The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enriquez

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enriquez

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. Oh, my God. You're not going to believe the brilliant author that we have on today. In fact, he's incredibly prolific. He's a Ted all-star, I'll tell you that. You've seen the Ted Talks, I should mention. And then he's the author of a ton of books we'll get into. But before we get to him, be sure to subscribe to the show. If you want to watch the video version of this with the newest technology out there on YouTube, you can actually stream it to your phone, your computers, and screens around your world.

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and also there's another place i'm forgetting the cbpn.com online podcast And this episode is brought to you by IFI Audio and their new NEO IDSD. The NEO is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop, music, gaming, and bleeding edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Today, we have a most excellent guest. I've been really interested to have him on the show. He's prolific in everything he seems to

be doing when it comes to thinking about things and being smirked. The name of the gentleman is Juan Enriquez. I'm going to cut that real quick, Juan. I'm going to introduce the book first. He is the author of Right, Wrong, How Technology Transforms Our Ethics. His name is Juan Enriquez. He is the leading authority on the economic impact of life sciences and brain research on business and society, as well as a respected business leader and entrepreneur. He was the founding director of the Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project and is a research affiliate at MIT's Synthetic Neurobiology Lab. He then co-founded Excel Venture Management. He's an author and co-author of a multitude of booksellers. He is also, as we mentioned before, a TED Talks all-star.

He has nine, count them, nine TED Talks on a variety of subjects, as well as dozens of TEDxTalks. Welcome to the show, Juan. How are you? I'm great. How are you? Thank you. Thank you very much. It's an honor to have you on the show.

Let me hold up your beautiful book here that you have. And I like how you designed it. You've got black and white as the cover and right and wrong on the opposing sides. But before we get into your book, tell people where they can get the book and any plugs that you want people to look you up on the interwebs so you know if you just go to amazon or any of the sort of book selling sites you'll find it on there or mit press yeah and i'd love it if you did that because it'll make your holidays easier with family and your job easier and hopefully hopefully maybe even allow you to have conversations with your kids or grandparents. Do you want them to look at any other dot-coms, like for your Excel, Venture Management, or anything?

You know, if you look up TED and just put in Juan Enriquez, you'll find a talk or two. There you go. Great gift thing. And plus, not only is it a great book and a very smart read, it might make your relatives smarter, huh, if you give it to them, friends, neighbors, relatives, all that good stuff. You never know. Hope springs eternal. We need as much hope as we can right now. So give us an idea why you wrote this book. You've written a number of books here, just an extraordinary amount. How many total books

do you have, if you don't mind me interjecting? I have about seven now. Seven, there you go. So look those up, guys, on Amazon. So what motivated you right and wrong? So most of my life for the past 30 years has been really weird technologies, like trying to figure out how to make synthetic life forms and trying to figure out how new technologies change the brain and change our humanity.

And I kept getting asked questions about, okay, but what about the ethics? Is this right or wrong? And I thought the answer would be very simple, but it took me a mere six years to try and figure that out. And so I wrote a short book on that. Here you have it, guys. We have the definitive right and wrong in a book. It's actually exactly the opposite.

I started out thinking I'm going to write a catechism, and I'm going to tell you what's right and what's wrong. And the really weird thing is right and wrong changes over time. Technology changes right and wrong. And technology is moving at exponential rates. And is that the overview crux of the book, and then you get into some of the details, would you say? I think that's right. In this so polarized time, in this so angry time, most of us come at most questions thinking, I know right,

and you're wrong if you don't disagree with me. And, you know, first, it's unlikely on all subjects. But second, even if you are right, even if you're Mother Teresa, this stuff changes so radically over time in terms of what we think was right today will be wrong tomorrow. So you talk about what's right and what's wrong or perceptions of what's right or wrong. Mm-hmm. in it, uh, as aside from people who, you know, look at something and go, I should really learn more. And, and I realized that, uh, what's the old rule, uh, that I like to talk about is,

is, uh, sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Um, is that some of that that you're talking about in the book? It, you know, it's partly that, but it's, it's also people who are really trying to do the right thing and trying to learn. And the rules change on them. So, you know, we've all probably had this experience where you walk into a place of business and the rules have changed in terms of what you can say or can't say. Or in terms of how you treat somebody or how you address somebody. Or what you can joke about or can't joke about and and they seem to change ever faster and people seem to get more and more upset if you use the wrong word 10 seconds ago 10 minutes ago 10 months ago or 10 years ago and so part of what i think we have to do is we have to understand that the context of a word can completely change,

that an action can be seen in a completely different light, and that those rules are changing. So a costume you thought was funny 10 years ago can look very different today. And how do you judge the past? How do you treat each other today? And how do we educate each other on this stuff? So is it something where we need to understand that this evolves? I mean, you bring up some really great points in the book, like looking back at slavery, where we have to understand the time period of it.

