How to Be a Better Human - Summer Fridays: How zombies, dragons, and superheroes could make you a better person (w/ Christopher Robichaud)

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Roleplaying games and the Marvel universe may be fictional, but they can also teach us a lot about morality in the real world. Christopher Robichaud is a Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In this episode, he shares ways we can explore important, everyday issues in fun, safe, and unexpected ways. Christopher has made a career out of teaching ethics and philosophy using pop culture, dissecting moral questions using anything from zombie apocalypse simulations to superhero narratives. He received his doctorate in philosophy from MIT. In 2015 he won the Innovation in Teaching Award at the Harvard Kennedy School for creating a day-long simulation--using design elements from old school tabletop roleplaying games like D&D--where policy students wielded their leadership skills and confronted ethical dilemmas to deal with a zombie pandemic. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscriptsFill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to How to Be a Better Human. This summer, we're doing something special. We're calling it Better Human Summer Fridays. And every Friday this summer, we are going to be dropping a special episode on the feed pulled straight from the How to Be a Better Human archive. These are conversations that I loved and that our team loved. And we think a lot of you may have never heard. And we think they deserve another moment in the sun.

So we're giving them that literal moment in the sun here in the summertime. This show has grown a lot over the years. So this is our way of making sure that if you found us recently, you're not missing. out on one of the conversations that I am still thinking about, sometimes years later. And if you are a day one better human listener, well, first of all, thank you. Thanks for listening for all these years. And I hope that you will enjoy this trip back into our archive, back into some of the best conversations that we've had in the past. So let's get into it. Here's Better Human Summer Fridays. You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Christophie.

Okay, so our show is called How to Be a Better Human. So one question that I've tried to to ask every person that I've gotten to interview for this show is, what's something that's made you a better human? And the answers that I've gotten from them have been very varied, from a person in their life, to an idea, to a book, to a movie, to all sorts of other possibilities. Here is how today's guest, Philosophy Professor Christopher Robeshoe. Here's how he answered. Oh, that's a really great question.

Uh, I'm going to say Dungeons and Dragons, which is a, I don't know if you get a lot on this show. But the reason I'm going to say this is because from a very early age, Dungeon and Dragons socialized me. It taught me and taught me how to develop good friendships. It taught me how to play. It taught me how to imagine. It taught me how to take up different perspectives.

It taught me how to problem solve. It taught me how to read in a lot of ways. And it taught me how to deal with uncertainty and to deal with the consequences of my decision. And all of that was while having a blast and fighting trolls and dragons and all the rest of it. And so I think Dungeon Dragons means different thing for different people. but for me, it was an arena in which I developed certain traits that I've leaned on my entire life. So dungeon dragons, playing dungeon dragons with good friends has made me a better person. Christopher has taken that idea and that passion, and he's made a career out of teaching others' ethics and philosophy using D&D and pop culture.

He picks apart thorny moral questions using everything from zombie apocalypse simulations to superhero narratives. And what I find so fun and engaging about Christopher's work is that he is dealing with really big, important questions, the ways in which ethics intersects with our everyday lives, no matter who you are. But he's able to make those tough concepts accessible in this very unexpected way. So today on the show, we are going to be talking zombies. We are going to be talking superheroes. And we are going to be talking about how we can learn lasting life lessons through play and imagination. And we're going to get on that trolley in just a moment. But first, a quick ad break.

And we are back with zombie expert and moral philosopher Christopher Robichot. Hello, my name is Christopher Robeshoe. I'm a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. What is ethics? That's the basic most question. Hey, I know people spend their whole careers studying this exact question. But if someone's listening isn't really familiar with the term.

