The Jordan Harbinger Show - 524: Nicholas Christakis | Pandemic Impacts and Contagious Behavior

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Nicholas Christakis (@NAChristakis) is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale, a physician, and author. His latest book is Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. What We Discuss with Nicholas Christakis: What social science tells us about our best shot (pun moderately intended) at achieving herd immunity from COVID-19. How social networks allowed the virus to spread and reinforced mistrust of well-known science among certain politically oriented segments of the populace. What the lessons of past disasters can teach us about the road ahead. Why the bad (and good) habits of our friends' friends can have an impact on our own behavior from across vast social networks. What we can do to best defend ourselves against the unwanted influence of these unseen members of our network. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/524 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Most people understand it's not very controversial or even unexpected to just say, look, you're affected by your friends. But the point is that the influence doesn't stop at one degree of separation. You can have a sequence of social interactions such that you come to be affected, not just by your friends, but by your friends, friends, friends, friends, friends, or your friends, friends, friends, or perhaps even your friends, friends, friends, people you don't even know can affect you.

Now, as soon as I say that, you think, well, okay, I can kind of see that with respect to germs. Like right now you're not sick and your friends aren't sick, but your friends' friends' friends are sick. The germ is going to wind its way through the network and affect you. But it also then happens with other things like emotions and ideas or behaviors. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We've got in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists,

even the occasional four-star general former cult member or drug trafficker, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or you just want to tell your friends about it, which I always appreciate, I've got episode starter packs on the website for you. These are collections of your favorite episodes,

organized by popular topics. This will help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. So if you don't know where to begin, this is where you begin. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. Today on the show, I've been wanting to do this one for a while. As with many folks that have been on my list for a few years, I often get overly ambitious on what I want to cover. So we start with COVID and vaccines in the pandemic. But then we move on to social science.

So stick with us, even if you're angry about my ProVax and COVID chatter at the top of the show or you're sick of hearing about COVID, which, look, I feel you. There's a lot more that follows. Our guest's latest book describes the progress of COVID-19, how it originated. And yes, it holds up over time. And we here on the Jordan Harbinger show, we did a big show, a big episode about pandemics, before the pandemic kicked off. This was like February 2020.

It was fascinating how pandemics have been predicted for decades now. But Dr. Dennis Carroll, who we interviewed in February 2020, he thought it would be the flu that ended up being a pandemic. Nobody saw a novel coronavirus coming into play, of course. And when I say nobody, I mean, the majority of people thought it's going to be the flu. But hey, we had SARS. Anyway, today we'll discuss herd immunity, how it works, why we might not hit it. We'll also touch on some of these new and terrifying variants, diseases that are combining in our bodies and becoming something new and spreading. Kind of like a pandemic smoothie.

I wanted to go beyond the science of the virus and get into the science of belief around the virus and about some of the social networks that allow them to spread. And as you've heard on this show before, people tend to trust some. until it contradicts their political or religious beliefs, which is always fascinating, endlessly fascinating for me. And just as cakes taste different than their individual ingredients, social networks are also greater than the sum of their parts. And later in the show, we do a deep dive on social networks and network effects, which lead us just some pretty shocking conclusions, frankly, such as the idea that if your friend's

friend's friend is a smoker or is overweight or both, you are even more likely to smoke and be overweight, even if you don't even know that person. So that was a little bit disappointing for me, endlessly interesting, and frankly, the kind of social science that gets me up in the morning. So it's a bit of a misfit show, but sometimes those are the best, in my opinion. I hope you're going to dig it. I think you will. Also, some small audio issues during the show, which forced us to degrade the audio quality a bit. You have our apologies for that.

What can we say? Modern technology. Now, the audio quality of this show is a mere five times better than most shows instead of 10 times because of producer Jason's amazing technical skills. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network, my social network, the one we're talking about here on the show. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And I don't need your credit card or any of that crap.

I just want you to learn the skills and dig the well before you get thirsty. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, so they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Dr. Nicholas Christakis. Just bluntly, how have we done with this pandemic? Because it looks to me like Americans, we're so resistant to containment measures, and it's frustrating to me.

And I know you share that. Yeah, I mean, I think from the moment, you know, this is quite a serious germ. It could have been much worse. But it's not a trivial germ. It had these intrinsic properties when it leapt from bats to humans. And from the moment it was loose in our species, it was ultimately going to become what is known as endemic. the virus will circulate among us forever.

It'll become just one of those sort of background pathogens that we have to face. And from the moment it reached our shores in the United States, surely it was going to kill 100, 200, 300,000 people just by spreading, you know, and killing people. But we have as a nation, in my judgment, done abysmally badly. If we had acted with more maturity, if we had acted with more alacrity, if we had acted with more probity, we could have mounted a defense that befits a great nation like ours and limited the deaths, you know, that have befallen us. When I wrote the book Apollo Zero, I finished it last August of 2020, and I sort of thought

that we would, at the time, we'd have about 130,000 Americans dead, and I thought we would lose between half a million and a million. And we've already blown by the bottom of that. And I'm pretty sure we will bump up against the top, that before this pandemic is over, as many as a million excess deaths will have occurred. So I think there's no way to portray that as a victory. I think we have just done awfully and there are many, many mistakes as a nation that we've made. Tying some of your work together, I sort of pulled this one from the new book and the old book, one of the older books connected. I found it really interesting and very important because this

point was lost on me and many people my age and younger, which is that we actually need to target socially active people and young people for immunization, which to me was counterintuitive because a lot of my friends are saying, I'm young, I'm 21, I'm 31, I don't really need this, I'm super healthy. If I get COVID, I'm probably going to shake it off. Yes, there's exceptions, but it's a new vaccine. All those counter arguments aside, it's very surprising to me. You know, I kind of just said, okay, you know, that's a you thing. But now it's like, wait a minute, no, we need to target those people, the people who go out every single weekend and talk with others. That's an interesting point. Tell me about this and why.

Yeah. So actually, this is a very subtle idea about human social networks. It can play out in all kinds of interesting ways, including, as you're suggesting, how to vaccinate people, how to choose people for vaccination. So let's say you have a population in a city of various age people, and you have a finite amount of vaccines. You know, you have a thousand vaccine doses you're going to administer. And in this particular disease, the so-called shape of the mortality curve, if you put people's age on the x-axis and their probability of dying if they get the germ on the y-axis, it has this backward L-shaped. So it doesn't, if you're young and you get the disease, you're not likely to die. In fact, if you're under 25, you have a maybe one-in-10,000 chance of dying if you get the disease, somewhere in that neighborhood. And then if you're in your 50s, you have maybe a one-and-a-hundred

chance of dying if you get the disease. And by the time in your 70s or 80s, you've got a one-in-five chance of getting the disease. So it has this L-shaped, backward L-shaped mortality curve. And so you have a thousand doses of the vaccine to administer, and you're like quite rationally going to give those doses to elderly people to prevent deaths. It makes perfect sense. But the thing is, a young person, elderly people are already typically not as socially active, on average, as young people. Working-age adults are out and about.