We have to judge it, but we also have to have some perspective. Well, start with an absolute. Enslaving people, indentured servitude, serfdom, absolutely wrong. I mean, there isn't a person listening who wouldn't agree with that statement. So if we all know that this was completely wrong, then the question is why did human beings tolerate this and actually make it legal for millennia? Because this wasn't just the US. This was China, India, Africa, the Greeks, the Romans, everybody had slaves.

Why did we tolerate it for millennia? And then the flip side of that question is how did we tolerate it for millennia? And then the flip side of that question is, how did we get smart so that it, in legal terms, disappeared from most of the world in a few decades? Because most countries got rid of slavery in a pretty short period of time. Part of the story is there were a series of incredibly brave abolitionists and outspoken activists who put their lives on the line, like Harriet Taubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and that certainly deserves enormous credit. coincidence that we started to do away with the oppression of other human beings when we started to have energy because a single barrel of oil contains 10 years of a human being's

labor in energy equivalent and is it a complete coincidence that we started to do away with these practices when we had the industrial revolution and we had thousands of horsepower. And so the narrative of technology in terms of ethics is normally the Terminator's coming, technology's going to destroy us all. In this particular case, it allowed us to free millions and millions of people while having more and producing more. And what ended up happening is we doubled and tripled the average human lifespan. millions of people while having more and producing more.

And what ended up happening is we doubled and tripled the average human life spent, and we massively increased wealth. So what you're saying is, because that was the thing I was going to ask you about the book, it's entitled How Technology Transforms Our Ethics. And, you know, I never really thought about it from that aspect. About the same time that a lot of this stuff was going on, we were technologically advancing to where you wouldn't need slaves quite as much to work a field. So does technology tend to raise our awareness, or is it a matter of convenience, or realizing that, hey, we should quit being less jerks because we have better technology?

Or what say you? So, you know, technology sometimes changes ethics towards the bad, but very often it changes it towards the good. So, you know, I was brought up in Mexico, and I was brought up to be a little bigot. I went to, you know to Jesuit school every morning and listened to the priests and the preacher and teacher and peers and laws and newspapers, and everybody told me one of the worst things you could be was gay. And through 1997, two-thirds of the United States believed gay marriage was absolutely wrong.

And today it's flipped 180 degrees. And when you think, okay, here's something that is inculcated in young children as a fundamental belief by the people they admire. How in the world did our society as a whole flip 180 degrees majority to majority on that subject? And again, it's got to do a lot with technology. come out of the closet of having media bring theater and television and music and film and all of these extraordinarily talented people in this community in a visible way into our lives so that you could see the the pain the anguish creativity, the humanity, which made it so much harder to see these people as the other, the people who were to be shunned, the people who were to be exiled. And it's very strange because a lot of people who thought they'd learned right all of a

sudden find themselves boycotted or shunned because they haven't changed what they were taught was right as children and i think when we judge other people we have to see how they're educated and where they're coming from we have to use two words that we never use today, which are humility and forgiveness. My forefathers were wrong, and the founding fathers were wrong. You have to think, if I was educated as a 12-year-old in that time, how would I have acted? What would I have been taught? And I want to stress, that doesn't make the stuff right.

Those actions were wrong. They were hideous. They are to be condemned. But you also have to think, a lot of stuff we're doing today is going to be wrong and hideous and condemned as technology evolves into the future, and we are judged in retrospect. And that was one of the things you talked about in the book.

Are we going to be around 300 years from now to be able to determine, you know, hey, what were we doing wrong? Which was probably a lot at this point. I remember a comedian, I think he told a joke, he says, you know, when the archaeologists dig us up from, I don't know, whatever the Charlton Heston, you know, Planet of the Apes world is,

and they go, hey, what were these humans doing back then? You know, they're going to see all these photos of us online where we're always smiling. And they're like, man, they had some weird thing where they're always smiling. I guess they evolved or something. And they're going to wonder, God, their society was either really happy or really high. But you talk about some interesting things, too. I mean, there's a lot of different aspects of this. LGBTQ, like you mentioned, slavery. A lot of people had their minds changed on have said is was a black lynching, a form of a black lynching live on TV or recorded on TV.