professionally the study of ethics really looks at the way that thinkers across time and in the space have really wrestled with questions surrounding how ought we live our lives what's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do what does the good life look like and i've tried to come up with answers to those questions leaning on religious tradition leaning on their own their own rational faculties just trying to argue and argue in the best of ways think about what we ought to do what our obligations are. All of us during the course of our lives are trained in thinking about ethics from a very young age, at least I hope so. But at the professional level, what we try to do, at least what I try to do, is to look at all those spaces in which it's not exactly obvious what the right or wrong course of action is, where reasonable people can end up reasonably disagreeing about what ought to be done or what our obligations are. You know, it's funny. Obviously, I just asked you why is it important to teach ethics, but there's something, it's so fundamental to, what it means to have a functioning society and what it means to be a good person, that

there's something very funny to me about the idea that ethics is an elective course that students choose to take. I really want to emphasize here. I think ethics at an adult level is not like a list of, it's not a laundry list. Here are the right things to do. Here are the wrong things to do. It's not a recipe. It's more an invitation to really think about what are my values, what are my principles, what are other people's values and principles, and how do I set on these these hard questions where it's not obvious what to do? Right now we are still, dealing with a global pandemic. And so one of the issues that has arisen over the course of the past year has been this conversation around what is it reasonable to ask people to do in terms

of curtailing their liberties for the sake of public health. So here we have two things that we really value, public health and individual liberty. And it turns out that we can't have as much public health as we want and as much individual liberty as we want. Yeah, it's so practical. It just, it really, highlights that this is not just a hypothetical that is for studying in a college course. It's something that we have to live with every single day and ask ourselves. And even the hypotheticals end up turning into real life scenario. So philosophers, at least trained in the kind of thinking that I'm that I've done, talk for many years about these trolley problems.

And this shows up in television as well, you know, here's a runaway trolley. It's about to go over, you know, five people, but you can pull a lever and put it on a track and it only runs over one person rather than five. do you let it kill a five or do you put it on the other track? This was entirely a hypothetical scenario. And many people for many years were like, okay, this is interesting, whatever I come up with. But this is never going to happen.

And then folks like Google started designing cars that are going to drive themselves and Tesla. And pretty soon a lot of ethicists are being hired by these companies to be like, all right, well, what is the answer? Of course, we need an answer now because the trolley is on the runway now. That's exactly right. So that's not going to be the case in every hypothetical. But it does turn out sometimes that the hypotheticals end up bleeding into real life.

I mean, this is probably going down and opening a whole can of worms. But I have to do it just because I'm curious. When you think about the trolley problem, do you pull the lever or not? I do, at least in the first case that I gave you, you know, it's going to run over five people or you can put on track and have it kill one. And then, you know, you come up with scenario number two. Famously, you know, you're on a bridge overlooking a bridge. Charlie's about to run over five people. There's a large person next to you, really tough and big.

you can push them over onto the track and kills that person and saves five. What you get from a lot of people is, well, I'll pull the lever. Most people will say they'll pull a lever, not all but most. And then most people will then say, yeah, but I'm not going to push the guy. I'm not going to do that. So then you have to step back and ask, well, what's the difference between those? And I gave you that example because I myself am regularly challenged with, you know, here's my gut reaction. But I can't just stop with my gut reaction.

I have to think about it. Like what might be the differences here? What am I trying to track when I react different? to these different cases. That to me is where philosophy, good ethical reasoning starts. When you're presented with a challenge, even of yourself, like, I don't know how to make sense of myself here. I better do some thinking and maybe I have to revise my beliefs. The importance of curiosity as a virtue, I can't emphasize enough. We should be curious towards others and how they think we should equally be curious towards ourselves. And so looking inward at ourselves,

not just to do important psychological work, but important philosophical work as well. Why do I think this, should I be thinking this? Am I willing to follow an argument to a conclusion that I might find, you know, uncomfortable? So how do you, though, in your day-to-day life, and obviously you are an ethics professor and a philosopher, but there are so many decisions that we make in each day. Certainly we can't hold all of them up to this high level of scrutiny. So how do you even decide which decisions you're going to scrutinize and which you aren't? So what I do, and this introduces something that we really haven't talked about yet is I think that self-examination is really important it can be exhausting we all have lives but sometimes it can be fun and so I try to find

spaces in which this examination is is entertaining as well so you sort of get entertained as you're doing this and this is what I referring to is when I'm talking about pop culture so I spent a lot of my time thinking about the moral lessons that we can extract from pop culture entertainment One of my areas of focus is superhero stories. I wish there were just more superhero stories to interrogate. I think we're really lacking some good, I'm joking, by the way. I mean, I just finished watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and I'm delighted with it, and I won't give any spoilers away. But the point is, I'm a superhero geek.