And it is a standard understanding of infectious diseases that the very young and the very old are at the so-called end of the transmission chain. In other words, the germ is brought home to them by people who are out in a bit. So if you have these thousand doses, you might actually save more lives if you vaccinate a thousand young people. Because when you vaccinate them and you interrupt the transmission of the germ because now they're immunized, you know, you might save 5,000 lives instead of 1,000 lives because you're preventing them from spreading it. So this is an old and well-understood idea in public health and in network science. But if I can, let me just play it out a couple

steps further because there's some cool wrinkles here. So it turns out that there's this phenomenon called the friendship paradox. And the friendship paradox is it's an intrinsic property of human social networks that your friends have more friends than you do. Actually, your sexual partners have more sexual partners than you do, too. And if you're a scientist, your co-authors have more co-authors than you do. This is really irritating. Yeah. A bunch of promiscuous writers. Yes, exactly. Permiscuous writers, exactly. So it's exactly right, promiscuous writers. And the reason for this is that if you can imagine a social network and you have this dense interconnection of nodes, which are the people and ties, which are connections between the people, you should have this image in your mind's eye that in the

middle you have all these people that are in the thick of it and these little jumbled networks. So people in the center, the very popular people might have 10 friends and each of their friends might have 10 friends, for example. And on the very edge of the network will be the sort of socially isolated people who might have one friend. And so you should have the intuition that at least for all of the people on the edge of the network, all of those socially isolated people, their friends will have more friends than they do by construction. I mean, that's why they're on the periphery. They have one friend because they're on the edge. That's the only person they know. And their friend has at least two friends, them plus the next person over closer to the center of the network. And it turns out that this is

true for everyone in the network, that on average, everyone's friends have more friends than they do. on average. And another way to think about this is to imagine a cocktail party where there's a very popular party host who invites 100 wallflowers to his or her party. And they only know one person, which is the party host. So 101 people in this party, if you go and you ask, pick these people at random and you ask them, who's your friend, a hundred of them will say the party host who has a hundred friends. Only if by chance you pick the party host, will that person's friends have fewer friends than they do. These are some intuitive. There's a mathematical explanation of the friendship paradox as well. But anyway, that's the basic point. But here's the kicker. It turns out that if you have,

let's say, enough vaccine to vaccinate 5% of the population, what you really should do is pick 5% of the population at random, ask them who their friends are, and give the vaccines to their friends rather than to them, because their friends will be more popular and have more connections that they do. Now, in my laboratory, we've exploited this idea, believe it or not, to deliberately foster cascades of innovation in developing world villages. If we have a group of people in a village and you're trying to get them to switch their behavior to breastfeed their children or adopt vaccination or increased latrine usage or some other global public health objectives, turns out you can use this trick to artificially create tipping points. And we've done this. So this is the same idea behind

vaccinating the young. You want to vaccinate popular people if you use. young people as a proxy for being popular, then you might, in fact, not vaccinate the elderly and vaccinate the young. Now, I'm going to say one more thing, and then I'll shut up because it's a very long-winded answer. People have analyzed in the case of COVID whether, in fact, it would have made sense to do this. Many people, myself included, suggested we should consider this idea of preferentially allocating vaccine not to the elderly, but to, let's say, popular people or people with many social interactions. And it turns out that actually people have done the mathematical modeling in the case of COVID, that would not have been wise.

The brief reason is that this disease is particularly infectious, and furthermore, that this disease has a very steep mortality gradient. In other words, it is so much more deadly for the elderly that, you know, it's still wiser in the end to vaccinate them. Anyway, that's a very long, meandering answer, but it's not a crazy idea that you asked. Right. It makes sense. And it kind of, it did originally change my mind.

Like, the mortality curve, okay, we did the right thing in the end of the day. But the mortality curve, if that weren't the case, if it was sort of like, let's say, more or less even. 50% of people die and it's plus 10% either way, older, young, then it would make sense. And it did change my mind on some of the people I know who I live here in California. So people were saying, oh, you know, if you just tell them you're a bus boy, or they don't even ask, just go in and assume you're a food worker.

And I thought, you a-hole, you're cutting in line, you know, for vaccine, what are you doing? And then I read your work. And I thought, you know, actually let them do it. Because they're going to go snowboarding, then they're going to go play an escape room. And then they're going out to dinner. and they don't like wearing masks because they want to grind up on each other at parties. You know, like, fine.

Cut in line, because the person you're cutting in front of is working at home from Zoom and hasn't seen a new face in 18 months like me, right? Yes, and also, I mean, now you're highlighting yet another reason that these types of strategies can be difficult to implement. I was one of those people that was advocating for a very strict, in the end, I was advocating for a very strict age-based thing.

I did not think that we should have complicated, you know, by your zip code or by your race or ethnicity or by your occupation or by your, we were asking people to go through 60-step procedures and upload their health records to justify giving some people a vaccine earlier than the next person. And although all of those might have been rational things to do, I'm not saying they were crazy, in the end, the benefits of those things were outweighed by the delay and the complexity. So I thought a very rational strategy is just to do it by age. Everyone, most people in the country have an ID card or can produce some kind of the birth certificate or some document that has their age on it. And you just work your way down. So this week we're doing 85 to 90 year olds. Next week we're doing 80 to 85 year olds. Very simple. Everyone can understand it. You work your way down. And I think the states that did that had a much more rapid and effective and publicly accepted procedure for distributing the vaccines. Listen, this is one of the things that's so difficult and why I think earlier when I said our nation needed maturity.

alacrity and probity, public health by its very nature is utilitarian. You know, you have to make sacrifices. You are trying to do what's best for the greater good. And there are always tradeoffs. Like, do I do this or do I do that? And you're trying to pick the strategy that minimizes the loss of life. And sometimes that strategy, you know, it irritates somebody or it leaves somebody off. It's unavoidable. I can imagine you making that argument and it being like, oh, this just in breaking, Dr. Nicholas Dr. Nicholas Christakis thinks Greek people should get vaccinated first. and that like Hispanic people should be after other, well, what's going on here? You're suddenly, you know, dot, dot, dot.

You're losing your tenure and you're a racist or something like that. I know you're joking, I think, but I certainly make no such arguments. But you're right. I mean, there are people who, when you are making recommendations from a public health point of view, even if you're doing it in a very technocratic way, people will always be prone to be suspicious. You know, do you have some political agenda? And this happened, you know, because we had, unfortunately. we politicized the public health response in this country to such a great extent.

You know, our nation came to see mask wearing as a political act. Yeah. Which is nuts. You know, other nations did not politicize mask wearing. Masks are neither a signal of your independence and fearlessness, nor are they a signal of your virtue and neighborliness. They are just a barrier for droplets. And I think everyone should be wearing them.

And I said so back in April of 2020, they are a very effective tool for limiting the spread of respiratory pandemics. and the evidence for this is really, you know, very compelling. But then other people would say, well, you shouldn't wear the masks because they're somehow interfering with economic productivity and that you have some kind of agenda against, I don't know what, restaurants or something. I have no antipathy to restaurants. I love restaurants.

