of breaking. I mean, we never know day to day. Like this morning, I was woken up by my daughter at 2 AM and that was the day.

So if I had to go and do a day in an advertising agency coming up with amazing ideas, writing brilliant stuff, and presenting to clients, I'd be a dribble of a person and no one would get the best of me. It's really difficult but I've had to kind of change my entire world. 

Now, I think maybe I need to reinvent what I see as success. Actually, for me now, success is being able to give my kids the time they need. I think this is the issue when you've got children who have a disability. It doesn't necessarily get easier the older they get. Often it can get harder, and you're needed more. 

I'm now dealing with lots of mental health issues, things I never thought I would have to deal with as a mom. There's none of this in the kind of baby books about how do you talk to your child who wants to kill themselves. It's really difficult, so you've got to be there. You can't be like, "Sorry, I've got to go off to a meeting about a chocolate bar and sell a chocolate bar to millions of people." It's really difficult. 

So not only has my ambition changed from being about me, but I also need to make money for them because they're going to need financial stability growing up. It's almost like I have to decide where to put my energy. I have such little energy left for the bit that needs to make me money. Actually, I'm asking myself, "Why am I giving it to huge corporations who are going to make billions off my ideas, whereas I'm getting an ulcer and a child who's sobbing and needs me?" It's really difficult, so it's a bit of an epiphany for me.

Silencing is the problem. If these are your priorities, then you must be allowed these priorities and people need to hear them and listen to them. Yes, I mean, I think that's it because a lot of carers' voices just get squashed because A, we're really tired, and B, no one really wants to hear it. They're like, "Oh, that sounds really hard but anyway, cool, I'm just gonna pop off."

That's why you got called angry. I think it's because it was really unwanted. And if you explained it to people, they would just be like, "This person's moaning." And you're like, "No, no, I just need to get across why today is quite a hard day."

Coming to the other side of the world, weirdly, I've kind of formed this underbelly of carers, my kindred spirits. They're all from all walks of life. The other day, I was in the supermarket and I got this scream across from the other escalator. It was a friend of mine. She's a Jewish mom with two autistic children. She fell into my arms sobbing and she's like, "I can't do this anymore." We had a moment in the supermarket and everyone was kind of going around us. I reassured her, telling her, "You can do this. You're amazing."

Her day was basically going to be spent coaxing one of her children off the sofa to eat because her kids were in rock bottom autistic burnout. After we buoyed each other up, she went off. I thought to myself, "These are my people."

These are my people, where there's no rage anymore. The anger's gone. We don't have time for anger; we're too exhausted to even fuel the anger. It's just, "I need you, help me. Here's what you need." 

Last week, when I was confined to bed with the flu, I texted a friend and told her I was unwell. She immediately offered help, "I'm bringing Bolognese." It's not about sympathy or superficial comfort, it's practical help, a question of, "What do you need? Here's what I'm going to do." These are the people that understand you. 

When I'm with these individuals, the rage dissipates, because we're on a level playing field. There's no pretense, no small-talk about Johnny's tennis lessons. Our kids aren't involved in such activities like everyone else. We're just on a level playing field, and that's when my anger subsides. That's when I feel the most at peace and the most like myself. 

This is a new development, something that's only happened recently since I moved to the other side of the world. Perhaps when you have to make new friends, you end up finding kindred spirits more easily. 

Now at 46 years old, I've observed shifts in my support systems and friendships. As you become caregivers yourselves, have you noticed a change? Have surprising people entered or exited your lives? 

What I've found is that some friends here, friends of my husband since we moved to Melbourne, have gone out of their way to understand the type of autism my children have—PDA, Pathological Demand Avoidance. They've read up on it and followed the same people as me on Instagram. They've put in the work, and that is a mark of a true friend. 

My experience, on the other hand, has been interesting. Since my schedule isn't flexible due to my son's needs, I can't meet up with friends outside of my immediate neighborhood. It's stressful to take him anywhere, so I stopped doing that a long time ago. Consequently, I don't see my friends that don't live close by very often.

Nevertheless, the friends I've made in this neighborhood have been incredible. Though I didn't make friends through my son's peers, I made incredible friends through my daughter. These friends have embraced my son, known him since he was quite young, and even help out when we go on holiday. 

Interestingly, I was forced to ask for help. As a single parent, there are times when I literally cannot manage everything on my own. For instance, when my daughter was invited to a birthday party but was too young to be dropped and left, I either had to bring my son with me, or someone else had to pick her up and take her. It's situations like these that make you ask for things you wouldn't ordinarily ask for.

"If I hadn't been in that situation, I would message people, 'Oh, who's going to so-and-so's party? Can anyone else swing by and pick up Agnes on the way?' And someone would be like, 'Yeah, sure. No problem at all.' Then, I'd take her there with my son, and my son maybe would stop coping after half an hour. I'd say, 'I'm going to skip out. Can anyone else drop her home?' And there'd be like three volunteers going, 'Yeah, we'll drop her home. No problem.' 

We're in this really quite incredible community here where people just stepped up, but I had to learn to ask. I learned to ask, and actually, this comes back to my other caring experience. I really, really, really, really hate not being independent, and part of that comes down to the fact that I was a young carer as well. I cared for my mom when I was a teenager.

If you meet and speak to any young carers, one of the things you'll find is that they are hyper-independent. I had to learn how to look after myself at a very young age, so asking for help does not come naturally. Like it doesn't for a lot of women, but particularly for someone who didn't -- I would say -- was not being looked after by anyone from when I was about 12. 

Arthur has forced me to confront that and the challenge it's about. And if he hadn't made me do it, I'd be having to face that when I was older and needing to receive care myself. Because we don't like the idea of having to receive it. We're very scared of having to receive it because we see it as something that is something that none of us want. 

We talk about it as being the worst thing in the world to go into a home where other people would care for us or to have our child constantly having to care for us. But, it's a really natural human thing to happen that we need care towards the end of our lives if we're lucky enough to live a long life. 

But there is also a real problem there because there is a natural desire to care, but I think that desire is exploited in women. Far fewer men are expected to, and women are doing it at least ten years earlier. And they're often doing it for much longer. I think double the amount of time that men are doing it, and in terms of the people who are doing it for more than 35 hours a week, it's 75% women.

To replace unpaid care in the UK would cost something like 162 billion. The amount of money that unpaid carers contribute to the economy is the equivalent of running a whole other NHS. So, if there weren't unpaid carers, the whole society would collapse. It would completely crash. 

I don't know what the figures are now. They're much higher because there are a lot more carers now than there was pre-pandemic. There's a lot more people living with chronic illness now.

If someone is a carer and they're listening to this right now and they're struggling, the thing you have to do first is admit that that's what you're doing, that you're a carer. It can take people years to admit that that's what they're doing. They don't want to see it. 'I'm just a daughter, doing her job, doing what's expected.' 

But the first thing you have to do is admit that this is work. It is unpaid work, but it is care work, and it's on top of the relationship you have

 with that person. It complicates the relationship you have with that person. They might hate receiving that care, for instance. This can be a very complicated relationship.

So, I think the number one thing you can do first is always admit that's what you're doing. Like with a lot of things, as soon as you kind of admit it, then you can open up to other things, like maybe admitting that you might not be able to do it all on your own. Which can be a really difficult thing because sometimes people, even though it's very difficult, want to be able to do it all on their own, but physically can't anymore without some serious consequences.

What would you say, Charlotte? Yeah, I mean, and also connection with people that are similar to you, because silence is really dangerous. Penny and I are both writers, and we're obsessed with telling stories. There's a reason that women need to tell stories because otherwise, it all just becomes unsaid it gets lost.

David Ruebain: disability, protest movements, law, equality, inclusion, interdependence | Podcast

David Ruebain is one of the most thoughtful thinkers I know on disability, equality and the law. He is currently a Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Sussex with strategic responsibility for Culture, Equality and Inclusion including dignity and respect. He is an adviser to the football premier league, the former director of legal policy at the equality and human rights commission and has been in the top 25 most influential disabled people in the UK. 

We chat on:

Social change seems to come about in a complex way. But peaceful protests seem to have had influence on some social topics. What is the importance of protest? In particular, thinking about the disability rights movement.

David gives insights into his role and view into the UK disability rights movement. The roles of agency and simplicity of message. The comparison with the climate protest movements. 

David’s work with the UK football premier league and also the equality commission. What types of policies are successful for equality and diversity. What challenges are structural and what that implies for solutions.

The role of interdependence and that means at the moment. Whether the law can deliver inclusion and what that means.

How ordinary talking about equality seems now vs the 1970s. But how it itself will not be enough for humanity. 

“Equality is what we all wanted in the seventies; for those of us who considered ourselves progressive. But now it feels fairly vanilla really as an idea. Equality is simply about level playing fields, with its sort of a zero sum game approach to if two people are in a race, nobody should be unfairly disadvantaged for any relevant consideration, which of course is true. It's sort of almost unarguable. But it isn't especially ambitious. … But if we are really to bring about the change which will ensure the survival of the species and other species, it will need more than equality, I think.” 

We end on David’s current projects and life advice.

“....do what you need to do to believe in yourself because so many of us don't or doubt ourselves. That doesn't mean to say-- I think first of all, that knowing there's nothing profoundly wrong with anyone, including whoever you are. But secondly, knowing that from that perspective you get to learn and evolve; it doesn't mean you say rigid in the position. So there's something the risk of sounding like a not very good therapist. There's something about really believing in yourself…”

Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods) or on video (above or on YouTube) and the transcript is below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript with David Ruebain (only lightly edited)

Ben (00:02):

Hey everyone. I am super excited to be speaking to David Ruebain. David is one of the most thoughtful thinkers I know on disability, equality, and the law. He's currently a pro vice chancellor at the University of Sussex with strategic responsibility for culture, equality, and inclusion, including dignity and respect. He is an advisor to the Football Premier League, the former director of Legal Policy at the Quality and Human Rights Commission, and has been in the top 25 most influential disabled people in the UK. David, welcome.

David (00:37):

Thanks very much, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Ben (00:40):

Social change seems to come about in a complex way, but peaceful protests seem to have had influence on some of these social topics. You were involved in the disability rights movement, particularly here in the UK, and protests seemed to be quite an important part of that movement. How important do you think is protesting social change movements and what other factors do you think go into this type of social change?

David (01:09):

I think it's tremendously important. I don't know that I can say it's necessary for every area of change; I don't know that. But it has certainly been critical in affecting significant areas of change, I would say over the centuries. And as you mentioned, I was heavily involved in the disability rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s. I saw firsthand really the kind of step changes that arose as a result of increasing activism. At one point, I was vice chair of the Rights Now campaign, which was at the time, a national coalition of organizations campaigning for civil rights for disabled people. I mean, perhaps I should say that the principle demands at the time were for a significant change, a step change in understanding and thinking about disability from one which is often called the medical model or charity model, which is about repair or rehabilitation or providing minimum standards of accommodation and finance and so on to one which sought to treat disabled people as equals and afford them legal rights as such in the way that had happened at that point to some extent, at least for women and for black and racially minoritized people.

Nowadays, I suspect we see that as being almost prosaic and ordinary. But at the time, it was quite a radical agenda to think of disability as a civil rights issue and not just a medical or a quasi medical issue. Disabled people themselves had began campaigning for it in a number of ways. But really, the change accelerated through activism, through demonstrations, occupations; various forms of civil disobedience. And the Rights Now campaign, to which I refer was what became an umbrella organization, was something like 80 or 90 civil society organizations, which collectively represented, I'm pretty sure over a million people. Because it included the trade unions local authorities, as well as disability organizations. One can debate and discuss the extent to which laws-- which is what was demanded. Laws came into effect because of that.

But I do remember that at the time, the initial response of government to a demand for civil rights legislation for disabled peoples was, "It's not necessary." And then after a couple of years, it became, "It might be useful, but it's too expensive." And then a few years later, it became, "It might be possible in some instances, but it will conflict with other legitimate rights." And then later on it became, "It's not a priority." And then eventually it was, "All right then." Nothing conceptually or intellectually had changed in those various stages. But to my mind, there is no doubt that the external pressure led to the eventual enactment of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which was the first piece of legislation. Now, I should say that some disabled people in their allies thought that that was insufficient. It is stronger now-- Current legislation is stronger than it was then. But to my mind, I thought it was a huge victory, really. And it was because conceptually, if nothing else, it placed disability as an issue of exclusion and underrepresentation as much as a medical or a private medical tragedy.

Ben (05:17):

And that first law, as you've alluded to, was not the final step. And in fact, arguably the journey is still ongoing. I guess hearing that, there's two things I reflect upon. One is, I guess what it's like being both parts of such a broad movement. And you look at some movements today, I'm interested in kind of the decentralization of leadership to some extent, or like multi collaboration between many kind of people and stakeholder groups of not necessarily a leader, but there always does seem to coalesce around certain figures. And I wondered how you think about that in terms of sort of structurally organization in terms of social movements. That also echoes into my question alongside that which is, the part of the kind of culture change piece, because the law obviously was a great step change.

But I reflect back listening to the stories and hearing things now. But this idea of a social model of disability or this idea that it's not all about the money or financialization. It's about making a more inclusive place that's sort of seemed to be the start of that movement as well. And that culture change piece, you can't really legislate for. I mean, you don't really legislate for either. It's in how people think. So I guess it's an interconnected one is with a broad social change movement in getting a lot of people and that decentralization and how do you think that goes, do you think that's part of the key for getting the broad culture change piece to go alongside the law?

David (06:55):

Yes, I do. I think if I understand your point, Ben, I think-- I mean, many more erudite people than me have written about power having to be taken, not given and related maxims like that. But I think that-- I mean, if we take the environmental crisis, which you and I have spoken about it and I know that you know a lot about it as well in terms of your work. I think many people will have strong views about the activities of extinction rebellion. Some are very supportive and others oppose their actions because of its disruptiveness. But it is very much-- and I don't try and say that I understand or know everything. [ ] I even think everything that happens is wrong. But it is based on quite a compelled theory of chain, how societies evolve and change by reaching a critical mass of activity.

And in reaching that critical mass of activity, a level of disruption is required. Now, of course, you can debate and dispute, "Where the line should be. Is there a line that there should be? Should we not disrupt certain things because it causes too many other problems, or it's too difficult?" And there are legitimate conversations to be had there. But I do think that there is merit, at the very least, in communal action. Because otherwise without that, then we're left with what to my mind seems to be very narrow models of democratic participation, which is basically either involvement in an established party and/or voting. But whether it's citizens assemblies, whether it's demonstrations, whether it's petitions or other forms of town hall meetings, other forms of activity; nonviolent direct action as well. It seems to me that that is a key characteristic of change and probably has been in every major change event over the centuries.

Ben (09:36):

Yeah. I think of-- What is it that quote? I think, is it Martha Luther King Jr. That the creative dedicated minority has always made the world better or some such like that. Yeah, I think you've convinced me. I flip-flopped on protest movements of where they are. We're particularly related to climate because it's so intersectional and broad. But I think you have raised in general my feeling about how these movements can do. And I think-- going back to my point, which I think you did get. I'm really interested in essentially, particularly in the climate movement, a real emphasis on a decentralized way or in some ways this is touching on inclusivity, but the fact that they don't put the power in a few people. I mean, they have leaders just by nature of the kind of charisma force of what those people are doing. But quite purposely, they don't want those same kind of power structures. And I think that's really interesting in spreading that. Although the flip side is then you've got some groups which will do things that other people don't agree with within the movement. So there are some downsides to it, but I think it's really interesting how broad that is and the kind of governance or non-governance structure of being decentralized.

David (10:48):

Yeah, and I mean, it raises-- I think communal activity is complicated. It doesn't lend itself to neat, straightforward, logical processes and outcomes. It's messy; kind of wide engagement is a messy process. But I think ultimately in a way, is it is its strength. So in the Rights Now campaign as I mentioned, we had 70, 80, 80 plus member organizations from disabled people's organizations, to parents organizations, to trades unions, political organizations, local authorities. And each of them had their own particularities around the issue and their own perspective. And probably if we had been interrogating them all, they would've said something slightly different. But it was essential that we were able to contain all of that. So our demands were very, very simple and deliberately so; rights not charity. We especially didn't go into a lot of detail about what that would mean for X, Y, or Z with a significant level of detail because at that point, we may not have maintained the cohesion of the collective.

And it was able to hold a range of diverse viewpoints because of the unifying central objective. That's a reason for a devolved model as you are describing. It's probably not the other one because I think people need to feel that they have agency. If things are too centralized or indeed hierarchical, you basically-- anybody who's not in the position of power is a foot soldier for want of a better phrase. It's very hard to maintain enthusiasm just as a foot soldier because you've got your own mind and your own thoughts and feelings and priorities and commitments. So I think in the long run those things don't work. And so even if you're just thinking of end goals, I think it's important to have a level of devolution and democracy really.

Ben (13:20):

So I'm hearing simplicity and agency; quite important ingredients in the movement. And reflecting maybe the last one on the kind of disability rights movement of that time. Were there other important steps or pieces of the puzzle that you'd articulate for anyone thinking around this? Whether you were targeting some key policy makers as well, or whether it was going in a way having a broad movement and then going kind of hand, hand combat to convince people or whether there was some other kind of tactical strategy in the movement that you felt was a key reason for success?

David (13:59):

Yeah, I mean, we had many advantages, if I'm honest. In the case of disability, even if you're not a disabled person-- and most people aren't... Disability is one of those identities which everybody can acquire. I mean, that itself is a whole other conversation about what is an identity and is it just a fact or is it a set of beliefs and whatever. But nonetheless, putting that to one side, anyone can become disabled. And indeed, if you live long enough, you probably will. Even if you're not-- thankfully nowadays most people have good contact with other disabled people or they may be family members or parents or companions or partners or coworkers or whatever. The idea of rights, not charity, was broken down into very simple evidential nuggets.

Like, "Why can't I live with my friend?" Or, "Why should my coworker not be able to get in the building?" It was probably slightly more elegantly put than those, but... They were kind of very simple moral imperatives, and that was coupled with... I think we were at a moment in time in a wider political sense, the kind of individualism and autonomy, which had been very much foregrounded by Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in the early 1980s. Had really begun to look very tired and offensive to some people. We'd been through the minor strike, we'd been through a heavy period of de-industrialization, and depending on how you think about it, a shift from a materials based industrial society to a much more knowledge based economy. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but with that came tensions and destructions of communities and so on.

So there was a strong feeling increasingly widely held that foregrounding of individualism was wrong. And we'd seen the poll tax, which is a classic example of that, which is where-- For those listeners who were old enough will remember that it was all about everybody paying the same amount regardless of your income for council services. And there was such a visceral reaction against that because it was an ultimate individualistic rather than societal response to being in a community that it was ultimately rejected and finally brought down Margaret Thatcher. So the Rights Now campaign and Civil Rights for Disabled people rode those waves.

Also, the kind of longer arc of history about civil rights for black people and for women, as I mentioned and emerged in other issues for marginalized people. So there's very much. I think we were lucky, or I think we were of our time at that moment. 1991, George Bush not known for his kind of very liberal or progressive tendencies. Was it George Bush? Have I got that right? Anyway, whoever was the president in 1991 in America certainly was a Republican, passed the Americans with Disabilities Act four years ahead of the United Kingdom. We already had evidence of the fact that those voices which were saying that it's too costly, we can't afford it, disabled people don't need it, whatever, it was increasingly impossible for the change to be resisted. So I think there was a constellation and a conflation of a whole range of forces which allowed it to happen. I'm probably answering a completely different question at this point, but...

Ben (18:24):

No, I think that makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, one of the big pieces you highlighted was empathy. People could understand it.

David (18:31):

Yes.

Ben (18:31):

And then I think this really important moment in time or riding a wave, or maybe history comes in these kind of waves as you had if you go back a little while away, slavery, women's rights, black and minority rights coming through, and then the movement in the US. There's a little bit with that within climate and climate justice as well. But I do think one of the things that climate struggles with actually is this empathy piece, because it's more diffuse. It's a crisis which is pervasive and everywhere. And you can't ask that same question of your neighbor, particularly in rich nations, where actually it falls. It falls unequally not as badly in rich nations. But you can't ask for your friend who can't get access to a building or those very visceral why questions when it's desertification in Africa or this kind of diffuse.

So I think that is a key difference. But it is interesting here you also talking about a moment in time, because I do think the environment is seeing that somewhat. Perhaps pivoting a little bit to your work with the equality commission from there. My wider question here is that when I look at your work, there's a really strong thread of essentially evidence-based work, what actually might really work as opposed to, for instance, in corporate world, slightly different, I guess from academic and everyday place. But in corporate world, when I think about or I see corporate, culture, and diversity, a lot of it is just simply, I think your phrase is, "Let's just be a little bit nicer to one another." That's a kind of common sense culture thing is not really to do with diversity, inclusion, DNI, or culture or quality or all of those things which is kind of common sense. And then also there are some things which are contested and maybe don't really work or are not as clear as some other things. So I was wondering what kind of evidence-based work are you most attracted by and what did you learn in the equality commission? Is that where a lot of that came from?

David (20:36):

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, Ben. But actually it's a really important question for me. Before I joined the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I was a lawyer; a litigator in private practice. I basically sued organizations who we were alleging had either discriminated or had treated an individual, my client unlawfully. It's actually great fun suing; it's really, really good fun. It's a bit like a task and finish group with a clear end point, and you either win or you lose. So if you like playing-- I don't wish to trivialize this in any way-- I don't mean this in that way. But if you like playing games and you want to win and you believe in the cause and you enjoy what you do, which luckily, I have always been able to do. You can try really hard for something and if you're successful, you are successful. And then you move on to the next case, and then the next case.

So it's a bit like having a fight with very clear rules sort of thing. Then there is an outcome, and hopefully you'll succeed. And often we did-- not always-- often we did. But what I found from that, and why I stopped practicing eventually was because the change was limited; were two things. The change was limited. If you were successful, you would afford a remedy to your client. If you were really successful, you would bring about wider change which would hopefully benefit some other people as well if it was a change in the law or in processes or approaches. But it was incremental and often you ended up taking similar cases time and time again.

The other thing is it became very-- If I was ever in any doubt, it became very clear to me from the outset that this wasn't about good versus evil at all. This was about a structural set of arrangements. So the organizations who were acting in ways which was disadvantaging the people that I was representing. Clearly they shouldn't have been, and I didn't want them to, but they weren't doing it out of malevolence. I don't rule that out. I'm not saying that nobody's malevolent; some people may well be malevolent. But in my experience, that's not the common approach. And increasingly, I was attracted by theoretical understandings of oppression as structural. So the work that I went to do at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which was as director of legal policy, which was really about looking at levers for national change and then subsequently in my other work, has been about-- obviously behaviors are important and egregious behaviors of any sort should not be permitted.

But beyond that, what is the cause for the evidential data backed approach, which shows chronic areas of underrepresentation and disadvantage. We know a lot more about it than we ever did and we know what are the issues. And they are overarching these structural issues; some of which are cultural, some of which are legal, some of which are organizational. But it is that, which it's not necessarily easy to resolve, but it is very much about that in my view. And I think that interestingly, I'm lessened notwithstanding that-- I think civility and kindness and respect for everybody is important. I almost take that as a given in terms of what we've expected. And actually I'm looking at I think the challenging areas are these much bigger issues.

Ben (24:55):

Yeah, that's fair. So I'll come on to I guess institutional bias or institutional racism, whether it's conscious bias or not; and not just racism, there are other structural things. But maybe before that, I would be interested if in that time or your reflection over the past decades on, what do you think are the kind of policies or guidelines which work which are most effective now that we have a foundational kind of piece of law in place? You've got more knowledge and awareness, although it's still a journey coming through. Are there any particular policies, either at the organizational level or things we should be advocating or looking to that you think like, these are my experience, are some of the most effective to looking at this area?

David (25:47):

I'll give you a couple of examples. So for large organizations, in Britain, the law requires that they publish annually in a certain format their gender pay gap, which is the mean, and I think sometimes median pay for men and women and the gap there in. And then there's a level of details sometimes which also has to be published. And that is really interesting because first of all, the gender pay gap is what it's not about is paying men and women different amounts for doing the same job. That would be straightforwardly unlawful. That would be what's called positive. That would be what's called direct discrimination and straightforwardly unlawful. What it is the average pay for men and the average pay for women and what that reaches for are issues of occupational segregation.

So it's a hierarchical organization, what's the distribution-- broadly speaking, it turns out to be about distribution between men and women in different grades. So if there is a gender pay gap, it's because there are many drivers. It's not only this, but often it's because women tend to do the more lower pay jobs than men than more higher pay jobs. But then there are particularities which are different in different organizations. What you can find. So the gender pay gap is an indicator to something, but it isn't, in my view, an end in itself. It's an indicator to possible structural issues. Why are all the people at C-suite level men, if they are? That's a structural issue probably. I mean, there may be also. I have to be [inaudible 00:27:48] egregious behaviors like sexual harassment and so on as well, which will play a part. But even if there wasn't, there would still be structural issues.

But actually it's possible to have a zero gender pay gap and for there still to be structural issues. So you could have a complex organization like a university where if you look at the mean or medium pay for men and women, you end up at roughly the same, so there's no pay gap. But there are maybe pockets of university activity where there are no women or no men for whatever reason. What I learned from that is in seeking to drive forward culture change and advanced equality, diversity and inclusion, there isn't really no... You can say, "We want to have proportionate numbers of men and women or black and or racially marginalized people and white people according to the populations or disabled people, which is roughly running at 15%," you can say that. And they will be useful indicators, but they're not the end point if the end point is really about full inclusion. I don't think any of us really know exactly what that would look like. I think it's a journey that we're on.

But the other example I would give, because you ask about successful initiative. I say that because I trying to point to the complexities I think of some of this work. But at the Premier League, we've instigated something called a premier league equality, diversity, and inclusion standard. Well, the Premier League has instigated that. That's a requirement of all clubs who wish to play in the Premier League. So obviously all clubs are going to do this because they're not going to refuse to be in the Premier League because they don't want to do it. It's a systemic change program that all clubs have to participate in, which requires collection of qualitative and quantitative data, effective analysis, and a production of an action plan. It's a standard approach for systemic change work.

And what we've seen is significant change over the years in not only the representation of marginalized people in football clubs-- I'm not so much talking about players themselves, although that's also an issue. But broader staff, fan bases, community activity, things like that. But also amazing initiatives that they do which in my view is sort of leading other sectors. If you would've asked me 10 years ago, "Would I think football could lead other sectors in inclusion?" I would've thought, "I think it's unlikely." But in many respects it is in terms of what organizations like football clubs could do within their communities and to be inclusive. That's very much process based, but I think it works.

Ben (00:31:09):

Yeah. That's really fascinating. And in your comments is kind of oblique critique of why quotas might not necessarily work because it's not to do with the structural, the process; and it's to do with the system. So one individual thing may not happen to work. I mean, there might be other arguments for and against, but a blunt quota may not get at a systems problem. Whereas at least if you start to do some of these things about understanding where the situation is and some of the causal roots and all of this, you might engender some of that change. And you kind of preempted my question about your experience on football in the Premier League. So perhaps I'll ask it wider about what do you think of organizations, which is not necessarily any their "fault" or an individual fault of how these behaviors and things have come about.

But there are claims particularly in the UK, but I think it applies to quite a lot of organizations where you look at this in the US or even in Europe around institutional bias, either racism or things like that. And then issues around that and changing that. I think in the UK particularly, there's-- Well, across a lot of things, but there's a renewed focus on the London police force. So I was wondering reflections on how that's happened over time. And again, perhaps a little bit what we can do for-- Your example in the UK, football's actually quite a good example of actually something which is steadily improved and probably much more than people would've predicted 10 years ago, which I think is kind of a hopeful point.

But there is still quite a lot of debate around that. So I'd be interested in all your reflections on that. And what we will do, particularly when maybe some of it is you could argue on the kind of unconscious bias part, and then some of it just seems to be behaviors which have built up over a long period of organizational time. So you don't really-- in fact, it's probably unfair to pin it on any one particular person. And it's a layering on layering of leadership over time. Some UK organizations seem to be particularly stuck with this as a challenge.

David (00:33:32):

Yeah, really interesting points, Ben. There's a couple of things I want to pick up. Well, first of all, you are right that more and more, I understand the issues to be structural and therefore not much less about end point change, which you might argue, is what something like a quota is. However, I actually do think there's a lot of merit in arguing for quotas. I mean, quotas in many instances is currently unlawful in UK law at least. So it's very difficult to operate lawfully if that's what you want to do. But the reason why I say it can be important is because culture is so contingent on things like dominant ideologies-- and group think and atmospheres and so on.

And if you have cultures which are relatively homogenous, which I suspect is part of the issue with the metropolitan police, although I don't know-- firsthand, I certainly don't know. Then they tend to replicate themselves and allow for some of these horrible, egregious things or create spaces for these horrible and egregious things to happen. And conversely, they mitigate against the idea of a sense of belonging for a wider group of people. One way of improving centers of belonging, which can in term disrupt hegemons and dominant cultures and make things more diverse and sort of embed diversity as an empirical experience, not just about numbers of people. One way of doing it is by having quotas. By saying, "We are underrepresented in this area, so we are just going to have a large number of these people coming in."

And of course, again, that's likely to be unlawful. We don't have positive discrimination in this country except for the asymmetric categories of disability, funny enough, and also marriage and civil partnership. It's very difficult to do that. There are some things you can do, which organizations are experimenting in terms of group higher work. But really belonging, in my view, is something which has become more and more understood in recent years for cultures. And if you are going to engender a sense of belonging for everybody, you're going to have to address homogeneity. So the argument for diversity is well understood and well made even from a bottom line argument; the general argument that heterogeneous organizations do better than homogeneous organizations, almost self-evident. But actually there are more subtle ways in which it's important, which is around-- Well, I'm probably repeating myself here; where if you have diverse groups, you are able to better people individually feel safer and more themselves and therefore are able to thrive.

Ben (00:36:59):

And, and for someone like the police force, you want to feel that the police force is a reflection of you and your society.

David (00:37:06):

Of course.

Ben (00:37:06):

I couldn't help but think that if your police force was 50/50-- let's put it the other way. More extremely. If it was 60 40 women and say 40, 50% made of minorities and conglomerate. I would find it really difficult to believe that you wouldn't via that just structure be quite different from where you are today. And maybe it's because you couldn't repeat what you had before within that. So I do take that point. And I have seen-- For instance, there's a decent amount of corporates organizations where you may not have that quota as the outcome, but they're looking at, for instance, balanced and diverse shortlists for whatever that you are looking for.

So even though, like in senior management, yes, you're still expecting it to be men, but if you're looking at a short list of six people, you need to really ensure that three are women and you've got some diversity in there because if your shortlist is only six men, you're never going to get there because of that. And particularly at the shortlist stage with all of those types of things. I was really interested also maybe picking up on some of that because we kind of touched on it, on your thoughts on the kind of inclusion piece. Because equality or a lot of equality law is kind of all-around about fairness. And to some degree there's this kind of-- you've described it as a zero sum game within some of that.

I look at some of it where you are kind of saying, "Oh, is someone worth an hour of work on this, or can you do that or not?" It's still very much within a market structure, not necessarily with this inclusion piece. And then I think also of my own experience-- So I'm going to put another 'I' word here. Maybe you can reflect on a kind of interdependency and the fact that we as humans, and actually all of the world is very interdependent on so many things, whether it's natural or physical or in humans relationships being social creatures. I have a little story or an anecdote about what I see in a kind of area, which is called music therapy, which I'm sure you'll know about. But where this therapist who's a musician essentially enables music to come out of another person; often a disabled person, but not always sometimes someone with a lot of other needs.

And what's really unique about this from a creative perspective and even a philosophical perspective, is that the musician is the enabler. The piece doesn't work without the two of them or without the group. But actually, the primary creation of the music or the creative act is not from the musician, it's from the therapist is often from the other person or the group. But it doesn't work without the two of them. It's only an independent piece of work. It's put often in the therapy world, but I see it as often really beautiful creative acts of the level of that you see on any other creative works. And I often think about that in terms of independence and how actually that's closer to how humans are and how we actually work in the real world. In any event, bringing it around was like your thoughts about how things have changed or your view on this inclusion piece which has now talked a lot about alongside equality and things like that and how it is actually maybe another step in terms of thinking about society change or culture and where we might be heading.

David (00:40:54):

Well, I have to say, I think interdependence is having its moment and I'm delighted about that, Ben. Not for all the reasons that you say, but also others. In fact, I have been working on this myself in various talks that I've been giving recently and in my inaugural professorial lecture last year. If I may, I just might look back to an earlier part of our conversation. I mentioned that one of the reasons why I stopped practicing as a lawyer and moved into strategy and policy work and then into higher education doing that, is because it felt to me that the law had its limitations, certainly as a litigator. I think more generally the law is-- In a recent lecture I gave, I tested this rhetorical question of, "Can the law deliver inclusion?" In short, my answer is it's a necessary but not sufficient condition to have good laws.

And the reason for that is the law can impact on errors of public life, but it's ability to transform more fundamentally is very limited. So very crudely it can tell an employer that it can or cannot take certain approaches as to who it hires and how it deals with its employees. But it can't say anything to you and I about who we have relationships with or who we invite for dinner or anything like that. And nor should it, by the way, in my view. Beyond the law, I think we need to put attention strategically on relationships. When I say strategically, I don't mean just relationships or things that happen or don't happen depending on circumstance.

I think we need to look at that as a tool of liberation-- relationships as a tool of liberation and political change. And profoundly, that is because of as you say, the concept of interdependence. Because as much as anything else, the narrative certainly of sort of 20th, 21st century western societies is of independence. This idea that we should all be able to manage on our own and be on our own, maybe with some the exception of having families. But otherwise, that's it. It's contrary to other cultures, and I'm very mindful of ideas of Ubuntu in Africa. This philosophical concept of I am because you are, and therefore the fact of relationship or community being the essence of my sense of myself. John Donne wrote about, "No Man Is an island." Many artists and philosophers and writers have explored it.

But I think it's coming to its own because more and more people are reacting against this idea of independence. Interdependence in my view, is also not the same as dependence, which is very one way. And it's also different from co-dependence, which seems to be a kind of therapeutic type of where two people with mutually connecting sets of distresses are reliant upon each other. So it is important. I'm not trying to be tricksy in this, but it's important to kind of think about what it means. And I think also that it is-- Disabled people talk a lot about interdependence because they have always been characterized as being unhealthfully dependent whereas the reality is we are all dependent and ideally interdependent. More and more I feel that it is the key to systemic and structural change.

Ben (00:45:02):

I think it also goes beyond or alongside this movement and the human piece to a couple of other areas that we've talked on tangentially, but I see, which is around climate and actually around business and the world. So we've got to a state-- and I think we were always in this state-- but where organizations and business just rely not just dependently on supply chains and things, which is there, but there is an interdependence around all of this. We've seen this for some of the geopolitical tensions and where we've seen businesses and organizations almost at this meta-level expression. It's very obvious within climate that we are very dependent and actually have interdependence on much to do with the environment. And then you see it in the micro with pets, for instance. So not just within human relationships.

And there's the kind of a growing understanding on that with other sentient beings. So interdependence, I really do see as it having its moment, and actually it's trickling around of our understanding of so many complex systems with that. And to your point, you have cultures within Africa, you've had artists. I think I listened to a talk where you spoke about dharma and Buddhist concepts of this as well. So, I do think there's something really interesting on that and we will have to see where that goes.

David (00:46:32):

Yes. I'm sort of quite excited about it. So many people are talking about it at the moment, and it feels like, again, it has its moment. Just one other thing about equality. Equality is what we all wanted in the seventies; for those of us who considered ourselves progressive. But now it feels fairly vanilla really as an idea. Equality is simply about level playing fields, with its sort of a zero sum game approach to if two people are in a race, nobody should be unfairly disadvantaged for any relevant consideration, which of course is true. It's sort of almost unarguable. But it isn't especially ambitious. And I have to say, I think, looping back to how we started this conversation with these major meta global existential challenges like climate change, whatever your perspective about likelihood of resolution or not, it is probably one of the most significant problems the world is facing, if not the most significant problem. I don't think concepts of equality are sufficient to try and really address, philosophically at least. I mean, they have their place for sure, not least in the way that you mentioned earlier, the disproportionate impacts on different populations and countries around the world in part dependent on their wealth. And so there are relevant considerations of equality there. But if we are really to bring about the change which will ensure the survival of the species and other species, it will need more than equality, I think.

Ben (00:48:21):

Yeah. I agree. But I also do think it's really interesting about how vanilla equality is. I don't think anyone really argues against, for instance, equality of opportunity. It's the mainstream like 95%. I would even say up to 99, but you've always got a minority strangeness somewhere of that. And that wasn't the case in the seventies. There was a live debate around it, and-- if you want to call it the progressive movement, I won that argument. So it is no longer a progressive idea; it's now a mainstream idea, which is kind of in the name of how you progress along. And I see this as a continuation. That's why I'm very interested in these social change movements, because these are human constructs.

Laws are only important to humans. They're not important, at least first order to the trees or the dogs, except for where humans interact with the trees and the dogs. And we've had that from, as we've mentioned, slavery to women's rights to minority, equality and things. And then, "Well, where does this go next? And these other things; some inclusion, interdependency, some of these other things, which I think is really fascinating. Obviously in the moment you don't really know where it's going, and in the moment you're also in the minority. So in the seventies, equality was a progressive idea. In the1900, 1890, women's equality was a progressive idea. In 1800, lack of slavery was a progressive idea. So it's kind of really interesting, I think, how that social progress happened.

Perhaps just one final little section then with something which I know you've sort of been involved in and has been the university level, which we probably should touch on; again, which is a bit intersectional of this. So one is some of the debates around-- I guess they're calling it the freedom of speech thing and the other with identity which you mentioned right at the beginning. The debates around how much is a construct, what is the construct, and where we are, which is quite fluid at the moment versus where it is. And I think that's interesting as well, because it wasn't so much in the seventies, the topic that people would've come across and has now progressed there.

And you've done a lot of work within academic circles and those sort of systems. I think people who just read the sort of media reports or aren't really actively involved or see this often get a kind of-- not a very broad view of what's really happening. So I'd be interested to see from where you are how you are feeling around a lot of the debates around identity and free speech. I mean, a lot of it seems to me sort of common sense and people just asking for reasonable things and we're working on getting those right. But there's some other things there.

David (00:51:13):

Yeah. I mean, certainly for universities-- especially for universities, freedom of speech is critical, really. The idea that we can interrogate and test concepts and ideas howsoever, and follow the evidence, even if we end up making a mistake or saying the wrong thing, it's critical. There are obviously laws which limit freedom of speech, whether it's around hate speech or harassment or defamation or matters to do with property rights; contract laws and who owns intellectual property and thing. So there are a variety of laws where-- It's not true to say that free speech is absolute, but free speech is certainly tremendously important. And I think we're in we're in a time, not just in this country, but in many countries where those concepts are colliding with a particular sense that many people have about the essentialness of their identities or whatever those identities are.

And I think it's very interesting, very complicated and very difficult to resolve. So if I take one example, I'm a disabled person, so I identify as a disabled person and there is an objective reality to me being a disabled person, but it is also constructed. So somebody with my particular impairment, my medical condition in a different time and space and different world wouldn't have the identity of disability that I have at the moment, even though I might have the same impairment. So there's a complex mix of the essential and the inessential where one is talking about identity. And that plays out and crashes against ideas of freedom of speech, particularly where the speech appears to profoundly undermine the identity. The challenge for us all who are working in this area is to navigate that; to navigate that in a way which doesn't compromise either the importance of freedom of speech, because without that in a university environment, we are really denuded. So it is an essential element to it, but also doesn't compromise our emotional and evidential understanding of people's individual sense of themselves and what matters.

Squaring that circle is not easy. I think it's possible. I say that even though I may not have all of the answers at all. But I think we have to square that circle, and I think we can, because I do come at this issue like I do with all issues from the perspective that there's no fundamental conflict between only two groups of humans. Of course there is actual conflict-- some of it is horrible over the centuries as we've seen. But I don't think in terms of the essentialness of humans, I don't think that there's any real conflict. And so we have to navigate a way through all of this he says loosely, but nonetheless, relevantly.

Ben (00:54:48):

Not with all the answers, but we're on a journey on that. And that sounds quite hopeful as well. So maybe last couple of questions here would be, what are your projects or thoughts that you are working on? Obviously, this interdependency, you had this lecture which you can listen to on YouTube on whether law provides inclusion, although we've given the punchline already; so necessary but not sufficient. But other current projects and thoughts you'd like to share?

David (00:55:24):

I mean, there's lots we're doing at Sussex and also at the Premier League. But I think probably-- And this is true I think for many of my colleagues in other universities and other sectors as well, I think that there are big challenges around what we mean by identity, what is essential, what is not essential. But profoundly how people can keep a sense of themselves, their sense of belonging and safety, even in environments which may feel like it's critiquing something, which is profound for them. That's probably one of the major more trickier issues for universities, certainly at the moment in terms of EDI and culture work. There are chronic areas of underrepresentation for which I think there are solutions. And underrepresentation is a signifier for other things. But there are chronic areas of underrepresentation which for certain groups which there are still-- if I could just give you one example.

British Caribbean heritage colleagues, they are considerably underrepresented. And I think that there are really complex issues of structural issues of race and class which need to be unpicked and addressed in many areas. And there are broader issues of belonging, which I think if we're able to tackle that-- and they're probably complimentary to tackling the other areas of underrepresentation which are important to address. And then there are legacy issues; what I call legacy issues. Ones where in many ways the arguments have been won, but we are still not getting it right. They're still stupid access issues for disabled people. So we're not arguing about the principles here anymore. We're arguing about having still not worked through all the changes we need to operationalize, if I can put it that way.

And then there are these much more ephemeral issues about what does good culture look like beyond EDI work. I think we can probably all imagine what it would-- We all want to belong, we all want to feel that we're operating in a collegiate environment. We all want to be supported by and support our colleagues. Again, often these things reach for interdependence issues. We all-- whether in a work environment, we all want to feel safe, we all want to feel productive and meaningful, we want to feel that we're having meaningful work and meaningful lives. Maybe I'll stop there because there's a lot to think about.

Ben (00:58:33):

Yeah, I'll pick up on the legacy issues. I think that's really true. I guess in the business world, they call it implementation or execution. We won the principles, but actually, it's getting it in place. I see that a lot in special education needs where there's a lot of things which you now have a right to in law, but cannot actually access it. A lot of it comes down to Maverick money, but that's also intersectional structures or resources and all other things.

David (00:59:02):

Yeah, I remember that.

Ben (00:59:03):

And then actually some legacy is also legacy of history, whether that's empire and all of those things as well. But to your first point as well, I would put a lot of that emphasis on this challenge of agency or having feeling agency, which is intertwined with identity. And I will swear again into the climate thing because where on the crisis where you feel you lose agency, where you feel you can't do anything, you stop doing something and therefore you then lose. Actually kind of almost ironically. Whether you were going to win or not in the first place is almost beyond the point. If you don't think you have any agency, you are not even referring back to an early part of the conversation; not that it is, but you're not in the game. If you don't think you're going to win the race, you are almost never going to race it. Even if you aren't going to actually win the race, it kind of doesn't matter. You have to have the sense of agency and whether that's within identity and all of that. I feel that's a really important piece.

I get a little bit worried meeting some young people who either through climate anxiety or an identity thing have feel that they've lost their agency because they lose it through one of those pieces. And then I think you've got all of these other problems which occur kind of unnecessarily, as in, I understand why this has come about, but it doesn't need to be that case. And so that's something which I think is quite important.

Perhaps reflecting on that, the final question would be, do you have any thoughts on general life advice? So advice for people who are thinking about social change movements or are in law or are worried about rights or things like that. So it can be kind of on career journey or something like that, or life advice in terms of how you live your life, either as a minority or just as a person going through that you reflected on in your years of wisdom.

David (01:01:09):

Well, it would almost feel impertinent for me to give advice to people. I'll do my best, Ben, but can I just say one... I just want to underscore your point about-- I really don't think that we can underestimate the current impact of the legacy issues of things like slavery and colonialism and how they... I mean, we may think, "Well, of course we abolished slavery, whatever it was, 200 years ago or something. And we had colonies for 50 years or more." But the consequences of that in the way they play out in thinking and organizational design, although they have been unpicked to a considerable degree, are still prevalent. And I think that's part of the explanation for ongoing racism, basically. So I completely endorse that point.

It's very difficult to give-- Everybody is an in individual and I know that for me, I never really had a career plan other than just I found the things that interested me and I just went at it really as much as I could. I was lucky enough or fortuitous enough to be able to do things, to be born at the time I was born, and therefore able to pick up on a zeitgeist, which interested me. So it was a lucky combination of events in my own circumstances. But I do think relationships-- not to sound too pedestrian about this. I do think relationships are important; having relationships, trusting relationships beyond families is what I mean as well-- what Armistead Maupin calls your logical family, not just your biological family.

I think that it's trite to talk about working harder and things like that so I'm not going to. But I am going to say things like, do what you need to do to believe in yourself because so many of us don't or doubt ourselves. That doesn't mean to say-- I think first of all, that knowing there's nothing profoundly wrong with anyone, including whoever you are. But secondly, knowing that from that perspective you get to learn and evolve; it doesn't mean you say rigid in the position. So there's something the risk of sounding like a not very good therapist. There's something about really believing in yourself, I do think, because in every case where somebody doesn't believe or like themselves, it's not true.

Ben (01:04:49):

That seems really good advice to me. So believing and backing yourself-- and I think your first point is choose your friends or make sure you have relationships beyond your family and have established them and invested in them. So with that, great advice, David. Thank you very much.

David (01:05:15):

Thanks, Ben. Thanks. I really enjoyed it as ever.

Jennifer Doleac: crime, policing, policy | Podcast

Jennifer Doleac studies the economics of crime and discrimination. In July 2023, Jenn will join Arnold Ventures as the Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice.  She also hosts her own podcast:   Probable Causation, a podcast about law, economics, and crime. Her twitter is here.

We chat about trends and causes of crime. How guns, drugs and policing interact with crime trends.

…there was this huge increase in violent crime in particular in the late early eighties, early nineties. And suddenly violent crime started falling dramatically in the mid-1990s. We still aren't entirely sure why that is the case, this big mystery in the economics of crime world. But we do know that basically crime has been falling since then until very recently. So during the pandemic and since the pandemic, we've seen this big uptick in homicide and shootings, at least in the US. Again, we're not entirely sure why that change. It's kind of like trying to describe what's going on in the stock market. There are lots of sort of little blips and everything, and you can have big picture understanding of the economy and what drives growth, but not be able to predict fluctuations in the stock market. So it's similar with crime rates

But overall, we're still in a place where homicide rates and violent crime rates are much lower than they were in the early to mid-nineties. So overall things have gotten much safer, especially in our big cities; we're much safer. But of course, as you said, there's a lot of variation place to place; particular neighborhoods, particular communities, they're the brunt of a lot of violent crime that is still going on. So it's a major public safety or major public problem and concern for policymakers in particular places and that has become more of a focus in recent years as homicides and shootings have gone up, which of course we're not used to after this big decline for decades

What we know of policies that work on reducing crime, and how challenging the recent uptick in crime statistics is to ideas on reforming criminal justice.

We discuss alternatives to jail, and what type of interventions can work on crime, such as sentencing for misdemeanors, and access to healthcare. 

Jenn explains why the “broken window” theory of crime has not really held up. The mixed studies on body cameras and how deterrents (like DNA databases and CCTV) seem to work.

Jenn discusses her work suggesting some policies have had unintended consequences related to “ban the box” (where employers are not allowed to know of former convictions on initial job application), and related to her paper on the Moral Hazard of Lifesaving Innovations: Naloxone Access and Opioid Abuse (which has proved controversial in some quarters).

We play overrated/underrated on: Texas, diversity and universal basic income.

We end on Jenn’s current projects and life advice. Transcript below and video above or on YouTube. Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods).

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PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript: Jennifer Doleac with Ben Yeoh (only lightly edited)

Ben Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Jennifer Doleac. Jen is about to join Arnold Ventures as head of their work on criminal justice, and I think she does amazing work bringing the economist mindset to challenges related to criminal justice, poverty, and discrimination. She hosts her own podcast, At Probable Causation. Jen, welcome.

Jennifer Hello. Thanks for having me.

Ben (00:27) 

So let's start with crime. When I've looked at the crime data, it occurred to me it's not exactly clear what the trends have been in all different types of crime, or why. My personal reading is it does look like long-term trends over the last 40, 50 years for violent crime seems to be down, and for overall crime as well looks broadly down both in the UK and the US and other rich nations. But there's quite a lot of flux and quite a lot of regional or city differences. And then in more recent years, the trend in crime in anything in the US looks like it might have ticked up. It looks like it might have ticked up in a couple of other places as well, although, again, unflux and unstable in some other nations. So my first question then is what do you think the trends in crime are? And maybe you can cut it in ways which you think are helpful as in violent crime, non-violent crime, crime in cities and cutting it away from the long term and the short term.

Jennifer (01:32) 

Yeah, I mean, I think those long term and short term pictures you just painted are really the main stories when we think about where we are in terms of public safety. So there was this huge increase in violent crime in particular in the late early eighties, early nineties. And suddenly violent crime started falling dramatically in the mid-1990s. We still aren't entirely sure why that is the case, this big mystery in the economics of crime world. But we do know that basically crime has been falling since then until very recently. So during the pandemic and since the pandemic, we've seen this big uptick in homicide and shootings, at least in the US. Again, we're not entirely sure why that change. It's kind of like trying to describe what's going on in the stock market. There are lots of sort of little blips and everything, and you can have big picture understanding of the economy and what drives growth, but not be able to predict fluctuations in the stock market. So it's similar with crime rates.

But overall, we're still in a place where homicide rates and violent crime rates are much lower than they were in the early to mid-nineties. So overall things have gotten much safer, especially in our big cities; we're much safer. But of course, as you said, there's a lot of variation place to place; particular neighborhoods, particular communities, they're the brunt of a lot of violent crime that is still going on. So it's a major public safety or major public problem and concern for policymakers in particular places and that has become more of a focus in recent years as homicides and shootings have gone up, which of course we're not used to after this big decline for decades.

Ben (03:26)

So when I was reading the literature, I was surprised by that observation and the comment that you make is that there isn't that much agreement as to the why on these trends, and the why for the down and the why for the up which is very perplexing, which I guess is one of the reasons why maybe the person in the street has kind of misunderstood what the trends were and certainly misunderstood as to what they were. I guess my thought is what are your best theories of why it was down and maybe why it has come up? What are your top two or three best kind of causal explanations for it?

Jennifer (04:05)

Yeah. So there have been a lot of studies trying to nail down what happened, especially with that nineties decline. All kinds of theories have been thrown around. There was a lot that was changing about criminal justice policy during that period in response to the rising crime rates. We increased incarceration, we increased policing. We know independently that both of those things reduce crime. And so it seems reasonable that we put a lot more police on the street, we lock up people for a long time, maybe that helps to reduce crime. Again, in general that is true, but that doesn't seem to explain what happened in the nineties and why we saw this big decline in crime in the nineties. Other theories out there are removing lead from gasoline and cars. So if you remove lead exposure about 20 years earlier, then those kids who would've been exposed to high lead levels grow up and are less violent, less likely to get themselves into trouble. So maybe we see crime decline for that reason.

Others have suggested that it's a similar story, but abortion legalization. So really like explanations all over the map. My hunch about the nineties is that it's honestly just a mix of a whole bunch of different stuff. I think the lead hypothesis is somewhat compelling, although we, again, whether it could explain the whole decline feels like a bit of a stretch to me. We also were benefiting during that period from a big investment in anti-poverty programs in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and having those kids grow up and have better opportunities surely reduced criminal involvement. So my best explanation is very unsatisfying, I think it was a lot of things in the nineties. For the more recent uptick, again, as you said, we don't really understand what's going on here. I really thought and I think said on some podcasts early on in the pandemic that my guess was it was a lot of everybody is inside, you don't have as many eyes on the street. So there's this Jane Jacobs urban researcher story that basically if you just have more people around who can be eyes on the street, then everything is safer. You've got potential witnesses and so on.