I've been reading the comics forever and watching television shows and movies. And there's just a sure fit of, like, superhero stories out there. So I will often look at them, and while I'm being entertained, also ask myself questions. Like, what do I think about what the characters did here? Like, what's a different way to think about that? What are the ethics involved? That's a great way to train oneself to do this in a way that's fun as well. Ethics is all around us.

It's in the era that we breathe. Using popular entertainment as a way in, I find invaluable. Yeah, it's so interesting to see in real life, we still have this version of the story that we want to tell about our society versus the practical part, right? Like the very beginning of the pandemic, the narrative, I feel like we kept hearing was we're all in this together. It affects everyone the same. And yet, of course, that wasn't true. That was never true because there's nothing in health care or in income or in, you know, a safety net that affects people equally in this country. And so many people wanted to believe that and then were forced to confront the reality that it actually was not the case.

And like you said, that that can also hypothetical. in a best case scenario, offer the possibility of addressing that and changing it. So it's not that way. You use pop culture to have people think about these big issues. Can you tell us about this moral simulation that you designed that uses the zombie apocalypse? Sure. So in this simulation, individuals come together and they create a fictional country. And as they're creating this fictional country, they have to make some decisions. Like, is this a democracy, right? Is it a monarchy? Is it something in between, you know, they make all these decisions. What are the values that the country stands for, et cetera, et cetera. So there's some buy-in early on about like, here we are, we're going

to be working with this country rather than handing them one that already exists. They build it. So there's some commitment to like what is, what is this thing that we're going to be navigating through? And then they're put into roles of high-ranking representatives having to advise the leader of their country some really, really tough decisions about how to manage an unfolding zombie pandemic. The zombie part is fun, but still models real-world pandemics in some eerie ways. the point of it is to give people a shared experience of what it is to have to make some very, very hard moral decisions. And then on the other side of it, to step back and to debrief it and to talk about,

how did that group function? How did you work through those decisions? How did you absorb the consequences of that? And then to take those lessons and bring it back away from zombies into real life for those sorts of situations in which we do have to make high pressure ethical decisions, maybe nothing with the fate of the world on the balance, but certainly all of us throughout the course of our professional lives that sometimes face really serious, you know, moral questions, both for ourselves and for others. And to give people a fun space in which to make those decisions, but then to take that learning and to apply it to their real lives.

So the philosophy behind it is you can have fun and do serious work in moral reasoning at the same time. And that's one of the reasons why I do this. The other, which I'll just mention quickly, is over the years teaching a lot of ethics cases and a policy, school. And this is not a criticism. I think this is quite understandable. When people read a case of other individuals, you know, having to make hard moral tradeoffs, they often will read them and say, oh, well, if I were in that situation, I would have done it completely differently. I would never have these mistakes. To me, as lifelong Dungeons and Dragons player and just a role player, I'm like, all right, well, I can build something where you can make those decisions yourself.

So let's see what decisions you actually end up making. And, and then we'll start the learning there. Yeah, it's so true. It's so easy to, um, be on a high horse judging someone. And then when you're in the scenario yourself, all of a sudden, it's not so simple. I think that's sometimes where, you know, sometimes you read the Darwin Awards of the people who died in the dumbest way each year. And then, you know,

I'll be tying my shoes next to a stairwell and be like, wow, this is not safe. I'm really close to being one of those on that list. So part of the way that you were inspired to come up with this zombie scenario to get people interested in ethics, if I understand correctly, was through your past,

with Dungeons and Dragons. How did you first get interested in Dungeons and Dragons? I would love, I actually wouldn't love, but it's not just the past. Okay, yes, yes, yes. Of course, I meant the beginning of the relationship, not the end of the relationship. I'm just so delighted that Dungeons Dragons has, as there's ever been a renaissance in Dungeon Dragons now. We're even going to get more movies.

Oh, my goodness. But my story into Dungeon Dragons is I'm basically the Stranger Things generation. That's how I describe it. If you look at those kids and Stranger Things, I was one of those. kids almost exactly their age. So that helps situate for folks who may not be of Gen X and that time. That's exactly where I was. And for me, you know, my uncle gave me the red box, the basic edition of Dungeon Dragons way back in the day. I must have been 10 or 11 at the time. And that hooked me, just, you know, opened it up. And it was this whole promise that, you know,

you can, you can participate in these adventures. You don't still have to read about them anymore. And this idea, this really attractive idea that a pencil, some people, paper, a dice in your imagination can go on forever. There's no, there's no end to it. There's no board in Dungeon Dragons when you reach the edge of the board. The story just goes on. It's one of the inside jokes for people who don't know about Dungeon Dragons, always ask you who won.