Sure. But restaurants are not a safe place when there's a respiratory pandemic. And, you know, neither are churches, for that matter. There are lots of places that are not safe. Relatively speaking, oh, one other thing, just so clear for your listeners, it's very important to understand that a pandemic is not a binary situation. It's not like things are either okay or not okay or either they're safe or they're not a safe. During a time of a serious epidemic of any kind, there's no life without risk.

Everything you choose to do has some risk associated with it. It's shades of gray. And so, for example, even now that I'm vaccinated, if you asked me, would I wear a mask if I had a dinner party with a bunch of my other vaccinated friends? The answer is no. We'd get together indoors. We'd get people, 10 people, it'd totally be fine. The risk is extreme. It's not zero.

like we just saw with that baseball team where they have an outbreak of all, they're all vaccinated. There's an outbreak of nine COVID cases in this baseball team right now. It's not 100% safe, but it's more than safe enough. But if you ask me, I'm vaccinated, would I go to my local grocery store and be indoors for 20 minutes while I shop? The answer is no, put on a mask. It's a simple, easy thing to do, and it further reduces my risk. Why wouldn't you do it?

You wrote about the 1918 flu pandemic and how people wanted to keep schools open, and that turned out to be a good decision for various reasons. New York City's staggered business hours. There was an anti-spitting campaign, which is very 1918 somehow. But also, the more I read about the 1918 flu pandemic, especially in your work, the more it seems like we're about five minutes from that time in terms of the societal response. Like the science is far advanced. Our knowledge is well advanced, but some people were just kind of, it's like we haven't learned

anything even though we've advanced a century in terms of the science. It's worse than that. In some ways, it's we've advanced. You know, millennia, I mean, one of the themes that, one of the ideas that I try to advance is this notion that this way we've come to live right now, it feels so alien and unnatural. But plagues are not new to our species. They're just new to us. We think, this is crazy that we are being forced to live this way.

But people have been confronting plagues for thousands of years. They're in the Bible. They're in Homer. I mean, one of canonical works of Western fiction, you know, the Iliad begins with a plague. They're in Shakespeare. They're in Servantes. Our ancestors have been coping with this threat for millennia. And furthermore, they have been trying to warn us. Plagues are in our religious traditions. They're in our literature, like I just mentioned. We also in our society have expert scientific knowledge. We have medical

historians. We have epidemiologists. There was knowledge and collective wisdom about this threat, which for various reasons we tended to ignore. My Jewish friends last year during Passover, said, you know, for their whole lives, they'd been doing the Passover Seder and they've been talking about plagues. But in 2020, they really understood, you know, what it meant to be confronting a plague. But see, here's the thing, as you mentioned, our social responses to plagues are so typical. You know, for example, during times of plague, it's very standard to blame others, right? During medieval times during the bubonic plague, it was the Jews, you know, anti-Semitism spikes. During HIV, you know, homosexuals needed to be blamed.

or Haitians needed to be blamed, or IV drug users needed to be blamed. During COVID, you know, immigrants are blamed or Asians are blamed. You know, always there's this desire, this awful, sad desire by human beings to blame others for the calamity. And that's not the only social response, which has been apparent since time immemorial. For example, one of the other things that's very typical about plagues is that it is a time of sadness. Marcus Aurelius talking about a plague that afflicted Rome, you know, 2,000 years ago, talks about how in some ways the mental health impact of the plague was worse than the physical impact, that a kind of miasma settled down onto the city, a mental miasma. And we see that now with coronavirus. It plagues our time of grief.

We lose our lives. We lose our livelihoods. And we lose our way of life. People are suffering loss, right? So this is also very typical. Also plagues our time of lies during a pandemic disease. it's very typical for leaders and for people to engage in kind of denial and pretend like nothing is happening. You know, we saw that President Trump, for example, was making preposterous statements about, you know, nothing is going to happen, everything's going to get better for months, months into the pandemic. When tens of thousands of Americans were still had died and were continuing to die,

he was still pretending like nothing was happening, which is absurd. And the person on the street, you know, people were engaging in all kinds of superstitious behavior. All of these social responses are typical. of our species. And human beings have been acting this way for thousands of years. So you're right, it's sad

that we aren't capable of doing better in the 21st century. It reminds me of the virtual plague in Warcraft, the world of Warcraft, the video game that you talked about during the book. It showed us human elements of pandemic behavior. You wanna take us through that? That was fascinating.

Yeah, that's a story I haven't told in a while. I'll try to, you could correct me if I get the details wrong, but there was a massive multiplayer online game. I can't remember if it was World of Warcraft or another one. The designers of the game decided that it would be nice to endow some individuals with the power to infect others or, in any case, to add the existence of an epidemic disease in the game. What they found was that actually they created an epidemic situation in the virtual world in which all of the players were

dying. And in this game also, there were some players who had healing powers and there were groups that were fighting each other. And, you know, it was a, I don't play these massively multiplayer games, but people who are listening who play these games know sort of what I'm talking about. And what they found was that this so-called corrupted blood epidemic. And oh, and when people got this disease, they had this very gross death, you know, where they would break out in blood and they collapse into like a little, you know, limp body onto the ground.

And what they found was that all of the human responses that are typical of human beings confronting a real plague were manifested in this virtual world. So some of the healers, you know, at great risk to themselves, try to treat people who were sick, you know, who were sick in this virtual world. And incidentally, the death of healthcare workers is another feature that goes back thousands of years. And during the plague of Athens, Lucidides talks about how all the doctors were dying. And they didn't know how to treat the condition. Of course, because the doctors were going to care for the sick, they were contracting the disease and dying. During the abubonic plague in the 14th century, Pope Clement, I think I can't remember who it was the fifth or the sixth or the seven. I think it was Clement the sixth, about Pope Clement, you know, talked about how all the nurses were dying, caring for people who were sick. And now during coronavirus,

we've seen thousands of healthcare workers around the world, and even in our own country, in the richest country on earth, we lost doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers because we didn't have enough PPE for them. What a shocking embarrassment to our country.

So in the game, in the corrupted blood pandemic, in this World of Warcraft game, healthcare workers were dying. We also saw people acting altruistically, people trying to ferry sick people back to their homeland. We also saw sort of sociopathic behavior where some people would infect themselves

and then leap to their enemy or to other people just for fun to see if they could kill them. So all of these human behaviors were manifest. And to make a long story short, the game designers were unable to stop the epidemic, so they had to basically reboot the entire world, pull the plug on the server and start from scratch. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that

you know, when we're fighting coronavirus? It's a little scary that that was the solution, isn't it? Yes. It's like, oh, yeah, what we had to do is we had to figure out this patch and we rent. No, we just had to rip the cord out and start again. And it's like, that's not really the answer that humanity is looking for. I don't think. Yes.

Yes, I think that's right. The story, as you say, is very captivating. And I used to know the story in detail, but it's been over 10 years since I read the original papers about it. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Nicholas Christakis. We'll be right back. Now back to Nicholas Christakis on the Jordan Harbinger show. The tsunami stones were an interesting factoid as well.