And so suddenly during the pandemic we're not all out and about anymore. So taking the eyes off the street means that people who want to go and cause trouble can without any consequences. So I sort of was hoping, at least, that was a temporary change and you saw an increase in homicides and shootings, but then that would all decline when we started moving around again. It didn't. And so that suggests we're at a new equilibrium almost, so things just shifted. And in addition to a lot of people buying more guns at the beginning of the pandemic, seems like there are just more access to guns. Maybe we got to a point where everyone just has more guns and also there are sort of cycles of retribution if it's gang violence and so on. So we seem to be in a new equilibrium in a lot of cities where gun violence is just higher than it was pre pandemic. So we're going to need to actually do something about it which is harder.

I think all of that said, I mean, what makes me optimistic as a researcher is I think we're much better at figuring out what to do about these problems than we are at explaining why we are in this situation to begin with. So we don't necessarily need to understand why crime is higher now in order to figure out what works to reduce crime. So that is helpful. We don't need to fully under-- Of course, understanding root causes can help us come up with ideas about what to do, but it's not necessary.

Ben (07:50)

Yeah, that's a really good point. So empirically we can do things that you know. So the pollution thing, improving neighborhoods, we might talk about some of this access to healthcare, some of the jobs, cognitive behavior therapy; a lot of things that have been shown to work. I guess speaking from here in the UK and Europe, one thing Europeans can't get their heads around is the whole gun issue. I guess as you've raised it, it seems to European people that guns must be a really big answer to it. I guess this is a little bit contested in the US. From your reading of it, what is the intersection of the whole gun issue and is it a case that because this is all a minority or quite a large minority who own a load of guns and there seems to have been a tipping point in certain communities or regions or zones, like you say, with intersection or with poverty or the environment and communities and it spills over. There also seems to be some intersection with mental health because you've seen mental resilience issues also spark up. So you put some of these small factors together and like you say, you're getting one and one and one at one equals like this really big thing. I'll be interested in your views from that and explaining it to us here in Europe and the UK where we just don't quite understand the issue around guns.

Jennifer (09:16) 

Yeah, I think a lot of people in the US don't really understand either why we're in this situation. A lot of people believe very strongly in Second Amendment rights to be able to own guns. So that makes meaningful gun control just very difficult politically to implement. And so I often think of conversations about gun laws as being a little bit of a distraction if we're focused on like what policies can we implement to actually change things because it's just going to set off; it's just going to cause lots of fights. But all that said, I think one challenge here and the reason it's not sort of an immediate one-to-one, like someone buys a gun and we see crime go up. I think that there are lots of law abiding people who buy guns. One big challenge is that a lot of those guns get stolen. So I've actually been having a lot of conversations with people recently including police officers who say like they know-- I live in Texas-- You see a pickup truck in a parking lot, they could guarantee you there's a rifle in the back of that pickup truck. Thieves know that too. And so you wind up seeing a lot of guns stolen out of cars. A lot of people just store their guns in cars and they're not locked up. So it's interesting, I've just been having a lot of conversations about like, "Maybe we could get policies passed about having to lock up your guns when they're in the car."

So there are some places like that where you could imagine some sort of interventions that just try to keep the guns in the hands of the law abiding citizens rather than the people who are stealing them. But otherwise, it's a much bigger conversation. Surely if we implemented really meaningful gun control, I think the best evidence shows that that would dramatically reduce violent crime. There is uncertainty there, of course. These studies aren't perfect. We don't randomly pass these laws, they're really contentious. We can have a much longer conversation with the literature there. But I think in my mind the big question is whether we're actually going to do it, and it seems very unlikely to me, so I don't spend a whole lot of time talking about it.

Ben (11:33)

So the economic case is clear, but the political world is not. In some ways that's a little bit like carbon tax, although carbon tax is probably more contested. Most economists, I think some ridiculous number like 80 or 90% of economists think carbon tax is the answer. “We do that, we price the externality, what's the problem people?” And then all of the political economy people are going, "Well, in a democracy it doesn't quite work like this." So that's another example, but it's quite interesting on that. We mentioned guns. I guess the other two big ones on there are kind of drugs and poverty with some of these intersections. I was really interested in the drugs one. Mostly I was reading the stats on alcohol in particular which seems to be true across-- Well, I only looked at European nations and the US. But something like alcohol was involved in between 30 to 50% of violent crimes, 30 to 50% of murders across all of these nations, whether you're Scandinavia, continental Europe, UK or the US, which was really amazing; domestic violence. So all of these violent ones. Obviously that's kind of legal drug, but then the second order on drugs and things. So it seems to me that people think that the link of alcohol is pretty causal. Would you agree, and I guess are there some policies that we can do or think around that, or is that again tricky because of people on the other side law abiding and the rights to alcohol and things like that?

Jennifer (13:05)

Yeah, the evidence on that is very strong. Alcohol is really bad. Occasionally, some reporter will write up a story about, like, "Imagine there was a drug that we knew increased violent crime by X percent and had all these terrible outcomes, and we heavily regulate or make illegal all kinds of substances that because we were worried about the criminal effect. And then they reveal at the end what we're talking about alcohol, which is obviously quite legal and easily available.” So there are policies out there, a lot of which are contributing or allowing these studies to figure out what's the effect of alcohol on crime. Taxing alcohol; so increasing alcohol taxes tends to reduce violent crime.

Something I've been really interested in and most of my own work is on how to help people reintegrate into society after a conviction or time in prison. So I spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of reducing recidivism piece. There are a bunch of studies of this program called 24/7 Sobriety, which was started in South Dakota and is now expanding to some other states where they frame it as basically like if you are engaged in crime that is alcohol involved, you essentially lose your license to drink. And so as part of this program, you have to basically come into the local jail and breathe into a breathalyzer at random several times a week, or actually wear one of those bracelets that measures your blood alcohol content. The idea is if you are caught drinking, then you are immediately put in jail for a night or two.

So it's basically a hundred percent certainty of getting caught if you drink, but a very light sentence or a very light consequence. And basically they dramatically reduce the amount of drinking that people are doing. Also, most of these policies are targeted at people who have DUIs; driving under the influence offenses. But they also see reductions in domestic violence and they actually see reductions in mortality down the road. So it just has big benefits. I think as you said, if we were thinking we could just ban drinking in general in order to reduce crime, I think that's a political non-starter. Lots of people see lots of benefits to drinking and enjoy it. But I think it does raise questions of if we trust people for the most part to do this responsibly, perhaps we could trust people to do other things responsibly and then punish the violations of that rather than banning the substance outright. But finding ways to discourage it would certainly help public safety benefits.

Ben (16:07)

Sure. That makes a lot of sense. But it's kind of interesting because-- I guess it's slightly mixed, but I tend to read that a lot of people think the war on drugs though hasn't been particularly helpful or at least have had pros and cons. So strangely, the alcohol thing we kind of agree on that. But then on these other ones, the side effects of the war driving crime into the black markets and things, with an economist mindset, again, not sure it's politically palatable. But that seems to have gone the other way. Is that also kind of your reading? It's a little bit more contended I guess.

Jennifer (16:43) 

With the war on drugs?

Ben (16:44)

Yeah, with the war on drugs.

Jennifer (16:45)

I mean, obviously in the US, we're in the middle of a big experiment about legalizing marijuana, the easiest of the drugs to legalize. In general, yes, my read is that the war on drugs has not been particularly successful, has created black markets, has increased crime in other ways. All of that said, there are a lot of drugs that do have really negative externalities in econ terms. If using substances only affected you, then perhaps we'd all be okay with everybody just making their own decisions if we assume you have full information and everything else. But knowing that a lot of drug use does have the possibility of really negatively harming people around you-- as we just discussed alcohol does-- then there's an incentive for the government to regulate it. And so the question just what that regulation looks like is complete criminalization and throwing the book at you and putting you in prison for a long time. Is that the best way to handle it? Probably not. So I think in general we're in the middle of finding a middle ground and finding ways to back off this thinking that we can just convict and incarcerate our way out of people using drugs. But we haven't found the best solution yet.

Ben (18:07)

Sure. So there's going to be a lot of good, natural design experiments coming up now with all of this.

Jennifer (18:12)

Let's hope so.

Ben (18:15)

Which is a good segue into I think one of the papers I read on your work, or it might have been your work sort of looking at this, which was looking at misdemeanors and particularly sort of small offenses and how harshly you come under judgment and things like that. The work kind of basically suggested-- I'm going to say it in real lay terms-- But if you were kind of given strong warnings for small offenses and you weren't put into the system, the chances are it was better for you in terms of then not getting into system or re-offending and that type of thing. So that's one possible policy that could work. And actually there seemed to be some natural experiments would support that would also help sort of the fact that prisons are really expensive. So that type of thing. Is that a true reading and how certain do you still feel of that idea on that work now?

Jennifer (19:13)

Yeah, I think there's growing evidence that we've been, especially in the US again, very concerned for a long time about mass incarceration and the effect that really long prison sentences have on people and then communities. And this idea that locking people up then makes it really difficult for them to get a job later and everything else. There's more and more evidence that really seems to show it's not the incarceration that seems to be doing most of the damage, it's the initial conviction. So if you put anything on someone's criminal record; that initial misdemeanor, even an arrest honestly can often show up. But let's just imagine here for the sake of argument, it's a misdemeanor conviction, a felony conviction. A lot of people who are convicted of these crimes never go to prison but still have a very difficult time then finding a job, keeping a job if they had one, finding housing. These records are permanent. It's public record that you have this kind of record probably for good reason. We don't want the government to just convict and incarcerate whoever without telling us.

But this all means that giving someone a criminal record is really costly over the long term. So I think the evidence in general, my read of it is that we've gone too far basically in how easily and quickly we give out criminal records and we should be airing toward leniency, especially for first time offenders. So that research you mention with Amanda Agan and Anna Harvey when we were working with Suffolk County in Massachusetts where Boston's located. We basically had a really nice natural experiment where non-violent misdemeanor cases; stuff like disorderly conduct and minor drug possession and shoplifting are essentially randomly assigned to different district attorneys who decide in this first court hearing whether to just drop the case, it's not worth the government's time, or to move it forward and let a colleague take it and pursue it.

We found that if you get lucky and get one of these lenient prosecutors that drops the case, you're 50% less likely to show up back in court again with a new charge. So it actually dramatically reduces recidivism. There's other work showing something similar with felony defendants. If you kind of put them on probation and then wipe the charges off if they successfully complete probation, similarly, about 50% are less likely to come back. So the way I often describe it to people is like, especially these first time offenders when they come into court, they're really at a fork in the road and you can either give them a conviction and pull them into the system, or you can just send them on their way and hope that this initial contact was enough of a wakeup call and they'll kind of figure it out themselves. And it turns out for a lot of people, they would. That is enough of a wakeup call and they would course correct without the conviction and punishment that the court system would implement.

And so knowing that, that just all strikes me as meaning that we are currently over convicting and over prosecuting, and we should just pull back a little bit and let people course correct on their own. Doesn't mean no punishment, doesn't mean like decriminalize these offenses or don't arrest them, but we don't need to be convicting people and throwing the book at people for everything.

Ben (22:34) 

First time offenses, particularly more minor offenses, although even felonies. And it does seem to be true outside of the US as well. What I like about what I was reading is, like you say, it's replicated across a different couple of areas. The numbers are also quite big. It's not one of those where you've got just a five or 10% could be kind of within forecast era. So essentially replicated. And also the causal model just really rings true. Interviews I've read, there are some people-- Yes, there will obviously be some bad apples or not. But some people will say, "Yeah, this was a wakeup call, I changed my life. This was not the person I wanted to be." So it makes a lot of sense. My view generally is that I find policymakers tend to be open to economists. There might be political constraints which mean it's not practical. Do you feel this is something that policymakers have potentially been able to pick up and maybe the politics of wanting to be seen to be hard on crime means that it's not possible? There has been a little bit of take up. I mean, where do you think we are with this policy?

Jennifer (23:43)

So one of my favorite things about working on criminal justice policy broadly is that there's just really broad bipartisan consensus that our current criminal justice system is not working very well. Incarceration rates are too high. It is helpful here that incarceration is so expensive. So even if it's just like small government conservatives are worried about spending lots of money on a field program, incarceration is a great example. So that means that there are a huge number of people of all political stripes that are interested in what the evidence says about how to fix things. And on most of these topics, there isn't a left and right policy yet. That's probably because most of this is state local and the federal government doesn't get involved as much. So it becomes less fodder for cable news, which is great.

I think all of that said, one challenge in the current conversation about whether prosecutors should be airing turn leniency is in the US, we've been having this conversation about progressive prosecutors. So they've been the ones really pushing policies like this. A lot of them have been elected around the same time that the pandemic happened and you see this increase in homicides. So it has become a very hot political issue whether these progressive prosecutor policies are what are causing the rise in homicide. My read of the evidence is that that is absolutely not happening. But there are variations in policies across places. Maybe there's some places where contributed, who knows? But it is at least an easy story to tell.

So I think that is sort of a one short term blip in this conversation about, "Could we go easier on defendants, especially first time defendants?" But I'm quite confident that over the longer term it'll get a lot of traction. There are a lot of policy makers in the space that honestly just are trying to figure out how to make things work well. Their courts are overwhelmed and crime rates are always a concern. So if they have a policy that is this effective-- And again, we're talking here about just like airing more turn leniency. It's not like everybody gets one crime free or something. It's not a totally guarantee of leniency.

Ben (26:07)

And it's cheap.

Jennifer (26:11)

Exactly. It's cheaper than the status quo and you get less crime. It feels like this should be an easy sell. So everyone I talk to gets it. It seems intuitive. And I suspect these sorts of changes are happening. They're just a little bit-- They're not advertising them and it's not the sort of thing you want to get into a fight on cable news about. But I think a lot of offices are paying attention to the evidence and using it accordingly.

Ben (26:46) 

Sure. That makes sense. That also brings to mind the question that Tyler Cowen asked, and I think you kind of part answered, which was with this recent uptick in crimes. “Does this mean the end for criminal justice reform?” And I think your answer was, "Well, it's a blip, but hopefully over the longer term actually because we don't quite understand why there's this uptake, but we do know things which would make it go back down. Regardless, we should still be pressing ahead." But yeah, that's his question. Does this mean a criminal justice reformance is harder and has it even kind of stopped making any headway?

Jennifer (27:24) 

I know that a lot of people, especially early in the pandemic when we saw homicide first start to rise, a lot of people in policy circles were really freaking out about this; that this was going to be the end of the criminal justice reform movement. The idea being that a lot of people are very open to the idea of reform when they feel safe, but as soon as they feel like their personal safety is threatened or the safety of their kids or their friends is threatened, then forget it, lock everybody up. So I think this just requires us to be more deliberate in our... It's going to be a harder conversation and already it is a somewhat harder conversation. Something that I have noticed is that often you see almost like the right left divide almost becomes like the left, only wants to focus on the fact that the criminal justice system can be very unfair and inefficient and racially biased. But they don't want to acknowledge that there's a real public safety problem.

And then the right is only focused on rising homicide rates and doesn't want to acknowledge the inefficiencies and inequities in the system. And obviously both of these things are problems. We can fix the system and make it more efficient and more fair and lower crime and make people safer. And it seems like we have to do both of those things. But it has been interesting, I think, the political dialogue around whether we acknowledge that crime is increasing has seemed a bit contentious. I think part of it is because there are some folks that worry that if we acknowledge that homicide is increasing and that there are cities that are less safe now than they were four or five years ago, then somehow people won't be supportive of reform anymore. And I, in my personal view is you have to acknowledge the facts on the ground in order to have a productive conversation.

Ben (29:29) 

Yeah. I call it the kind of walk and chew gum problem. You definitely can do both. Maybe not that exactly, maybe it's a little bit harder than walking and chewing gum. Actually, we have the same arguments here in the UK on our health system where it's obvious if you don't really tackle it from a left right perspective, that it actually needs more money and more investment and it needs to be more efficient. Those two things are actually both true. It's really inefficient, and I guess generally the right leaning would say, "Oh, but we've got to make it more efficient. We are wasting money," and all of that, which is true. But it also needs capital investment and needs investment in human capital of this. So it needs more money as well. You can walk into government. You need to do both if you're going to do that. And actually probably most things are like that. So maybe thinking about it...

Jennifer (30:21):

One other quick thought on that. One thing that I do hope that we've learned from this experience in the nineties where we saw a big uptick in violent crime then, and we responded by putting everyone in prison for a really long time and just basically-- I mean, mass incarceration was our response. We've learned since that that's not a cost effective policy. So jail and prison can keep actively dangerous people off the streets for a certain period of time. That is genuinely helpful. But it has zero or close to zero deterrent effect on long-term behavior. People do not respond to the knowledge of a long sentence. They respond to the probability of getting caught.

This is all the same. We've learned a lot since the nineties about what works and what doesn't. And so my hope is genuinely that this time around if-- I mean, already it seems like crime rates are leveling off. So hopefully we don't get into this kind of situation. But if crime were to continue to rise and it continues to be a major public policy issue, my genuine hope is that we will respond smarter this time and actually use everything we learned over the past several decades to do this better and achieve more public safety in a smarter, more cost effective, more fair way.

Ben (31:48):

I'm hopeful. I'm always a kind of cautiously optimistic person though on a lot of these things.

Jennifer (31:54):

Same.

Ben (31:54):

Maybe thinking about some of these other win-wins or the intersectionality. I mentioned healthcare because I think it was in a couple of your review articles that access to healthcare helps reduce crime. And actually, I do a lot of work in health and this is one of the things I think people really miss, is this intersection. There's a lot of intersection with social care and all of these other things. But I'm saying, "Well, yes, access to healthcare will help life expectancy if you want your health KPIs." But you get a lot of these other side benefits. And the one particularly in poor areas, and particularly now with the mental health one on crime seems to be absolutely massive. And particularly if you then try and put it in dollar terms, you're getting huge returns to the system, which don't go into the standard health economic ones because they're not interdisciplinary enough, which is one of my real bug bears around how specialized most economists have gone.

I said, "Well, you make this health economy argument, but you've missed two or three of the really big wins, which is if your crime goes down and then you try and put a value on that, you've just blown out 10 times.” So I was wondering how strong do you think that access to healthcare element still is. Maybe talk about that. And the three other ones if you wanted to comment on them as well, which I thought were really interesting, were improving neighborhoods because people like nice streets, it tends to be a win for the community, seems to also reduce crime; a little bit more niche, but these ones on summer jobs. And then also for certain people are kind of essentially cognitive behavior therapy. But therapy for people who could spiral downwards. Again, relatively cheap interventions seems to be win-wins. Be interested in how you've reflect on that sort of literature and that intersectionality of these-- I guess these are kind of non-police other win-win ways of reducing crime, which kind of seem to work. And I kind of feel that there would be, or there is support for. Am I right here?

Jennifer (33:50):

Yeah. I spend a lot of my time talking about interventions like this when I talk to policymakers. Basically when I get invited to talk now, it's all about how to reduce violent crime. I'll start with the criminal justice interventions because we do know some stuff works; like putting more police on the streets works, putting cameras everywhere works, stuff like that. But if for whatever reason you want to know about what else you could do, there's a lot of other stuff you could do. So healthcare is, I think the one I've become most bullish on. There are a lot of really nice studies now showing that increasing access to healthcare through programs like Medicaid which is available to lower income residents in the US. So there've been recent expansions that have especially expanded Medicaid to low income childless men which is exactly the group that you might worry would be engaged in crime. And those all show big reductions in crime rates.

The exact channel is still a little up in the air. It could be an increase in mental health care, it could be an increase in substance use treatment. Of course, those things can heavily interact and intersect. It could be just the reduction in financial stress that might lead to more drinking or something like that. So people are still working out the exact mechanisms. But there's this one amazing paper by Alicia Yakima where she has data from South Carolina on who's on Medicaid as kids, and then sees basically if you have Medicaid as a kid, it's just much easier to be on Medicaid as a child. Then once you're an adult-- They kick off most people at age 19.

So she can see what happens to everyone at age 19. She just sees like at age 19 for young men that are kicked off, suddenly just a huge increase in incarceration rates; almost immediate, you can see it in the graph. They're all just locked up. And that is driven entirely or almost entirely by young men who were having medication for mental health issues covered by Medicaid. And so basically they lose that medication and almost immediately are locked up in our criminal justice system. And it's just like, "God, what a waste of money, of time, of..." This is such a burden on these kids. It's just such a cheap intervention when you think about it that way; healthcare. So there's more and more evidence coming out like that.

I talk to some people sometimes and they're like, "Yeah, I mean, anyone who looks at this system and has any interaction with this population knows immediately healthcare matters.” I always like to say, "But now we have the research so it's useful. Not everything that seems obvious to us when we look at it firsthand actually is borne out by the data; this one is.” So there's more and more really strong causal evidence that increasing access to healthcare reduces crime and reduces recidivism. I kind of put cognitive behavioral therapy in a similar bucket, although there it's obviously CBT can be useful for people that don't have what we traditionally diagnose as a mental illness. But the story around CBT and the kinds of programs that have been tested are more around like changing the scripts that we all have in our heads about how social interactions will go. And that is perhaps more beneficial to people who live in neighborhoods where you have to interact with some people in some way and then sort of change your interactions to interact with other people.

So for those of us that live in safe, affluent neighborhoods, you sort of defer to authority or if anybody gives you a hard time; if someone mugging you on the street, you hand over your wallet and know that there'll be a cop around the corner. If a cop pushes back on you and tells you to do what you're told, you do it. But kids that are growing up in higher crime neighborhoods might learn over time that they need to stand up for themselves and push back if they're threatened in the neighborhood because that's the only way they survive. And then of course, if they do the same thing with a cop, there could be terrible consequences. So when you have to do that sort of script shifting across different places that is just much more cognitively taxing. So these CBT programs basically push everybody to just slow down and think about what is the story you have in your mind about how this interaction is going to go and just make a more deliberate choice about how you're going to respond, and don't respond with your immediate impulse.

I hope I didn't butcher that program too much to anyone who's listening who studies these programs intensely, but I think that's the general idea. And they've been shown to be really effective when they're introduced with kids in schools, high risk kids in schools, and even tested in juvenile detention centers. You see big reductions in recidivism going forward. I often joke with folks that if we just gave everyone a therapist-- I mean, truly everyone a therapist, I think we'd all be better off and we'd see a lot of social returns. But especially if you give people that are at high risk for mental illness and for emotional trauma that comes from violence and living in rough neighborhoods and everything else, if we gave all of them a therapist, I think we'd see big reductions in crime and other sorts of social ills. So it seems like a really good investment.

Ben (39:17):

That's one of my left field ideas for AI therapy. I think there's some evidence that AI chatbots are okay. They're not as good as an in-person therapist, but they're better than nothing; at least for overall therapy. So obviously not proved here. So if they become very cheap and everyone has them on their phone and there's a little bit of a push, then maybe they can give us the positive stories that we need. The last one on that was the improving neighborhoods. Is that strong on built in environment. Are you positive on that one as well?

Jennifer (39:47):

Yeah. I would say in general there's some suggestive evidence on this. I think, again, the channel here is a little unclear. I saw something recently saying that maybe part of it could be that police spend more time in nicer neighborhoods there would be like green vacant lots or whatever. So it's actually the police presence that's doing this. So I think we still need to figure this out. But there are some neat studies. There's one where they looked at neighborhoods where there was some sort of moth or something that was eating all the leaves on the trees and killing trees of certain types, but not other types. So it was like this random shock to where the trees were. They saw what happened to violent crime in the places where these moths susceptible trees to the ones that that were okay. And they saw crime go up in the places where the trees all died.

So it's sort of like these neat where it's like, "Oh, so it could be the tree." Even there, we also have evidence that increasing temperatures increases crime or increasing pollution or reducing air quality seems to increase crime. So it could be trees also help with air quality. They help cool everything down, there's shade. So is it really the greenery or is it the shade or is it the better air quality or is it the cops who like to hang out where there are nice trees? Who knows? But there is a good amount of evidence on this. And there are a whole bunch of criminologists in particular that are really interested in just the connection between our built environment and how we behave in that environment. So there are other psychological mechanisms that are potentially at play and that we just behave better in certain types of places than others.

Ben (41:32):

Yeah. There definitely does seem to be a link with a built environment. But as you say, it's complex and actually may not even hold from one location to another location, even with the same physical makeup. The one I see here in London, although I think they might have run out money because I don't see it as much so often, but we have fly tip zones. Do you call them the same thing in the states where people dump their rubbish and they're not meant to dump them there? You occasionally get these hotspot places where people just dump all of their old fridges or toys and stuff. They are often ugly corners of the street anyway. Local councils did efforts like they cleared them up and then they dumped them again. But they cleared them up and then they planted plants and made it look really nice. Then actually people decided not to fly tip there anymore because it's kind of like, "Oh, we wouldn't want to spoil it." I think maybe it just moved it to other places so I'm not sure the point there. But at least those were no longer fly tip.

Jennifer (42:38):

But it improved that neighborhood.

Ben (42:39):

And maybe I think the idea at least in that then if it's then you have to go so far enough that you can't fly tip on your street, then you do what you're meant to do, which is just call up the local council and then they come and take it away.

Jennifer (42:52):

It increases the cost of the alternative.

Ben (42:55):

Yeah. That's exactly right.

Jennifer (42:58):

I mean, this is in some ways a bit of a theory behind broken windows which was really hot in the nineties, which is this idea that if we really track down on low level offenses and quality of life offenses, like littering or dumping your trash on a street corner or breaking windows which is where the name came from, then everybody notices that this neighborhood is now being cared for and people are paying attention to it. And so then they will stop behaving in criminal ways. So this again, was hot in the nineties. A lot of people thought that implementation of these broken window strategies and policing was a reason that crime declined so much in the nineties.

We now know it doesn't seem to have contributed, doesn't seem to explain why crimes fell so much in places like New York where it was especially important. But this basic idea that if you take care of a place and lots of people seem to be paying attention and there's like a neighborhood watch or something like that, then it does seem intuitive that people are going to be less likely to do things that would disrupt that place. So might generally be deterred from committing crime in that place if they feel like people are paying attention to it. The question is how to actually implement that? It doesn't mean we need to arrest everybody and throw them in prison for 10 years. It can mean lower level consequences or it could mean plants and flowers can deter people from dumping their trash there. There might be other ways. But I think the basic point is that sometimes it's low level investments can have big payoffs.

Ben (44:50):

Yeah. And I think, like you said, it's probably an intersection of a few things. So community policing or being aware in your community and your neighborhood being good. More aware, police more likely to be walking on the beat and all of those other types of things. I was interested in your views on what alternatives to jail else we could do. So like you said, there's kind of just letting people off for minor misdemeanors, but there seemed to be some evidence that some of these other alternatives to jail also work in a kind of win-win because jail is really expensive.

Jennifer (45:25):

Yeah. So I've become really interested in electronic monitoring as an alternative to especially short jail and prison sentences. So in the US we often use electronic monitoring as a supplement to community supervision. So if we're going to let you out pretrial or we're going to put you on probation, then maybe we'll add electronic monitoring so we can keep track of where you are and we'll get notified if you leave your house and you're not supposed to. Increasing supervision doesn't seem as helpful. But as an alternative to locking you up, we now have a lot of evidence from other countries that do this routinely that it's really beneficial and seems to reduce recidivism quite dramatically. Some of that seems to come from reducing the destruction that jail and prison can have. You'll see you're able to continue working, continue spending time with your family, maybe going to school. It also could reduce the negative effects you might get from spending time in prison with other people that are criminally active. So those sort of negative peer effects can be reduced if we just put you on electronic monitoring and send you home. 

There's one recent paper that just came out from someone who's on the economics job market this year; Roman Rivera. And he's finding similar effects in the US, that using electronic monitoring as a substitute for incarceration seems beneficial. So that's the first evidence we have in the US which has been a major hold up with policymakers because everyone's like, "Well, we're not Australia, we're not the UK, we're not France. So it's totally different here." It turns out it's not totally different; it works the same way here. So that's really promising and it feels to me for various reasons we might not want to just let everyone that we're currently sending to prison out. We might not even want to let everyone who's on the margin of going to prison out. But it could at least make it more politically palatable to reduce our reliance on incarceration and has the big benefit of actually dramatically reducing recidivism. And like we were talking about earlier, it's also cheaper than sending someone to prison. So there are a variety of reasons that this could shift us in a better direction and is something that I'm paying a lot of attention to this research space.

Ben (47:47):

Yeah. So that's all of your work on sort of technology and justice and crime. Those arguments from policymakers actually really irritate me sometimes because sometimes it's clear. So if you've got differences in countries like America with guns and Europe, okay, there might be differences. But when the causal model you have is the same kind of human and the same kind of thing, it's kind of really silly to do that. It's like you are putting it back. There's a reason that there's these similarities. And if you ask the experts, they will generally agree when they think there's read through or when they think there's not read through. And they're also generally right as well, that's the other thing. If you do the research and say, 'You are to guess in advance, do you think this will replicate or not replicate a couple of these things?" Actually, economists generally get it right, which is also kind of unsurprising there.

Maybe we should touch a little bit on also what doesn't work. I recall you said earlier cameras can work, but I think you were referring to kind of CCTV cameras and cameras on the street which we have a lot of in London. Actually, we might have reached over saturation because once you have one on every block-- maybe three on every block is not going to do you any further, but one on a block versus not. Whereas I think your work suggests or we've looked at that body cameras, long story short, kind of probably don't work and are also quite expensive. Another thing which maybe doesn't work or is a little bit more mixed-- and this is kind of on the flip side, is when you're applying for jobs and you're kind of now when you're resume blind. So you don't have to say things about...

Jennifer (49:23):

Ban the box policies.

Ben (49:24):

Yeah. Ban the box. I forgot the buzzy buzzword on that which is kind of interesting because you would've thought that, "Oh, maybe not." But the second order effects which might be the same with the body cams, which I thought was quite interesting. And maybe in the third one which also seems to be a little bit more contested was on alternative drug use for naloxone and methadone and things like that; whether there's any displacement on that. So I'd be interested in your views on some of the things which actually may be second order when we've looked at them in more controlled cases, may not seem to have worked how we thought or either contested or neutral or you kind of think actually they may not be worth the money. Those were the three I picked up on in in your work.

Jennifer (50:13):

Yeah. So I'm talking a lot here about what works, what have we learned. The drum I usually am beating with policymakers is these are really hard problems to solve, most things we try will not work. We should aim to fail fast; not to fail because the reality is most things we try are not going to have the effects that we are hoping for. And often they're going to backfire just because these are such complex situations and human behavior is really hard to predict a lot of the time. So these are great examples, those sorts of situations. So cameras in general like CCTV cameras seem to be really beneficial because they're increasing the probability that you get caught. And again, as I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of evidence now that increasing the probability you get caught has a much bigger deterrent effect than increasing the punishment.

So they have a privacy cost and so that needs to be our public conversation; like different types of surveillance technologies are going to have bigger benefits than others and also bigger costs than others. So weighing those things becomes the conversation we should have. But we should know that in general they're going to be more effective than putting people in prison for 20 years. The body-worn camera literature is actually really interesting because there were all of these really nice randomized controlled trials, which is really unusual in the space. We had all these RCTs across different countries randomly give body-worn cameras to some police officers and not others. The working hypothesis there was that if the officer is wearing the camera and knows their behavior is observed, they're going to be less likely to behave badly which could include knowingly escalating a situation to an arrest or use of force when it didn't need it.

So to the extent that police are behaving badly in a conscious way rather than just because they're afraid for their safety, for instance, then body-worn cameras could reduce that bad behavior. But across all these RCTs, basically we found very little evidence of any sort of benefit or any behavior change at all. So that was really discouraging. All these places kept their body-worn cameras presumably because they weren't actually counting on that behavior change as the main goal of the policy. They also just wanted transparency and they wanted to be able to hold people accountable when something bad happened, even if it was somewhat rare. So that was sort of the conversation for a long time.

But we've since had a couple studies come out that have made the point to the extent that these body-worn cameras-- that if some officers are wearing them and others aren't, it could still have a broader impact on the community in a way that within community randomized control trial is not going to pick up. So part of this is just spillovers across officers or across ships depending on how these things are randomized. The studies already always talked about this, but it was hard to tell exactly how big the spillovers would be. Anyway, so there have been a couple of other studies that have just compared communities that adopted body-worn cameras with those that didn't and compared trends over time. And those seem to find at least suggestive evidence of big reductions in police use of force in the places that adopted body-worn cameras, which suggests that these community-wide effects could be happening. This is still a very active research area, active conversation, but it feels like maybe there's something there that we didn't see with the RCTs, which is just fascinating from a research perspective because we usually love RCTs. It's like the best gold standard, at least.

Ben (53:49):

No design is perfect.

Jennifer (53:50):

No design is perfect. You learn different things from different designs.

Ben (53:53):

Yeah. And they can’t capture everything, right?

Jennifer (53:55):

Exactly. Yeah.

Ben (53:57):

Interesting. So the jury is still out?

Jennifer (53:59):

The jury is suddenly still out. It's back out. The jury was in for a while and now it's back out because of this new evidence which is just-- science man, it's great. On Ban the Box, yes, this is an area I've studied directly. So basically the idea behind Ban the Box is that we are worried that a lot of people with criminal records cannot get their foot in the door to get a job interview or to be considered for a job because employers see-- Like, they'll have a box on an application saying, "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" If you check yes on that box, anecdotally, we know that employers will often just throw those applications out. We also just have a bunch of really nice experimental research where people send fictitious resumes from different people with the box checked or not. We know employers discriminate against people with criminal records. So there's good evidence on that.

The hope was that we could stop that discrimination by just removing that box. So banning the box. But this of course prompts economists like me to say, "Well, then what will they do next without the box? Why is it that they were discriminating in the first place?" And if they're worried about, for whatever reason, an employer doesn't want to hire someone with a criminal record, removing that information doesn't remove that worry for whatever reason. They still don't want to hire someone with a criminal record; you haven't changed that. Now, you've just left them in a position where they have to guess who has a criminal record. And the United States, there are huge racial disparities and who has a criminal record. So it would be statistically accurate for them to assume that young black men are more likely to have a recent conviction they might be worried about than young white men, for instance.

So this kind of policy could increase racial disparities in employment rather than reduce them. And indeed, we had previous studies showing that when employers first got access to criminal records, like in the nineties when the internet became more widely available, we actually saw reductions in racial disparities; reduced racial disparities in employment because it seems employers were racially discriminating before because they were worried about hiring people with criminal records and not because of race itself. So adding the box on actually was a policy limine at the time to racial discrimination, even if that wasn't exactly the design. But it turned out that was a good intervention.

So now we removed the box and we actually see big increases-- this is what I find in my study-- big increases in racial disparities in employment for young black men. A bunch of other studies have shown these policies don't even help people with criminal records get jobs. So we see that young black men who don't have a record, their employment is falling because they can't signal they don't have a record upfront. But the people with a record aren't even getting the second chance that the policy had hoped it would get, because eventually the employer can do a background check and reject their application then. So this policy has just been a complete disaster and it's still very popular. I think there are a lot of advocates who view it as just like a step in a broader movement which can be-- I am sympathetic to that concern and the broader desire to want to increase second chances for people with criminal records and want to improve reintegration-- something I study a lot myself. But this particular policy is not working and actually seems to be making things worse. So, yes, there are many other things we could be doing instead and so I have that conversation a lot with folks. But yeah, great example of how just well-intended policies do not always have good effects. So we need to be making sure we're meeting the goals that we set out to meet.

And then on the drug front, I have a study on Naloxone and opioids which is easily the most controversial paper written which is sort of amazing. I write a lot on race and crime. It turns out this paper on, I mean, essentially noting that depending on whether you want to use the words moral hazard or risk compensation. If you make something safer to do, people are going to do more of it. So basically Naloxone is this amazing drug that basically reverses overdoses of opioids. So it saves your life if you're in the midst of an opioid overdose. And there are these policies that just dramatically broadened access to this. So just sort of you could easily get it from pharmacies, anywhere without a prescription. A lot of people thought like, "Great, this is just an obvious clear wind. You're just going to save a lot of lives. This could dramatically change the opioid epidemic." An economist might like me, looks at it and says, "Well, probably we'll have a lot of benefits, but could also increase risky opioid use. If we're going to make something safer, people are going to do more of it. So how much of that benefit does it undo?" 

And so I have this paper with Anita Mukherjee where it seems to undo a lot of the benefit. We see no net decline in deaths due to opioid overdoses even though people go to the ER more with overdoses. So it seems like there's some which together suggest there's more actual risky use. In general, our takeaway is even if we obviously want to save people's lives in the moment, but we have to recognize that this policy does not seem to be a slam dunk on its own, and we have to be investing in other things like treatment or other solutions. So, yeah, that paper has generated a lot of anger from the public health community. It occasionally comes up for one reason or another, and the harm reduction folks become irate and send me lots of angry emails. But look, I am also interested in saving lives. And I think the question here is just what the best way is to do it.

Ben (01:00:01):

Yeah. The answer is it's complicated. I spent a few minutes on the internet. I was surprised at the strength of anger. I mean, they were really rude. It's kind of really interesting because-- I don't know why I wouldn't expect it in academia. I kind of expend it to my day job is all about investments and markets and I kind of expect us to be rude with one another. We're trying to make money and obviously we think some person is wrong because otherwise we wouldn't do that. But I kind of thought with people in good faith trying to do something complicated to get to the right answer. It's complicated, humans are humans. So there was that. But I guess that the strength of pushback probably continues to surprise you today then.

Jennifer (01:00:50):

Totally. It's just amazing. Similarly, I'm an economist and academic economists are not known for being warm and fuzzy and nice. You're all used to heavy pushback, very sharp criticism in academic seminars, but all in sort of an intellectual-- It's all part of an intellectual exchange where we're trying to make the ideas better. We're pushing each other on the ideas and the data. And if you have a disagreement, you go to the data with it. It's like, "Well, let's see. Let's test these different hypotheses." The pushback that I have gotten from the public health community, Lisa's corner of it, over the years seems much more in line with the idea that there is a consensus on what the "right answer" is on a policy topic like this. And we found the "wrong answer." And so that goes against what they've been advocating for in policy circles. So they need to come after the paper and sort of tear us down as opposed to talking about like, "What could be wrong with their research methods or whatever." Actually talking about how to make the paper better.

So I've had a lot of very frustrating conversations with people since about the sort of detrimental effect that that kind of attitude within a scientific community has on the research that's done. It's not surprising to me that you haven't seen other papers reach similar conclusions from within that community because people get the very clear message that they will be ostracized and torn apart publicly if they even suggest if they ever find a result like this. I've got a pretty thick skin and I'm willing to work on controversial topics, but it definitely deterred me from ever writing a paper on health myself again. And I'm sure it deters others from working in this area which I think is what a lot of these folks want. I know a lot of wonderful people who work in public health and are public health researchers, and they're doing excellent work. But it does seem to be a corner of that research community where there are more advocates than scholars. And I think that is the segment of the community that comes after me on the internet every year or so. It's just sort of amazing. I don't take it personally anymore. It's just clear that this is just something else that's going on, but it's fascinating to watch and I'm curious to see how it evolves over time.

Ben (01:03:15):

Sure. Yeah, I saw a glance of it and obviously don't know the ins and outs. But it strikes me that this is a symptom of wider challenge, which I see across many sectors. I think we see it within economics. I guess also with a kind of more recent me too phenomena or the fact that I have a lot of women friends and also younger female friends who find economics are kind of unfriendly. They also find this about law, investment banking, quite a lot of other sectors. So I mean, we can brush quite a lot of that. But also amongst the social sciences-- And I had this conversation with economists here in the UK, with Diane Coyle, who makes similar things. It kind of shapes also the research agenda, also how the diversity of thought, and that there seemed to be so many reports in the last couple of years. Again, this is just skimming the internet, occasionally seeing things on social media or whatever was sort of ‘me too’ and these allegations, which seem to sit quite awkwardly. I guess from your viewpoint being a woman in economics, but actually soon to leave academia, what your viewpoint is. Obviously, everyone just got their own personal story. This is not necessarily N equals 10,000, but N equals one. But I seem to get a lot of N equals one of women who haven't necessarily been super happy with the state of where economics is in terms of diversity of people or thought and things like that. I'd be interested if you had any thoughts on that.

Jennifer (01:04:51):

Yeah. So this is a topic I have thought a lot about over my career. In general, I love being an economist. I love the toolkit and the insights that economics brings to important social problems like criminal justice policy and reform. Being in academic and working at a university as an economist can be different. So then we're talking about working within certain industry. So first, I mean, I think there has been a lot of talk for a long time about just the way that women and various racial groups are just tremendously underrepresented in economics. I think in general we hover like full professors-- It's around like 20% of full professors are women and somewhere around a third of all assistant professors are women. Maybe half is too lofty a goal, but it'd be nicer to get closer to half.

It seems to be worse than in other STEM field. So a lot of times people are like, "Oh, well, it's just such a math-based profession." Of course for me, if you are women, that doesn't seem to be the holdup. It's something different about economics that does seem to make it worse. There've been a bunch of really nice empirical studies recently in recent years showing that women do seem to face biases in publication in terms of being burned with more service within the academy and all this other kind of stuff that reduces productivity or parent productivity, even if our actual intellectual contributions are the same. And like you, I've heard a lot of N equals one stories from lots of friends at this point who just have faced lots of what feels like one-off challenges and biases and lack of recognition of their contributions and their professional value in the workplace. They're just really frustrated. I think at this point I am solidly mid-career, I've been a professor for 11 years.

Most women I know who are sort of in my general cohort are really struggling and really starting to look for other jobs. But they're trying to figure out what those alternatives are. And I think a lot of us, if you spend all this time in the academy, you work so hard for tenure, it feels crazy to give tenure up. I personally got to a point where both and just experiences in the universities, but also in this broader economy too conversation that I was heavily part of in this past fall. It just kind of got to a point where it seemed clear to me that while tenure guarantees you a job, it doesn't guarantee you a good job. It just made me more open to the possibility of giving tenure up and considering something else. Then once I did that, all of a sudden, there are really amazing opportunities that are available. So yeah, I'm moving to Arnold Ventures. I'll be running their criminal justice program. So excited, it's such a good fit for me. I'm going to have an opportunity to really influence research and policy in this area in ways that I've already been trying to do, but it will just be so much easier to do from this other platform. So very excited. It's definitely a move for the best. Now, I find myself, when I talk to women who are like, "I don't know, this is just such a terrible job. I don't know..." I've stopped just commiserating and now I full on encourage them to consider other options. So I think they are out there.

There are all kinds of people that are really working hard within economics to make it better. In general, I still strongly encourage women to go and major in economics, even get a PhD in economics if they love research. I think it's an amazing toolkit and an amazing source of expertise and it allows you to have an influence and interesting insights on wherever you want to apply it. But I'm also very glad that there are now lots of different ways that you can apply that expertise. You don't have to become a professor. You can work in tech, you can work in industry. Everybody loves economists at this point and sees their value. So, yeah, that's the not so short version of my current thinking on economics and the profession.

Ben (01:09:44):

Sounds very clear. I'm going to ask about Arnold Ventures at the end. I guess I had one question then on this. What would you propose to the economics profession? Are there any policies or ideas or culture change? I will link it back to policing, because why not? What I've seen here-- this is more of a London metropolitan police issue which I've seen. But it does strike me that particularly for London which is quite a multicultural city, having a police force which reflects your city really seems to help. So more women and more minorities in the police. And again, this for me is anecdotal. But I've seen some little bit in literature and kind of because it causely makes sense that if you're part of the black community and you see black police officers, you kind of feel like you're going to be listening to people in your community and you'll be listened to.

Jennifer (01:10:35):

They'll take you seriously.

Ben (01:10:35):

Take you seriously either if you have a complaint or if you feel like you're being picked on. "Oh, it's not being picked on. Hey bro, this is what's happening." You'll feel you are listened to. And again, all sorts of good reasons for having women. So I'm actually quite interestingly a fan of kind of-- I don't know whether you'd necessarily get there by quotas, but diversity In police force, diversity to a lot of organizations seem to have these system-wide benefits, which obviously I could see happening in economics. I wonder whether you think that's true of policing and then what would you do for economics?

Jennifer (01:11:10):

Yes, there's definitely evidence that that's the case in policing; that having more women officers increases reporting of gender-based violence, reduces homicides due to domestic violence, for instance. Increasing the hiring of black police officers seems to reduce victimization of black people in the community. So basically the story you laid out is supported by the data, at least studies we have so far. And I think this is a place where seeing if this continues to hold up in current day-- a lot of this was based on litigation in the seventies and eighties. So we're a different baseline, but it’s definitely something I think we have good reason to believe would be a really good fix for policing or at least contribute moving in the right direction.

I think the same holds in economics. I mean, we know that there are important role model effects. It's hard to be what you can't see; that whole thing. So having more senior women encourages more women to come into the profession. There also is evidence that people appreciate having mentors who are like them in some way. And you could imagine women being able to be better mentors to women because they just understand their experience. So there have been interesting papers suggesting that one way affirmative action can be beneficial in the long run is that it brings in at least a first cohort of senior people from this minority group, and then that has long-term benefits. Even if the affirmative action stops, they're able to mentor people further down. So then it can kind of continue the flow of people from that minority in. So you could imagine there being big benefits there.

I mean, economists in general hate quotas, but there have been all these interesting studies showing that quotas, at least in the political space requiring a certain number of women to be elected from certain places. They all seem to have huge benefits and it seems to be mostly crowding out more of mediocre male candidates. It changes the way that residents think about women in leadership. Right now, they are actually seeing a woman leader and so they're less likely to think women can't lead or they're maybe more able to be better judges of women candidates because they now have a better-- they've seen some examples and are able to… Maybe they didn't know how to tell who would be a good woman leader from a bad woman leader before, but now they can; something like that.

So you can imagine similar stories in economics. As someone who has organized seminar series in various places that I've worked, I have definitely in the past thought about I want to bring in more junior candidates from underrepresented groups because I want my senior white male colleagues to think about these people as economists; these are examples of what economists look like. That has been a very active type of intervention I've made in the past. I think all of this stuff matters. And then as you said before, I mean, there's a reason. This isn't all just to make us feel good. I honestly think the science will be better if we have the best and brightest people at the table; and you can't do that if a huge segment of the population either feels excluded or is actively excluded and discriminated against.

But then also it changes the research questions that we're asking, if we don't have people with all kinds of life experiences in the room. We will come up with better policy solutions, we'll come up with better hypotheses if we have a variety of perspectives there. So this is good for science ultimately; to have a wider variety of people there and to break down the different silos that are separating us currently. So a lot of this is motivated just by like, "I'm just tired of injustice. It's just really frustrating to see my friends not valued by their colleagues.” But part of it is, honestly, I think this is just really important for science. And really, I think, economics is often offering some of the best policy solutions in really important spaces and we have seats at the table a lot more than people from other disciplines. So if we're falling down on the job because of stuff like this, feels to me like a relatively easy fix.

Ben (01:15:40):

Yeah. Better for the science, better for humanity. I wasn't aware of that political leadership work you mentioned there, but makes a lot of sense to me. Great. So I thought I'll finish with a little overrated, underrated, and then future questions. So if you're up for it, you can just go overrated, underrated, or you can pass or neutral. I'll start with Texas.

Jennifer (01:16:07):

Totally underrated.

Ben (01:16:09):

Of course. It's got to be.

Jennifer (01:16:10):

I love Texas so much. I grew up in...

Ben (01:16:12):

You're Texas born?

Jennifer (01:16:12):

I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up in Massachusetts and have slowly been moving farther south. I like warm weather unfriendly people, and Texas is great on both counts. So I love it here.

Ben (01:16:24):

What's most misunderstood about Texas?

Jennifer (01:16:29):

I think on the coasts of the US it's very-- it's like people really enjoy making fun of Texas as being this crazy outlier where everyone is just politically super hard right and it's just not true. It's like any state. There are rural areas and urban areas. Also, it's a huge state. There are like five major cities in this state. So it's just a really diverse place; I think that's the biggest thing.

Ben (01:17:06):

Yeah, it's like Nashville and Tennessee also. People think of it as one thing, but it's more than that. So overrated or underrated, universal basic income.

Jennifer (01:17:21):

I think probably overrated. Feels like it's getting a lot of hype. It's not a policy that I am super excited about as like a panacea.

Ben (01:17:37):

Yeah, that seems fair to me. Overrated or underrated, DNA databases.

Jennifer (01:17:47):

Underrated. I have research showing that they have huge deterrent effect. As I was saying before, there are going to be some surveillance technologies where there are really big privacy costs and others where there's less. This one I think people think because it's DNA, it's really invasive, but it's not what you're imagining. They're not analyzing your whole genome. It's really just like a higher tech fingerprint. So low privacy costs.

Ben (01:18:13):

I think they're overblown. In fact, so on my health work, I think this overall privacy concern is holding back all of our healthcare data analytics and we don't realize we give so much more information to Facebook and Google and Apple anyway. We've ticked the bot and given it to them. Actually, because of the rules and regulations we've held onto healthcare, but actually the healthcare would really help us out. And the data to Google only allows them to sell you more widgets and shoes. So we've got it backwards. It is more targeted shoes, so it's the shoes that you want. So there is maybe a little bit of consumer welfare, but it's not the same in health. We've definitely got that the wrong way around. But anyway. And it's through the same channel like the CCTV is because your probability of getting caught, it puts you off

Jennifer (01:19:05):

Exactly. Yep.

Ben (01:19:06):

Overrated or underrated, daylight savings time.

Jennifer (01:19:12):

Written in all my papers here. I think underrated. So from a crime perspective, it turns out shifting daylight to the evening, which is what daylight saving time does, reduces crime because people are more likely to get caught when the sun is out.

Ben (01:19:27):

Yeah. So I only learned that this week. So a lot of people don't seem to like daylight savings time, but I hadn't heard this angle. So actually when you put into the crime effects, it actually seemed to be more robust, a slightly bigger number than I thought.

Jennifer (01:19:44):

Yeah. People often think of daylight saving time as the switching, but it's actually like daylight saving time is the summer when sunlight is in the evening and then standard time is when the sunlight is in the morning. We could eliminate the switching and just keep daylight saving time year round. And so people occasionally propose this in Congress. So you could imagine like three different fights. You want to have, “Do you want the switching?” And all the costs that people worry about seem to come from the switching of the time change. So you don't get as much sleep and there are more heart attacks and car accidents and all this stuff because people are thrown off. But we could do away with the switching and just keep daylight saving time in terms of when we want our daylight.

Ben (01:20:27):

So you get one step up. And that's because more crime happens at night, is that right? Or in darkness.

Jennifer (01:20:33):

More crime happens at night, right.

Ben (01:20:33):

It does happen at night. Is it actually easier to do crime at night or is it just perceived to be from the stories we tell ourselves so that's why we do it.

Jennifer (01:20:45):

Yeah. I mean, I usually quip that criminals aren't morning people. They're not getting up to rob you at 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM on your commute. They're only going to rob you at 5:00 PM on your commute. There might actually be more people out and about at 5:00 PM too and you might be more likely to walk home than walk to work. But for whatever reason, there's a lot more crime in the evening. And so shifting the daylight then does actually reduce crime overall, it doesn't just get shifted to the morning.

Ben (01:21:16):

Sure. And the last one on this, the links between I guess climate and crime, although I guess this might be more specifically heat.

Jennifer (01:21:29):

So, yes, we have all of this evidence that higher temperatures increase crime. I have work with Jonathan Colmer showing that that also intersects with gun laws, going back to the first part of our conversation. And gun laws are very effective at mitigating this crime intersection. But the all matters because climate change is happening and our temperatures are rising so we should expect violent crime to rise too, and all of these anti-violence programs are only going to be more important as temperatures go up more.

Ben (01:22:10):

That makes a lot of sense. Great. So last couple of questions. How about your future work and ventures? So what's on your agenda for your work with Arnold Ventures and what's all of the other things you're getting up to?

Jennifer (01:22:25):

That's the main one right now. So yes, I'll be the executive vice president for criminal justice at Arnold Ventures starting in July, which means I'm overseeing their research and advocacy funding and strategies. In general, what is really attractive to me about Arnold and what has drawn me to them and why I think I'm a good match, is they are very focused on rigorous research informing policy. And not only trying to support and generate more of that really high quality causal research, but also getting it into the hands of policymakers and making sure that it's having an impact. So yeah, I'll be doing a lot of that. I will keep the podcast going. I've realized in the close conversations that a lot of the stuff I have been doing as a professor has mostly been structures to help me keep better tabs on what is going on in the field, which of course is now going to be only more important in this new job. Just knowing who's working on what and what new evidence is out there. So I have this online seminar series; plan to keep that going; a conference every year, keep that going, and the podcast. So that's the big thing.