And everyone saw it. And everyone who had a soul a lot of the adoption of Black Lives Matter, where a lot of white people didn't get behind Black Lives Matter back in Obama's years and et cetera. And we've had a lot of discussions about that. So it's interesting what you are talking about in the book as to how we do that. How do we get ahead of that where we don't have to wait for technology to inform us or enlighten us or to evolve us. I think the first thing is to have an open mind. If you enter any conversation with the notion, I'm right and you're absolutely wrong, you quit listening. You quit trying to even understand why does this person have a different viewpoint from me? And I think the starting point has to be

98% of people are decent human beings trying to do the right thing. There are 2% who are psychopaths or sadists or horrible human beings. And I get it. But when you polarize society and you have to pick a side and you say, I'm this or I'm that, you enter a trench and you give cover to people who are doing horrendous things in your name. on your side for doing stuff which is just wrong because the only other alternative is then you're designated an x there's there's almost a no man's land where you're shot if you try and reach a middle ground with the other side either by the other side or by your own side because you become a deserter and that makes conversations at work walking on eggshells that makes conversations on college campuses almost impossible that makes discussions with people who have a different

political viewpoint or viewpoint on race or religion or whatever almost impossible so you're talking a little bit about like culture? I'm talking about cancel culture. I'm talking about attack and destroy anybody who disagrees with me culture. I'm talking about you're not one of us. You're one of the other culture. Let me ask you this because we're in an interesting time right now. A lot of our polarization, and I'll let you correct me if i'm wrong because it's your book and you've done the research but a lot of our polarization circles around uh one man

really in in the political identity uh that has been pretty toxic and who's i think we all agree main motive has been to divide us um It appears that sun may be setting soon. Do you see a future after this? Well, is that correct? Or do you, I mean, a lot of polarization, Me Too, everything has come out, Black Lives Matter, a lot of this stuff has really come out of this one man being the leader on the white horse. I don't know if you want to, am I correct, or where are we in that scheme of things? You know, I think this one man is nitroglycerin.

So I think he came into a very, very dry forest, and ignited it. But we've been spending a lot of money trying to convince 51% of the country that they should have nothing to do with the other 49%, that the other 49% are retrograde troglodytes, ignorance, not good human beings, they're baby killers, they're pedophiles, they're this, they're that, the other. And somehow we've allowed ourselves to come into this thing, but you and I and everybody here have had extraordinary generosity from people as we drive across this country.

And as long as you can stay off one or two topics, these are decent human beings. And when we say all X are Y, we end up supporting some pretty awful things in their names. So gross generalizations are bad? I'm sorry, the? So gross generalizations are bad? Well, one of the ways to address this is let's assume you have a very good-looking 16-year-old daughter and you need an emergency babysitter for the weekend would you rather have Donald Trump or Barack Obama

as a babysitter and once you answer that now tell me would you rather have Paul Ryan or Anthony Weiner definitely Paul Ryan or Anthony Weiner. Right? Yeah. Definitely Paul Wright. You know, I understand there's a lot of abuses and I understand there have been terrible things.

But let me tell you, I grew up in Mexico and if you have a police that doesn't function, that doesn't protect people, that really does become corrupt and killers, you are not in favor of not having an effective police force. you either see lawns today that have a yard sign that says BLM, or you see yard signs that say, we support the police. And the question that goes through my mind is, okay, why don't I ever see a yard that has both of those signs on the yard

and then a sign that says E Pluribus Unum? Because out of many, one is what makes this country great. And having people in communities that may not think exactly the way you do, that may not have been educated the same way you do, that may not understand what you need in terms of respect and space. But let's have a talk about that, because let's talk about the consequences of ripping ourselves apart

and stereotyping big chunks of people as the other. Three quarters of the flags, borders, and anthems in Europe did not exist a century ago. Europe continues to rip itself apart. The Catalans want to leave the Basques, the Welsh, the Scots, the Northern Italians, the Walloons in Belgium, the Southern Finns, the Corsicans. It goes on and on. It is really easy to rip a great nation apart. It's really hard to keep a community, especially a community where you begin to see more and more people,

more and more groups as the other. And so the question that I sometimes ask cadets, if I'm given the privilege of lecturing at West Point, is how many stars do you think will be in the U.S. flag in 50 years? And that's a gut punch to a cadet, because they're willing to die for that flag so before they get too angry with me I come back with the next question

tell me exactly how many presidents of the United States have been buried under exactly the same number of stars they were born under and the answer is exactly zero there has never been a president of the United States buried under the same number of stars he was born under. And until there's a president that's born after 1959 that dies before there's a change in the flag,

there will never be a president of the United States buried under the same number of flags, of stars, that they were born under. So it's not as crazy a question as it seems. And we take this country for granted. We take our community for granted. We think we can rip each other apart and stereotype each other, and that that won't tear the nation apart. And that's really dangerous.

Do we need to have leaders that take us down a uniting path? Does that help? I think we need to see the humanity in most other people. Because if we don't do that, then we can't isolate the truly evil. And we can't see the truly evil. You know, one of the big stains on U.S. history is what happened with the Japanese internment in World War II, where they took the Japanese-American families and put them in basically jails. What's incredible to me is that most Americans understand and recognize how wrong that was.

But there's an enormous number of Americans who are watching the same thing happen to Hispanics, documented or not. And it's actually worse than what happened in World War II because the families aren't together. They're ripping the families apart. They're putting the kids in cages. They're putting them on cement floors with space blankets. They're not allowing human contact, and they're deliberately losing the parents.