And that's not the sort of game. It's a game in which you just, you know, you play to keep on playing. And that, that to me was fertile territory for thinking about how to use some of those insights. Because in good Dungeon Dragons games, and we see this now with critical role and others. You see people, I mean, they're playing other people. personalities, of course, but you see them wrestling with hard decisions, having to make tradeoffs, rolling dice to find out what happened, dealing with those consequences. It's a fictional arena. It's tons of fun. But the seeds are there for designing simulations for which you can extract some

really important learn. It's so funny because I feel like my version of Dungeons and Dragons is improv, which is its own like, let's play in a make-believe world and let's make things up together. And, you know, one of the core things of improv comedy is to agree with the other person and then build on it. And so I often feel like, oh, this is how I kind of wish the world worked. Is that like every time someone said something instead of rejecting them, you were like, I see that. I accept that. And let me take that and grow it. And yet, let me be very clear. It is absolutely as nerdy, if not more than Dungeons and Dragons because this is just like, hey, we're grown adults pretending and being like, I'm in space. Yes, I am in space. It's, it is fully in this exact same

world. Well, I think that a lot of times people don't realize in the way that I think it's so interesting about you and so fascinating about your talk and your podcast is I think sometimes people don't realize that these games and the movies and the things that we consume her fun, they also inform the way that we think about the world and the way that we think about possible choices and just the way in which we see the range of possibilities. How do you get people to start to see that they are in that world, that the things that they take in are affecting them and affecting their moral judgment? It takes very little effort, which is, which is good. A short conversation can do it.

Partly, it's just, you know, inviting people to see that many of the stories that we're consuming and enjoy are already reflecting some of our concerns or anxiety. Speaking to, you know, the idea of polarization in this country, a few years ago in 2016, there was ongoing polarization, but this is when we were really starting to talk about it, while at the same time, two of the 10th pole movies that were coming out was Marvel Civil War and Batman versus Superman.

And here are two stories which, I mean, I don't think that writers sat around and said, like, let's write a story about polarization. But I also don't think it's entirely accidental that two of the 10th pole movies around the same time were about our heroes fighting each other. So who are the heroes fighting in this one? themselves. They're tearing each other apart. We saw that in two different ways. I don't think it's

an accident that movies like Marvel Civil War have in the backdrop, this question of, well, should people who are very powerful, nevertheless, you know, acquiesce to some outside authority to tell them how to use it, or should we just trust our own guts and our own virtue and our own insights? That's a deep question that a lot of us think about in many, many places. So I mean, I point to that is just one example of many where, you know, these are larger than life stories with larger than life stakes. But behind them are our ideas that I think many of us do think are quite relevant to what we're wrestling with as a community, what we're wrestling with as a public, what we're wrestling with in our own lives as well. And just to follow up on this, I think that Marvel in

particular is starting to do a really good job, showing us that villains end up being villains, not because of their goals, but because of the means of their goal. So they're starting to give us some villains who, you know, you can agree with, you know, you can agree with their sort of righteousness of their cause, but sort of a disaster in terms of the way that they pursue it.

That's very real for all of us. I think that many of us think that if our goals are pristine enough, then anything that we do to get there is just fine. That's not what storytelling is telling us. And I would say that ethics should remind us of that as well. Well, first of all, I think that's really powerful. And it makes me see the Marvel of movies in a different light, even though I knew we were going to be talking about this,

even now I've seen them in a different light. And also just as a person who, you know, I am a TV writer. I write and work on this kind of stuff. I do think that it's impossible to divorce the art that you make from the context that you make it in. It informs it, whether you push against it or embrace it. It informs it.

I think that the reason of the Marvel movies took off around 2000, 2001. So this was 2001, obviously, a very, very heavy time for us Americans. The movie that came out directly after that was Spider-Man, the first Sam Ramey Spider-Man movie. So, and that is, it's a fun superhero movie. I mean, Spider-Man's fun. I love Spider-Man. It's my favorite superhero. Early on, you get these movies, Spider-Man, and it's a lighthearted movie.