I'm moving to Houston, I'll be spending a lot of time in DC and New York. A lot of our team is there. Basically, I'm really looking forward to learning from the incredible people that are on the Arnold VJ team. It's just a tremendous group of people who have been working in the criminal justice policy space for a really long time and I'm going to learn a lot; both about the research they've been supporting, but also just these policy areas which hasn't been directly part of my job to be actively engaged in the policy conversation. And so that'll be much more proactively part of what I'm doing. Other than that, I'm working on a book called, The Science of Second Chances. So that will keep going. It's due to go to my editor in December, so I'm hoping to get that in on time That book is going to be on basically what we know from the research on the best ways to intervene at each stage of the criminal justice process to give people a real second chance and break the incarceration cycle. So I'm keeping that going while I am starting to think about this transition out of academia and into the real world.

Ben (01:24:57):

That all sounds great. Got a bit of a great advice. So the last question would be, any life advice for people?

Jennifer (01:25:21):

I think the main thing that I try to remind myself and hopefully will be relevant to other people too, is I think that we are all probably too cautious in terms of taking leaps, making changes, leaving employers, leaving industries, leaving relationships. I think there are a lot of things that we could imagine either like sunk costs; there's a sunk cost fallacy here, which economists love to think about. Like, “I've already invested so much in this thing, so I don't want to leave." But I think also it's just a fear of the unknown. And so we imagine that the alternative is going to be the worst possibility. We know what we have right now, but in practice I actually think the alternative tends to be much better.

So I think a lot of us are too risk averse in terms of being willing to make changes. And most of the time when I talk to friends after they've hemmed and hawed for ages about whether to make some leap, they're so much happier once they do. This is somewhat related. There was a study a couple years ago by Steve Levitt and probably some co-authors looking at-- they randomized people into just like, if they had some major life decision to make, they flipped a coin and then did whatever... They were sufficiently torn that they did whatever the coin told them to do. And the people where the coin randomly told them to make the change and take the leap were actually much happier later. So that confirmed my general hypothesis that I think a lot of us are too risk averse in making major life changes. So when in doubt, I try to take the leap.

Ben (01:27:12):

Take more risk. I had someone who's a master improv actor and there's a theme in improv, which is always say yes. So that's one of the things. Well, on that note, Jennifer Doleac, thank you very much.

Jennifer (01:27:30):

Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Patrick House: neuroscience, understanding consciousness | Podcast

Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer. His research focused on the neuroscience of free will and  in particular how mind-control parasites altered a rat’s behaviour.

We once had a long chat on the rainy streets of Glasgow. This chat – which I may not fully recall – involved speaking on what consciousness is, and touched on his work on mind-control bugs.

He’s written a collection of essays: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness on what we really don’t understand about consciousness.

“Consider different translations of a poem: Each has something relevant to say, but none can entirely capture the essence. House repeatedly returns to a case in which a woman was undergoing brain surgery to address epilepsy. At one point, the surgeons touched a part of the brain that made her laugh. Did this indicate that emotional responses are simply an aspect of the physical matter inside our skulls?” (Short Kirkus Review)

We had a long chat on this. I asked him:

About dreaming in colour 

Whether lucid dreaming is real?

What he meant by: "If I were asked to create, from scratch and under duress, a universal mechanism for passing consciousness from parent to child, I would probably come up with something a bit like grafting a plant." ?

Memory in childhood

What he finds the most terrifying result in neuroscience

What translating poetry has in common with understanding consciousness 

Whether animals have consciousness 

What he thinks of AI and why he no longer plays Go

Patrick asks me if I would write a play only for robots.

We end on Patrick’s advice:

“My suggestion is to have phenomenological date night with whoever you're interested in the world and ask what their dreams are really like and if it's in images or what inside of their head is really like and see if you get anything, see if you solve any conflict.”

It was lovely long form chat about consciousness and the mind.

Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods) or on video (above or on YouTube) and the transcript is below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Patrick House. In alphabetical order, Patrick is a neuroscientist and a writer. His recent book is Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, which is a fascinating look at what we don't understand and may never understand about consciousness. So, Patrick, welcome.

Patrick

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Ben (00:26):

We met in Glasgow a while ago. I recall a stimulating conversation on a windy night on a street corner, and I recall our chat with happiness and satisfaction although I do not remember the exact details. What do you think that it means that I recall our chat with happiness and it was a kind of experience, but I don't really remember any of it?

Patrick (00:51):

I love that. Just straight to meta right away, I love it. So one thing it means is-- I mean, there's this truism, right? There's this kind of aphorism that people often remember the way someone makes you feel, but not what they've said. So you're kind of asking like, "What is that about? Is there really physiology there? Is there a real true reason for that?" I think there's this funny thing where there's a different way in which memories get tagged. And so when I say tagged, I mean like-- A very simple way you might think about this would be like-- I don't know if you have a Mac, I think Windows allows you to do this too. You can kind of color code your folders.

You can add little like silly arbitrary colored labels to things; post-it notes are good at this. Anyone who's read a book, you see these academic books and they're full of these tiny, thin little-- especially if they're in law school or medical school they're studying these-- tiny, thin little color coded tabs. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say memory scientists and memory neuroscientists are desperately trying to figure out for at least the last a hundred years how the brain figures out how to color code, how to code its experiences between lived experiences. So let's just think about, for example, the kinds of categories of things that you might wish to remember. 

So for example, you might wish to remember something that happened to you. You might wish to remember a story that was told to you by a friend, but it was something that happened to that friend. You might wish to remember a piece of fiction you saw in a movie theater. You might wish to remember a piece of non-fiction, a documentary you saw in a movie theater. You might wish to remember a dream. You might wish to remember the difference between the dream and you recalling the dream. You might wish to remember when you tell a story about something that happened to you in your childhood and your sister or brother then says, "Actually, that happened to me." And then you have to update your memory to be like, "Oh, shoot, did I misremember that autobiographical moment and did it actually happen to someone else?"

Paul Bloom; he's a researcher, cognitive scientist at Yale. He told me the story once-- I was interviewing him-- about how he went back to his high school reunion and he told a story about jumping off of a cliff to one of his friends that he hadn't seen in 40 years. And the friend just kind of stood there silently shocked and responded, "That happened to me. That didn't happen to you." But he credited it to his friend being such a good storyteller that when you're listening to him telling the story about jumping off a cliff it's like you're there. So with respect to our moment in Glasgow, it's this funny thing where some part of your brain is remembering everything that has ever happened to you. When I say that-- so I actually say that in the book. And what I mean by that is even if you're anesthetized, your body is still experiencing things and there's a kind of physical memory that comes along with that. Every single day that you wake up and you're slightly better at a thing you did yesterday, that means that your brain has physically reconfigured itself somehow to be better at the thing.

That doesn't mean it necessarily can remember the thing better. It means that the motor skill, the tactile skill-- Let's say it's just like making bread at home. You're better at it as you do it, as you experience it more and more. And you might not be able to say exactly why. You cannot necessarily replay in your head every single time you try to make bread and every single time you succeeded or fail. But still you get better at it. So what that means is that the brain is really, truly paying attention to everything that has ever happened to you. It comes up with this coded and abstract version of learning and experience, but fundamentally, nothing is going to waste; no experience is going to waste. So I would say in actual direct answer to your question, it didn't really matter the exact content that you can't recall it word for word. I can't recall it either word for word.

But there's a lot going on in any different social interaction. And really what you were probably doing is thinking of some sort of social judgment of like, "Do I...?" We were meeting hundreds of people at this conference and it's like, "Do I or do I not wish to remember this moment as positive or negative and therefore just more likely to engage in conversation with that person in the future?” So it's still social learning in a way. You might not have invited me onto this to share this moment with you if you didn't remember like, "Gosh, I remember something interesting from that moment, but I don't remember what."

Ben (06:07):

Yeah, exactly.

Patrick (06:08):

And here we are.

Ben (06:09):

And here we are. Actually, and that recalls me that because I'm pretty sure my parents give me anecdotes of-- and all parents do this-- of when you were two or three or one or four or five. And I think that I create the memory based on their storytelling and not my actual recall of when I was two, three, four, or five because I actually think particularly at two, your recall is pretty fuzzy. But who knows? Maybe I had that recall and the stories that I hear later sharpen out that part of the brain or that part of recall. So I think that's really true.

Patrick (06:48):

Just to that, there's a lovely study, ironically-- I hope I remember it correctly. But there's a lovely study about memory in kids where I think like three to five, they had language, but they still were learning some rules. Three to six years old range where they had two sets go to the zoo with the parents. In one set they had instructed their parents to always talk and always describe, "Say that that's a leopard. Leopard comes from Africa, comes from here." So the parent was always talking. Then they had the other group, the parent was explicitly told to say nothing and the kid had to keep talking. The kid had to be like, "Leopard, yellow, spot," whatever language it was able to. The parents just sat there and let the kid tell the story.

Then they weeks later asked the kids in a laboratory room, "What was the zoo like? Tell me about the zoo. Remember you went to the zoo a couple weeks ago. Tell me how that was." And the kids where their parents told the story just kind of retold the parents' version of the story. They kind of remembered what was said and just retold it. There was a lot of similarity between their retelling and what the parents had said versus the kids that were allowed to do the speaking freeform. They told it from their point of view and it was from their perspective rather than from the parents. So there's a very interesting way in which storytelling... Storytelling is like the heartbeat of culture, but there's a sense in which it's impinging on your own experience. If someone else is trying to tell you the story of theirs as you're trying to experience something, there's a sense in which it overwrites your own abilities.

Ben (08:42)

Yeah. That's really fascinating. We're definitely going to come to storytelling and dreams. But riffing on our first question then, it does lead me to think, "What does it mean to be if I say that I am very sad or I am happy?" I just wonder how are we interpreting that and how do I think like, "Oh, I was happy about that" conversation. What does that really mean, do you think?

Patrick (09:10):

So it's this funny thing in science sometimes like... The single document that has set science the most behind I think is the thesaurus. A bunch of people thought I was going to say something different. It's the thesaurus, and the reason is because it tricks us into thinking things are opposites. It tricks us into thinking that sad is the opposite of happy, that hate is the opposite of love. But it's not. So there's this great study on an fMRI study where they were brain imaging people on hate; they wanted the emotion of hate. And the question is, "How do you get someone to feel hate wrapped in a sarcophagus fMRI tube? How do you induce hate in them?" And so they had to ask them before the study, "Who are some people that you hate?" Like 90% of the people would choose an ex-lover or a former spouse or a bully who turned on them or something where... What it turns out to be is actually someone they used to love. That's how to create some of the strongest kinds of hate that we have. So this idea that they're the opposite is not quite as clean and simple.

The idea that happy and sad are in opposition or in direct opposition is also not quite as simple. The thesaurus has ruined things. So for example-- I don't give too much credit to etymology. But the etymology for sad is sat, which is the same root as satisfied. So to be sad is to be satisfied, right? It's this interesting twist I think on the concept which is like you'd think of satisfaction as the ultimate form of joy. But actually for some kind of person, for someone who maybe likes stimulation or excitement or likes new things, to be satisfied-- Purgatory is supposed to be the worst form of hell. Or like in Dante's little setup, I think he at one point describes purgatory as the worst kind of punishment. It's not even the ninth level or whatever when you're frozen solid. So I think of the little people wandering around purgatory as immensely satisfied, but they have nothing to do and it's the worst.

Even in my personal research, my PhD research, we had to deal with it. It was all on this kind of, "How to make mice love cats or how to make mice attracted to cats?" It was this whole mind control parasite thing. We could go into it if you'd like. But basically, one of the things we had to truly confront was, "Is attraction to something the opposite of being afraid in a mouse?" So when we see a mouse run towards a cat, is it running towards the cat because it now has gained an attraction to the cat, it has now gained an affiliation, it has now gained a desire to go that way? Or if you eliminate fear, is there just a basic sense in which you explore? We can't ask the mouse and so we spent years on this philosophical question like, "What is the opposite of fear? If you eliminate fear, what do you get?" And so this idea that you have a pleasant memory of that time on the Scottish corner, it could just be that you felt comfortable or like there was no... It was a lovely weekend. We were meeting lots of people and maybe you just had a cessation of all unpleasant feelings and your memory is kind of warmingly remembering it.

Ben (13:21):

I can definitely see that. And this idea of being satisfied is the hell for a headiness. Then also the absence of things; negative art, liminal, all of that type of thing. You could see that the kind of trite aphorism of bravery not necessarily being the absence of fear. What are these things when you take away the negative, what do you get? But I do recall something about our conversation which you alluded to because you spoke to me on cats and more specifically about how parasites can change the behavior of host rats. And this was specifically on that is actually relatively rare in mammals. You see it in other things. That these rats suddenly who are generally fearful of cats, or let's say they seem to avoid cats or avoid cat odors now run toward cat odors because of that. I guess that's the kind of a root cause of where you explore a lot of these consciousness and things like that. So I don't know. What's most misunderstood about rats and cats and odor and mind control and how does that lead us into consciousness?

Patrick (14:28):

It's funny because I now imagine myself hearing... So back to the first question, I'm now reliving this thing that I lived and I was supposed to have experience but kind of through your eyes of it. And now I'm imagining myself as some sort of Pied Piper. But instead of with trails of rats behind me, I just have trails of stories about my PhD which was about rats behind me. I'm still singing the same kind of egoistic song though. So I did my PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University under Robert Sapolsky. The thing we were just kind of interested in is we had heard rumors-- Well, there were scientific papers published on this. But when I say rumors, what I mean very specifically is like as a scientist, you wait until something is confirmed at multiple labs across the world and there's lots and lots and lots of pieces of evidence all pointing at something like, "Oh, you know what? That might be a fact."

So there had been this preliminary evidence; that's the scientific definition of rumor. There's preliminary evidence and very strong evidence-- There's a wonderful scientist out of Oxford, John Webster; had discovered this fascinating phenomenon, which is that rats that were infected with this parasite seemed to be more likely to be in areas that had cats and cat urine and the smell of cats. So just straight up as a biologist even if you knew nothing else, you would find this interesting because trying to overwrite a very natural rodent fear. So rodents are extraordinarily afraid of cats. They have an innate fear of the smell of a cat, of any feline urine and any feline presence. They've been having this kind of predation prey war for hundreds of thousands; millions of years.

So a mouse or rat born generations removed from ever experiencing a cat will still be afraid of a cat and they'll run away. So just as a straight scientist, the thing you're interested in there is, "What is the mechanism by which they overwrite that fear behavior in the brain?" Because there are parasites in the brain. So that's an interesting clue that maybe it's doing something to the areas it kind of infects. The reason that it's interesting is because we humans, we do good work, but we don't really know what happens when someone is afraid. We don't really know what happens in the brain when someone is happy or sad or afraid or not afraid or love or hates someone. We have a bunch of metaphors and guesses and some good data, but we don't really know.

And this idea that this tiny single cell maybe knew more than we did. Maybe this tiny little parasite was able to go to the right spot and flip the right switch. That's fascinating because then we can learn more about fear and we can learn more about why a vast majority of anxiety and PTSD and various human ailments and conditions can be attributed to chronic fear. And if maybe this parasite is good at lessening the fear in rodents, maybe it can give us a clue into a trigger in a human. Then we can dial that down from 11 to like a six. So anyway, it also turned out that the parasite can only sexually reproduce in cats. It's lifecycle for some arbitrary evolutionary reason can only complete itself; sexually reproduce in a cat.

So the really compelling thing that John Webster kind of threw out into the world was, "Hey guys, hey everybody, look at this. What if this parasite is intentionally manipulating the mouse and the rat so that it's more likely to get eaten by a cat so that the parasite can finish its life cycle?" And now this is kind of a thing that people have heard of. HBO's Prestige Sunday night drama, The Last of Us is about mind control parasites. This has been a trope in science fiction for a very long time. Resident Evil; the video game and movie. The premise of that is some mind control gone awry. So my PhD work was in fact kind of giving it to mice and testing where it went in their brain and the first possible mechanistic explanation for how this parasite is manipulating this behavior.

It turned out to be a really cool little-- Again, I'm going to use 'rumor' also to describe my own work because as a scientist you want to be good like that; consistent. So there's a rumor. So there's preliminary evidence that-- Basically I found that if you take a male rat and expose it to a female rat you can trace what that pathway looks like in the brain. We're speaking a little bit after Valentine's Day. It's in the air, right? It's like a love circuit. Like it's literally if there's an estrous female rat (so that rat is in heat)-- we don't know that word in human land because for some reason, we are the only mammals that do not have seasonal mating. It's fascinating.

There's a few domesticated animals where it's been domesticated out of them. But if someone's trying to ask any question about what makes humans special, one of the weirdest things is that we do not have seasonal mating. We're the only mammal that does not. Anyway, there's this thing you do if you expose a male rat to a female rat and you can look in their brain, then you can expose a male rat to a cat and look in their brain. Both of these behaviors basically start with a smell and then they end with an extraordinarily rapid behavior. The preliminary evidence that we found is that when you look at an infected animal, infected rodent that has this parasite, it looks like the other pathway is also active. The one that's supposed to be for the female, the one that's supposed to be loved, the one that's supposed to be for sexual attraction appears to be more active in the infected animals. 

So the idea is maybe that's why we're seeing that behavior. The parasite gets into the brain, mucks with things, and then the rat or mouse smells a cat. But really it's tricked into thinking that maybe there's a female rat on the other side of the cat. That really got me started on questioning like, "What is...?" To me, this is the heart of free will. This is the heart of preferences. Why do you like the things that you say you like? Can you be tricked into liking things that you're not supposed to like? These little rats are being tricked into liking this cat which then eats it. 

I ended up from that kind of getting really interested in fraudulent emotions or fraudulent ways of thinking about things because I feel like the rodent has been tricked. It's attraction to the cat is a fraud. I kind of took that into a bunch of different things. I think the concept of elegance is a fraud. I think are the stories we tell ourselves about why we do things, it's mostly a fraud. So I wrote this book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness specifically because I found a moment that I think someone was behaving fraudulently and I wanted to focus on that moment in the same way I would focus on the moment of a mouse behaving fraudulently at one moment.

Ben (22:28):

I'm glad you say that because that is my reading of your work as well. I would express it as the parasite is tricking the rat somehow or tricking the mind of the rat or maybe tricking the brain of the rat. It seems to be that humans, our mind tricks ourselves. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that our brain tricks our mind or something like that over and over again. Although I think in some respects, I think fraudulent is right, although sometimes I think of it as more of a myth. So we create our own myths and that's why it's stories. Because yes, sometimes it is fraudulent, but sometimes it's kind of almost mythical. It's neutral. You could take it for ill or you could take it for bad because we've just created this myth. And some of these myths are very human. Like I've already said in some ways, law is a myth, money is a myth, religion is a myth in the sense that they are only powerful because other humans believe them to be powerful. They're like systematic mind tricks in that sense. Not to do them down because they're kind of our reality of that.

Is that a kind of incorrect interpretation of how some of your chapters are? They're all sort of different, but they all seem to be various versions of tricks. My overall conclusion was that you are arguing in some sense that we really don't understand how consciousness is, how it's come about or what it might be. And further, I think you made that argument and the analogy I guess is with the translation, the Elliot Weinberger piece, that the limits of language or the limits of our own seeing insider might mean that we never know, or that it's impossible or that at least the limits of language are there. So passing that comment out is, is it all about mind tricking ourselves and is that the right message to take about how we may not understand what consciousness is?

Patrick (24:25):

Yeah, I couldn't be too direct in the way that I kind of framed or introduced the book. But fundamentally, I'm like a mind control parasite guy. I think I say that in the book but I don't really say what I mean by that. What I do mean by that is that I ask one level deeper or I'm interested in one level deeper than what the brain purports to tell you is true or the brain purports to tell you is happening because there's a lot of evidence that the mind is tricking us. It might actually be in order to create consciousness, consciousness itself must be fraudulent, must be a simplified version of what's going on. You might not be able to ever separate them. So maybe this is a good time to actually tell the story a little bit because people might be like, "What the hell is... What does Elliot Weinberger have to do with anything? What kind of brain is lying to itself and what are we talking about here?"

So I actually got asked to give... In San Francisco there's a California Academy of Sciences. I'm glad I gave that whole preamble about cats and rats because it's relevant now. One year on Halloween they were like, "Hey, you studied this wild wacky Halloween thing, scary zombie thing. Would you give a talk on Halloween about monsters? That's the theme, monsters." And I was like, "Absolutely. Sure, I'll give that talk." And then I said, "But can I talk about whatever I want?" And they said yes. I made a switch to them. I did not talk about mind control parasites at all. I talked about the study that this paper, that my book is about because I find it the most terrifying paper in all of neuroscience. This whole zombie mind control stuff is nothing.

The most terrifying result in all of neuroscience is the paper, which is the seed root of the book that I wrote. So it's in the mid-nineties there's this teenage girl-- I call her Anna in the book. But it's like that initial thing. She's AK in the paper, but I give her a name and she has epilepsy. So she goes into the hospital-- this took place in Los Angeles. She went into the hospital and the neurosurgeon was like, "Okay, this is great, but we can't find the spot of your epilepsy. We don't know where it starts." It was bad enough that no drugs were working, nothing was working and she needed to fix it because it was getting very dangerous. So the surgeon said, "Look, the best thing we can do here is we drill holes in your skull and we implant electrodes. Those electrodes are kind of like seismic monitoring stations so they will be able to detect wherever the seizure happens because you have 19 of them or 12 or whatever. We'll be able to know instantly if you have a seizure while we are watching. We'll be able to know exactly where it started from and then we can go in and we can take out--" literally they would have to take out a piece of her brain. "Take out the tiniest piece of the brain possible, a few neurons maybe, probably a few hundred thousand. But the rounding error. And then the seizures will stop. If you take out the source, the seizures will stop."

So the thing is when you do this, you can implant the electrodes into the spots in the brain and then the person-- You can't tell them when to have a seizure. It's a random event-- or it's not random, but it's a hard to predict event. So you just kind of have to sit there waiting and it sometimes takes weeks. So they're laying in the hospital bed and they're awake and they're asleep and they're awake and they're asleep. There's no pain because the brain doesn't feel pain. So they're just sitting there talking. The surgeon personally told me that whenever this happens, he sees this as like neurosciences Large Hadron Collider. Every patient he gets where he's able to have them awake and conscious with these electrodes in their brain, and you're just waiting and listening. But you can say, "Hey, while we're here, do you mind if we do a few very easy experiments on you?” These electrodes can both listen and they can also stimulate.

So stimulate is just they shoot out electrical current and they can actually stimulate the part of the brain that they're in. So this girl had an electrode in the part of her brain called the supplementary motor area. It's just kind of a thing that induces a bunch of motion, movements. They pushed the little button-- I actually watched the video. He's pushing a button and kind of turning a dial like this is spinal tap. He turns it a little bit and she just kind of has this feeling of mirth or a little bit of smiley. He turns it up and up and up and up and eventually he turns it up to 11, figuratively. And she cannot stop laughing. She's almost convulsing. She can't speak. She's just laughing hysterically. Everyone in the room starts to laugh. You as you're watching the video, you can't help but laugh. She's not just laughing. It's like she's heard the funniest thing she's ever heard in her entire life. Her whole body is connected to like a braided hair of these electrodes coming out of her head. It's connected to multimillion dollar scary machines. She's just throwing herself around the bed and she can't stop laughing.

So the surgeons are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's too much. Hold on. Let's dial it back down." And they start to do an experiment on this where they actually don't tell her when they turn the dial on and they have her do various things. They have her read some books, they have her look at pictures, they tell her some stories, they have her tell stories, and then they'll secretly turn the dial on and off. It turns out that when she doesn't know that they've turned the dial on and she laughed, they then ask her, "Why did you laugh?" This is the question. I don't know with inflation what it is, but this is the 64,000 dollar question. "Why did she laugh?" This is like with the mouse and the rats. Like, "Why are you attracted to the cat? Why do you do anything you do? Why are you sad? Why are you happy? Why, why, why?” Asked her why, she laugh and she says, "Oh, because the picture of the horse is funny. Oh, because I'm holding a fork. Aren't forks funny? Because the doctor just told a joke. Oh, because you guys are just so funny standing there;" all these different reasons.

Her brain immediately came up with a reason. Her brain never once said, "I don't know." Even though it was electrically stimulated by the surgeon, her brain never once said, "Actually that doesn't make sense that I laughed. According to the deterministic laws of the universe, I should not have laughed there because nothing in front of me is funny." She laughed and then came up with the explanation after the fact. And each one was kind of plausible. The doctor did not tell a joke. They were not funny. The fork is not funny. But there were things in the room. They were reasonable answers. They weren't off the wall answers. So I find that that's the fraud; that's fraudulent. You can argue it, but fundamentally that's a fraudulent explanation. That's called confabulation in the psychological literature.

The part that I found so interesting-- So first there's that which is the mind control part. I don't care if it's a tiny parasite or an electrode. If someone is behaving in a way that is abnormal and they don't understand why and they lie about why or confabulate why, that's fascinating to me because that's the heart of will. But then there's something really, really interesting that happens. This is almost an extremely long answer to your very first question because alongside the laughter, she also said she felt joy and mirth. It wasn't just the laughter, it was the subjective emotion of joy came with it. So that means a few really deep things because it means that you can have a fraudulent laugh but maybe still get the benefits from it. Or the laughing itself is the subjective experience, is the emotion perhaps. We don't know. This is more raising questions than answering them. And so to me, that single study is everything. I agree with the surgeon; that is neuroscience’s Large Hadron Collider. That's our Hindi boson moment. That's our tiny little fleeting blip of anomaly that we can infer the beginning of the universe probably. We don't get many of those. In neuroscience, stuff is hard. We don't even know what anything is. We've never cured a single anything.

That's kind of why I got interested. And so the book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness is telling that moment, telling that story nineteen different ways as if you believed in a current modern theory. The reason Elliot Weinberger came up is because the book, the title-- and the concept I stole. That's fine, we can do that. I stole the idea from Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which is a book by Elliot Weinberger, edited by Elliot Weinberger, which are just nineteen different translations of a single four line poem; Deer Park by the Chinese poet, Wang Wei. I've loved that book. Someone gave it to me as an undergraduate and I just have loved that book. It's short, it' just 19 different poems. That's it; the translation. You just see so much beauty in the fact that none of the translations say the same thing. The Chinese character, the written characters, the written diagrams have different-- You can have sometimes the opposite meaning with the same one. And so different poets have taken that to be different things. I just think there's no better way to describe the difficulty of studying consciousness than that tiny book of poems, The Nineteen Ways of looking at Wang Wei because it's like you think you can understand your mind maybe as best you can, but you're going to have trouble understanding someone else's mind. It's a translation problem.

Ben (35:15):

Yeah. I have so much to say about that. That's utterly fascinating. So I read that book of poems also when I was 20 and it was very influential in me in the sense that multiple meanings-- you have an ideogram which means both blue and green or can mean both happy and sad at the same time. So impossible to actually translate in language, but yes. And then that leads me to three other on the fly observations or thoughts. So maybe you can comment on that. There is a practice within acting or theater work which I do which comes down to two phrases. One is inside out acting and outside in acting. So inside out is these actors who do these character things then they think, "Oh, how he's going to think about when he goes to buy a milk. And if I think like this, this is what you're going to do." So this characterization, there's a certain class of actor who does that from character and then they create these great characters from thinking about these questions.

Then there's a whole school of things which is outside in though, which is if I dress like this type of person I think should be. So if I dress like a clown, I become a clown. And actually there's a whole school of thought where you see that and you see it and from the outside, it is exactly like that. You can actually get to brilliant characterization from both sets of techniques to this end thing which the audience or person can see. I thought there was a lot of analogies on that when I was hearing what you say, even in the creative process. It also led me to remember-- I probably misremember ironies of one neuroscience experiment. Maybe I was told this kind of like, "It's the neuroscientist guide to dating," which I don't really advise or suggest. But the experiment was really around the fact that if you went out on a date and you did something which was kind of moderately arousing or exciting like going on a fairground ride or something like that on your date, you would do it and then you would say, "These feelings that I felt or whatever I was thinking was because of the fairground ride." And because it was very close, you interpreted in that and you didn't necessarily really transfer it or think about it in terms of the person you were with.

But if you somehow managed to set up the meeting so that you had done something or either party had done something moderately arousing or exciting, so they were kind of in a more aroused brain state or more aroused physiological state which they kind of measured, but it was long enough that you kind of forgot or your brain didn't causally say, "Oh, it's because of the fairground ride which happened a little while ago." What seems to happen is that when you go on the date, you attribute your better state to use your word fraudulently to the other person and you're much more likely to have a happy and successful date and go on something. But it wasn't necessarily anything to do with the person. I can't remember how they controlled it and stuff. In your language, this is only preliminary evidence of something.

But the story told seemed quite convincing that you were misrepresenting or fraudulently or just associating these kind of states or brain states. And when the brain couldn't immediately link it to the probably causal physiological state, it linked it to, "Well the only other thing around here is this person. So it must be that I really like this person and therefore that is love." Therefore I thought it was the neuroscientist guide to love. It kind of seems like these are all good examples of what you write about in the book and the impossibility maybe of understanding inside someone else's mind. And then the impossibility or the way that we think of the world is maybe a purposeful fraud.

Patrick (39:07):

Yeah, I was imagining if I wrote the sequel, Another Neuroscientist Guide to Love and I would just say like, "Well it's just a mind control fraud. This isn't real." So to that point though there's-- I actually forgot. I was trying to think of the term. I think it's like Alsace-Lorraine. Is that a food dish? Is that a culinary dish?

Ben (39:34):

I think that's close to it. Yeah.

Patrick (39:36):

There's some phenomenon in psychology. This is like one-on-one Wikipedia entry. I just don't remember. Where basically a psychologist went out for dinner with his wife-- I'm kind of enjoying intentionally misremembering some of these things because I don't know if it was his wife, I have no idea. I'm just adding for the flourish-- Where a psychologist goes out and he goes to dinner and then the opera, and then he got food poisoning from the dinner. I think it was Alsace-Lorraine; I don't know what that is. But if that was the dish and then he gets sick and he realizes, what's so interesting is exactly to the heart of your question. Like, "Do we kind of randomly or fleetingly associate a feeling with anything that happens around it?" Or does the brain kind of parcel out, can it carve out different experiences and be like, "Well, one is more likely to cause the other, one is more likely to be associated."

So his profound observation was that he got nauseous and food poisoning and he did not attribute it to the opera. He could still go to opera, but he could never have Alsace-Lorraine, the meal again. And what was so interesting is that it actually makes more sense that the thing closer to it would have-- The opera was after dinner. Why did the opera not create the conditioning? So now this is no longer a rumor, this is no longer preliminary evidence. A huge body of work has established that nausea and food-based stimuli are more likely to be linked. So what you eat as mammals, we're much more likely to link a bad feeling to what you eat than a bad feeling to a random experience; than a person made you feel. So that you're a little more accurate in your learning about the world. The next time you don't want to eat that food. Next time you don't want to eat the poisoned apple on the tree.

Whereas social observations and social interactions kind of fit in a different category. So you might, for example, if you feel deep dread in anxiety or feel like you got picked on or something, you would not associate that with the food. You would remember that and associate that with the person you interacted with outside the opera or something like that. So our brain is not just a dumb association machine. We do have these kind of fascinating built in rules which we don't have access to. That's the thing. What you said earlier about law and economics and various different things is just kind of myths we're telling ourselves. We don't have the source code to our behavior. We don't know what all the rules are. We don't have our constitution. We don't have our amendments. If you were to describe a modern human, modern homo sapiens in terms of legal documents, our constitution was written 3.5 billion years ago by a single cell and we've just been amending it. It's just a series of amendments. But we still have that same goddamn founding document. There's still some originalists out there that insist we have all the problems that that single cell had.

Ben (43:03):

Certainly the problems that the rat has.

Patrick (43:05):

Yeah. We've inherited all of the legacy issues. Look at the side effects of any-- Walk into a pharmacy or Apothecary-- I'm in Europe, so Apothecary, and you just look at the list of side effects. That's your data, right? That's your data. That biology is messy is all hell. Everything we have has just a litany of side effects. There's no good clean way of interacting with a biological system because it's like-- Imagine a Lego set. Imagine if in 1960 Lego stopped making new pieces and there were just 20 pieces and everything you had to build from then on was just based on those 20 original pieces. That's kind of what we are. We're just the amino acid version of that.

People get astounded. They're like, "Oh my god! Did you know the stomach has serotonin receptors? So that must mean it can think or your gut has a brain." It's like, "No it doesn't.” It's just like there's a few Lego pieces and your big toe has neurons. It doesn't mean it's goddamn sentient; it's just a big toe. Then cockroaches have octopamine which is a very close analog to dopamine. They use it to spring their legs when they're jumping. That doesn't mean that they are addicted to slot machines like we are when we need our dopamine. I find a lot of the analogy can get twisted and the similarity that a lot of biological systems have, people give a lot of meaning and weight to that; like our stomach has serotonin just because our brain also has serotonin. But it's not that the stomach is interesting, it's that the brain is more like the stomach than the stomach is like the brain.

Ben (45:05):

Yeah. And like you said, the brain doesn't have pain receptors. Does that mean we don't actually feel pain? Not so. It's all of that. 

Patrick (45:18):

Comedy's all about timing. It'll be less relevant if I come back with this later. I get so annoyed when people talk about the gut being a thinking thing. They say, "Never trust your gut to do anything except dissolve something quickly." That's precisely what you should. It all happens. Everything that you've ever done and paid attention to-- Like gut feeling if you get into the elevator and someone's creeping you out, that's happening with your cerebellum which is in the back bottom part of your brain, above your spinal cord. It contains like 50 billion neurons. It's one of the most evolutionarily beautiful conserved mammalian structures. It's metabolically expensive. It's hugely interesting. It has kept track of everything that has ever happened to you and it gives you like a slight little warning sensation in your gut. That doesn't mean your gut is doing the thinking, it's your cerebellum. Trust your cerebellum. But it's less catchy to say trust your cerebellum.

Ben (46:14):

There you go. And I can tell you I am laughing because I believe that to be true and also because it's got good comic timing because it has come off another rift that we were talking about. But deconstructing it like that doesn't make it seem actually that funny, and it is. We're now laughing together without any little stimulating things. I have one experiment that I was going to run by you before because I do want to also think about time and sleep dreams and actually also AI and open AI and maybe poetry, if we get to it. But there was one kind of on the neuroscience thing. I'm not sure they can repeat it now, maybe they can. So it was more with monkeys. Long story short, they got monkeys addicted to a very hard drug. I think it was maybe heroin or cocaine. And they learned that if you press pedal lever number one, you got the cocaine and so they got addicted and this is pretty much all they could do.

But then they were also taught separately that lever number two will shut off access to lever number one. So they learned both of these things and then they ran the experiment. What ended up happening is that the monkeys would press lever number one because they were addicted to wanting the cocaine, but they would also press lever number two because they wanted to shut it off. To me, this kind of embodied-- and I'm being really intrigued by this result. And people have got different things. I think it has been replicated to some extent and now there's a little bit more ethical concerns because it was a little bit of time ago. But that there are different systems or these different buckets in the brain which sort of, I guess know or act differently in terms of how they learn and they remember. They are at odds with one another. What do you think of this?

Patrick (48:14):

So I'm not familiar with the study. Back to that point where I said the source is the least scientific document in the world. Why do you say they're opposite?

Ben (48:28):

Well, I guess they're not. Opposite is probably the wrong word. As in one seems to try and cancel out the other in that sense that they're opposite.

Patrick (48:37):

But it's still possible they're maximizing for some sort of joy or they're...

Ben (48:42):

Quite completely. Oh yeah. Well, I think welfare is ...

Patrick (48:44):

In combination they could be, yeah.

Ben (48:47):

Yeah. If you think about it in terms of welfare and trying to maybe more objective, this is what you'd want to do. This is where the analogy is because if you can do so, there's obvious-- Okay, I'm going to make up the story. But the story would be they realize that the cocaine is not good for them and they have another mechanism over the long term of shutting that off. But they're also trained there's a very difficult impulse to fight against. So you can't help but have one impulse, one learned mechanism. You could call it almost associative which is so strongly learned that it's a habit which is really hard to break, but they have something more instrumental or longer term or something other where they realize if they can shut off that mechanism, it will be really good for them.

So there's all of this thing about orbitofrontal or prefrontal context and long-term thinking. This is the part which if you blow it out, you find it's really hard to make those longer term thinking decisions or maybe more complex attention type thinking even though we have these shorter term, more associative and these other things. I was just thinking. It's like, "Well, the brain has learnt certain things which seem to be the nausea and food things and it's got these other mechanisms to try and think about some of these other aspects." But you could definitely. The story I think we weave is that actually we are trying to maximize long-term welfare and these are two mechanisms you can more broadly see. I think that is one of the explanations for it.

Patrick (50:15):

Well, I mean maybe the monkey is trying to write a book. While I was writing this book my levers were different. So I have this thing. I have this time safe at home and when I want to write, I set it usually for 12 or 24 hours depending on how much I can tell I want to hit lever number one which is the internet, which is my phone and the internet. I'll take it and I'll take my phone and I'll take the power cord to my internet router and I'll put them in a time safe for 12 or 24 hours and I'll print out all the things I want to read first. It was one of the most effective tools I had for actually getting a book fully written.

I would love to hope and believe that I could intrinsically just say, "Don't use your phone, don't check your text, don't go on the internet." But I can't. I need a structural hurdle-- and not just a hurdle. I need a structural wall. My behavior, if I had like a CCTV camera around that time safe I would sometimes pace it. I would pace it in circles waiting and I would think like, "All right, well, how strong is it really? I could probably break it if I dropped it from a really high..." You know how Eagles break turtle shells. They pick them up really high and drop them on rock. I'm like, "I could probably break this safe."

Somewhat annoyingly, the information for how to break the safe is probably on the internet. I couldn't find it. But what am I doing there? Fundamentally, what am I doing there? I'm pushing both levers. I'm creating the external structure to deny myself but also allowing myself the pleasure. I don't get rid of my phone. I allow it to be in my life and control other parts of my life. So to the point that I made about the trickiness of describing things as what appear to be simple opposites, is like I'm doing it because I'm still maximizing for something else. So what appears to be anti-lever one behavior is really just I want to enjoy lever one more in the future.

So I have this thing where I have smoked tobacco and cigarettes. Kind of started in grad school and occasionally, I will still smoke a cigarette. But I don't want to. I gave myself 100 more in my life. I only have a hundred more and I keep track of each one. I don't know when it'll happen and I think I have like 79 left. Each one, I enjoy now. Instead of thinking about it like a terrible thing, I've given myself a finite amount. So I've created the lever two structure and I've been kind of like, "I just want to slowly taper off over the course of my life and then once I get to zero, I'll never have another one." So to me it's kind of-- It's like I'm a pianist hitting both of the levers at the same time.

I'm like, "I want everything. I want both things. How dare you try to take my addiction away from me and how dare you try to take my lack of addiction away from me?” I'm trying desperately to maintain control as if I'm on a crashing plane and the flight control is the voice in my ear saying, "You can have a hundred more. That'll be fine." So addiction is hard. Addiction is a complicated, weird thing. I'm maximizing by virtue of retaining an intrinsic reward and requiring the-- or kind of creating the outside structure which hinders that; that's lever two. This is my interpretation. But I'm allowing myself to not neither be controlled by it, nor lose the joy that I do associate with it.

Ben (54:39):

Yeah. That resonates a lot with me. I switch off the Wi-Fi when I try and do writing as well. And yeah, addiction is complicated and we have all of those mechanisms. There's also when you get addicted-- I think I'll pivot away from this. But you can get addicted and have it resonate with place. So this is the interesting things where if you take lots of morphine-- So if you're end of life in a hospice and you're having to escalate the dose and then you change rooms, you can actually lower your dose because you build up tolerance or actually you can also have it the other way or sensitivity and it can be linked to place and time and feeling and emotion and things like that. 

So maybe the last one directly on consciousness although I suspect everything is connected, is you wrote-- I'm going to quote your own words at you now. "If I were asked to create from scratch an under duress, a universal mechanism for passing consciousness from parent to child, I would probably come up with something a bit like grafting a plant." I realize your whole book is sort of thinking about this. But I've been dwelling on that sentence quite a lot. So I'd be interested in how you would say, "Why is it like grafting a plant?"

Patrick (56:08):

Yeah. Very intentionally the first word of the book is, 'If." I'm not kidding. I was like, "That's going to be the first word of the book." In part because I think a large part of what consciousness is, the way that we get to it is through counterfactual imagining of things. It's so funny because I like... So I write for New Yorker and various different popular science places; Pop Psych 101, Journalism 101. It's now considered a truism that you're not allowed to start an article with a thought experiment because nobody likes to be challenged in the beginning. I've been told this over and over and over. Part of it was like my rebellious response to that to be like, "Oh yeah, here's your thought experiment." But it's also because the human mind is just a nested series of Russian thought experiments. It's a bunch of counterfactual if statements.

But it's mostly the fact that-- Neuroscientists as a field, we ask extremely difficult questions about certain kinds of learning and how information gets maximization of entropy within the brain, how information travels from one region to another and all these fancy questions. But some of the basic questions are still shockingly profoundly unanswered. And not because the answer is interesting, but literally the very fact that it could be a question is interesting. So for example, every night we shut off the hell is that, and then a tiny, smaller, forgetful version of us which doesn't really have a body and can kind of float and has very strange thoughts-- Or do they have thoughts? Does your dream self have an inner monologue? I'm not even sure.

Then we just kind of wake up again the next day. It's extraordinarily strange because it's a control condition for consciousness. What it means is that in order to feel like it is like to be something that is conscious, you don't need to be behaving at all. You can be completely shut down and some weird amalgamation of some half or part of your brain can conjure its own version which has a full enrich experience with your friends in it. Where the hell do they come? Your friends are just in it and they have voices that are not your voice? Are you kidding me? We can reproduce these things just through activity alone. So that is still a mystery to me.

Number two, we can just make new ones? We can just without knowing how or why, two people can get together and 10 months later a new one is made? This is profoundly strange. This is bizarre in a way that I feel like we just take for granted. I was thinking, “I'm 39. My more stable friends have started to have babies.” It's just every single time completely and utterly mysterious and profound to me that consciousness kind of-- if you think about consciousness as the thing-- So I sometimes think that consciousness itself is potentially subject to natural selection and evolution. Not just the being that we are, the body that we are, but actually the mind itself might be changed through the process of generational transfer which means that it needs a mechanism by which it goes from one generation to the other.

I don't know if you recognize the cadence of my tone here, but this is also how I talk about cats. I say the parasite has to get from one cat to another cat and it uses the mouse as an intermediate host. So the consciousness version of that is consciousness has to get from one mind to another mind, and it uses a speck and a single cell to get from one host to the next host. How does it go through a single cell? I don't get it. I don't even remotely get it. How do we make a new one? Because it means that it just grows from its own rules. For me, the only thing that makes sense would be you have consciousness in one creature. 

And then when I say it's a bit like grafting a plant, what I mean by that opening sentence is like-- Well, obviously you go in and you scoop out a piece and you go and you put it in your backyard and you grow it. But you need that original seed. How else could you do it without a seed? But consciousness doesn't have a fucking seed. Excuse my... I don't know where it comes from; not French. Consciousness doesn't have a seed. It just can regrow? I'm just continually profoundly bothered by that.

Ben (01:01:30):

I never heard that. That's really fascinating that actually the mind or consciousness is selective. And having heard that for the first time, I was speaking to someone who thinks about what they call cognitive economics and this why we dream, why we have fantasies. His idea is that the projection of the future self is a very valuable incentive. That's why we can sit and have a daydream and find that really pleasurable. Well, what happened? Nothing happened. It was all in all in our mind. Why did that come about? But combining that thought or that idea with the idea that whatever that is coming about consciousness, then maybe there's also trying to self-select or evolution to make sure it keeps going on which does raise the question, "How on earth did it come about in the first place?" So that's question or thought number one. Thought number two, perhaps a tiny bit easier but completely unknowable is, "Why then do you think we dream at all?"

So my son says he lucid dreams and I think I believe him. But who knows? Who knows what goes on in other people's dreams? So whatever is lucid dreaming. I have all of these questions about, "Do you smell in dream? Do you have colors in dream? Do you think in images and words? Do you hear music?” All of which is like all higgledy piggledy depending on who you ask and where you ask them, which is infinitely fascinating. But yeah, so maybe why do you think?

Patrick (01:03:03):

Even that simple sentence like, "Oh, well, I have these questions. Do you smell in dreams? Are they in color?" People have different answers. Why is it the case that there isn't just one kind of human brain? Why is everybody goddamn different? Why do some people dream in color and some people don't? Why do some people have mental images on the inside of their head and some people don't? There's no explanation, there's no theory of consciousness out there that even remotely begins to address the variation. So I think about it when I say consciousness itself might have variation through natural selection. What did Darwin do? Darwin just went around and looked at some finch beaks-- I'm simplifying things-- Went around and looked at some finch beaks and was like, "Oh, variation. This is interesting." And there was a theory of geology at the time which allowed to play tectonics. Then through observation of difference alone, a theory popped out.

We don't even have anything close to a catalog of human conscious variation, but in speaking to people, it seems to be extraordinarily variant. And just something as simple as dreaming, some people don't dream in color. Ask them, just ask your partner. Some people have never had that kind of phenomenological date with their partner where they ask them like, "What is it like on the inside of your head?" You might find that the person you've been sleeping next to for the last 50 years doesn't dream in color and every time you've talked about things, you are completely and utterly talking past each other.

So it's funny you say your son has spoken about lucid dreaming, but then you kind of believe him. I didn't believe in lucid dreaming for a very long time in the same way, I don't really understand hypnosis. I don't really believe that. How's that possible? I just kind of didn't. I thought it was one of those things that people were maybe confabulating or in their storytelling, they're getting it interestingly wrong or. It could be easily be they're having a normal dream, but when they remember it, it feels like they have agency; all kinds of things. The brain is a fraudulent liar; you can't always trust it.

But there was an absolutely insane study recently which completely and utterly changed my mind and I now believe it to be a thing. I now believe it to be true. The study was a sleep lab out of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Giulio Tononi. He's a sleep researcher and a brilliant consciousness scholar. But he had this study where-- So during REM sleep (stage of sleep where the eyes are moving around, rapid eye movement), you can actually shine an infrared light and look through the eyelid and see the eyes moving. You can do this and it kind of seems to track with what people report from their dreams. So for example, you can wake someone up really quickly if their eyes are looking back and forth really rapidly. They wake them up-- this is in the case reports, this is no literature. And then you say, "What was happening? Right now what was just happening?" They'll be like, "Oh, I was at a tennis match watching a tennis match." The eyes track with the kind of behavior of the dream.

The interesting question would be, "Okay, all these jokesters which say they can lucid dream, let's catch them in their lie. Let's tell them in this world, in the real world. Let's say, "All right, when you lucid dream, I want you to do this for me. Move your eyes up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, and then I'll know you're lucid dreaming. And then do me a favor. Count to 10. Just count to 10 in your lucid dream, and then do it again. Up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right." It's kind of like a konami code. I don't know if you remember this from like Nintendo; a little code you enter. And people could do it in their lucid dream. When they stated they could lucid dream, they did it. And then they counted to 10. There was some variation. It wasn't perfectly 10, but we're not perfect. If I asked you to count to 10 right now, you'd be off a little bit. It's absolutely insane. They were able to communicate up to the sleep researchers in the sky using just their eye movements. So sometimes when I'm having a bad day or something, I'll be like, "I'll just move my eyes up down, up, down, left, front, left, right just in case there's another level" because maybe there's another level.

Ben (01:07:35):

It's a secret code. I haven't quite got the combination right. But if I get it right, is a good day, it's going to come.

Patrick (01:07:40):

Yeah. Well, I just want the sleep researchers in the other one sky to know that I'm paying attention. To me that's profound evidence that it's real.

Ben (01:07:55):

I suspect it's sort of real. It wouldn't be a hundred percent, but like you say, maybe don't trust the brain. It seems to be never trust the brain in any event. Because I do sometimes, and a lot of people I've asked to report it, have that falling through the air sensation and then waking up thing, and then you wake up when your hot things and you say, "Oh my, I was falling." And then you wake up because it was that. It's often on the verge of when you go to sleep you have this. From time to time-- maybe it's no more than two or three times a year or once a year or something it happens and it feels really real. And I feel that that falling and it thinks, and it seems to me that's not too far away from a lucid dream although a little bit different.

Maybe think about sleep and dreaming and whether it's conserved and that thing on consciousness. Do you think dolphins have consciousness and what is going on when dolphins sleep then? I mean, it seems most mammals do some form of sleeping; at least what it seems to be when you do electrical brain and maybe half the brain is only sleeping and maybe only sleeping for 15 seconds, blah, blah, blah. So it's slightly disputed whether all mammals sleep, but a big bunch of them do. What's going on when they sleep? Are they dreaming? Do they have consciousness?

Patrick (01:09:09):

I think they obviously have consciousness. I think they definitely do. I think the way to know-- and this is extremely scientific, is you take a pair of snorkel goggles and you go down to Belize and you jump off a boat, and then the dolphins will just... Like, it's just obvious. That's the best I have. They're just looking at you and they're smart as hell and they know exactly what's happening.

Ben (01:09:39):

I had the same looking into the eyes of an orangutan. It wasn't dolphins.

Patrick (01:09:46):

Yeah, it's just kind of obvious. So I'm here in Vienna, Austria right now, and I got invited to witness or to go to-- They have a Kea cognition lab. So Kea is a New Zealand bird which just got the honorific of the world's smartest bird. I think it stole it from a crow or something; the New Caledonian crow. Anyway, stole it. I walked into the pen. They have a cage out of the Austrian, gorgeous, and there's like 30 of them. I got the same feeling I did when I was underwater playing with dolphins. There was a sublime intelligence in their movements, in their mannerisms. The human brain is really good at theory of mind. We jump into other people's minds. Adult imagination is-- People say kids are creative you should embrace your inner childhood. Kids are idiots. They're not creative. They're just randomly seeing imaginary friends and things.

We use our imagination as adults like experts to infer at a dinner party what everyone is thinking and what they might want. That is our imagination. That is way better than anything kids can do. And we use it to infer other minds. I say that only to say we're tuned to this. It can go wrong when everyone thinks these language robots are sentient, which they're not, obviously; that's a mistake. But I have never felt more uncanny intelligence than when surrounded by a pod of dolphins in the water or in this bird lab here in Austria last week. It felt like I was in a room of toddlers. They were so obviously curious and smart and intelligent, it was wild. I had never felt that feeling before.

Ben (01:11:53):

Definitively consciousness. Therefore I think if we believe that, I'm going to say I think they dream and I think they dream in their sleep. Whatever dreams are.

Patrick (01:12:06):

Well, I think the burden of proof. So there's a funny thing also in science where sometimes... You know in like law, you have evidentiary standards and then once someone's convicted, there's a burden to undo or there's all kinds of burdens of proof that you kind of layer top each other. For some reason, the burden of proof seems to have fallen on people to argue that animals are conscious. I wish to flip that burden of proof and say like, "No, actually. You have to prove to me they're not because there's so much reason to believe that they are. I can almost just sit back and wait for someone to prove to me they're not. I don't know how to wrap my mind around it.

Ben (01:12:51):

I think that's real. Thinking about you on Theory of Mind, I was just observing that maybe adults do it because they're really just trying to get really good at flirting. So that's why we have to pass...

Patrick (01:13:02):

To pass their consciousness from one host to another through a single cell.

Ben (01:13:04):

Yeah, exactly. So that's why we really, really need to know that well. And then thinking about animals and... It just seemed they probably do consciousness and dreaming. And therefore maybe because you have worked-- I think you were a contractor with open AI writing some stuff for them while they were blind and maybe around the time of GPT-2 two and now we're at three, three and a half and we're going to go 4, 5, 6. I recently heard an argument from I think Tyler Cowen, but I have heard it from other people that essentially these AI bots or language things-- So a lot of people are fearing this kind of rogue AI from a rogue consciousness. And the argument kind of goes if we don't really know where consciousness has come from and stuff.

But if you look at all of its evolutionary things, and we have it in animals and stuff, it just seems to be in a completely world removed. So at least how we are thinking of consciousness is not going to occur through AI or language bots. There might be other things that they're very clever at doing and tasks and stuff that. But at least on the question of consciousness and therefore potentially on the question of rogue AI or some people call it AI Alignment or the singularity and the science fiction or whatever it is, is just really, really farfetched. There might be other things you're worried about like nuclear weapons can be really dangerous just in the hands of humans. You don't need to give it into the hands of rogue bots which might be that.