So do you remember these as well? This is something you wrote about a while ago. Yes, yeah. No, the tsunami stones are in Apollo Zero, and I just wrote that a year ago. So even though I'm 58, I can't remember things from a year ago, even if from 10 years ago is a bit of a challenge. No, the tsunami stones are another interesting phenomenon. These are these large stone markers in Japan, which warn people about the dangers of tsunamis

and might carry messages like, do not build your dwelling below this line. For example, 100 years ago, there was a tsunami that washed many, many miles inland and destroyed everything in its path. And then the high water mark was at a certain spot. The ancestors of modern Japanese living on this location erected stones and said, this is how far in the tsunami came, don't build your houses below this stone. And this knowledge was transmitted also by oral tradition. Little children were in these communities were taught about these stones, were taught about how their ancestors had died, or taught about how their ancestors had left

this message to them, so they knew about it. And when the tsunami came about 10 years ago, again, during the Fukushima disaster, people who built their houses above those markers, none of them died and all of their houses were spared. And in fact, there's these oral traditions about this. You see, events that occur outside of living memory, that occur more, less often than once every hundred years, require the transmission. We were talking earlier about the transmission of warnings

in religious texts or in literature about what it means to confront plagues. With respect to tsunamis, there are similar things. And so, for example, there are these islands in the Indian Ocean, the Nicobar and End of an Islands, where these are some of the last untouched people on the planet. They are a protected group. They have no contact with the outside world.

They live in basically almost a Stone Age way. They are very limited technology. They fire arrows at helicopters that occasionally are seen above them. Like the Sentinel Islands, right? Where they kill everyone who gets on the island. That's right. That's right. They don't like strangers.

And occasionally a journalist or a drunk tourist will attempt to go there and they're killed. But anthropologists who study these groups report that they have oral traditions that say when the ocean suddenly recedes like it does before a tsunami, you know, in that trough before the great wave, the waters get pulled back from the shore like a tide that's going out. But at an odd time for a tide and much more than a tide, the oral tradition says, when you see this, go to this temple and pray. It's a stone temple that's inland up on a mountain, you know, and they all survive. So in India, with its modern technology and it buoys offshore and its radio and television communications and everything else was devastated. But, you know, on these islands, they survived because they had this oral tradition. So yeah, these are warnings we tried to transmit. And incidentally, this is sort of a tangent on a tangent, but it's actually a set of ideas that I explore in yet another book called Blueprint, the evolutionary origins of a good society, which came out again more recently.

So I remember that one easier, which is that. Our capacity to teach each other things, which many listeners probably take for granted, is actually exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. And this capacity for teaching and learning from each other is at the fundamental root of our capacity for culture, which is in fact, and it's our ability to be a cultural animal, to transmit knowledge across time and space that has made us one of the ascendant species on the planet. So just to illustrate this point, many or most animals can learn independent. You know, little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims up to the light, it will find food there.

That's independent learning, a single organism probing its environment and learning by stimulus response, you know, what's happening. Some animals can learn socially. That means by observation of other animals. For example, you put your hand in the fire. You learn that it burns. So if you've acquired some knowledge, fire burns, but you paid a price. You burnt your hand. Or I can watch you put your hand in the fire.

and I gain almost as much knowledge, but I pay none of the price. My hand isn't burnt. Or to pick a more extreme example, you and I go into the forest and you eat red berries and die. You've learned that red berries are deadly at a great price. And I watch you eat red berries, and I say, I better not eat red berries. So that's incredibly efficient. That's called social learning, where you learn by mimicry or imitation or observation of

other members of your own species. And many animals do that. But we do something even more remarkable is we teach. each other things. We set out to transmit knowledge from one person to another, in particular between genetically unrelated individuals. And this is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it. Elephants do it. Certain cetacean species do it. And a smattering of other, not to exaggerate, smattering of other animals do it too. And this capacity for teaching, which many listeners probably take for granted, but is actually quite distinctive feature of our species,

is in fact one of the ways we've survived. So the tsunami stones are kind of our ancestors teaching us, right? The existence of oral traditions or the existence of scientific knowledge, which is accumulated in written texts or transmitted through schools or other means, this is one of the fundamental qualities we have as human beings and is essential to our capacity to survive, including when faced with pandemics. It seems like there's less danger now of losing knowledge. Everything's on the internet forever, God forbid, I should forget how to do the macarena or whatever, but it seems more likely we will lose our sense of reason.

I'd like to see you do the macarena, I have to say. You know what? I'm pretty sure it's out, out, over, over, cross, cross. Oh, my goodness. Hip, hip, shake your hips, right? I'll have to Google it, but I can Google it. It's still there somewhere. We're more likely to lose our sense of reason, right, because of misinformation or

disinformation plus poor education. And that's kind of my worry, less so with a new dark age. where, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but like the Romans were living in concrete dwellings, they themselves couldn't build for like 700 more years. Europeans, that's right. There's some knowledge that's lost. The Roman recipe for concrete that was incredibly strong.

They even had concrete that could solidify under water. They built these offshore piers with specialized concrete, and Europeans were living in Roman houses for 700 years, made out of materials and with techniques that they themselves did not know had been lost. There is knowledge that's lost. My very favorite is the Antikythera mechanism, this clock-like device that was built by ancient Greeks over 2,000 years ago using complex metal gears, the likes of which were not seen again for a thousand years. Wow.

So there is a specialized knowledge. Another famous example, this is the purple dye, the technique for extracting purple dye from a certain kind of shellfish that was available in North Africa. Again, someone recently was able, after many years of effort to reconstruct the recipe for making this purple dye. It was a very elaborate process. So knowledge is sometimes lost, and you're right to suggest that now in the modern era might be harder to lose knowledge, but not necessarily, not for everyone and not always. For example, just think about the Y2K problem. When we were all struggling with Y2K, all of a sudden, all these Fortran programmers,

the knowledge was lost, that we couldn't find. These guys were brought out of retirement, paid huge wages to deal with this code, code base that had been written decades earlier, and the knowledge was almost lost on how to deal with that code that was at, you know, the basis of many machines. Yeah, it was a programming language called like Cobol or something like that, I think, yeah. Cobal, I'm sorry, not Fortran, yeah. Well, you could be right. I think I'm not sure. I'm not, I'm not super confident on that bet. Yeah. I was reading in Apollo's arrow, I think it was, that when we shake hands, we often sniff our hand and we don't notice it. And that might come from prehumans and using smell to evaluate.

it. And I noticed, well, I didn't notice. Somebody told me, an ex-girlfriend told me that after I shake hands, I often touch my nose. And I try not to now, but she noticed it. She goes, you always do that, you always shake hands and then you do that, like one finger on the nose. She noticed this before you read about it in the book. Oh, yeah, this is like 15 years ago. She noticed this habit that I did. So I vindicated your former girlfriend, in other words. Yeah. Yeah. She thought I had like a nervous tick. And I thought, no, maybe, but I'm not nervous. I don't really understand what it's for. So I didn't know it was a primal thing that a lot of people do. Yes, apparently, according to some studies, chimpanzees do something similar. So there is a sense in which

we don't, you know, human beings culturally, we don't sniff each other. In other words, it would not be considered normal behavior when you encounter a stranger to sniff them, you know, like dogs do, for example. That would be odd. But certain other chimpanzees do that. And we, apparently, it is claimed through this surreptitious observation of human beings done by these other scientists, you know, that we smell our hands after we shake hands with other people. And that's a way of assessing sampling the olfaction, olfactory signals of other people. Switching gears a little bit, going to a little bit of the knowledge from connected as well. You make an interesting point in that humans have only been able to choose where they live and not actually modify their environment up until the last few thousand years, speaking of like, people. and aqueducts and things like that. What we can modify are our social groups and connections. So genetically, we in the past have been rewarded for things like kindness,

the ability to connect well with others. And I'm wondering, have you read Rutger Bregman's work, humankind? Yes. Yeah. I couldn't recollect it. In fact, it's right over there. I can look over and see his book. But yes.