It's, to speak to your point, I think that it's not accidental, that it emerges at a time when we needed something. We needed heroes, and we needed something to bring us together, and we needed something to help our morale. And Spider-Man, that movie just took off. And of course, there were many, many films after that. By the time we get to 2008, we started doing some self-reflection. We started what would appear to be a never-ending war on terrorism. And, you know, we took some licks in terms of what we were able to accomplish. By 2008, we're starting to reflect more.

That's when you get grittier movies like The Dark Night, which is unapologetic. To me, it's the best superhero movie of all times. It's really, you know, dares to look at like our relationship with power and with surveillance with all the rest of it. And even Iron Man. Iron Man is such a fun movie, but Iron Man is also a very complicated character. Tony Stark is not a great guy. He's personally morally problematic. And, you know, he deals with a, he's head of a company that's morally problematic. And so I think, I'm just agreeing with you in the sense that it took us some time to get to the point where we're ready for those stories, but they came. Do you get into more arguments in your life by saying

your true, genuine political beliefs or by saying that you think, think the Dark Night is the greatest superhero movie of all time definitively. That's such a funny question. No, because we all know that the Dark Night is the greatest superhero movie of all. Okay. Wow. People are going to come for you if they disagree. That one, believe it or not, I mean, there's always someone that disagrees, but no, certainly my own political views are, which, and one political view to tie together with comic books is my complete incredulity at the criticism that is sometimes leveled against superhero stories that they're bringing politics into superhero stories.

So this is where I will voice a strong opinion, which is, of course, superhero stories are bringing politics into them. They've always brought politics into them. From the inception of Superman, Superman's earliest adventures was fighting against domestic violence. I mean, Wonder Woman is wrapped in the stars and stripes. Captain America's conception of Captain America number one has him punching Hitler in the face. And on and on. And so to me, you may not agree with the politics

of any one storyline. That's fine, we're allowed to disagree. The idea that superhero stories aren't political shows a resistance. Let me put you this way. A resistance to what's actually happening in these stories from the get-go. And I'll just conclude by saying,

I've just recently been revisiting Superman's fighting of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, Superman takes on the KKK. He wins, of course, because he's Superman. Black Panther did as well. This has always been going on. Nothing is new in contemporary attempts to turn some political questions into questions that superhero stories address. Which superhero do you think would be most likely to fall into online conspiracy theories and be posting some really disturbing things on Facebook?

Well, he's not a superhero, but I have to lean on Roarshack from Watchman because Roershack. Oh, that feels right. Yeah. But to me, Roarshack, I just can't resist the idea that Roershag would be the one creating some of those conspiracy theories. Hmm, okay, well, we are going to take a quick break, and we'll be back with more in just a moment. And we are back. We're talking with Christopher Robeshoe about how he has used lessons from his years playing Dungeons and Dragons in his work, teaching ethics. Here's a clip from his talk where he's discussing when he was a kid, and he heard all the adults in his town worrying about what they saw as the moral dangers of D&D.

All right, so at that moment, I stood up and said that I would devote my... my life to showing the goodness that Dungeon Dragons brings into the world. That's absolutely not true, right? I mean, that's what was going on my head at the moment, but I was still really young and completely intimidated. But it turns out that I found myself decades later in a profession where I could demonstrate that this game gives us some interesting insights that can help us make people better moral agents, and that's what I want to turn to now.

And my job is to help teach ethics in an impactful, meaningful way for professionals, to to find ways to make ethics sticky. And so common ethics pedagogy, when you take a look at it, is mostly some back and forth between theory and cases. So some courses lean pretty heavily on theory. You know, we're going to go through it all. We're going to go through consequentialism, deontology, John Rawls and so forth,

and maybe just do a little bit of dabbling with cases. Others lean in hard on cases. Let's look at protagonists in these situations and seeing what they're doing. But it's typically this back and forth. However, I recognize that there was, much merit in the movement to add more experiential learning into the classroom. Experiential learning, not just being generally active learning, I think classrooms and ethics