But with all of our discussion and things like that, it seems to me that maybe-- I'm not very certain, but it does seem to me that consciousness won't come from that sort of software-led thing. Or is that just not right. What's your experience of seeing an inside glimpse into language bots, how they are, how they develop and your experience with open AI?

Patrick (01:15:01):

Is it possible that on the street corner in Glasgow I was telling a story about how I haven't played a game of go since AlphaGo because it sapped all the joy out of the experience? I'm getting Deja Vu.

Ben (01:15:18):

I think maybe. I'm getting a little bit of this. I definitely feel we talked about games and chess and how chess was bounded and is all go and Backgammon and the differences between Pico and all of that. So I think we did. We must have talked about getting that because this is it. I hadn't remembered that until now and now we have resurrected it from our consciousness.

Patrick (01:15:39):

Yeah, because I played Go. So the board game Go, I had been playing that almost every day in my adult life on average of once per day. And when DeepMind made AlphaGo and they beat it, there was a really interesting response. I had a really interesting response which is like, I just stopped playing. I didn't care anymore. They had sapped away one of my great and favorite hobbies. The funny thing is like, "Well, why would I stop?" It was because knowing that a robot could do it in a non-conscious way, in a non-intelligent way, ruined the game for me. It ruined the beauty of it. It ruined what I had held to be like an aesthetic.

I used to think that there was a part of Go that required aesthetic understanding of the pieces and the moves and the positions in the same way that a ballet dancer... To me, it was as much of an affront as like... To enjoy ballet, to enjoy opera, to enjoy art, I feel like you have to have an aesthetic sense. You have to be able to listen and watch and things like that. I thought that was true for Go also, I thought you had to be good at it. I thought you had to have an aesthetic sense. And then when they were like, "No, we can be the best professional in the world," something got ruined. And so my great fear is not AGI taking all our jobs or anything. My great fear is AI ruining all of our hobbies. Now that ChatGPT can write well-- I'm a writer now. I've moved out of my life from neuroscientists to-- I'm still thinking about consciousness, but more as a philosopher. And if ChatGPT can write philosophy and consciousness and fiction, now I'm like, "Goddamn it, get out of my hobbies. What am I going to do? What do I have left?" I have nothing left.

Ben (01:17:52):

I think you're going to be okay for two reasons. We have no evidence behind them whatsoever. So the first reason is I felt similarly the first time I picked up a digital camera, I had done a lot of photography in 1919; the late 1990s. I spent hundreds of hours in the dark room, analog, all of that. The first time I picked up a digital camera, I don't think I took another image for months. Maybe even I suspect years. And I've never used the camera thing on my phone for quite some time; for unbelievably a long amount of time where people's like, "Why did I dislike this digital thing?" It's not this analog thing I grew up with. But over time I have come to appreciate a different facet of it.

And within creative arts, my explanation for this is number two. So now I do take some image, although actually it's not the same as my work in the nineties. I think of myself much more of a theater writer and things like that than a visual artist. But I think there is a share of art or writing, which is the share that you have in the reader or the person who's seeing your work. You really definitely see this in theater arts because most theater arts is not complete unless you have an audience. There's sort of some exceptions but without an audience, you can't actually make theater because the audience completes it for you. Maybe this is like one of those weird koans or stuff. But if you perform in front of nothing that is not actually mostly considered theater, right? I don't know what you did. You were in a rehearsal, you did something else. It's only complete when you have an audience.

And you can then see, "Oh, that's true." In some ways a piece of art is only complete when you have a viewer. Writing is only complete when you have a reader. And you look at art for instance, cave art from thousands of years ago where going back to consciousness of things, we must have really no idea. We cannot substantiate anything at all what those people and cultures were doing when they were making what we now consider art. Maybe they didn't even consider it art or whatever it is. But we can look at those and we can create all of these myths-- maybe they're tricks-- around what it means to us today, what it might have meant for them then. All of the pleasure from photography, from Go, from whatever it is, we can recreate it if we trick our minds-- Maybe don't trick our minds because all our minds tricks to it.

So I think where you have generative art, generative writing and the like, there will be some stuff which at a surface level will meet the surface needs of what we want creatively or whatever it means to be human and consciousness. But this element which is the receiver's end are part of consciousness or brain which is that will is inherent in this part of creativity. Now, we can change our minds about it. So if Go no longer has joy for you, you have pricked your mind both ways into thinking that. But actually it's on your receiving end and so you can trick your mind differently in the same way that we can look at this art. Artists play with this going back to Duchamp's urinal toilet and saying, "Okay, we'll put it, and then this is art." So what it is, is a function of where we are. But that is why at least in in this aspect of it, I am maybe not as fearful as AI as some of my other creative friends. And they flip flop because of the power of the receiving angle. So that's my information.

Patrick (01:21:46):

Let's focus on the theater side for a small moment. I once interviewed a woman who was making robotic ballet dancers. So I was researching the concept of elegance for another project and there was something about ballet. When people say things are elegant they often use as their canonical example, ballet dancers. So I found it really interesting to ask, "If someone's making robotic ballet dancers, could they be elegant?" And the woman's answer was, "Well, it's trivially easy to make a robot who can stand on point for as long as you want it to. You just design it to stand on point." When the Bolshoi opening and happens and someone stands on point for some amount of time and they get 23 curtain calls and a standing ovation, why do we give it to the person and not the robot in that condition? Why would people not necessarily applaud to the robots version of performance but they would to the human? And I feel there's something about the pain that is required. The known pain outside of the constraint of the human body and the assumed amount of practice it takes. They knew it took decades. They knew this person has been devoting their entire life to doing this thing, which is totally unnatural, which is outside the normal bounds of human mobility.

But if you make the robot do it and it's designed to do it, it's designed to mimic human aesthetic peak. It's designed to mimic human peak performance. But in an aesthetic way and it's trivial easy, you're not going to applaud it. So what I was thinking about is the kind of idea of a robotic actor. So I've been kind of nominally on book tour and in one, I give a lecture and an actress was in the audience at one of the New York events. She came up to me and it was about laughter. So I was telling the story of the book about how to laugh and how this is a fraudulent laugh. And she's like, "You know what's really funny? As an actor I'm professionally trained to laugh; to fake laughing, to laugh on command, on cue."

Her thought, which I had found extraordinarily beautiful was that-- So she had two points. One, that maybe the robot the best they will ever do. Let's say that they can become ballet dancer, let's say that they can show emotion, let's say that they can speak as if they have interiority and consciousness and everything. Fundamentally all they will ever be doing is acting. Their ceiling is acting because they're still always imitating, they're still always not feeling the thing. It's a performance rather than the thing in and of itself. I don't really know what to make of that. I still ponder it every single day. I'm trying to think about it. I found it really beautiful.

But the other thing she said was that when she remembers an acting laugh-- So she goes back in her memory, the theme of this conversation. And then she remembers joy even though it was a fake laugh, even though it was an acting laugh. Maybe to be good at acting is too be able to fake it so severely that in your memory you can't tell the difference between a real one and a made up one or a professionally done one. So how does that work? You're a theatre writer, how does that work with respect to emotions and your memory of emotions on the stage versus in real life? Do people remember emotions differently? Would you perform a play for only robots? Would you write a play if only robots were in the audience?

Ben (01:25:53):

Okay, so several observations on that. So one on the laugh and emotion. So some actors will use sad thoughts from their life and also physical manifestations of how we often feel sad. So the breathing and things to trigger crying on command; the same for laughter. So they're drawing on lived experience to recreate another experience and that's a very common technique. So we talk about outside in and insight out. It does live as a sort of truth in them. So I do think it's not the actual experience of it as on their time, but it's like a form of dream or where it is, it's a recreation of that, which leads me into the second observation about the power of human performance, particularly live performance.

There's a phrase that some of us use within theater arts called shared experience. This is the concept that when humans can feel-- call it theory of mind or whatever it is-- that we can think in someone else's shoes or go through someone else's experience, or even when you're with other audience that you might be going through the same experience as the human next to you, that becomes extraordinarily powerful within our minds. We fool ourselves to think, or maybe we do that in the most powerful experiences, we are actually all in that moment sharing exactly the same thing or maybe almost exactly the same thing, or we're going through a similar emotion or we've culturally relearn to that. So when the ballet dancer makes that leap, there is a combined intake of breath, or you also see it in a combined silence.

How is it a thousand people are silence in this moment waiting for that cut to drop or waiting for that character, that actor to say something? It's because we are got a combined experience. Maybe that's where group hysteria comes from. Maybe that's where crowd and mob behavior also comes from and it's an emergent behavior of that. But I think you can see-- I expect this has been studied. I've not read the studies on it. But that I think is certainly true. My then personal observation is one of the reasons why live performance or theater can both reach heights more powerful than cinema, but tends to also be more painful than cinema is because you have that shared experience with live actors in front of you as well as a live audience. And then on top of that, you know there is this possibility that something will go wrong, that it's valuable, that it's human. That something will happen, it'll be off script or it'll be a moment or there's something different about this, which of course the robot never has. And so you lose that aspect of it.

But it's also why the shared experience part-- and I'm sure you've done it and some of us have done it. When you sit through for whatever reason, a performance, maybe it's a standup act; it is just not funny for whatever reason, or the performance is just painful because it's not a good story or it's a story you heard a thousand times. The pain of seeing a bad performance is so painful and that's why people actually put off a theater. You can ask them why. It's like, "Oh, I went to this bad piece again and I can never do that again." Because that shared experience-- the actor knows it's bad, you know it's bad, everyone knows it's bad. Why are we sitting here having this shared experience about this? Oh no, we can never do it again which is a little bit more diffuse in cinema. So although you can do bad tv, it's not as painful.

Bad theater is like one of the most painful experiences ever. But it's the same for the shared experience on the way up. And that is actually why also robots I think are never going to be as satisfying, even all the technicality. And then the other last aspect is, is because of the embodied meaning of that. So the embodied meaning of that particular passage or that particular jump or that particular music, we have given it a cumulative humanity reason. And in that shared moment with a shared culture or a background, we can probably all be ascribing a similar meaning at that point in time. And robots do not come with that or as least of yet and I don't think they will with that accumulated meaning of it.

So going back to the cave art, there is an accumulated meaning on that because we sense a shared humanity which we do not at least as yet share with robots. We might get there if we have some sort of hybrid AI and we start to evolve ourselves. So we have maybe more robotic components, we might feel that. But I don't think it is of the moment. So shared experience, accumulated embodied measurement and knowledge and of that. So I would probably never write for a robotic audience. There might be something kind of meta about it. So you might write it because other humans would be interested in what it is that we would observe when actors observe looking at the robots. But there's actually the human element, not really the robot element.

Patrick (01:31:07):

Even if they laugh at the right times and they nodded at the right times and they looked at their phone at the right time when they were bored.

Ben (01:31:14):

Because there would be no mistakes. It's the wrong way around. You might make a mistake, but the audience is not ever going to make a mistake. I mean, never say no. If you want to give me a million dollars I'll do it for you. I've got other incentives.

Patrick (01:31:30):

That was fascinating what you just said. So the audience is capable of making mistakes also in their perception of...? So that's part of the shared humanity or the shared risk?

Ben (01:31:43):

Yeah. So that's the joke because it's like, "Oh my god, the audience laughed in the wrong place." And then you realize, "Well actually no, it isn't in the wrong place. Maybe it's the right place. Oh my god, I haven't interpreted my own piece of writing correctly because I thought this bit was really funny and nobody laughs and I thought this bit was really rubbish and I was going to cut it. But it actually is really brilliant." And so that then has this whole line of things that the writer doesn't necessarily know the beauty of their own piece, who owns that piece and stuff. And so why is it that you write the line and you thought everyone is going to find this so funny and no one did? And then, "This is really not a good line." And then they do. So obviously who is correct? The audience is not wrong in that sense because the audience is having this experience. Although you then get some interesting conflicts. Conflicts is too strong a word. Well, you can sometimes see that some part of the audience is thinking one thing, one part of the audience is thinking another thing. So this is where some people laugh and some people don't.

So you don't always have that shared experience. It's a mixed shared experience which is kind of interesting as well. And audience members pick that up. So we know it's like, "Oh, you laughed at that. I know why you thought that was funny, but really that isn't funny and that's why I'm not laughing." You can see that dynamic going round. I mean, it's much more obvious when you have these cues like laughter or silence and stuff. And so you see this is why the standup comic process is often you do small gigs and you test out your material because you don't actually really know what's going to be funny or what's going to work until you find it in a live audience and then so you play with that so it becomes a working piece of R&D. Because the audience is giving you this feedback of like, "Well, I thought that joke was really funny, but only two people laugh so obviously not. Either they're wrong or I'm wrong."

Patrick (01:33:24):

I would expect a professional comedian-- It's true. They do workshop; the workshop with the material. But then I'm trying to think of writers. So I would expect a professional comedian to have an internal module or a self which was a listener of comedy. I would expect a music composer to have an internal ability to imagine what it would be like to listen to this. I would expect a writer to have an inner reader; to be able to listen or read or find funny their own work. And what you're kind of saying is no matter how good you are at coming up with an internal version of it, a fake listener, a fake reader, a fake audience member, it's still not good enough.

Ben (01:34:14):

Correct.

Patrick (01:34:15):

It's still not the same thing as having actual people. There's a limit to what you can imagine.

Ben (01:34:19):

Yeah. That would be my assertion and I really believe that to be true. Now, the better you are or the more practiced you are, you can get that maybe 90% there on your first go say. But even there, what I think you normally do is you draft and redraft. So you drafted it and redraft it in your imaginary audience or whatever you've done. You've done it so many times and you're doing it so quickly you're just getting up the curb. But even then, I think all of the professional creators will tell you, you test it in front of an audience and what you expect is not necessarily how it goes. And this is it. Even authors think about it as their own work. They go, "You know what? I think book number three is really by far my best work. But no one really thinks that. They think it's book number five. What do they know? Book number five, I dashed it off in an hour and it's just not there." You see that. So this is the audience share and the reader share, and it's to do with culture and time and place and comedy which might work in one city, might also work in another city. Really good comedians can bend to that as well. Really good writers can do that and all of that. But that is it. There are some of it I think it's a cousin thinking to what is consciousness or what is shared consciousness? "Are there emergent properties of the crowd?" I think there are some evidence of that. Or is it just all social learning? Some of that is social learning, but who's doing the social learning while it seems to be our brains? So I do think there is all on some of that.

Patrick (01:35:54):

I just came up with a new fear. Now I have my greatest fear for the encroachment of the robot. I've been writing popular non-fiction for 15 years and I've worked with a ton of editors. And I've also in science, you work with editors. I feel like I have an internal-- I have to what you said to your point gained an ability through all this exposure. I have a little internal way of reading my own work. After I type it, I can then say, "Okay, what would the editor do here?" And then I have through experience a kind of ability to see the page from the editor's point of view and be like, "All right, David, take this paragraph and put it at the front." And this has made me a better writer easily." I've incorporated the skillsets of-- It's kind of like in basketball you steal some moves from people around you and now you've gained a larger skillset of moves you can do. They used it against you and then you take it and now you can use it.

Now here's my fear. Robot editors, if you work with them for long enough-- Let's say they get good. Let's say that they get as good at writing as they're go where you still write and you still try to go along with them, but you use them as a tool. People use chess robots to train, people use go robots to train now because they're better and you learn from them and you learn new techniques and you learn new ways of approaching it. Now, let's take that and put it into writing. Imagine a robotic editor who every time I write something, the robot editor would be like, "Well, I think you should-- This is a nice beat. Let's stretch it out a bit and put..." They do story editing. And then I slowly start to use this over the course of a decade. And then even worse than Battlestar Galactica, even worse than some sort of hybrid machine parts. I now every time I write think, "What would the robot editor think?" And then that just becomes assimilated into the kind of writer that I am and you cannot remove it. It just becomes part of me to mentally imagine what would the robot do here? And then it's over. Then humanity's just over. That's my new fear

Ben (01:38:22):

I think there's a kernel of truth to that. And I think the AI could well end up training the human to some extent with that. My distant analogy to that is dogs train humans pretty well. We think humans train dogs, but you could think actually the dog has been really successful in training the human. It sits and we give it treats because it does these things. There's even a more distant thing. If you think about domesticated wheat and you think of it from the wheat's point of view, it's far more successful depending on what you think it. Does wheat even have a consciousness? Probably. I don't think so. But wheat domesticated humans, humans did not domesticate wheat and now wheat is the predominant plant wherever. So I do think there is this interaction with everything that we interact. We train it, it does train us. So I think that is true.

But I think this fear of the taking over, I don't think necessarily that is necessarily true. There's also perhaps your aim. Maybe if you're going to rewrite the thing which is the New York Times opinion piece or that long form bit in the Atlantic, which is the kind of thing that this Atlantic audience wants to read, there might be a touch of that where the AI has figured out that sort of audience or things for that. For something that's just a little bit more rote and stuff which what we think of as a bit of creative perhaps comes a touch more rote. But there actually is still a huge bunch of things where I don't think it will be able to do that. Again, I've already said because of the reader's half and the audience's half.

And then there might be things which are just really quirky. So I think one of the greatest American poets is a poet called Charles Reznikoff. One of his greatest pieces of work; he has two really big pieces. One is called testimony which is based on court testimonies based on Holocaust and the other on trials in the 1800s often to do with slavery. He makes poems out of those. I think probably only a few thousand people have ever read his work and will probably maybe ever read his work. But it's extremely powerful in a second order effects on what it is. And although this is a more personal view, there is a lot of other people who think he is probably one of the greatest American poets of the last hundred years. And I think that power of writing where it doesn't necessarily have to appeal to 5 billion people like K-Pop might do, will also still be really powerful. But it might not be the metric of either money or how many people read you, but that's always been the case within art and a different strand of that. Okay. So maybe last couple of questions would be current projects that you're working on. I get the impression that sleep and dreaming is important.

Patrick (01:41:13):

Yeah. I'm in Vienna to kind of try to come up with a next book or think a little bit more about sleep and dreams. Again, what I said a bit earlier, I get mystified very easily I guess maybe. I think the appropriate response to learning about the human brain is awe and nothing else. So I generally find myself with these moments of awe. I'm trying to figure out what the purpose of dreaming is. So that's kind of why I came to Vienna. Like, "Why do we need the conscious part of the dream when we go to sleep?" If it's for something, if it's for good, if it's for learning, if it's for-- there's all kinds of theories about why we do.

None of the theories really allows for, or none of the theories that I know of really explain why it is the case that we have to be conscious for little bits and pieces of it. Why couldn't that exact same kind of surrealist nonsense happen and we just aren't aware of it? Why? So I'm here for that. I'm trying to figure that out as I deal with my own kind of insomnia. It's pretty meta. I came here because it's cold and I sleep better in the cold. I sleep best when I'm frigid. I think I’m meant to be a hibernating bear and I'm just deprived of years and years of hibernation.

Ben (01:42:44);

Go cold, go north. Yeah.

Patrick (01:42:46):

So basically I'm entering into torpor as I think about dreams as I try desperately to have them.

Ben (01:42:54):

Go into hibernation, great. And then the last question is-- I guess I often ask this. Do you have any advice for others; life advice or thoughts? Or in reflecting on this conversation, I might turn that around on, what are the questions that you think people in this area who might be interested-- What are the questions do you think they should work on? So one of the questions obviously is why we dream, what is consciousness? But any advice for those thinking about writing or neuroscience or what do you think are the most important questions we might be working on or should work on?

Patrick (01:43:36):

There's a tricky thing with neuro... Paul Bloom, I mentioned him earlier; Yale professor studies cognitive science in kids; he's a psychologist. So he had a bunch of kids and he studies cognition and psychology in kids and someone asked him, "Given everything you know, you're a professor at Yale, you've been doing this for decades about child rearing and psychology. How did that change how you raised your kids?" And he said, "Not at all." I think I'm remembering this right. But he's like, "Maybe I have some better understanding of how to triage what is factual and what is not." But fundamentally, nothing he knows changed how he raised his kids even though he studies the thing.

To me, this is like a sad reflection on how useful neuroscience is, which is not at all. There's a bunch of theories and there's books and there are all the kinds of genres and sections in the bookstore. Anything that actually worked had to do with like someone changing their diet or various forms of proxy therapy. That's basically all that works. It's the most useful interventions neuroscience has ever come up with it. We didn't even come up with them. So I do think there's one way to be useful as a neuroscientist which is to ask your partner; romantic, otherwise, friends, people that you surround yourself with at any given time-- Take an entire evening, have phenomenological date night where you actually ask them what it's like on the inside of their head. "Do they dream in color? Do they..." Ask them to imagine a sunset and describe it when they close their eyes.

There's some people that are aphantasia and have zero mental imagery on the inside of their head. There's some people that are hyperphantagic that when they close their eyes, they effectively see a sunset with just as much richness as if their eyes were open and actually seeing the sunset. Those two people can be married for 40 years and they talk about, "Oh, do you want to go see the sunset?" Or they'll say, "Hey, can we go out?" Let's imagine this hypothetical married couple and one of them is hyperphantagic and one of them is aphantagic. The aphantagic one who cannot conjure the image of a sunset, cannot conjure in his or her mind the beauty of art or anything because it's blank in there asks their partner, "Hey, the sun is about to set. Could we go up to the back porch and watch it?" And the partner who's hyperphantagic who can just close their eyes and see the sunset goes, "I'm kind of tired. Let's not do that."

And let's say there's animosity that then builds right in their relationship because of this. Because there seems to be this mismatch in interest and, "Why doesn't he ever go outside and watch the sunset with me? It's so beautiful. "Fundamentally, those people need to have a conversation where they realize that the person who can't see gets infinite joy out of witnessing the thing. It's the thing itself. And that the person who can close their eyes and imagine it vividly can get infinite joy sitting on a couch with their eyes closed, doing nothing. So what appears to be laziness might be something different and what appears to be a mismatch in interpersonal preference might just be about a phenomenological difference on the inside of their head. If the person suddenly knew that their partner was aphantagic and that their partner couldn't see anything and they need to experience the thing to experience it-- they can't close their eyes and imagine it. They would say, "Oh my God, of course we can go watch the sunset every goddamn night. I didn't know you can't watch the sunset in your head." To me it's a movie that just plays and it's like an HD movie.

So I would guess that a huge percentage of interpersonal-- the things we ascribe to personality differences or liking certain people or liking certain things or motivation to do things. I would guess that a large part of it is just differences in what's happening on the inside of your head. Language is very difficult. Maybe my new career is phenomenological relationship counselor where I just charge people. I do marital counseling, but I only talk about... I do like visual imagery questionnaires and something like that. My suggestion is to have phenomenological date night with whoever you're interested in the world and ask what their dreams are really like and if it's in images or what inside of their head is really like and see if you get anything, see if you solve any conflict.

Ben (01:48:37):

That seems to be really great advice. I've heard you because you had this story of someone who didn't see images and wanted to see your image all the time because they couldn't imagine you. I think that's really true. And that recalls, I had a maths teacher in high school who discovered late on that they really believe they have their red-green vision. Red-green cones are reversed because most people find the greens of forests really relaxing and he finds the greens of forest really angry. He really reckons that the colors are reversed. And actually he's now evidence for this which is the way we've learned about it. You have this in color blindness and things. This is literally what you thought was red and I thought was red is not red for you because actually your physical cones in your eyes are actually different. It happens in a small percentage, but actually a much larger percentage than you might have thought. So that sounds like really good advice to me. Actually ask the other person what they think and maybe what's going inside their brain is not what you think it is.

Patrick (01:49:45):

"Why the hell did you get me green roses for Valentine's Day?"

Ben (01:49:50):

Yeah, exactly. Well on that note, the book is “Nineteen Ways of Looking At Consciousness.” Patrick, thank you very much.

Patrick (01:49:59):

Of course. Thank you.

Jade O'Brien: from stockbroker to teacher, being a woman in finance, schools and teaching | Podcast

Jade O’Brien was a stock broker (equity sales)  for over 7 years. She then retrained as a teacher and has taught in both the state sector and the private sector in the UK.

Jade used to pitch me stock ideas and speak about the investment world. I was very curious on why she decided to change careers to become a teacher.

We chat about what drove Jade to the world of finance. What she viewed as the pros and cons, and what it is like as a woman in a male dominated world and advice she has.

Jade outlines her experience of finance which has many positives as well as challenges, and what might have changed over the decade. 

(Ben) So what would you say to women wanting to make it in the city or in financial services? 

Do it. Give it a go. I mean, I'm speaking for myself here and I have read that the imposter syndrome feeling is very common within women in finance. But then again, I think, well maybe that imposter syndrome is for everyone in finance but men can hide it better. So I would say do it. Everybody feels insecure and doesn't really know what's going on at times. To have the confidence to go for it and also to not necessarily feel like you need to follow my path of giving up finance and becoming a teacher. I don't think that's something you need to do if you are genuinely interested in finance and you want to get to the top. I think it's definitely possible.

We discuss the factors that made Jade change her jobs. How we might think about death and how she found teacher training.

We chat on how we might “value” teaching and why it’s hard to rate teachers. Why some people ask for more homework, and others ask for less homework and how both views can have merit. 

We address: 

• The importance of mentors 

• the funding situation in UK state supported schools

• A glimpse of teacher training

• Differences between state and private schools in the UK 

• Why she thinks teacher quality in both state and private settings are similar

• Why teaching class can feel private

• Views on SEN (special education) policy

• Streaming (where it might work, where it might fail and why she changed her mind) 

• What Jade’s perfect class size is, and why

• Her views on uniforms

• School start times 

• School food

• Exercise 

• The importance of gratitude

This was an amazing long form conversation addressing many of the debates within education today.

Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods) or on video (above or on YouTube) and the transcript is below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript, Ben Yeoh and Jade O’Brien in conversation

(Note only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Jade O'Brien. Jade was in Asian equity sales or stockbroking for many years before retraining as a teacher. Jade, welcome.

Jade Thank you.

Ben (00:17):

So you worked for over seven years in equity sales for investment banks where you pitched and discussed investment ideas for Asian companies to asset managers like myself. You then retrained as a teacher and have been teaching at London Primary Schools. I'd love to know what influenced your decision, perhaps first of all, to go into financial services and then the pivot into retraining as a teacher.

Jade (00:44):

Yeah, sure. I think originally to go into financial services, essentially it was money driven. It wasn't any particular interest in finance or the financial markets. I'm sure that is an interest for a lot of people but it did not drive me. It was more, “What job can I get that I can get paid very well for as quick as I can for?” which I don't mind putting in a lot of effort. I didn't mind back then putting in a lot of hours. I had been at Oxford where I think everyone was hugely driven and I felt like I needed to prove myself and I was judging myself on how much I was able to earn as quickly as I could. So I think that was the main reason why I went into it. Also, I really liked the structure. I was I am still quite institutionalized that I'd been at school and you kind of got those A grades at school and you were doing the tests, and then you went up a year and then you went to university, and then it suddenly felt like there was just this. The whole world was open to you which a lot of people embrace and love. For me, that was terrifying. I wanted to stay on a path and I wanted to be on that path and go as quickly down that path as I could and to the best of my ability.

Ben (02:28):

So it wasn't so much a treadmill, or it was a sort of a treadmill but one which felt very comfortable?

Jade (02:33):

Yeah. So even though it seemed like it was a hard route being an analyst in an investment bank, to me, it was actually an easy route because I had all the credentials to get there. There was this really well-trodden path of you're an analyst, then you become an associate, then you become a vice president, then you become an MD. I felt like it was a set structure for me to follow which made me feel quite comfortable and I didn't mind working hard for that. I knew it would be hard work, but that wasn't something I was scared of. What I was scared of was actually not having structure, not having a path, and not feeling like every day was moving me forward.

Ben (03:27):

So that's 12 to 14 hour days and I guess it was an easy decision for you to make then and you didn't feel any qualms about it. It was like, "Oh, this is a next comfortable step. Can work really hard, then I work really hard and I should get rewarded."

Jade (03:41):

Yeah. I felt like I was monetarily rewarded for working hard. I'd be waking up at about 5:00 AM every morning and I would leave the office around 6:00 PM, but then after that I would frequently have client dinners and various other things I'd have to be doing afterwards on the client side. Or if I was on a business trip as I frequently would, I'd be traveling in the evenings or flying, so...

Ben (04:18):

And traveling on weekends and all of that. I always say that they think traveling for an investment bank seems really glamorous, but it really isn't. You either see a conference room, hotels-- I was in Barcelona recently. I saw nothing of Barcelona except the conference. So it feels doubly bad. But what then changed in your thinking around financial services for seven/ eight years and then wanting to retrain? Did something change or what happened?

Jade (04:48):

I never really enjoyed the finance side of my job because ultimately as I mentioned before, I didn't have a deep interest in the markets. I always felt really jealous of my colleagues that were obsessed with the stock market. They really wanted to talk about the next big thing whereas for me, it was more around the sales side and the client acquisition side that actually interested me more. I realized I got to a point in my career-- got to vice president, and I realized that actually to progress further in my career and get to MD and then even further than that head of a region, I felt like it would take an exponential amount of effort to get there when I didn't have a fundamental drive and interest in financial markets because up until then, I was able to just do the background reading and put in so much effort around everything else that it didn't really matter as long as I knew what was going on. Whereas I needed to really have an interest and really put the extra hours in.

I wasn't really willing to do that. So it was a few things. I think that was a sort of slow burn for me over the course of seven years until the eventual realization. Another catalyst was also my mom died and the company I was working for was actually-- they were very good. They allowed me to work from the Hong Kong office so I could be closer to my mom in her last few weeks in Hong Kong. I really appreciated that. But it also made me realize-- She was always really proud of me and proud of how much she felt I'd achieved in my career and whatever. But I knew ultimately she really wanted me to be happy. I think I was to a certain extent, but I think I just realized I didn't want to wake up every day and not enjoy what I was doing and it got to a point where the job wasn't exciting to me anymore. All the points that I really enjoyed like meeting new clients, calling people up, going to new places no longer had the same appeal to me. I'd been there and I'd done that. I realized I wanted to wake up every morning and be really interested in what I was doing and feel like I was making a difference as well.

Ben (07:43):

So a combination of slow burn or not fully enjoying financial markets and a kind of pivot with the family death; having to reassess. I think that's one of the things that I do really interested in markets. I’m really fascinated by companies as well as so many other things like theater and all of that which keeps me in the job. I understand also the client relationship part is actually remarkably important that particularly on the investment banking side, servicing clients, giving them the research they want and things, even if you don't deeply understand markets or whatever. As long as you're giving clients what they need, they can take you so far. In fact, probably the first 10 years of a career can easily be built on really good client service. We met at an investment conference. I think it was a really busy one and you sat at a table where there was one spare seat and there were virtually no other spare seats. So it was one of those serendipitous moments.

I judged that conference like most others I go to was 70% male which seems typical to me. I was wondering, did you feel the world of finance was welcoming to you as a woman? Obviously you're not as much of an outsider as in a lot of Oxbridge elites things there and you understood the system and the process. I guess I hear stories on both sides. Some women don't feel that there's much of a difference. It's a kind of work hard, play hard type of thing where some women do find it as unfriendly and embarrassed aspects. I'd be interested which side of that fence you fall on?

Jade (09:24):

I would say it's a mix for me. You're definitely outnumbered working in finance and I would consider myself quite a girl’s girl; most of my friends are female. I think I would have a lot more in common with a lot of people there if there were more females which obviously makes your job and your daily life more enjoyable if you're surrounded by people you have things in common with. I would say as a junior, I was welcomed into finance. I think also predominantly because I worked in sales and to be a young female in sales that's willing to work hard, I don't think it was that difficult actually being a woman on the trading floor. Actually, specifically within stockbroking, if I looked around the trading floor there were lots of younger females or more junior females I should say. But I think as my time went, the ranks do thin very quickly. When women have families, I think the retention is very difficult within investment banks because of the hours and relative inflexibility within that role. So I think I felt less welcome as I became more senior because I felt there also the path ended for me. There were fewer role models for me within the financial world.

Ben (11:05):

Yeah. And I guess that's reflected in legal accounting, private equity. A lot of the structured-- I guess they're hierarchical, but it's really difficult for them to retain even though the messaging, I think from all of those industries is that they would like to. The structure doesn't make it easy. It always helps, I think, when you have mentors or people who've done it and the generation of women who've done it. The stories I hear often that they had to make some sort of sacrifices to do that. That's not necessarily the message you want to hear; that you will have to sacrifice X, Y, and Z which you might not want to, to reach those MD and above levels as opposed to men who I think in general, at least in those industries, don't seem to have had to sacrifice as much or at least in the same type of way.

Jade (11:55):

Yeah. I mean, I would also say that this was 10 years ago when I first joined finance. I do following the news and watching the Me Too movement unroll. Since then, we've had a global pandemic. I hope that females within finance feel differently. I get the impression that I think it is quite a different world now and I definitely felt while I was there that the world of finance was changing. There were so many parts of it that were changing. For example, the client relationships I had and how we were expected to be with our clients, how much we were allowed to spend on our clients, how much our clients were allowed to accept from us in terms of dinners and lunches. And that changes how you do sales. But also, I think the world in how women were viewed was also changing quite quickly while I was working there.

Ben (13:04):

Do you think hybrid or work from home is going to be more female friendly? At first, I thought it really was because you could balance family commitments and things. Then I noted that over pandemic a lot of domestic duties still seem to fall on women's shoulders more than men, even when both were at home for various reasons; structural or others. But it's only anecdotal and it does seem to have helped, but maybe not as much as perhaps people had wished for. Also, I don't think we've settled down into how that balance is going to be. A lot of companies are still trying to say, "Oh, are we back to the office? Are we remote? Are we hybrid?" for that. Do you have an impression it's going to help? Do you think it would?

Jade (13:52):

I'm not sure because I feel-- I mean, as you sort of touched on that actually the domestic expectation on women was still the same. So it just means that women are expected to do two jobs rather than one. Rather than actually try and juggle one job, they're expected to juggle two. I'm not sure because I haven't really been in that situation so I couldn't really comment. When I was working in finance I was largely living on my own.

Ben (14:32):

Fair enough. So what would you say to women wanting to make it in the city or in financial services? Any parting thoughts for them?

Jade (14:41):

Do it. Give it a go. I mean, I'm speaking for myself here and I have read that the imposter syndrome feeling is very common within women in finance. But then again, I think, well maybe that imposter syndrome is for everyone in finance but men can hide it better. So I would say do it. Everybody feels insecure and doesn't really know what's going on at times. To have the confidence to go for it and also to not necessarily feel like you need to follow my path of giving up finance and becoming a teacher. I don't think that's something you need to do if you are genuinely interested in finance and you want to get to the top. I think it's definitely possible.

Ben (15:39):

Yeah, for sure. It's funny, I don't feel any imposter syndrome around markets or investment. But as you know, I perform and do theater stuff and I often feel like-- For instance, I always say that I'm not a performer yet later on this month, if this is January, 2023, I'm going to be getting up and performing and that definitely doesn't feel right. So I think you are correct that everyone has insecurities around something. I guess you mentioned that if financial services are really for you, you should go for it. Do you think there's anything really underrated or people misunderstand around what stock breaking or equity sales might be like that you would sort of say, "Oh, this was really good or misunderstood?"

Jade (16:19):

It's nothing like The Wolf of Wall Street, I will say that, or in fact I read Liar's Poker before I became a stockbroker and it's nothing like Liar's Poker either. It's not the eighties anymore.

Ben (16:35):

Things have moved on.

Jade (16:36):

Things have definitely moved on since then. I think that is probably a huge misconception. As soon as I tell anyone I was a stockbroker, Wolf of Wall Street will always be the first question they ask me of, "Is it the same or is it similar or what was similar about it?"

Ben (16:56):

That's fair enough. I find it's the same. Actually in both my hats, I can't describe to non-theater people what really working on a play is or backstage or how it is. For my theater friends, they can never really understand the city or say, "Well, I help invest people's pensions." And people are like, "Well, what does that really mean? How does that work?" It is one of those mysterious things until you try it out.

Jade (17:19):

I think-- although going back to your original question of what I think is underrated within finance, I would say that it is a very diverse mix of people. It's very culturally diverse and I think having a job in finance-- specifically within the stock market is actually... Finance is sort of that common language that you could travel to the big financial centers and you could get a job there and you could work there and you can experience life. A lot of people that worked in finance have worked in lots of different large cities which is a huge perk of that job. I don't think you could say the same for many other roles. Even if you think about law, you are still quite specific to a region. Even teaching or medicine, I would still have to retrain to a certain point. I think that's quite underrated within finance; to be able to have that opportunity.

Ben (18:27):

Yeah. I never thought about that and I think that's really good observation. I think of myself whether on the asset management side or on the stockbroking side and in any of the major cities, even maybe Tokyo, although there'd be a language issue. But certainly Hong Kong, India, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Boston, London, you could do all of those. English is probably the lingua franca and then numbers, the stock market, and that type of thing. So it is very transferrable. That makes me think of another thing which is although I guess all industries have a level of social politics because we are human and social creatures, there is a reasonable correlation between working really hard and doing really well in the sense of that it is probably more meritocratic than some other industries I've looked at where obviously connections and network are always the thing and I think they're thing in all human walks in life. But I see people who haven't come into the city with connection who work really hard and do well. I think that's attractive to some people as well.

Jade (19:37):

Yeah, I think it's quite performance based which is nice. I mean, if I'm comparing it to my job in teaching, if I really wanted to excel as a teacher, I would be hard pressed to really find good performance indicators to show somebody that I was an excellent teacher versus a good teacher. Whereas I think working as a stockbroker, I could very easily find those KPIs to show to my boss or to show to anyone.

Ben (20:09):

Can you even tell the difference between a good teacher and an average teacher looking in on the outside? So your class could probably tell and maybe parents of your class might be able to tell. Excellent to good is also quite an interesting comparison, but good versus average; is that hard?

Jade (20:30):

Hard to tell for a teacher. It depends because it depends on what you class as a good teacher.

Ben (20:41):

Yeah, what do you value?

Jade (20:42):

Yeah, like what do you value in a teacher? Is it the connection they have with their class? Is it how much their class loves them? Is it the Maths results you're getting? Is it how creative their English work is? Is it how happy they are? Is it how well you cater for the diverse needs of the class? Maybe you are really good at supporting the students that need more support and maybe have dyslexia and that, but maybe you are not excelling the highest 2% or 10% of your class. Yeah, it really depends then, what about your relationship with the parents? How do the parents then see you? I don't think it necessarily correlates to how much the class likes you or the results you're getting as a teacher. That could just be your sales pitch to the parents and your outward interactions.

Ben (21:47):

There's lots of things there that you could do city speak almost optimized for. So grades, pupil happiness, those who need extra support, those who are in the top 2%. I got the impression though that you're saying that you can't quite optimize for everything; that there was a trade off with the resources that teachers have.

Jade (22:08):

Absolutely. I mean, even to the point where-- Also, I think sometimes I'm asked contradicting things. So for example, people have different parents and teachers in schools have different views on homework. So on one side a parent asking me for more homework for their child, and on the other end another parent saying, "You give them too much homework, I want them to be able to play." Both are really quite reasonable views. To be an excellent teacher I guess it would be managing that conversation with the parents. But ultimately, there's not one view or one thing that I could do that would make both parents a hundred percent happy

Ben (22:58):

They maybe end up both a hundred percent unhappy; probably in the middle. I flip-flop actually. So I used to think homework was okay or I never had a problem with it. I now think on average-- although there's a lot of exceptions that it's probably overrated for most people. Or at least homework how it's done in this country for things as opposed to long-term projects or something like that which would be a form of homework. But I would prefer something like rather than a little bit of rote something every night, I would say, “Well, over half term compose a long poem like Beowulf or something;” some ongoing project I would prefer but that's something more recent. 

So you retrained as a teacher-- so a year training, although this was over the pandemic so it was a little bit unusual and probably really tricky. But in general do you think teacher training is good? How is the provision? What's it like? Or I guess this is a special circumstance so you can only speak from your point of view. I guess this because there's a couple of schools that thought of this. You always hear like, "Oh, there isn't enough investment in teachers or the training isn't that adequate for that type of thing" which is probably the predominant story that I hear. But I hear some other things so I'd be interested. What was it like for you and then going into the state system after that?

Jade (24:28):

I would say-- because I did my PGC during Covid so I actually only got about half of it done before Covid hit. Then it was mainly online learning. But even then, I have to say the university that I was at didn't really give a proper provision for that book learning side. Essentially they gave us a reading list which is just not the same as being in class and watching teachers have to juggle the class and try and create their lesson plans and things like that. So the teacher training, a lot of it is of a practical element. I would say at least half of it is actually sitting in a classroom observing, and then over the course of-- You'll be assigned a school or you'll be assigned a few different schools over the course of your PGC. But I was actually only assigned two schools because we only managed to get through half of it. The structure is that you would observe your class teacher and then towards the end of your six week placement, by the final week, you are essentially teaching 90% of the lessons. The teacher is basically your mentor and would be giving you feedback and so you can sort of watch best practice. So it really depends on the class teacher that you get, that you are learning from because a huge amount of your time and your learning is coming from that one teacher.

Ben (26:08):

So it's like a mentor apprenticeship type of model?

Jade (26:11):

Yeah, correct. In my instance anyway, the teacher that I was with was really organized. She was great. I'm really appreciative of her allowing me to be in her class. It's a really personal experience to let somebody into your classroom actually because you give a lot of yourself as a teacher. Every day you need to deal with a lot of tricky circumstances and it is just very personal. You have a very personal relationship with your students and you are sometimes teaching on the fly, answering questions on the fly, and learning yourself as you're teaching new topics. That it is quite personal having someone in the classroom with you all the time. But I did only really see one teacher teaching so I would've loved to-- I think I would be a much more rounded teacher if I was able to observe more classes. I did try and make the effort when I became a class teacher after that to try and observe other teachers teaching, but it's really difficult to find that time.

Ben (27:24):

And I guess it's not the same. It's like being able to apprentice with other mentors or not even mentors; it's the same within now. I mean, I'm very experienced and done various things, but I still learn from other really experienced people different ways of doing things, different ways of handling things which just all add to it. But when you are full-time teaching, the opportunity to do that I guess is much more limited.

Jade (27:45):

Yeah. It's also quite a lot of pressure to ask a teacher to observe their lesson because they feel like they need to perform a perfect lesson and to have really prepped and made sure that everything has been organized beforehand rather than realizing halfway through the lesson, "Oh no, I forgot this. Can you go and get it from the resource room?" Or something like that. Just really little things like that I think they'd be a bit self-conscious that they'd forgotten which is really common as a teacher because you're teaching all day every day. Your prep time is not very long at all. A lot of the classes you suddenly realize actually, "Oh that would be a really good resource to use. Or actually, you know what? The class isn't really following this line of lesson. I'm going to change tact and try and teach in a slightly different way because the class is just not really gelling with this method." So you do change lesson plans quite a bit even on the fly. Not because you're disorganized, just because that is the nature of being a teacher. You need to respond to your class.

Ben (28:56):

Reminds me of the aphorism, "Expect the unexpected" or I guess there's something about going into battle or plans when they meet reality. So actually the so-called perfect lesson doesn't exist. The perfect lesson is the one where the unexpected happens and you can see how people deal and react to it because children haven't read the teaching textbooks at least about how to be taught. How did you feel about the resources within the state system? So I guess here in Britain or I guess particularly in England, the predominant narrative is that state systems are underfunded and teachers are somewhat overwhelmed. But when I look more broadly, there seem to be the case in quite a lot of educational systems that actually teachers are generally overwhelmed and underfunded although that might be the structural issue about education is costly and expensive and time resource and is broadly undervalued for various reasons. Perhaps one of the reasons being that people go into it for things other than money. So the system somewhat takes advantage of that which I think is true of nursing and actually other female led professions because it's the nurturing, caring element of it. But as you started in the state system and now have had a little bit in the private system, I'd be interested maybe on whether you feel the state system is under-resourced and your experience of it.

Jade (30:28):

Yeah. So I would caveat that I've only worked at one state school and I've observed another state school quite extensively as well. Again, I experienced the private system personally; that's how I was educated in the UK and I'm experiencing it also this one school. This is on what I have seen from quite a small number of schools. But I would say that the state system does seem quite underfunded and for everything I've read as well as what I've experienced, it does align. For example, just trying to get resources for lessons that I would consider more exciting to do that would really only be a few extra pounds to spend. The school's budget is so tight that...

We're learning about living things for example, and buying seeds and soil and plastic pots. I've done that and not been reimbursed by the school because it hadn't been okayed beforehand because the school didn't have resources and funding for that. So it really was only a few pounds and it was really, really difficult to get anything extra and above what we already had. But I would say that we did have quite a few resources within the school to use. You have to be quite creative on your lessons that you come up with and looking in the store cupboards seeing what you can use. There is a lot there, but I definitely would say the schools are underfunded. Also, in terms of cover. So teaching cover, if you are ill, your colleagues have to cover for you. They're very reticent to bring in extra support staff because it's so expensive. I would say those are probably the biggest issues around the funding in state schools.

Ben (32:46):

So the stories we hear of teachers having to buy pens and pencils or even notebooks for children in some schools is kind of unsurprising to you?

Jade (32:56):

That's not very surprising to me at all.

Ben (32:58):

Obviously you got seeds and soil; not quite the same, but of a similar sort of adjacent thing. I guess you can contrast that to financial services where if you don't okay something you might get a slap on the wrist and they'll okay and say, "Next time make sure you do." Or if you will go for something which isn't necessarily in budget or something which is not even outside the scope of thing, you just write a little investment case or an email to someone and they go, "Well that makes sense" and they'd authorize the money which obviously just does not seem possible within the state system. Do you think there's a deficit in-- Well, I guess the accountancy term is kind of human capital, human resources; so you say like people cover. But you mentioned it a little bit in the training. Do you think it would benefit from somehow more money spent on training or time for training or giving teachers more time, or is that just not practical because of the way it has to be taught and because of the whole-- I mean, I guess there's a huge supply deficit or over demand. I feel like if teachers had doubled the amount of time available, they would fill all of that time easily. Yet also you mentioned that more training, more apprenticeship and things would also help. So I don't know how much money solves that or whether you would have a thought.

Jade (34:22):

Money would certainly make everything easier. In terms of the training, I think actually recently-- So my cohort was the last cohort to do a one year PGC. When you do your one year PGC, you are then a NQT; so a newly qualified teacher for a year. Your school needs to sign up to that and agree to doing quite heavy observations of you and finding the time... Senior members of staff need to find the time to observe you and give you feedback on your teaching. That's for a year which has now been extended to two years which I'm sure also costs. I'm not sure who exactly is footing the bill, whether it's the school or the government. But that obviously does cost more because there's a lot more time needed from senior staff to be going in and doing that training and feedback and teaching.

I have to say after a year PGC-- I mean, bearing in mind I only got half of it because of Covid. But I didn't feel prepared to stand in front of a class of 30 kids and teach them everything from obviously English, Maths, Geography, History, Spanish-- I don't speak Spanish--, Music-- I hadn't played an instrument since I was about eight--, P.E, DT-- DT without resources which was interesting--, Science. I didn't feel prepared for that. And you have to come up with your own lesson plans. The UK system doesn't have-- It has a national curriculum but the national curriculum is so broad that you can essentially-- especially within the primary sector-- that you can really come up with your own lesson plans within... I mean, the national curriculum for science I think is only about a page long for each year group within primary school. So yeah, that was quite a daunting task when I first started and I was working until the school closed every day and then working at home to be researching and coming up with lesson plans and content and things.

Ben (36:55):

That feels more daunting and ongoing daunting than equity sales. It sounds like you're working similar hours, although hopefully, more contentedness. That strikes me as you could do research on, “Why one should invest in an Asian company?” to maybe even some experience fund managers easier than it was to teach everything that a seven year old or eight year old might want to know after a year. I'm very impressed.

Jade (37:27):

Well, at least most asset managers politely listen to you when you do your pitch. A class of 38 year olds do not listen politely if your pitch is not interesting.

Ben (37:38):

You know after three minutes or five minutes where the fund manager will just be like, "Nope, no votes this month." Well, I guess you get the direct feedback. I have an interest in special education needs or SEN although I really dislike the term actually now for various reasons. Those are the legal labels. It seems to me that schools particularly in the state system but actually overall or at least in the mainstream, seem pretty underfunded and that SEN in particular is underfunded. I now view looking at children or even the whole world that there's a spectrum or range so that you might be officially labeled SEN of some sort and that could be autism or some disability or dyslexia. Then there might be a whole other class of pupils who might not get a label, but a disadvantage in other ways like from a disrupted family or they've had a death in the family or they're just simply really poor.

So I know in the British system for instance, we look at whether you're on free school meals or not because it's known that if you're really poor you're going to come with all of these disadvantages and then there's other stuff in the middle and there could be all sorts of issues. I'd be interested-- I guess it riffs on what we were saying earlier. Do you think it's primarily or at least co primarily a money or funding issue? So money will definitely help, we can see that. But are there other ways that maybe we should be thinking around children who have disadvantage of needs or any sort or even because you can make the claim that if you're particularly in the top 1% or top 2% that their needs are not getting met sometimes depending on the teaching. I can see that in some children in this day. They just get really bored and they get disruptive, but it's because they're bored on the other side so these are kind of the tradeoff. I guess if there was a magic answer we would've heard it and it wouldn't have been such a debated question. But I'd be interested if you had a view or thought on that.

Jade (39:44):

Yeah. So there's quite a few things within that that I have opinions on. I think the whole SEN list and putting children on a list like that there's been a much greater move to make sure that list is dynamic because essentially SEN is Special Educational Needs. So children that have English as a second language would be on that list because it means they're not accessing the curriculum that the teacher can teach them in a class of... When I stand up and I teach 30 children, which children can access the curriculum of what I'm teaching and which children can't. Obviously if you can't speak English, it's difficult to access the curriculum. So they would have special education needs and things I would have to do for them to help them access those lessons.

So whether that be a vocab list or when I prepare all my presentations, I need to make sure that everything with writing has pictures of what those things are; having a visual timetable so that child knows what's going on. But on the other hand because it is quite a dynamic list, when that child then masters English, they're taken off that list. I think it's really important that that list is dynamic because it means you can't be lazy about these types of things. You need to make sure you're constantly assessing and making sure that those special needs are met. I think a child needs to be assessed properly for that. As a teacher, like I said, there are so many topics, so many subjects that I'm teaching and I have up to 30 children in a class. My training has not been around special education needs. There are so many special education needs. You could be an EAL; an English as a Second Language specialist, you could be an autism specialist, you could be a speech and language specialist. I know the waiting lists for children to be-- Children need to be assessed to then be able to give them specialized things and to teach them in specific ways that will specifically help them.

Trying to get my class assessed within a state system was quite difficult because the waiting lists were so long for them to see a specialist. The system is once they've seen a specialist, then the specialist will give the teacher and the parents’ specific advice. Then potentially after a few more rounds-- I'm sure you've gone through this as well-- the school can then request extra funding. A lot of the time if their needs are very specialists, that funding would cover an extra member of staff or some hours of an extra member of staff to be able to sit with that child or with a small group of children as a teaching assistant or to be a teaching assistant within the class to make sure that… For example, to break down. If I give a multi-step instruction to be sitting there with that child and give the instructions one at a time; one instruction at a time or to be doing speaking for writing. If they have real trouble with writing they can say what they think the answer is or their story and then the TA will be able to scribe for them and then they will have that written down so it is still their work. Then they will have some extra time to then copy what the teaching system has written down into their books. But that's obviously not possible for me to do as a teacher being at the front of the class and trying to teach 30 children.

Ben (44:09):

Sure. And reflections on, I guess the private system versus the state system obviously is much better funded and so money as we've already said, obviously really helps. I guess there's some arguments that people say, "Oh, we should just all be comprehensive and better funded” which is maybe ideal, but doesn't seem likely, at least in Britain. And then others say, "Well, there's choice and the private system is funding itself. There might be a profit motive that doesn't necessarily need to be bad." I don't know if any reflections. Both of us obviously went through a private system and I've been around them both and they sort of have pros and cons or at least differences in each. But I'd be interested if you had any reflections.