That's stuff that the Argentine junta and generals didn't do. That's stuff that the Chilean generals did do. That's stuff that the Brazilian generals did. And they were crimes against humanity. And how a 90% plus majority of this country doesn't see how fundamentally wrong that is. And that it's going to be a stain that is bigger than that stain of world war ii

but these are crimes against humanity how the hell have we polarized to the state where that is not front and center and that is not you know the basic fundamental discussion today instead we're discussing whether this tweet was right, whether that tweet was right, whether this insult or nickname. We're losing sight of the forest. Is that one of the things that got us here? I mean, one of the things we've been watching, there's been a lot of discussions we've had with authors on the Chris Foss show, is the dissolving of the middle class and the desperation that comes from that. You know, you see that with a lot of societies that fell, Venezuela and different things, where when hard times come and you see the rise of authoritarianism or fascism, a lot of it comes out of desperation. The support of it comes out of desperation because there's some sort of sun setting

on whatever the norms are of society. Like recently we had the author of Strong Men on and she talked about how anytime there was a rise for LGBTQ or women's rights or something or there was job issues, economy, you saw that with Germany post-World War I where they were struggling economically. And so populations, you know, in the desperation that they're involved in, where they're just losing everything and they're in that, what was the movie, Network,

where you're just like, give me my tires and my TV at the end of the day, just leave me the fuck alone. Is that one of the things that drives a lot of this factor? You know, again, it's two sides of technology, and it's very weird. We are able to generate wealth on a scale that is unimaginable to any previous generation. I'll give you a specific example. So this little app that a lot of us use called WhatsApp for messaging and stuff, 50 people created that. And they sold that for about $22 billion. billion dollars and just to put that in context that means that 50 people created wealth equivalent

to every person every gardener every journalist every mechanic every lawyer every politician everybody working in a country during an entire year didn't generate as much wealth as that and that is true for 15 latin american or car, where the GDP of the nation in a year is smaller than what these 50 kids created. So by the time you get to the Amazons of the world or the Facebooks or the Apples or the Chinese companies, you're talking about economies the size of countries being generated by not that many people in a very short period of time. And we've never seen that. That does two things. It drives this incredible disparity in wealth.

It makes the rich just crazy rich versus everybody else. But the thing that I think we're not seeing yet, which technology is enabling, is it changes the fundamental issue of economics from the allocation of scarcity. We don't have enough food. We don't have enough iPhones. We don't have enough penicillin. We don't have enough food. We don't have enough iPhones. We don't have enough penicillin. We don't have enough education. And it creates a society of what Peter Diamandis calls abundance, where we have more than enough of most things. And the issue is how do we distribute antibiotics, basic health care, shelter for the middle class if there isn't enough to go around.

Ethically, it is much harder to support that position if there was more than enough and you didn't choose to help distribute it. The ethics change because you can no longer hide behind the fig leaf of, well, I'm sorry, there just wasn't enough. One of the chapters in your book you talked about was renewing capitalism's license. That is one of our problems in federal capitalism. I mean, capitalism is great, but there is a point where it's great for a few people well i think that's you know we're we're entering a period we we look back at how people worked and we look at how long they worked and how brutal the conditions were. And we just can't conceive of working for a feudal landlord. We can't conceive of working in the mills in Britain at age 10 or 12.

We can't conceive of working six or seven days a week for 12 or 18 hours under almost indentured servitude conditions. I think what the current forms of production capitalism could allow us to do if we choose it is to reduce the work week massively and provide a universal basic income and standard of living. And boo on us if we don't understand that. I think we have an opportunity to treat other people in a way which we couldn't have done that before because we didn't have enough. We didn't have the optionality of doing that. And so I think when you talk about capitalism, I think we're going to have to have a serious conversation.

It would not surprise me if the work week becomes a 20-hour work week going forward. It wouldn't surprise me for many people. It wouldn't surprise me if you still have a lot of very rich people, but you also have the basics provided for almost everybody. I think we either reinvent it or people are going to burn it down. Yeah. I mean, we definitely got to do something because we seem to be,

like you talk about in the book, we're, you know, at odds with each other and we should be at an inflection point if we're not already. One of the things you talked about in your book that I noticed, you were talking about the disparity of what it takes to get an education, college costs compared to just about everything, what everything else costs in the world. How does that affect what we're talking about here?

So when you think of the cost of a dozen pencils, a phone, an international call, a shirt, almost anything. The costs have been dropping massively over the last few decades. What you're seeing now is there are two things that are consistently going up in price much faster than inflation. Education and healthcare. And those are the two things that people need. Because if you're not healthy, you can't work and you can't enjoy life. And if you're not educated, you don't have a shot.