can have active learning when you just have people, you know, engaging the Socratic math method back and forth, talking to each other in small groups about what's going on, but experiential learning, the kinds of things that you get with simulations. And so, you know, I wanted to add simulations into this cycle where you can have students engage in some kind of an activity that's not just analyzing a case or not just consuming theory and come out of that with some really interesting insights about their own

moral character and about how they want to navigate the world. I wanted to put students into situations where we got to test that. We got to see, well, what would you actually do in some of these things without really putting them into a situation where there's high-stakes ethics in play? So what I ended up doing is stepping back

and thinking about some of the general design principles from Dungeons and Dragons because it turns out that in a lot of Dungeon Dragons gameplay, you end up thinking about ethical issues. You end up doing things that I thought would be extraordinarily useful to bring into the classroom.

And, you know, bringing that into the classroom, Christopher, like you were just saying in that clip, that's kind of exactly what you've done. So in your talk, you say that playing and learning are complimentary. I'd love to have you expand a little bit more on what you mean by that. What I mean is that

our parents and our elementary schools teachers knew this, and we knew it when we were growing up, and then somehow we forgot it. Somehow I think along the way we decided that if it's serious learning, it can't involve play. And I don't know who decided that. Certainly I don't think it all has to involve play.

I mean, there's some serious learning that just has to happen on its own. But we are imaginative creatures. I mean, you're in television. We don't stop imagining when we get older. As much as I love reason and argumentation from a philosophical standpoint, that's not always or even most of the time, the way that we navigate the world. We navigate it through metaphor, through analogy, through allegory, through fiction.

There's a reason why we learn so many moral lessons from stories. We can't forget that as adults. I was going to ask you this question as how can parents integrate this and trying to have these conversations with their kids? But actually, how can we just use this with our friends, with our family, with anyone that we were talking about? How can we take this and implement it in our own lives? So one of my favorite moments of the most recent Spider-Man movie, I'm going to pick Spider-Man again because he's my guy.

He's your favorite. Yeah. And Spider-Man Homecoming, I hope I'm not spoiling this for folks. I mean, it's been around for a while now, so I'm just going to say it. There's this moment towards the end where the vulture, played by Michael King, who I love this character. I love the way that he did. He temporarily best Spider-Man. He outsmarts him and he collapses a building on Spider-Man.

our Peter Parker is like crushed under all this weight. His face is in a puddle and he's trying to push up and he can't. And he panics and he cries out. He's like, help, help, help. And he's like, come on. And then you see him and you see his reflection in the puddle. Half of him is Peter Parker and half of him is Spider-Man. His mask is torn off.

And he starts pushing. He's like, come on, Peter. Come on, Peter. And then that quickly transitions to, come on, Spider-Man. Come on Spider-Man. And as he's saying, come on, Spider-Man. Like he starts to lift, you know, to lift. the building and he escapes.

Why am I sharing this story? First of all, I just love it. I think it's very, very powerful. But the point is what happened to the character, Peter Parker in that moment is he found his inner power. He found the source of his power. And it was just the belief that he can do this. That was the change from Peter Parker to Spider-Man.

So sometimes I'll just say, especially with parents, with their children, take that and run with it. Cultivate for your children a space in which they feel comfortable exploring where their power is, and then helping them bring it out because we all have it and we all need it because, you know, children and adults are often crushed. We're often crushed under the weight of the world and the weight of our circumstances, but we can, we should help each other too. Let's not make this entirely individualistic, but we sometimes need to do some of these things on our own. We just know that.

So I'm totally bought in on everything you've said. You've convinced me. Yeah. But what if you're someone who just is really averse to sci-fi and fantasy and superheroes, how can you still make use of these great lessons? To me, it's a wonderful question, and I do think it's important to emphasize that you don't have to be on board with some of the more geeky stuff. The thing you do need to be on board with is the role of the arts in helping us think. So if it's not going to be popular culture, have it be what some people call, I'm a little bit, I always shiver a little bit with this, but high brawl culture, you know, have it be, have it be Shakespeare, fine, have it be retomas Mon. I mean, you know, do without will when it