Jade (44:59):

Yeah. I had a misconception before I started teaching in state schools that I thought the quality of teaching in private schools was better. Having taught in a state school and been really interacting with the staff and observing lessons and then working in the private system, I think the quality of teaching is the same actually. The quality of staff you get I think is the same because essentially, I think there's a misconception on private school teacher’s salary. It's basically the same as a state school salary. So I think that also means that you get a similar quality of staff body. It's not that the best teachers decide they want to teach in the private system because they earn tons more money. That's just not true within the state system in London that I know of. I'm sure people could come up with examples that completely disapprove that. But from my experience, I definitely didn't get much of a pay rise; maybe that's my negotiation skills. But no, having spoken to other people within the private system as well the salary is pretty similar which surprised me.

Things like resources-- The types of lessons that I want to do. If I want to have a really exciting lesson, I can speak to the school bursar and within reason he will say yes. And being able to kind of go on trips and things-- I think in my previous state school we had a five pound limit per year per student that we could ask the parents for. Anything over that the school also wasn't going to pay for. So anything we did, it had to be a hundred percent free to do. We're so lucky being in London. I was so lucky being in London that I could do these amazing trips because the museums are all free here and getting on public transport was also free for children. I think children under 11 or under 12 get free transport or I think school trips.

Ben (47:21):

Yeah and bus rides are free under 18.

Jade (47:25):

Yeah. So TFL is very good about that so doing school trips was easy. Well, it wasn't easy, but I was able to fund them which was great. We had loads of opportunity to go to museums and to do really wonderful school trips which I don't think would be possible in a lot of other schools that maybe you'd need to rent buses or transport for or maybe there weren't museums that were free within that. So we were really lucky in terms of where we were. So yeah, the school trips are the same, teaching is the same. I think what you get in a private school is much better access to your class teacher because the class sizes are smaller. I went from teaching a class of 30 to teaching a class of 12.

I think also the private system allows parents to have that contact with teachers and would give out a teacher's school email address. Whereas to manage the teacher's time in a state school, I don't think you'd be given a teacher's email address. All the contact would have to go through the front office and then you'd have to book in a time slot with that teacher and that time slot might not be that soon. Or they could try and grab the teacher during pickup in the playground. But again, that's only about a 15 minute window when he or she is releasing 30 children back to their parents and probably is a bit distracted.

Ben (49:12):

Yeah. We did have at our state primary teacher's email but you were really expected not to abuse it if you did have it, and we had special education needs so we might have been exceptional for that. That's really interesting. So if I were to summarize, there's quite a lot of variety in teacher skill or teacher experience. So given all of that, you would say that the teaching is just as good within state schools as private schools and actually the money is roughly the same what you're saying. But private schools are much better resourced for things like trips. You probably wouldn't have problems with buying soils and seeds and things like that and the class sizes are smaller. Do you think also that-- Are there more teachers-- Well, I guess that's class size so there are more teachers per student even if the quality of the teaching is roughly the same. The number of teachers per student is more in the private sector. You might have more teaching assistants or something in the room.

Jade (50:19):

It depends on how you define quality of teaching. I mean, a teacher's time is finite. So the contact and personalization to each individual student would be higher in a private school than in a state school just because the class sizes are smaller. So during a lesson, a teacher can get around 12 students and give each student much more individualized time than they can in a class of 30 that might not have any individualized time at all. But if your class doesn't have very specialized needs-- if it's a very diverse class of needs, I think it's definitely better to have a smaller class. But if it doesn't have a very diverse set of needs and they're all attainment levels and learning speeds are around the same and they're quite a well behaved class-- which is a lot of ifs, I don't think there'd be much difference in if you compare their results at the end of the year, for example.

Ben (51:35):

Sure. Qualified what the metric we're looking at and all of that. But like you say, that might only happen one out of three years, one out of two, one out of five years to get all of those ifs together. And to clarify, probably didn't express it very well. Broadly, if you put a state school teacher into a private school system they're performing the same from skills and experience. But like you say, in the state school because of the funding and the money and the structure, they might only have X amount of hours to spend on all of the things they want to spend on. You actually have more of those same amount of hours or minutes per student and resources in the private system. So it's not teacher quality per se, but the structural and time things which is what the money is buying you as opposed to teaching quality is buying you those other things.

Jade (52:28):

Yeah. I would say you are also buying specialist teachers for topics like languages, music and PE. So generally, private schools will have a specialist PE teacher. They'll have a specialist music teacher and Spanish teacher or modern language teacher which wasn't the case at some state schools. I know some state schools have specialist music teachers but that is an extra cost as opposed to just getting the teacher to do it. And obviously having a specialist coming in and teaching is of a higher quality than a generalist. So I'd say my job is a lot easier in a private school because I don't have as many subjects that I need to be teaching.

Ben (53:24):

So quality adjusted pay has kind of increased since. Even if the money dollar amount isn't the same, your job is easier to do now.

Jade (53:31):

Yeah. The holidays are more as well for private school.

Ben (53:35):

Okay. That's also worth something. So maybe we can hit some topical things which are debated within schools and you can give a quick opinion or not. Kind of underrated, overrated or what it really means. We've touched on one but I think it might be worth going over again which is class size. My impression you are saying is that class size might not need to be different, say 30 versus 12 or 24, if speeds are the same, diversity is the same and there's no quirks. But in reality, often there will be quirks and then in which case teacher minutes per pupil does make a difference. So I guess underrated, overrated would depend, but generally maybe there is a reasonable amount of truth to saying that smaller class sizes are better.

Jade (54:29):

Yes, I think so within reason. I would say my perfect class size is between 12 to 15 students which is a really specific number. I think that because a lot of primary school teaching is about scaffolding, it's about Q&A. So you ask the class the questions and you lead them to the answer. You don't just present to them. You don't just stand up in front of a whiteboard and talk at them. You would have a very disruptive class if that was how you taught. So to have that Q&A, to have that sort of interactiveness you need to have enough students that are going to be bouncing ideas off of each other and enough students who are confident enough to put their hands up and put forward their ideas.

I would also say with very large classes you generally-- With the large number comes more diversity in terms of learning needs. The two ends of the spectrum of teaching I think take up the majority of my time. If everyone was in that middle of the bell curve as a teacher, that would probably-- I mean, that does make teaching the class a lot easier because you don't need to differentiate as heavily, come up with as many resources, you don't need to be teaching... Sometimes it feels like I'm teaching three lessons at the same time; the top, middle, and bottom. Sometimes to make sure that every child can access the curriculum, especially with Maths it is so diverse that it's essentially a different lesson especially when it comes to things like fractions.

Ben (56:33):

Okay. Interesting. It's funny you mentioned 12 to 15 because I've now seen classes below eight. Actually in some ways they're sometimes harder because of that Q&A although it can also work well. I'd probably prefer to be smaller than much larger. Strangely, there's two adjacent topics I think about which is good dinners or good dinner meetings and also other things. It's interesting if you have a dinner meeting over 15. They're harder because it's the one conversation. Obviously if you have a dinner for four, then it's just like chatting between your friends. You don't have that Q&A. So it's interesting you have that 12 to 15.

There's also something about innovation and team sizes. So the anecdote from Amazon is you want to all be able to sit around the pizza box. So they tend to have it as eight to twelve, but it's similar. It's that you have to be able to have one conversation, but that you can spark some other people. So it may be not so crazy to have a specific number in mind; 12 to 15. Actually, so that leads me to one other thing which I hadn't thought of, but you just said. So streaming-- I guess it tends to happen in secondary more than primary. My impression then is you think that might be useful, not so much for all of the other things that might be, but just so that you cannot have to teach three different ways. You can teach one lesson to one. It doesn't necessarily mean that the middle or the top go faster or at a more appropriate speed. It's that actually you can just have one lesson plan because you know everyone is roughly there or have I misinterpreted that? Is that what your view of streaming would be?

Jade (58:13):

No. That used to be my view actually before I became a teacher. I actually wrote my thesis on streaming and I changed my...

Ben (58:22):

PGC streaming?

Jade (58:23):

Yeah. Maybe thesis is the wrong-- I think they called it a thesis. It wasn't...

Ben (58:30):

Extended essay?

Jade (58:31):

My extended essay, yeah. I felt quite strongly about streaming for that reason; that I felt like teachers are very overworked especially for how much they get paid. There's a lot expected of them. They have a huge amount of responsibility and they're expected to do a lot just in terms of all the subjects they're teaching, all the parents that they're managing, all of the sort of pastoral side of things, and then all the paperwork that goes around it as well. One of the biggest things teachers have complained about is their hours and how hard they work. They're always going over their contracted hours. The contract hours you think, "Oh, okay, we're a teacher. You get so much holiday and your hours only are until sort of..." I don't know what your contract says, but it's generally eight until five. "Oh, that's not that long." But then you think, well actually for what you are paid and the hours that you do, you sort of expect to be working your contracted hours which is never ever the case as a teacher. So to be expecting to go over and above, I think is quite a big ask especially how much time you're expected to spend within full-time education to get to that qualification.

So streaming, I thought I would be really pro streaming because streaming reduces the amount of hours a teacher needs to spend on lesson planning which is a really big complaint that a lot of teachers have. It’s they spend so much time lesson planning and they need to tick so many of their school's internal boxes on their lesson plans and how their lesson plans are set out and all the different things that they cover off to show they've done differentiation, they've put vocabulary, they've done assessment for learning, they've done a conclusion at the end, that it's properly evidenced in the books, that there's the date written in the right way in their books, and all these things you need to jump through in a 30 minute lesson when a child might be throwing a chair in the corner and another child crying in the front. It is a lot of things to be getting through in 30 minutes. So I thought I was really pro streaming because it would just make everyone's life easier and every child would be able to get a much more personalized lesson because it would be better suited to them.

But actually in practice having been in classes, I believe that mixed classes are better for everyone to an extent assuming that all the children can access the curriculum. The higher attaining students add this spark of competition to the rest of the class as to what the other children want to get to or what the other children want to then understand. I found my highest students will be asking questions that all the class will sit up and think, "I don't even understand the question, let alone what the answer would be." It really makes a class-- I think it just sets the whole class's standards a lot higher for every single student because within a classroom there's so much competition. I think even if I'd been asking these questions, it wouldn't have the same effect as an actual student asking those questions or responding in a very eloquent way to a question or coming up with a really in depth answer. I think there's no substitute for that within a classroom and I think it just makes everyone want to do better within the class and aspire to have that understanding of what's going on. Kids really have a hard mentality. Most children don't want to stand out-- primary school children anyway. They don't want to stand out and they don't want to be different. They really, really want to conform and I think that is one part of it.

A lot of studies have been done. When I did my thesis I was looking at a lot of different studies. I had slightly different opinions, but generally they found that putting the higher attaining children all in one class will benefit the higher attaining children slightly more. But the lowest group of students it disadvantages hugely. So actually in terms of overall equity, it's much better to just have a mixed class if that is what you want is overall equity.

Ben (01:03:25):

Yes. So we mentioned it depends what KPI you want and there's all of these caveats. There's no golden rule for everything. But that's really interesting. So the deficit for high attainment students is not that much and maybe might be overcome if you are aware of it to compensate for that. But obviously if you're looking—Particularly, say you take a utilitarian value, expected value per student in a mixed class you're saying would be higher than the two separate given that you'll have to teach them all at any point.

Jade (01:03:57):

Yeah. I think there are also different skills that the higher attaining students can get within a class. It's not that they're just sitting there bored and thinking, "I've done this Maths already." You have to be quite creative with that in terms of you would get that student to then explain to another student, "This student doesn't know how to do it. Can you teach them how to do it?" Then that's really getting that student to learn a whole new set of skills. Obviously it's not teaching them algebra in a fractions lesson, but it's teaching them leadership skills and empathy for other students.

Ben (01:04:33):

Yeah. Well, regardless of those which I think are really strong; empathy, leadership, how to teach. I actually always learn something when I try and teach something even if I do know it really well. Actually, when you try and teach it, it's kind of like, "Oh, well I understand it like this. But they obviously understand it like that in order to do that." That's really interesting. And so in general, would you say it's true? I think there's an expression, "Antelopes like running with the faster antelopes. You run faster with the herd." So you're kind of saying as long as there aren't huge differences in the herd that's probably true. That at least in primary, people like running with the herd and so if you run faster with that-- I guess it's true in running groups. You kind of have a pacemaker and you run with a group and it drags the middle and the less pacey people along.

Jade (01:05:25):

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Ben (01:05:28):

Okay. I guess two or three other things would be uniforms. Are we neutral, underrated, overrated? They don't really make a difference? Seems to be very heated. I don't know whether it makes as big a difference as it does, but maybe sometimes it does.

Jade (01:05:43):

Certainly in primary school I really agree with uniforms. In general I agree with uniforms actually. I think maybe less so in secondary schools because children are more keen to express their individuality. I have to say primary school kids aren't that keen to express their individuality. They are much more concerned about fitting in and looking the same and I think that's very natural. I think also children at that age have so much to worry about already. I mean, they're learning how to manage relationships for the first time, their teeth are falling out. Why give them a worry about what they look like and what clothes they have to wear every day? Teaching them how to judge other people on their socioeconomic status by what they're wearing? It just seems so irrelevant when they're that young. I think they have the rest of their lives to be judging people on what they wear and worrying about the clothes they wear. I don't think they need to be exposed to that on a daily basis at primary school.

Ben (01:06:57):

Interesting. I hadn't thought of that as clearly that there is. That they've got so many other things to worry about taking that. I do think that's one of the reasons that actually boys have it slightly easier in the city and financial services. At least until recently, you didn't really have to think about what you wore. You have a sort of uniform, right? Shirt/ tie, now, no tie, suits. Then regardless of any other things like makeup, you just don't have to think so much. So you just put that on, you can do enough and you're out. Whereas women obviously have a more complex uniform in general; call it uniform fashion. Do you think also then out of uniform…? So if you're not in uniform, even in primary, it seems to be that girls cue onto this a little bit sooner. Again, this is average, there's lots of exceptions. But then that gives them a higher burden because they're a little bit more worried about what they're wearing already at that stage, although I can see it definitely in some boys as well. But it would seem to me on equity grounds as well, it seems to remove one more thing on that line of argument.

Jade (01:08:00):

Yeah, definitely. I think it just makes it easier for all children to be able to fit in at school. I don't think primary school encourages children to be hugely individual.

Ben (01:08:28):

At least not through clothing.

Jade (01:08:30):

Oh yeah, definitely not through clothing. But they are expected to conform in so many ways. It's almost teaching them the rules first so then they can break them later. I don't think that primary school children should be expected to already be trying to break the rules. They're literally just learning the rules of the game.

Ben (01:08:52):

Sure, that makes sense. So maybe the arguments are a little bit weaker in secondary, but depending on the circumstances you'd maybe be pro that. On secondary, although there's a stronger argument maybe for individualism. It's interesting because you probably do get exceptional primary school children and then a little bit more in secondary where that urge to express that individualism is so strong that they're really great against those, but it does seem to be rarer. But you see them and actually, I see them. I'm close to what we might call some of the homeschool community and some have ended up there. But just because these rules or whatever they are, that institution as you said right at the beginning is just something which doesn't fit them. But that seems to be a structural fit issue when you do have children like that. That might be accommodating a minority as opposed to a majority.

Jade (01:09:48):

Yeah. Generally when I have come across students that want to express their individuality in primary school, it's generally not how they look. They generally don't want to express themselves through how they look. I see it more through behavior and more through the stories they write, the art they produce. The sort of creative academic outlets I see it much more. I sort of see these signs and I think, "Okay, that child is probably going to dress different in secondary school, but right now that hasn't expressed itself yet. I think the first things that they express is actually more in their writing and their behavior.

Ben (01:10:31):

Okay. That's really interesting. Great. So we've done that. Overrated, underrated then on Physical Exercise or PE?

Jade (01:10:44):

I think PE is hugely important. I think it's tough in the city London schools to find the space to do PE. I say that, but then there are so many things you can do that you don't need a lot of space for like dance or things like that. All the kids love playing football on the playground and things like that. But I think it's really, really important. I think just in general-- not just for PE but just in general-- I feel like one of the best things that primary school education gives you is hopefully to give you a love of education. For me, I obviously want my class to be able to read, write, and do basic Maths when they leave school. But one of my biggest things is I really want them to leave school enjoying learning and not thinking about school as a chore, or really wanting to learn and giving them that zest for education and asking questions.

Ben (01:11:50):

That seems fair. School start times? So there's an argument within secondary that they're too early; I think weaker argument within primary. But maybe a little bit more time for teachers to prepare and maybe go into later in the day. On the continent they tend to start earlier but then they finish much earlier. So any view on school start times?

Jade (01:12:12):

I agree definitely for secondary school start times are too early because the circadian rhythm of a teenager is they wake up much later. Their circadian rhythm is they wake up later and they go to bed later and I think we as an education system need to respond to that because it seems ridiculous that they're coming into school so tired yet still staying up really late at night. I think for primary school students, that's not really the case. Actually, the children are the most responsive in the mornings before lunch. As a primary school teacher you'll always put your Maths and English lessons in the morning and then your more fun, more creative things in the afternoon like DT, Art, PE in the afternoon when they have a bit less energy. So I would say primary school start times are fine as they are.

Ben (01:13:19):

That's really interesting. I had sort of heard that. It seems to be a real consensus on secondary school that basically post puberty you should be much later. It's really interesting when I hear that from teachers and academics and then obviously it's based on the biology when you've got such a strong consensus and the system can't move there. I mean, there's a handful of schools who have set their ability and you can do it. And where it's most studied, I think in the US, where because they can drive from late teen, they show that states or little districts which have moved later have many fewer accidents because the teenagers who drive to school aren't so tired and that. So when they drive they're having many fewer accidents as well as everything else. But it's very obvious that that's an effect and still seems very difficult to implement which I guess is the downside of old institutions. Although if you were to implement it, then you could get it better on the institutional bit. Okay, last one on the school things; school meals. Are they good, bad? Should they be better? Should we be investing in them more? Are they overrated, underrated?

Jade (01:14:29):

Oh my gosh. All the state schools I have observed and visited the food has been so bad. Honestly, terrible. It was chips and beans. It was really, really bad. I really like eating vegetables and I just couldn't get any. It was all refined carbohydrates. Overall, the ones I've seen do make an effort to reduce the amount of salt they add to the food and reduce the amount of sugar. But that means that you're left with super tasteless food as well as it being very carb heavy. I think that's a response to children's pallets as well, that they like quite plain food as well. So obviously nothing spicy. I feel for state school caterers though because they have a really tight budget...

Ben (01:15:31):

Like 50 p or a pound or something?

Jade (01:15:34):

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I know their budget is so tight and they're trying to feed so many children with so many diverse eating requirements. So obviously if a child has an allergy to anything, they basically have to cut that food out of almost all of the food within the school. I mean, certainly every school I've been to have been a no nut school so nuts are completely out. Some students have a really severe allergy to quite a specific vegetable. They'll just cut that whole vegetable out of any school meal for the whole school just to reduce the risk. But also it just makes catering a lot easier for them as well. And if they're on such a tight budget as it is, you can't really blame them.

We do try and teach healthy eating and a balanced diet within schools, but I don't really see that quite so much in terms of the school meals that are offered. There's always a salad bar that'll be offered with little chunks of cucumber and a few lettuce leaves and things. But I have to say the students hardly ever help themselves to that part of the meal. So yeah, they're kind of catering to what the students will be helping themselves to and eating and also the options. But then comparing it to-- This is a big thing you would get with a private school, the food is much better. Just in the private school and the experience when I was at school, there'll be great salads, really interesting roasted vegetables. The food is a lot better. I think that's probably a big part of what you're paying for as a private school parent.

Ben (01:17:30):

That’s actually a recent change. I remember the early 1990s private school food wasn't that good and then that was a...

Jade (01:17:39):

Even in comparison to state school food?

Ben (01:17:41):

I don't know in comparison. It probably was a little bit, they were both really awful. But then food awareness really started kicking in a lot with it. You had celebrity chefs that started and there was a huge outcry. I remember in many private schools once parents found how much was being spent on the food-- and it was still a low amount. I remember it's kind of like one or two pounds. You couldn't even quite buy a sandwich regardless of inflation. So there's this outcry so food started to uniformly increase. At least these are from London private schools which is my experience from what I know. But then that's kept today there does seem to be a more-- I guess up to a certain level there's quite a direct correlation between how much you spend on food and what food you get although you can be very creative. When you're creative with cheaper foods you need to spend more time and also your time constraint within schools. Okay. So maybe last question on the school thing and then a couple to wrap up on. So on the school one is, have you been asked or what are the most awkward questions you've been asked? Maybe this is a segue and loop around with during pandemic or post pandemic. Do primary school children ever ask about death or around that or illness and things like that?

Jade (01:19:08):

Yeah, they do. I mean, certainly over Covid I knew of a few students whose parents passed away. I don't know whether it's Covid related. But obviously the staff body is made aware so we can keep an extra close eye on that student and check in on the family as well. I'm not sure how big of a topic it is discussed. I think it deeply scares primary school students that it's not really a topic that's discussed very much because it is quite a scary thought. I mean, depending on what age within primary school. Certainly my year four class were very aware of death and what that meant and were very sensitive to other students in class that were grieving.

But I don't think it's a topic that is discussed. I wanted to share with my class parts of my experience of when my mom passed away and how I felt because I knew there was a student in my class that had lost a parent. Actually, I knew there were multiple students in my class that had lost parents. It was a PSHE class so I wanted to make sure that they felt like I was sharing as well as asking them to share with us. I mean, obviously it wasn't asking individuals to share, but just in general we were in on that topic. I shared with them the experience of my mom dying and things like that and I have to say I just felt fear from them actually. There wasn't a huge curiosity. I think they were too scared to ask questions not necessarily because it would hurt-- Well, maybe because they were worried it would hurt my feelings. But I think they didn't even want to think about it.

Ben (01:21:40):

That's interesting. As you know, we've had some conversations around being the phrase, "Is death positive?" Children might be different. In general society, we don't talk about death or grief enough given its importance. Also, compared to 50 or a hundred years ago or else in different societies. But the studies I've seen have suggested now in western societies children understand the concept of death around the ages of seven-ish. So that's sort of towards primary. But actually in what we'd call these emerging market nations and not the western nations, it happens earlier because they're surrounded by it. There's some evidence that 50 or a hundred years ago it also happened earlier because the stats you have in like 1900, 50% of children under the age of five wouldn't survive. So it would be very common to see it. It was just much more talked about it around then. So I do think that is something that we don't fully appreciate and actually that children do just-- They know a lot, they ask a lot. Your point about fear, that there are certain things that maybe we need to help them not be as fearful about if there's no good reason to be fearful. Death is obviously a little bit of a complex topic. I don't know whether you'd want to have any final reflections on how your mum have influenced you into teaching or how it made you reflect or what death has meant in your own life.

Jade (01:23:26):

Yeah. I think it's about being present in so many senses of the word to really appreciate or try and appreciate every day that you have and be present in a sense. I try not to eat with my mobile phone; in that sense. If I'm having a meal with somebody, to really try and be present for them and appreciate that moment. I love being a teacher and I really enjoy working with children and it feels great to be doing a job that I wake up every day and I'm interested in. I'm thinking about afterwards, "How could I have made that better?" I think maybe to find that in your life, to find something that you want to get up every day and do is really important. I hadn't really experienced a career before recently that I enjoyed. I didn't even think that that was a possibility because everyone talks about, "A job is a job and ultimately you're going to be doing the same thing and a lot of it is repetition and you're kind of doing it to get paid," which I do agree to a certain extent. But there's a gradient of that and I guess really getting to know yourself and finding out what you want to do.

Ben (01:25:11):

So that's a little bit of-- The aphorism is, "Find a job you love and never work a day in your life." It's probably a little bit extreme, but towards that you can be content.

Jade (01:25:21):

Yeah, definitely. It's about finding contentment. I knew mom always wanted me to be happy more than anything else. So yeah, kind of finding ways to make myself happy.

Ben (01:25:40):

Great. Would you like to share any final life advice or that does seem to be pretty good which is find something to be content with?

Jade (01:25:51):

Yeah. I would say being present, appreciating... I think also being grateful for what you have. Really feeling and expressing gratitude is really, really important. I try to teach my class that.

Ben (01:26:06):

Do they keep gratitude journals? I'm always keen on data and the science has a quite strong science behind it that it makes people happier.

Jade (01:26:15):

Yeah, I've read about that as well. Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In,” she talks a lot about a way that she overcame her grief for her loss of her husband was doing a gratitude diary or every day writing three things she was grateful for. I definitely try to do that because there is a lot to be grateful for.

Ben (01:26:38):

Great.

Jade (01:26:39):

You can always find something.

Ben (01:26:40):

Well Jade, you strike me as an awesome and brilliant teacher who is going to go on and you have many great ideas. So I hope you go on and do much more teaching and get promoted and make a real big difference which you seem to be doing. So Jade, thank you very much.

Jade (01:26:55):

Thank you. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for chatting with me.

Kanjun Qiu: AI, metascience, institutional knowledge, trauma models, creativity and dance | Podcast

Kanjun is co-founder and CEO of Generally Intelligent, an AI research company. She works on metascience ideas often with Michael Nielsen, a previous podcast guest. She’s a VC investor and co-hosts her own podcast for Generally Intelligent. She is part of building the Neighborhood, which is intergenerational campus in a square mile of central San Francisco. Generally Intelligent (as of podcast date ) are looking for great talent looking to work on AI.

We get a little nerdy on the podcast but we cover AI thinking, fears on rogue AI, and the breakthroughs of Chat AI. We discuss some of her latest ideas in meta science based on the work she has done with Michael Nielsen (previous podcast here) and what are the important questions we should be looking at.

We chat about the challenge of old institutions,  the value of dance and creativity and why her friends use “to kanjun” as a verb.

We cover her ideas on models of trauma and why EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy) and cognitive therapies might work.

We discuss why dinosaurs didn’t develop more.

We chat around “what is meaning” and “what is the structure of knowledge”, what are the strengths and weakness of old institutions; culture vs knowledge vs history  and other confusing questions.

Kanjun gives her advice on how to think about dance (dance like you are moving through molasses).

Dance is inside of you. It just needs to be unlocked.

We play underrated/overrated on:  having agency, city planning, death of institutions, innovation agencies, high frequency trading; diversity

Kanjun thinks on how capitalism might want to be augmented and what excites Kanjun about AI and complex systems.

Kanjun asks me questions and I offer my critique on Effective Altruism. (Although Tyler Cowen more recently (link here Dec 2022) and philosopher Larry Temkin (podcast link here mid 2022) have deeper comments on this.

This is quirky long form conversation on a range of fascinating topics.

Available wherever you get podcasts. Video above and transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript (only lightly edited)

I am super excited to be speaking to Kanjun Qiu. Kanjun is co-founder and CEO of Generally Intelligent, an AI research company. She works on meta science ideas often with Michael Nielsen, a previous podcast guest. She's a VC investor and co-host her own podcast for Generally Intelligent. She's part of building the Neighborhood which is an intergenerational campus in the square mile of central San Francisco. And she is all round amazing. Kanjun, welcome.

Kanjun (00:30):

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.

Ben (00:33):

Everyone is talking about OpenAI's, chatbot, ChatGPT. The bot has some major flaws but can also produce some amazing writing and code. You can add on top of that the recent advances in AI art generation also via open AI or stable diffusion. And then other more technical advances such as DeepMind and protein folding and the like. I'd be interested what do you make of the current state of AI? Where do you see perhaps AI language going and where does Generally Intelligent and its own mission fit into this ecosystem?

Kanjun (01:10):

Yeah. It's a good time to be asking this question because I think when I first started Generally Intelligent with Josh, my co-founder, a few years ago we definitely didn't expect things to go this fast. I mean, we expected things to go quite fast. But I think this is faster in terms of progress than we've ever seen. It's really exciting and a little bit scary. We can get into the safety stuff later. But I think ChatGPT is something we've kind of roughly known would be coming for a while. But what's really remarkable about it is that you change the interface from something that's a freeform, unconstrained, humans have to prompt into an interface that's a chat interface and suddenly tons of people figure out how to do much more creative things.

Something I've been thinking about is like the Xerox PARC component of AI where we have all of this interesting development in capability. So one question is, "Okay, what are the interfaces that might allow humans to be able to get a lot more out of even existing models?" In terms of where models are going, I think-- At Generally Intelligent, we work on building general purpose agents that can be safely deployed in the real world. I think we kind of timed it well. We think we will have general purpose agents that can be hopefully safely deployed in the real world in the not too distant future.

So I can go into kind of our focus really is about studying generalization and reinforcement learning and how these models are able to generalize. And whether we can get a better, clearer theoretical understanding of how to construct these models in a way that is more predictive. Like, can we know ahead of time given this training data, these parameters, this training procedure, this type of model that you'll end up with a model that has these behaviors? So that really is the kind of hope. It’s that we can get to something that is more controllable. It's kind of like building bridges or nuclear power plants. Neither of these things is exactly safe, but we've made them safe because we understand how they work. So I think the same thing has to be true of neural networks.

Ben (03:38):

And so for a person outside the tech world or even outside the AI world, what do you think is most misunderstood about where we are with AI? So one impression I have is what you alluded to; it has gone a lot quicker than expected. Another element we can segue into the sort of rogue powerful AI, the so-called alignment problem on safety which I think the person in the street is generally not something which comes across their minds. And obviously there's a lot of strange and detailed technical elements to some of this. But I'd be interested in what you think is perhaps most misunderstood when you speak to the person in the street.

Kanjun (04:18):

I have a few. One is we tend to use words that we use to describe humans in order to describe AI. For example, the word 'understand.' So when I talk about whether or not a human understands something, I'm kind of referring to a mental process in their head that I have some sense of like, “It happens in my head too." So I have some model of what's going on in their head. A lot of people they say, "Oh, these models are just statistical. They don't really understand anything." In some sense that's true. Certainly they're not understanding in the way that humans are understanding. They don't have the same mental process in their head as we have in our head. But I think that is maybe foolish to expect these models to have the same mental processes and to say, "Okay, unless they have the same mental processes as humans, they can't be intelligent or capable and be able to do things that humans can do." So I think just being careful about using human descriptors to describe these models as a way to say, "They can't do X because they're not like humans in X." What else is misunderstood?

I think on the flip side some people say, "Oh, we already have something that's general. Everything is solved." I think that's probably not true. It seems like as we scale up models that we get a lot more capabilities for free. I think if you ask any researcher in the field, there are few results remaining towards something that's a lot more general.

Ben (06:08):

That makes a lot of sense. I think that initial observation you make about how we humanize things has been quite a human trend for a long time. So we humanize trees and we have already done the whole religions and cultures around that. So I can understand why we would do it with AI. But perhaps it's the same mistake to think that trees are like humans. It could be a similar type of thing. How worried are you about the alignment problem and rogue AI? AI safety is how real a thing that we should be working on? There's some people who are kind of dedicating their whole careers to it and others who seem quite blasé and just say, "Look, this is seemingly a human construct." Is there a small but real risk or is it overstated?

Kanjun (07:00):

I think the risk is that we don't know. I don't know, none of us really know how these models are going to evolve, what kind of capabilities they're going to express. The issue with complex systems-- and I would say neural network is a complex system, is that they end up with emergent behavior. So will they end up with behavior where they're trying to deceive us at some point? Maybe. It's hard to say, "No, absolutely they're not going to do that." So you can kind of construct the problem in ways where you can study whether or not they're likely to end up having that behavior. And I think it's really good for people to study.

Ben (07:42):

I guess that makes sense because I'm never quite sure how much we really understand the brain itself. Like maybe below 50%, maybe even as little as 10 or 20%. I'm going to segue into something which I've been reading. Some work that you've done and something which isn't very well understood in the world which I guess is around trauma or anxiety. I'm interested in neural networks and how the brain thinks of it because we don't really understand it. I'm particularly interested in this technique called EMDR which works on eye movement and it essentially seems to have a reprogramming effect. It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. If you look at controlled trials, it really seems to work for some people. Not everyone, but actually pretty good results in trauma and things like that. Quite a lot of neuroscience, we don't really know how it works. So I'd be interested in what you think AI or neural networks or this has perhaps told us about trauma or anxiety or the brain, and maybe vice versa in terms of maybe some learnings or thoughts you have about how it might be helpful or not in this kind of area.

Kanjun (09:01):

Yeah. So get ready for the rabbit hole. I have a bunch of thoughts on trauma. I think maybe the kind of core idea is-- and I'll write an essay on this at some point. This idea that trauma is overfitting and therapy is actually a process of retraining. So let me give some examples. I've done a ton of therapy on myself, I think. I grew up in China. I moved here when I was six by myself. My parents had moved here when I was much younger. I had a lot of abandonment issues that resulted in all sorts of weird behaviors that were not well suited to my current environment. Those behaviors were rooted in fear. I think basically young children copy a lot of beliefs from our caretakers, and in particular we copy beliefs where our caretakers are scared.

The theory behind social copying like this is that copying is a really efficient pre-filter on potential beliefs or potential behaviors because presumably other people around you have those beliefs and behaviors because they're adaptive. That's kind of one theory why we copy so much. So we copy all of this into our brains and so now we have all these fears that our parents and grandparents and family have. I had internalized a lot of those fears. We call something trauma for really two reasons. One is something that seems really bad happened. That's kind of the medical term of trauma. But I want to use trauma to refer to this other phenomenon where we call it trauma when it doesn't seem like it's well suited to our daily life or our current life.

So post-traumatic stress disorder is a trauma and PTSD is fine if you're at war. You do actually want to be super jumpy and really careful about whether or not a shell is coming. But then you migrate back into the real world which is out of the data distribution of the environment you were just in and now you're out of distribution. So you've been overfit to the previous environment-- and I'm abusing some terms here, but now you're not generalizing to this new environment that you're in. I think this is true of most people. We don't actually generalize that well from childhood to adulthood. We freeze a lot of these old beliefs because they're adaptive and in an environment that is much more dangerous than our current environment that worked really well. But our current life, this environment is quite safe and having these fears is actually not very useful and causes a lot of maladaptive behavior. And so trauma is overfitting.

So therapy is retraining. I think what I've observed in therapy is that there are really three processes going on. There is the process of activating or accessing a network; a sub network of some sort. There's the process of giving it new training data from your current life and then there's the process of updating it. So actually having that memory reconsolidation process happen. It seems to me that all therapy techniques are good at one to three of these three elements of retraining. So EMDR as you mentioned is actually quite good at all three. I think that's part of why it's so effective. It's that with EMDR, you are flicking your eyes back and forth or you're doing this bilateral tapping where you're tapping different sides of your body. Somehow that seems to reduce fear response so that you can more easily access a network.

EMDR I would say the places where it's not as effective is in giving your mind new training data from your modern day. Your therapist actually has to prompt you to do that. So if you're working with a therapist who doesn't understand this frame of, "Okay, now you need to see how this old memory is not adaptive and you can update it." If your therapist is not doing that, if they're not giving you training data from your modern day then you may not see updating. And so that might be why. I've done EMDR on a lot of people and it seems fairly consistently if you do show them the training data and their modern life is good, then they'll update.

Ben (13:23):

This is fascinating to know and also that's a sort of learning that you get from understanding ideas of neural networks and training data. It might in some ways bring us closer to some animal behavior type model. But I hadn't heard it articulated that way and also makes sense of why some of these things may fail or not.

Kanjun (13:44):

I kind of have this whole theory of why therapies work or don't work because I've experimented so much on myself and designed new techniques combining existing ones because they're not all good at all three things. So cognitive behavioral therapy is fantastic at getting new training data from your modern day because it's asking you things like, "What are the costs of what you're doing or what are the costs of that belief?" So it's basically a data accumulation mechanism. You can acquire more data using CBT procedures. But it's not very good at accessing these very old beliefs. The kind of complaint about CBT is that it often works at the surface level where it's actually really hard to get to these deep old beliefs. And then it's pretty good at helping you update. Has a bunch of different methods to help you update.

Like, you write down on the costs, you look at the list of costs, you implement habits into your life, et cetera. So that's particularly good for getting training data but it's not good for access. Now you look at something like Internal Family Systems where you're talking to different parts inside your body and these different parts are kind of-- The way I think about it is they're like old memories that are stored. IFS is really good for access. The whole point is that you're accessing some of these parts and able to go into them, but it's not very good at getting training data from your modern day. So often people do IFS, they go into those parts and if they're not prompted properly or they haven't prepared their conscious mind with new beliefs from today, then they'll just believe whatever that part is believing. They'll believe like, "Oh, I'm three years old and I'm really scared and it's good to be scared." And you're like, "Well actually no. You're not three years old anymore." You kind of have to bring them out of that purposefully.

So combining IFS and CBT or somatic therapy and CBT, these are effective methods. It makes a therapy method much more effective. I think this framework actually makes therapy debuggable. So if a person is for some reason not able to update a situation that they're feeling frustrated by you can kind of say, "Okay, well is the problem in access? Is it in training data or is it in updating?" There are techniques that you can combine to get all three to happen. Then to your point about neural networks and how that influence the mind, I think basically both neural networks and the mind are learning systems. And learning systems-- like modeling systems have some shared properties. So overfitting is one of them.

Ben (16:33):

That's amazing. So you definitely have to write that as an essay. It sounds like you should actually have a whole new startup investigating that. You may not get to AGI, but you solved the therapy problem which seems to me almost as great.

Kanjun (16:50):

Actually, I think an important part of safety is figuring out what values to align to. So understanding humans is an important part of that.

Ben (16:59):

Exactly. It leads me to think that... Do you think animals go through trauma then? Some form?

Kanjun (17:06):

Almost certainly. Yeah. So you'll see some dogs were abused when they were young or by a previous owner and then now they're really jumpy even though they're with a new owner. So these learning systems update very conservatively in humans and living creatures which makes sense because the real world is fairly unforgiving. If you update too quickly, then you might die.

Ben (17:32):

Sure. So this is the paired learning response. It's really strong. Okay. So a slight left field pivot then is, do you think dinosaurs felt trauma?

Kanjun (17:44):

Almost certainly. Again, it's a learning system. Unless dinosaurs never learned anything new, that's plausible, but unlikely.

Ben (17:56):

That's quite a good one because you have a question on your website which you posed which I guess we have no answer, which is they existed for 165 million years or so, give or take, and they did not seem to advance to the levels that we seem to advance to. But obviously they seemed to felt trauma and they have some of these learning mechanisms. I guess we can just extend this to other animals which have been around for a long time. Maybe you could do mammals like rats or you could do insects as well. What's your current thinking on this?

Kanjun (18:30):

So the question is basically-- I was reading a lot about dinosaurs and I was like, "Why is it that for hundreds of millions of years we had these creatures that evolved a little bit but didn't seem to improve dramatically or change dramatically? And then versus in the last like 1 million years or 2 million years on earth, we have had this crazy exponential change in the nature of intelligence of animals on this planet. Is there something that causes this kind of change in evolution?” My current best hypothesis is environment constraints force evolution of new skills or capabilities. So basically you want to be in an environment where intelligence is rewarded. If the environment is too abundant-- which at that time there was a lot of oxygen in the air. Maybe it was very abundant in terms of an environment, in terms of food. If the environment's too abundant, there's no benefit to being smarter. And so here now today, the environment's not as abundant-- I think, we think. I'm not sure, no one knows. But if that were true, then constraints, maybe.

Ben (19:46):

Yeah. Okay. I like that theory. I got one slightly downstream for that which is dinosaurs didn't have hands as much. I think the second thing which comes alongside is language. And that didn't develop. But why didn't those things develop? There is some evidence or there’s some theories that the human animal or something like that was forced to-- for instance in ice ages or when there was scarcity-- to develop these things to survive. Therefore that would happen with a bit of luck. So they kind of intertwine. I guess the follow one from that though is I was pondering when you go back just a little bit in time I guess on this time scale to the Romans and the Greeks, why did they not invent more advances than we have today? They certainly seem to have some of the capabilities-- and they did invent some things like Roman cement which we still can't seem to copy which seems to be a really good material.

But they didn't invent some of those things. You can see this is going to segue into meta science at a point because they also didn't invent some things which didn't really need other types of technology. The one I always think about is the randomized control trial. So you test one arm and you test another arm and you compare them. That didn't need any extra science and certainly they had seemingly the capabilities of it. In fact, you could have gone back 2000 years earlier and they would've had the capabilities of that. But it didn't develop, or maybe it did and it just didn't hold which is also kind of interesting. Have you ever thought about that? Why did Greek and...

Kanjun (21:28):

Yeah. I thought about it. Quite a lot.

Ben (21:31):

Is that essentially a meta science question? Because some of these ideas like randomized control trial or how they did it wasn't holding and so it didn't transmit.

Kanjun (21:41):

Right. So I'll talk about randomized control trials first and then we can go to the tie to evolution. So I think randomized control trials, the reason we have them now is because we have the statistics, the mathematical foundation to be able to evaluate these two groups. Are they actually the same or not the same? I tried this trial. I randomized one is the control group and one is the test group. Did the test group outperform the control group? There are a lot of statistical techniques that are needed to really understand that question. So I could see that maybe they would have done randomized control trials for really small effects a long time ago, but that maybe it's not very deterministic. You get some people in this scoop, it works and some people in this other group, it works. Then they might throw up their arms and be like, "I don't know what to conclude about this." So I could see the reason RCTs didn't exist before is because we didn't have the mathematical foundation to be able to look at the results and say something about it and get information out of it. And I think that's true.

Ben (22:50):

Geometry which I find a lot harder, but maybe that's just me. Euclid invented geometry which seems to be quite harder than the stats behind certain RCTs. But it's true. They hadn't seemingly invented the stats. But I'm not sure- Like the ability to see that.

Kanjun (23:11):

Trigonometry doesn't build on so many other fields of mathematics whereas statistics does. But I kind of back to the question of, "Why did Romans and Greeks not-- their civilization didn't accumulate in the way that ours does technologically?" I think it actually comes back to this process of variation and selection which is true in evolution and also true in science. So in evolution we were just talking about constraints. I think the reason why constraints are interesting is because in evolution you're varying, you're doing a lot of variation. Then what the constraints do is they enable selection. The tougher the constraints are, the narrower the selection is. In science at that time in the Roman and Greek era, maybe a way that people thought about knowledge is that knowledge maybe came more from authorities.

There is not this idea of evidence being a thing. So it was not until the royal society in the 1600s, I think, that they had this model; nullius in verba, which means take no one's word for it. Which means that before that model, people took other people's word for it. So people weren't varying and evaluating ideas and they weren't able to test and select new ideas to adopt as a culture. So the church had some top-down ideas-- many of which were wrong, and so no one was able to change them. But now we have this process of science is quite remarkable. In the ideas of science we can-- Any grad student if they're more correct than a Nobel Prize winner, the field actually acknowledges that they're more correct. So this is quite a remarkable thing to be able to have the ideas change not from the establishment, the authority, but from the outside; from people with no authority at all.

Ben (25:22):

It can take them some time but it does eventually happen. I think about ulcers and how they figured that out, but they weren't believed for some time. But eventually the science does seem to win out which like you mentioned is a kind of remarkable thing.

Kanjun (25:40):

Actually, in some fields it happens really quickly. Like in physics, there's this idea of superconductivity where Brian Josephson was this 22 year old and he had published this work on Superconductivity. John Bardeen who's the only person who has ever won two Nobel prizes said like, "No, you're totally wrong." People pretty quickly realized Bardeen was wrong and Josephson, the 22 year old was right. And the physics community pretty quickly, I think, came to this conclusion. So it's not true in all communities. Some communities rely a bit little bit more on authority, but happens sometimes.

Ben (26:21):

Isn't that true about-- was it Linus Pauling and DNA as well?

Kanjun (26:24):

Right. Pauling was wrong.

Ben (26:27):

He was wrong and he admitted it quite quickly and so did the community. And said, "Look, this is obviously right." So I think that's true as well. You speaking about the fields of mathematics in ancient Greek and all of these other fields leads me to something. So I've just been reading it in the last couple of days and I believe you were part of this conversation as well as actually a ChatGPT. And that was Michael Nielsen's recent notes on the ideas of fields or communities as a unit of advancing progress or thinking about progress. I thought this was a really interesting idea. This is reflecting on the fact that you said stats has to build on quite a lot of other fields, whereas some fields may just develop out of not quite nowhere, but may not have to build on so many other things.

I think of this in creative literature art fields and performing art fields. To what extent are you building on what goes before or to what extent do you take from a whole sideways field and make a kind of new field of it? It seems to me that actually that is one interesting way of thinking about how advanced we are, and that actually now that any individual human will find it very difficult to even have a surface knowledge of all of the fields, and certainly not an in-depth knowledge of maybe more than 5, 10 or 20 of which something like an AI could start to do. So I was interested in what you think about fields as a unit and therefore AI or some development putting these fields together to then create new fields, is maybe one of the key questions that we should look at.

Kanjun (28:12):

Yeah. I'm actually quite confused about the-- I think the underlying question here is kind of like, "What is the structure of knowledge? Or something like that. There's this one model of knowledge as being a thing that is like a tower block. You've got some blocks at the bottom and then you put some... This is not a good analogy. There's maybe a better analogy. Like a computer program where you're calling a lot of previous functions. So like you have a function that calls another function, and that function calls an older function, and that function calls an older function, and each of those functions is like a discovery. So there's that model where by definition, the outermost function is dependent on all of these discoveries that came before it and can't be simplified. It has to call all of these preexisting functions. That's one model, but that model is not really true.

It often feels like when an idea is first developed in a new field, the person who developed it actually doesn't understand it as well as the people who follow them. So I think there was a Feynman quote that talked about how like-- or maybe a Hamming quote that talked about, "Einstein didn't understand his own ideas as well as the people who came after him." There's this kind of reconsolidation process where the understanding is simplified and it may be simplified even more. So it's no longer true that this function is dependent on all the previous discoveries. In fact, you might end up with a new fresh function that doesn't depend on any other previous discoveries and that still captures all of the information. So it's actually not clear to me that humans can't-- in some fields at least, that humans can't understand everything. Maybe the reason we can't understand it yet is because it's not yet simplified to its final form.

Ben (30:18):

I guess that might be true because I'm going to segue from creative arts as well, and that does seem to be true in creative arts. Although it's argued about, the very simplified precis is that you might have a play or a poem or whatever it is. The audience or later artists make much more of that creative work than the original creator. The original creator has obviously their view and vision and have that. But actually those who come after make it even so much more than what it was. It's actually out of the original creator's hands, and particularly once time has passed-- I guess you can think about this in Shakespeare today. Obviously, he had a view and we don't quite know what his view was on all of his work. But it has been taken to another level by so many more artists and creators. And actually, I think arguably is greater today than it was in his own time because of that. And actually that feels-- although it's still argued about, quite well established within art. That your creation is not just your own and that the very greatest creations become bigger than what the actual original creator think and might be interpreted more deeply than what the original creator can even think. Therefore, you actually aim [inaudible 31:30] who at the peak of their art will often slightly step away from commenting on what they think their art is because they realize that their answer may not be the best answer and actually might narrow the interpretation of what that might be by imposing this idea that the author knows best.

Kanjun (31:50):

That's really interesting. I'm really curious about this process. So here's what's happening. In your view, what's happening-- let's take Shakespeare. These people who have built upon it, is it that they've kind of added additional meaning to what-- They're interpreting it in different ways. And so a single sentence if you read it yourself might only have a little bit of meaning, but if you read it in the context of everyone else's interpretations, it has a lot more meaning. Is it that they've added more meaning? Or is it that the people who come after have found simplifying patterns in his work that mimic this reconsolidation process in science that I was talking about of ideas. What is it that's making it richer?

Ben (32:36):

So actually for the most complex work it's both elements. And I would actually add a third to segue into something like cave art. So cave art, we find new... Obviously, we don't actually even know the original creators of that art, whether they even viewed it as art. But obviously we find patterns now. So young children put their hands in the mud or in wet cement. And so we riff on the now of the culture and then obviously we will add our own meaning into what we see how in the now. Then because so many people have commented on cave art and made their own mud art and a kind of, I guess, a meta art sense from that, it's also made the whole field richer. So you've definitely got those elements and it added together. Then you've got people who draw on those various things to then create more meta pieces.

So it definitely builds that way as well as wide. I'm only thinking out loud. I'm sure there must be more, particularly in something as rich as Shakespeare because it then becomes so pivotal to other things and actually might segue into things like culture. So it's now a key element in how British people think about themselves. If it wasn't for Shakespeare, we wouldn't think the way we do, I'm pretty sure. Obviously that would be arguable. There's probably a PhD in that. And even, there are words and catchphrases from Shakespeare's plays which now have gone into different nations' vernaculars which didn't exist beforehand, but have also made alive something which was already there. But actually crystallized it potentially in a simplifying form or in some form that people get, "Yes, that is what that was about and that's what that phrase means."

Kanjun (34:28):

That's really interesting. Yeah. This is another thing I'm quite confused about which is, "What is meaning?" I think an interesting thought experiment that my co-founder, Josh, gave is. "Let's look up at the sky, pick any star, and let's imagine that a hundred thousand years from now humans or some descendant of humans live on that star." Now, we have two scenarios. In one scenario, they have no memory of earth or where they came from. They don't know how they ended up on that star, but they're there and they don't know anything about their history. In the other scenario they look up on the night sky and they point at earth and say, "Hey..." I mean, maybe they can't see Earth, but in this general direction. Like, "Hey, that's where we came from." There's like some merchant on that star that's like, "I know that my distant distant ancestors came from Earth." In one of those scenarios it feels like there's a lot more meaning. That merchant feels a lot deeper sense of meaning than in the other scenario where they're kind of disconnected from where they came from. I don't really understand why. Somehow meaning is tied to this sense of context and history and kind of where things came from and why they are the way they are. But I don't know what it is.

Ben (35:50):

I can't answer the why. I kind of almost obviously, or if I had, I would've made some genius breakthrough in the human condition, I guess. But it is definitely true. So you think about money or cultural symbolisms or particularly art. But say in your example of the star. Say I said, "Oh, I went onto the internet the other day and I sold Kanjun that star or one of these internet star nomination things and 10 million ancestors later, Kanjun's ancestors arrived on the star which supposedly she owned." Again, you would've imbued that with so much more meaning. Except in today's day and age, what does it mean selling someone a piece of paper saying, "You sponsored such and such a star?" There is no ownership in our legal culture of what that star might be.

That's actually why I am not so worried about what some people are worried about in terms of some aspects of AI generated art because-- I don't know what the portion is, but some significant portion of art is the value is in the so-called the eye of the beholder. So the meaning we give it and its time and place and things, and that's part of its value. Obviously that's part of the value in the techniques and everything which went into it which is obviously going to be different in AI art. But there's definitely this part that humans bring. This kind of human value part which is not seemingly part of the physics natural laws, but seems to be part of the human natural laws.

Kanjun (37:21):

Yeah.

Ben (37:22):

That's leads me to think then, what do you think out of all of the things you are confused about, interested in. What do you think are the most important questions in science or meta science that we should be seeking to understand at the moment?

Kanjun (37:38):

We wrote a whole essay on that.

Ben (37:43):

Glad you noticed.

Kanjun (37:47):

Yeah. Talking about the essay, I want to come back to this idea of meaning later because maybe we can riff on it.

Ben (37:52):

Yeah. Essay back to meaning. Something might...

Kanjun (37:57):

So talking about the meta science essay, originally some of the questions that motivated us were questions like, "Why is it that a refunder says they want to do high reward research and yet they end up doing relatively low risk incremental work; a kind of funding low risk incremental work? What is causing that?" Clearly there's an intention to do something different and yet every new funder kind of gets sucked back in into the existing ecosystem. They don't diverge very much from the existing processes and norms and results. So why? That's so weird, right? Isn't it weird that you try to do something totally different and you end up being exactly the same? In many fields that's not true. In art, if I try to do something totally different, presumably at some point I'll ended up with something totally different.

So that really was the beginning of us trying to understand like, "What is going on here? Why is it that we can't fund things in totally different ways?" There are lots of different kind of ideas expressed in the essay, but one of the ideas is this idea that the space of social processes of science is very underexplored in that most funders have very similar social processes to existing funders. Even if you start a new funder, you might still have peer review, you might still approve grants based on you don't anonymize the names or anything. You approve grants based on how good other people think those grants are. You approve them based on how successful they seem like they might be.