He was on episode 494, and his point was the same, that, look, yes, it looks like psychopaths and sociopaths, whatever, are rewarded in society. But much more so do we reward people who are kind and connect well with others. And it's, quote, unquote, always been that way because of the way that we evolved to live in groups. I want to talk a little bit about how behaviors spread because this is fascinating. And it's different than, say, like, habits spreading through a network. And this is the Milgram sidewalk experiment, for example. If you want to take us, like, through a brief example of what this

might be, because I think we all know we pick up habits from friends, but we don't know that we pick up mindsets and habits and behaviors of all kinds from people we don't even know. Yes, that's right. I mean, in a way, it's just the claim that all kinds of phenomena spread through networks, not just germs, for example, that we've been discussing, but also ideas, spread through networks, norms, spread through networks, behaviors like smoking cigarettes or marijuana spread through networks. People come to be affected by other people to whom they're socially connected. Now, most people understand it's not very controversial or even unexpected to just say, look, you're affected by your friends.

But the point is that the influence doesn't stop at one degree of separation. You can have a sequence of social interactions such that you come to be affected, not just by your friends, but by your friends, friends, friends, friends, friends, your friends, friends, friends, or your friends, friends, or perhaps even your friends, friends, friends, friends,

people you don't even know can affect you. Now, as soon as I say that, you think, well, okay, I can kind of see that with respect to germs. Like right now you're not sick, and your friends, friends aren't sick, but your friends, friends, friends are sick, The germ is going to wind its way through the network and affect you. But it also then happens with other things like emotions and ideas or behaviors.

So right now, for example, you're not acting in a corrupt fashion. You're not avoiding you don't cheat on your taxes and nor do your friends. But your friends, friends, friends start to cheat on their taxes and that behavior winds its way towards you. Or they start recycling or smoking or engaging in all kinds of activities. We've done in my laboratory many experiments to show that this happens. And we've actually used this effect to change public health behavior in developing world settings. For example, we can go into villages or places in India and Honduras and elsewhere around the world. And by using some of these ideas about how networks function create artificial tipping points

where we change the behavior of the whole village by fostering a cascade of desirable properties. So the basic idea here is that diverse sort of phenomena can spread through networks. And as a result of that, you know, individuals can be affected. by unseen other people who are beyond their social horizon. And some people have read our work in this regard and looked at our experiments in this regard and said that what we have done is sort of depressing, that we are kind of delivering a whack to free will, right?

That I'm saying basically that you might think that who you vote for or what your body size is or whether you are kind to others depends on your own choices and actions, you know, your volition. But in fact, it's greatly effective. affected by the choices and actions of people you don't even know. So on the one hand, it's true that our experiments in this regard. And just to be clear, the voting experiment, which was done by my former colleague James Fowler involved, you know, 61 million people were randomly assigned to a social network intervention on Facebook. And he was able to document along with his colleagues

that voting believers spreads, you know, two or three degrees of separation. And we've done experiments looking at cooperation and kindness. And we've shown experimentally in the laboratory that if I treat you nicely, you treat someone else. So Tom treats Dick treats Dick treats Harry nicely, Harry treats Betty nicely, Betty treats Susan nicely. How Betty treats Susan depended on how Tom treated Dick even though neither Betty nor Susan ever saw Tom or Dick.

Never interacted with them. But how they're treating each other depends on how these other two people somewhere else are treating each other. We've shown that experimentally in the laboratory. So on the one hand, the existence of those phenomena would seem to subvert free will, but on the other, it elevates the importance of free will because now it suggests that when you take a positive choice,

when you lose weight or improve your mood or are kind to others, it can ripple through the network and affect dozens or hundreds of other people. And so actually free will is quite important. Making the choice to do the right thing is good. It's incredible how that works. But you're right. I also see the other side of it, how it could be a little bit depressing, right, because people are going, oh my gosh, how do I, well, I'll get to that in a second,

but there's a lot of people doing some bad stuff out there that we would want to avoid. I'm sure you've heard this sort of self-help trope that you're the sum of the people with whom you surround yourself the most, right? I think there's a lot of truth to that, honestly. Well, it sounds like you proved a lot of that. And I'm wondering if surrounding ourselves with people virtually is the same or similar as, like, can Tom treat Dick poorly or positively via Zoom and via social media or on the phone? or is it through a podcast that they're listening to,

or is it only in person? The way I would emphasize it is it's not the median that matters. It's not the means by which I communicate with you that matters. It's the intrinsic nature of our relationship. Actually, there's some wrinkles to this idea, which we can explore if you want. But the gist of it is it doesn't matter whether I'm communicating with you by Zoom or Facebook or instant Twitter or whatever if you are in fact a real friend of mine.

So I could have like, for example, we did an experiment in which we, an experimental study in which we looked at a movie tastes by people on Facebook. And we saw that if one of your Facebook friends posted that they liked the particular movie, it had no effect on a year later whether you also expressed an interest in that movie. But if one of your real, so you have hundreds of Facebook friends, but if one of your real friends among those Facebook friends expressed an interest in that movie, then it did affect your probability of being interested in a year later. So it's not that you were using online means of communication that was relevant.

It was with whom were you interacting? Was it an actually materially relevant person? So yeah, so that's how I would answer your question. Now, there's some wrinkles to that, which is that these tenuous online connections can actually potentially be influential, even among strangers, if something is at stake. For example, let's say you have a community of online people

with diabetes or some kind of cancer that are sharing health information online, even strangers. Like, I'm there to manage my diabetes, and here's another person who I don't know who has diabetes, and they are making recommendations to me. I could be affected by that person because we have a common interest,

that something at stake, you see, or dating apps where everyone's trying to, you know, find a date, you know, there's something at stake, or so you could be affected by other people. So that's a little wrinkle to what I just said. Whose contagion wins, right? So if I'm depressed and you're excited and positive, just as a general rule,

will I make you feel more depressed, or will you make me feel more positive? Or is it both directions? It's bidirectional, and it depends on the intrinsic nature of the thing itself, in part. So, for example, what we looked at this, for example, in one experiment we did with respect to happiness and unhappiness. There were waves of happiness and waves of unhappiness spreading within a social network, and we found that on balance, happiness spread more robustly than unhappiness. So both spread, and you're buffeted by both, waves of both.