comes to like engaging these stories that you think are important, read through the classic mythologies across the world, not just the Greek mythologies. But don't abandon the idea that the arts can't help us reflect in a different way about matters that are really important to us. So maybe it's music that's more the arena. Maybe it's, maybe it's theater. Maybe it's highbrow literature, but whatever it is, find the space to do that. And if someone says, well, I don't believe in any of that, then I don't know what to say except give it a shot. and you might surprise yourself. Popular culture right now,

there's been a lot more focus on moral philosophy and ethics being more explicitly tied in. Why do you think that is that all of a sudden people are looking to moral philosophy more explicitly? I think we all crave it

and here I'm being speculative. I think that, thank goodness we're evolving into culture that is more comfortable. I mean, gradually, being more vulnerable, more open,

more accepting of emotions. And that provides fertile terrain for starting be more comfortable talking with ourselves about our ethical beliefs as well. I also think that we're recognizing that we are hyper-polarizing, and if we don't spend some time in spaces that aren't entirely within our own homes, talking other people about their values, we're going to just stop talking altogether.

We're just going to end up yelling at each other on Twitter or something like that. And I'm not a person to think that if we all just held hands and shook hands and smiled, the world's going to be a better place. It's hard. I mean, some people's values are repugnant, and we're never going to see eye to eye. in some things, but I am an old school believer in the Democratic liberal project. Liberal I'm not using in a conservative versus liberal. I'm talking about like the use of reason and conversation

and discussion as a means of coming together as a community to face the challenges that we all face together, even if we're not going to see eye to eye on it. If I have to abandon that, I don't know what to do and I hope others are willing to at least keep that practice up. So to me, sometimes coming together over a superhero story to work out some of our differences is just a safer and more productive way to do it than if we just started off with. So are you team Trump or are you team Biden?

They're not going to get anywhere there. But you can get somewhere with are you team Iron Man or team Captain America? And that can sometimes lead to a conversation that can be very productive. It also seems like now, because of technological advances, we are more able to see the consequences

of an individual action. So like you said, right, the trolley problem is no longer a hypothetical problem because we can see how one person programming the software that makes the decisions in a self-driving vehicle has huge impacts on the actual, actual trolley problem in real life. Or I think with like with police violence, we can see how because of, you know, cameras and video being everywhere now, the actual effects of police violence are no longer just anecdotal. There's video, there's photos, there's the stories that are, you know, shown. It feels like now people are starting to see that these decisions and this kind of circling back to something you said at the beginning, but that moral philosophy and that ethics, they're not hypothetical. They're practical and they have huge rippling impacts throughout our society, what each individual person chooses to do.

Yes, we can't escape it. For better or worse, as you say, it's in our face all the time. We are a more open society. You have to go out of your way to be closed down. Okay, so I know we're coming right to the end of our time here, and I still have so many things that I want to ask you. I will just never get to all of them. So we always ask our guests,

what is one way in which you personally are trying to be a better human right now? I'm trying to be a better human right now by practicing forgiveness of myself and others during this time. And by that I just mean that we are all in such extraordinary circumstances that it's sometimes easy to forget. how extraordinary these circumstances are. When I came back to my home here during the pandemic, I had a list of all these amazing things that I was going to do

during this time off. I haven't done any of them. And I know a lot of my friends and colleagues and students are all dealing with their own personal struggles. So I think that just giving ourselves a little bit of space to forgive each other for the failings that we've had during this time and elsewhere, but there's a grace to that that I think is really, really important. I'm not always good at it.

I'm an impatient person. I'm impatient with myself, first and foremost, and I'm impatient with others. So forgiveness and the grace that I hope to have in doing that is really, really something that I'm working on. And it's a work in progress. Beautiful answer. It has been so much fun to talk to you. And you've also given me so much to think about and help me to see movies and culture in a new way, which I'm really excited about. So thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Oh, thanks so much for having me. This was awesome. Thank you.

That is it for today. episode, this has been How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Christophie. Thank you so much to our guest, Christopher Robesho for being on the podcast. On the TED side, this show is produced by dungeon master Abimaniudas, 15th level paladin Danielaurezo, undead zombie Frederica Elizabeth Yosephov and trolley operator Karen Newman. And from PRX productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Reformed supervillain Jocelyn Gonzalez and current Wonderwoman Sondra Lopez-Monsalve. Thank you for listening and please. make good choices. We'll be back with a new episode for you next week.