Michael in his head already had a giant list that I started to add to of potentially totally different programs that you could run as a funder. For example, high variance funding. You only fund things where the peer reviewers really disagree with each other or funding an open source institute. So this is something that typically wouldn't be considered science. But if you're a funder, you could fund a whole institute that's working on open source projects and that is an important infrastructure for science. I think at some point we talked about like a traveling institute of scientists where you go around the world... A young genius immigration program where you immigrate people into the country, find people across the world who seem like they might be really capable in some particular way. So it was like, "This is infinite." We just kept going. And so we were like, "Okay, well that's interesting." Eventually we found a frame for this which is the beginning of the essay which is, “Let's say you come across some aliens and they do science. Would those aliens have discovered mathematics?” Seems likely. “Would they have discovered atoms?” Unless we're totally wrong about atoms, seems likely. “But would they have PhD programs or tenure or...?”

Ben (41:21):

And have randomized controlled trials.

Kanjun (41:23):

They might have randomized controlled trials or we may discover that actually... One thing about RCT... Sorry, go ahead.

Ben (41:31):

We haven't discovered it.

Kanjun (41:34):

Well, one thing about RCTs that's interesting is that we only do RCTs in situations. We don't do RCTs in physics because we can understand mechanistically why the phenomenon is happening. We only do RCTs in situations where the situation is so complex we've kind of given up on mechanistically how to explain the result. And so we just kind of divide into two different camps and see which one is more probabilistically likely, which to me... Maybe it is a method that we'll always have because there are some things that are always beyond our understanding. But to me it's very unsatisfying.

Ben (42:16):

Yeah. I hadn't heard it described like that, but you're right. Complex sciences, biological sciences; anything to do with humans, so social sciences, that's true. I will try and say, so what do you think is the best idea? Or you can do both. What was the worst idea in your meta science paper? Because maybe that's the one we should go for on the grounds that actually it should be a lottery and you don't know. You might say there was also failure audit, 10 year insurance, you had your traveling scientists, you had long short prizes, anti-portfolio, interdisciplinary institute, you had the funder as detector, and you had a variety more. What's the thing which you just think was probably Michael's like, "Oh, that's just really awful but we should just keep it in there because you never know. It might be right." Or the otherwise like, "This is mine and this should be right at the top because the best idea in it." What do you think?

Kanjun (43:10):

Maybe I'll answer a slightly different question which is like, "What are the most interesting ideas?" And then...

Ben (43:19):

Or you could go, what's the most high risk idea? What's the idea most unlikely that anyone's going to go for, but probably is the one they want to try?

Kanjun (43:27):

Well, all of the ideas are a little bit out there. I think the most interesting ideas are a little bit less about the funding programs because those programs are just given as examples of underlying generating functions. What's much more interesting is looking at the generating functions. So we have this general idea of latent potential. As a funder you're assuming that you-- When you allocate money, you can give it to people where there's latent potential; where their potential is not yet unlocked by another funder or another way of doing discovery. So your goal should be to find latent potential. I think this is actually a relatively new idea. Most funders don't think about their job as finding latent potential. Just like in finance, your job is finding edge.

Also as a funder, your job is finding edge. You shouldn't be allocating more money. And it's not very effective, I guess, to allocate more money just where everyone is allocating money. So this idea of latent potential is kind of this core idea. Then we have all of these-- The way we got to a lot of this part of the essay is that we were trying to understand, “What are different ways of excavating latent potential? How do you find it?” So the anti-portfolio idea, for example, came from Bessemer Venture Partners, which has on their website a list of all of the great ideas that they missed. If a funder had a list of all the great ideas that they missed, the theory about latent potential here is that there's something in the incentives or motivation of the program manager or the people making the funding decisions that maybe is overly risk averse or doesn't have a feedback loop and there's latent potential in that feedback loop and in shifting that incentive structure.

I think maybe another idea that is on the list or we don't have is a Noble Prize for funders. Kind of gets at a similar generator of latent potential which is changing the way that the program manager is behaving. There's a totally different way of thinking about latent potential which is around how you might construct new fields or how might we 10x the rate of field production. So that is a question that generates a lot of potential program ideas. The community's idea maybe is one of them. I used to run this big group house and one idea I had was like, "What if you started lots of group houses and funded lots of group houses and just got interesting people to live in them?" You end up with these interesting communities where maybe that would increase the rate of field production. Or another thing is maybe there's a field shutdown process where at some point the field feels too incremental and you have to shuffle people into a different field. So you get cross-disciplinary work as well as this kind of death of fields and maybe that would result in new fields. There are lots of ideas for like, “Okay, if you think about this question, you'll end up with lots of different ideas.”

Ben (46:48):

Well, people should definitely read the essay, or rather, I like to say open source book.

Kanjun (46:53):

Right.

Ben (46:54):

I'm going to riff on two of those things. So one you mentioned laterally and we might come back to the Neighborhood idea as well. I think that's really interesting because surely what 10, 20, 30, 50, maybe even 80% of the value in universities is the social capital of bringing people together. Why not recreate that and see what happens? The other one you said is about investing edge because that's really interesting in financial markets. There is this school of thought where you should try and identify where you have skill and then play where you have skill and don't play where you don't have skill. This is true of a lot of sport and other games. Therefore even if you are lucky, it will have been viewed as a mistake if you played where you didn't have skill. And actually if you won, that is also judged to be a mistake. Whereas if you have skill and you played a good bet and it didn't go your way-- which markets happens a lot-- that is actually the correct process because you played where you had skill. Where you had edge, the edge didn't come off. I think this is very true of funders. They probably have idiosyncratic skill because it's a social science, but they probably do have that and then they should play to that and not where they feel they don't. I think that's a really...

Kanjun (48:14):

Every funder is started by a different person and that person has different networks, et cetera. So I think their edge could be different. They could end up investing in really different programs but they don't. Another idea that we don't talk about that much in the essay is this idea of institutional antibodies. So another reason why-- and this is the entire second part of the essay. It’s about kind of bottlenecks to change. “Why does change not happen? We have all these program ideas. We just came up with a hundred of them off the top of our heads. Why doesn't anyone do them? That's so strange." That really got into the second question of like, "Okay, well actually there are a lot of bottlenecks and one is institutional antibodies where you try to do something different and existing institutions actually lump asked you for it.” They really don't like that. There are reasons for it. One is maybe they feel threatened. Maybe Harvard feels threatened by a new funding institution. I think Harvard said something really negative about the Thiel Fellowship when it first came down because it was a threat. And by definition, if someone's finding edge somewhere else and it's a little bit competitive, it will be somewhat of a threat to some existing powerful institution.

Ben (49:29):

Don't we call those type of things-- So you call them antibodies. But it strikes me that what we're really talking about or what a layman might think about is culture or at least part of that culture. There's something interesting about institutions which have a very long history about the culture that they develop. I know you're very interested in institutions and culture broadly. So I guess my question is, is that one of the problems about old institutions is the way that culture has ossified whether it's competition or not. And therefore you need new institutions or maybe new arms of old institutions. And maybe you could potentially look at through the lens of, or you might want to comment on the culture that maybe you are trying to build at your firm or in startups in general because that seems to be potentially one of the competitive edges that startups have. It's that they don't have to deal with a legacy culture of whatever that might be. Except there's this observation that old institutions seemingly have this problem, this bottleneck which you see in funders. .

You can see in a lot of old institutions and in fact in startup language. Jeff Bezos calls companies on that. They’re two companies. He wants to be a day one company and he says, "You're day two company, you’re dead." That's another way of saying dead's probably slightly overused. But it's saying that your culture and everything is ossified and you can't do all of these things that you want to do for innovation startup. But it strikes me that that seemed to be a very human thing. On the other hand, cultural and institutional knowledge when you take the long cycle of history has been incredibly valuable for making progress, at least up until this point. So I'm not entirely sure that something about it has been preserved for very good reasons. So yeah, your thoughts on culture.

Kanjun (51:18):

A lot of thoughts on this. Okay, there are a few categories of thoughts. One is an idea of old institutions that's overfitting. Second is, I think the phenomenon of institutional antibodies is speaking to actually something broader than culture. The way I think about culture is culture is a set of beliefs held by the people in that culture, and it is also reinforced by a set of systems. So kind of just going back to the point of institution-- I think there was a third thing that you talked about around-- I forgot. Maybe we should cut out the...

Ben (52:11):

The history of culture also being important for traditional knowledge as well on that flip side. But knowledge over time.

Kanjun (52:20):

That's right. So knowledge versus culture and history. So I'll talk about the institutional antibodies thing first. I think that goes beyond just the beliefs. I think that's actually more about the competitive system dynamic. So it's about the broader ecosystem of institutions and what happens when there's a competitive dynamic in general. So whenever there's a competitive dynamic you're kind of taking away the power of an existing institution and that institution's going to retaliate because they're old. And part of why they're old and still exist is because they have some kind of power. So I think that's actually more of an institutional is an organism and that organism is being threatened and less about the culture of that institution in particular.

I think there are some environments like the startup environment-- and we were inspired a lot by the startup environment where threats happen all the time and the existing institutions retaliate but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that much. There are some mechanisms in place like antitrust that prevent existing institutions from retaliating too much. So some ecosystems of institutions like a startup ecosystem is relatively healthy because new institutions form all the time and old ones die when they need to die, and they don't die when they don't need to die, and you have kind of this outside party that enforces antitrust laws. So that's one way to-- That's kind of addressing the institutional antibodies is broader than the culture of the institution.

But now if we talk about institutional culture. I think your question is something like, "Why is it that existing institutions can't implement new ideas? Like the Harvard, Harvard can't implement the Thiel Fellowship." I think it's because basically these two institutions have beliefs that are directly in conflict with each other. So that's one reason why the existing institution can't do it. So Thiel Fellowship says, "University/ College is not useful for some people." And Harvard says, "I am a college, you should come. It's clearly useful for you.” They have this core underlying belief that just can't coexist. So in this case, it's really hard for those two beliefs to exist under the same institution unless you have two really different cultures.

Ben (55:04):

I get that. But Harvard, I guess could do a failure audit or a ten year insurance or high variance funding which also seems to be a bottleneck in this culture. But I can see sometimes you just can't take it on because it's not part of your set beliefs.

Kanjun (55:19):

Yeah. I think Harvard could do a lot of these other things. We'd love for them to do those things. We just feel like people have not been very imaginative in the types of things that they could try.

Ben (55:30):

Why do you think we've lacked imagination?

Kanjun (55:34):

I think it's not very safe.

Ben (55:38):

I guess that hearts back to culture. I understand your point about antibodies of maybe being wider, but I do wonder about this culture thing. You're not safe to have maverick ideas. Maybe they're maverick, maybe they're not even maverick. I'm jumping around, but I guess that leads me to think how you create a positive maverick then if you've got institutional antibodies as a problem. Maybe you've also got culture as a problem, although maybe you've got these new institutions. And you might-- I cut you off before thinking about the knowledge question as well. You can return to that one as well.

Kanjun (56:14):

That's okay. We'll come back to that one. So this problem of safety I think is really interesting both from an institutional perspective and an individual perspective. So humans, if we feel unsafe as individuals we won't take risks generally. There's some survival instinct that prevents us from doing that. Institutions, I think a lot of funders don't feel safe because their funding is coming from some outside party. It's coming from the government or it's coming from someone who's wealthy or someone else who wants to see success. They want to see that their funding is going to a good place. So as someone who runs a funding institution I would need to be like, "Okay, I need to be able to show success because I'm not the source of this funding." But if you see funders run by the high network individual-- For example, the Arnold Foundation who funded Brian Nozick, who started the Center for Open Science which we also talk about in the second part of our essay. Brian was rejected by the NSF-NIH. Literally everyone, I guess NSF, literally everyone rejected him for years until the Arnold Foundation found him.

And I think part of why Arnold Foundation was able to do something strange or fund something strange is because John Arnold was involved in it and he was the supplier of all the money so he felt very safe. When I interact with funders of different types where the source of their money is held by the decision makers versus not held by the decision makers, they actually end up behaving in really different ways. When a funder's money is held by the decision maker, then the funder takes a lot more risk because they feel safer. They can spend their own money however they want. They have no one to report to.

Ben (58:10):

That's really interesting. So slightly adjacent to that would suggest that you might believe in all of the work done on psychological safety which is work in teams. Google sponsored it for Amy Evan's work. So this idea that when you're feeling safe you will point out bad decisions and also venture more riskier, audible decisions. And when you're not, you don't point out something which you think is obviously bad because you're worried it sounds stupid. And also you don't take more risks in new ideas because you're just feeling not safe in your team.

Kanjun (58:42):

Yeah. I think psychological safety is really useful in situations where you want higher variants. You want people to take risks. And you may actually not want it in situations where you don't want people to take risks.

Ben (58:54):

Maybe. Although they also point out stupid things you're doing. So it's not just the risk side. That adds to your point. You've been doing it for 10 years and you get a new member of the team like, "Well, they've been doing it for 10 years," but obviously this way is better and then they don't suggest it. Somehow they think it's better. Another thing then is I observe a strong streak of creativity in your work and life. There's setting up a Neighborhood...

Kanjun (59:22):

Sorry, we haven't talked about knowledge yet.

Ben (59:25):

Okay. Let's go on knowledge and then we'll go-- Maybe knowledge into creativity is a good way of going. So holding knowledge...

Kanjun (59:30):

Okay. Yeah, we can do that.

Ben (59:32):

Holding knowledge on an institutional level. Or let's hold knowledge in and then see where this goes as well. So strong streak creativity in your life. Setting up the Neighborhood you obviously had feelings before. I really wanted to talk about all of the dancing as well. The dancing comes in because I was going loop back to somewhere early in the conversation about meaning and value because I think dancing has that. Actually, dancing might be quite a good example because there's also knowledge held in dances. The way that we dance and that talent is also developed through time. Actually, we can segue, sometimes institutions hold onto that knowledge although sometimes it's groups and community groups. I think of things like, I guess Brazilian dance or Capoeira which held in a community and then has come out. Maybe not exactly a dance though, although you could call that. So how important is creativity? And you can talk about knowledge and institutions as well.

Kanjun (01:00:37):

Yeah. I guess to answer that question directly, I think for me, creativity drives basically everything I do. I only realized this a few years ago. I never really identified as creative personally. I had a really close group of friends in high school and a few years ago talking to one of them I was like, "I think I might be a creative person." And he was like, "Duh." Everyone knew that. It was really obvious. I was like, "That's strange." But anyway, I think like...

Ben (01:01:11):

All of those people understand you better than you understand yourself.

Kanjun (01:01:19):

Yeah. I guess it points to how powerful stories of yourself can be and how limiting they are. I believe in human creativity and the potential for like if we can unlock human creativity, then there's this extraordinary potential in humanity. I think that's why I'm so interested in artificial intelligence. It seems to me like fire or like electricity. One of the greatest tools for unlocking human creativity that we've ever encountered. So I think all of my projects; AI, working on meta science, the Neighborhood, the fund, the podcast, it's all about human potential and understanding human potential, unlocking human potential. Can we set up systems and excavate ideas that can unlock human potential?

I guess to your point of knowledge, there's something about knowledge I'm very confused about which is I don't understand really... It seems like institutions, there's like a benefit from institutions and cultures holding old knowledge and then there's a point at which it's not useful in many situations to hold that knowledge. So institutions like Harvard might have really outdated knowledge or beliefs that they're holding. And so this is why I was like, "Maybe there's an analogy to overfitting where times have changed and you actually should be dropping some of your beliefs.” But I'm also confused because it seems actually good for some institutions to hold the belief of, “Universities are good” because they're good for some people and good for other universities, other institutions like the Thiel Fellowship or New Science which is a new funder out here, to hold the belief that universities are not useful because they're not useful for some people.

So now you have institutions that hold different beliefs, cultures that hold different beliefs, and so you get a lot more variants or diversity and you're able to 'service' many more people because different beliefs, different institutions are a good fit for different people. But I'm kind of confused about this dynamic of like, "What causes an institution to grow?" Based on this beliefs like, "How come the Thiel Fellowship is still so small?" I'm sure there are more people that could service-- I don't know. I'm a bit puzzled about this relationship between knowledge and culture and diversity.

Ben (01:04:01):

Sure. So my reflection on that is that's because that form of knowledge is actually much closer to art than we would like to acknowledge. And so as we are riffing on earlier, art has a time in place and culture and can be interpreted by one set of group and people in time and place and one. And actually just adjacent to that in another country or another time or another thing, they can interpret that very same piece very differently. Plausibly both getting a lot of value from it, or one group could get one value or one less value. But because we pretend to ourselves that knowledge is closer to that physical natural science, like you said, the physics, like how the atom works. Well, actually institutional knowledge is not like how the atom works. To your point, I don't think the alien would view the same way like Thiel Fellowships or Harvard.

To the alien it might be, "Well, you might do it that way or you might not do it." It's not like the atom would be. Therefore it is closer to art than all of the complexities around art. That's probably why you need a randomized controlled trial to ascertain it. But even though I actually think it would give you a false read because as time changes and as people change, actually the value of that will also change which is why it riffs back to your earlier thing about creativity and art. It seems to me to be a lot closer to that, but I'm not sure.

Kanjun (01:05:21):

That's really interesting. Yeah, this idea that the beliefs expressed in art are dependent on particular things in order to be effective or useful or meaningful. So they're dependent on how everyone else is interacting with each other; some of the other norms and beliefs that exist. You can't take a belief fully out of context because it's part of this dependent system of beliefs and behaviors.

Ben (01:05:49):

Correct. And therefore that's the same of institutional like that. I'm going to finish off on the creativity and the dance element because I'd be interested to know what you think non-dancers do not understand about people who dance.

Kanjun (01:06:10):

I guess I was a non-dancer until college. Then I started doing competitive Ballroom dance which is a very structured dance style. That was very comforting to me because before doing Ballroom I was like, "I can't dance. I'm super clumsy." I'm still super clumsy. I don't have any spatial awareness. I'm not paying attention. I'm always in my head. So Ballroom was this really interesting way of getting to understand the connection with a partner and with my body and with the floor and with the air, the space around me, in an environment that felt like I wasn't just failing the entire time and doing a bad job. I think there's something interesting here about non-dancers where a lot of people say, "I can't dance."

It I think is more because of this lack of positive feedback, this feedback cycle where people are not getting any positive feedback for their attempt to dance. So then they end up with this belief that they can't dance. So for me, I did Ballroom first and then after 2012, I started to strip away some of the structure of Ballroom. I got tired of it and I was like, "I really want to do something where I can be a lot more expressive and still have this partner connection because that adds so much complexity to the dance. But where I can make things up or improv or try new things, discover new things." And so slowly got into first, West Coast Swing and then Fusion. Fusion is this really interesting partner dance style where it's literally what it says; it's fusion of all styles. You're just making things up the entire time and just combining contact improv, with ballroom, with swing, with all of these different styles and making up new styles all the time.

It's basically kind of like constructivist dance with a partner to music; constructivist movement with a partner to music and I love that. Some people come to Fusion and they say, "I'm not very good at it. How do you get good?" I do think that the structured training of Ballroom and this understanding of connection and how to hold my body and how to connect my body to itself was really helpful. I guess maybe a piece of advice I give people for dance or like new dancers is an easy way to hack this sense of connection is to imagine that you are moving through molasses. So air is no longer air, it's molasses, and it's very, very viscous. And now you're basically always pushing against some force that's pushing back. This actually basically imitates a lot of this sense of internal connection that you get in dance when you've done dance for a long time.

Ben (01:09:22):

Wow. That's really fascinating. So think of it like molasses or I guess like those slow Tai chi movement dances. And also that if you are a non-dancer and you think you can't dance, that's obviously false in some fundamental way. I guess I reflect every three or four year old can dance in some form. Therefore it's not something you must lose the ability to. You must somehow decide that. I've learned a lot.

Kanjun (01:09:53):

Dance is inside of you. It just needs to be unlocked.

Ben (01:09:57):

And somehow I'm not quite sure. But the fusion dance seems to me a kind of long loop analogy to general intelligence. This idea you mixing a lot of things, it's kind of everything that it is, but it helps with structure and you are forming new things in real time with a chat partner or the environment or everything that you are. Obviously that's a very human thing, but somehow in this whole conversation it seems to me a distant cousin of what we were talking about on the connections of all of these other types of things.

Kanjun (01:10:30):

That's actually really interesting because in AI we often talk about-- So if you're training an AI system in some simulated environment, we often talk about multi-agent simulations. So you want multiple AIs in the environment. Why do you want multi-agent simulations? Well, some people say, "Okay, well, you get maybe interesting emergent behavior." But I think that's actually much less interesting. What other agents cause is more diverse set of data, outcomes in the environment. So the environment is static and other agents are modifying it. So you're much more likely to encounter new states of the environment when other agents are modifying it than not. So I don't like dancing by myself because I kind of get stuck in local minima of movement. Whereas if there's somebody else then they're always introducing new states of the environment that caused me to have to figure out how to react in new ways and discover new things about myself and my own sense of movement. I do think there is this parallel to multi-agent simulations.

Ben (01:11:34):

It seems to me to draw another maybe tenuous parallel, that friction or dance between two entities, either in dance or something else seems to be more likely to create this new field or a field where we don't even know it's a field because you've had a new novel interaction within dance. Well, plausibly you do it enough times and people like it. That's actually a new dance form. At that moment in time no one would thought it was a new dance form because it was the first time it ever happened between those parties. And if that analogy holds, that would be other AI agents or whatever making those new fields to stay form.

Kanjun (01:12:08):

Yeah, that's interesting.

Ben (01:12:12):

So how about we play a short version of underrated, overrated and then you can talk about a couple of your current projects and things. So you can make a comment, you can pass, you could just say underrated, overrated. We have some of these things. Underrated or overrated having agency?

Kanjun (01:12:36):

Depends on what environment you're in. I think vastly underrated in the vast majority of the world. Slightly overrated in the rationality community. Speaking as someone who is very close to it. I met my co-founder at a rationality workshop. What agency is kind of the underlying description of human capability? I think of it as like, "What is our ability to change the world from one state to any arbitrary state?" The farther away that state is, the more agency we have or something like that.

Ben (01:13:15):

I could definitely see that. It's like whenever I meet a long-termist or something like that, I definitely think they overrate existential risks, but that's probably because everyone else underrates existential risks. So you're probably meeting somewhere in the middle. Although on that one, that's why I can never quite get my head around the totality of EA or effective altruism because they seem to just have so little weight on art and creativity which just cannot jive this no world view even though they try and make exceptions for it. So they vastly underrate it, but might mean I erect it a little bit. Okay, next one, city planning; overrated, underrated?

Kanjun (01:13:55):

Dramatically underrated. I think all cities should be raised except for some and then built from scratch.

Ben (01:14:02):

Would it be from a centralized planner or would you somehow let-- I guess you could call it a kind of market forces or people choose where to be? How much zoning would you there from, I guess, nothing to everything. Are you just in the middle?

Kanjun (01:14:19):

Yeah, I would basically... Okay, maybe not raise cities. I live in San Francisco which is the most frustrating city in the world. A good friend of mine studied zoning in lots of different cities. My vote would be basically almost no zoning. Tokyo is one of the most interesting cities in the world partly because it's zoning laws are very, very loose. So basically anyone can build anything anywhere. It's not fully true, but people have a lot of agency over what they're able to do with their space and so you see this really crazy stuff; really interesting outgrowths. To me, Tokyo is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's kind of this melting pot of humanity in a way or where people really can express themselves in the environment.

I think San Francisco is the opposite of that. Everyone's expression is completely shut down because you're not allowed to do anything. So I wouldn't do central planning necessarily, but maybe a little bit of it. And much narrower streets, human scale, planning human scale cities. I think we can actually probably convert existing cities if there were enough motivation into much more human scale cities where we build onto the roads, or on the roads we have like parks and restaurants and pop-up shops and things like that.

Ben (01:15:47):

Yeah. So I can see that. And San Francisco is ridiculous like that, isn't it? It must be one of the highest GDP per capita places like in the world with maybe five other places. But one quirky thing about Tokyo which I'm sure you know is that-- or in fact Japanese planning in general is they think about their buildings only with 30 to 80 year lifespans. So because of that, actually this idea of renewal-- And you think of that because you think of the really old temples and wooden buildings which obviously lasted a thousand or even 2000 years. But actually those are the exceptions.

Kanjun (01:16:22):

The Shinto temple also gets replaced. So that's just really interesting. I think actually this is a very underrated thing which is death. In the western culture we really underrate death. Institutions should die. It's part of why we have all these problems in science because institutions can't die. Buildings should die.

Ben (01:16:42):

For those listening actually, before the 12th of January 2023, my next performance lecture is all about death. That actually in the modern day society we don't really talk about it enough. Whereas even going back just 50 years, but certainly fifty hundred, two hundred years, the death of everything-- whether it's buildings, institutions or particularly people, was a much talked about thing.

Kanjun (01:17:08):

Actually, I just made a connection which is I think there are lots of things with tradeoffs. So longevity versus death has very clear tradeoffs. Similarly, institutional history versus brand new institution with no knowledge has very clear tradeoffs. So just wanted to make that point of there are different parts in the space that you can choose with different tradeoffs.

Ben (01:17:32):

Yeah. I hadn't thought of them as the opposite, but that's exactly right in what we talked about in terms of institutions, death and renewal and all of that. Okay. Underrated, overrated; a couple more left. Innovation labs-- I think we're thinking ARPA or here in the UK we now have ARIA. Underrated or overrated ideas; innovation agencies?

Kanjun (01:08:00):

Probably neutrally rated. It's not really rated. They're useful and they're not that useful if you don't do new things.

Ben (01:18:14):

Okay. Very good. All right, last two. High frequency trading or in particular high frequency trading algorithms?

Kanjun (01:18:24):

That's hilarious. I guess the context is I was a high frequency trader in college and to pay for college. We'd always tell people... People are like, "What's the purpose? Are you doing something good for the world?" Everybody in high frequency trading says, "We're providing liquidity to the markets. That's the answer. That's the good that we're doing in the world.” So I think probably that purpose is overrated from within the community. I think most likely we should have much less high frequency trading.

Ben (01:18:59):

This is interesting because there's a debate within business market economists. So one of the functions of markets supposedly is to find prices or whatever the correct price is. And they have no idea why we need so many trades to try and actually find out what the correct price is because you don't need that in a lot of other forms of markets. But you seem to need it in stocks. There is also a debate as to whether high frequency trading actually provides liquidity or not. But if it funded your college, then in some ways must be massively underrated because it has allowed you the second or third order to produce all of this other amazing stuff. So that is a bet. Definitely what should have taken if you had that validity. Okay, last one is, I guess broad ranging is diversity in tech or in any domain. But I guess I'm interested in diversity in technology as it always comes up.

Kanjun (01:19:58):

What exactly do you mean by diversity?

Ben (01:20:02):

So you can't clarify. I'm probably thinking of people diversity but you could take it further. And I guess riffing back on our tradeoffs is this idea of lots of different things obviously being good for ideas and other things versus narrow focus which potentially might allow you to go faster on one thing. But you could take the kind of women in tech answer on any domain as well. Or you could take it broadly.

Kanjun (01:20:32):

Yeah. I think probably diversity in general is underrated, I suspect in Silicon Valley style cultures. The Silicon Valley style culture is very maximizing and capitalism in general is rather maximizing. So I think there're probably lots of things that don't get funded or don't get done even though they might be really interesting or useful. So the arts I think are a good example where there's not very much art here for that. I think for that reason it's very maximizing, it's very utilitarian. People are like, "Why do art?"

Ben (01:21:12):

[Inaudible 01:21:12] In San Francisco. There can be great people as well but not that much into art. In fact, I was reading just recently. Julian Gough wrote the end narrative in the original Minecraft but supposedly didn't sign any contracts and has now made that open source or essentially creative commons license. He has this whole long post on this riff about he has nothing against the people who did try and make him sign contracts but that was a capitalist system. And his system, his art, they clash in these very interesting ways for when you want to make or create things, whether you're talking about financial capital or if you want to use finance speak; these other bits of capital, social capital, intellectual relationship, human and all of those type of things.

Kanjun (01:22:04):

That's really interesting. I'll definitely read that. There are a lot of clashes and I like capitalism. It's very good at an important thing which-- this idea is Michael's-- which is aligning what is true with what is good with power. When those things are misaligned, you end up with very corrupt states. In capitalism it actually goes moderately well, but also it has a lot of tradeoffs. I wonder if there exist actually much better systems once we have more intelligence to be able to align things that can have a lot more diversity of ideas and types of things that people can be doing in addition to aligning what is true, what is good, and power. So maybe aligning what is true, what is good, power, and beauty; something like that. That beauty piece is definitely missing.

Ben (01:23:01):

Yeah, that's the next system obviously. My day job's obviously well within the capitalist system as well. I spoke with an earlier podcast someone called Jacob Soll, Jake Soll, who traced the history of ideas. That the early capitalists like Adam Smith traced a lot of their thought back to Cicero; these Romans and groups. But actually early capitalists, one of the ways that they thought about the world, one was an industrialized sort of world and that state and governments were also meant to make and create markets. But they also had this aligning the good and the incentive. I remember actually Amartya Sen has this anecdote or analogy for how he thought the early capitalists work. And that's if you are being chased down the street by someone who wants to knife you for your money or because you look wrong, and you suddenly throw a lot of money in the air behind you and they stop and they go for the money instead.

So it is actually meant to align people to something which is actually aligned for the greater good. So it's actually a moral cause. So the early capitalists actually thought it saved us from our basal nature to do something which you could align from incentives. I had never really heard that. Then I went to read back some of these early capitalists and back to Cicero and it is seemingly true, at least my interpretation of what they were saying, thinking then that that's that. We've evolved it to this state. So it's interesting that to your point, it will likely evolve again and how it evolved for these things is still very open.

Kanjun (01:24:38):

I think that's really interesting. How are we doing? Are we doing okay on time? I can do a slight diversion?

Ben (01:24:46):

Go for your divergent thing.

Kanjun (01:24:49):

Okay. I think this is really interesting in that capitalism has successfully aligned us toward satisfying people's desires and wants and somewhat away from our basal nature. Violence has decreased a lot. There are goals to go forth that are not tribe against tribe kind of goals. It actually feels like we're pretty ripe for some kind of transformation because AI is getting better really fast. If you were to ask a question like this, it's getting better way faster than most people in the world see. I think people can see ChatGPT and see all its flaws, but ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg of even research that we've done already. So there's still a ton of low hanging fruit in terms of the capabilities. So I think all of this stuff will happen faster than we think it will. And maybe that means a system like capitalism needs to be augmented somehow.

Ben (01:25:57)

That's an agree for me. So I actually work a lot in biological sciences and I bore everyone. I don't have technical details because I'm not really a coder. But what DeepMind have done with protein folding in biological and computational biology, and actually this is-- I mean there are a couple of generations in. But it's early journeys. It is so mind boggling having studied it 10, 20 years ago. This is the equivalent of magic or a form of magic. It seems that far away. Therefore the downstream effects are just very hard for us to imagine because even people in the field can only just start imagining it and what it would do. In something related to your point, typically we've had to use control trials because we don't really know. This is like some of the beginnings of actually we might start to understand-- and we've got a linking of the biological mechanisms of something. So it's not that we're at zero. But between zero and a hundred, we're closer to 10 or 20 than we are to a hundred for sure. You can just see on the edges of where I have domain expertise that these things are just opening up in ways which just is very hard to imagine and therefore I think could be both very exciting and scary at the same time. Riffing on the capitalism...

Kanjun (01:27:17):

Really one quick thing there which is one of the things I'm most excited about AI. Most people talk about automation and kind of doing what people are doing. That's maybe interesting, but I'm most interested in systems that are able to monitor very complex systems. Because they're interacting with the economy or with all of the people, the model can interact with all of these people simultaneously. It's building up some model of the system that we can then interpret and inspect. That might lead us to a much deeper understanding mechanistically of how human complex systems work in the way that outfolds. Allows us to better understand mechanistically how protein folding works. But you were going to say riffing on capitalism.

Ben (01:28:00):

I'm going to riff on that and I'll come back to capitalism. Are you most interested in human systems like markets and social stuff, or things like weather systems or other complex physical phenomena or essentially both because you think they will probably apply to both?

Kanjun (01:28:16):

More human systems. I think weather and other systems like that we can evaluate and measure using instruments. We can measure how good the weather is somewhere and then we can make better algorithms and collect more data. That doesn't require as much 'intelligence.' But what's interesting about human systems is that humans are full agents that need to be modeled. You need to model both the human agent and also somehow take what they're saying, communicating in language, and turn it into some something useful. That's just huge amounts of data. So you need something that's able to understand linguistically all of that data and maybe beyond linguistically like, "What is their body language, et cetera?" And then turn it into some useful behavior. I think for a system to be able to do that it needs to actually have a pretty good model of not just individual humans. but also groups of humans interacting with each other. And I think that kind of model is a really interesting model to inspect from the perspective of like, "How does a complex human system work? How does an institution or a culture work?" I can imagine deploying some AI chat bot within an institution. If it's actually learning from the people inside of it, then it will end up learning a lot of things about this institution. It would be really fascinating to inspect what is the fingerprint of this institution versus this other institution.

Ben (01:29:39):

Yeah. And because group behavior is different from the individual behavior, it is this uniquely or very interesting place to assess that.

Kanjun (01:29:48):

Exactly. Also you can think about democracy. Democracy is an algorithm that has really terrible inputs right now. It's just binary for every person. We use that terrible input because it's the highest resolution that we could reasonably aggregate from people so far. But AI systems, maybe that doesn't have to be true. It doesn't have to be the highest resolution.

Ben (01:30:11):

That's the best worst system we have or something. What is the quote? "Democracy's really bad. It's just better than anything else we have" or something like that.

Kanjun (01:30:21):

Right, right. Exactly.

Ben (01:30:23):

Okay. One final riff on the capitalism and then I'll ask you on your current projects and advice. If you go back to the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds-- at least my reading of it, you had thinkers like Malthus who basically thought, “We could never really get rich as a large population.” And if you looked at the preceding thousand, 2000, 4,000, 10,000 years of human history, you would've broadly agreed with them which many people did that. There was seemingly these kind of limits whether they were physical limits and all of these others.

And then we essentially had the industrial revolution. You can talk about corporate labs, innovation, corporate forms, industrialization, energy, technology, innovation which seemed to break the Malthusian trap. And so we are at least in aggregate really wealthy in a way that the person in 1850 or 1800 or even 1900 would've been completely astonished by. This seems like magic. But on the other hand, I think they would be very surprised. In fact, my reading of what they were writing about at the time is they were very surprised that we cannot be splitting the pie better. So they would basically say, "There's no way we could have grown this pie this big." They would just be like, "That's incredible. What did you guys do? That's like magic."

But on the other hand is like, "How dumb could you be that you could grow this pie but you haven't-- You've got more than enough but there's no way that you can split it? Surely splitting it was the easier problem and growing it was the hard problem.” That's really interesting. You read the work and you go like, "Wow, they just thought the really difficult thing was growing the pie. They thought splitting the pie was just going to be really easy." Well, when you have it and you have all of these things like, "Oh, when we're really wealthy no one will work or they'll split it, all that." It seems to be the reverse is that-- and we see with AI will come. It looks like we are going to be rich in whatever form we are, at least in aggregate. But splitting the pie we have not got any closer really. I mean maybe at the edges, some ideas, welfare states, some insurance and all of that. But it's nowhere near what the thinking the 1850 thought we would get. But they had no belief that we would ever get this wealthy.

I find that's a really interesting dichotomy about how we got it wrong. So I think we probably got everything wrong in the future. But I always think this about capitalism is they didn't think they would be this rich, but they just didn't think we'd be this stupid in terms of splitting the pie. It's just incredible.

Kanjun (01:32:58):

I think this is a really big and important problem especially when it comes to AI being deployed. I want to kind of harken back to our points about death which is there was a study about how if you increase the estate tax to basically a hundred percent or even like 95%, then a lot of our incoming inequality problems would be solved. This is quite interesting. One hypothesis that they had is that basically accumulation effects are what result in the wealth gap, not necessarily what you're able to get in a single generation. Once you accumulate a lot of that wealth, get rich fund investment, it's a little bit harder to lose than it is to just get from scratch. And once your rate of increase gets much higher than someone could ever make in their day or lifetime, now you're just accumulating wealth at a much higher rate than anyone could even gain it when they start from zero. So yeah, I think this point of death or estate tax or-- Maybe hypothesis here would be something part of the reason why it's not actually about splitting the pie. It's about disrupting accumulation here. It's not a pie, it's actually...

Ben (01:34:24):

The pies that you continuously make because obviously the analogy falls down. But you're true in that.

Kanjun (01:34:29):

The pies that are always growing; self-growing pies.

Ben (01:34:34):

Great. Like, “We’ve invented self-growing pies, magic, but we haven't...” And so there is something on that because in the UK and Britain, the landowners have been rich for a very, very long time. Land is still basically the majority of Britain's wealth which is very weird. So for a thousand years they've been one of the richest people and that has not had the renewal, whereas actually most other long-dated families, technology or merchants or whatever have gone through and you see that. But actually the landowners have not because it's an accumulated wealth which you don't give up. Okay. So one last cheeky question and then finish. We had a slightly cheeky question from Twitter about how you can use your name as a verb. I have seen on your website that you can use it definitely kind of as a noun because you have kanjectures of which we talked about a couple. But do you also see yourself as a verb to action; so “kanjun” as well as have kanjectures?

Kanjun (01:35:36):

So this question's from Aram, one of my best friends who was my housemate for many years. The joke is that I love to steal people's food. People's food is much tastier when it's someone else's food than it's my food. So often I'll go out with friends, I won't order very much, and I'll just steal food from them. So Aram coined the term too can-june, which means to steal someone's food. However, there's another thing that I do which is whenever I talk to somebody-- and you didn't encounter it that much here although you would have if we had more time to riff. I kind of intensely question them about things; like trying to understand them. Like, "Why did you make these decisions? Why do you think this? What do you think about this?" So also too can-june means-- this is like my default state encountering anyone-- means to basically intensely question someone about their life and their thoughts. So it can mean either; take your pick.

Ben (01:36:44):

That's great. So actually that's two verbs and a noun. I will riff back to our earlier thing and posit that's because food from somebody else's plate has more meaning to you than food from your own.

Kanjun (01:37:00):

I love it. Yes.

Ben (01:37:02):

The calories are obviously the same. The value to it is more. I don't often do this. I'm open, you can ask me a question if you would like to ask me a question.

Kanjun (01:37:15):

Oh, I asked you some questions, but I have lots of questions about your relationship to art. I'm really curious how your reaction to-- The culture I'm in, in Silicon Valley, EA, and there's maybe a non-value of neural art. I'm really curious from your perspective as somebody who's a playwright and who clearly art is very important to. Why do you think that there's this disvaluing of art and what do you think are the things that are lost in a culture like this?

Ben (01:37:54):

So in my view, this stems quite clearly from a utilitarian led thinking which you can trace to both Peter Singer all the way back to John Bentham. And then you can also see it in the work of Derek Parfit who was viewed as one of the greatest living British-- actually global philosophers. He died a few years ago. But it was actually an encoder of his work, “Reasons and Persons.” So to put a long answer short is their shortcut for this is something which you'll know, but for listeners that you get round to expected utility theory or expected value. So this is a shortcut for trying to value something, particularly stocks or cost benefit or things with cash flows and things that you can count.

There are a lot of paradoxes which don't work for expected value. The classic one is Petersburg Paradox. But things like when you have a 51/49 bet. 51 you get a lot of value, but 49 you lose everything. Let's say you destroy the world or you double the value of the world and you play it for long enough and you're going to destroy the world. Strict expected value basically tells you to play this game. And that is because there's a lot of things which you can't put into an expected value calculation. Now, the so-called in my view, fudge for this in expected utility which can work for some things, is that you have this idea of utility which you then try to fudge the value to bring it closer back to humanness. But this is really hard for us to do. And actually mostly we fail to do it except in very simple cases.

Then even in complex cases where you can then take some idea of what humans might think, it's not clear that there's a consensus. So a classic one from healthcare economics is it's very expensive to save a preterm baby. It costs somewhere like half a million to a million dollars or more. Whereas you could spend that in saving the life of a diabetic which only costs maybe $20,000 or $30,000. In first order expected value you always save the diabetic. Then you kind of think about utilities, "Oh, maybe there's more life to something like the baby and the society" and you can try and fudge it. Or you can ask people and you find that the person in the street, the majority say, "No, we should save some babies." And so that's just one way of getting this kind of dispart which doesn't play into expected value.

But because expected value is such a core way of how their thinking has grown up, they can't do things which are hard to measure. Or to our point, things like art or creativity which is not only hard to measure, potentially impossible, but is also not time and variance. So moves across time, people, space, and culture. And because that doesn't fit into that framework-- and I guess some of them do get there if they think really hard about it or they do fudges or they might think of themselves as slightly pluralist. It really doesn't fit into that framework and therefore all of that falls down. Therefore when you had enough time to do expected value over malaria nets, you definitely can't do it over art. And then the second order effects which are just really hard to do about the power of art, you just can't put into your calculations. Yet they seem to be at really crucial tipping points for the world.

So two or three examples. Maybe it's emergent behavior talking about that. Greta, is that emergent behavior or not. But for instance, the white Texan lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr became a lawyer for minority rights because he listened to Louis Armstrong play jazz and he said, "I've heard genius in a black man. The only thing I know is that I need to fight for equality." He's on the record of saying that. That's the interesting formative power of art. You think of something like...

Kanjun (01:42:01):

Art is like a way to see the humanity in anyone else.

Ben (01:42:05):

Exactly that. And all of these important social progress points you had an artistic narrative which changed the system or made the system better. Some of that goes to our deepest myths. I call them myths because they're things that are true only because humans believe them to be true. Like money. The tree doesn't care about money. The dog doesn't care about money. The alien probably wouldn't care about money depending on whether we had to interact. Humans only care about money because we've made that. So that's one of our greatest myths. And essentially that's an act of creativity. In fact, that's kind of an act of art which is across that and humanity. Because that doesn't fit into expected value theory very well with some soft order pluralism, they can't get it so easily and therefore it fails by the wayside. But that's why you then get these critiques outside about how they don't understand the system. They do obviously understand the power story and art and things, but because you can't really weigh it up between individual stories, they tend not to really invest in it very much. So that's an answer to that. But I feel fairly certain that seems to be the roots of it. And when I speak to a lot of EAs that seems to be true. If you read their influential philosophy, that also seems to be true.

Kanjun (01:43:27):

Yeah, I think that's true. Peter Singer explicitly says funding the arts is not as good as saving lives in different countries. One thing that I think I've been puzzled by is this question of measurement. Michael and I think -- One of the things we talked a lot about is funders trying to measure research results and how that results in short-term incremental decisions. And I think measurement is actually-- It's something that I deal with a lot in my day-to-day life. I used to run a startup. Startups are all about measurement because it's all about short-term. But running a research lab, I can't measure anything. There's very little stuff that I can measure. So I've had to completely change my perspective on measurement.

So I think there's this really interesting point about utilitarianism. Startup founders can be utilitarian because actually they're not losing that much when they are super measurement oriented. But when you're doing research or you're in the arts or you're trying to do real long term change in world countries, then actually things are really hard to measure. The problem is that when I talk to an EA-- I would consider myself somewhat EA in terms of being interested in the philosophy but also finding some things quite problematic. But if I were to talk to an EA they would say something like, "Well, the issue is that your utility function just hasn't captured all of the things that you're missing." There was a time when I thought, "Yeah that seems true. We should be able to capture other things in the utility function." But now I'm at a point where I'm wondering, "Actually, that may not be true at all. Actually, some of these things may not be measurable. Maybe not for a very, very long time.” So actually using expected utility as a framework is just going to lead to the wrong actions. It's going to lead to non-optimal actions in the long term. So I think your point about art is super interesting. Old me would've said, "Okay, can you count art in the utility function?" The now me is like...

Ben (01:45:37):

And they believe you can. I think I'm arguing cannot. So what's the phrase? "Not everything that can be counted counts and then not everything that counts can be counted either." I have got quite a long podcast with a philosopher called Larry Temkin who has this critique on EA. It is for those listening, a little bit nerdy and it does go on for three hours. But his main point is that his work on moral philosophy and something called the transitivity or intransitivity problem shows that the axioms behind expected utility theory do not hold. They do not hold for moral choices. So they hold for maths; obviously three is bigger than two, two is bigger than one, three will always be bigger than one. And it holds for heights. So it holds for maths, it does not hold for social or moral reasoning.

He has a 500 page book to explain all of this, but you can get it as read. And when he first posited it a lot of people thought, "Hmm, that doesn't seem to be right because that's crazy." And now actually there's a majority of thinkers who actually think this is true. Therefore my point of view is if this is right and it seems like it is right. If one of the fundamental axioms cannot hold, then you have to use it with caution. Doesn't mean it can be a useful tool, it's obviously a useful tool. But to apply it to all moral reasoning you need to do with caution and it seems to be not potentially with a much caution. Early in the year Larry Temkin explains this in actually his book. It's very interesting reading about that if anyone wants to go back and listen to that.

Kanjun (01:47:24):

That's really interesting. I'll definitely listen to it.

Ben (01:47:27):

Yeah. I'll send you the link. Alright, so let's end on-- You could also feel free to ask me another question. But current projects that you are working on that you might want to mention. I think we have mentioned quite a lot of them. You could also offer any advice that you have either for startups; could be what you're looking for in startups, women founders or your own journey or something in AI. So yeah, current projects and any thoughts or advice you have.

Kanjun (01:47:58):

What would you like for me to give advice on? Advice is always very personal.

Ben (01:48:06):

Okay. So let's do advice on if you are thinking about working in AI or as a startup, what you should be looking to do? Because you already gave me really good [inaudible 01:48:17].

Kanjun (01:48:21):

Join Generally Intelligent.

Ben (01:48:23):

Yeah. Okay. So that's number one. You are hiring. If you're interested in that you should look them up on the website and you should go and join them. But maybe you are abroad so that might be tricky for you. So if you're not going to go and hire at Generally Intelligent, what's the next best thing?

Kanjun (01:48:41):

We also hire remote engineers.

Ben (01:48:45):

Other best thing. If you want to work on AGI, join Kanjun.

Kanjun (01:48:51):

That's right.

Ben (01:48:53):

So that's that.

Kanjun (01:48:55):

What else?

Ben (01:48:58):

Well, you can maybe look at current projects.

Kanjun (01:49:01):

My current projects?

Ben (01:49:02):

Or advice.

Kanjun (01:49:04):

Sure. Yeah. I guess I can briefly talk about current projects. So Generally Intelligent, we've already talked about-- Well, we are hiring and we're very interested in inspecting systems to get a deeper understanding of what's going on and using that to figure out can we get good guarantees around robustness, safety, et cetera, as capabilities increase. Other projects-- I guess if you're a startup founder I have a fund to investing folks called Outside Capital. We do a fair amount of AI investment or if you're interested in investing in a fund. What else?

Ben (01:49:49):

You want to talk about the Neighborhood at all?

Kanjun (01:49:52):

Maybe. It's not something I advertise too much. But the Neighborhood is a really fun project. The reason why we ended up doing it-- Jason Benn, my former housemate and coworker is the one driving most of it. I'm just helping him. We used to have this house called The Archive and it was a great house. I think it changed our lives in really important ways. Maybe this is the piece of advice I would give which is something like you really become the people around you. I really become the people around me. The like five people I spend the most time with. I think choosing those people very carefully is quite important. For me, I've chosen them in particular ways such that they are people I really look up to and would want to become more like because people tend to internalize the beliefs and the limitations of the people around them.

So I want people around me who are expanding my idea of what I can be capable of and not reducing it. So The Archive was a 25 person house that I co-ran for five years. One of the big things-- Michael actually made this comment that The Archive seems like a self-actualization machine. Like someone comes in and a year later they are just much more actualized. I think that was a really interesting thing that we did culturally accidentally just because of the people that we were. We were really trying to understand how do we become better versions of ourselves and discover what our potential could be. I think very seriously asking that question and having people around us asking those questions was really transformative. We shut down The Archive in the middle of Covid.

The Neighborhood is like a scaled up more sustainable for 30 somethings version of it where essentially we want something that is like a university campus for modern adult living where you can have your best friends around you and have this lively intellectual culture that we found at The Archive. And kind of live in an area in a city where you just run into people that you know and want to be around. So in the Neighborhood-- I live at the southern tip of it. I run into a lot of people which is really interesting and have spontaneous interactions in a way that in a normal city I wouldn't have.

Ben (01:52:26):

That's amazing. I really think that's an underrated thing. I wish in my twenties I was walking distance with my close friends and that. The only piece of advice listening to that is I would design it if it's at all possible-- and might not be-- to take you all the way to end of life. So when you're 60, 70, and you are 80 that would be great.

Kanjun (01:52:50):

That is the goal. We'll see what kind of institutions we need to build. In a lot of ways we're constructing a new type of institution, a new way of living. It's not really centralized. It's like a set of decentralized institutions. So we're planning schools and then eventually there will be like end of life type of things when you're growing older, when you want to leave a legacy, et cetera.

Ben (01:53:15):

Mini town within the town. Well, that's great. That advice sounds really great. So choose your friends carefully.

Kanjun (01:53:26):

Yes.

Ben (01:53:27):

And with that, Kanjun, thank you very much.

Kanjun (01:53:30):

Thank you. This is super fun.

Florence Evans: mud larking, art collecting, curating and dealing | Podcast

Florence Evans is an art dealer, historian, curator, collector and mud larker. Her Instagram flo_finds is here for mudlarking.  And here for art collecting. This is a Guardian profile featuring Florrie and other mudlarks.

We chat on what does mudlarking tell us about history ? What does art tell us about being human ?

…we mustn't forget is that ultimately there's a real human connection with beauty. So conceptual art aside which serves an important purpose and helps us to think and challenges us in many ways. On the other hand, there's a human need, I think, a kind of nesting instinct to have art for the home, things of beauty to lift your spirits. I think that's really elemental. …

Florrie chats on the cultural history of mudlarking, the stories found objects represent from the both the darker side of human history such as beads and the slave trade, as well as the lighter sides of found items. 

We discuss one of her favourite finds, a whole child’s shoe from the Tudor era. 

We chat on what we’ve puzzled out from our river finds including a hand blown glass apothecary bottle from the 1600s. 

We discuss: bottles, beads, coins, stories, Roman items, buttons and costumes and more…

We touch on her philosophy as an art collector and what art means to us as humans. 

One of my happiest achievements in my career thus far was curating an exhibition on mudlarking and mudlarked art in 2019 for the Totally Thames Festival. That was an exhibition that I put on showing art by artists featuring mudlark finds, still life photographs by Hannah Smiles; a photographer of mudlarked finds and portraits of mudlarks as well that she had taken. That was in the Bargehouse which is a massive warehouse space on the South Bank by the Oxo Tower; so right by the river.

That was a joy to be asked to do that and it felt like it was a fusion of both my passion, hobby; mudlarking and what I do in work which is curate and look at art. So that was a fusion of art and mudlarking and looking at craft and elevating it to art. Looking at history and saying, "This is part of who we are as human beings. We create-- There is an impulse and an urge to make things of beauty. Even things that are utilitarian, there's beauty to be found." And that kind of links back to the philosophy of someone like William Morris who believed that art should always be useful and beautiful.

What art Florrie likes and collects and the challenge of modern art. 

Florrie gives her advice on art collecting and life.

I've always done what I love and it gives me great satisfaction. You can always find your people, you can always find your niche even just by going online. It's amazing how the world opens up. As long as you are doing something that you're passionate about, you should be okay.

Available wherever you get podcasts. Video above or on YouTube and transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript (only lightly edited): Florrie in conversation with Ben

(Time stamps only very approximate)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Florence Evans. Florrie is a mudlarker extraordinaire. She's also well followed on Instagram under account, under @flo_finds. She also runs an independent gallery representing artists as well as an art collector herself. Florrie, welcome.

Florence Evans (Florrie)

Thank you so much, Ben, and thank you for the little praise scene which sounds very grand when you put it like that. But honestly, I'm not tall and I don't technically have a gallery. I do popups.

Ben (00:33):

Popups. Well, an independent representation, I guess.

Florrie (00:37):

Exactly.

Ben (00:38):

So thinking about mudlarking, one of the things I've really loved about walking down the river is the connection with nature. Something both man-made, I guess, with the bank and the foreshore and also the connection with history; a time and a place, one person's rubbish being another person's treasure. What do you think perhaps for you is most underrated about mudlarking or walking on the river?