And those are the two places where we have allowed crazy unethical behavior. You shouldn't go to a pharmacist and hear your money or your life because they won't give you that prescription if you don't pay. You shouldn't have to have loans. The current system of student loans is so crazy because you could go out, get 10 credit cards, buy all the fashion baubles in the world, and then declare bankruptcy. But you can't do that with student loans. So there's no incentive to stop these diploma mills that are just exploiting kids and laddling on a debt that never goes away. That's completely unethical. That's got to stop. I totally agree with you. I owned a mortgage company for

almost 20 years before the bust. One of the things I was seeing at the time was this extraordinary thing of the student loans really impacting people's lives and almost an indentured servitude really when it came down to it. I mean, there were people that I saw that, you know, they take an extraordinary loans to do something that didn't have an ROI, a return on investment. Like you would see, you know, you spent $50,000 to become a social worker. Do you know what social workers get paid on an annual basis and how much you would need to make in profit to service the ROI on that loan?

I saw people who went to school to be either doctors or pharmacists or, you know, something in the field of between brain surgery and, you know and all the different levels below, dentists, et cetera, et cetera. And I would see guys that, while they were in the medical field and a high-paying field, the service to their indentured servitude college loans was going on for 10 to 15 years. I've known people that are my age that are just barely now paying off that 50 that are just now paying off their student loans. It's extraordinary. And it's almost like an indenture of servitude because, I mean, I had one friend, I think at 45, she's like, I can go buy some cars and some stuff now. And you're like, holy shit, half your life is gone and now you can finally live it because now you've got your student loans paid off.

Yeah, and that is going to be seen as so crazy unethical and i don't know if it's five years or 10 years but it can't come soon enough yeah and and and i mean we've seen the stagnation of of employment wages for 40 years i think i think politicians have something to blame for this but also a society that doesn't educate itself you know i mean my mom was a mother for 20 years uh she she you know would constantly call me and complain about how the legislature is doing this they're doubling our class sizes they're taking away our money um you know we're going to raise a more idiot society we're not teaching civics and etc etc um but but then there also has to come in. I think, you know, for me, I wasn't highly

educated as a youth. Um, I started my first companies at 18. Uh, I seemed to have some sort of, you know, weird thing where I could figure stuff out and connect dots, but really my real toy was like, go from A to B and do a straight line. Um, and, and,. And there's nothing brilliant about anything I did. I just went and did it and learned the hard way and stuff. So, you know, I don't know how much that needs to play into it. So how do you talk in your book, how we resolve some of these ethics? How do we deal better with each other or analyze each other better from a different perspective?

You know, I think on the one hand, we absolutely have to face the wrongs of the past and recognize the wrongs of the past. I think we also have to judge people in the past with a whole lot more forgiveness and compassion, right? If Mark Twain used a absolutely banned word today a hundred times in Huck Finn, you have to ask yourself, was he intending to harm or hurt or insult, right? And I think intent matters. And again, it's not justifying the use. It's not saying it was right. But it's saying maybe you and I at the same time writing may have been even harsher or stupider in this use than he was. And we have to apply that same lens to ourselves because there's a very weird thing right if if you're a historian

you go into these archives and you research the life of henry the eighth and all the awful things he did and his relationship with his wives and everything else even the most famous person in history, you know a whole lot less about that person than future generations are going to know about you and I and everybody listening. Because think about when you go into a bar and you see somebody who's got a bunch of tattoos. By the time you look at those tattoos, you've got some idea of what that person cares about and where they've been. But you can cover those tattoos. You can roll your

sleeves down. You can wear a hat. You can wear a turtleneck, whatever. We can't do that because we've all been electronically tattooed, right? By our Instagram, by our Facebook, by our Twitter, by our dating profiles, by our credit card receipts. So there's all this electronic exhaust that creates a tattoo of who we are, what we thought, and that doesn't get covered by a shirt. That doesn't get buried when we die. And so people are going to know exactly what we were thinking, exactly who we were with, exactly what we did, to a degree that nobody on earth has ever been transparent and judged before. the great latin american writer borges when the military junta came after him he laughed and he said how can you threaten me other than with death if you truly want to make me scared threaten me with immortality well guess what we're now all immortal right and and your great grandkids will be analyzing your dating profile and your sexual preferences because you're putting them out there. This is why you don't have kids. God damn it. I really thought I had, didn't I?

So hopefully they won't be as harsh in their judgments as we are. My lineage dies with me, baby. It's over. It's's over but no i i get what you're saying um you know it's extraordinary the thought you put into it because it's true a lot of people haven't really thought about that maybe i should start asking people on social media you want your kids reading that your grandkids and great-grandkids reading that uh you know i mean you you bring a lot to to bear because we're constantly we're doing that right now. We're judging very harshly the Woodrow Wilson's of the world, people 100 to 100 years ago. And we're judging them by the rules we're trying to apply today. And I think I heard or read, you know, George Washington grew up in, or many of the people that wrote the Constitution, they grew up in slavery.