You know, you're surrounded by people who are happy and unhappy, but happiness tends to be. to win out in that particular case. The weight gain and weight loss is a bit more complicated. Weight gain tends to win out. So weight loss and weight gain both spread in the network. And part of the reason is probably too tangential for us right now, but part of it has to do with whether an external force is driving the epidemic. So for example, what you have to understand about networks is that networks magnify

whatever they are seated with. They're agnostic. They will magnify hatred and violence and fascism and journalism and journalism and journalists. terms and sadness, but equally they will magnify love and kindness and ideas and happiness. But they must be seated. An external force has to impinge on the network to get the epidemic going. And so, for example, but then the networks will just take over and give you more of that. When you introduce coronavirus into our midst, the fact that we're a social network creature

that we form friendships and we don't live as isolates, if you think about it, if we lived atomistically, if we each lived independently, we didn't live socially, then infecting one of us with coronavirus, you'd get no pandemic. But the fact that we form social networks magnifies, gives you more coronavirus. So on the obesity example, what's happening is, is that other forces in our society are getting the obesity epidemic started. For example, the declining real price of food. You know, it's cheaper and cheaper over the last hundred years to put food on the table as we've gotten more efficient at producing food, or they move to sedentary lifestyles, or the design of our cities, or the marketing of food products by big food companies.

All of those things could make me gain weight, but the fact that we're in social networks means that once I gain weight, it affects your probability of gaining weight, and so you get a multiplicative effect because of the social network. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Nicholas Christakis. We'll be right back back. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Your support of the show, your support of our advertisers, keeps the lights on around here. All those discount codes, all those URLs you hear during the commercial ad breaks for this show, we put them all in one place, we make it easy for you. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where that's at. So if you can't remember the code,

please do check out the deals page. Consider supporting those who support us and support this show. And don't forget, we also have worksheets, also free for many episodes. So if you want some of the drills, the exercises, and the main takeaways during each show. Those are also in one easy place, so you don't have to stop driving, running, lifting weights, whatever it is you're doing. The link to the worksheets is also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of my conversation with Nicholas Christakis. So this isn't, it doesn't sound like it's a ripple effect from one person. It sounds like it has to do with all of the nodes, all of the people being nodes and radiate, kind of radiating.

I don't think that's the right term, but like in all directions in their network. Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. And everyone is doing this, is everyone is acting this way within the network. And this is, of course, why some people are more structurally influential than others. So, for example, one intuitive understanding of this is, you know, if you were a bioterrorist and you had to infect one person in San Francisco with a germ, who would you infect? I mean, you're not going to infect some monk that's by himself, you know, off in some monastery

because that person is not interacting with anyone else. You have the intuitive understanding that some people are going to be spread the germ more and that that's the person you really want to infect to get it going. So the capacity to induce ripples varies from person to person. How conscious is this process, right? So am I sort of out loud thinking, eh, my friends are all a bit overweight?

It's just the way guys are these days. It's not a big deal. Or is it very unconscious, like imitation, proliferation of unhealthy habits and diets and exercise patterns, in acceptable body size, but it never quite leaps into my consciousness. It just happens.

No, it can be both. So one of the things that's happened is, if you look at those old photographs of young men listing in the Second World War, they all look like tiny guys, right? But if you look at the analogous recruits today, they would be, you know, much bigger. And what happens is that there's a kind of spread

in norms about acceptable body size. So you're surrounded by other people who get bigger and bigger, and it sort of changes your expectations about what a normal body size is. and then you sort of gain weight and you pass it on to the next person. We've been able in some work we've done to provide evidence for this normative effect. In other words, it's not just behavioral.

It's not just that your friends say, you know, let's have muffins and beer. And you're like, you know, that sounds like a yucky combination. But, you know, my friend is suggesting muffins and beer, so let's do that. And of course, you know, then you adopt the muffins and beer diet and you gain weight. Yes, that does happen. But it's not just that. It's that there's a spread of norms as well, not just the spread of behavior. So you, by seeing your friends who are overweight, let's say, you,

change your ideas about what an acceptable body size is, then you can gain weight. Or here's the tricky part, you could even be an asymptomatic carrier. Just like, for example, I could be infected with a germ, have symptoms, give it to you. You have the germ, but you don't have symptoms, and then you transmit it to your wife who gets the germ and symptoms. So you functioned as an asymptomatic carrier, just like in the case of coronavirus, the virus can spread and some people are asymptomatic. Well, the same can happen with norms, for example, like obesity. So, for example, I have the norm, I adopt the norm that it's okay to be bigger. I gain weight. You see me that has gained weight. You don't gain weight. But now your ideas about what an acceptable body size are have changed through exposure to me.

Now you encounter a new friend of yours who has started to gain weight. And if you hadn't interacted with me, you might have said to that friend, you know, let's go to the gym. You might have kind of given them a gentle correction. But now, having seen me, you're like, well, actually he's not as bad as Kostokia, so I'm not going to say anything. You see, you then have become an asymptomatic carrier of a norm, even though it has not affected your body size, for example. Right. So I'm sitting there going, well, I'm just abnormally fit and trim everyone else.

Yeah, compared to my friend. I'm not going to interrupt their lifestyle to impose my norms of working out all the time and watching what I eat. That's ridiculous. Can we use these powers for good? Because that seems very useful, right? I'm imagining companies organizing so that they're using the influential people to improve the health and fitness and work habits of others. And also, I want to know how to increase my own influence so that I have a positive effect on others.

Like, how do I get my virtues to spread versus being spread upon? Well, I mean, the answer to that question is yes. And my lab has been doing for over 10 years now, many experiments showing how you can foster desirable cascades of behaviors. As earlier I alluded to developing world settings where we've shown, for instance, that you can foster. the spread of anti-diarrieal practices to reduce diarrhea in developing world villages, and diarrhea is a leading killer of young kids in much of the developing world. Or we have a big trial. We just finished recently with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Honduras, where we've been able to show that we can improve maternal and child health behaviors

in thousands of people by fostering these kinds of behavioral cascades. And many other experiments we've done online. We've also worked with companies, for example, companies that are trying to increase or decrease the prescribing behavior of physicians. You know, how do we get doctors to change what medications they prescribe the patients or what tests they order? We want to reduce needless test ordering by physicians. We want to foster the diffusion of innovation through networks of doctors of these desirable prescribing or test ordering practices.

We have done many, many applications like this. And so many commercial firms, of course, are interested in these ideas. You know, we're interested in proving to the health of the public because they want to sell widgets. But, you know, our technology can be used to sell widgets as well. Incidentally, it can also be used for ill. Like any technology, you know, you can invent a gun for hunting and then you can use it to murder people. And, you know, it's a dual-use technology.