Florrie (01:14):

Well, I think that a lot of Londoners don't realize that they have the river as a place to go and as a refuge which makes me sad. I mean, I think more and more people are discovering it thankfully. But I was very fortunate. I grew up near the river. My mum who is Australian and from Sydney always said that she had to live near water. So as a child, she would take my brother and I down to have walks along the foreshore and that felt very special. But I don't think many people necessarily realize that they can go down onto the banks of the Thames, or they think that you have to climb down a ladder to get down there. But actually there are numerous access points. So it is a place that needs to be visited more.

I think when you do go down, it is an extraordinary experience because as you say, there's this sense of nature in the middle of the city and a connection with the city's past. You can't escape the fact that you are walking upon detritus centuries; old detritus, whether it's old bricks or broken bits of pipe stem or plastic that was chucked into the river yesterday. It's a very specific terrain and it has a very specific smell as well, I should add. I love the smell of the River Thames. I imagine for some people that's a horrendous thought. But it's slightly briny, it has elements of the seaside to it. And I do think of parts of the foreshore as being like a beach. In fact, my daughter calls it the beach because where we live in East London, the stretch of river by Wapping is very sandy. So yeah, it's a connection with nature and it's a connection with the city and it's quite a special space.

Ben (03:25):

It does feel like a beach to me. So in London, fortunately or unfortunately today-- people in the video can see this. You will need a pass. You do need to get a license from the PLA to go mudlarking. And I think they are currently-- as of the end of 2022, kind of full up because there's over 5,000 licenses. But I guess when recently thinking about finds-- The last time I was at the river, I don't go so often-- Talking about the pipes here. Again, on the video you can see there's these little stem pipes. I think for a lot of people and certainly for me, it was one of the first finds. I still get excited and my son still gets excited when he finds one. I'm also on the ever lookout for a bead and I haven't found an interesting bead. I know famously you always hunt for beads and you have some amazing ones. So maybe the question would be what are your most exciting finds or quirky finds or those that you've had? Maybe you can talk about your love of beads.

Florrie (04:34):

Yeah, sure. Well, it's interesting that you say that one of the first things you found was a clay pipe stem because one of the first things I ever found as a child was a clay pipe stem and I didn't really know what it was. I was mentioning to you earlier actually that I first made the connection when I went on a school trip to Hampton Court and saw some examples of clay pipes that they had found under the Tudor kitchens from the time of Henry VIII. And I went, "Oh my God, those are what I've been finding by the river." That was very exciting to me. It was a tangible piece of archeology. From there, I started to realize that the river had these little scraps of history to be found and then I think I started looking more carefully.

I remember a particular find-- one of my first, again, after the pipe stems was a Venetian Millefiori bead. I don't have it today unfortunately. I can't be sure whether it wasn't just dropped off someone's 1980s earring or whether it was some amazing Renaissance's trade bead. I will never know. But for me, that was a very exciting find. Today, I do make a point of looking for beads. And again, where I live in East London, I have found an area which is rich in trade beads. Trade beads have quite a dark history. They were used as a commodity to trade with indigenous peoples in the Americas and in Africa because in these places the Europeans worked out, they didn't know how to make glass. So a bead was seen as a very precious object. And of course, they were small and they were portable. They would sell them for what would've been thought of as a high price. 

So you could buy literally slaves in Africa with beads. So some of them are known as slave beads; particular types of beads. You could buy beaver pelts from Native Americans because obviously, fur was hugely coveted over here but also incredibly important over there in the harsh winters. But they were prepared to sell the pelts for these tiny little glass beads. So they tell a story that is fascinating and I think is important to be brought to light today so that we understand what colonialism did and how our ancestors conquered-- if you want to call it, far flung places and people. The mind boggles really when you think of beads in that way.

Ben (07:48):

Wow, I hadn't heard that full story in their history like that. Walking down the river it also does-- and these objects really brings home how what humans’ value is a part of the myth and the story. You could say this about money. Money's a trust thing, you can't even touch it digitally. And we've given it value. We have in London this idea of a peppercorn rent because peppercorns used to be extremely valuable and actually they're not so valuable anymore. Things like beads or whatever we've had to represent used to be very valuable. They might have had a certain meaning; a dark meaning or a light meaning. We can reinterpret that today. Sometimes we don't even understand what we're looking at or what it means and I think that connection's really amazing. I had once found a piece of flint which I thought had been fairly worked on. So I did wonder how old it would be, but other people thought maybe it hadn't been worked on that long. But what's the oldest thing then you might have found? Because some of the worked flint could be over a couple of thousand years old going back that far.

Florrie (08:59):

Yeah. I would say I have quite a considerable collection of worked flint tools; Neolithic scrapers and cores and things like that. Not an arrowhead yet, unfortunately. But yes, I would say my flint tools are my oldest finds definitely.

Ben (09:19):

And that's, I guess because there used to be communities all during that time which lived on the river, lived from the river, and by the river and all of that.

Florrie (09:27):

Absolutely. I mean, this is it. The river is a place where people always have to settle near water. It gives life literally but also it's used as a dump where you chuck things as well. So it's kind of this wonderful contradiction in a way. The river sees communities flourish and grow and it sees communities kind of-- not the demise of, but it has just seen the ebb and flow of time and people. I find that quite interesting.

Ben (10:12):

This is very London centric and it's got a particular rich history. In fact, I think there have been mudlarkers for several hundred years where the treasure hunters of 300 years ago were looking for different sorts of treasure today. But I was on a beach or a foreshore, I guess, in an American city and found not very old detritus. But I guess you can mudlark anywhere in some of those sort of history, although I guess river cities are always going to be the richest. People do these bottle bank hunting and rubbish dump sort of hunting. So have you done any other type of hunting like that?

Florrie (10:51):

I do. I go digging in Victorian and Edwardian bottle dumps on the outskirts of London to find the vintage bottles and things. I have an endless desire to find these things. I'm a regular Womble. I just like picking stuff up and digging shit up-- excuse my language. But it is a recreational drive today and I think it's an important distinction that you made in the past. The term mudlarking is a Victorian term for the destitute people of London in Victorian times who would go looking for things like old rope to sell, lumps of coal, things that had fallen off ships when they were being unloaded or packed. They were looking for things that they could trade and sell or even just food. They saw the river and mudlarking as a source of income. Often, it was sort of poor children who would go into the muddy, low tide without even any boots or shoes on because often they could feel things with their feet in the mud and use their feet almost as a sensory way of finding things.

But then, I mean, it goes back beyond there. There are 17th century and 18th century drawings and engravings of people looking for Roman finds for the Antiquarian collectors. You would get locals wading in the Medway on the coast line looking for Roman pots using long pikes to dig into the mud to feel for pot shards underneath. It has been going on for centuries. I should add actually also the poor little destitute Victorian children who would look for things to sell from the river would sometimes come across artifacts which they would sell to Antiquarian dealers. So there have always been treasure hunters. But in those days it was generally rich people paying the impoverished to go out and find the treasure for them rather than get their hands dirty themselves.

And this-- I'm sorry to go off on a tangent-- brings to mind an amazing picture that I handled a couple of years ago by an artist called Walter Grieves. It is a very detailed painting of the Chelsea embankment from 1876 showing the Chelsea Regatta. There were numerous people that he drew on the foreshore watching the race and they were all men. There were no women down on the foreshore. That's another thing to remember. Women wouldn't have wanted to get their skirts muddy. It would've been considered indecorous to go down there. Only women destitute women and mudlarks would've gone down onto the riverbank. But if you had any sense of decorum, you wouldn't go down at low tide unless to watch a race and you were a man.

Ben (14:46):

Wow. So it shows everything about our history with gender, trade, colonialism, and everything. That brings to mind a couple of things. One is how oysters used to be a peasant, a poor person's food; similar type of things before it kind of changed through. Do you think the Romans themselves would've mudlarked? And I wonder what they would've mudlarked for? I guess it might've been too early. But I imagine they were on the river and they did find things.

Florrie (15:16)

Oh God, yes. It's interesting because there are pockets of London where you find lots of Roman detritus. Obviously, that's because they were very active in the center of London and that was where Londinium rose up from the river by St. Paul's; that kind of area. But yeah, what did they find? I imagine again, there must have been always trade on the river and there would've been mudlarks and locals looking for things that had been dropped off the boats. Of course there will always be opportunists.

Ben (15:56):

Yeah. Even in modern day. The most valuable thing that I've found which wasn't very valuable was a half penny from I think the 1950s or sixties when we still had half penny. But I think if you were a mudlark from then, people would've been dropping coins. And if you find a coin, that would've been your week or maybe even your month if it was a particularly good coin.

Florrie (16:18):

Absolutely. Another thing to mention with regards to coins, obviously you had all the dockers who would be dropping their [detritus] and things as they were loading and unloading boats. But there are certain parts of the river where there were spectacles such as the Regatta and you would get people going down and dropping coins from their pockets. Also, there were kind of your London pick pockets who just as today, might steal someone's wallet and then throw it into the river. You would presumably have that happening and things being thrown in the river. As you can imagine, a kind of Fagan type character or one of his children stealing things. Suddenly realizing they're going to get caught, chucking it in the river to then go and retrieve it later on at low tide.

Ben (17:19):

I can imagine that's been happening for thousands of years.

Florrie (17:21):

All sorts going on. Yeah.

Ben (17:24):

Interesting. I'm just thinking outside of London for one moment. Are there any other cities which are as famous for mudlarking? Are American cities too young? I guess some European ones must have a-- I guess it helps having a tidal river. I'm only thinking out loud, I haven't discovered this long enough. But are there other famous cities for mudlarking?

Florrie (17:46):

Absolutely. It is really helpful if you have a tidal river because obviously you can go down and search the river banks. There are mudlarks in the north of England, in Edinburgh as well, and Scotland. Then in America, there is a lot of mudlarking that goes on around New York for art Deco treasures. Probably the place I would most like to go mudlarking but it's not titled and it requires actual diving is in Netherlands, in Amsterdam. There are amazing treasure hunters there who literally go into the canals, dive, and bring out all these Dutch golden age artifacts which put all the things from the Thames to shame. Honestly, they're bringing out complete onion bottles from the 17th century, amazing complete delftware tiles; all sorts of extraordinary things. There's a real community of Dutch mudlarks. They're hardcore.

Ben (19:00):

It's almost beyond mudlarking.

Florrie (19:03):

They go down and they dive and it's incredible what they find.

Ben (19:06):

Wow. That's the next step. So that brings me to this little piece of glass that we found. Actually, Anishka, my partner found it. It's a piece of nothing, right? It's a bit of rubbish but we really loved it because it had these words. You can only make out “society unlimited.” We saw a couple of double op. So we looked it up and it was the co-op society. We puzzled it out that it was an old milk bottle from I think the 1930s or something like that. And what's great about these little things-- whatever you find-- if you have a little bit of something, there's a puzzle and a history that you can figure out from something medium to easy, hard like that to really complicated things. What's the best thing that you ever puzzled out?

Florrie (19:58):

That's a difficult question. You are right. These pieces of social history which you don't learn about in school books, these little personal stories that you get from written text are so satisfying to find and puzzle out. But I have to admit that the finds that fire me up are historical costume which don't necessarily have the little clues with the writing and the maker's marks. But having said that, I have a vast collection of buttons. On the backs of buttons you'll often have the maker's name and address. So you can have a deep Google and find the details or sometimes the birth and death dates of the tailors who made these buttons. That's always fascinating that you can go down a rabbit hole with those.

Ben (21:01):

And can you do that even without a mark because the shape and style are over time?

Florrie (21:06):

Absolutely. So you learn the fashions for different periods and so you learn to expect a certain shape for a certain period. For instance in the 18th century, buttons became very large and flat. So if you imagine a gentleman's waist coat, it would have these big shiny flat buttons. So they're very easy to date because it was specifically a fashion of the time, of the era. For a Tudor period button it's generally quite globular and small and round and often decorated. Then in the 17th century, button makers realize that they could make buttons-- they're called blowhole buttons that are hollow. So they're still round but they use less metal and therefore they're more economic to make. Less metal used, cheaper all round, cheaper to sell, and saving on materials. So you can definitely learn a lot about what period something might have come from by how it was made.

Ben (22:32):

I remember viewing a series of mudlarked knives and hadn't realized that the style of knife tells you a lot. And actually then if you find it with something else, you can really date that period. I'm told it's also the same with shoes. So shoes date really... Even modern day shoes, you can see this with trainers that you have. They're only sold in a two or three year period. So if you see one in a photo you can really tell roughly when that was.

Florrie (23:01):

That's right. In fact actually, one of my favorite finds that I have is a complete child's Tudor shoe. It's a very specific shape. Apart from the fact that the leather is very fragile and soft, it has this wonderful kind of pointy toe which is typical for the period. So that's one of my favorite finds. Also, the idea of a child's shoe, how did it end up in the river? You can play out all sorts of scenarios in your mind.

Ben (23:38):

Wow. What's the one you want to find that you haven't found? So you mentioned an arrowhead. I'd still love to find a bead. I'd love to find some worked flint which I could definitively say was old. I'd like to find a whole glass bottle-- but partly because I think glass often breaks so getting a whole one is going to be tricky.

Florrie (24:00):

Although actually glass bottles are incredibly well preserved in the deep mud. So maybe you're not going into the muddy end.

Ben (24:08):

Yeah. I'm mostly around Hammersmith and just walking on the top which is a well walked bit so it's not... I probably need a lucky storm to put something up or I need to go east one day or something like that.

Florrie (24:22):

Or you need to head towards Chiswick from Hammersmith because there are lots of bottles down that way as well. I'm giving secrets away. Oh, no.

Ben (24:33):

So what do you still lack in your collection which you would love?

Florrie (24:42):

I am very lucky because I have-- like to think of myself as being quite a good all-rounder, but I have time on my side which is that I've been doing this for years and years. So I have a well-stocked collection. I have found most things, Ben. That sounds really awful, but I have. I have found most things. What would I really love to find? A complete onion bottle would be a bucket list find for me. I just love the shape of the bottle. For anyone who doesn't know, an onion bottle is a 17th century style of wine bottle and it looks like an onion. It's globular and it has a flat base. There's an apocryphal tale whether this is true or not-- I think it probably isn't true but I like it. That they were designed to be bottom heavy so that when ships went out to sea they didn't roll around on the captain's table. You would have a heavy bottomed, flat bottomed bottle that would be there in the center of the captain's table and all the sailors could help themselves to a drink from it which is quite good.

Ben (26:03):

That's why you have to learn to dive and go to Holland.

Florrie (26:06):

Yeah, exactly. So I'd love to find one of those. I love finding worked bone artifacts, and until recently, I had never found a complete worked bone knit comb. I found one from the 1600s this year so that was a bucket list item ticked. But thinking of worked bone, I have found over the years numerous bone dominoes and gaming pieces but I have never found a Roman bone gaming piece. So I'd like to find a Roman gaming.

Ben (26:53):

And they're medium common or they're findable?

Florrie (26:55):

They're medium common. They're findable. The problem is I don't generally like mudlarking in the center of London where one finds them because it's too overcrowded for me. I go to the river also for peace, nature, to kind of be by myself, and for head space. So I'm not someone who likes to go and mudlark next to the hoards, but I feel like I should probably go a bit more often into the center of town and then I might find my bucket list Roman game encounter. But until then, I don't think I ever will find it.

Ben (27:34):

Talking about groups, we should mention that actually group visits-- Is it Thames Discovery?

Florrie (27:41):

That's right.

Ben (27:42):

They do tours. So if you're just interested in coming for a day in London or you're in London and just want to try it-- you're not going to do this every week and go up for a license-- That's one way of getting a taste for it and a little bit of history. I wouldn't say absolutely certain, but you're very likely to find at least a pipe stem. I think every time I go we still find a pipe stem and we're not even in a very particular rich bit, either walking along Hammersmith or by the Tate Modern.

Florrie (28:08):

Well, you guys must be eagle-eyed because not everybody finds a pipe stem. They're there to be found but they do blend into the pebbles so you have to be in tune. I recommend to anyone who is interested in going mudlarking and doing something with Thames Discovery-- While they can't get a license, they can do the Thames Discovery group tours-- To have a look at what these things look like online so that then you know what to look for. I think you have to have an idea because if you had never seen a clay pipe stem-- and I should add these are the fag butts of yesteryear. They're from literally clay smoking.

Ben (28:47):

They do look a little bit like cigarettes.

Florrie (28:49):

They do look like cigarettes. If you haven't seen them, you might not necessarily know to pick them up.

Ben (28:59):

Yeah, I agree. Maybe we'll finish on this part. You brought some of your own finds with you. Is there one you'd like to share?

Florrie (29:08):

Yeah. I've brought in several things but I do love glassware. There's something about glass that really does it for me. I thought I would show you my 17th century apothecary bottle which is tiny and it's like a miniature onion bottle actually. But it would've contained some kind of quack cure. God knows what medicine went in that.

Ben (29:37):

This is amazing. So for those not on the video, the glass has a really beautiful, translucent quality with greeny, very slightly oily rainbow colors. It has this kind of handmade quality because it's not quite regular. Only very slightly off regular, but it gives it a kind of really unique joy. And it's really tactile. You have it in your fingers and it feels like it has definitely been touched or shaped by humanness. I guess it was blown rather than with fingers. But because of that, very slight unevenness. There's a real quality of being connected to another human just me touching this and looking at it

Florrie (30:28):

Exactly. It's hand blown and it has been squished by the bottle maker to be slightly cuboid. So while the glass was still malleable, as it was cooling, they kind of pinched it. That's why it has this tactile quality, I think. So they've pinched it into this slightly sort of square shape and then left it to cool. It has such a fascinating hidden story that we'll never know. So from the glass maker, the glass blower to the apothecary-- what they chose to put in it, to the person who bought it to cure The Black Death, maybe. Who knows what their aspiration was that this medicine would cure? Did it work? Probably not.

Ben (31:23):

And you've dated it from 1600s?

Florrie (31:25):

This is from the 1600s. Probably the mid to late 1600s.

Ben (31:32):

And how can we tell?

Florrie (31:34):

From the tint of the glass. The kind of wonderful aqua color. From the way it's been made, the shape. And on the bottom, this kind of kick up and rough bit is called the pontil scar. That's where you have the scar from where it was blown and cut off the piece of glass. By the 18th century, they had worked out how to make glass completely transparent; the flint glass which has a slightly gray color to a modern eye but which was considered to be transparent then. But this still has that kind of slightly greeny aqua color of the earlier glass. This was as close as they could get in the 1600s and before then to transparent.

Ben (32:31):

That's amazing. So I would take something like that-- And today, if we put it on a little plinth or had it in a gallery, I think a lot of us would call it art. I guess there's always been through history a kind of, "Where does craft become art?" But I think even more so when we think about finds or there's a whole modern day sequence of found objects or found art or I guess earlier, but from the time of Duchamp's famous urinal where he takes it and puts it on a plinth and calls it art and it therefore becomes art. What do you think about how much if an artist or if anyone says something that they've created or even found or placed is art? Do we really think that's art? And how does that change the things through time? 

I guess I ask it partly because it links into this. But I meet a lot of people today who think, "Oh, a lot of this modern art will go into post-modern." Doesn't seem to be art to them because it doesn't have some of that craft skill based. But people sort of read into how some modern art has gone and think about it, does value it in things like art and in that language of art. So I was wondering of your perspective of long art history and obviously you’re are very learned within mudlarking and objects, but also within modern art, even into masters in classics and how that's been viewed full time. So is art always art if an artist calls it such?

Florrie (34:10):

Well, that's a very big question that perhaps I can't fully answer. I think if someone creates something and decides that they want it to be viewed as art, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. It will be a piece of art if it has been created with artistic intent. Whether you think it's any good is another matter. But it is interesting. There are a lot of artists today who are fascinated by craft from the past and who work specifically with mudlark finds. In fact, I think there's an exhibition on view at Tate Modern at the moment which I haven't been to see yet. An installation of objects displayed by an artist and there are objects that she found in the Thames. I wish I could tell you who this artist is. I'm so sorry everybody. I haven't been to see it yet. Someone just mentioned it to me in passing the other day and said, "Oh, you should go and see."

But there we go. There's a whole mudlark display in Tate Modern so I think that sort of answers your question there. One of my happiest achievements in my career thus far was curating an exhibition on mudlarking and mudlarked art in 2019 for the Totally Thames Festival. That was an exhibition that I put on showing art by artists featuring mudlark finds, still life photographs by Hannah Smiles; a photographer of mudlarked finds and portraits of mudlarks as well that she had taken. That was in the Bargehouse which is a massive warehouse space on the South Bank by the Oxo Tower; so right by the river.

That was a joy to be asked to do that and it felt like it was a fusion of both my passion, hobby; mudlarking and what I do in work which is curate and look at art. So that was a fusion of art and mudlarking and looking at craft and elevating it to art. Looking at history and saying, "This is part of who we are as human beings. We create-- There is an impulse and an urge to make things of beauty. Even things that are utilitarian, there's beauty to be found." And that kind of links back to the philosophy of someone like William Morris who believed that art should always be useful and beautiful.

Ben (37:19):

Yes. And we were talking earlier about how there are these human impulses; children throwing stones in the river, people leaving hand prints in wet mud or cement, maybe cave painting hand prints. Maybe it's the same impulse and this impulse to be with nature and things. So some of my friends who don't really like or appreciate modern art think that it's not saying anything around that. But a lot of people who are into modern art or post-modern art kind of think, "Well, actually there is a story and language which maybe half of it is in the kind of the viewer's part-- we call it, I guess the beholden part." And maybe this is one reason that part of me is not too worried about AI (Artificial Intelligence) generated art because although you have the visual picture, there's a portion of any picture or object like we've discussed which has this whole other value or story or narrative behind it and what we make of it; whether it's to your earlier story about the dark side of beads or the light side of costume making.

It will always need a human or an audience or a reader to complete that. Yet I also worry sometimes that maybe some modern art or post-modern art has gone so far that they've left a lot of people behind because they've been working and building on all of these stories and every generation goes a bit further. I know you started off in old masters, but now you also deal with modern and living artists and things. Do you think this is much of a worry and do you find people outside of the art world? Do you think they're correct to be worried that they don't understand modern art? Or is this always one of those things a bit like these finds which you need to puzzle it out and appreciate to get perhaps the most out of it, although there's always a surface tactile craft quality as well?

Florrie (39:32):

Well, I think that there are tiers of art. And what we mustn't forget is that ultimately there's a real human connection with beauty. So conceptual art aside which serves an important purpose and helps us to think and challenges us in many ways. On the other hand, there's a human need, I think, a kind of nesting instinct to have art for the home, things of beauty to lift your spirits. I think that's really elemental. I certainly found as an art dealer that post-Covid coming out of lockdown, a lot of people had been in their homes going a bit stir crazy looking at their walls and had been rearranging their homes in their mind's eye. There was a kind of frenzied fever of art buying that happened both online during lockdown and immediately after lockdown. People had been art staffed and commercial art galleries were the first galleries to open because businesses were given special dispensation by the government.

Commerce had to carry on eventually. So they opened before museums and galleries. As a result-- I was working in a gallery at the time, the influx of visitors, the number of people who wanted to come just to see art was a massive uptick. I think that that was a direct result of people being in their home and feeling the need to rearrange their nests, but also to get out and see art again. They had felt starved of art and the need for beauty and a need to look at beautiful things to distract from what might be happening in the world. So I think that art has a very important place and people haven't actually become disconnected from it. But there is very much a difference between conceptual and AI and what you materially might have in the home, and I include craft in that.

But looking again at instinct, I think so much of what I love and what I do is an instinct. You are either a collector or you are not, but there's a definite core group of people who are fascinated and want to collect and want to find and look at things. My mum tells me that as a small baby once I'd learnt to crawl, I would go out into the garden and bring stones back in and arrange them under the kitchen table. I'd be nipping in and out all the time creating installations of stones under the kitchen table; nesting is what she called it. She says that as a little baby I just wanted to nest and create dens with things that I had found. That wasn't something that was influenced by home life per se. That was surely at that age an instinct.

Ben (43:03):

Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I think we do have that instinct to some degree in all of us. That leads me to think what are the pieces of art that you have in your own home or flat? I guess you're going to like all of them because that's why they're there. But maybe you would highlight some pieces you have or what they mean to you or perhaps what they brought to you during pandemic or out of pandemic. How you've thought about your own collecting within art for the home.

Florrie (43:35):

Well, I definitely have a philosophy which is that I never buy any art that I wouldn't want to have on my own walls. Indeed, when I buy art now, that's where it goes. But at the same time, nothing is a permanent part of my collection or home. Everything is fluid. I'm an art dealer so I buy art that I can sell and I buy art that I'll sit on for years and then sell down the line and I'll enjoy it. Then it will be time to let it go and find it a new home and bring something else in. So it's a constant state of flux. 

But a painting that I recently acquired that means a lot to me is a view of Hastings where as a family we go every summer to spend time. It's by a wonderful artist called Laetitia Yhap, who is half Chinese, half Vietnamese. She has lived and worked as an artist in Hastings for the last 55 years. She does these beautiful figurative paintings often; sort of fishermen on the beach. But this is actually a view from the window of her home looking out at the cliff; a very specific cliff where I've been for long family walks. So it has resonance for me because it represents a place that is special to me and my partner and our daughter.

Ben (45:18):

Lovely. What do you look for in art or an artist then? So you have a nesting instinct piece. There's also an eye to maybe there's going to be value longer term. I guess that's the market commercial piece as well. Then there's the meaning and the symbolism and all of that. I guess it's got to speak to you. But if you are thinking to maybe represent an artist in a pop-up gallery or a piece to collect, what goes through your mind when you are looking or handling a piece of art or talking to an artist?

Florrie (45:54):

Well, again, I think a lot of it is just gut reaction and that sounds very unscientific. We all like to think that we've got good taste but it's all relative. I mean, all I can do is look for art that speaks to me and I see beauty in. I suppose because my grounding-- as you mentioned briefly-- is in old masters, I am interested in artists today who use techniques that bridge the centuries. So I am interested in art where you are looking at a painting and it's a picture of something and you can say, "Yes, that is a portrait of a person or a landscape." I do like abstract art as well. But then in something like that, it would have to be a composition that has balance and color that I like. But I'm afraid it's an entirely personal cocktail that's impossible to quantify or specify really.

Ben (47:06):

I guess that's one of the joys that it hasn't been brought to just an algorithm or something that you can count in numbers or things like that. And I guess thinking about art like that, I'm probably-- because my day job is within the market-- much more amenable to thinking about art markets and culture markets. I think artists in general, all creators are probably on average undervalued because of the way they've done it. But I think it is important to have that value. I know a lot of my arty friends have a very uncomfortable relationship with the market because they think quite rightly that a lot of the things that they produced are in some ways beyond a measurable value. Like the things we've talked about are very hard to put in words and you don't put in numbers.

There is something slightly awkward about putting a price on it. Yet in so many things human, markets are also our invention and there is this invention of being able for people to exchange in some sort of value these intangible things which are hard to count. But do you have a view-- I guess with a commercial background you are probably going to be also at least somewhat amenable to art markets having dealt with them your entire lifetime. But is there anything misunderstood about art markets or how artists should think about approaching a market or their work or something which is maybe more valued? I think it's very easy to make the argument against them just saying, "Look, these things are priceless and valuing them somehow makes it awkward.” But I think it's often less talked about of the value of markets that they can bring. And I've been just intrigued as to if you have to have any of these debates with artists and people.

Florrie (49:01):

Well, I should really say at this point that I do deal with living artists but my expertise really is in historic art. My main dealing now is with mid-20th century works of art; modern British art. So a lot of the paintings that I buy and sell are by artists who are no longer alive. I am particularly drawn to works from the 1920s, thirties, forties. I love high Art Deco design and I love what was happening in art at that time. I find the history interesting as well. So that's a market that has really blossomed and grown over the last 10, 15 years. A lot of the paintings that I deal in now are by artists who you could have bought their work 10, 15 years ago for nothing, but now you have to pay a price.

Auction houses have a really big role to play there because I think that they set the basic level at which people are prepared to spend in an art market. So there are auction records. You can look online and see what a particular artist's works might have fetched in the last year or two or even the last decade, and you can look on a website called Artnet; a kind of auction records for the last 10, 15 years on a particular artist so you can see how the market has changed or grown. That really is the litmus test. 

But with contemporary art, I tend not to deal with contemporary artists who are super trendy where you are talking Gagosian level prices. That is a market I don't understand and I have no interest in. The kind of artists that I deal with today who are living, as I say, they tend to be rooted in the past. And as such, often they're kind of what I would call late career artists. People who were working in the 20th century and are still active today, but who have a kind of back catalog, so to speak, and already have a market themselves, already have a level at which they used to sell their works. Having said that, I would love to represent young emerging artists as well and students and help to guide them.

Ben (52:14):

If you have a good connection.

Florrie (52:15):

Yeah. If I think that the work is beautiful and worth pushing, I will. I have an old boss who always used to say to me, "Florrie, willing buyer, willing seller." I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but it's true. Ultimately, all you can do is say what you think something is worth and then it will flow from there. You may have to end up in a scenario where you haggle or you reach a mutual point of agreement, but markets are fluid. But in the end, you just need someone who wants that piece of art and who's prepared to pay the price that you think it's worth.

Ben (53:04):

And why has 1920s, 1930s British art flourished and do auction houses or galleries in general? What is their role in the curation that may then actually impact value or even just the stories? I guess that's not just auction houses and galleries. That would be public galleries and national art places as well. Although again, that's probably split between contemporary and living and that. Is it just market forces of demand or is there some story as to why that art has suddenly become more noticeable? And I guess the other part I look at very afar-- So I'm interested in art, don't track the market. But it seems to me that artists or art which was perhaps historically more underrepresented, whether that's women-led art or art outside of western art or normal domains is also lifted. And you could see that as a reflection of a society movements although obviously, there's a range. So I speculate, I wonder whether that's had anything to do with it. But I'd be interested in your thoughts as to why it happens now.

Florrie (54:18):

I think that it's recent enough history that people can relate to it visually. And I think a lot of our taste today is informed by the last hundred years and what we are used to seeing, whether it's growing up with cartoons of a certain era. We are inevitably visually impacted by the aesthetics of the last century. So I think that it is natural that people look to the past to try and understand the present. That applies to art as well. But something that you say there really does strike a chord. And as you say, right now museums and public galleries are trying to rebalance their collections and to look at art and to bring women and minority groups into the history; to bring them back into the public eye. When in the past it was very much kind of white male art in galleries and museums.

I was very fortunate recently to acquire a group of works by a female artist from the 1930s who was part of the East London group of painters; a movement in East London. Her name was Brynhild Parker. She did some very sensitive, beautiful portraits of East Londoners; one of which is a young girl of Afro-Caribbean descent. She was painting what she saw every day in East London. So those are paintings for which I have aspirations. I think that they should be placed in museums and that's what I intend and hope to do because people do need to see the work of female artists and of especially the female gays in the past, they need to know it existed. They need to know that there were people looking at minority groups then in a way that we're trying to sort of look at them today.

In the past, if you went to the National Portrait Gallery you wouldn't expect to see, for instance, a portrait of a black person. Its lots of pictures of white aristocrats. I think that there's a conscious decision and it's laudable that museums and galleries are trying to kind of say, "This isn't a fair representation of our history and our country." We are a multicultural, interesting place and we have been for centuries. It's not just male artists who've been painting over the last few centuries. There were women painting as well. So I think that that's a real shift.

Ben (57:39):

And a good shift.

Florrie (57:40):

And rightly so, a good shift.

Ben (57:41):

I'm very sympathetic to that. I still think it's extraordinary that roughly half your population is still underrepresented in all walks of life and in everything that we do. Therefore, that means that society doesn't flourish as well as it could be. I'm very interested in minorities, neurodivergent, and all of that type of work. But there is, I guess-- You hear in some quarters a kind of counter argument or some sort of backlash for saying... And I guess the arguments go, "Oh, these old master works were still really great or there was that." And we have this argument, I guess, quite acutely in Britain. But you've had it in other places around statues and their role. Maybe we can reinterpret them, but should it all be put by the wayside and people feel like maybe something that they liked or they felt part of has been diminished? I don't particularly see that. I see it as raising a side which should always have been there. But what would you say to people who feel awkward or challenged by some of that older line of work perhaps being more diminished or feeling threatened by the raising of this other kind of work?

Florrie (59:05):

Oh, you said to me earlier if you had a different question...

Ben (59:10):

We can avoid it.

Florrie (59:14):

No. The thing is-- I would say to that person, "Why don't you want to discuss this?" I think that people who can't understand that there needs to be a shift in the way in which we look at society need to look at themselves.

Ben (59:36):

Yeah. I think that's fair. I really think of this still globally. Like when people saying this shift and it happens in my work domain quite a lot. And I just point out that do you think broadly speaking, the world would be a better place if we had more female power, all of these type of things? I think the answer is unequivocally yes. Obviously, there's difficulties, anything, and the nuance and challenges of actually doing that. But you can't help but to say that's true and I think it's the same in history. There's always been roughly half the population and to have it not represented just doesn't seem very true. Never know quite what the truth is, but seems very far away from the truth that we had.

Florrie (01:00:26):

Yes. And for someone to suggest that by doing this it's to the detriment of the art that we... The two have always kind of shone a light on. I mean, that's ridiculous, really. We are not going to stop looking at paintings by Monet just because we think we need to be looking at paintings by a female artist of the same era for instance.

Ben (01:01:03):

The other thing I think on that and then I'll move on is that often those artists have been really supported often by-- I guess you could call them a missing woman because we don't often know. I was reading a story about Giacometti. So he does these tall sculptures as you would know, extremely famous, very well regarded. He worked obsessively on his art for hours and hours a day, day in, day out. But if you read the story of his life, there was no way he could have done that without the women in his life. Very short, that's a very complicated domestic life he had. But it was obvious that he could not do his art without that.

There's an interesting thing actually. I'm going to pivot completely around something called music therapy or also music enablement and this idea of that we don't-- The idea of anyone creates anything and avoid is even more mythical than the other myths that we have. And that people or men throughout the centuries, the fact that they created and avoid is not true. In fact, old masters used to have-- They probably had male assistants. But they had big workshops. They had people that had helpers. In fact, you could see this maybe in Damien Hirst today. Other people, they have studios and you've always had people to work with you whether they are craft assistance or your family life and how that works. I think it's always been really interesting that it's coming to light more and more how that enablement happens. Without that enablement, you don't have the art. So I do think that is a form of co-creation which historically we've undervalued-- and we're still undervalued today, I'm sure. But we could have a slightly bigger sense of how that comes about.

Florrie (01:02:59):

That's so true. And it's also interesting, I think, that often a lot of artists' wives historically painted as well but are not as well-known as their husbands because they facilitated their husband's creativity and they tended to the family. But I've always thought you could do an exhibition called Artists Wives or Artists Two. Especially in the 20th century, there were so many artists whose wives they met at art school. In fact, a lot of women in the early 20th century went to places like the Slade to study, met their artist husbands, and then kind of went on creating but didn't have shows in the way that their husbands did because it was just understood that the male part of the relationship would be the one that was nurtured.

Ben (01:04:03):

Yes. And if they do go off by themselves, they're then often labeled difficult women.

Florrie (01:04:09):

Yeah, exactly.

Ben (01:04:10):

There's a whole other like... 

Florrie (01:04:11):

Barbara Hepworth was considered to be a difficult woman because she agitated to have representation in New York and London and she expected for herself what a male artist would expect. So she was labeled a difficult woman.

Ben (01:04:30):

Is Hepworth's art now valued about the same as Henry Moore's or is there still a gap?

Florrie (01:04:36):

I would say the gap has closed.

Ben (01:04:41):

Okay. Last few bits and then we'll talk about current projects and advice for people. So very short section on underrated, overrated, or some thoughts or comments on where things might go. So one of this is NFT art. So these are non-fungible tokens or this kind of crypto art type thing. Do you think it's underrated or overrated? We had this conversation a couple of years ago so it might be quite different because that market has come down. 

Florrie (01:05:10)

I have no idea. Zero idea.

Ben (01:05:13):

Let's pass. Okay. Next one would be, do you think we should have more public funding for art, or is it about right or should we have less?

Florrie (01:05:26):

We probably should have more. Always more public funding for art, especially in bleak times. We all need places to go to raise the spirits and elevate the soul.

Ben (01:05:39):

And you said you don't think it can be supported just by commercial terms on the art mark after?

Florrie (01:05:43):

No. We need more.

Ben (01:05:46):

Very fair. Then we briefly touched on this, but AI art or art generated by computers or artificial intelligence. Or at the moment what's really happening is you are using a prompt. So show me a boxer in the style of Van Gogh and then the algorithm has been trained on these sort of images and produces these type of things. Do you think underrated, overrated, or where do you think it'll go?

Florrie (01:06:16):

I think it's absolutely amazing. I know nothing about it. My brother knows a whole lot more. But something that really sticks with me is as a teenager in the nineties I remember him creating these incredible AI demos through programming. These beautiful things that would come out of incredibly complex coding and was so intriguing. I think he created one of the first codes, or if not the first code that enabled movement in time with music which was hugely innovative at the time and paved the way for AI; the fluidity of it today. I think it's fair to say he was a pioneer of that. I just have huge respect for artists who work with computers. I think that what they do is phenomenal. I say to anyone who looks down their nose at it that they have no idea the craftsmanship that goes into that. It is a type of craftsmanship and it is art, in my view.

Ben (01:07:41):

Yeah. And I hinted that this is my view on a lot of people who don't really engage with modern art or even conceptual art. I can see why it doesn't resonate with them, but I never find a case where it hasn't been extremely worked upon and thought about. You might not value that very much and everyone's got their own taste but I wouldn't necessarily just dismiss it. So thinking about collecting then, if you wanted to start out and you're interested in maybe collecting some sort of art which might be sending to you and maybe you have even just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand pounds or however, whatever budget you are. What would be your advice to a would-be person starting out thinking about collecting art?

Florrie (01:08:30):

I would say there are two things you could do. First of all, identify whether you are interested in new art or old art. If you are interested in new art, then go to degree shows, go to graduation shows for the Royal College of Art, the Slade, all these types of places and you can buy from students and support them. You can do that for not very much money and get a beautiful piece of art by an up and coming artist and that is a fantastic way to collect. 

Or look at auctions. Everything's online these days. It's incredible. You can look at all sorts of things on the-saleroom.com for instance. There's another site called Invaluable and all these regional auction houses and global auction houses put their sales online with photographs of things that they have for sale. Again, you can buy things for not very much money at auction and it's quite exciting. Just think of it as a kind of glorified eBay. It's no different. If you like to kind of truffle out a bargain, that's the way to do it.

Ben (01:09:54):

Very good advice. In fact, I think I will make that on my list of things to do next year. I haven't been to a student show for quite a number of years but always really like them. I like them in design and furniture as well because I quite like the craft stuff. Okay. And then current projects and things that you are working on. So you've moved to representing potentially on pop art, pop-up gallery type things, and a little bit of collecting yourself. But any current projects you want to talk about?

Florrie (01:10:22):

Yeah. I mean, I touched on it. I'm hoping to do a pop-up exhibition on Brynhild Parker; the East London artist I mentioned who was very active in the 1930s. I have a group of her paintings so I intend to do an exhibition pop-up hopefully in the spring. So that's my main focus at the moment.

Ben (01:10:49):

Great. Would you like to end with any advice for our listeners? You could think about that as advice for artists or advice for someone who wants to take a career as a gallery person or a mudlarker, or anything you'd like to share about your life experiences so far?

Florrie (01:11:09):

Oh my gosh. I don't know that I'm the best person to give advice but I've always done what I love and it gives me great satisfaction. You can always find your people, you can always find your niche even just by going online. It's amazing how the world opens up. As long as you are doing something that you're passionate about, you should be okay. And I think it's okay to monetize your passion as well. I mean, you know I'm an art dealer. Maybe I've sold my soul, I don't know. But I mean, I don't see it that way. I just think I love art, I love dealing in it. That's how I earn my living and it gives me great pleasure.

Ben (01:12:09):

That seems like excellent advice. So Florrie Evans, thank you very much.

Florrie (01:12:14):

Thanks, Ben.

Michael Nielsen: metascience, how to improve science, open science | Podcast

Michael Nielsen is a scientist at the Astera Institute. He helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He is a leading thinker on the topic of meta science and how to improve science, in particular, the social processes of science. His latest co-authored work is  ‘A Vision of metascience: An engine of improvement for the social processes of Science’ co-authored with Kanjun Qiu (open source book link). His website notebook is here, with further links to his books including on quantum, memory systems, deep learning, open science and the future of matter. 

I ask: What is the most important question in science or meta science we should be seeking to understand at the moment ?

We discuss his vision for what a metascience ecosystem could be; what progress could be and ideas for improving the the culture of science and social processes.

We imagine what an alien might think about our social processes and discuss failure audits, high variance funding and whether organisations really fund ‘high risk’ projects if not that many fail, and how we might measure this.

We discuss how these ideas might not work and be wrong; the difficulty of (the lack of) language for new forming fields; how an interdisciplinary institute might work. 

The possible importance of serendipity and agglomeration effects; what to do about attracting outsiders, and funding unusual ideas. 

We touch on the stories of Einstein, Katalin Kariko (mRNA) and Doug Prasher (molecular biologist turned van driver) and what they might tell us.

We discuss how metascience can be treated as a research field and also as an entrepreneurial discipline.

“...."How good a use of the money actually is? Would it be better to repurpose that money into more conventional types of thing or not?" It's difficult to know exactly how to do that kind of evaluation, but hopefully, meta-scientists in the future will in fact think very hard and very carefully about how to do those kinds of evaluation. So that's the meta-scientist research discipline.

As an entrepreneurial discipline, somebody actually needs to go and build these things. For working scientists it's often remarkably difficult to do that because it doesn't look like a conventional activity. This isn't sort of science as normally construed. Something that I found really shocking-- you may be familiar with and hopefully many listeners maybe familiar with, the replication crisis in social psychology. So this was, I guess most famously in 2015, there was a paper published in which 100 well-known experiments in social psychology were replicated. I think it was 36% of the significant findings were found to replicate and typically the effect size was about roughly halved.

So this was not a great look for social psychology as a discipline and raised a lot of questions about what was going on. That story I just told is quite well-known. What is much less well-known is that in fact going back many decades, people had been making essentially the same set of sort of methodological criticisms. Talking about the file drawer effect, talking about p-hacking, talking about all these kinds of things which can lead to exactly this kind of failure. And there are some very good papers written in-- I think the earliest I know is from the early sixties. Certainly in the 1970s and 1980s you see these kinds of papers. They point out the problems, they point out the solutions. “Why did nothing happen?” "Well, because there's no entrepreneurial discipline which actually allows you to build out the institutions which need to be built out if anything is actually to change."

We discuss how decentralisation may help. How new institutions may help. The challenges funders face in wanting to wait until ideas become clearer.

We discuss the opportunity that developing nations such as Indonesia might have.

We chat about rationality and critical rationality.

Michael gives some insights into how AI art might be used and how we might never master certain languages, like the languages of early computing.

We end on some thoughts Michael might give his younger self:

The one thing I wish I'd understood much earlier is the extent to which there's kind of an asymmetry in what you see, which is you're always tempted not to make a jump because you see very clearly what you're giving up and you don't see very clearly what it is you're going to gain. So almost all of the interesting opportunities on the other side of that are opaque to you now. You have a very limited kind of a vision into them. You can get around it a little bit by chatting with people who maybe are doing something similar, but it's so much more limited. And yet I know when reasoning about it, I want to treat them like my views of the two are somehow parallel but they're just not.

Available wherever you get podcasts. Video above or on YouTube and transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

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• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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Transcript: Michael Nielsen and Ben Yeoh (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Michael Nielsen. Michael is a scientist at the Astera Institute. He helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He is a leading thinker on the topic of meta-science and how to improve science, in particular, the social processes of science. His latest co-authored work is, “A Vision of Meta-science: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science.” Michael, welcome.

Michael

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Ben.

Ben (00:33):

So first question, big question of science. What do you think is the most important question we should be seeking to understand around science or meta-science today?

Michael (00:45):

Okay. Science and meta-science are such large subjects that it's impossible to give a really comprehensive answer to that. I'll just stick with the sort of science itself. I think there's this really interesting transition that's happening in science at the moment where for the longest time, the way we made new objects in the world, in some sense it was sort of by inspired tinkering. And we’re now over the last 20, 30 years kind of going through a transition where we actually have a theory of the world that's pretty darn good. And we're starting to use that theory to inform how we build up new objects. It's a little unclear. What I mean by that is sort of atom by atom we are starting to do assembly.

We're not doing it ad hoc. We're actually able to design things from first principles. I think this is a really large change in technology. Over the next hundred or 200 years, we're going to figure out how to do this kind of first principles design whereas before it was always there were some external objects lying around in the world. Maybe you discover copper or iron in the Iron Age and you make use of it but there's no principled underlying theory. So I think that's actually a very exciting thing which is underlying a lot of changes in science over the last 20 or 30 years and I expect it will be a really large force over the next, in fact, probably centuries.

Ben (02:28):

You sketch with Kanjun a really dizzying vision of what a science ecosystem could be. And I understand your point is there's a lot of variety that we could be expected to see in a really healthy ecosystem. Then right in the start of your essay or book, I think you have this interesting provocation around what would an alien think when presumably an alien would understand the laws of gravity, understands the laws of physics. Although maybe if they've time traveled maybe there'd be something else on gravity. But you make the point that actually around the thinking of the social progress around science, there might be some elements that an alien finds the same. Maybe something like a controlled trial. You would've thought that design would also stick in an alien culture and some things that an alien might find really very different. So when you talk about some of these first principle building blocks, are you thinking of the principles that an alien would hold to be true? And in which case, which of those principles do you think we've discovered already?

Michael (03:33):

Yeah. Scientists certainly often obsess quite a bit about things like their citations and their number of publications and their h-index and all these other kinds of things. And it's pretty difficult to imagine that an alien scientist or an alien society would've rediscovered those. They don't seem like platonic elements of the world just out there waiting to be discovered. Although it also seems likely to me that alien societies might have some pretty strange constructs of their own that we would also laugh at. In terms of what's actually fixed, I would frame that question as a question about fundamental meta-scientific principles. Are there particular ways in which it's good to organize the social processes of science to enable discovery? So an example might be for example, in the 16th century, Francis Bacon had a certain number of interesting ideas, but a couple-- One was that there should be extremely limited deference to authority.

At the time of course, there was still a great deal of deference to the church, to the state, to Aristotle, to the other great thinkers of antiquity. And Bacon said, "No, that's not right. Really, we should get away from that. In fact, nature is the final." And anybody, if you do an experiment and it contradicts what Aristotle says it's so much the worst for Aristotle. You don't simply defer just because the great man of 2000 whatever, 1500 years earlier said so. There's a whole bunch of notions there. But this notion of deference to nature rather than to authority and freedom of inquiry, those are examples of meta-scientific principles that I think it's reasonably likely that in fact other alien civilizations, to use your framing, might well have discovered things which are quite similar to that as kind of being best practices how to organize the process of science.

Ben (05:43):

And how well do you think we understand how we've made progress in science? Because there's kind of essays out there saying, "Well, we don't really understand that much about how much progress we've made. It's all been a little bit haphazard." But then some people say, "Well, no, actually we do have some of these progresses and what we think." Do you think we've understood very well the processes that we've made? Or do you think it's barely touched and just been completely haphazard and we don't really quite know what we've been doing?

Michael (06:15):

We said they have lots of rules of thumb. Economists will tell you that total factor productivity is somehow strongly related to the practice of science. People try and write papers relating to patents, to productivity growth and things like this. It's hard certainly trained as a theoretical physicist not to feel like we're still in the pre Aristotelian phase of this. These are very gross kinds of ways of thinking that they just seem very coarse. We don't have anything like a detailed theory of how to design institutions to support discovery. But people are making little bits and pieces of progress which is fun. I think of it as kind of... I mean, it's a proto field. It's a proto field now with a long history. You can find people proposing doing this sort of a very explicitly kind of investigation going back a century or so. And then you have people like Bacon or in fact many others in the 16th and 17th century who in some sense were doing what I would call meta-science.

Ben (07:31):

So still the early days which is very exciting. So how should we go about improving the culture of science or these social processes? Perhaps one way of asking that-- because that's the whole big part of your book, is you pick up on one idea on high variance. So things that people support or donor variants. So maybe I thought I would ask you in the least that section, what do you think is the best idea in that and what do you think is the worst idea? What's the one that you would just not do and maybe else should do?

Michael (08:06):

So certainly the processes which we use now in universities and more broadly in the research culture, a lot of those seem pretty arbitrary and ad hoc. If you think about the NIH panel system or things like this, in many cases those kinds of systems weren't designed after a lot of careful reflection and thought. They were just done in a very ad hoc contingent manner by people who rush to get things done which is terrific. But then when you don't have any process for actually upgrading those systems later on, you can get really stuck in quite a rut. So I certainly think that I'm far from being alone in this. A lot of people I think have considerable problems with the notion of essentially committee based peer review of proposals for scientific projects.

You have five or 10 or sometimes more of your peers sitting in judgment of your proposal and you get these kind of averaging effects where the thing that is pretty acceptable to everybody is the thing that can get funded. And the idea that maybe is radically polarizing it's very, very difficult to get funded. So some people love it, some people hate it. That will tend to die under that kind of process. And that process wasn't designed to be the best. It's just something that made quite a bit of sense early on as something to try out. But it's now a little bit frozen. I've heard so many people refer to it as the gold standard. I don't know in what sense it's the gold standard. Maybe the sense in which it’s the thing more people complain about than anything else.

Ben (10:03):

Right. Okay. So that high variance would perhaps weigh against it. All right, I'm going to spit out a few of these and then we can maybe talk about why they don't happen or maybe which one is the worst or best on that. So use high variance on that. So I was very interested, failure audit, 10 year insurance, an institute for traveling scientists, long/ short prizes (prizes in general), having an anti-portfolio and an interdisciplinary institute. So out of that, maybe I'm just going to pick one first and then you can dwell on whether those you really hate or really like one of those ideas is. I'm really interested in why science hasn't really got a failure audit much built into it because a lot of other industries have it. Some it's even mandated somewhat either by regulations and law that you have to go and look. If your bridge failed, you'd look and examine why exactly that happened.

And actually even in one of my domains investing you're always looking at your investing mistakes; what worked and what didn't, particularly what didn't. And yet at least on the funding part where you haven't-- So like your high variance part, did they go looking back and, “Well, committees all gave this an average score and we put it through. Was that a failure or not?” So that does raise the question of why something like a failure audit hasn't happened. You talk about some of the institutional bottlenecks maybe for that. So how good an idea do you think this is? Why hasn't it happened and what should we do?

Michael (11:33):

Just to fill in some background. We propose a large number of different ideas more just as kind of grist for the mill than anything else in this long essay with my collaborator, Kanjun Qiu. One of those ideas-- it's just a paragraph, is the idea of a failure audit. It's that, for example, if a funder claims that it's serious about high risk, high reward research, then they should actually evaluate what fraction of their projects fail. And if the failure rate is not high enough there should be some kind of restructuring. Maybe the program officer gets fired, maybe the director's job is under threat, some kind of consequences if they really claim to be serious about this kind of high risk model. Whether that's a good idea or not is another question, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that they are.

So just a couple of points about that. One of many motivating factors for this was just reading a report from the European Research Council where they're doing an analysis or a retrospective on what they funded. So throughout this report, they talk very assertively about how they're engaged in such high risk work. But they also claim at the same time that 79% of the projects-- I think it's 79%, it's about 80% of the projects that they fund are extremely successful. So this is not quite a definition-- I don't know what definition of risk they're using. But when 80% of the things that you try work not just well, but really well, but you're also trying to claim that you are really engaging in highly risky behavior-- Well, there seems to me anyway like there's some kind of a mismatch. I can't speak to why they do this but it does seem a little bit confusing. This is certainly a common thing when I talk to individuals, many funders. They will talk a lot about wanting to encourage a lot of risk, but they're not assessing in any sensible way the extent to which they actually are buyers of such risk. And when that's the case, there's no real feedback mechanism which is actually encouraging them to move towards the behavior which they claim to want. So this is just sort of a simple-- There are many variations of this idea which one could try, but the idea is to have some kind of mechanism for doing that kind of alignment between people's stated intentions and the actual outcomes.

Now, when I've talked to people and individual funders about this, about trying some sort of variation of it, they're often fascinated by the idea. I've talked for hours to people at some funders about it but they won't do it. And I think for really quite a natural reason which is, yeah, they're nervous about having consequences in this kind of a way. It's the most natural thing in the world to want to avoid those consequences. Of course, I don't like having my nose rubbed in my failures either. But it does leave this gap between what they think they're doing or what they say they're doing and what they're actually doing.