They, from a very young age, they had slaves in the house, you know, being around them. And so to them, it was so enmeshed in their society that being able to see outside of it was hard to do. But they wrote the famous words in the Constitution giving man rights, and yet this was something that had to evolve and be enlightened and awakened. So I noticed in conclusion in your book you had kind of some good advice, and you have different pieces of advice throughout the book, but in the conclusion thing you kind of gave us some different things to look at. And let me see if I can find that. But you have some different perspectives or questions we can ask ourselves

in terms of ethics and stuff. Do you want to go through some of that so I think you know first and foremost it's it's important we recognize the basic humanity and the other person right I mean I keep stressing this but get in a car go talk to people people. Almost anywhere you go, you're going to find people who are absolutely great human beings. And they may be coaches, or they may be plumbers, or they may be university professors, or they may be business people. You can't drive anywhere in this country and not find people who are extraordinary and admirable

and who get up in the morning and say, you know, I want to do the right thing. I want to be a good parent. I want to be a good employee. I want to be a good boss. I want to be a good teacher. That's in people's hearts. and we have to provide not a catechism of if you do this you're right and if you do this you're wrong we have to provide a ground where we can have different opinions and talk to one another and still part as friends and also a place where we can isolate the truly evil.

And we're not doing that. So I think what I'd love people to do is pick up this book, read it with people who disagree with you. Read it with kids. Read it with a different generation. Read it with people who are very angry about something that's different from what you're very angry about. And listen. Don't listen as you're thinking of the answer. Think of the answer after you listen. It's Tip O'Neill, who used to be

the head of the House of Representatives, once had a young, aggressive, progressive activist run into his office and say, Mr. Speaker, I'm ready to fight the enemy. And O'Neill leaned back and he said, ah, young man, good, I love your energy. Tell me, who are we fighting? Why, the Republicans, of course. Ah, young man, you have much to learn the enemy's the senate it just changed the viewpoint of that kid very quickly and that's part of what we have to do

the enemy are the people who wish to tear us apart as a community. So let me ask you this on a devil's advocate, because I think I understand that portion. But if, and I understand that everyone's good people. I mean, if I'm the American on the street, regardless of whatever, I'm going to be nice to you. You're going to be nice to me and be gracious. We might have a polite conversation, just like you talked about with,

aside from one or two conversations we should avoid. We're going to be nice people and that's great. But if we talk about these things, one of the things that I see is an issue and I'll ask you to address this, but let's say it's something where I want to change your rights or persecute you maybe in a certain way. let's role play here let's say that i'm a woman and i want to have certain rights with my body and you're a person politically who says i want to control your rights especially if i'm not a woman and i should be able to tell you what to do what would be the best approach to that sort of thing in the context that you're describing that doesn't make me want to get very upset.

Because you're looking to take something away from me. I completely agree. One of the ways of getting people to understand how much things can change even their basic opinions is to say you know while we're on the topic of sex let's talk about having a conversation with our grandparents about what we do today and imagine bringing your four dear old grandparents back in a time machine like that movie Back to the Future. And so your grandparents are now sitting in your studio, and they're 20-something years old, and you're interviewing them and telling them about sex.

And if you were to do that, you'd first explain that you can now have sex and not have a child, because you've got birth control. And yes, you did have birth control since the Egyptian times, but it wasn't consistent and effective. And now you've completely decoupled the act from the consequence. That would be very weird to grandparents. That's not something they had. Then the second thing you tell them is, look, because I'm going through cancer treatments, I'm going to freeze eggs and then do ivf and and they'd say well hang on so ivf as you just explained it two bodies never come together physically they don't have to be in the same room they don't have

to be in the same state they don't have to be in the same country and you can conceive a child that's miraculous we used to call that the immaculate conception and then you explain that you can now have surrogate mothers and freeze eggs and have identical twins born 20 years apart so for many people listening to us birth control is normal IVF is normal and freezing eggs and for people who can't have a child, having a surrogate mother is something that they think is okay. That would have horrified her grandparents. They would have taken the same position that this person's taking against a woman being able to control her body. And so I think part of the way in which you jujitsu this conversation is to say,

I hear you, but you have to understand that you conceive a child is going to change so radically in the measure that you're able to reproduce cells without having to bring or reproduce bodies without having to bring egg and sperm together. Yeah. or reproduce bodies without having to bring egg and sperm together. I think our concept of children is going to change so fundamentally in the measure that today you and I and most listeners would be horrified by the idea of deliberately gene editing a child except for a deadly genetic condition. But you could easily see a conversation with your grandkids where they say, boy, you people were so primitive back then that you didn't bother to take out the cancer-causing genes. So I still have a KRAS.

I still have a P53. I still have a BRCA gene. I have cancer because you out of superstition didn't edit me. And it flips 180 degrees. So I'm against that, and I'll tell you why. Because it puts Mari, who you are the father, out of a job. No, I'm just kidding. Put that up.