Our technology and the ideas that my lab and many other similar labs advance can be used for good or for ill, frankly. You know, that is something we are mindful of and we certainly also discuss in various things we've written. Social networks can seemingly spread good ideas. bad ideas, political ideas, smoking, right, back pain, suicide clusters or something you mentioned in the, the back pain thing was interesting, though. Tell us about that, that was kind of out of, I didn't see that one coming, you know? Well, I mean, the thing is, there are these diseases

which are called culture-bound syndromes, which are diseases, which are very typical of a particular cultural group in which, as far as we can tell, have no physiologic basis. Now, when we look at other cultural groups, we can think, oh, those people are nuts. For example, there's this illness in certain countries in Asia, where a man becomes convinced that his penis is disappearing, and it's being drawn up into his body. And there's no physiologic basis for this belief. And the penis is not, in fact, disappearing. But the treatment for this condition is to have a trusted family member hold the penis 24 hours a day to make sure that it doesn't receive. It's a sort of psychological kind of belief system. And you can have outbreaks of this condition.

Like you have epidemics of this condition, right? Now, we look at that and we think, well, that's They never heard of duct tape over there? Exactly. We look at that and we think that's nuts. But, you know, they might look at us and think that's nuts. For example, we have epidemics of anorexia in our country. And this is seen in very distinctive subgroups in our population. Often sort of upper middle class white girls are particularly afflicted by this condition. It's not, of course, restricted to that group, but you rarely see anorexia in very poor

countries where food is scarce. And it's a bit of an odd kind of a condition. So from an outsider's perspective, that might look. look to them, it looks like the penis disappearing story, for example. And back pain, which typically afflicts middle-aged men, and often there's no physiologic basis that we can ascertain for this condition, also might be in this category, where it is a kind of a social contagion. And there was a very interesting sort of study that was done, I think that is what you are alluding to and what got us on to this tangent, is that in East and West Germany, after the reunification of Germany, I can't remember

right now which side had the lower incidence of back pain. I think East Germany, Germany. Had very low levels of back pain in middle-aged men, and West Germans at high levels, very similar population of human beings. And then after the reunification, suddenly East German back pain levels came to approximate West German levels, right? By the author speculated a process of social contagion and the change in norms about back pain, you know, which if you have back pain, you're excused from your obligations.

I need to be very clear when I'm talking about inorexia and back pain and all of these things. I am not saying that anyone who suffers from these conditions has a lot. a mental illness. I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with them. I'm not saying they're making it up. I'm saying none of those things. All I'm saying is that there is a social contagion component to these conditions that's easier to see when it afflicts other groups and when it afflicts our own. Another example of this is in Latin America, there's a condition called Susto, which means sort of spirit loss, the idea. It's a kind of quasi-religious belief that someone is losing their spirit and can die from this condition. And you can have epidemics of Susto as

well. And from our perspective, that doesn't make much sense. But of course, they might look at us and think analogously. It does make sense that these things are socially contagious, but of course, it also makes sense that it is real mental illness or real, a real physical or physiological or psychological condition. I mean, when you're talking about suicide clusters where teenagers, just for example, teenagers hear about somebody committing suicide and then there's a rash of these same types of incidences, it's not that they're not really depressed. It's just that that depression or that condition that causes them to do that is contagious? Well, it's complicated.

The suicide clusters, one of the things that's felt that happens in suicide clusters is what's spreading there is a lowering of the threshold for taking your life. So, you know, there was some threshold. Now some person takes their own life, and it lowers your threshold for doing so. And that's what's causing the cascades. It's not that people think that, or suicidal ideation, thinking about suicide. Every human being has contemplated from time to time, taking their own life. I think that's not abnormal. Many listeners will have had an odd thought when driving

late at night. You know, what happens if I just drove out this bridge or drove into oncoming traffic or will have had a kind of intrusive thought like while walking across a high place? You know, what happens if I slipped or maybe I should jump? What would it be like to jump and so on? It's not uncommon for human beings to have this. But when you start getting these cascades, people might be more likely, let's say, to act on these kinds of thoughts. So there's like some baseline level of depression. There's some baseline level of these types of intrusive thoughts. Now, when you begin to have the kind of change in the environment, you can get these sort of outbreaks. And suicide clusters have been known for hundreds of years. I mean, it's not a novel observation.

You know, we are psychological animals. We're influenced by each other. Our emotional state depends on the emotional state of those around us. Our beliefs and ideas depend on the beliefs and ideas of those around us. And so, you know, we copy each other. We do. We were talking earlier about how this copying is really good because it's efficient. It's a kind of social learning, but it can also have a downside. What was that experiment? I can't remember if you wrote about there, so far I read about it somewhere else, but essentially there was an experiment where they had a bunch of people look up at the sky. I don't know if they were pointing. Milgram. Also Milgram, of course. Why not, right? Of course. Milgram was a genius, just an absolute genius. And the backstory on him is amazing. He left Yale and goes to the City University of New York.

He has no research budget. And he proceeds to conduct a series of landmark experiments, which we're still talking about, you know, decades later on a shoestring. The experiment you're alluding to is the Milgram's sidewalk experiment. And what he did is he arranged to have some Confederates on a block segment in Manhattan. And he has a guy sitting in a window up on the sixth floor of a building, let's say. And then he has other Confederates that are stopped in the middle of the block and look up at the guy across the street up in this window. And what he experimentally varies is he varies the number of people that have stopped to look up at the window. So, for example, if one person stops and looks up, the other passers-by who are normal people,

they're not part of Milgram's experiment, they're the subjects, the subjects of his research. The other passers-by just walk by this one person and completely ignore him. I mean, if you're walking down the sidewalk and you saw one guy looking up somewhere, you might not even notice this person, you probably wouldn't do anything. Then Milgram has two people stand and look up. And now some passersby glance up, you know, one of those two guys looking at, but they keep walking. Then Milgram goes three, four, five, six people. When you get to six people that stop and look up, everyone else stops, you know, and looks up at the thing.

So Milgram was able to show that there's a kind of nucleation process for social movements, like crystals forming. You know, you need to have a critical mass of a certain amount. And then the crystal grows and grows. And he was able to do this experiment. And then he had people hiding and observing what do the passers by, do when he varied the size of the set looking up at the individuals. A brilliant experiment. Do you think at all about like cryptocurrency or markets and seeing, oh, my friend bought this? And I mean, you have to have some thoughts on this craziness as well, right?

Yes. I mean, I just keep thinking, I've been watching Bitcoin go up for, I don't know, however many years now. Yeah. I'm not a sophisticated investor. And I am not sophisticated about these types of money making, you know, far-sighted schemes. But I remember looking at it and thinking, I wonder if I should just put little money. Literally, if I had invested $1,000 back then, it'd be worth, I don't know how many millions today. I mean, it just kills me that I didn't just pay attention and do it. But yes, I mean, there's a lot of subtlety about cryptocurrency and a lot of serious conversation that could be had about cryptocurrencies and about what they represent for our society,

what they represent for the future of money, which ones are likely to be successful, in what ways are they the same or different than hard assets like gold, and so on, and fiat currencies. but they absolutely have a social component as well. You know, that this sort of fattishness of buying, and the same steep rise, of course, will be followed by his steep fall when and if they crash,

just like the tulip mania of four or five hundred years ago. In closing here, is there anything we can do to defend ourselves against this type of influence? I mean, it seems impossible to avoid. On the one hand, we kind of don't want to insulate ourselves, right? We want to get good habits, and we want to get good thoughts and feelings and contagious emotions from friends and family.