Ben (15:01):

Maybe we need to pay them more to offset that but with consequences. So you don't think it is because they actually want to see success and they're not interested in high risk? You think they are interested in high risk but they just don't particularly want to be audited on it?

Michael (15:20):

At the individual level I'm quite certain many are interested in high risk. There is of course this issue around, “What exactly does one mean by this?” So you talk to individuals about what specifically they're looking for, and it turns out that what they're looking for is actually quite different than what one other scientists in their potential pool of fundees thinks is high risk. So also having that kind of mismatch creates something of a communication problem. So I live in San Francisco in Silicon Valley and I have some friends who work in the startup and technology land. It's interesting there to talk about risk seeking behavior on the part of the venture capitalists. Certainly I've chatted with friends and acquaintances who've been pitching some idea for a startup company and they eventually realize that what they're pitching is not ambitious enough to get the attention of the top VCs. So there it's a case of what-- Basically, the good they're selling is not ambitious enough for the VCs. In the case of many of the funders, they're saying they want a purchase risk but they're only buying safety because eventually the scientists just start offering safe kind of proposals.

Ben (16:50):

That's what's happening. There's something slightly akin within investing world, one of my primary domains. If you claim you are a value investor and you actually define value, then when you're audited at the end of the year your own end investors will ask you, "How did you make your money?" Hopefully you made some. But if you didn't make it doing value and you bought--In investing you can buy growth and all sorts of other things, well, they say actually you failed. “You might have made us money so you might have had successful projects, but you didn't do what you said. And we can audit and we check you.” And actually, you check it in very many different domains. So this goes back to your VC example. VCs are expected to take these hundred x, a thousand x return type of businesses. Typically, a café business is not going to do that even though you might have an okay return. So you wouldn't expect to see a café business in a typical VC portfolio. And if you're pitching it, you're not really likely to that because it doesn't match what they're looking for. But there is an audit on that. It's both a success and a failure audit. So I thought it was really interesting that it didn't seem that science funding really had that.

Michael (18:00):

Not to my knowledge. I don't think I've ever talked to a funder that said that they really do a pointy version of this. Many of them do retrospectives. That's quite common. But they tend to be very soft in terms of the consequences. Actually, for an interesting reason which is those documents are both evaluations for the funder in terms of how they're looking at themselves and you can view them potentially as self-improvement documents, but they also tend to be marketing documents as well. In particular, it may be a document which is being used to communicate with government and with the wider public. Then there's a very interesting situation where to the extent it's a marketing document. They're trying to use it in fact to raise money or to ensure the continued supply of money. That's obviously a difficult spot to be really brutally honest with yourself about your own failures. Sort of absent really strong controls to ensure that you are honest in that way.

Ben (19:04):

I guess it's hard to put into that language of risk and you need something maybe simple. Like the person proposing the project has got to say, "Well, I honestly believe there's only a 4% chance of this project working." And you assess, "Well, I funded 10 projects at 4% chance which actually means all of them should probably fail. At the end then if I got one out that was really lucky." But it's quite hard probably for the originator of the project to honestly say, "Well, this is only a 4% chance of working” or something like that. Interesting I do a lot of analysis of early stage drug development, and we actually know before you enter phase one, you are talking roundabout 1% chance give or take a little bit within the error. So you kind of know what the average is when you go into that funding without having to say that. So if you get one in a hundred right you're doing about average on that. But we have a language of risk that you use which I don't see when I look at a lot of projects. And maybe that's because it's hard to do. But I guess the originator of the project or the funders should probably put a percentage chance and if they funded something they should say, "Well, I honestly thought this had a 10% chance of working."

Michael (20:12):

So I mean, in the conversation we're having we are putting a lot of emphasis on risk and working and failure. I guess I just want to emphasize-- That's a particular-- You could have a particular set of VCs around that. Those VCs may or may not be right. We're sort of for the sake of the conversation assuming that they are.

Ben (20:31):

Yeah, this might be completely wrong.

Michael (20:33):

It might be wrong. But once you have doubled down or decided that you want to pursue a particular thesis, having mechanisms in place to ensure it's not just words but something that's actually being done is obviously a valuable thing to have. The one really large funder that seems to do this quite well... I don't know of a really formal estimate that's been done of the failure rate of DARPA's programs. But people pretty close to the agency have estimated rates of sort of 80 and 85% failure which is truly remarkable given the scale at which they operate. And yet, I think most people at least view DARPA as having been really quite an outstanding success.

Ben (21:25):

And that's one of the things I'd emphasize on reading your essay is that you just put out so many ideas, some of which you think might not be any good at all or might not be correct. But the whole point being is that there seem to be so many ideas out there which we haven't really tested at all. And you make the point that actually that might be really the early days of it. So I might just touch on a couple more ideas and then move on to exploring this thing as ideas of funder as a detector. But I was very interested in your interdisciplinary institute because I sense a lot of universities or research thinks think of themselves as interdisciplinary or they have things and maybe some universities have that different type of scientist meeting. But the vision you gave of something which was truly interdisciplinary, I didn't see out there in the world. And when I read that I thought, "Well, that is actually surprising that there's a lot of talk as well about how great it is to be interdisciplinary and how much you learn from far domains and near domains and mixing of people in agglomeration effects." But to your point-- and you say this with a lot of these things, it hasn't really been done in the real world. Maybe assess the idea. Do you think interdisciplinary institute's actually a good idea? And what would you do if you thought it was a good idea?

Michael (22:42):

So again, this is just another-- It's sort of an amusing idea. It's simply to point out that in fact programmatically, you can try and engineer serendipity. If you've got 30 pairs of disciplines and you simply hire three people at the intersection of all 30 choose two, whatever that is. I think it's the-- I can't remember. It's about 450 odd-- sort of intersections to work at the intersection of any pair of those disciplines. Most of those researchers are going to fail. A few of them though will be doing something that is not supported anywhere else in the world and that happens to actually have a lot of latent value and they may pay for all the rest. So again, it's really sort of a mechanism design point of view where you say, "Let's take seriously the idea that maybe actually we have a systematic problem with funding interdisciplinary work. Let's simply see how to do it in a scalable way, design the mechanism to achieve that end." And then there's a question, sort of a meta-scientific question which is, "Is the value created actually sufficient to justify the upfront investment?" We don't know the answer to that question. You probably I think need to do a lot of work to make a prediction about it, but it's at least plausible as kind of an interesting way of going.

Ben (24:06):

And you could test some aspect about it.

Michael (24:09):

You could certainly do it at a low level relatively easily. The standard way in which a lot of interdisciplinary work is done, it's by people who are pitching their particular interdisciplinary work. I was involved in quantum computing beginning in the early 1990s. At that point it was very much a field that was seen as interdisciplinary. It was at the intersection of computer science and physics, didn't really have a natural home in either place. And so a certain number of quantum computing people would go to universities and sort of pitch at us essentially an interdisciplinary kind of a project. So that's kind of a bottom up approach. This thing we've been talking about is much more top down where you're just sort of saying, "Let's seek to create it at the intersection of every possible pair of disciplines." It might be that the bottom up approach is better to sort of look for things which are bubbling up. Again, that's something that actually needs to be tested. If you wanted to do something which was a little-- didn't involve quite as many resources as funding 450 at the intersection of 450 disciplines, you could simply sample from that set, for example and you'd get some interesting information.

Ben (25:19):

Yeah. Actually it would probably be pretty interesting even with fewer numbers of pairs.

Michael (25:22):

Even with 10 or 20 pairs. Just randomly chosen. You think about, actually... A good example, much of the modern deep learning revolution has of course been enabled by GPUs. GPUs were created—basically, my understanding is for video games. Just because modern displays had gotten such high resolution they needed dedicated chips to drive them. They're also very good at just doing linear algebra in general. And so circa sort of-- the latter part of the [inaudible 25:58] or whatever we call that decade, there was a relatively small number of people who were both familiar with AI or familiar with neural networks and also had some experience of GPU programming. And those people had an interesting competitive advantage in getting into neural nets. I just don't think that the intersection of video game programming and artificial intelligence is something that you could have predicted was going to be a good spot to be at the intersection of.

Ben (26:29):

Yeah. Hard to get that right; top down. And maybe that brings me onto one of your last ones, at least in this section, which was the anti-portfolio. You gave some quite interesting examples in the essay. For instance, one of the key scientists behind mRNA pretty much didn't get funded within the public university system a little bit. And then the university kind of celebrated it and said, "Well, actually you should definitely have funded her more." And then these other near misses or complete misses that we can see. Sometimes scientists now being a taxi driver rather than being in science. I had this overwhelming sense of, "Oh my gosh. How much have we missed out?" So I'm not sure if the anti-portfolio would really help with that, but I thought it was quite an interesting idea borrowed maybe from investing in VC about, "Well, these were the mistakes that we could have invested in and we didn't."

But then the next step being, "Well, why did we miss those and why didn't we invest further?" Because some of it, like in mRNA, they could have controlled it because everyone thought, "We're not really ever going to get a drug out of this.” So very low chance, let's not really fund it. But to your first point if you are funding high risk, this is exactly what we probably should state. “Government public, something other funded for a while because it is so low chance of success.” And the people in the field were telling you, “But if we make this work it's going to have a really high impact.” I just thought it was really interesting how you sketch that out and we missed it. Do you think that's a system--? Because you can always have individual misses and you make this point. But the way you sketch it out, it seems to me that it does seem to be more of a systems problem. How certain are you of that and what do you think we should be doing about it?

Michael (28:12):

So one of the most famous stories that you learn as a young scientist is that of Albert Einstein stuck in the Swiss patent office, unable to get an academic job. It's totally sort of a funny story. In this one year, 1905, he did plausibly four or five things that are Nobel Prize worthy which is pretty good for a guy who couldn't get an academic position, including I should say, he reconceived the notions of space, time, energy and mass which is not bad for sort of a side hustle. The thing that is omitted from this story is anything about what changed in the university system as a result. Did people say, "Oh, maybe we made a bit of a mistake here? Maybe this guy should have been able to get a good job." Of course, after having done that he quickly was made a professor and had a long academic career after that. But as far as I know, there was no postmortem done sort of systematically to say, "Why did we miss this person? Why was he actually not offered jobs before that?" That's sort of a spectacular example. You mentioned this example, Katalin Kariko, the scientist or one of the key scientists behind mRNA who in fact lost her job or was demoted, I guess, by the University of Pennsylvania. Had basically a lot of problems in getting to the point where she could pursue that work. Repeatedly turned down for NIH grants.

The University of Pennsylvania and the NIH will now happily take a lot of credit for her work. But as far as I know, they haven't done a serious postmortem internally. I mean, these are very spectacular, sort of very relatable examples. But if you've worked in science, actually you will know a lot of examples which are like this. But there is no then systematic reform. There is no way of conducting a postmortem which actually leads to systemic changes. So of course, it's fine. Any system at all is going to miss some people. The question that I think needs to be asked is, "How do you change in response? Do you just accept that that's the price?" Maybe that's the right response to the Kariko example but maybe it's not. Doug Prasher, the scientist who discovered green fluorescent protein which later won the Nobel Prize-- At the time of the Nobel was awarded for that work. He was working as a shuttle bus driver at a car dealership which is fine work but probably not the best use of his talents. There are many such stories and just no way for them then to feed back to cause systemic change. That's the issue, not that mistakes are made.

Ben (31:20):

Yeah. And I worry that although science is a discipline where outsiders with good ideas can be proved by the science, that it's not as strong as we would believe. And you have all of these data, whether it's minorities or outside, or your CV doesn't come from a prestigious university or your idea is just way out the mainstream where it just doesn't seem to shed light. So I'm not exactly sure but I do sense that might be a problem. Then it's interesting because you go on to make this analogy of the funder as a kind of detector system where they're looking for dark intelligence matter out there. And that that as a model is like, "Well, if it's out there, maybe there could be more ways of finding that type of dark matter and intelligence." When I was thinking about that I was reflecting that in some ways you're also incentivizing more dark matter intelligence to form in ways which won't work in the current systems that we have. How useful is that analogy in thinking about, "Well, are they really just looking for stuff which is out there and if we change some of this system, we could find it more as to your point is that that dark matter like it is in the universe just to be so much wider than we can currently invest."

Michael (32:40):

Okay. Let me just give it a really practical example. So a friend of mine, Adam Marblestone, has this notion of what he calls a focused research organization. A focused resource research organization is basically, think sort of tens of millions of dollars, an independent organization which is typically going to-- It has one very specific goal and it will create a particular type of a tool or a particular type of a data set. So for example, the cultivarian is an example of a focused research organization. And what the cultivarian is trying to do is it's trying to develop synthetic biology for non-model organisms. So a lot of the work that's done in synthetic biology at the moment it's typically done using e-coli as the particular organism which is modified.

So we have great tools for doing it in e-coli, but we don't have great tools for doing synthetic biology in a lot of other organisms. And so what they're trying to do in the cultivarian is they have a very specific list of tools that they want to create so that they can be used in certain other types of organism. So this is a very specific kind of-- It's a crossover between engineering and science. In many ways, this is something that is extremely likely to succeed because they just have kind of a checklist. "We need to do it here, here, here, here, and here. Here are some of the bottlenecks. Here's what the outputs are going to be. We're going to exist for a certain fixed period of time. It's going to cost--" I have no idea how much that's going to cost, but let's say 30 million dollars or something like that.

This is just a type of scientific problem that has been certainly been solved in the past but it's always been solved in a very bespoke fashion. So something like the Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, LIGO; the gravitational wave detector, these are all examples of projects where you had a very specific outcome very clearly in mind. You had a very specific process which was intended to get you to that goal. You just needed a large enough organization, the right set of resources to do it. But those were funded in a bespoke fashion. They weren't funded... Basically, people had to go off and sort of make an individual case. The clever thing about the focused research organizations is they're trying to do it in a scalable way. They're creating this container, convergent research, which seeks out people who have ideas for things which fit this general template.

And it just turns out-- What they tell me, they talk to a large number of scientists about this and most of the scientists don't immediately necessarily have anything to say. They're not used to this kind of container. There's no funding vehicle for it previously. And so if they've had an idea which would be a good match for the focused research organization, they don't necessarily-- It's not something they've developed in the past because there was no avenue for taking it further. It was a form of intellectual dark matter, this kind of very nascent thing and you got on with doing other things. You got your NIH R01 one grant or whatever was available and you did that kind of work. So it's interesting what they're essentially doing with the focused research organizations is building a kind of a detector to search out this intellectual dark matter.

Hopefully people have many, very nascent in most cases, ideas for focused research organizations that might actually be just a much better use of their talents than doing more conventional projects. So that's just kind of to sketch a very specific example of a person who identified a particular type of knowledge that at the moment, most funders just have-- They have nothing they can do with that. They're not set up to do it at all, but they founded this template and now they're systematically searching it out. I like to think of it as-- It's almost an antenna for eliciting this kind of information. Most people of course say, "Oh, I don't have any ideas like that." But a few people say, "Oh, actually I have this very half-baked idea." And then they may go off for three months or six months, think about it a lot more, and then actually come back with a really solid proposal. It's very early days for the focused research organization. I think the first two were funded last year. So we'll know whether it's a good model in five or 10 years. But certainly I think it's very interesting as an example of expanding the range of things which funders look to fund.

Ben (37:22):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in the essay you make two points around meta-science as a field. First of that it should be treated as a research field. And I could see that related to philosophy of science, history of science and things that this particular element of meta-science could definitely be seen as a research field. And then your other point is that it should be seen as an entrepreneurial discipline. So you actually have to trial out things, scale it, try these new social processes out. I'm interested in both, but on that entrepreneurial part, it seems that that's particularly challenging to say, "Well, we've got this new field and now we've got to try a lot of other things and then scale it out which we see on the experimental level. But we are seeing this at the meta level.” Do you think this is the only way that we should pursue it? How strong do you feel is this entrepreneurial field and what is it about it which means that you think, "Okay, this is what we've got to do. We've got to trial these small things. There's loads of ideas out there we don't know and then we scale and do it." That's kind of what entrepreneurs do and therefore I'm saying it's an entrepreneurial field. Have I got that right in terms of what you're saying and arguing on that?

Michael (38:35):

Well, there's certainly at least two components-- Actually, I would say three. We might come back to the third. One is just studying the processes people use and how well do they work? How can they be improved? What's not working at all, these kinds of things? So taking an evaluative approach, I mentioned, for example, the focused research organizations before. At some point in the future it's going to take a little while. It's going to be very good to do an evaluation of those and to start to think about questions like, "How good a use of the money actually is? Would it be better to repurpose that money into more conventional types of thing or not?" It's difficult to know exactly how to do that kind of evaluation, but hopefully, meta-scientists in the future will in fact think very hard and very carefully about how to do those kinds of evaluation. So that's the meta-scientist research discipline.

As an entrepreneurial discipline, somebody actually needs to go and build these things. For working scientists it's often remarkably difficult to do that because it doesn't look like a conventional activity. This isn't sort of science as normally construed. Something that I found really shocking-- you may be familiar with and hopefully many listeners maybe familiar with, the replication crisis in social psychology. So this was, I guess most famously in 2015, there was a paper published in which 100 well-known experiments in social psychology were replicated. I think it was 36% of the significant findings were found to replicate and typically the effect size was about roughly halved.

So this was not a great look for social psychology as a discipline and raised a lot of questions about what was going on. That story I just told is quite well-known. What is much less well-known is that in fact going back many decades, people had been making essentially the same set of sort of methodological criticisms. Talking about the file drawer effect, talking about p-hacking, talking about all these kinds of things which can lead to exactly this kind of failure. And there are some very good papers written in-- I think the earliest I know is from the early sixties. Certainly in the 1970s and 1980s you see these kinds of papers. They point out the problems, they point out the solutions. “Why did nothing happen?” "Well, because there's no entrepreneurial discipline which actually allows you to build out the institutions which need to be built out if anything is actually to change."

So it's just academics doing what academics do; studying a problem, figuring out what needs to happen maybe. But then they don't actually have the kind of infrastructure which is necessary to go and really make the changes. Turns out there's just a lot of institution building. And fortunately, that has happened in the modern era but it required a tremendous amount of energy and foresight and intelligence and also, I should say, actually funding from some unusual sources. A lot of the money for this work actually came from the Arnold Foundation run by the Hedge Fund operator, John Arnold.

Ben (42:18):

It didn't came from this different source of funding which I think is interesting. It struck me that these institution builders may well be not desktop scientists but they might well be meta-scientists. But actually the disciplines are potentially a little bit different for institution building. Actually, you see that in some other perhaps slow to change or slower to change industries. So for instance, lawyers have potentially run themselves by lawyers but now they're slowly evolving. They realize that actually, "You know what? If you're really good at law does not necessarily mean you're good at running your own organization." And they started to get in people who might be better at that. Accountants are the same. They might be very good at accounts. Is that the same as running an organization, small or large? And it struck me that science is having this similar problem that actually there's even more in law than in accounting about what you should do. It should maybe be attracting not those who've necessarily studied physics, but could have studied anything or interested in this to help build those institutions. And that's the kind of entrepreneurial part. Do you think that can happen just understanding some of science to build those organizations like a whole different discipline? Or do you think it's got to come from scientists themselves?

Michael (43:33):

I think just looking at examples where this has happened successfully in the past, there are a certain number of people who largely come from outside of science who have contributed successfully. But with that said, most of the examples begins with a scientist who is very close to the particular problems, understands them well, feels them very acutely, has an existing network and begins to develop solutions from there. Often when they do it, a classic is that they need to leave their home institution. Sometimes they need to leave science entirely. You’re often beginning to seek very unconventional sources of funds. Actually, I should say the default thing that happens under those circumstances is it just fails because there is no sort of support mechanism. It's done in this very strange, very bespoke fashion.

Brian Nosek who was the person behind some of this work on the replication crisis, he started the Center for Open Science sort of as an entrepreneurial kind of an organization to build out a lot of the required infrastructure. He took a leave of absence from his university position. And partially, just because the kinds of person who they needed to hire, there was just a person that is quite difficult to hire conventionally in an academic environment. So that's an example where it was done successfully. But when I talk to people who have ideas like this, they don't have any model for how to do this successfully.

Ben (45:17):

Yeah. I was talking to innovation historian Anton Howes and he has this idea that back in history, you essentially get people who were disgruntled but couldn't let it go. And from that you have all of these type of things which happened. He's got a lot of historic examples whereas more individual inventor scientists forming these things, but scaled in slightly different does seem to apply to today. And you think about homes for other types of thinkers. I think of the Santa Fe on complexity. There was no home for these, I guess you call them slightly maverick scientists and thinkers, although maybe not today. But they couldn't find homes in their home institutions and so homes had to be built for that.

The other thread of work I see through the essay and from your previous work which I feel is quite important although it doesn't necessarily touch on this exactly, is on decentralization and also open science. Entrepreneurial stuff seems to work better decentralized. We can talk about how much you can do top down versus bottom up like we said on kind of pairing disciplines. And then this idea of open science-- Even going back in history, how much you could build on what was public knowledge versus whether it was shared or whether you kept it as patents. But this idea that if you are thinking of just the glory of science as opposed to any profit motive, then building on other people's knowledge or knowledge out there might be quite useful for speeding up that which is a kind of open science idea. How important do you think are those two threads to expanding the field of meta-science, particularly entrepreneurial? Or are they really separate threads which may or may not happen and don't have to intersect with how meta-science is?

Michael (47:00):

I think that they are sort of separate. The point about decentralization, it's really just this point that you want change to be able to come from anywhere. So in particular, you don't want gatekeepers who are able to inhibit change. The ideas of science, we have a pretty good balance there. There's certainly a large number of Noble prizes are awarded to people who actually a long time ago when they were doing the original work, they were the outsider. They were the grad student or whatever. And maybe the famous expert was saying, "No, this can't be done." Certainly there are examples where science is not so receptive to outside ideas but overall, has a really remarkable track record of accepting that kind of thing. An example actually given in the essay which I rather like is the determination of the structure. The DNA molecule done by Watson, Crick, Franklin and arguably her student, Goslin as well.

They were very much kind of scrappy outsiders. They were at well-known institutions but they were almost completely unknowns. The other person who was in this race at the time was Linus Pauling who was the most famous chemist in the world. He was a Nobel Prize winner. I don't know whether he'd won his second Nobel Prize by that point, but he certainly had won. And it wasn't any Nobel Prize, it was a truly spectacular piece of work. Pauling actually announced that he'd found the structure first before them but he was wrong. The remarkable thing is Pauling accepted this immediately. They pointed out-- I think it was Watson pointed it out to him the error that he'd made and then showed Pauling the structure that they'd found, and Pauling just looked at it and realized that he'd goofed.

And this kind of situation where nobody with a good idea can sort of essentially emerge almost immediately victorious over the incumbent is obviously a very healthy thing. It's possible in science at the level of ideas, it is much harder at the level of institutions. If you have a much better idea for how the NIH should be dispersing its funding, good luck. I mean, the only way you can be taken seriously is if you are already at power. If you're sort of at that level-- If you're at the level of the director of the NIH or you have a Nobel Prize or something like that, sure, you can get taken seriously, maybe, but you're not going to do it as a grad student like Watson or Crick or somebody like that. So that ability to do decentralized upgrades in the social processes, the institutions of science is something which we just have no mechanism for at the moment. And I think that's the reason for much of what I see as sclerosis.

Ben (50:10):

And so your solution is new institutions, or can you do it new arms of old institutions?

Michael (50:16):

A few things. I mean, there are some patterns that work decentralized already. I won't talk about them now. One thing that would help a tremendous amount is a much more serious discipline of meta-science which is able to do evaluations which are dispositive. So I mentioned before this example of the replication crisis in social psychology. That is an example where you had an outsider who was actually really able to change an entire discipline because the strength of the evidence was so good. But it was also rather a peculiar situation where sort of the key paper-- arguably the key paper that they wrote, 270 authors replicated a hundred papers over multiple years of work. So it wasn't just get a data source, write some Python scripts, generate a few nice graphs.

This was a very serious kind of a project where they had said what level of evidence would be so overwhelmingly convincing that in fact even people who hated this conclusion would be forced to accept it or would be forced to... I think really it's change your mind; that's the relevant question. So even somebody who is initially hostile would change their mind. At the moment we just don't have very strong techniques for doing that. This is an example of where it was done, but what you would like is many more such examples and in particular, just a lot of people to work on developing techniques which are strong enough to do that. I think there are a few people who are doing that. Pierre Azoulay, an economist at MIT has I think also done some very strong work where it starts. I don't think it quite meets this bar, but it's getting close to the point where the evidence is so strong for certain processes that you might actually start to think, "Oh, I was wrong before in what I believed was the right way to do things." So that's kind of the bar. We introduce this term, decisive meta-scientific result, meaning a result which is so compelling that it would actually cause somebody initially skeptical to change their mind.

Ben (52:46):

Skeptics changing their mind. That's a good hurdle to cross. So I'm going to see if I can pin you down then on a meta-science question or idea. What would be the one thing that you would bet on most or most want to change in meta-science or some experiment to run do you think would be most valuable? Or you could also do the work like high variance. We could do, what do you think is the best idea in meta-science and what do you think is the worst idea in meta-science? And maybe we should go from the worst because then we'll be... Anyway, best and worst?

Michael (53:17):

Going to the bottom of the barrel you can always go further down. I'm certainly very fond of the idea of people thinking much more explicitly about increasing the rate at which new fields are founded. Actually, some funders do a certain amount of this work. They think explicitly in terms of trying to support fields in their relatively early days, but never that early. Something funny happens at the beginning of new fields very often. It's often very hard for people to get support for their work. I was involved in quantum computing in the relatively early days. I started working on it in 1992 just doing things like, “What journal do you publish in?” Surprisingly hard question. If you submit it to a lot of journals that you might think were relevant they'll just say, "I'm sorry, what is this?"

So it requires some editors to actually be a little bit friendly. If you try and arrange something like a scientific meeting actually people are like, "What is this?" So there's all these sort of very interesting barriers. But at the same time if you look at the papers which are being published retrospectively, they're enormously important; not all of them, but many of those papers are incredibly important. So there's kind of this very interesting mismatch where the work that is being done is often of incredibly high value relative to the resources that are being put into it. But also the barriers are much higher than much more conventional work. And I've used the example of quantum computing because I saw that very firsthand. But in fact, reading histories and talking to people seems to be quite a common feature across many fields.

There's often a lot of really very important low hanging fruit in the early days and yet pioneers surprisingly often it's very difficult for them to obtain even very extremely minimal resources. So certainly I think there's a lot of room for funders to think about this question of how can we accelerate the rate at which new fields are being produced? One of the things that they can do is to try-- To think about the question much more seriously, "What are the very early signals which currently we're not able to detect at all?" If you have a really good story, a really compelling kind of an account of how this is all going to play out and so on, that's actually a sign that maybe you're a little bit later on in the whole process. Very few fields start that way. Alan Turing inventing computing in the 1930s. He certainly didn't anticipate video games or something like this. He was actually trying to solve a logic problem. So many fields are born in very strange, almost entirely illegible ways. And this is one of the reasons why funders have trouble funding a lot of that work very often. But it's also an opportunity for them. So that's something I would love to see done.

Ben (56:41):

I could definitely see new fields. I've seen it tiny bit afar from science but actually more in the arts when you're talking about new ways of working or work. The interesting thing what I've seen in the very early days, I would say call it something where it's about a quarter baked-- So working on something else is their main thing and they've got this quarter baked idea and typically, almost everyone in the world or in that room won't understand what the person's talking about. It's quarter baked, so they don't even have the language to describe it. Quantum computing is quite a good example. You have to invent the terms and the language which are derived from other things but its own unique thing. Yet what I see, at least in art world-- And I think tangentially I see it in some science as well, is this quarterback idea is part obsessive.

You still have to do other things because you've got to do other things, but it nags at you or it nags at the person and it doesn't go away at the back of their mind. And then somehow the successful ones I see is they get a piece of usually chance funding or time or something and they work it into enough of a language that someone else can then potentially get it and go-- And someone with status or something saying, "You know what? This is worth a bet on. I can barely understand it, but I think I understand enough of it to know that it's true as opposed to completely wacky." You see that in art easier and I guess the stakes are lower in art. Then if it develops, it develops into it a language. You see this in language of art. They develop the whole other language and go, "Okay, that is a compelling vision," which in its very early days everyone thought was crazy or couldn't even understand and maybe wasn’t art. You could see it sometimes too early for its time. So I give a lot of credence to this quarter baked or fifth baked idea thing where they're trying to express something and in a language that you can't quite understand. But I can completely see it from a funder, if they can't understand it, well, how are you going to fund it? Except that that's maybe the signal that they're really obsessed about it. You can't understand it, but someone may be something and they're trying to invent something new about it. There seems to be tentative signs around it, still very low probability at success, but you have got these kind of meta-science which I think could be explored.

Michael (58:58):

I think the difficulty there, the challenge of a funder is the natural tendency is to want to wait to see whether or not things will become clearer. But of course they don't necessarily become clearer because if the person is not being supported at all, well, the demands of everyday life just mean that they will do other things mostly. So that's really quite a significant barrier. To your point about sponsors, so the English physicist, David Deutsch, wrote what is arguably the first really serious paper-- one of the first serious papers about quantum computing. In 1985, was communicated to the journal by Roger Penrose who has since won the Nobel Prize. My understanding is that actually Penrose was very skeptical of the paper, but sort of in a friendly fashion enough to be willing to have an opinion.

And really, certainly the community of physicists had almost no opinion at all for 15 years. It was just certainly in the late nineties that the most common conversation I would have with other physicists about quantum computing was, "Is this physics at all?" There was no interest. It was just, "Is this physics at all?" Got that question from many people who now work full-time on quantum computing. But I think it's really to Penrose's credit and to your point, it's an example of how having this kind of friendly, maybe somewhat skeptical but also ultimately supportive kind of sponsor can be very helpful.

Ben (01:00:42):

Great. There are two other things in the essay which you sort of look at askance which I'm quite interested in. One is essentially science in non-European, non-American type of institutions. I guess India, China, Russia, maybe to some degree, which you only fleetingly talk about but I was quite intrigued by. Do you think there's any particular learnings from that? There's a whole other type of, I guess sibling ecosystem. Anything we can learn from that or do you think it will go on a different track and should it go on a different track rather than converge?

Michael (01:01:19):

Well, you will know from the essay certainly we hope that it will go on a different track or at least there won't just be mindless duplication of the existing-- There's obviously a large research ecosystem in the United States, in the UK, in Europe and many other countries. But for countries who have a lot of scale in terms of population and whose economies are growing very rapidly, obviously China and India are the two most obvious examples. But you also have places like Brazil.

Well, there are many other places; Indonesia which match this kind of description. They have a really interesting opportunity. Historically because their economies have been relatively small, small relative to their population at least, they have tended not to put that much of their GDP into developing a research ecosystem. Now they're at a point where in fact they are very rapidly developing that research ecosystem. And the question is, "Do they do the same kinds of things? Do they duplicate the NIH? Do they duplicate UKRI or do they try and do something more adventurous?" I certainly hope that they'll take the opportunity that they have to study these systems, hopefully identify what they think are some shortcomings and then maybe make some big bets about doing things in somewhat different ways.

They can actually probably to some extent have their cake and eat it too. Nothing says that they can't spend 70% of their research budget in a way that looks relatively similar to the UK or to the United States but then also actually have a big chunk which is spent in very unconventional ways. Sort of just a way of saying, "Well, maybe we can actually do this much, much, much better." As far as I know this is not happening. I don't know of any large scale initiative to do it. It is a little bit encouraging. Certainly a lot of the innovation you do see actually comes from small countries that have just decided, “Let's try a little bit of a random experiment. We're not going to beat the United States on scale. Maybe we can do it in some other way.” Some of the foundations in Denmark do very interesting experiments. The New Zealand Health Research Council did, I think the world's first large scale experiment with randomized funding or lotteries that you just sort of give some of the money to an applicant at random. That kind of innovation I think is fairly natural in places which are already somewhat peripheral. But I certainly hope that India and China will do some experiments in that way. They have this opportunity.

Ben (01:04:13):

And I think these mid-size countries-- So Denmark's already well on its way. Singapore maybe. But places like South Korea, I think about their social housing as an example. They didn't bother with wired phones. There's a joke that those are stock phones and they went immediately to mobile. So skipped all of that infrastructure because it was of a generation that they didn't need anymore. I kind of simplify the story. And I wonder whether there might be in those countries which are already there, and like you say, there's a variety. The other one on the-- Again, which you saw askance was you mentioned Hume’s is-ought because you mentioned that all of this meta-science does not tell society or anyone what should be studied. Whether that should be climate, physics, quantum computing, how the economy is run or anything like that. Do you have a sense about what should we and where we are on the balance? Do you have any projects where you think, "Well, this is really important science questions?" Do you think the mechanisms that science decides on it is any good at the moment? What should we be exploring on this? Or is this something which is just that much far away from meta-science which it should leave well alone and just stick with trying to develop its own field?

Michael (01:05:34):

So I guess my-- This is partially a personality thing. I certainly have very strong opinions about the way the world ought to be but I also feel that's not my own personal comparative advantage sort of professionally. It's more sort of a personal thing. Something to chat about with friends and to have some opinions about as a civic actor. So a very concrete example, in the United States for somewhat arbitrary historic reasons, some of the big funders-- There's the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which does biomedical research typically with a human focus. There's the National Science Foundation which does basic research. There's DARPA which is doing defense oriented stuff. There's the Department of Energy, does a lot of high energy physics. Those organizations, the way in which their budget changes is determined in fact largely at the political level.

So the NIH, for example, has actually grown consistently at a rate-- It's roughly 1% above if you look sort of over a long enough time period. 1% per annum faster than the NSF. And I think this is most likely really a reflection of politics and political constituencies. People, taxpayers, perhaps understandably rather more interested in research which seems like it might be connected with improving their health than with the more speculative kind of basic research which the NSF tends to fund. That might be a bad choice and there are certainly some sort of 'is' questions which can be asked. For example, you might ask the question, "What fraction of human health span extension or change has actually been due to discoveries made at the NSF versus discoveries made at the NIH?"

It's quite plausible that that's a reasonable kind of a research question or might be turned into one with a lot more thought than I've just put into it. And you can imagine trying to sort of disaggregate that in a variety of ways. That might then feed into some sort of decisions at the political or the values level but I'm not going to try and wade into that. I think you want to develop good techniques which can be used to answer that kind of question. But then it's an entirely separate question and to some extent, I want it to remain separate. How one reasons about it after the fact, you might decide that it's tremendously important that you have a very strong defense research establishment in which case you would be strongly in favor of increasing DARPA's budget perhaps. But perhaps you're not, and that's not a question that can be settled by studying the way the world is. It's a question where you need to bring some of your own values. But to the extent that you can decouple those two things, I think actually both really strongly benefit. Both sides of that benefit.

Ben (01:08:47):

Well, maybe delving into that just a little bit more. This movement of effective altruists or EA do have some strong sense of this. There's an interesting part of the EA movement which is actually very concerned with progress and actually on new institutions which is a kind of interesting overlap. You had really interesting initial reflections in a blog on EA which EA by its nature also they solicit criticism so thought about that. You had a conversation with some EA's and they're obviously worried about existential risk, pandemics by security and how you can think about utility and doing good. After all of that, and you've gone through that, has it changed the way you think rather than going through all of that which was kind of on the record already. Have you changed your mind at all around some of your thinking around EA and how they think about that? Or have you arrived at roughly the same place still with an open mind but it's kind of like, "Well, they have the way of thinking which is good?”

Michael (01:09:50):

Actually, I'm not sure I'm quite understanding the question, Ben. Can you...?

Ben (01:09:54):

Yeah. I guess, having had all of these conversations around effective altruism and what they're thinking, do you think that is a good way of thinking around the world and has your view changed since your blog and conversation on EA?

Michael (01:10:04):

Okay. So I think the connection you are drawing to your previous question, like in some sense they have a set of values which they're using to drive, their giving in a whole lot of ways.

Ben (01:10:15):

And essentially they've decided this is how things ought and is to be. So that's one world view. I'm a little bit too old. EA was not invented when I was at university so I've also come to and it's like, "Oh, I find that quite intriguing. It's not my way." And obviously you've done some work on it. So I was just kind of intrigued partly because that's the connection. Yes, they have a way and also you've done some thinking and it might have changed. So it was kind of like, "Is that EA way of doing it? How much does that resonate in part?" It's a way of thinking about the world where they have-- And it's a new movement as well as opposed to utilitarians were there before and you had the various things. But I find it's interesting because it's a new movement about how to think of the world and at least some of them have quite strong views as to how to do this, maximizing good or maximizing utility.

Michael (01:11:04):

Yeah. It's a really interesting question. They are using their values to drive their giving. I suppose you can break your question down into two pieces. One of which is, "Are they just mistaken about certain facts about the way the world is?" And actually, I probably think they are. But then there's also the question of, “How do I align with them on values?" And just so happens that for personal reasons I don't particularly align with them on values. I like many EA's a great deal. I have some close EA friends but it's not for me. There's a big long personal conversation about why that's the case. You could talk about why that's the case.

I don't know that it's necessarily so interesting why do I have the particular set of values I have? Well, that's of interest to my close friends and family and probably not to too many other people. The question that you might find more interesting is, “How do I think they're mistaken about the way the world is?” Certainly I think EA is actually practiced when they're oriented towards research. I think they don't appreciate nearly enough the value of illegible work, very early stage work. So most of the things which they seem to be strongly oriented to support, they're very big, very legible goals. The most common one is the people-- Well, the one that people perhaps talk the most about and think the most about is AI safety.

It's a big scary monster which is very easy to describe. To sort of think about it, it is a big goal. But historically, a lot of the most significant work on progress has not been legible in advance. I mentioned Turing before as an example solving a logic problem. Didn't realize that it was going to become maybe the most important industry of the 20th and 21st century. He wasn't working towards a big goal. And this is such a common pattern across research. I tend to think that systematically the EA organizations undervalue that. When I talk to EA friends they're perfectly aware of this. I don't really understand why they're not more indexed on it though.

Ben (01:14:05):

Yes, it's hard to... I guess there's a corporate truism that what you can't measure doesn't get managed. But then there's an aphorism above that which is this idea that if you only try and do the things that you can measure, this is not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted, actually, you go even more wrong because of those things.

Michael (01:14:36):

I love this book, "Seeing like a State" by James Scott where he talks about the way in which or what he called the high modernists have often caused problems when they're in governance because they will adopt some goal as being good for the locals in some part of the country which they're governing. But they're ignorant of so much local knowledge which is actually important for the functioning of the systems. And so with complete good intentions, sometimes they actually make things go very backwards. I think it's sort of the government version of this. Figure out what you could measure, use it to manage it, and then sometimes be very surprised when in fact it's a disaster.

Ben (01:15:22):

Some of the disasters in international aid can be well traced back to those routes. I guess I partly ask because I see EA's are building new institutions and new organizations and some of them will be quirky and that's probably a good thing.

Michael (01:15:38):

That I'm totally in favor of. Actually sort of...

Ben (01:15:42):

But it's also separate. It kind of doesn't matter in that sense that they may have got the version of the world wrong because they're a new organization doing things in a new way and therefore will hopefully discover something around the dark intelligent matter even if it was not the thing that we may or may not have thought was there.

Michael (01:15:59):

Yeah. I think some interesting question about scale, what fraction of all philanthropic giving do you want to be EA? The interesting thing to my mind anyways, there's not really a natural regulator for that. Nothing sets the scale, or at least there's nothing really strongly sets the scale there. It's a question just of to what extent do these ideas become fashionable? So yeah, maybe it ends up as actually 50% of all philanthropic giving. Maybe it ends up as 5% of all philanthropic giving. I don't know what it is at the moment. I think it's maybe on the order of 1% or something so it's actually pretty tiny. So you might say, "Well, okay, if it's tiny it's fine for it to grow.” But if there's nothing obviously stopping the growth-- and there will certainly be many internal drivers; lots of people whose careers and self-image has now bound up with it that doesn't seem so great. Of course, I mean this is the story of so many things which don't have a natural mechanism limiting their scale.

Ben (01:17:15):

Yeah. And when you don't have the tradeoff audit-- You see this today in terms of like, "Well, how much should we be working on climate versus deep poverty versus pandemics?" No necessarily natural capital working on any of those so really tricky.

Michael (01:17:32):

Whenever it's politics which is deciding it there's a natural sort of oligarchy tends to form where... You would think that if you had two pretty promising approaches to solving some problem and one of them had let's say 90% of the funding and the other one had 10%, and if you did a serious evaluation and conclude the 90% funded one was only slightly more likely to be successful, you'd get a rebalancing. But actually that's often not what happens. What really matters is politics. And many more of the people on the 90% funded one are actually in a position where they're able to influence future flows of capital. So actually it gets even more lopsided. It's kind of a, I think a crazy-- It's just a natural way in which oligarchy is formed and that pattern you see absolutely everywhere. But it's such a problem in philanthropic funding, this kind of rich get richer effect.

Ben (01:18:38):

Great. Okay. Well, wrap up with a couple of questions and then your current projects and advice. So maybe just a couple of quick underrated, overrated things then. So rogue AI risk, AI safety, do you think underrated or overrated?

Michael (01:18:53):

I have no idea.

Ben (01:18:55):

No idea. We'll pass. Okay. Critical rationality or rationality as a movement?

Michael (01:19:03):

Well, I think those two things are used to mean very different things actually.

Ben (01:19:07):

Okay. Yeah. That's probably true.

Michael (01:19:08):

Critical rationality I tend to associate with Karl Popper and with David Deutsche and with a few others. Rationality sort of in many of its modern incarnations is a slightly different branch of the tree.

Ben (01:19:20):

Perspective, value, probability and that type of thing.

Michael (01:19:21):

Yeah, exactly. And EA actually for that matter which is a different group of people completely. Just having clarified the terms, what was the...

Ben (01:19:32):

Let's go through critical rationality because we covered...

Michael (01:19:34):

I think probably underrated.

Ben (01:19:37):

Yeah. Maybe that's part of a...

Michael (01:19:39):

It's funny I can't read Popper-- That's not quite true. I just don't respond to him. But I still think underrated.

Ben (01:19:51):

I found Popper and actually Deutsche quite hard. I think I get it, but I'm not sure I do get it. And I speak other to people who I think they think they get it. I'm not sure they get it, but maybe that's where it is. So I probably think mildly underrated too but I'm very uncertain because maybe I just completely don't understand. One on this-- although this could be quite a long answer you can just give a short one if you'd like. Memory systems? Obviously you've done a huge amount of work on that. Maybe I'll just split them because you've got the kind of your card based repetition space systems and then you've got memory palaces. I get the overall sense that you probably think memory is more important than people think. So the overall underrated. That's my impression from you. But I'm not entirely sure because you've written a lot on it. So is that your view and what should we know about memory systems?

Michael (01:20:48):

So certainly underrated. It's a combination of I guess technology and science that really points out how people with very minimal effort... Actually, it feels like one of those products that is promising you the world with no effort. You know, "Lose 25 pounds in three weeks while eating hamburgers only."

Ben (01:21:16):

Just by saying this mantra three times.

Michael (01:21:18):

Yeah, exactly. It turns out though that with memory systems actually you can have a much, much better long-term memory for relatively minimal investment and it's just due to some quirks about the way the human brain works which have been known to psychologists for more than a century. There are thousands of papers about it. People have now built systems. They're a little bit aversive in some ways. They're like bicycles. It takes some work to get good at using them and most people just give up because they don't see the effect. If you stick with it and master them, actually they can be very useful if you are doing the kind of work that benefits from a really good long term memory. Not everybody is, but for the people who are, I think they're absolutely wonderful.

Ben (01:22:06):

Yeah. I think for me personally, the space repetition type ones I find are a little bit more useful because I think they can do more interactions with other forms of whatever you are learning. Whereas the memory palace ones are great for long lists of things but are actually less practically useful. They can be. So you've got a long list of history places, you've got your history exam, well why not learn them that and you'll learn them perfectly? But less practically relevant although not always. Whereas I actually think the space repetition ones amongst with other ways you can actually form new-- Well, maybe new to myself ideas, but newer ideas just due to that. But that's a personal thing. So last couple of questions then. What are some of the current projects or things that you're working on or what you're most excited about?

Michael (01:22:59):

So I'm on vacation at the moment which is part of the reason why I'm here.

Ben (01:23:02):

Very exciting.

Michael (01:23:03):

Little break in London. I don't know what I'll do next. We'll see. I've just finished this book that took way longer than I thought. I am just enjoying goofing around; reading about religion, trying to understand religion better, trying to understand art better and trying to understand a little bit about the latest technical progress in AI. So maybe a project related to one of those, but I don't know. And then there's some follow up things from the meta-science work that I will almost certainly do. But I just want to clear my head a bit before making a decision.

Ben (01:23:35):

Sure. Well, if you're looking at art, is this particularly visual art and do you have a view on where, I guess AI art will be? I would say that I'm less worried about what some people worry about AI art because my view art has-- I don't know what percentages, but there's this term in philosophy of art of the beholder share. And so this is the fact that art is valuable because someone receives it. So it's not just obviously you've got paint and creation and then it's all great. I see this very much in my theater practice. Essentially, theater is not really theater unless it has an audience. And actually that's true of quite a lot of art. I think people-- because it's new and because we're going to generate so much stuff and because of where it's come from, I have not quite seen that part. That's my own personal view. A lot of people have the other side. But if you're thinking about it, do you have a view or a thought there?

Michael (01:24:33):

I have many, probably far too many. What's a particularly interesting thing? Okay. So maybe one concern and one observation. The concern is just essentially capturing of the commons. So if people-- Where it used to be that anybody could buy a set of paints and just start to paint, if you actually need technology which is the IP of somebody, yeah, they've inserted themselves as an intermediation layer and historically that's... It always causes some problems. There's always some tradeoffs. I don't know how that will turn out. Most of the conversation which I hear about it is by people who have some sort of motivated reason either to be very, very keen on this possibly because they may own some of it, or to be very, very anti because they're worried that they will be put out of a job by it.

I don't think either of those things necessarily-- It leads to interesting perspectives but doesn't necessarily lead to a particularly clear perspective unless those people are really unusually honest. So a lot of the conversation I hear about that just seems, "I'm a VC and wow, I'd love to own some of this" is kind of the subtext very often. But yeah, you don't get actually very interesting thoughts from that or not a lot of clear thoughts. The interesting observation, I do just enjoy seeing what some of the artists who are working with this are doing. Like when they're able-- I admire so much people like Matisse or Cezanne or Picasso who were able to discover new ways of seeing. Picasso, probably particularly to some extent, Rembrandt, that's sort of a slightly different thing that he was doing.

And I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of genius with the new AI art systems. That would be very exciting. It's very tempting if you look at the way the systems work to think, “Well, they're not really going to be creating new ways of seeing in the same kind of way." You don't get that sort of-- Once you begin to understand cubism, it's really remarkable. You get what they were trying to do and you realize that you've expanded the way you can see the world. Somebody discovered that and it's just incredible. I guess I'm sort of just cautiously optimistic that maybe the same thing will happen with AI art. Brian Eno, the musician and composer has this really interesting observation that it took hundreds of years for us to figure out what possibilities are latent inside the grand piano.

And today, an instrument as rich as the grand piano is being invented every day and nobody will ever master it. That is kind of sad in some sense; to have all these kind of latent possibilities which will never be explored. So that's also a potential outcome maybe from the AI art systems. Maybe it turns out that actually the system is changing sufficiently rapidly that nobody ever masters it. Certainly, I think you see this with software systems at the moment. The rate of change in something like JavaScript frameworks or whatever is so rapid that nobody ever gets really good. A friend who's a dancer and a programmer committed to me that she finds it irritating when people have been programming for five years and they think they're really, really good. They're a senior software engineer at Google or meta or whatever. She's been dancing for 28 years and feels like she's just getting the hang of it. There is something to be said for that kind of deep art and if the AI systems are changing sufficiently rapidly, it might be that nobody ever masters them. That would be a little bit sad. That's a very long answer.

Ben (01:28:50):

Yeah. That's a really interesting observation. I hadn't known that. I guess I can take the other side and say it's quite nice that there's always going to be opportunity. But I think of the other observation then is like we'll never even master the programming language of sea. There will be no real Picasso of sea or something about that which was so elegant and beautiful or something. We're beyond and past it and it might not have even been-- I don't know whether the current languages are better. Is English really that much better of Latin? But you've got heights of Latin expression which we've had and we'll have in English which we might never get in these programming languages which have been around for a short time. I hadn't thought about it like that but that could well be true.

Michael (01:29:35):

Somebody who was at Google pretty early on-- So one of the people who famously helped build Google's early systems, Jeff Dean-- I guess they knew Dean at that time and commented just unselfconsciously that he poured out code. I just thought that was such a lovely way of describing somebody. Sort of a real master is pouring out code.

Ben (01:30:02):

Yeah. Maybe this settles back I think this act of creativity; arts, humanities is much closer to where we are on science coding software than I think it seems like first glance when you speak to actual scientists and particularly that messy layer before you make it legible and put it into an equation. All of that thinking before that seems to me to have much more in common with what dancers do, with what artists do, with what performance do than you might have thought. So I do think that ties around and I think that might even be true in what we discover on the meta layer when we think about those. That act of imagination that you need for something which isn't quite discovered yet, that part of whatever makes us human on that is still quite mysterious and seems to dwell in this creative part or blob or however we do it. In any case then, last question. Do you have any advice or thoughts for people? Maybe young people thinking about their careers or what they might want to do or maybe someone who's wanting to do the leap into a new organization or something within meta-science or open science? Do you have any advice or thoughts about what you would do, what you would tell them?

Michael (01:31:21):

I'm certainly interested... They say that the advice you give others is the advice you'd wish you'd given your younger self. That's probably true. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail has this lovely equation that advice equals limited life experience plus overgeneralization. That's certainly true. The one thing I wish I'd understood much earlier is the extent to which there's kind of an asymmetry in what you see, which is you're always tempted not to make a jump because you see very clearly what you're giving up and you don't see very clearly what it is you're going to gain. So almost all of the interesting opportunities on the other side of that are opaque to you now. You have a very limited kind of a vision into them. You can get around it a little bit by chatting with people who maybe are doing something similar, but it's so much more limited. And yet I know when reasoning about it, I want to treat them like my views of the two are somehow parallel but they're just not.

Ben (01:32:31):

Yeah. Well, I guess that might suggest maybe one needs to try out more things to actually know.

Michael (01:32:39):

That does I think is probably generically... It's generically true. One way in which it's not is it depends on what kind of a safety net you have. Some people have, and I am certainly one of those, have pretty reasonable safety nets and so that enables me to try new things. But the great majority of people in the world do not. And so they're I think, justifiably extremely cautious. But then people also the size of the safety net they think they need does tend to expand as well. If your safety net includes driving a Mercedes and having a et cetera, actually you can probably do a little bit better than that. A friend of mine who's a science fiction writer-- Science fiction writers do not make much money. Even famous science fiction writers do not make much money for the most part. He was trying to decide, "Was it fair on his daughter that he had chosen to be a science fiction writer?"

Because it meant that she probably wouldn't-- He couldn't afford to send her to the best high schools and things like that. Maybe she might get a scholarship or something like that. There were certainly some opportunities. He said that he was on a-- I think it was just a little boat somewhere off Northwestern Australia with a collection of his science fiction buddies who are just an incredible group of people. And he said he realized there that she might not necessarily get quite as-- She might miss some opportunities but she would also have opportunities like that, that she just would not have if he had chosen a more conventional and solely higher paying line work. So I think of that also as kind of a living that kind of a life is a safety net of its own. It's certainly something that you're providing for you and your family and your friends. I don't know whether that's clear or not. Hopefully it's clear.

Ben (01:34:58):

I would interpret that saying there's these immeasurable, these uncountable elements which are actually very valuable. And if you only measure it in dollars, then you might miss actually some of the vast positiveness or wealth or safety net that...

Michael (01:35:18):

Yeah. She was getting an expanded conception of the world, I guess, in some really interesting way. And I could see it would be valuable. You can't eat that, unfortunately. That's the flip side. But you actually don't need to make that much money to be able to eat.

Ben (01:35:35):

Great. Well, on that note, thank you very much.

Michael (01:35:38):

Thanks so much, Ben. This was fun.