Because, I mean, we can't put Mari out of work. That's a great show have you ever um so do we do we all have to read the book and come to a place of a conversational agreement to where we have to realize that ethics are always involving evolving instead of being cemented or concrete in our in our analyzation and we have to have a little bit of take and give or is it watching uh the example of prior prior prior what the hell prior what the fuck prior i don't know where that came from uh prior uh evolving of our ethics to get us

motivated to realign with what we're currently addressing? Look, that which human beings hold most dear and are often willing to give their lives for often disappears.

So if ethics don't evolve and if your beliefs don't evolve you as a religion tend to go extinct and 99 of the world's religions have gone extinct so when you go to a history museum when you go to an art museum when you go to an archaeology museum a big chunk of those museums is dead gods. So here's Zeus, and here's Zaratustra, and here is Neptune, and here is Tzatzalcoatl, and here's Tlaloc. And all the vessels, and all of the symbols, and all of the jewels dedicated, and all the effort dedicated to that god, that religion didn't evolve. They didn't learn that ethics and right and wrong changes.

And they became more and more fundamentalist, became more and more conservative, and became less and less relevant to that society. Similar things happen to the way we used to organize countries. All the heraldic shields that determine, you know, I will die for the shield, or if this shield marries this shield, that becomes a country. That's all gone away. So I think as we go forward and as we try and create communities and as we try and keep countries and societies together, labeling people as the other destroys societies. Not evolving your ethics destroys societies. Not having compassion and dialogue and helping bring people along destroys societies.

And I'm an optimistic curmudgeon. I think humans are much better off today than they were in 1900 on average. And much better off than they were in 1800 and 1700 in the year 1000 so even given some of the horrors of today and many of the wrongs of today i'd love to wake up in 100 years and see how this story plays out if we're not all on the planet of the apes uh archaeology site right that's right well we may have engineered monkeys by them so it may look something like that yeah they may have taken over and stuff but no i i love the principles you're

talking about i'm just trying to figure out how to get to that point when when uh we can all have those conversations i mean when you're dealing with people that that don't want to learn anything new that that are insistent on the dunning-Kruger scale of that they know everything without exploring other worlds, sometimes trying to crack that nut open. You know, I mean, if I want to have a discussion with you about a certain subject, we both kind of have to be on the same page that we're willing to explore the possibilities as opposed to, no, I'm right and I'm stuck in my heart in my position well you have to put them in a context where you find places where they may have changed their minds

or you find places where they may think differently from their grandparents and you may want to put them in a position where first you understand why they're in that position right because you know if you and i were educated in a certain environment or a certain structure maybe one out of a hundred or one of a thousand of us would have gotten out of that and learned something completely different without leaving, without being educated somewhere else. And that's why the Army was so important as a community-building institution, because it was hard as hell to maintain segregation when the person you'd been fighting next to, your buddy who saved your life, suddenly couldn't use your same water cooler,

suddenly couldn't go to the same restaurant. There was a complete dissonance between what you were living with, who this person was, and what the laws were. And it's the same thing with people who were gay, right? I mean, once people started to come out and they were your cousins and they were your brother and they were your friends and they were your architect and stuff, it becomes a hell of a lot harder to demonize the other.

So humanizing the other becomes incredibly important. One of the things we've done wrong in COVID is a lot of people have gone towards the technical arguments and the big numbers instead of the humanizing of the cases that are out there. That is because of the law of large numbers, we are doing one of the cruelest things we have ever done to U.S. society, which is we're letting 9-11s happen every day, and we're not stopping it.

And I can't tell you how harshly we're going to be judged in the future because of what we're doing today. Yeah. Yeah. future because of what we're doing today yeah yeah you know what's interesting to me about what you're talking about is we were doing the same thing with the school shootings up until now where we were we were dehumanizing those and just going well you know another shooting day okay well whatever and i completely agree with you and that that's going to be one of the great moral failings of our society. But coming back to something you mentioned earlier, which was George Floyd, that stuff had been going on for a long time. and there had probably been 10 times as many incidents a decade ago, and 100 times as many incidents in the 1960s,

and 1,000 times more of those incidents in the 1900s. Not a single one of those is justified. I'm not arguing any way, shape, or form this is ever justified. But what gives me hope is that each of us now carries a full broadcast studio in his or her pocket. And so before you had to have a television crew there as occurred in Los Angeles with the Rodney King riots. But now everybody's got a television play.