But also, I kind of don't want to get wrapped up in buying tons of different cryptocurrencies and losing money or gambling or eating too much or smoking or, you know, I don't want those things to be contagious. How do we block out the negative influences or is it just not that possible? Well, I think there's no way to stop being, we are social animals. I mean, there's no way to completely insulate yourself from this. But there are habits of mind you can cultivate and practices you can cultivate which reduce the likelihood you will, you know, just engage in copycat behavior. The first is to surround yourself with a variety of people with different views. Certainly politically, I think that's very wise. Like my friends run the gamut in the political

spectrum. I enjoy arguing with the ones I just agree with. I like having people I do agree with. It's gratifying and nice to see that my opinions about things are shared by some people whose judgment I value and whose intelligence I respect. But I think if you're only interacting with people who agree with you about something, whether, incidentally, it is a political topic or a scientific matter, right? The way scientists advanced in understanding the world is through the debate of ideas, right? They fight with each other. They don't literally fight, or at least we hope they don't. Scientists are through sequential experimentation under a set of rules are trying to understand the world. And so, and you learn from disagreement, whether it's a scientist or a political,

ideas or whatever. J.S. Mill famously said, you know, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of it. So one of the things you can do as a smart person is to surround yourself with people who have a range of views, including people who disagree with you. Incidentally, I used to do martial arts for many, many years, Shodokan, very traditional Japanese karate style, and you bow to your opponents. You thank your opponent. This is the whole principle. You are learning from your opponent, right? And you respect your opponent. I mean, it's through sparring with a willing opponent that you grow. And so the same holds for intellectual and political and scientific and other pursuits. I think we should respect people with whom we disagree. So that's one thing you can do.

And the other thing you can do is you can cultivate habits of mind where you ask, you interrogate yourself, why do I believe this thing? I believe something. What is the evidence for my belief? How did I come to believe this? And you're entitled to have things that you have no good reason for, right? I'm not telling you that you should live your life obsessing about every detail. You know, I just like, I like collarless shirts. Why do I like collarless shirts? I don't know. I fell in love with them when I was a young man

and I've been wearing collarless shouts ever since. I can't really give you a rational reason why I like collarless shirts. I think they look good. You know, that's fine. I don't have to provide an explanation for everything. But I think for other things, I think it is good to discipline yourself,

to interrogate where your beliefs come from. And in any case, I think it makes for a more interesting life. Thank you so much for your time. I know we had some technical difficulties I appreciate you sticking through. This has been fascinating. All of your books that I've read so far are fascinating, and you definitely have to come back when you plow out the next one.

Jordan, I'd be more than happy to do so, and thank you for a really just a wide-ranging, I mean, what are meandering conversation we had? Thank you so much. Here's a preview of my conversation with a former Homeland Security agent who reluctantly got involved in chasing down global child trafficking. Did you know that there are more people enslaved right now

than there ever were before? in history. Here's a quick listen. 30 million slaves in the world, is that correct? I mean, that's insane and is correct. Ten million of those are children who are either enslaved labor, organ harvesting, or sex trafficking. The traffickers are trying to get these kids

into our country and into our black sex market because that's where you can make the most money. Again, we are the demand. We drive this. It's a hundred and fifty billion dollar a year business by most estimates. The amount of money made every year selling children with

that money, you could buy every single Starbucks franchise in the world, every single MBA franchise, every team, and still have enough money left over to send every child in America to college for four years. That's per year selling human beings. We go online in the dark net, and honestly, Jordan, it was about 10 times worse than my mind could have conceived. The things that people do to children, I could not comprehend. We helped to rescue a little girl who was smuggled in from Mexico.

taken to New York City between the ages of 12 and 17 years old. In New York City, she was raped over 60,000 times. They bring them here and they just have these clients lined up. And they drive her to this house, this hotel, this bar, and she's raped, I mean, easily 15 to 20 times within a 24-hour period. I mean, and this is the life of thousands, tens of thousands of children in the United States right now. Just like in the 18th, 19th century, no one's really talking about it. it's too hard. People look away. They don't want to engage. And that's why I get frustrated. Like, look what's happening right now. I'm not going to get into the argument, whole debate with a riot. I'm just using as an example. But governments are shifting now. People are getting so loud, we're going to see changes. But I would love to see someday that happen for child rape victims. I'd like to see something so loud in every country that we have riots and people screaming because the children don't have a voice. They can't protest. They can't rally. And they're the most precious.

in the world, and yet they're being exploited, traffic, kidnapped, raped by the millions. For more, including how Tim Ballard became involved with busting child traffickers and rescuing their victims, check out episode 369 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. You know, I thought it was pretty interesting that over time, bugs, diseases, viruses, they evolved to be less lethal or we adapt to make them so. Pathogens typically evolved to be less deadly because killing the host, you know, killing us or forcing the host to isolate themselves, you know, we're so sick we can't go out of the house, results in a lower spread. So that natural selection is just a whole amazing thing.

It's sort of a genetic truce that keeps both the bugs and their hosts, so humans, that's us, alive, to reproduce, to evolve. Really, really amazing stuff. I could read endless books about that alone. And hey, now we know that not only do pathogens spread, but emotions spread and how that works in practice and why humans adapted to read others' emotions. That's also in his book. book as well, or in his books. I read all three, so it's hard for me to keep straight what's in each one, but when you got good work, you got good work. What can I say? When it comes to the social networking, each happy friend that a person has increases that person's chance of being happy by 9%. And unhappy friends, it decreases our chances of being happy by 7%. So more friends is not enough.

More happy friends is key. Again, this is a bit of a misfit episode. I loved it. I really enjoy this one. did as well. And again, a big thank you to Dr. Nicholas Christakis. His latest book is called Apollo's Arrow, the profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live. Of course, the other book about social networking and social network effects is called Connected, the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, how your friends, friends, friends affect everything you feel, think, and do. We will link to all of that in the show notes, as we always do. Please do use our website links. If you buy the books from any of the guests, that does help support the show. And yes, they work in your country. And yes, they

for Audible. All of you seem to be getting this right, but occasionally there's somebody who doesn't understand how these links work. Just use the links in the show notes. And if they don't work, let me know. Worksheets for the episode are also in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on the old YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. We also have a brand new clips channel with cuts that don't make it to the show or highlights from the interviews you can't see anywhere else. Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips is where you can find that. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. or just hit me on LinkedIn.

I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find that. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show,

they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millio Campo, Ian Baird,

Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in the COVID thing and isn't totally freaking sick of it by now, you know what, let's be honest.

The social networking stuff is probably where most y'all are going to resonate. Share this with all your friends who think that the bad habits of those they surround themselves with are not rubbing off on them. Basically what I'm saying is share this with your kids. Share this with your teenagers and your 20-somethings who think they're isolated from all their dirtbag roommates. Hopefully you find something great in every episode of the show.

Please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something

you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.