And it becomes harder and harder for injustice or corruption or evil not to be shown. And it's scaring a lot of people who, you know, thought they were, you know, above the law or not accountable. They better be scared because we can now hold them accountable. Can also be used for evil? I mean, we've seen, you know, if you look at what Betsy DeVos does with the Council of National Policy and the radio stations they run and the networks they run and how they can really just beat in, you know, messaging. And you've talked about that in your book with Facebook and LinkedIn and all these different Twitter and the messaging

and that sort of messaging that cements those ideas into people's head that makes them unmitigable in their minds to new thoughts you know that's one of the hardest things that we're going to have to deal with because let's talk about drugs for one second we're getting so good at chemistry that we can generate millions of molecules very quickly and and molecules in the brain act a little bit like Lego blocks. So you're designing Lego blocks that are stickier and stickier and stickier.

And so basically what you're doing is you're taking these chemicals and going after the receptor sites and deliberately engineering to be more addictive. So the drugs that were around when we were kids are completely different from the drugs that are around now. The degree of how quickly you are hooked that you see with opioids is a very different structure from what was happening with very damaging drugs a couple decades ago. And something similar is happening with the targeting on some of these social media stuff because we've become so afraid since 9-11. And a country that was very confident, a country that was very certain of itself, all of a sudden, all of the messaging is be afraid, be very afraid, be terrified, be an informer. Think about walking into an airport back when we used to be able to be very afraid. Be terrified. Be an informer. Think about walking into an airport

back when we used to be able to walk into airports. The first thing you hear, if you see something, say something. If there's any unattended baggage, if there's any suspicious activity, right? So you're constantly barbarded, not by, you should be so happy you're taking a trip with the kids.

It's be terrified and be terrified of everybody around you and report everybody around you. And the media has caught that message, and it terrifies you because you're sitting there minding your own business, and all of a sudden you see breaking news alert and those tones of music, and your heart just goes, shit now what right and that works and and fear and anger is powering so much of our social interaction and it's it's so addictive that it's really dangerous and it really targets our fight and flight sort of mechanisms you know like news

news stations had that you know every every lead on every day was like today or tonight at 11 we'll cover how hugs are dangerous and horrible and kill people and you're like hugs what the fuck i better find out what hugs are doing you know no i think that's exactly right and and think that's exactly right. And that's not new, right? Because the old saying that editors had, if it bleeds, it leads. So that's been true for a long time. What's different is the weaponization, both of chemicals and drugs, and the weaponization of the news and the targeting of the news. And that's where technology has played a really nasty role. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's interesting. So we have these two balances. We have technology that can be used for good or technology that can be used for bad. No question. Definitely. And that's why people should read your book. Anything we missed in the book so far in discussing it? We, of course, want people to read it, but anything we missed?

You know, I think it took me six years to write this thing because, you know i think it took me six years to write this thing because you know i thought i knew right from wrong and i thought this is going to be a short article i just have to tell people what's right and wrong in genetic research or brain research and boy was i wrong right and and the more dug, the more I understood that the rules change, and the faster the rules change. And I guess what I'd love people to do is, if you read it, if you discuss it with people, let me know where I was wrong. And let me know what I missed and let me know what we're going to be doing in the future that in retrospect is going to make what we do today look pretty darn silly if not completely wrong so how do you think your book's going to hold up in 300 years then you know one of the things I try and

do really hard sometimes people call me a futurist There's no way I'm a futurist because if I really knew what the future was going to do, I would be a multi-billionaire off the stock market. What I can do is I can look at current trends for a while and say if these trends continue for a year, for five years, for a decade, this is going to be the impact. And I try and write books that matter across time. So in 2005, I wrote a book and said, look,

there's going to be a giant financial crisis. It's going to be driven by over-leverage in real estate. And the long-term consequence is going to be, it's going to rip nations apart and it's going to divide the politics. And the title of that book was The Untied States of America, Polarization Fracturing in Our Future. And that book was not intended to be a how-to manual. It was intended to be a warning. so what I'd like to have is this book to be something that is relevant and not completely right

I'm certain I made many boneheaded mistakes in this but I think the general idea that right and wrong changes over time that technology changes right and wrong and that technologies are moving faster and faster and therefore ethics are going to change faster and faster. It's an idea that's got legs for a while. There you go. And the preponderance of the book is built upon that,

really, when it comes down to it, if you think about it. Yes. There you go. Juan, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for sharing all the wonderful knowledge. And tell people where they can go to find out more about you and pick up the book. If you wander over to Amazon or if you wander over to your independent bookstore

or any place you buy books, just right wrong Enriquez. Hopefully it will pop up. If you'd like to watch stuff on brain research or genetics, go to Juan Enriquez at TED.com.

The more you can learn, the more you can know. There you go. Thanks for being on the show with us. Here's his book, Juan Enriquez, Right, Wrong, How Technology Transforms Our Ethics. Thanks for being on the show today. Thank you so much. Take care, Chris. Thank you.

Thanks, Juan, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4S Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com fortress chris voss hit that bell notification button go to goodreads.com force us chris voss go to facebook.com for just the chris voss show and also go to the ecbpn appreciate bonus for tuning in be sure to stay safe wear your mask and we'll see you guys next time